As for those saying that we need not extend the rights of justice and due process to those who are not American citizens.
U.S. grand juries have indicted Saudi multimillionaire Osama bin Laden twice: once before the embassy bombings in Africa,
and again in October on allegations he participated directly in those bombings.
That Afghanistan refuses to extradite is not a criminal issue, it is a military issue. The only law applicable is international law, and the standards of evidence to allow the U.S. to engage in self-defense have been met and exceeded.
Give the CIA/FBI a week, and they will certainly have convincing evidence. Perhaps not evidence that would stand up in a court of law, since it will be obtained without through lying, stealing, and other various trickery, but it will be convincing evidence. I only hope enough of it can be shared with the U.S. citizens to convince the majority of the people of its accuracy.
And if it can't be accomplished without killing civilians in other countries? Sit back and let it happen again...and again...and again?
I didn't say it has to be zero civilian casualties. It's relative. There's no formula. But I'm not willing to say that innocent non-American lives are completely worthless. To be honest it takes a lot for me to admit that the U.S. government should even treat non-American lives as worth more than American lives. But I feel I've come to accept that fact. One thing which is certain is that terrorism will happen again and again and again and again regardless of our military response.
The terrorist groups need to be hurt. This particular attack probably cost them a lot of training and money, and those sources need to be attacked. I find it hard to believe that the camps where these terrorists are trained are not already known to some extent. The problem is that we did not want to get into a war with the country which harbored it. Well, at this point I think that may be necessary.
Civilians will die. But they should never be targetted, if not for reasons of morality, than for the practical reason that we will lose support from the rest of the world if we do so.
Innocent is relative. When a grieving family member applauds the execution of a convicted murderer, should we kill him/her?
What if it's later found out that that convicted murderer was innocent?
We don't know what's going through the heads of those rejoicing. We don't know what their news is reporting to them, what they believe is the real story. As long as they are not a threat to the U.S., we should live and let live/die.
On the other hand, I fully support a declaration of war against any country which harbors known terrorists, if those terrorists can be killed or captured with a minimum of casualties of both Americans and civilians.
If we used your standard you yourself would be a target, since you're advocating the death of "innocent" people.
Hijackings, biological and chemical attacks, and yes, even net warfare are the new weapons of mass destruction.
Net warfare? You can't conduct an act of war without physical access to the victim. Every penny spent trying to protect people from such things is a penny which could be spent saving people's lives instead.
These events could have happened at any time since the towers were first constructed 30 years ago.
The towers were specifically built to withstand a direct hit from a 707, which was the largest plane at the time of construction. Whether or not it they actually would have withstood such a hit is unknown, of course.
The internet is up and running fine. It's a large portion of the web that's down. What we need to do is build a web infrastructure similar to the internet infrastructure. Something like freenet would be a great start.
Call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. There is no need to rush things. Any time in the next week or so is fine. The current blood supply is being sent to the needed areas, and the new donations will be used to replenish things.
Better that then wasting your vote on some guy from the nipplebiter party who will only get 3 votes in the election.
By voting for the nipplebiter, you increase his/her votes by 50%. By voting for the republican/democrat, you increase his/her votes by 0.0000001%. Either way you don't change anything, though.
About 700,000 pot smokers are arrested every year, often losing their jobs and homes because of it.
That is not a national problem, it is a local one. The federal government only controls the distribution of pot (and arguably only then when it affects interstate commerce), not the private home consumption of it. Besides that, I challenge your statistics. 700,000 pot smokers may be arrested every year, but I highly doubt 700,000 people are arrested each year due to pot consumption.
We have got to drop the consensual crime laws and respect the Constitution before we can trust the government with more toys.
I feel that the number one problem with consensual crime laws is that they are not enforced evenly across the juridiction of the law. Once you get the president and congressmen in a situation where they have to obey the laws they write, instead of giving them to the police to use as an excuse to arrest people they don't like, the consensual crime laws will largely go away.
In any case, consensual crime laws generally take place in the privacy of ones home, not in public. Almost by definition once the action takes place in public it is no longer something which is between yourself and your own morality. So how exactly are these cameras going to affect consenual crime laws?
Information is power.... I don't like it, but I do accept it.
I agree with you here. Information is power, and power can and will be used against people. But I feel that people have to accept that the government is going to get that information no matter what. Taking that information away from the government, like total nuclear disarmament, is a positive goal, but the reality of the situation is that neither are going to happen at this stage. So we have to work from that assumption and try to protect against accidental or malicious actions which abuse that power.
First step - social security numbers.... People blindly use that number as a form of identification. If they want to be that stupid, let them. But why are we paying for it?
I'm not sure what you're referring to about us paying for it, unless you mean the ID cards, which I agree are a waste of money. Other than that though, the existance of SSNs lowers government costs, not raises.
I also take a bit of personally offense at the "stupid" remark. I for one have no problem giving away my social security number to anyone who needs to know who I am. I try not to give it away when I am subscribing to a service, because I want the ability to withhold payment in case of problems and force them to take me to court to get the money rather than leaving a mark on my credit report, but in cases where this isn't reasonable I don't even bother pushing the issue. Other than that, if someone has my name and address (or some other unique key) they might as well have my social security number, so I have no problems giving it to them. (Again I make an exception for services. My long distance company, cable company, electric and gas company, none of them have my SSN).
There is not one valid reason that I need to be identified by a number.
If you throw out the social security system, perhaps. I'll agree with you that such a forced savings account is rediculous. But as long as you have social security, there needs to be an account number. It may be hidden, it may be bits representing your full name, birthdate and time, hospital, and pointer to the record of your doctor, but there has to be a key of some sort. I don't see any reason not to make it a number.
So we finance this government tracking system every day, and you say that we aren't heading towards totalitarianism?
These tracking systems lower the costs of the government, not raise them. We have given the government the mandate to enforce the laws. We have given the people the right to the privacy in their homes, but not in public. We have also given the people the right to due process. Under these and other constraints which I'm probably forgetting I believe the government needs to perform that enforcement in whatever way is most efficient without infringing on the rights of the people. I don't think the right to be anonymous in public is one of those rights.
Computing power is now at the point where it is trivial to track just about everything. Cameras in public will just add to this whole mess.
The fact that the computing power is there makes me assume that it is being used. Perhaps I'm just paranoid. I'd much rather have an openly admitted to system of monitoring everyone than to have the covert systems of monitoring only those whom the government wishes to target.
I was the owner of a certain free homepage site which I registered under my real name and address, a throwaway email (registered under fake information), and an efax telephone number (also registered under fake information). Someone used that homepage site to create a homepage and was alledgedly sending harassing mail through the USPS. By this time I had moved to another state and hadn't updated my address. Well guess what, I was still contacted by phone by a sheriff looking for information who said he got the information from the FBI who had traced me through my old license to my new license and then got my new phone number and address. Don't think for a second that the government needs a social security number to find you. They found me given only a domain name.
Maybe I'm just being selfish. If the government knows everything about me, I guess I want them to know everything about you, too. Well, since you're responding to a post of mine on slashdot, I'm sure they do:).
Totalitarianism - "Of, relating to, being, or imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed."
What about what you described helps a central authority exercise control over your life? If anything it helps them to exercise less control over your life, because if they want to find out who you are they don't have to stop you and check ID or anything.
Information wants to be free. Laws which attempt to stop the spread of information will fail. You have to come up with a way to protect against abuses without stopping the spread of information, usually by adding more information. You haven't stated any of your potential problems with these systems, so I'll leave alone the better solutions to the problems which don't involve stopping information.
Technology needs to be accepted. Just as the RIAA needs to accept that napsteresque systems will never be stopped no matter how many laws they passed, U.S. citizens need to accept that police surveilance is not going to stop no matter how many laws they pass. Sure, you can effectively stop the police from using illegal obtained information as evidence in court, but you can't take the information away. We need to reach a comprimise in both situations which addresses the fact that information is naturally free.
This guy has two 19" monitors, seven computers, a beer fridge, coffee maker, and a little plush penguin - Potelé. How many friends do you think he has?
Face recognition, however, is not so exact. There are not unlimited unique faces.
You're joking, right? Faces are of course as unique as fingerprints, possibly even more so (I'm not sure about identical twins). I even know identical twins and I can tell the difference between them easily. I'm sure a cop couldn't, because s/he hasn't know them for a long time. Likewise, a computer potentially could, because it, like I, have a very good memory of the face. Ironically, you'd get fewer false positives if the computer had everyone's face, both the criminals and the upstanding citizens.
Information wants to be free. If you want your face to be protected, don't ever go into public. Otherwise I feel the police have every right to track and monitor anything you do in public. The only thing I expect is that they prosecute as soon as possible when they intend to prosecute. My only fear is that the cops will save up video evidence of small little crimes (say littering) which become bigger crimes when they add up (5th offense littering is 30 days in jail, or whatever). Then they have the power to basically put anyone they want in jail, because virtually none of us are perfect (we just think no one saw that candy wrapper we threw out the window).
This idea in and of itself is not bad, so long as its optional.
If it were optional, you know there'd be hefty insurance discounts for using it. If or one would love to sign up. I never drive drunk, and I never would let anyone use my car while driving drunk. This was even true when I was 16-24, when insurance companies raise your rates in large part because of the increase in drunk driving among that age group. It would be nice if I didn't have to pay with my money for those drunk drivers, even if I still have to pay with the risk on my life.
la ya blah da money happiness trying to get past the compression thingy I don't know why it didn't in the first place this is really stupid. Oh... it's the subject? FUCK YOU SLASHDOT.
Re:So I will drive with my windows open, NEXT
on
Remote Breathalyzer
·
· Score: 2
What a load of horse dung. Simply because you are driving a car does not mean you have given up your Constitutional rights. Sorry, that's not how the Constitution works. It is in effect at all times always. It is the highest law of the land (higher than the Supreme Court).
It is a little known fact that the Bill of Rights do not protect you from state laws. For instance the supreme court has ruled that states have every right to restrict your use of weapons, despite your constiutional right to bear arms. The first ammendment starts "Congress shall make no law". The 14th ammendment says that states may not "enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," but the supreme court has ruled that the Bill of Rights is not a privilege or immunity of U.S. citizens.
But what is the work, the image, or the entire site? Google is clearly creating a derivitive work by taking your images and combining them with the images of others. I really don't think you can argue against that.
OTOH, the opt-out feature should protect google from being accused of willful infringement.
"A statesman, actor, musician, or inventor who asks for and desires public recognition in a large sense surrenders his right of privacy to the public...On the other hand, the privilege of using the picture of a famous person as a subject of new or current interest or for informative purposes does not extend to the commercialization of his personality through forms of treatment distinct from dissemination of news or information." Photography and the Law by George Chernoff and Hershel Sarbin (NY: AMPHOTO, 1971), pp. 36-37. [call number: KF2042.P45C44 1971 P&P]
Slashdot Mirror
As for those saying that we need not extend the rights of justice and due process to those who are not American citizens.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/ter rorists_990110.html
That Afghanistan refuses to extradite is not a criminal issue, it is a military issue. The only law applicable is international law, and the standards of evidence to allow the U.S. to engage in self-defense have been met and exceeded.
Give the CIA/FBI a week, and they will certainly have convincing evidence. Perhaps not evidence that would stand up in a court of law, since it will be obtained without through lying, stealing, and other various trickery, but it will be convincing evidence. I only hope enough of it can be shared with the U.S. citizens to convince the majority of the people of its accuracy.
should even treat non-American lives as worth more than American lives
I meant less. Shit, now I'm gonna get royally flamed. Ohwell.
And if it can't be accomplished without killing civilians in other countries? Sit back and let it happen again...and again...and again?
I didn't say it has to be zero civilian casualties. It's relative. There's no formula. But I'm not willing to say that innocent non-American lives are completely worthless. To be honest it takes a lot for me to admit that the U.S. government should even treat non-American lives as worth more than American lives. But I feel I've come to accept that fact. One thing which is certain is that terrorism will happen again and again and again and again regardless of our military response.
The terrorist groups need to be hurt. This particular attack probably cost them a lot of training and money, and those sources need to be attacked. I find it hard to believe that the camps where these terrorists are trained are not already known to some extent. The problem is that we did not want to get into a war with the country which harbored it. Well, at this point I think that may be necessary.
Civilians will die. But they should never be targetted, if not for reasons of morality, than for the practical reason that we will lose support from the rest of the world if we do so.
Innocent is relative. When a grieving family member applauds the execution of a convicted murderer, should we kill him/her?
What if it's later found out that that convicted murderer was innocent?
We don't know what's going through the heads of those rejoicing. We don't know what their news is reporting to them, what they believe is the real story. As long as they are not a threat to the U.S., we should live and let live/die.
On the other hand, I fully support a declaration of war against any country which harbors known terrorists, if those terrorists can be killed or captured with a minimum of casualties of both Americans and civilians.
If we used your standard you yourself would be a target, since you're advocating the death of "innocent" people.
4417 1284 5032 4056. How you gonna kill someone?
Any computer that is involved in keeping the victim alive should not be hooked up to the internet. Try again.
Know any air traffic control centers which use the internet? Last time I checked they use radio waves, which is a form of physical access.
Can't vote in NY. Gov. Pataki has shut down the primaries.
Hijackings, biological and chemical attacks, and yes, even net warfare are the new weapons of mass destruction.
Net warfare? You can't conduct an act of war without physical access to the victim. Every penny spent trying to protect people from such things is a penny which could be spent saving people's lives instead.
Like I said, they were supposed to withstand such a hit. Whether or not they would have can only be speculated.
These events could have happened at any time since the towers were first constructed 30 years ago.
The towers were specifically built to withstand a direct hit from a 707, which was the largest plane at the time of construction. Whether or not it they actually would have withstood such a hit is unknown, of course.
The internet is up and running fine. It's a large portion of the web that's down. What we need to do is build a web infrastructure similar to the internet infrastructure. Something like freenet would be a great start.
Call 1-800-GIVE-LIFE. There is no need to rush things. Any time in the next week or so is fine. The current blood supply is being sent to the needed areas, and the new donations will be used to replenish things.
Better that then wasting your vote on some guy from the nipplebiter party who will only get 3 votes in the election.
By voting for the nipplebiter, you increase his/her votes by 50%. By voting for the republican/democrat, you increase his/her votes by 0.0000001%. Either way you don't change anything, though.
About 700,000 pot smokers are arrested every year, often losing their jobs and homes because of it.
That is not a national problem, it is a local one. The federal government only controls the distribution of pot (and arguably only then when it affects interstate commerce), not the private home consumption of it. Besides that, I challenge your statistics. 700,000 pot smokers may be arrested every year, but I highly doubt 700,000 people are arrested each year due to pot consumption.
We have got to drop the consensual crime laws and respect the Constitution before we can trust the government with more toys.
I feel that the number one problem with consensual crime laws is that they are not enforced evenly across the juridiction of the law. Once you get the president and congressmen in a situation where they have to obey the laws they write, instead of giving them to the police to use as an excuse to arrest people they don't like, the consensual crime laws will largely go away.
In any case, consensual crime laws generally take place in the privacy of ones home, not in public. Almost by definition once the action takes place in public it is no longer something which is between yourself and your own morality. So how exactly are these cameras going to affect consenual crime laws?
If the spread of information is made illegal, only criminals will have information.
Information is power. ... I don't like it, but I do accept it.
I agree with you here. Information is power, and power can and will be used against people. But I feel that people have to accept that the government is going to get that information no matter what. Taking that information away from the government, like total nuclear disarmament, is a positive goal, but the reality of the situation is that neither are going to happen at this stage. So we have to work from that assumption and try to protect against accidental or malicious actions which abuse that power.
First step - social security numbers. ... People blindly use that number as a form of identification. If they want to be that stupid, let them. But why are we paying for it?
I'm not sure what you're referring to about us paying for it, unless you mean the ID cards, which I agree are a waste of money. Other than that though, the existance of SSNs lowers government costs, not raises.
I also take a bit of personally offense at the "stupid" remark. I for one have no problem giving away my social security number to anyone who needs to know who I am. I try not to give it away when I am subscribing to a service, because I want the ability to withhold payment in case of problems and force them to take me to court to get the money rather than leaving a mark on my credit report, but in cases where this isn't reasonable I don't even bother pushing the issue. Other than that, if someone has my name and address (or some other unique key) they might as well have my social security number, so I have no problems giving it to them. (Again I make an exception for services. My long distance company, cable company, electric and gas company, none of them have my SSN).
There is not one valid reason that I need to be identified by a number.
If you throw out the social security system, perhaps. I'll agree with you that such a forced savings account is rediculous. But as long as you have social security, there needs to be an account number. It may be hidden, it may be bits representing your full name, birthdate and time, hospital, and pointer to the record of your doctor, but there has to be a key of some sort. I don't see any reason not to make it a number.
So we finance this government tracking system every day, and you say that we aren't heading towards totalitarianism?
These tracking systems lower the costs of the government, not raise them. We have given the government the mandate to enforce the laws. We have given the people the right to the privacy in their homes, but not in public. We have also given the people the right to due process. Under these and other constraints which I'm probably forgetting I believe the government needs to perform that enforcement in whatever way is most efficient without infringing on the rights of the people. I don't think the right to be anonymous in public is one of those rights.
Computing power is now at the point where it is trivial to track just about everything. Cameras in public will just add to this whole mess.
The fact that the computing power is there makes me assume that it is being used. Perhaps I'm just paranoid. I'd much rather have an openly admitted to system of monitoring everyone than to have the covert systems of monitoring only those whom the government wishes to target.
I was the owner of a certain free homepage site which I registered under my real name and address, a throwaway email (registered under fake information), and an efax telephone number (also registered under fake information). Someone used that homepage site to create a homepage and was alledgedly sending harassing mail through the USPS. By this time I had moved to another state and hadn't updated my address. Well guess what, I was still contacted by phone by a sheriff looking for information who said he got the information from the FBI who had traced me through my old license to my new license and then got my new phone number and address. Don't think for a second that the government needs a social security number to find you. They found me given only a domain name.
Maybe I'm just being selfish. If the government knows everything about me, I guess I want them to know everything about you, too. Well, since you're responding to a post of mine on slashdot, I'm sure they do :).
Totalitarianism - "Of, relating to, being, or imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed."
What about what you described helps a central authority exercise control over your life? If anything it helps them to exercise less control over your life, because if they want to find out who you are they don't have to stop you and check ID or anything.
Information wants to be free. Laws which attempt to stop the spread of information will fail. You have to come up with a way to protect against abuses without stopping the spread of information, usually by adding more information. You haven't stated any of your potential problems with these systems, so I'll leave alone the better solutions to the problems which don't involve stopping information.
Technology needs to be accepted. Just as the RIAA needs to accept that napsteresque systems will never be stopped no matter how many laws they passed, U.S. citizens need to accept that police surveilance is not going to stop no matter how many laws they pass. Sure, you can effectively stop the police from using illegal obtained information as evidence in court, but you can't take the information away. We need to reach a comprimise in both situations which addresses the fact that information is naturally free.
This guy has two 19" monitors, seven computers, a beer fridge, coffee maker, and a little plush penguin - Potelé. How many friends do you think he has?
Face recognition, however, is not so exact. There are not unlimited unique faces.
You're joking, right? Faces are of course as unique as fingerprints, possibly even more so (I'm not sure about identical twins). I even know identical twins and I can tell the difference between them easily. I'm sure a cop couldn't, because s/he hasn't know them for a long time. Likewise, a computer potentially could, because it, like I, have a very good memory of the face. Ironically, you'd get fewer false positives if the computer had everyone's face, both the criminals and the upstanding citizens.
Information wants to be free. If you want your face to be protected, don't ever go into public. Otherwise I feel the police have every right to track and monitor anything you do in public. The only thing I expect is that they prosecute as soon as possible when they intend to prosecute. My only fear is that the cops will save up video evidence of small little crimes (say littering) which become bigger crimes when they add up (5th offense littering is 30 days in jail, or whatever). Then they have the power to basically put anyone they want in jail, because virtually none of us are perfect (we just think no one saw that candy wrapper we threw out the window).
This idea in and of itself is not bad, so long as its optional.
If it were optional, you know there'd be hefty insurance discounts for using it. If or one would love to sign up. I never drive drunk, and I never would let anyone use my car while driving drunk. This was even true when I was 16-24, when insurance companies raise your rates in large part because of the increase in drunk driving among that age group. It would be nice if I didn't have to pay with my money for those drunk drivers, even if I still have to pay with the risk on my life.
la ya blah da money happiness trying to get past the compression thingy I don't know why it didn't in the first place this is really stupid. Oh... it's the subject? FUCK YOU SLASHDOT.
What a load of horse dung. Simply because you are driving a car does not mean you have given up your Constitutional rights. Sorry, that's not how the Constitution works. It is in effect at all times always. It is the highest law of the land (higher than the Supreme Court).
It is a little known fact that the Bill of Rights do not protect you from state laws. For instance the supreme court has ruled that states have every right to restrict your use of weapons, despite your constiutional right to bear arms. The first ammendment starts "Congress shall make no law". The 14th ammendment says that states may not "enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," but the supreme court has ruled that the Bill of Rights is not a privilege or immunity of U.S. citizens.
But what is the work, the image, or the entire site? Google is clearly creating a derivitive work by taking your images and combining them with the images of others. I really don't think you can argue against that.
OTOH, the opt-out feature should protect google from being accused of willful infringement.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/195_copr.html