275 research outputs found
Wrong Turn in Cyberspace: Using ICANN to Route Around the APA and the Constitution
The Internet relies on an underlying centralized hierarchy built into the domain name system (DNS) to control the routing for the vast majority of Internet traffic. At its heart is a single data file, known as the root. Control of the root provides singular power in cyberspace. This Article first describes how the United States government found itself in control of the root. It then describes how, in an attempt to meet concerns that the United States could so dominate an Internet chokepoint, the U. S. Department of Commerce (DoC) summoned into being the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a formally private nonprofit California corporation. DoC then signed contracts with ICANN in order to clothe it with most of the U. S. government\u27s power over the DNS, and convinced other parties to recognize ICANN\u27s authority. ICANN then took regulatory actions that the U. S. Department of Commerce was unable or unwilling to make itself, including the imposition on all registrants of Internet addresses of an idiosyncratic set of arbitration rules and procedures that benefit third-party trademark holders. Professor Froomkin then argues that the use of ICANN to regulate in the stead of an executive agency violates fundamental values and policies designed to ensure democratic control over the use of government power, and sets a precedent that risks being expanded into other regulatory activities. He argues that DoC\u27s use of ICANN to make rules either violates the APA\u27s requirement for notice and comment in rulemaking and judicial review, or it violates the Constitution\u27s nondelegation doctrine. Professor Froomkin reviews possible alternatives to ICANN, and ultimately proposes a decentralized structure in which the namespace of the DNS is spread out over a transnational group of policy partners with DoC
Mandatory Binding Arbitration Clauses Prevent Consumers from Presenting Procedurally Difficult Claims
Women Do Not Report the Violence They Suffer: Violence Against Women and the State Action Doctrine
Mixed Wino Dark Matter: Consequences for Direct, Indirect and Collider Detection
In supersymmetric models with gravity-mediated SUSY breaking and gaugino mass
unification, the predicted relic abundance of neutralinos usually exceeds the
strict limits imposed by the WMAP collaboration. One way to obtain the correct
relic abundance is to abandon gaugino mass universality and allow a mixed
wino-bino lightest SUSY particle (LSP). The enhanced annihilation and
scattering cross sections of mixed wino dark matter (MWDM) compared to bino
dark matter lead to enhanced rates for direct dark matter detection, as well as
for indirect detection at neutrino telescopes and for detection of dark matter
annihilation products in the galactic halo. For collider experiments, MWDM
leads to a reduced but significant mass gap between the lightest neutralinos so
that chi_2^0 two-body decay modes are usually closed. This means that dilepton
mass edges-- the starting point for cascade decay reconstruction at the CERN
LHC-- should be accessible over almost all of parameter space. Measurement of
the m_{\tz_2}-m_{\tz_1} mass gap at LHC plus various sparticle masses and cross
sections as a function of beam polarization at the International Linear
Collider (ILC) would pinpoint MWDM as the dominant component of dark matter in
the universe.Comment: 29 pages including 19 eps figure
Supersymmetric Benchmarks with Non-Universal Scalar Masses or Gravitino Dark Matter
We propose and examine a new set of benchmark supersymmetric scenarios, some
of which have non-universal Higgs scalar masses (NUHM) and others have
gravitino dark matter (GDM). The scalar masses in these models are either
considerably larger or smaller than the narrow range allowed for the same
gaugino mass m_{1/2} in the constrained MSSM (CMSSM) with universal scalar
masses m_0 and neutralino dark matter. The NUHM and GDM models with larger m_0
may have large branching ratios for Higgs and/or production in the cascade
decays of heavier sparticles, whose detection we discuss. The phenomenology of
the GDM models depends on the nature of the next-to-lightest supersymmetric
particle (NLSP), which has a lifetime exceeding 10^4 seconds in the proposed
benchmark scenarios. In one GDM scenario the NLSP is the lightest neutralino
\chi, and the supersymmetric collider signatures are similar to those in
previous CMSSM benchmarks, but with a distinctive spectrum. In the other GDM
scenarios based on minimal supergravity (mSUGRA), the NLSP is the lighter stau
slepton {\tilde \tau}_1, with a lifetime between ~ 10^4 and 3 X 10^6 seconds.
Every supersymmetric cascade would end in a {\tilde \tau}_1, which would have a
distinctive time-of-flight signature. Slow-moving {\tilde \tau}_1's might be
trapped in a collider detector or outside it, and the preferred detection
strategy would depend on the {\tilde \tau}_1 lifetime. We discuss the extent to
which these mSUGRA GDM scenarios could be distinguished from gauge-mediated
models.Comment: 52 pages LaTeX, 13 figure
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