Perhaps the US should take Europe to the WTO for violating US law by sending passengers here without the information? Seems to be two sides of the same coin to me.
It's a simple matter really. If the airlines can't release that information passively due to European laws, then the airlines will simply get the passengers to sign waivers to release that information, then they are abiding by both European and US laws. Then it is up to the individual...if want to come to the United States, they have to sign the waiver.
There may be all sorts of laws in a particular country that I don't like, but if I want to go to that country, I am expected to abide by them.
I wonder how many Europeans with a trip planned to Disney World are going to get to the airport with kids in tow and decide the tradeoff of sharing those 31 pieces of information with the American government (who will likely never even look at the information) just isn't worth it and call the taxi and head back home?
The truth is that while a lot of people may not like giving their name and address to the foreign country they are visiting, about 99.9% of them don't care enough to change their travel plans over the matter.
I'm all for privacy, but I am willing to give away some of my privacy for my own convenience. In this case, if I am European and I want to go to America for some reason, my choices are:
1) sign a waiver letting the Americans know who I am. 2) Find an airline that will let me pay an extra $6000/ticket to not have to sign the waiver. 3) spend 2 weeks on a boat getting there the old fashion way (only to have to tell the Americans everything they want to know once I get there anyways).
First, I don't blame Sony one bit for not wanting to give another dime to the company that screwed them over the PS2 controller. Immersion is getting what they deserve.
Second, all the PS3 controllers are wireless, which means battery operated. The rumble feature is a huge battery sink. I know the Nintendo Wavebird controllers don't have rumble for this very reason.
Third, if a game is actually using the tilt sensing feature, then it probably would be difficult to support the rumble at the same time. I suppose a game could do either or though.
There is no reason that BluRay players won't be dirt-cheap just like DVD players a few years from now. So cost is a non-issue. What consumers will ultimately be facing in a couple years is $50 for a DVD-only player, $70 for a combo blu-ray/DVD player. Which do you think the consumer is going to pick? They will pony up the $70. Soon as the cost difference is that small, they will quit even selling DVD-only players.
This article discounts the impact of the PS3 on the format war, but Sony sold 100 million PS2's and over the next 5 years will likely sell upwards of 50 million PS3's...with 10 million sold in the first year. Now, these people aren't buying PS3's to play movies, but if you are one of those millions of people who happen to own a PS3 and your favorite movie is released in BluRay format and DVD format, with the BluRay only being a couple dollars more perhaps (again, prices will drop quickly), which movie do you think they are going to pick up?
Also, HDTV's will take over the market. It is difficult to buy a non-hd TV now days that is larger than 30", and large TV's are becoming quite popular.
People seem to be judging the viability of the technology against its ability to be adapted overnight. What is wrong if it takes 10 years for BluRay to become as common as DVD, there is no hurry here.
Just a quick word on HD-DVD, it is DOA. Every publisher will publish on BluRay, not every publisher will publish on HD-DVD. HD-DVD has little support, and only gets support from companies like Microsoft because M$ wants to try and devalue the PS3 as much as possible in consumers eyes...a bluray win gives the PS3 a huge marketting advantage over xbox. Also, the large installed base of PS3's will ensure that every publisher produces their content for the format early.
Wow, you figured it out all right. Who would have guessed that a guy who writes an article about global warming had actually written on the topic before (and held the same views as before). I didn't realize that only the first article you wrote counted. I sure hope you apply the same standard to the writing of authors you agree with.
Talk about pea brain arguments. That's like saying that if you are going to error on the side that global warming might be happening, why doesn't the left-wing also error on the side that the fetus may be a living being. It's the same argument you are making reversed. How you managed to get modded up to 4 as insightful is just an indication of how many dumb-ass lemmings there are here at slashdot.
I saw the 767 fly into the building and it was fully loaded with fuel, so how do you explain somebody being able to stand there next to the impact? Where did the 200,000 pounds of jet fuel disappear to? The truth is the person was sufficiently far enough away from the burning jet fuel to be able to survive, but that has absolutely nothing to do with whether there was 200,000 pounds of jet fuel burning somewhere.
Let me guess, the ground-crew at the airport that filled the plane was in on the conspiracy as well and only added enough fuel to get the plane to the target....moron....
Do you really think they could keep something like that a secret? It would take hundreds of men weeks to rig those towers to come down. Do you really think every one of them is going to keep their mouth shut? Plus the dozens of people up the chain of command?
Somehow idiots like you seem to think the American government is made up of people who are 'part of the conspiracy' and somehow all keep it a secret. The truth is the American government is entirely made up of, surprise, everyday Americans.
What about the thousands of workers who cleaned up the plane at the Pentagon...are they all in on it too? Any conspiracy theory that requires thousands of people keep the secret is pure BS and anybody who believes otherwise is a total moron.
You know what? I am confident in the American system to deal with these kinds of problems if they ever materialized. I don't see any reason to quantitatively reduce our security for a hypothetical abuse that may occur down the road, particularly when I have complete confidence in the 'system' to root out any serious abuses. I really don't see any non-fairy-tale scenario whereby substantial freedoms get lost due to these kinds of activities.
Geez you guys are paranoid. I've heard of the camels nose under the tent, but this is getting ridiculous. To listen to half the guys posting here you would think a dictatorship was just around the corner. We are SO FAR away from losing any real freedoms it's ridiculous.
I don't see what the big deal is. They are just inverting the system a bit. Imagine if they found a terrorist. The first thing they might do is supoena the guys phone records for the last year and see everbody that he talked to regularly, then add those guys to the scrutiny list. This is run of the mill everyday police work.
With this system, it seems all they are doing is simply collecting and archiving all the data in advance, such that they when do find a terrorist they can have their super-computer analyse all the phone data and try to identify accomplices.
Do you guys have any idea how much data we are talking about here? It's not like somebody is thumbing through your personal phone records and noticing that you are calling 1-800-hot-chik all the time. With the massive amount of data they are collecting, the only thing looking at that data are computer algorithms doing complex data analysis trying to find subtle links between the terrorist cells.
The computer will be able to identify terrorist relationships that a human would never be able to figure out looking at the data by hand. It's a perfectly legitimate use of our technology to fight terrorists and something that can't be accomplished without having access to all the raw data.
The constitution gives us guaranteeds against unreasonable searches, but the definition of what is unreasonable is left for contemporary interpretation. Seems to me data-mining is very reasonable given the problem at hand.
National security is also a completely different problem than criminal law and you can't approach the two problems the same way. I think the NSA ought to have even more latitude than they have now to do stuff in the interest of national security, but the fruits of their efforts should be unusable in a court of law.
I'm not an expert on anything even close to lasers, but I suspect the people capable of building these kind of lasers systems are well aware of the issues you bring up. You logic would imply that you can't get lasers powerful enough to do anything due to the plasma cloud problem, yet there are real laser systems out there now that are examples contrary to your assertion. Take the M-THEL system for example:
It shoots down missiles at fairly decent distances. Now, we aren't talking in-orbit distances, but we aren't talking in a lab either. The amount of energy generated by that laser would seem to be enough to create your plasma cloud right in front of the laser, yet it seems to make some distance. It would seem to me that a beam like that reaching space would still have at least a little bit of energy...then you simply multiply that by a few hundred using an array and you have yourself a ASAT weapon. Plus I doubt that M-THEL laser is operating at the maximum energy that can be achieved without your dreaded plasma cloud.
The real reason is the $6.1b number they are quoting are before the adjustments are made for portion of the survey regarding whether the consumer would have bought it had it not been pirated. They mention the study analyzes that angle, but they don't actually say that the 6.1 number reflects the adjusted amount. I suspect the truth is the 6.1 number is pre-adjusted and that the report actually shows that probable losses are substantially smaller. I suspect all MPAA members are in agreement to selectively release the report and this is just a cover-story. After all, the idea that the studios would not want to release the numbers for fear of hurting their stock-prices set off my BS radar.
Not sure Galileo could be classified as an demonstration of technological prowess. After all, it is 30 years later. I suspect China could easily create a GPS system too if they felt the need. Not saying Europe is technologically inferior, just noting that the ability to create a sat-nav system doesn't exactly make a great poster child.
That said, I applaud any amount of money Europe spends on this kind of thing, particularly as it related to the military. Since I consider Europe to be a eternal ally of the US when the rubber hits the road, it's nice for them to start sharing the bill a bit when it comes to this kind of thing.
Not sure this is a really a competition to see who could build a better system. The US system is almost 30 years old. Anybody here think the US couldn't develop a better system than GPS if they were to make it today? From a technology point of view, there is so much technology sharing between Europe and the US that there is very little if anything that one can do that the other can't. The US likely has a slight edge in advanced technology overall, but only because they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on military research.
There is really little doubt that if some foreign power were using GPS or Galileo as a targetting mechanism against any NATO country, that both systems would pull the plug. 99% of GPS uses, like tracking shipments and navigation don't need any more accuracy than GPS provides. I don't see Galileo really opening up new markets for products that weren't there before as the additional accuracy is usually irrelevant. That said, there is a trend of incorporating more and more positioning systems into things, and I have little doubt that this trend will embrace Galileo as well.
The article notes that future upgrades planned for the GPS system will benefit Galileo as well. Anybody have specific details on how the two systems are cooperating? It is kind of looking like the US and Europe are jointly developing redundant parallel systems. Wouldn't surprise me if future US military hardware uses both systems for redundancy as well.
It's not a function of whether they achieved their goals or not, it's a function of whether the agenda they proposed is what Americans really want, and clearly it is. Also, there is only so much the House of Representatives can do. The House passed every element of contract, but the Senate (which at the time was controlled by the Democrats) prevented much of the legislation from becoming law. And President Clinton blocked some of it as well.
The Republican "Contract with America" was enormously popular and caused the largest shift in the congress ever, with it swinging from Democratically control to Republican control for the first time in 40+ years. The numbers largely show that the agenda layed out in the plan had broad popular appeal. I don't think a similar left wing agenda would be nearly as well received.
Wish I had more time to reply myself. I agree it was rushed through originally, but it's not like the bill was written in a 2 days. There were honest good intentioned people working on it for months. Some of the provisions had been talked about long before 9/11, so there was plenty of awareness of the issues. Since that time, congress has had years to analyze the Patriot Act, so it's not like another 3 months of debate is going to matter.
That said, I think they should have extended it for a few months to try and come to a compromise, rather than let it all expire, effectively throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I suspect now that the posturing is done, they will work out a compromise fairly quickly and prevent too long of a lapse.
As I said in another post. This isn't a debate about whether the camel camped out inside the tent, this is really just a matter of whether the camel is even sticking his nose under the tent.
It's also worth noting that all uses of the Patriot Act provisions are subject to congressional review and are reviewed annually to monitor for potential abuses. So far I have yet to see anybody from the intelligence committee claiming that the reviewed uses have been abusive.
There are enough safe guards in place that the benefits of catching terrorists far outweigh the insignificant, virtually non-existent liberty violations of innocent Americans. This isn't a case of my giving up my liberties for security...my personal liberties haven't been hampered one bit.
On the one in a billion chance that the government somehow thinks I might be a terrorist and takes a peek at my book purchasing history, do you really think I give a crap? I worry far more about terrorists than I do about the government finding out which C++ books I like best (and I don't worry about terrorists very much at that).
Would I trade letting the government see which books I buy in return for also being able to see which books some terrorist buys, you bet. And I don't feel like I am giving up my liberties at all, because as liberties go, have privacy regarding which books I buy isn't even on my list.
Can anybody on this forum tell me they actually worry that the government might find out which books they buy?
While I am personally fine with pretty much all the provision of the act as they exist now, I can certainly understand why some of the provisions rub some people the wrong way. Those provisions should be clarified/narrowed to gain wider consensus.
That said, it's difficult to argue that any of the provisions are grossly over-reaching. They may cross the line in some people's mind, but only a looney thinks they akin to Stalinism. But to read the rhetoric posted on this topic in general, you would think it was the end of the world. The harsh rhetoric only serves to prove the ignorance of the poster. And on this particular topic, slashdot as a whole is looking particularly uneducated. Like I said in the subject line, the entire debate here seems very one sided as best as I can tell.
That's why we have a representative government instead of a pure democracy. We elect a small subset of the population that is representative of the wants of the whole (in theory) and they are supposed to study this stuff in detail and make decisions in line with what they think their constituants would make if they were to read the entire thing.
The abstraction goes even deeper than that though. Every Senator doesn't have time to read and understand every piece of legislation, so they divide up into committees. The committees study these bills in greater detail and then make a recommendation to the full Senate. Senators tend to base their vote off the recommendation of those on the committee that they believe have the same governing philosophy that they do.
But weren't not done, the abstraction goes even further. Senators on the committee hire staff members to help them weed through the meaning of the bill. Staff members in turn meet with advocacy groups the help them fully understand the meaning of the bill. In this manner, laws like the Patriot Act are fairly well fleshed out.
Where the system falls apart is when some dork Senator who never read the bill decides he can make some political headway out of it. Odds are the law is perfectly fine, but on the surface it looks like something that might be infringe on rights, so the grab it like a political football and run with it. Quite shameful really. Both parties do it with their respective issues.
A Vice Presidential candidate for the Democrats no less. The truth is that the far-left wing of the Democratic party doesn't really have much power and their ideas are out of the mainstream of American politics. I'd like to see the looney left put together a 'contract with America' list of what they would like to do and see how far it gets them. They would get laughed off the stage. Best keep your filibuster able minority in tact...
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps the US should take Europe to the WTO for violating US law by sending passengers here without the information? Seems to be two sides of the same coin to me.
It's a simple matter really. If the airlines can't release that information passively due to European laws, then the airlines will simply get the passengers to sign waivers to release that information, then they are abiding by both European and US laws. Then it is up to the individual...if want to come to the United States, they have to sign the waiver.
There may be all sorts of laws in a particular country that I don't like, but if I want to go to that country, I am expected to abide by them.
I wonder how many Europeans with a trip planned to Disney World are going to get to the airport with kids in tow and decide the tradeoff of sharing those 31 pieces of information with the American government (who will likely never even look at the information) just isn't worth it and call the taxi and head back home?
The truth is that while a lot of people may not like giving their name and address to the foreign country they are visiting, about 99.9% of them don't care enough to change their travel plans over the matter.
I'm all for privacy, but I am willing to give away some of my privacy for my own convenience. In this case, if I am European and I want to go to America for some reason, my choices are:
1) sign a waiver letting the Americans know who I am.
2) Find an airline that will let me pay an extra $6000/ticket to not have to sign the waiver.
3) spend 2 weeks on a boat getting there the old fashion way (only to have to tell the Americans everything they want to know once I get there anyways).
Let's see....where do I sign?
First, I don't blame Sony one bit for not wanting to give another dime to the company that screwed them over the PS2 controller. Immersion is getting what they deserve.
Second, all the PS3 controllers are wireless, which means battery operated. The rumble feature is a huge battery sink. I know the Nintendo Wavebird controllers don't have rumble for this very reason.
Third, if a game is actually using the tilt sensing feature, then it probably would be difficult to support the rumble at the same time. I suppose a game could do either or though.
There is no reason that BluRay players won't be dirt-cheap just like DVD players a few years from now. So cost is a non-issue. What consumers will ultimately be facing in a couple years is $50 for a DVD-only player, $70 for a combo blu-ray/DVD player. Which do you think the consumer is going to pick? They will pony up the $70. Soon as the cost difference is that small, they will quit even selling DVD-only players.
This article discounts the impact of the PS3 on the format war, but Sony sold 100 million PS2's and over the next 5 years will likely sell upwards of 50 million PS3's...with 10 million sold in the first year. Now, these people aren't buying PS3's to play movies, but if you are one of those millions of people who happen to own a PS3 and your favorite movie is released in BluRay format and DVD format, with the BluRay only being a couple dollars more perhaps (again, prices will drop quickly), which movie do you think they are going to pick up?
Also, HDTV's will take over the market. It is difficult to buy a non-hd TV now days that is larger than 30", and large TV's are becoming quite popular.
People seem to be judging the viability of the technology against its ability to be adapted overnight. What is wrong if it takes 10 years for BluRay to become as common as DVD, there is no hurry here.
Just a quick word on HD-DVD, it is DOA. Every publisher will publish on BluRay, not every publisher will publish on HD-DVD. HD-DVD has little support, and only gets support from companies like Microsoft because M$ wants to try and devalue the PS3 as much as possible in consumers eyes...a bluray win gives the PS3 a huge marketting advantage over xbox. Also, the large installed base of PS3's will ensure that every publisher produces their content for the format early.
Wow, you figured it out all right. Who would have guessed that a guy who writes an article about global warming had actually written on the topic before (and held the same views as before). I didn't realize that only the first article you wrote counted. I sure hope you apply the same standard to the writing of authors you agree with.
Talk about pea brain arguments. That's like saying that if you are going to error on the side that global warming might be happening, why doesn't the left-wing also error on the side that the fetus may be a living being. It's the same argument you are making reversed. How you managed to get modded up to 4 as insightful is just an indication of how many dumb-ass lemmings there are here at slashdot.
Just figure out if Clinton had the same policies in place. If he did, then it must be legal.
I saw the 767 fly into the building and it was fully loaded with fuel, so how do you explain somebody being able to stand there next to the impact? Where did the 200,000 pounds of jet fuel disappear to? The truth is the person was sufficiently far enough away from the burning jet fuel to be able to survive, but that has absolutely nothing to do with whether there was 200,000 pounds of jet fuel burning somewhere.
Let me guess, the ground-crew at the airport that filled the plane was in on the conspiracy as well and only added enough fuel to get the plane to the target....moron....
Do you really think they could keep something like that a secret? It would take hundreds of men weeks to rig those towers to come down. Do you really think every one of them is going to keep their mouth shut? Plus the dozens of people up the chain of command?
Somehow idiots like you seem to think the American government is made up of people who are 'part of the conspiracy' and somehow all keep it a secret. The truth is the American government is entirely made up of, surprise, everyday Americans.
What about the thousands of workers who cleaned up the plane at the Pentagon...are they all in on it too? Any conspiracy theory that requires thousands of people keep the secret is pure BS and anybody who believes otherwise is a total moron.
You know what? I am confident in the American system to deal with these kinds of problems if they ever materialized. I don't see any reason to quantitatively reduce our security for a hypothetical abuse that may occur down the road, particularly when I have complete confidence in the 'system' to root out any serious abuses. I really don't see any non-fairy-tale scenario whereby substantial freedoms get lost due to these kinds of activities.
Geez you guys are paranoid. I've heard of the camels nose under the tent, but this is getting ridiculous. To listen to half the guys posting here you would think a dictatorship was just around the corner. We are SO FAR away from losing any real freedoms it's ridiculous.
You're in luck, I happen to be selling tin-foil hats and can give you a bulk discount if you want?
I don't see what the big deal is. They are just inverting the system a bit. Imagine if they found a terrorist. The first thing they might do is supoena the guys phone records for the last year and see everbody that he talked to regularly, then add those guys to the scrutiny list. This is run of the mill everyday police work.
With this system, it seems all they are doing is simply collecting and archiving all the data in advance, such that they when do find a terrorist they can have their super-computer analyse all the phone data and try to identify accomplices.
Do you guys have any idea how much data we are talking about here? It's not like somebody is thumbing through your personal phone records and noticing that you are calling 1-800-hot-chik all the time. With the massive amount of data they are collecting, the only thing looking at that data are computer algorithms doing complex data analysis trying to find subtle links between the terrorist cells.
The computer will be able to identify terrorist relationships that a human would never be able to figure out looking at the data by hand. It's a perfectly legitimate use of our technology to fight terrorists and something that can't be accomplished without having access to all the raw data.
The constitution gives us guaranteeds against unreasonable searches, but the definition of what is unreasonable is left for contemporary interpretation. Seems to me data-mining is very reasonable given the problem at hand.
National security is also a completely different problem than criminal law and you can't approach the two problems the same way. I think the NSA ought to have even more latitude than they have now to do stuff in the interest of national security, but the fruits of their efforts should be unusable in a court of law.
If China were to attack the US, it is defensive for the US to shoot down all their spy satellites. This serves to defend the assets of the US.
I'm not an expert on anything even close to lasers, but I suspect the people capable of building these kind of lasers systems are well aware of the issues you bring up. You logic would imply that you can't get lasers powerful enough to do anything due to the plasma cloud problem, yet there are real laser systems out there now that are examples contrary to your assertion. Take the M-THEL system for example:
http://www.defense-update.com/directory/THEL.htm
It shoots down missiles at fairly decent distances. Now, we aren't talking in-orbit distances, but we aren't talking in a lab either. The amount of energy generated by that laser would seem to be enough to create your plasma cloud right in front of the laser, yet it seems to make some distance. It would seem to me that a beam like that reaching space would still have at least a little bit of energy...then you simply multiply that by a few hundred using an array and you have yourself a ASAT weapon. Plus I doubt that M-THEL laser is operating at the maximum energy that can be achieved without your dreaded plasma cloud.
The real reason is the $6.1b number they are quoting are before the adjustments are made for portion of the survey regarding whether the consumer would have bought it had it not been pirated. They mention the study analyzes that angle, but they don't actually say that the 6.1 number reflects the adjusted amount. I suspect the truth is the 6.1 number is pre-adjusted and that the report actually shows that probable losses are substantially smaller. I suspect all MPAA members are in agreement to selectively release the report and this is just a cover-story. After all, the idea that the studios would not want to release the numbers for fear of hurting their stock-prices set off my BS radar.
Not sure Galileo could be classified as an demonstration of technological prowess. After all, it is 30 years later. I suspect China could easily create a GPS system too if they felt the need. Not saying Europe is technologically inferior, just noting that the ability to create a sat-nav system doesn't exactly make a great poster child.
That said, I applaud any amount of money Europe spends on this kind of thing, particularly as it related to the military. Since I consider Europe to be a eternal ally of the US when the rubber hits the road, it's nice for them to start sharing the bill a bit when it comes to this kind of thing.
Not sure this is a really a competition to see who could build a better system. The US system is almost 30 years old. Anybody here think the US couldn't develop a better system than GPS if they were to make it today? From a technology point of view, there is so much technology sharing between Europe and the US that there is very little if anything that one can do that the other can't. The US likely has a slight edge in advanced technology overall, but only because they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on military research.
There is really little doubt that if some foreign power were using GPS or Galileo as a targetting mechanism against any NATO country, that both systems would pull the plug. 99% of GPS uses, like tracking shipments and navigation don't need any more accuracy than GPS provides. I don't see Galileo really opening up new markets for products that weren't there before as the additional accuracy is usually irrelevant. That said, there is a trend of incorporating more and more positioning systems into things, and I have little doubt that this trend will embrace Galileo as well.
The article notes that future upgrades planned for the GPS system will benefit Galileo as well. Anybody have specific details on how the two systems are cooperating? It is kind of looking like the US and Europe are jointly developing redundant parallel systems. Wouldn't surprise me if future US military hardware uses both systems for redundancy as well.
It's not a function of whether they achieved their goals or not, it's a function of whether the agenda they proposed is what Americans really want, and clearly it is. Also, there is only so much the House of Representatives can do. The House passed every element of contract, but the Senate (which at the time was controlled by the Democrats) prevented much of the legislation from becoming law. And President Clinton blocked some of it as well.
The Republican "Contract with America" was enormously popular and caused the largest shift in the congress ever, with it swinging from Democratically control to Republican control for the first time in 40+ years. The numbers largely show that the agenda layed out in the plan had broad popular appeal. I don't think a similar left wing agenda would be nearly as well received.
Wish I had more time to reply myself. I agree it was rushed through originally, but it's not like the bill was written in a 2 days. There were honest good intentioned people working on it for months. Some of the provisions had been talked about long before 9/11, so there was plenty of awareness of the issues. Since that time, congress has had years to analyze the Patriot Act, so it's not like another 3 months of debate is going to matter.
That said, I think they should have extended it for a few months to try and come to a compromise, rather than let it all expire, effectively throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I suspect now that the posturing is done, they will work out a compromise fairly quickly and prevent too long of a lapse.
As I said in another post. This isn't a debate about whether the camel camped out inside the tent, this is really just a matter of whether the camel is even sticking his nose under the tent.
It's also worth noting that all uses of the Patriot Act provisions are subject to congressional review and are reviewed annually to monitor for potential abuses. So far I have yet to see anybody from the intelligence committee claiming that the reviewed uses have been abusive.
There are enough safe guards in place that the benefits of catching terrorists far outweigh the insignificant, virtually non-existent liberty violations of innocent Americans. This isn't a case of my giving up my liberties for security...my personal liberties haven't been hampered one bit.
On the one in a billion chance that the government somehow thinks I might be a terrorist and takes a peek at my book purchasing history, do you really think I give a crap? I worry far more about terrorists than I do about the government finding out which C++ books I like best (and I don't worry about terrorists very much at that).
Would I trade letting the government see which books I buy in return for also being able to see which books some terrorist buys, you bet. And I don't feel like I am giving up my liberties at all, because as liberties go, have privacy regarding which books I buy isn't even on my list.
Can anybody on this forum tell me they actually worry that the government might find out which books they buy?
While I am personally fine with pretty much all the provision of the act as they exist now, I can certainly understand why some of the provisions rub some people the wrong way. Those provisions should be clarified/narrowed to gain wider consensus.
That said, it's difficult to argue that any of the provisions are grossly over-reaching. They may cross the line in some people's mind, but only a looney thinks they akin to Stalinism. But to read the rhetoric posted on this topic in general, you would think it was the end of the world. The harsh rhetoric only serves to prove the ignorance of the poster. And on this particular topic, slashdot as a whole is looking particularly uneducated. Like I said in the subject line, the entire debate here seems very one sided as best as I can tell.
That's why we have a representative government instead of a pure democracy. We elect a small subset of the population that is representative of the wants of the whole (in theory) and they are supposed to study this stuff in detail and make decisions in line with what they think their constituants would make if they were to read the entire thing.
The abstraction goes even deeper than that though. Every Senator doesn't have time to read and understand every piece of legislation, so they divide up into committees. The committees study these bills in greater detail and then make a recommendation to the full Senate. Senators tend to base their vote off the recommendation of those on the committee that they believe have the same governing philosophy that they do.
But weren't not done, the abstraction goes even further. Senators on the committee hire staff members to help them weed through the meaning of the bill. Staff members in turn meet with advocacy groups the help them fully understand the meaning of the bill. In this manner, laws like the Patriot Act are fairly well fleshed out.
Where the system falls apart is when some dork Senator who never read the bill decides he can make some political headway out of it. Odds are the law is perfectly fine, but on the surface it looks like something that might be infringe on rights, so the grab it like a political football and run with it. Quite shameful really. Both parties do it with their respective issues.
A Vice Presidential candidate for the Democrats no less. The truth is that the far-left wing of the Democratic party doesn't really have much power and their ideas are out of the mainstream of American politics. I'd like to see the looney left put together a 'contract with America' list of what they would like to do and see how far it gets them. They would get laughed off the stage. Best keep your filibuster able minority in tact...
yeah, this guy is real insightful...nice modding /.
We should have bombed Al Jazeer a long time ago...