Nope. It's getting to the stage where it needs to use actual numbers for public statements. Linux has a hard time being taken seriously as anything more than a server OS. When Canonical comes out and says "We have an estimated X users, based on our utterly random guess from download counts" it doesn't help much. This looks like a way to get a more accurate count. No more, no less.
Sorry, but I have a knee-jerk reaction to ignore any post linking to FIJA. Despite claiming to support "fully informed" jurors, they're really only interested in promoting a justice system run by idiots.
When a jury acquits, it's likely to set precedent, and that includes all the aspects of the case. It's impossible to tell what the full effect of a precedent might be. An acquittal in the Childs case could set precedent that organizations do not control their computers. That would mean that, for example, a bank's sysadmin could be held personally responsible for hacked accounts. Toyota could sue their engineers for the accelerator problems. All sorts of mayhem could ensue, because of one acquittal. No, it's not very likely to go that far, but it is possible. Sensible indeed. FIJA seems to enjoy ignoring these possibilities, sacrificing the future just to express discontent. There's a better way to do that, that doesn't involve building a tangled mess of conflicting precedent.
Jury nullification is a byproduct of the double-jeopardy limit. I don't know of any place in the Constitution where nullification is actually a guaranteed right, or even mentioned as a possibility. Rather, it's a de facto right that remains because any attempt to outright stop it risks crippling the fairness of the justice system. The ability for a jury to vote "not guilty" was never intended to be a means to change laws.
If you want to change laws, butchering the judicial process is the wrong way to do it. Instead, take an active part in the legislative process. Run for office. Write your representatives. Vote for legislators that support your views. Don't obstruct justice.
Childs cost the city a very large sum of money through his denial-of-service attack on the network's administration system. One figure I read said the cost would be upwards of $1.5 million (though I can't seem to find the source again). That's $375,000 of vandalism per year of prison. In my opinion, that's pretty reasonable.
An acquaintance of mine converted his extra bays in a full-size tower to a storage space for often-needed electronics. There were drawers for transistors, LEDs, regular diodes, some ICs, and the other little bits he used often in his robot-building hobby. The top bay had a current limiter in it, cleaning and isolating the power supplied to plugs on the front, fed from the PC supply.
Nobody was physically hurt, but the financial cost to the city was substantial. First there's the cost to effectively break into their own system, then since they know there's been a breach, there's the cost for repair and another round of security testing.
Except as provided in subdivision (h), any person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense:...Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
For completeness, subdivision (h) is:
(h)(1)Subdivision (c) does not apply to punish any acts which are committed by a person within the scope of his or her lawful employment. For purposes of this section, a person acts within the scope of his or her employment when he or she performs acts which are reasonably necessary to the performance of his or her work assignment.
The judge determined that Childs' actions were not "reasonably necessary" to the job. It might be necessary to have passwords, but it's not necessary to lock out everyone. That's a denial of service, which is against the law.
There's one big problem with having well-qualified judges decide such questions. Over many years of service, they're much easier to bribe or extort than a jury, who are selected at random and serve for only a short time.
Judges do decide on whether each piece of evidence is admissible, and whether court rules are followed. Their qualifications are necessary for that.
That's assuming you can find a well-qualified judge in the first place. The jurors are pulled from the public, and there's more likely to be someone who knows the situation well. In this case, that's the CCIE juror. He can be expected to understand the circumstances better than the judge.
Childs could have implemented a system to allow access to passwords without his involvement. Would a judge, trained only in court proceedings, understand this? Could a defense attorney confuse the judge by delving into the mathematics? Would the judge understand the technical limitations and security implications of such a system?
Next week the same judge has to preside over a case on medical malpractice, which may require several years of medical school to understand. After that there's a motor vehicle collision, which means a few years of engineering.
The jury decides whether the accused is "proven guilty" by the criteria I've already mentioned. The judge's job is to make sure that the established legal process is followed.
They have the power to nullify, but that's not their job. The job remains to determine if the accused broke the law, with intent, and without mitigating circumstances. They can determine that the law's absurdity is a mitigating circumstance.
In this case, the laws are pretty reasonable: Sysadmins can't lock everyone else out of a system they don't own.
The point of a jury isn't to selectively apply laws. It is to determine whether the evidence indicates that the law was broken, with intent, and without any mitigating circumstances.
Childs locked down systems without documenting the changes. He did not take any steps to ensure continuous service in his absence. He put extra effort towards implementing systems that others couldn't access. He broke the law.
He refused to turn over passwords when leaving. When asked, he lied. That strongly indicates intent.
There has been no mention of blackmail or extortion. Nothing has indicated a legally-relevant level of insanity. He was not tragically injured just moments before handing over the passwords. There were no mitigating circumstances.
Childs is pretty clearly guilty. The fact that he's in IT is irrelevant.
There are lots of cars just like yours, though, that have been involved in collisions and killed their occupants or others. maybe the driver wasn't paying attention. Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe that death could have been prevented with a slightly-different curve in the body.
The problem is that safety costs money. There's the materials involved, which aren't cheap. There's the engineering, which isn't (or shouldn't be) cheap. There's the electronics, which are getting cheaper. There's the redundancy, which isn't cheap. People don't like saving their own lives when it costs money or time to do so.
That said, I sincerely hope this takes off, and that by some miracle of economics it's affordable. We have the technology...
How many operations even need to touch RAM? Most operations can keep their data cached, so the memory is only needed for cache misses. If the slowest cache is, say, 2 gigs in a DIMM, cache misses aren't going to be very prevalent. The CPU could take the cost of using high-latency storage, since it'd be needed very rarely.
The optical technology leads to high-bandwidth, high-latency connections. Sure, it might take a full cycle to transfer, but if we're talking about loading a gigabyte per cycle, we can afford the waste now and then. It'd be a hardware-managed high-speed swap device. Sounds like fun to me.
By my understanding, it's not so much the travel time as the decoding/switching/other electronic time. As one example, consider the switching time of a transistor/photodetector. The gate must collect enough energy to switch from "off" to "on". Increased speed means having fewer electrons enter the gate. Higher energy per electron means raising the voltage. That's why overclocking often involves fiddling with voltages. Unfortunately, with more voltage comes more induction, breakdown, and other headaches I don't know enough about to list.
In contrast, light is much simpler to work with. You can make a light beam brighter without affecting other beams much. There's little chance of a beam breaking through its cable. We can send higher energies to gates with ease. Higher energy means less time to switch, and faster operation.
Note that I am not a physicist, and not much of an electrical engineer. I may be entirely wrong.
Seeing as how the Navy funded the damn thing, I'd think the US government should already know.
The DoD funded the creation of the Internet as a whole, and now we have a military unit dedicated to protecting against online threats. Funding and use are different concepts.
there are no central servers. That's the fucking point of it.
Just because there's no central servers doesn't mean nobody has any idea what goes on. There's logs exchanged for bug reports, user comments, and a general community of interest. A project insider likely has a fair idea of what's going on. Knowing there's "a lot" of users from somewhere is only marginally less useful than knowing there's 15,931.
There's no way for any government to know, and so the only course of action is to set up as many nodes as possible and monitor as widely as practical.
Or ask someone who's probably already been spoken to by other governments about doing this. Even some reliable statistics about the size and churn of the Tor network are useful.
NSA has bigger computers and better monitoring of both domestic and foreign networks than competing governments.
Really? What proof do you have of this? Just a blind faith in the theory that the government is all-powerful?
Even if the NSA did have enough computing power to break encryption, it doesn't help if traffic is routed around their listening nodes. Statistical analysis of Tor's churn can help tell them how much they're missing. Knowing what changes are coming in the community can help them adapt faster.
any government flunkie could get a better report... by submitting an "Ask Slashdot" question
And given the quality of your statements, they'd waste far more than 3 hours trying to sift through the mindless drivel.
Now, the real question here is indeed how representative am I for the public?
It doesn't matter if you represent the public at large or not. You have an opinion, and have stated it, so it should be weighed equally to any other opinion (including my own).
an 100% trust the representatives will do the best in all circumstances, and no control is ever needed once the vote is cast?
Of course not. Personally, I'd rather not listen to the mindless drivel of politicians all day, so I do put a lot of trust into my elected officials. If I didn't, I'd run for office myself. That said, I do think it'd be interesting to see a politician offer direct voting to constituents. Communication (the biggest barrier to direct democracy) has improved a wee bit in the last two centuries.
how come the judges have the power to interpret the law created by the representatives? How come that, even with the judges having this power, the society found useful to use jury in serious cases?
The judicial system in general is a limit on the practical application of laws. It's not intended to change the law (which is why people get so upset about "legislating from the bench"). The role of a judge is to determine how laws apply in a fair manner. For example, is it fair to allow consumers to unlock phones? Is it fair to allow carriers to lock them? A judge should be the one deciding.
In civil matters, there's usually an established method to re-evaluate an issue later. Civil decisions don't matter as much as criminal cases. In a criminal case, a judge's bias could easily get an innocent bystander a death sentence. That's why there's a right to have a trial by one's peers, where fellow members of society will decide whether the evidence indicates guilt.
Good set of reasons to limit the law, but I don't think one can come with a complete and full-proof set of reasons (this would be a law in itself).
When a law becomes a problem, those who oppose it should petition the government to repeal it. The matter then falls to the judges to evaluate whether the law is still necessary. It literally becomes a judgement call.
And even if they did browse for contacts and such, privacy is not an essential liberty, is it now?
Nope. Not in a public area, where a phone rewired into a bomb can kill hundreds (or given the worst case, thousands) of people. In granting extra power to customs officers, Congress has voted that the right to life is more important that the right to privacy, in this limited area. If you want to opt out, don't cross the border. Again, the legislature can only go so far. If the general public want privacy rather than safety, they (we) can petition. When the government is convinced that the public opinion and need has changed, the laws will be changed to reflect it.
As long as it is not you (or government, or anyone else for that matter) to judge what is a minor inconvenience to myself or to anyone else anyone else, I don't see a problem with this.
Through levels of representation and indirection, it's me. It's also you. It's everyone together, democratically.
PS: Thus far, your facts are as close to accurate as anything else in the past 9 years. Personally, I think the border security is asinine. I also think it's asinine to blame parties or a few politicians for things that have beengenerallyaccepted by the public. I'm glad to see support for security theater waning, but people jumping right into the political rhetoric annoy me.
At the moment someone is inconvenienced enough that they feel it is unreasonable, they should complain about it. Apparently, that's exactly what's happened here.
By stating your opinion, you make a tiny push toward your opinions becoming accepted. I don't feel that a few hours is too bad, so I state my opinion, too. Both contribute to someone else's opinion, which on a larger scale contributes ever-so-slightly to the legislature.
It's called democracy. Everybody gets an opinion, even if they oppose absolute freedom.
Given that I've been one of those "innocent folks" being questioned twice now, I'm going to respond with a hearty "suck it up". My first detainment consisted of being asked a few questions about drug trafficking until they determined that the dog involved just screwed up. The second was getting pulled aside and asked about what I'd been doing in Africa. My total inconvenience: less than an hour.
Presuming innocence does not mean you get to do anything you like and have no inconvenience. Presuming innocence means that you don't get locked in shackles for 10 years because someone well-known in town accused you of a crime. It means that there has to be some kind of evidence before you have to deal with any kind of serious problem.
China and Egypt
The current Chinese government was established in 1949. Egypt's came in 1953. They also were both founded with different principles and ideals. A better comparison would be Great Britain, which has managed to avoid major political replacement for roughly a thousand years. The political ideals of modern Britain are on par with the United States, and their justice systems are similar. I also never said that our criminal justice system was in any way bad. I said that our intelligence (meaning the CIA, DHS, and parts of the FBI) are immature. We've made overt mistakes that have cost thousands of lives, and it's understandable that they are now scrambling to improve.
public activists and watchdogs are being outcompeted by the growing power of the state.
The state is controlled by representatives who are brought into office by the voting public. The representatives represent the public.
This is linked to financial interests
That's interesting, since bribery is outright banned. The way it really works is that a corporation can donate a large amount of money to a politician's campaign, and arrange for the contribution to take place during a personal meeting. Also during that meeting, the corporate representative can mention that the several thousand employees would benefit from some pending bit of legislation. That's several thousand opinions added to the politician's understanding of the issue. The general public also has the right to contact the politician, though it does require a lot of "people skills" to get an actual face-to-face meeting.
A better way to have your voice heard, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, is to become an activist yourself. For the most effect, go through the effort to meet your representatives. Write them letters. Even open debate increases awareness of a topic, which is a form of activism. Congratulations. You're an activist now.
My worldview is that knee-jerk reactions to short-term problems just makes more problems. We need to pick a course and stick with it, until we can clearly see the outcome, then decide whether it's desirable or not. Inconvenience is not an injustice. Calling people cowards for having different opinions is hardly making lives better. I believe that the democratic process works, and that the best way to effect change is through the democratic process.
I was accused of being a (precursor to a) fascist. I have no interest in holding the authority of the government over the authority of the people at large. I am, however, of the opinion that the public has confidence in the government's ability and need to investigate threats. In fact, the American public voted for the laws that allowed this detainment, according to the legal process we've held for two hundred years.
The limits placed on a law should be based on practicality, liberty, and benefit. Prohibition of alcohol was repealed because it caused more problems than it could possibly solve. Segregation was abolished because it was a clear affront to essential liberties. Countless laws have been rejected for being impractical.
I, for one, believe that the ability to detain incoming travelers at the border, with a reason, is good. The inconvenience is a few hours, and the benefit is a significantly larger pool of intelligence. Once essential liberties get breached, like being detained beyond the limits of the law, or being detained without reason, or being subjected to unreasonable searches, then it is time to reconsider the law.
I do not "put the law above the sky". I put the law above the minor inconvenience of people who work with things that threaten the nation.
Incomplete knowledge isn't a problem. When that incomplete knowledge results in new attack vectors, that's a problem. The IRA and Israel bombings were primarily acts of ongoing war with known enemies, where intelligence can be expected to be faulty and incomplete. The WTC attacks were unexpected. We weren't expecting anyone to be capable of that scale of attack. That's a problem. Again, I don't expect we'll know everything about everyone, but we should at least know what our threats are.
Activist is the right word. It's the general term for someone who takes action to effect a change. The fact that it's associated primarily with militants is an unfortunate consequence of the popular media. The public usually just doesn't hear about the quiet ones. The closest alternative is "advocate", but that implies being in favor of something, so use of the word would need qualifiers like "advocate of the repeal of X" or "advocate for the cause opposing X". Simply "activist" is the best word I know of.
Java gets a lot of criticism for its sandbox attitude, but that lets it enter the realm of idealism more than other languages. In my opinion, that's exactly what's needed for a programmer new to OOP. As I said above as an AC (damned checkbox), learn how to use and think with objects first, then apply the old knowledge of algorithms to get the most out of your abilities.
Most obvious is that Al-Qaeda, with the protection and aid of Afghanistan and Pakistan, put hijackers onto multiple planes in 2001.
The CIA reported in 2002 that Iraq had WMDs.
Iran's latest foray into nuclear weaponry wasn't announced publicly until 2002, by which time it was well under way. There is no declassified indication that the CIA knew of it.
I'm not saying the intelligence apparatus is insignificant, or even missing important things. The problem is that a large portion of its information was wrong. The hijackers were given flight training without concern. Iraq didn't actually have WMDs. Iran had a very active nuclear program.
To correct what we think we know, everything has to be verified again. That means asking a lot of questions, and it's going to take time. Whining about the President isn't going to help. What will help is patience, understanding, and the democratic process. Have tolerance for the programs that already exist, oppose the ones that you disagree with, and make your opinions known to your representatives.
That's where the activists come in. As far as I'm concerned, anybody can be considered an activist. All it takes is having the ambition to do something useful about an issue you consider important, and thus being active in the democratic process.
If you oppose a pending bill and it gets passed, that means you didn't do a good enough job of convincing people of your viewpoint. Activists, as annoying as they are sometimes, play a vital role in making the general public aware of the issues at hand.
In that regard, I already consider you an activist. You're engaging in an intelligent debate about an issue. Others will (hopefully) read this and it will affect their opinions a little. That means public opinion shifts a little, which means votes shift a little, and democracy moves on. The fact that we disagree on some issues is irrelevant.
A more direct form of activism is to contact your representative and state your opinions. Better yet, make an appointment to meet with them. The stereotypical sign-holding protester is just one kind of activist. You don't need to be chained to a tree to make a point.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It's getting to the stage where it needs to use actual numbers for public statements. Linux has a hard time being taken seriously as anything more than a server OS. When Canonical comes out and says "We have an estimated X users, based on our utterly random guess from download counts" it doesn't help much. This looks like a way to get a more accurate count. No more, no less.
And this is what happens when Slashdot stops showing new comments...
Previously there haven't been such Ubuntu tracking measures attempted by Canonical.
...If you ignore the landscape service and the popularity contest, which have done similar things.
Previously there haven't been such Ubuntu tracking measures attempted by Canonical.
...If you ignore the landscape service, and the popularity contest, which have done similar things.
Not in an absolute sense as a judge's decision would, but it can be brought up to affect future judges' decisions.
Sorry, but I have a knee-jerk reaction to ignore any post linking to FIJA. Despite claiming to support "fully informed" jurors, they're really only interested in promoting a justice system run by idiots.
When a jury acquits, it's likely to set precedent, and that includes all the aspects of the case. It's impossible to tell what the full effect of a precedent might be. An acquittal in the Childs case could set precedent that organizations do not control their computers. That would mean that, for example, a bank's sysadmin could be held personally responsible for hacked accounts. Toyota could sue their engineers for the accelerator problems. All sorts of mayhem could ensue, because of one acquittal. No, it's not very likely to go that far, but it is possible. Sensible indeed. FIJA seems to enjoy ignoring these possibilities, sacrificing the future just to express discontent. There's a better way to do that, that doesn't involve building a tangled mess of conflicting precedent.
Jury nullification is a byproduct of the double-jeopardy limit. I don't know of any place in the Constitution where nullification is actually a guaranteed right, or even mentioned as a possibility. Rather, it's a de facto right that remains because any attempt to outright stop it risks crippling the fairness of the justice system. The ability for a jury to vote "not guilty" was never intended to be a means to change laws.
If you want to change laws, butchering the judicial process is the wrong way to do it. Instead, take an active part in the legislative process. Run for office. Write your representatives. Vote for legislators that support your views. Don't obstruct justice.
Childs cost the city a very large sum of money through his denial-of-service attack on the network's administration system. One figure I read said the cost would be upwards of $1.5 million (though I can't seem to find the source again). That's $375,000 of vandalism per year of prison. In my opinion, that's pretty reasonable.
An acquaintance of mine converted his extra bays in a full-size tower to a storage space for often-needed electronics. There were drawers for transistors, LEDs, regular diodes, some ICs, and the other little bits he used often in his robot-building hobby. The top bay had a current limiter in it, cleaning and isolating the power supplied to plugs on the front, fed from the PC supply.
Nobody was physically hurt, but the financial cost to the city was substantial. First there's the cost to effectively break into their own system, then since they know there's been a breach, there's the cost for repair and another round of security testing.
Section 502(c)(5):
Except as provided in subdivision (h), any person who commits any of the following acts is guilty of a public offense: ...Knowingly and without permission disrupts or causes the disruption of computer services or denies or causes the denial of computer services to an authorized user of a computer, computer system, or computer network.
For completeness, subdivision (h) is:
(h)(1)Subdivision (c) does not apply to punish any acts which are committed by a person within the scope of his or her lawful employment. For purposes of this section, a person acts within the scope of his or her employment when he or she performs acts which are reasonably necessary to the performance of his or her work assignment.
The judge determined that Childs' actions were not "reasonably necessary" to the job. It might be necessary to have passwords, but it's not necessary to lock out everyone. That's a denial of service, which is against the law.
There's one big problem with having well-qualified judges decide such questions. Over many years of service, they're much easier to bribe or extort than a jury, who are selected at random and serve for only a short time.
Judges do decide on whether each piece of evidence is admissible, and whether court rules are followed. Their qualifications are necessary for that.
That's assuming you can find a well-qualified judge in the first place. The jurors are pulled from the public, and there's more likely to be someone who knows the situation well. In this case, that's the CCIE juror. He can be expected to understand the circumstances better than the judge.
Childs could have implemented a system to allow access to passwords without his involvement. Would a judge, trained only in court proceedings, understand this? Could a defense attorney confuse the judge by delving into the mathematics? Would the judge understand the technical limitations and security implications of such a system?
Next week the same judge has to preside over a case on medical malpractice, which may require several years of medical school to understand. After that there's a motor vehicle collision, which means a few years of engineering.
The jury decides whether the accused is "proven guilty" by the criteria I've already mentioned. The judge's job is to make sure that the established legal process is followed.
They have the power to nullify, but that's not their job. The job remains to determine if the accused broke the law, with intent, and without mitigating circumstances. They can determine that the law's absurdity is a mitigating circumstance.
In this case, the laws are pretty reasonable: Sysadmins can't lock everyone else out of a system they don't own.
The point of a jury isn't to selectively apply laws. It is to determine whether the evidence indicates that the law was broken, with intent, and without any mitigating circumstances.
Childs locked down systems without documenting the changes. He did not take any steps to ensure continuous service in his absence. He put extra effort towards implementing systems that others couldn't access. He broke the law.
He refused to turn over passwords when leaving. When asked, he lied. That strongly indicates intent.
There has been no mention of blackmail or extortion. Nothing has indicated a legally-relevant level of insanity. He was not tragically injured just moments before handing over the passwords. There were no mitigating circumstances.
Childs is pretty clearly guilty. The fact that he's in IT is irrelevant.
There are lots of cars just like yours, though, that have been involved in collisions and killed their occupants or others. maybe the driver wasn't paying attention. Maybe they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe that death could have been prevented with a slightly-different curve in the body.
The problem is that safety costs money. There's the materials involved, which aren't cheap. There's the engineering, which isn't (or shouldn't be) cheap. There's the electronics, which are getting cheaper. There's the redundancy, which isn't cheap. People don't like saving their own lives when it costs money or time to do so.
That said, I sincerely hope this takes off, and that by some miracle of economics it's affordable. We have the technology...
Ah! Now you're entering things I'm good at.
How many operations even need to touch RAM? Most operations can keep their data cached, so the memory is only needed for cache misses. If the slowest cache is, say, 2 gigs in a DIMM, cache misses aren't going to be very prevalent. The CPU could take the cost of using high-latency storage, since it'd be needed very rarely.
The optical technology leads to high-bandwidth, high-latency connections. Sure, it might take a full cycle to transfer, but if we're talking about loading a gigabyte per cycle, we can afford the waste now and then. It'd be a hardware-managed high-speed swap device. Sounds like fun to me.
By my understanding, it's not so much the travel time as the decoding/switching/other electronic time. As one example, consider the switching time of a transistor/photodetector. The gate must collect enough energy to switch from "off" to "on". Increased speed means having fewer electrons enter the gate. Higher energy per electron means raising the voltage. That's why overclocking often involves fiddling with voltages. Unfortunately, with more voltage comes more induction, breakdown, and other headaches I don't know enough about to list.
In contrast, light is much simpler to work with. You can make a light beam brighter without affecting other beams much. There's little chance of a beam breaking through its cable. We can send higher energies to gates with ease. Higher energy means less time to switch, and faster operation.
Note that I am not a physicist, and not much of an electrical engineer. I may be entirely wrong.
Seeing as how the Navy funded the damn thing, I'd think the US government should already know.
The DoD funded the creation of the Internet as a whole, and now we have a military unit dedicated to protecting against online threats. Funding and use are different concepts.
there are no central servers. That's the fucking point of it.
Just because there's no central servers doesn't mean nobody has any idea what goes on. There's logs exchanged for bug reports, user comments, and a general community of interest. A project insider likely has a fair idea of what's going on. Knowing there's "a lot" of users from somewhere is only marginally less useful than knowing there's 15,931.
There's no way for any government to know, and so the only course of action is to set up as many nodes as possible and monitor as widely as practical.
Or ask someone who's probably already been spoken to by other governments about doing this. Even some reliable statistics about the size and churn of the Tor network are useful.
NSA has bigger computers and better monitoring of both domestic and foreign networks than competing governments.
Really? What proof do you have of this? Just a blind faith in the theory that the government is all-powerful?
Even if the NSA did have enough computing power to break encryption, it doesn't help if traffic is routed around their listening nodes. Statistical analysis of Tor's churn can help tell them how much they're missing. Knowing what changes are coming in the community can help them adapt faster.
any government flunkie could get a better report ... by submitting an "Ask Slashdot" question
And given the quality of your statements, they'd waste far more than 3 hours trying to sift through the mindless drivel.
Now, the real question here is indeed how representative am I for the public?
It doesn't matter if you represent the public at large or not. You have an opinion, and have stated it, so it should be weighed equally to any other opinion (including my own).
an 100% trust the representatives will do the best in all circumstances, and no control is ever needed once the vote is cast?
Of course not. Personally, I'd rather not listen to the mindless drivel of politicians all day, so I do put a lot of trust into my elected officials. If I didn't, I'd run for office myself. That said, I do think it'd be interesting to see a politician offer direct voting to constituents. Communication (the biggest barrier to direct democracy) has improved a wee bit in the last two centuries.
how come the judges have the power to interpret the law created by the representatives? How come that, even with the judges having this power, the society found useful to use jury in serious cases?
The judicial system in general is a limit on the practical application of laws. It's not intended to change the law (which is why people get so upset about "legislating from the bench"). The role of a judge is to determine how laws apply in a fair manner. For example, is it fair to allow consumers to unlock phones? Is it fair to allow carriers to lock them? A judge should be the one deciding.
In civil matters, there's usually an established method to re-evaluate an issue later. Civil decisions don't matter as much as criminal cases. In a criminal case, a judge's bias could easily get an innocent bystander a death sentence. That's why there's a right to have a trial by one's peers, where fellow members of society will decide whether the evidence indicates guilt.
Good set of reasons to limit the law, but I don't think one can come with a complete and full-proof set of reasons (this would be a law in itself).
When a law becomes a problem, those who oppose it should petition the government to repeal it. The matter then falls to the judges to evaluate whether the law is still necessary. It literally becomes a judgement call.
And even if they did browse for contacts and such, privacy is not an essential liberty, is it now?
Nope. Not in a public area, where a phone rewired into a bomb can kill hundreds (or given the worst case, thousands) of people. In granting extra power to customs officers, Congress has voted that the right to life is more important that the right to privacy, in this limited area. If you want to opt out, don't cross the border. Again, the legislature can only go so far. If the general public want privacy rather than safety, they (we) can petition. When the government is convinced that the public opinion and need has changed, the laws will be changed to reflect it.
As long as it is not you (or government, or anyone else for that matter) to judge what is a minor inconvenience to myself or to anyone else anyone else, I don't see a problem with this.
Through levels of representation and indirection, it's me. It's also you. It's everyone together, democratically.
PS: Thus far, your facts are as close to accurate as anything else in the past 9 years. Personally, I think the border security is asinine. I also think it's asinine to blame parties or a few politicians for things that have been generally accepted by the public. I'm glad to see support for security theater waning, but people jumping right into the political rhetoric annoy me.
At the moment someone is inconvenienced enough that they feel it is unreasonable, they should complain about it. Apparently, that's exactly what's happened here.
By stating your opinion, you make a tiny push toward your opinions becoming accepted. I don't feel that a few hours is too bad, so I state my opinion, too. Both contribute to someone else's opinion, which on a larger scale contributes ever-so-slightly to the legislature.
It's called democracy. Everybody gets an opinion, even if they oppose absolute freedom.
Given that I've been one of those "innocent folks" being questioned twice now, I'm going to respond with a hearty "suck it up". My first detainment consisted of being asked a few questions about drug trafficking until they determined that the dog involved just screwed up. The second was getting pulled aside and asked about what I'd been doing in Africa. My total inconvenience: less than an hour.
Presuming innocence does not mean you get to do anything you like and have no inconvenience. Presuming innocence means that you don't get locked in shackles for 10 years because someone well-known in town accused you of a crime. It means that there has to be some kind of evidence before you have to deal with any kind of serious problem.
China and Egypt
The current Chinese government was established in 1949. Egypt's came in 1953. They also were both founded with different principles and ideals. A better comparison would be Great Britain, which has managed to avoid major political replacement for roughly a thousand years. The political ideals of modern Britain are on par with the United States, and their justice systems are similar. I also never said that our criminal justice system was in any way bad. I said that our intelligence (meaning the CIA, DHS, and parts of the FBI) are immature. We've made overt mistakes that have cost thousands of lives, and it's understandable that they are now scrambling to improve.
public activists and watchdogs are being outcompeted by the growing power of the state.
The state is controlled by representatives who are brought into office by the voting public. The representatives represent the public.
This is linked to financial interests
That's interesting, since bribery is outright banned. The way it really works is that a corporation can donate a large amount of money to a politician's campaign, and arrange for the contribution to take place during a personal meeting. Also during that meeting, the corporate representative can mention that the several thousand employees would benefit from some pending bit of legislation. That's several thousand opinions added to the politician's understanding of the issue. The general public also has the right to contact the politician, though it does require a lot of "people skills" to get an actual face-to-face meeting.
A better way to have your voice heard, as I've explained elsewhere in this thread, is to become an activist yourself. For the most effect, go through the effort to meet your representatives. Write them letters. Even open debate increases awareness of a topic, which is a form of activism. Congratulations. You're an activist now.
My worldview is that knee-jerk reactions to short-term problems just makes more problems. We need to pick a course and stick with it, until we can clearly see the outcome, then decide whether it's desirable or not. Inconvenience is not an injustice. Calling people cowards for having different opinions is hardly making lives better. I believe that the democratic process works, and that the best way to effect change is through the democratic process.
Fascism (n) a political theory advocating an authoritarian hierarchical government (as opposed to democracy or liberalism)
From WordNet
I was accused of being a (precursor to a) fascist. I have no interest in holding the authority of the government over the authority of the people at large. I am, however, of the opinion that the public has confidence in the government's ability and need to investigate threats. In fact, the American public voted for the laws that allowed this detainment, according to the legal process we've held for two hundred years.
The limits placed on a law should be based on practicality, liberty, and benefit. Prohibition of alcohol was repealed because it caused more problems than it could possibly solve. Segregation was abolished because it was a clear affront to essential liberties. Countless laws have been rejected for being impractical.
I, for one, believe that the ability to detain incoming travelers at the border, with a reason, is good. The inconvenience is a few hours, and the benefit is a significantly larger pool of intelligence. Once essential liberties get breached, like being detained beyond the limits of the law, or being detained without reason, or being subjected to unreasonable searches, then it is time to reconsider the law.
I do not "put the law above the sky". I put the law above the minor inconvenience of people who work with things that threaten the nation.
Incomplete knowledge isn't a problem. When that incomplete knowledge results in new attack vectors, that's a problem. The IRA and Israel bombings were primarily acts of ongoing war with known enemies, where intelligence can be expected to be faulty and incomplete. The WTC attacks were unexpected. We weren't expecting anyone to be capable of that scale of attack. That's a problem. Again, I don't expect we'll know everything about everyone, but we should at least know what our threats are.
Activist is the right word. It's the general term for someone who takes action to effect a change. The fact that it's associated primarily with militants is an unfortunate consequence of the popular media. The public usually just doesn't hear about the quiet ones. The closest alternative is "advocate", but that implies being in favor of something, so use of the word would need qualifiers like "advocate of the repeal of X" or "advocate for the cause opposing X". Simply "activist" is the best word I know of.
Java gets a lot of criticism for its sandbox attitude, but that lets it enter the realm of idealism more than other languages. In my opinion, that's exactly what's needed for a programmer new to OOP. As I said above as an AC (damned checkbox), learn how to use and think with objects first, then apply the old knowledge of algorithms to get the most out of your abilities.
Most obvious is that Al-Qaeda, with the protection and aid of Afghanistan and Pakistan, put hijackers onto multiple planes in 2001.
The CIA reported in 2002 that Iraq had WMDs.
Iran's latest foray into nuclear weaponry wasn't announced publicly until 2002, by which time it was well under way. There is no declassified indication that the CIA knew of it.
I'm not saying the intelligence apparatus is insignificant, or even missing important things. The problem is that a large portion of its information was wrong. The hijackers were given flight training without concern. Iraq didn't actually have WMDs. Iran had a very active nuclear program.
To correct what we think we know, everything has to be verified again. That means asking a lot of questions, and it's going to take time. Whining about the President isn't going to help. What will help is patience, understanding, and the democratic process. Have tolerance for the programs that already exist, oppose the ones that you disagree with, and make your opinions known to your representatives.
That's where the activists come in. As far as I'm concerned, anybody can be considered an activist. All it takes is having the ambition to do something useful about an issue you consider important, and thus being active in the democratic process.
If you oppose a pending bill and it gets passed, that means you didn't do a good enough job of convincing people of your viewpoint. Activists, as annoying as they are sometimes, play a vital role in making the general public aware of the issues at hand.
In that regard, I already consider you an activist. You're engaging in an intelligent debate about an issue. Others will (hopefully) read this and it will affect their opinions a little. That means public opinion shifts a little, which means votes shift a little, and democracy moves on. The fact that we disagree on some issues is irrelevant.
A more direct form of activism is to contact your representative and state your opinions. Better yet, make an appointment to meet with them. The stereotypical sign-holding protester is just one kind of activist. You don't need to be chained to a tree to make a point.
In terms of foreign intelligence, yes. Foreign actions are a different matter entirely.