At 12:57 AM 4/24/96 -0400, Declan B. McCullagh wrote:
Excerpts from internet.cypherpunks: 23-Apr-96 [Wager: Seeming Resolution] by Black Unicorn@schloss.li
The only issue is how you wish to modify that claim for the purposes of the wager so as to bring it within a semblence of accuracy.
Absent further interest on your part, I consider the matter closed and your claim retracted.
I confess I had a good laugh at Jim Bell's expense. His attempt at weaseling was sadly uninspired, and Black Unicorn was quite right to move in for the kill.
What "kill"? Unicorn claimed a few days ago that he THOUGHT that his challenge would never be accepted, ostensibly because of haggling by me. I interpret this as unwillingness to bargain in good faith (sandbagging), which is reasonable given Unicorn's track record. Given this thinly-veiled warning of dishonesty, it is only realistic that I would not want to accept his challenge. Notice that he hasn't presented what he would claim to be the scope of the conditions, which suggests that he's going to try to spring them on me later. I, for one, am not going to accept the legal equivalent of a witch-doctor's example, and I don't think anyone else here would find that to be acceptable either. Further, all this is merely an attempt to distract from the issue that I raised, one that Unicorn hasn't dared to talk about yet: I claimed that of the examples quoted in that SC decision, which were cited as exceptions to 5th amendment protections in the US, all of them represent examples which were only considered technologically useful in the last 100 years, the oldest being fingerprinting. Given this, it is easy to conclude that there is no realistic basis for an interpretation that they are genuinely exceptions to 5th amendment protections, and were allowed simply because they were useful. Isn't it interesting how Unicorn always seems to dodge the analysis and replace it with precedent? Jim Bell jimbell@pacifier.com