The Federalist Papers were, objectively speaking, propaganda pieces written to persuade the states to adopt the Constitution. This is not to disparage them, but it's just a reminder that they were not neutral analytical pieces, they were persuasive works.
Very true, and not often enough said. But I would gladly trade that caliber of propaganda for what passes for political discourse today. That politicians of that time could think and write at that depth, and be persuasive, me wonder where we, today, have gone so wrong.
So contrary to the popular "wisdom," the founding fathers were not as hostile to democracy as people like to claim.
I don't think they were hostile to democracy, only tyranny. Democracy protects us from the tyranny of the minority. Limits on democracy protect us from the tyranny of the majority. They were trying to craft a system which wouldn't tear itself apart at the first sign of trouble.
I'm not convinced a republic is any better....but the republic system produces oligarchy very easily with the resulting party systems.... Like weeds, the big parties prevent smaller parties from emerging and gaining prominence in the media.
The reason why the two party system inadvertently evolved (the framers certainly didn't design it in on purpose) in the US is the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college. I always thought, if the founders could have changed anything in the constitution, with the benefit of hindsight, they would have changed that. They really didn't like political parties at all.
Unfortunately, political action universally devolves into the ideological shorthand of a party system. I can't think of a modern republic without them.
Was there no person in their cabinets close enough/savvy enough to make it clear that a platform by which to hear from their populace was good and useful?
I think the web makes this a unique situation. Whenever a controversial bill is to be voted on, legislators and the president are inundated with letters, phone calls, and recently, emails. Now feedback can be given on a web forum, for all to see. Where once, when someone got pissed off and "wrote their congressman", it was a relatively private act between a citizen and his representative.
Now that private act is public, and serves as an advertisement for even more feedback. I don't think there is anything particularly revolutionary about this. Its only the intersection of politics with current technology, just as email was before it.
To me, it seems like a insight-free echo chamber where good ideas go to be drown in a sea of crap.
They should take a Greek political history course or something.
They don't even have to go back that far. They can simply read The Federalist Papers, specifically Number 10. The founders were nice enough, not only to give us a pretty swell constitution, but also a well thought out defense of the principals it rests upon.
But you really only need study the actual text of the constitution to find out what they thought about direct democracy: senators chosen by state legislators, the electoral college, and the conspicuous absence of a national vote on anything but amendments (and even then, only sometimes).
What benefit would non-paid-for proprietary software have over non-paid-for free software in that situation?
Just because there's no copyright, doesn't mean its free. I think proprietary software producers would move to some sort of "pay me and I'll write what you want" model, or super restrictive DRM, constantly phoning home, rented software. You'd still pay for it, and you'd never see a line of source. But they would be able to gobble up any bits of FOSS they like and never return the favor. I think this would lead to a slowdown in FOSS contributions from large corporations, who are trying to maintain a competitive advantage. That means fewer contributors (especially in areas where volunteer-based FOSS traditionally under-serves), which gives proprietary software a chance to meet and surpass the functionality of the FOSS equivalent.
The existence of the "Law" does not change this: it is merely an additional external factor that each of us must incorporate into his own decisions as he sees fit.
Exactly. The law has nothing to do with morality, right and wrong, or any other platitudes.
Its useful to think of the law as a tax on behavior you want to discourage. Much as high tobacco taxes reduce the amount consumed by increasing the cost; laws against murder, for example, are only increase the cost of committing murder. The theory is that people will, more or less, rationally weigh the costs and benefits of their actions, taking into account the cost of violating the law, and decide against taking actions which are net-negative. Ideally the law should be crafted such that the cost of punishment meets, or exceeds, the costs of the social externalities.
The success of FOSS is because of dedicated communities of volunteers and commitment to principles of openness and sharing.
The contributions of large, profit-seeking corporations also have quite a bit to do with the success of FOSS. If every piece of code IBM ever commits to a FOSS project could be instantly and legally scooped up by their competitors and rolled into their own closed source project, I think you would find IBM much less inclined to contribute as much as they do. Profit driven corporations are much less likely to give away their hard-won competitive advantage without the promise of something in return.
Without that corporate backing and its benefits, the FOSS installed base would be substantially smaller. Fewer users means fewer potential developers. And, fewer developers means a weaker, less secure, less usable FOSS ecosystem.
I'm no GPL zealot, but to say that the license has no effect on the strength of the FOSS community is naive at best. There's a reason linux overtook BSD as the most popular Unix, even though BSD is older, and more mature. I think it has little to do with the purely technical merits of the linux kernel, but rather the huge pool of development resources made available by its license.
But does even it even really tell you what the Machine is executing? Not so much.
No, you're looking at it at a lower level than what I meant. C, being the lowest of the "high" level languages, still is much too high level to really give a detailed understanding of what the computer is doing. But, its in the same ballpark: list of instructions, branching, conditionals, and use of memory. They follow the same basic rules. What I'm saying is, both C and assembler are just lists of instructions. If you can read a C program, you can probably follow one written in assembler; they're both just lists of instructions: do this, then this, then this...
Functional languages differ in that fundamental way.
Modern OO languages like Ruby are much more concise.
I don't have any Ruby experience, but it really couldn't be much worse than C++ or Java in that regard. When you try to introduce programming through Java, its: "ignore this", "we'll get to that later", or "don't worry what 'public class Foo' means".
The ideal language for a beginner's course should be a theoretical language that is built to be clear, not efficient.
Amen. I would imagine that a fair number of us here picked up programming outside of our formal educations, they learned whatever language they could use on their home computers, Basic, HyperTalk, or even Excel's macro language. For me that meant a lot of trial and error, trips to the library, and looking at other's code. It wasn't the most efficient way to learn a language. But, by the time I got to college, I already had the basic concepts down pat. (Although, when exposed to the "right" way to do things, I was shocked and horrified at how awful, inefficient, and stupid most of my design decisions, up to that point, were.)
A lot of the people in a CS101 class have never had, or never took advantage of, that opportunity. This will be their first introduction to programming. There are so many concepts I take for granted which aren't necessarily obvious: the plodding step-by-step explicit nature of computers, and how to think about a problem in the terms a computer would understand. I think some sort of imperative language is closer to how most people normally think about a problem, as opposed to a functional language (or Prolog for that matter). I could be wrong.
The perfect teaching language, for me, would be one where the student could progress through the course, writing more and more advanced programs and taking advantage of more and more features of the language, without ever having to type anything he doesn't completely understand. For example, if I was teaching Java, I would have to gloss over the "class" and "static" keywords just to get the student going on a Hello World program (not to mention "System.out.println"). I don't want to have to simplify those definitions to the student's level, and have that simplification be what sticks in his mind. Unfortunately, I don't know of an imperative language that does this.
I don't think functional programming is the place to start for the majority of students. A procedural language has a much more direct relationship to the underlying machine code. If you don't want to start in assembler (and I don't advocate assembler for a first language for a lot of reasons), a language like C, which is high-level enough to not get bogged down in irrelevant details while teaching basic algorithms, yet is close enough to the metal to give the students a taste of the underlying hardware, is a good compromise. Functional programming, while closer to the underlying math, is so different from the instructions the machine actually executes that students may finish the class and still not have a clear idea how what they wrote directs the machine.
That said, my first development environment was HyperCard and most of what I have done since has been OOP. When thinking about a problem, my first instinct is to objectify it. But, I think OOP involves learning too much at once to be the ideal teaching paradigm. Think of how many lines of OO exist in a Java Hello World program. And think how much of that is meaningless to the student when they're still trying to learn the basics of println.
Correction: Today, using the internet, the illusion of anonymity is easier to obtain than ever before.
It is true, it is easy to be lulled into thinking you're anonymous when you're really not. And solutions like Tor require a healthy dose of technical savvy to use properly. But, with open an open wifi network and a throwaway GMail or Yahoo account, pretty much anyone can do whatever they want on the internet without much fear that they will be found out.
If the person who wrote the allegedly defamatory comment about the donut shop had cared at all about remaining anonymous, this entire issue would be moot, as no one, especially not the host of the web-forum, would have any way to identify the complainer, even with a subpoena.
If you are at a party and a stranger calls you a jerk, is the host required to tell you who he was?
If you can get a subpoena, then yes... yes you can. If he just called you a jerk, well you probably won't be able to convince the judge to give you a subpoena, but if the remark rose to the standard of defamation, I don't see how you couldn't.
Anonymity in the US, aside from some very specific circumstances, has always been something of a "catch me if you can" situation. And, in my opinion, that's the way it should be. As long as when you need anonymity (and I mean really need anonymity, like from the government or evil corporate overlords), there exists some way to get the word out, the right to free speech has not been abridged, in my opinion.
Today, using the internet, anonymity is easier to obtain then ever before. If the people voicing their opinions on that web-forum really wanted to remain anonymous and insulated from the consequences of their actions, there are simple steps they could have taken so the host wouldn't even know who they were.
The problem is that the drug war is a result of minority rule, putting into the absolute, binary law something only a small portion of the population opposes. That's called tyranny.
I don't think you're correct on this point. Drugs are not an issue where an overwhelming majority of Americans support legalization. Only a few states have even legalized medical marijuana - the most sympathetic legalization argument.
Without recognizing that legalization is a minority opinion, we will use the wrong strategy trying to change the status quo. Education is still our strongest tool; most people are simply unaware of any real alternatives to prohibition, its astronomical cost, and its utter failure.
Anyone who still thinks that drug-related problems are cured by their prohibition is an idiot.
I think that is equally, if not more, true then the way you put it. Drug abuse is a problem that the people on both sides of the legalization debate wish would just go away. It won't. The abuse of intoxicating substances will be with us until the end of time. Until people realize there is no magic cure-all to the problem of abuse, we won't have a sane drug policy in this country. Prohibition or legalization are answers to an entirely different question, but defiantly not the question of abuse.
But since their profit is illegal, they cannot put their money in the bank...
I don't think most people realize just how many billions of dollars in cash exist world-wide, hidden from the financial system because of the illegality of drugs. All that money, stuffed under a street-dealer's mattress, stacked to the ceiling in some narco-lord's palace, or traded for guns in some third-world shit hole, could be sitting in a nice, interest bearing, FDIC insured bank account back here in the US, generating a little return, and allowing the banks to reinvest that capital; if only the drug trade were legal. That lost wealth alone would probably be ten times the amount necessary to pay for the social costs of all drug abuse.
Why is it that it took a constitutional amendment to start prohibition of alcohol, and bring it back...but, other drugs have been taken out of public use by the swipe of a pen?
A lot of court cases, which took place between the enactment of prohibition and the present, that drastically altered the interpretation of: the elastic clause, the general welfare clause, and the interstate commerce clause.
The real reason drugs remain illegal stems from the fact that society, as a whole, has taken responsibility for the actions of its individual citizens. As long as we socialize the costs of substance abuse: neglected children, hospital bills, and criminal activity; society will proscribe behaviors which tend to increase those costs. Rightly or wrongly, society, as a whole, views drug use as a cost which carries no benefit.
As a, more or less, strict libertarian, I believe that all drugs should be legalized. I also believe that the government has no business picking up the tab for the costs of abuse. So, while we continue to view it as the government's job to pay for someone else's risky behavior, we'll never see the blanket legalization of all drugs.
So since we've got some tiny islands that N Korea could barely reach if it got really lucky, that N Korea could benefit from attacking only by escalating a shooting war with the US, we should... polish the trigger and load the gun?
I think this is an arms race. Right now North Korea can only hit some tiny islands, and our tests only work in well controlled simulations. The hope is, by the time Korea can hit our mainland with nukes, we have a fully functional and completely deployed version of this technology. We can't just sit on our hands and wait for Korea(or Iran, or Pakistan) to obtain the capacity, and will, to hit us before we start the decades long research and development.
If they hit them, we'd suffer minimal loss, and N Korea would finally find itself facing the most global opposition possible. It would be a boon to the US, just as Georgia's attacking Russia finally gave Russia the chance to slap down its Georgia nuisance.
What we are preparing for is the nuclear ICBM equivalent of a suicide bomber. The coldly logical, and successful, strategies of MAD do not hold when confronted with an opponent that doesn't care if they face "the most global opposition possible". Losing a large American city to a nuclear ICBM is not at all equal to Russia's "Georgia nuisance".
I can understand N. Korea since they can actually reach the Aleutians... but Iran?
I think Iran and North Korea are simply the easiest threats to identify right now. What this system is designed to do is counter any country that is not deterred by the threat of massive retaliation. Whether it be Iran, North Korea, a destabilized Russia, or a fundamentalist lead Pakistan, this system should give pause to any suicidal leader who is willing to trade the annihilation of his country for the chance to wipe out at least one American city.
That being said, by the time Iran acquires the ability to launch ICBMs at the US, this program may actually work as advertised.
I hope you're right. But the absolutely dreadful track record of the US improving its infrastructure, whether it be electric, broadband, or whatever, leads me to believe we won't confront the problem until there are rolling blackouts.
A little of both. This story: http://www.motorauthority.com/expert-says-electric-grid-ready-for-plug-in-hybrids.html It quotes an expert as saying that the grid could handle a, "60% adoption rate of plug-in hybrids by 2050." Now, my opinion is that the demand, and supply of primary-electric vehicles will be stronger well before 2050. And how much infrastructure development would have to take place between now and 2050 to make it possible?
The infrastructure for electric cars is already in place as the majority of places are already on the electricity grid. All that has to happen is for the cars to be fitted with a plug and be able to charge off of house current (110/220).
Yeah, most places in the US are on our aging, antiquated electric grid. If all cars operated today were electric, and charged at night when there is less demand, there would still not be enough generation and transmission capacity to power them all.
Then some enterprising person will come up with a 'coin operated' charging unit to be placed at the front of all comercial and public parking spaces. And it is all done.
With this, the time it takes to charge a battery is non-trivial. Its not comparable to the five minutes it takes to fill your gas tank.
I believe electric cars are the future, not hydrogen, ethanol, or biodiesel. That said, battery technology has to radically improve before they are capable of general use. We can fix the other problems gradually, as electric cars are adopted. Hawaii is the perfect testing ground for this kind of network. An electric car that can only get 40 miles per charge is no problem when you can't drive that far unless you're doing laps (well, not quite). And the geothermal potential there has to be huge.
Its true. Abuse by institutions already has a, relatively, effective feedback system. What I worry about is individual criminals or criminal organizations. There, the anonymity of access to the data prevents the feedback system from finding the person responsible for the abuse. I wouldn't mind having most of my personal data publicly available as long as I could see a unforgeable record of who had looked at it.
I guess I have the same attitude as the banks do regarding fraud. Its easy to commit, but really hard to get away with. If we are going to live in a transparent society, I don't want to be caught on the wrong side of a one way mirror. Its got to be transparency for everyone, or for no one.
There is a cloud-like structure developing out there where virtually EVERY electronic transaction will leave a permanent record. There will come a skynet-like point where we won't even have the option of simply restoring privacy.
I think we're well past the point of restoring privacy, as it existed in the middle part of this century, without tearing down the computational, networking, and legal infrastructure that we've created since the 1970's. As long as the capacity exists to record and search this data, and proves useful enough to those who collect it, we will live in a world where almost everything we do is monitored by machine.
The part that's hard to imagine is when these disconnected islands of, seemingly innocuous, data are joined together completely. Few balk when their name is listed in the phone book, when their child's birth is certified, when their house's picture is on Street View, when their building permits and house plans are recorded at the county courthouse, when their credit report reflects the state of their finances, when the IRS requires a detailed accounting of all their money every year, or when the time, place and manner of their death is certified. But, when all of those records are digitized, linked together, and combined with other private datasets, people would blanch at knowing just how much of their lives had been recorded, tracked, and analyzed. Only recently has technology advanced far enough that it is possible to correlate all of these datasets for almost everyone.
I don't think there is anything we can do about it. If we want to live in the modern world, we have to accept that the data will be collected and stored. I just hope the legal system moves fast enough to allow the citizenry to watch the watchers (not freaking likely). Having more of this data publicly available helps.
Which is very different from a large society in which some people know everybody else's business. Even if this stuff is public, the time and money and knowledge necessary to use it will not be evenly distributed.
Information has never been evenly distributed. In small communities it was the neighborhood gossip, the corner pharmacist, the village priest, or the county sheriff who knew everybody's business. The replacement of social capital with monetary capital is the only difference.
Those small communities had, however, a fast-acting, closely monitored feedback system. If someone abused their position of power and trust, it was caught quickly and it was easy to remove them from the loop. A similar system is needed now, only on a national, or worldwide scale. I think the only way to accomplish this, without going back to a pre-computer society, is to make sure that as much information about the watchers is as publicly accessible as possible. Hopefully, the same spirit that makes the OSS community so vibrant and quick to act will transfer to this new domain.
Slashdot Mirror
The Federalist Papers were, objectively speaking, propaganda pieces written to persuade the states to adopt the Constitution. This is not to disparage them, but it's just a reminder that they were not neutral analytical pieces, they were persuasive works.
Very true, and not often enough said. But I would gladly trade that caliber of propaganda for what passes for political discourse today. That politicians of that time could think and write at that depth, and be persuasive, me wonder where we, today, have gone so wrong.
So contrary to the popular "wisdom," the founding fathers were not as hostile to democracy as people like to claim.
I don't think they were hostile to democracy, only tyranny. Democracy protects us from the tyranny of the minority. Limits on democracy protect us from the tyranny of the majority. They were trying to craft a system which wouldn't tear itself apart at the first sign of trouble.
I'm not convinced a republic is any better. ...but the republic system produces oligarchy very easily with the resulting party systems. ... Like weeds, the big parties prevent smaller parties from emerging and gaining prominence in the media.
The reason why the two party system inadvertently evolved (the framers certainly didn't design it in on purpose) in the US is the winner-take-all nature of the electoral college. I always thought, if the founders could have changed anything in the constitution, with the benefit of hindsight, they would have changed that. They really didn't like political parties at all.
Unfortunately, political action universally devolves into the ideological shorthand of a party system. I can't think of a modern republic without them.
Was there no person in their cabinets close enough/savvy enough to make it clear that a platform by which to hear from their populace was good and useful?
I think the web makes this a unique situation. Whenever a controversial bill is to be voted on, legislators and the president are inundated with letters, phone calls, and recently, emails. Now feedback can be given on a web forum, for all to see. Where once, when someone got pissed off and "wrote their congressman", it was a relatively private act between a citizen and his representative.
Now that private act is public, and serves as an advertisement for even more feedback. I don't think there is anything particularly revolutionary about this. Its only the intersection of politics with current technology, just as email was before it.
To me, it seems like a insight-free echo chamber where good ideas go to be drown in a sea of crap.
They should take a Greek political history course or something.
They don't even have to go back that far. They can simply read The Federalist Papers, specifically Number 10. The founders were nice enough, not only to give us a pretty swell constitution, but also a well thought out defense of the principals it rests upon.
But you really only need study the actual text of the constitution to find out what they thought about direct democracy: senators chosen by state legislators, the electoral college, and the conspicuous absence of a national vote on anything but amendments (and even then, only sometimes).
What benefit would non-paid-for proprietary software have over non-paid-for free software in that situation?
Just because there's no copyright, doesn't mean its free. I think proprietary software producers would move to some sort of "pay me and I'll write what you want" model, or super restrictive DRM, constantly phoning home, rented software. You'd still pay for it, and you'd never see a line of source. But they would be able to gobble up any bits of FOSS they like and never return the favor. I think this would lead to a slowdown in FOSS contributions from large corporations, who are trying to maintain a competitive advantage. That means fewer contributors (especially in areas where volunteer-based FOSS traditionally under-serves), which gives proprietary software a chance to meet and surpass the functionality of the FOSS equivalent.
The existence of the "Law" does not change this: it is merely an additional external factor that each of us must incorporate into his own decisions as he sees fit.
Exactly. The law has nothing to do with morality, right and wrong, or any other platitudes.
Its useful to think of the law as a tax on behavior you want to discourage. Much as high tobacco taxes reduce the amount consumed by increasing the cost; laws against murder, for example, are only increase the cost of committing murder. The theory is that people will, more or less, rationally weigh the costs and benefits of their actions, taking into account the cost of violating the law, and decide against taking actions which are net-negative. Ideally the law should be crafted such that the cost of punishment meets, or exceeds, the costs of the social externalities.
The success of FOSS is because of dedicated communities of volunteers and commitment to principles of openness and sharing.
The contributions of large, profit-seeking corporations also have quite a bit to do with the success of FOSS. If every piece of code IBM ever commits to a FOSS project could be instantly and legally scooped up by their competitors and rolled into their own closed source project, I think you would find IBM much less inclined to contribute as much as they do. Profit driven corporations are much less likely to give away their hard-won competitive advantage without the promise of something in return.
Without that corporate backing and its benefits, the FOSS installed base would be substantially smaller. Fewer users means fewer potential developers. And, fewer developers means a weaker, less secure, less usable FOSS ecosystem.
I'm no GPL zealot, but to say that the license has no effect on the strength of the FOSS community is naive at best. There's a reason linux overtook BSD as the most popular Unix, even though BSD is older, and more mature. I think it has little to do with the purely technical merits of the linux kernel, but rather the huge pool of development resources made available by its license.
But does even it even really tell you what the Machine is executing? Not so much.
No, you're looking at it at a lower level than what I meant. C, being the lowest of the "high" level languages, still is much too high level to really give a detailed understanding of what the computer is doing. But, its in the same ballpark: list of instructions, branching, conditionals, and use of memory. They follow the same basic rules. What I'm saying is, both C and assembler are just lists of instructions. If you can read a C program, you can probably follow one written in assembler; they're both just lists of instructions: do this, then this, then this...
Functional languages differ in that fundamental way.
Modern OO languages like Ruby are much more concise.
I don't have any Ruby experience, but it really couldn't be much worse than C++ or Java in that regard. When you try to introduce programming through Java, its: "ignore this", "we'll get to that later", or "don't worry what 'public class Foo' means".
The ideal language for a beginner's course should be a theoretical language that is built to be clear, not efficient.
Amen. I would imagine that a fair number of us here picked up programming outside of our formal educations, they learned whatever language they could use on their home computers, Basic, HyperTalk, or even Excel's macro language. For me that meant a lot of trial and error, trips to the library, and looking at other's code. It wasn't the most efficient way to learn a language. But, by the time I got to college, I already had the basic concepts down pat. (Although, when exposed to the "right" way to do things, I was shocked and horrified at how awful, inefficient, and stupid most of my design decisions, up to that point, were.)
A lot of the people in a CS101 class have never had, or never took advantage of, that opportunity. This will be their first introduction to programming. There are so many concepts I take for granted which aren't necessarily obvious: the plodding step-by-step explicit nature of computers, and how to think about a problem in the terms a computer would understand. I think some sort of imperative language is closer to how most people normally think about a problem, as opposed to a functional language (or Prolog for that matter). I could be wrong.
The perfect teaching language, for me, would be one where the student could progress through the course, writing more and more advanced programs and taking advantage of more and more features of the language, without ever having to type anything he doesn't completely understand. For example, if I was teaching Java, I would have to gloss over the "class" and "static" keywords just to get the student going on a Hello World program (not to mention "System.out.println"). I don't want to have to simplify those definitions to the student's level, and have that simplification be what sticks in his mind. Unfortunately, I don't know of an imperative language that does this.
Definitely functional programming.
I don't think functional programming is the place to start for the majority of students. A procedural language has a much more direct relationship to the underlying machine code. If you don't want to start in assembler (and I don't advocate assembler for a first language for a lot of reasons), a language like C, which is high-level enough to not get bogged down in irrelevant details while teaching basic algorithms, yet is close enough to the metal to give the students a taste of the underlying hardware, is a good compromise. Functional programming, while closer to the underlying math, is so different from the instructions the machine actually executes that students may finish the class and still not have a clear idea how what they wrote directs the machine.
That said, my first development environment was HyperCard and most of what I have done since has been OOP. When thinking about a problem, my first instinct is to objectify it. But, I think OOP involves learning too much at once to be the ideal teaching paradigm. Think of how many lines of OO exist in a Java Hello World program. And think how much of that is meaningless to the student when they're still trying to learn the basics of println.
Correction: Today, using the internet, the illusion of anonymity is easier to obtain than ever before.
It is true, it is easy to be lulled into thinking you're anonymous when you're really not. And solutions like Tor require a healthy dose of technical savvy to use properly. But, with open an open wifi network and a throwaway GMail or Yahoo account, pretty much anyone can do whatever they want on the internet without much fear that they will be found out.
If the person who wrote the allegedly defamatory comment about the donut shop had cared at all about remaining anonymous, this entire issue would be moot, as no one, especially not the host of the web-forum, would have any way to identify the complainer, even with a subpoena.
If you are at a party and a stranger calls you a jerk, is the host required to tell you who he was?
If you can get a subpoena, then yes... yes you can. If he just called you a jerk, well you probably won't be able to convince the judge to give you a subpoena, but if the remark rose to the standard of defamation, I don't see how you couldn't.
Anonymity in the US, aside from some very specific circumstances, has always been something of a "catch me if you can" situation. And, in my opinion, that's the way it should be. As long as when you need anonymity (and I mean really need anonymity, like from the government or evil corporate overlords), there exists some way to get the word out, the right to free speech has not been abridged, in my opinion.
Today, using the internet, anonymity is easier to obtain then ever before. If the people voicing their opinions on that web-forum really wanted to remain anonymous and insulated from the consequences of their actions, there are simple steps they could have taken so the host wouldn't even know who they were.
The problem is that the drug war is a result of minority rule, putting into the absolute, binary law something only a small portion of the population opposes. That's called tyranny.
I don't think you're correct on this point. Drugs are not an issue where an overwhelming majority of Americans support legalization. Only a few states have even legalized medical marijuana - the most sympathetic legalization argument.
Without recognizing that legalization is a minority opinion, we will use the wrong strategy trying to change the status quo. Education is still our strongest tool; most people are simply unaware of any real alternatives to prohibition, its astronomical cost, and its utter failure.
definitely not defiantly. Stupid spell-check is a crutch dang-nabbit.
Anyone who still thinks that drug-related problems are cured by their prohibition is an idiot.
I think that is equally, if not more, true then the way you put it. Drug abuse is a problem that the people on both sides of the legalization debate wish would just go away. It won't. The abuse of intoxicating substances will be with us until the end of time. Until people realize there is no magic cure-all to the problem of abuse, we won't have a sane drug policy in this country. Prohibition or legalization are answers to an entirely different question, but defiantly not the question of abuse.
But since their profit is illegal, they cannot put their money in the bank...
I don't think most people realize just how many billions of dollars in cash exist world-wide, hidden from the financial system because of the illegality of drugs. All that money, stuffed under a street-dealer's mattress, stacked to the ceiling in some narco-lord's palace, or traded for guns in some third-world shit hole, could be sitting in a nice, interest bearing, FDIC insured bank account back here in the US, generating a little return, and allowing the banks to reinvest that capital; if only the drug trade were legal. That lost wealth alone would probably be ten times the amount necessary to pay for the social costs of all drug abuse.
Why is it that it took a constitutional amendment to start prohibition of alcohol, and bring it back...but, other drugs have been taken out of public use by the swipe of a pen?
A lot of court cases, which took place between the enactment of prohibition and the present, that drastically altered the interpretation of: the elastic clause, the general welfare clause, and the interstate commerce clause.
The real reason drugs remain illegal stems from the fact that society, as a whole, has taken responsibility for the actions of its individual citizens. As long as we socialize the costs of substance abuse: neglected children, hospital bills, and criminal activity; society will proscribe behaviors which tend to increase those costs. Rightly or wrongly, society, as a whole, views drug use as a cost which carries no benefit.
As a, more or less, strict libertarian, I believe that all drugs should be legalized. I also believe that the government has no business picking up the tab for the costs of abuse. So, while we continue to view it as the government's job to pay for someone else's risky behavior, we'll never see the blanket legalization of all drugs.
So since we've got some tiny islands that N Korea could barely reach if it got really lucky, that N Korea could benefit from attacking only by escalating a shooting war with the US, we should... polish the trigger and load the gun?
I think this is an arms race. Right now North Korea can only hit some tiny islands, and our tests only work in well controlled simulations. The hope is, by the time Korea can hit our mainland with nukes, we have a fully functional and completely deployed version of this technology. We can't just sit on our hands and wait for Korea(or Iran, or Pakistan) to obtain the capacity, and will, to hit us before we start the decades long research and development.
If they hit them, we'd suffer minimal loss, and N Korea would finally find itself facing the most global opposition possible. It would be a boon to the US, just as Georgia's attacking Russia finally gave Russia the chance to slap down its Georgia nuisance.
What we are preparing for is the nuclear ICBM equivalent of a suicide bomber. The coldly logical, and successful, strategies of MAD do not hold when confronted with an opponent that doesn't care if they face "the most global opposition possible". Losing a large American city to a nuclear ICBM is not at all equal to Russia's "Georgia nuisance".
I can understand N. Korea since they can actually reach the Aleutians... but Iran?
I think Iran and North Korea are simply the easiest threats to identify right now. What this system is designed to do is counter any country that is not deterred by the threat of massive retaliation. Whether it be Iran, North Korea, a destabilized Russia, or a fundamentalist lead Pakistan, this system should give pause to any suicidal leader who is willing to trade the annihilation of his country for the chance to wipe out at least one American city.
That being said, by the time Iran acquires the ability to launch ICBMs at the US, this program may actually work as advertised.
I hope you're right. But the absolutely dreadful track record of the US improving its infrastructure, whether it be electric, broadband, or whatever, leads me to believe we won't confront the problem until there are rolling blackouts.
Citation? Or opinion?
A little of both.
This story: http://www.motorauthority.com/expert-says-electric-grid-ready-for-plug-in-hybrids.html
It quotes an expert as saying that the grid could handle a, "60% adoption rate of plug-in hybrids by 2050." Now, my opinion is that the demand, and supply of primary-electric vehicles will be stronger well before 2050. And how much infrastructure development would have to take place between now and 2050 to make it possible?
The infrastructure for electric cars is already in place as the majority of places are already on the electricity grid. All that has to happen is for the cars to be fitted with a plug and be able to charge off of house current (110/220).
Yeah, most places in the US are on our aging, antiquated electric grid. If all cars operated today were electric, and charged at night when there is less demand, there would still not be enough generation and transmission capacity to power them all.
Then some enterprising person will come up with a 'coin operated' charging unit to be placed at the front of all comercial and public parking spaces. And it is all done.
With this, the time it takes to charge a battery is non-trivial. Its not comparable to the five minutes it takes to fill your gas tank.
I believe electric cars are the future, not hydrogen, ethanol, or biodiesel. That said, battery technology has to radically improve before they are capable of general use. We can fix the other problems gradually, as electric cars are adopted. Hawaii is the perfect testing ground for this kind of network. An electric car that can only get 40 miles per charge is no problem when you can't drive that far unless you're doing laps (well, not quite). And the geothermal potential there has to be huge.
Its true. Abuse by institutions already has a, relatively, effective feedback system. What I worry about is individual criminals or criminal organizations. There, the anonymity of access to the data prevents the feedback system from finding the person responsible for the abuse. I wouldn't mind having most of my personal data publicly available as long as I could see a unforgeable record of who had looked at it.
I guess I have the same attitude as the banks do regarding fraud. Its easy to commit, but really hard to get away with. If we are going to live in a transparent society, I don't want to be caught on the wrong side of a one way mirror. Its got to be transparency for everyone, or for no one.
There is a cloud-like structure developing out there where virtually EVERY electronic transaction will leave a permanent record. There will come a skynet-like point where we won't even have the option of simply restoring privacy.
I think we're well past the point of restoring privacy, as it existed in the middle part of this century, without tearing down the computational, networking, and legal infrastructure that we've created since the 1970's. As long as the capacity exists to record and search this data, and proves useful enough to those who collect it, we will live in a world where almost everything we do is monitored by machine.
The part that's hard to imagine is when these disconnected islands of, seemingly innocuous, data are joined together completely. Few balk when their name is listed in the phone book, when their child's birth is certified, when their house's picture is on Street View, when their building permits and house plans are recorded at the county courthouse, when their credit report reflects the state of their finances, when the IRS requires a detailed accounting of all their money every year, or when the time, place and manner of their death is certified. But, when all of those records are digitized, linked together, and combined with other private datasets, people would blanch at knowing just how much of their lives had been recorded, tracked, and analyzed. Only recently has technology advanced far enough that it is possible to correlate all of these datasets for almost everyone.
I don't think there is anything we can do about it. If we want to live in the modern world, we have to accept that the data will be collected and stored. I just hope the legal system moves fast enough to allow the citizenry to watch the watchers (not freaking likely). Having more of this data publicly available helps.
Which is very different from a large society in which some people know everybody else's business.
Even if this stuff is public, the time and money and knowledge necessary to use it will not be evenly distributed.
Information has never been evenly distributed. In small communities it was the neighborhood gossip, the corner pharmacist, the village priest, or the county sheriff who knew everybody's business. The replacement of social capital with monetary capital is the only difference.
Those small communities had, however, a fast-acting, closely monitored feedback system. If someone abused their position of power and trust, it was caught quickly and it was easy to remove them from the loop. A similar system is needed now, only on a national, or worldwide scale. I think the only way to accomplish this, without going back to a pre-computer society, is to make sure that as much information about the watchers is as publicly accessible as possible. Hopefully, the same spirit that makes the OSS community so vibrant and quick to act will transfer to this new domain.