So, who, at the time, could have responded to a Soviet nuclear strike?
I don't know. I'm no lawyer, but I don't think anyone could have. I guess the VP has the best argument in his favor. And that's my point: no matter how detailed the procedures or well thought out the plans, there will always be cases you didn't account for.
Are you suggesting that POTUS's time is worth 8.7 TRILLION dollars a year?
$1,000,000 per hour * 8760 hr/year = 8.7 billion.
Yeah, I do. When a guy, with the stroke of a pen, can authorize (or veto) $700 billion in new spending, start wars which cost tens of billions a month, and negotiate trade deals (like NAFTA) worth trillions; then, yeah, I would say his time is worth a million dollars an hour.
Having basic amenities taken care of is not the same thing as hedonistic perks like a bowling alley in your basement.
The bowling alley, and most of the other perks in the White House, was not paid for with taxpayer money.
The POTUS has neither the authority nor the capability to launch a nuclear strike all by himself.
I guess I phrased that badly. The President is still the one with the final say-so about whether we launch our nukes, in most circumstances. It is still far more power than any other human possesses.
I think he's a little bit of both (I'm not just referring to W. but to all Presidents). The President is not only the leader of our government, but also the head of state. Like it or not, he is the personification of The United States, both domestically and abroad.
I don't think the, relative, luxury the President enjoys has anything to do with the recent rise of the "Imperial Presidency". The reasons you state, I think, have a lot more to do with it: "the isolation of the President from public opinion, the autocratic decisions without regard to the law".
I simply don't want my President wasting time cooking meals, ironing shirts, or worrying about wrinkling his suit when flying coach.
If the VP had given orders in response to an attack, I doubt many people would be questioning him.
That's exactly my point. The VP could have given orders, and they probably would have been followed. But they shouldn't have been. He had no legal power or authority at that point. No one did.
I'm not saying AF1 isn't important, but it just seems like such government waste. It pisses me off that the president, OUR employee, can't make do with "adequate," that he's got to have a flying mansion with more amenities than most people will ever even see in their lifetimes.
I want the President to have his every need taken care of. I don't want him to have to worry about anything other than the business of the nation. Its why we give him servants, chefs, a $300 million house, and a state-of-the-art plane. The President's time is easily worth a million dollars an hour. True government waste would be for him to spend his time worried about any of the concerns which are now taken care of for him.
If the top man is out of contact and presumed lost, or incapacitated, then command works its way down the chain. This is by design and is robust.
If its so robust, then who was in charge after Reagen was shot? He was in surgery, and incapacitated, for at least three hours. The President never formally gave up control; and the Cabinet never took it from him. Reagen wasn't dead, so power never passed automatically to the Vice President. So, who, at that time, could have responded to a Soviet nuclear strike? (Remember, no one knew at the time the assassination attempt was not part of a larger plot.)
I agree that we have a fairly robust system in place to maintain the chain of command. But, no system can ever take into account all the messy, real-world things that can happen. We're lucky that we haven't had too many unscripted transfers of power in this country.
in that role, he has precisely as much authority and responsibility as POTUS.
Until the UK Prime Minister has the means and authority to, single-handedly, end human life on earth, I don't think he has quite the same level of responsibility as the President.
The President is literally the Commander in Chief of the military; he goes incommunicado and before you know it you got Alexander Haig firing missles at Kazakhistan.
Exactly. People forget how fragile the chain of command really is. I know that people here had no idea what was going on when Reagen was shot, and Alexander "I am in control here" Haig only muddied the waters. I bet the Russians were shitting their pants. Air Force One, in its current form, is essential for preserving our nuclear deterrence. The office of The President of the United States is simply incomparable to any other.
For some games it probably won't matter, but who'd want to use it for an FPS where regardless of how detailed your graphics are, even a tenth of a second lag is the difference between who lives and who dies?
I might just be talking out of my ass here, but... If latency is your only bottleneck, and you have plenty of bandwidth and CPU on the server, wouldn't it be possible to deliver as many renderings as there are possible inputs, and only use whichever one corresponds to what the player actually does?
A simple example would be a game where, at any moment, the player could be moving up, down, left, or right. The server could generate four different views, one for each possible input. All four are delivered to the client. And the client's only job would be to determine the player's input, display the correct scene, and send notice of the players input to the server so the state of the game could be updated. Obviously, modern FPS have many more possible inputs, but the theory is the same. I don't think there would be any latency using this system.
For multi-player games, a similar setup could be used, only the server would have to create potential renderings for each player's inputs, in addition to the local client's inputs. So you could end up sending hundreds of frames down the wire and only to use one. But the latency would be the same as traditional multi-player games.
I think it's only fair for those who can't get the help transitioning, to be able to have extra time to switch over.
What about all the companies who bought licenses for those frequencies and would now have to wait until it becomes politically acceptable? I don't think they would approve the government changing their contracts.
They're not doing it to save you money. They're doing it to save the earth.
If they're hyping the cost savings instead of the environmental savings, its only because people don't really care enough about the environment, right? But the government, because it knows better than its citizens, has to trick them into doing what's best for them? Now, that's democracy in action!
No. Before the trial, we treat everyone as innocent. The guilty though, are still guilty. If there's a crime, you either did it or didn't, regardless of our ability to prove it. That was my point. I said in response to the post above this: a not-guilty verdict does not make a guilty man innocent, any more than a guilty verdict makes an innocent man guilty.
If you don't believe in "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" and you live in the US, please get the hell out of my country.
I believe that's a prudent way for society to deal with people who are accused of a crime. Its all we can do, given the imperfect nature of our knowledge of the events in question. But, no matter how we treat the accused, no court of law can ever change the actual facts (however unknowable to the court they may be) which make a guilty man guilty.
The guilt or innocence of a man is not determined by a trial, but only by the nature of his actions. The trial is only our societal decision-making process which determines how we will treat him.
No, no, no. Just because we treat everyone as innocent until proven guilty, does not mean that those who committed the crime are truly innocent. And if an innocent man is wrongly convicted, it does not make him guilty. This is the point of my original post: in the justice system, we use the words "guilty" or "innocent", when we should be using the, more accurate, terms "winner" or "loser". We confuse, perhaps deliberately, actual guilt with the finding of guilt by the court. A lost trial can never make an innocent man guilty.
Yes, all defendants should get a fair trial and a vigorous defense (though I stand by my statement that only the truly innocent ones deserve this). But, my point was that a trial has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, only winning and losing.
Unfortunate, but the guilty deserve a good defense, even if they are guilty.
Common misconception. The guilty deserve nothing but the punishment the law requires. Only the innocent deserve a vigorous and thorough defense. The problem is deciding which is which, before the trial.
Does the DHS have even one documented case of this information preventing said activity?
I don't think this is a valid criticism of the work the DHS is doing (and there is a lot of valid criticism). If you think that the only prevents attacks by stopping them at the gate, you are missing the point. Effective security should stop attacks in the planning stages when the terrorists realize their plan cannot work, not at the last possible moment. You can't really collect statistics on all the potential attacks which never got off the ground because of methods like these.
I'm not defending the frighteningly Big Brotherish strategy of the DHS. And I think this is a bad idea for a whole bunch of other reasons. But its effectiveness isn't one of them.
Tell me the meaningful service the stock market provides and I'll listen, but I'm hard pressed to find the value in their service.
The real service the stock market (or any other commodity or derivative market) provides is the transfer of risk. The market allows hedgers to minimize their exposure to risk by selling it to speculators who are willing to accept it in exchange for the potential returns. Every other function of the market is secondary to that.
The market is simply the most efficient method of risk transfer we have found. The only alternatives are to either not allow the transfer of risk at all, which would practically destroy the modern economy; or to socialize economic risk and make the government the only shareholder in all businesses.
Yes, all that extra research and development, and all that spending on new technology sure is horrible for the economy.
Yeah, it is horrible for the economy to spend billions inefficiently. Its called the broken window fallacy. If global warming can be mitigated for less than the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then that's what we should do. To do anything else is to throw away money and resources.
The industry isn't afraid of Fergie being downloaded, it's afraid of The Station being downloaded.
They should be. But I don't think the industry, that didn't even see P2P coming, has that much collective intelligence or foresight.
I think what they're really afraid of is a generation of potential consumers who give no thought to the copyright status or label affiliation of an album, who don't care if their downloads are legal or not. They're afraid of a culture which doesn't even consider paying for music. They're afraid that their role as musical gatekeepers will become obsolete. They're afraid that their product will have to compete with all others on a level playing field. And they should be.
In the 21st Century, and indeed as long as I've lived, the bulk of arguments made for copyright have been moral. The argument is that an artist deserves to have control over how his or her work is used
I agree that the question of artistic control is a moral one. But most of the arguments that I've heard rest upon the fact that an artist deserves compensation for their work (which is a moral question). But copyright is just a pragmatic way to assure the artist receives that compensation. If, because of widespread "civil disobedience" piracy, the copyright model stops providing that compensation, new structures will be invented.
Copyright, in its modern form, is simply a solution to solve a problem. If it ceases to effectively solve that problem, new solutions will be sought.
Of course things can be fought through civil disobedience that are moral (gay marriage, equal rights for women, equal rights for colored people are topics that come to mind.)
In the case of civil rights (the most prominent example in the US), civil disobedience only served to raise awareness of the issue, not change anyone's mind. It was not targeted at the racists in the south, but at the vast majority of Americans who believed in equal rights but had no idea how bad things were in the south. If anything, civil disobedience only served to galvanize the opinions of moderate southern racists against blacks, who were now seen as "troublemakers". Civil disobedience didn't change many minds, but it did raise awareness.
If you say that drug use leads to crime you are making an argument that I wonder about.
Drug use does lead to violations of laws: drug laws. It forces the user to turn to the black market, where there is no police protection or government enforcement of contracts. So drug users and dealers are more likely to own a gun for protection. Being that a non-trivial percentage of them are felons, possession of that gun puts them in violation of even more laws. And on, and on. Illegal drug use does lead to crime.
No people will no question its usefulness because the copyright warriors make a moral argument as well, namely "so how do I get paid or am able to protect my work?"
There are moral issues regarding copyright. But they are far outnumbered by the practical arguments. Most people's defense of copyright rests on the pragmatic ones, even the artists. Civil disobedience, in this case, can serve to diminish the importance of the pragmatic reasons, and the debate can move to the moral ones.
How do I legalize pot? Work with the system and get it legalized.
The arguments for drug prohibition are mostly moral, while the arguments for copyright are mostly pragmatic. Even the US Constitution spells out the purely practical justification for copyright's existence.
Because of its moralistic justifications, drug prohibition cannot be fought through "civil disobedience". Hard-core drug warriors will only see that widespread violation of the law as caused by the drugs, not the existence of the unjust law itself. Its hard to make the argument that drug use does not necessarily lead to criminal behavior, when it does 100% of the time.
Copyright, on the other hand, is primarily a practical invention. If enough people violate its protections, its usefulness will be questioned. If you want to modify or repeal copyright, you have to show society that it isn't necessary, or that it is actually harmful.
That reminds me of when I went to the computer store to buy a new laptop. The salesman asked me if I'd like to buy a mouse too. I told him no. I didn't think it and my cat would get along.
Its funny, though, how no one ever open sources their password. Everyone knows that weak passwords "can more easily be spotted and fixed when they are in the open."
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So, who, at the time, could have responded to a Soviet nuclear strike?
I don't know. I'm no lawyer, but I don't think anyone could have. I guess the VP has the best argument in his favor. And that's my point: no matter how detailed the procedures or well thought out the plans, there will always be cases you didn't account for.
Are you suggesting that POTUS's time is worth 8.7 TRILLION dollars a year?
$1,000,000 per hour * 8760 hr/year = 8.7 billion.
Yeah, I do. When a guy, with the stroke of a pen, can authorize (or veto) $700 billion in new spending, start wars which cost tens of billions a month, and negotiate trade deals (like NAFTA) worth trillions; then, yeah, I would say his time is worth a million dollars an hour.
Having basic amenities taken care of is not the same thing as hedonistic perks like a bowling alley in your basement.
The bowling alley, and most of the other perks in the White House, was not paid for with taxpayer money.
The POTUS has neither the authority nor the capability to launch a nuclear strike all by himself.
I guess I phrased that badly. The President is still the one with the final say-so about whether we launch our nukes, in most circumstances. It is still far more power than any other human possesses.
The President is a manager, not a monarch.
I think he's a little bit of both (I'm not just referring to W. but to all Presidents). The President is not only the leader of our government, but also the head of state. Like it or not, he is the personification of The United States, both domestically and abroad.
I don't think the, relative, luxury the President enjoys has anything to do with the recent rise of the "Imperial Presidency". The reasons you state, I think, have a lot more to do with it: "the isolation of the President from public opinion, the autocratic decisions without regard to the law".
I simply don't want my President wasting time cooking meals, ironing shirts, or worrying about wrinkling his suit when flying coach.
If the VP had given orders in response to an attack, I doubt many people would be questioning him.
That's exactly my point. The VP could have given orders, and they probably would have been followed. But they shouldn't have been. He had no legal power or authority at that point. No one did.
I'm not saying AF1 isn't important, but it just seems like such government waste. It pisses me off that the president, OUR employee, can't make do with "adequate," that he's got to have a flying mansion with more amenities than most people will ever even see in their lifetimes.
I want the President to have his every need taken care of. I don't want him to have to worry about anything other than the business of the nation. Its why we give him servants, chefs, a $300 million house, and a state-of-the-art plane. The President's time is easily worth a million dollars an hour. True government waste would be for him to spend his time worried about any of the concerns which are now taken care of for him.
If the top man is out of contact and presumed lost, or incapacitated, then command works its way down the chain. This is by design and is robust.
If its so robust, then who was in charge after Reagen was shot? He was in surgery, and incapacitated, for at least three hours. The President never formally gave up control; and the Cabinet never took it from him. Reagen wasn't dead, so power never passed automatically to the Vice President. So, who, at that time, could have responded to a Soviet nuclear strike? (Remember, no one knew at the time the assassination attempt was not part of a larger plot.)
I agree that we have a fairly robust system in place to maintain the chain of command. But, no system can ever take into account all the messy, real-world things that can happen. We're lucky that we haven't had too many unscripted transfers of power in this country.
in that role, he has precisely as much authority and responsibility as POTUS.
Until the UK Prime Minister has the means and authority to, single-handedly, end human life on earth, I don't think he has quite the same level of responsibility as the President.
The President is literally the Commander in Chief of the military; he goes incommunicado and before you know it you got Alexander Haig firing missles at Kazakhistan.
Exactly. People forget how fragile the chain of command really is. I know that people here had no idea what was going on when Reagen was shot, and Alexander "I am in control here" Haig only muddied the waters. I bet the Russians were shitting their pants. Air Force One, in its current form, is essential for preserving our nuclear deterrence. The office of The President of the United States is simply incomparable to any other.
For some games it probably won't matter, but who'd want to use it for an FPS where regardless of how detailed your graphics are, even a tenth of a second lag is the difference between who lives and who dies?
I might just be talking out of my ass here, but... If latency is your only bottleneck, and you have plenty of bandwidth and CPU on the server, wouldn't it be possible to deliver as many renderings as there are possible inputs, and only use whichever one corresponds to what the player actually does?
A simple example would be a game where, at any moment, the player could be moving up, down, left, or right. The server could generate four different views, one for each possible input. All four are delivered to the client. And the client's only job would be to determine the player's input, display the correct scene, and send notice of the players input to the server so the state of the game could be updated. Obviously, modern FPS have many more possible inputs, but the theory is the same. I don't think there would be any latency using this system.
For multi-player games, a similar setup could be used, only the server would have to create potential renderings for each player's inputs, in addition to the local client's inputs. So you could end up sending hundreds of frames down the wire and only to use one. But the latency would be the same as traditional multi-player games.
I think it's only fair for those who can't get the help transitioning, to be able to have extra time to switch over.
What about all the companies who bought licenses for those frequencies and would now have to wait until it becomes politically acceptable? I don't think they would approve the government changing their contracts.
They're not doing it to save you money. They're doing it to save the earth.
If they're hyping the cost savings instead of the environmental savings, its only because people don't really care enough about the environment, right? But the government, because it knows better than its citizens, has to trick them into doing what's best for them? Now, that's democracy in action!
Before the trial EVERONE is innocent.
No. Before the trial, we treat everyone as innocent. The guilty though, are still guilty. If there's a crime, you either did it or didn't, regardless of our ability to prove it. That was my point. I said in response to the post above this: a not-guilty verdict does not make a guilty man innocent, any more than a guilty verdict makes an innocent man guilty.
If you don't believe in "innocent until proven guilty in a court of law" and you live in the US, please get the hell out of my country.
I believe that's a prudent way for society to deal with people who are accused of a crime. Its all we can do, given the imperfect nature of our knowledge of the events in question. But, no matter how we treat the accused, no court of law can ever change the actual facts (however unknowable to the court they may be) which make a guilty man guilty.
The guilt or innocence of a man is not determined by a trial, but only by the nature of his actions. The trial is only our societal decision-making process which determines how we will treat him.
before the trial they are innocent, everyone.
No, no, no. Just because we treat everyone as innocent until proven guilty, does not mean that those who committed the crime are truly innocent. And if an innocent man is wrongly convicted, it does not make him guilty. This is the point of my original post: in the justice system, we use the words "guilty" or "innocent", when we should be using the, more accurate, terms "winner" or "loser". We confuse, perhaps deliberately, actual guilt with the finding of guilt by the court. A lost trial can never make an innocent man guilty.
Yes, all defendants should get a fair trial and a vigorous defense (though I stand by my statement that only the truly innocent ones deserve this). But, my point was that a trial has nothing to do with guilt or innocence, only winning and losing.
Unfortunate, but the guilty deserve a good defense, even if they are guilty.
Common misconception. The guilty deserve nothing but the punishment the law requires. Only the innocent deserve a vigorous and thorough defense. The problem is deciding which is which, before the trial.
Does the DHS have even one documented case of this information preventing said activity?
I don't think this is a valid criticism of the work the DHS is doing (and there is a lot of valid criticism). If you think that the only prevents attacks by stopping them at the gate, you are missing the point. Effective security should stop attacks in the planning stages when the terrorists realize their plan cannot work, not at the last possible moment. You can't really collect statistics on all the potential attacks which never got off the ground because of methods like these.
I'm not defending the frighteningly Big Brotherish strategy of the DHS. And I think this is a bad idea for a whole bunch of other reasons. But its effectiveness isn't one of them.
Tell me the meaningful service the stock market provides and I'll listen, but I'm hard pressed to find the value in their service.
The real service the stock market (or any other commodity or derivative market) provides is the transfer of risk. The market allows hedgers to minimize their exposure to risk by selling it to speculators who are willing to accept it in exchange for the potential returns. Every other function of the market is secondary to that.
The market is simply the most efficient method of risk transfer we have found. The only alternatives are to either not allow the transfer of risk at all, which would practically destroy the modern economy; or to socialize economic risk and make the government the only shareholder in all businesses.
Yes, all that extra research and development, and all that spending on new technology sure is horrible for the economy.
Yeah, it is horrible for the economy to spend billions inefficiently. Its called the broken window fallacy. If global warming can be mitigated for less than the cost of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, then that's what we should do. To do anything else is to throw away money and resources.
The industry isn't afraid of Fergie being downloaded, it's afraid of The Station being downloaded.
They should be. But I don't think the industry, that didn't even see P2P coming, has that much collective intelligence or foresight.
I think what they're really afraid of is a generation of potential consumers who give no thought to the copyright status or label affiliation of an album, who don't care if their downloads are legal or not. They're afraid of a culture which doesn't even consider paying for music. They're afraid that their role as musical gatekeepers will become obsolete. They're afraid that their product will have to compete with all others on a level playing field. And they should be.
It seems like it is drug LAWS that cause this as opposed to the drugs themselves.
The same point holds for murder and murder laws too. Murder leads to crime, more at 11.
In the 21st Century, and indeed as long as I've lived, the bulk of arguments made for copyright have been moral. The argument is that an artist deserves to have control over how his or her work is used
I agree that the question of artistic control is a moral one. But most of the arguments that I've heard rest upon the fact that an artist deserves compensation for their work (which is a moral question). But copyright is just a pragmatic way to assure the artist receives that compensation. If, because of widespread "civil disobedience" piracy, the copyright model stops providing that compensation, new structures will be invented.
Copyright, in its modern form, is simply a solution to solve a problem. If it ceases to effectively solve that problem, new solutions will be sought.
Of course things can be fought through civil disobedience that are moral (gay marriage, equal rights for women, equal rights for colored people are topics that come to mind.)
In the case of civil rights (the most prominent example in the US), civil disobedience only served to raise awareness of the issue, not change anyone's mind. It was not targeted at the racists in the south, but at the vast majority of Americans who believed in equal rights but had no idea how bad things were in the south. If anything, civil disobedience only served to galvanize the opinions of moderate southern racists against blacks, who were now seen as "troublemakers". Civil disobedience didn't change many minds, but it did raise awareness.
If you say that drug use leads to crime you are making an argument that I wonder about.
Drug use does lead to violations of laws: drug laws. It forces the user to turn to the black market, where there is no police protection or government enforcement of contracts. So drug users and dealers are more likely to own a gun for protection. Being that a non-trivial percentage of them are felons, possession of that gun puts them in violation of even more laws. And on, and on. Illegal drug use does lead to crime.
No people will no question its usefulness because the copyright warriors make a moral argument as well, namely "so how do I get paid or am able to protect my work?"
There are moral issues regarding copyright. But they are far outnumbered by the practical arguments. Most people's defense of copyright rests on the pragmatic ones, even the artists. Civil disobedience, in this case, can serve to diminish the importance of the pragmatic reasons, and the debate can move to the moral ones.
How do I legalize pot? Work with the system and get it legalized.
The arguments for drug prohibition are mostly moral, while the arguments for copyright are mostly pragmatic. Even the US Constitution spells out the purely practical justification for copyright's existence.
Because of its moralistic justifications, drug prohibition cannot be fought through "civil disobedience". Hard-core drug warriors will only see that widespread violation of the law as caused by the drugs, not the existence of the unjust law itself. Its hard to make the argument that drug use does not necessarily lead to criminal behavior, when it does 100% of the time.
Copyright, on the other hand, is primarily a practical invention. If enough people violate its protections, its usefulness will be questioned. If you want to modify or repeal copyright, you have to show society that it isn't necessary, or that it is actually harmful.
That reminds me of when I went to the computer store to buy a new laptop. The salesman asked me if I'd like to buy a mouse too. I told him no. I didn't think it and my cat would get along.
Its funny, though, how no one ever open sources their password. Everyone knows that weak passwords "can more easily be spotted and fixed when they are in the open."