There are now at least two people who have been stripped of their citizenship and sent to Gitmo. I won't argue that they are likely the type of people that should go to Gitmo, if anyone should. To reduce argument I'll grant that, though I don't agree with it.
The issue is the process.
The Executive gets to decide who is a "probably terrorist" and can strip them of their citizenship - no checks, no balances. Just because it has only happened to two (?) people doesn't mean it can't happen to others - in fact it means that there is now a "simplified, efficient" process for doing so, easing the way for future occurrences. The people in Gitmo are beginning to get some rights, but for 6 years they've had practically none.
I don't deny the occasional necessity, but that doesn't remove the need for checks and balances, indeed only makes them more necessary. Even if it's necessary to do things NOW, there should always be followup review, and restoration and compensation where appropriate.
> (especially if it involves the hanging of Bush and his oil cronies)
Never happen. Even if/when it all falls apart they have enough money to float through, high and dry. The ones to suffer will be the ones who always suffer, plus their neighbors just up the curve.
Your progression seems to assume that it's a line. I suspect it's really more of a closed loop, but we don't know how big it is, or how desperate things will have to get in the US before it comes back here. I suspect that part of the loop is seeking places where the workers are desperate enough to accept poor working conditions and low wages.
> b) Blast furnaces in the US are likely more environmentally friendly.
I saw a talk once that indicated that this wasn't necessarily the case. The talk was in the 80's, so they weren't comparing American steel to Chinese steel, rather to European and Japanese steel. The upshot of the talk was that the US infrastructure and factories came through WWII unscathed, whereas the industrial infrastructure in Europe and Japan was pretty badly damaged. So to get into the steel industry, they had to build anew - with newer, more modern, more capable, more efficient machinery. Once they came online they were much better poised than our pre-WWII era steelmaking equipment. At the very least, a more efficient machine uses fewer resources and has that level of environmentalism.
OTOH the surviving US steelmaking industry has likely modernized, and isn't running on pre-WWII machinery any more. In addition, I have this nagging, perhaps stereotyped attitude that Chinese steel is made on do-it-fast, do-it-now, nothing else matters tools, which could well be quite dirty.
What a porkbarrel spending bill! There are much wiser and better ways to spend this money. For instance, simplify the requirements for specifying no-bid contracts, and we could easily spend 10 times as much that way.
(For the sarcasm impaired, add appropriate emoticon here.)
> One word: multicast > > Uni-casting VOD over the Internet will keep doing this over and over again
But multicast is not VOD, because the stream happens when the stream happens. You'd have to consult some sort of schedule, and connect to the multicast stream at the right time. I'll bet that given time, there would even be publications, either online or perhaps even dead-tree, to distribute these schedules. Whatta concept.
We've accused the cable companies of trying to turn the Internet into TV. I guess at least now we telling them that if they're going to do it, please do it efficiently. The missing point is that we want to leave enough bandwidth for the rest of us, and I suspect that that's what the ISPs really don't care about. They're rather serve more re-runs.
Actually, I don't think I agree with either statement. What really matters most is that we keep bringing forth the next generation in a sustainable way, so the cycle can continue. In the process it would be best if we were all something a bit more than mere animals - realizing more of our own potential, too. Sometimes the path to those ends isn't clear. Sometimes "benefit" is the hard word to define. Sometimes it seems we can survive, even thrive, in any hardship except prosperity.
While you're busy turning the Internet into cable tv, why don't you roll back rural electrification and pervasive telephone access.
Certain things are deemed "strategic" for the country, and those things are fostered.
For that matter, why not deconstruct the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Oh wait, we're starting to do that. Oops.
Maybe you're right... Maybe we would be best off with our corporate overlords granting us access to the material we deem fit.
Too many people reserve the term "sheeple" for use with respect to the government. Corporations are fully capable of as much stupidity as the government, and IMHO greater evil.
Unfortunately it IS that companies can't be trusted. We've adopted the meme that companies are responsible ONLY for returning stockholder value, within the framework of the law. If the law doesn't require a common-carrier style Internet - if that law permits them to turn it into cable-tv-on-steroids, extracting maximum value from content providers and shutting small content out, they may well do it. If the extra revenue from the content providers is greater than the revenue loss from the few "net neutrality extremists" that leave, they will do it. Not only will they, but by today's corporate meme they MUST do it, because it makes more money and to maintain a neutral Internet would be fiscally irresponsible. Unless LARGE numbers of people are ready and willing to give up broadband, net neutrality legislation is the only thing that will save the Internet.
> Net Neutrality is a hot-button issue for a lot of people. > But I can't help thinking that without a very tough > adversarial system, none of these concerns would ever have > come up. What we need is not less competition; it's less > sore winners and losers. We might be going about things > differently, but the goal is still the same: advancement > over stagnation.
Problem 1: Define "advancement" and "stagnation". For different people, you can pretty much swap the definitions. Whose definition should rule?
Problem 2: hindsight - less sore winners and losers - Legislation in hindsight sometimes works, but sometimes you can't reverse what has become a new status quo. Unless you're really an ISP or a content provider partnered to one, without preemptive legislation you're about to be a loser, so SMILE.
> Any ISP that tried to block access to GooTube would > have no customers within 12 months.
You seem to presume that there's a choice. About the best that most can do is to choose between DSL and cable, and if both pull tricks like this, it's no choice. Many don't even have that choice of 2 for broadband, but get DSL *OR* cable - again, no choice.
This is not a free market, in any way shape, or form.
The real goal of net neutrality is to at least make it act like a common-carrier.
This entire article is a red herring, not on Slashdot's part, but on the part of an industry that wants badly to kill the Internet by turning it into cable-tv-on-steroids. They've found what looks like a valid technical objection to net neutrality and blown that appearance into a foregone conclusion. Then they're using that foregone conclusion to try to convince everyone that net neutrality is a bad thing that hinders innovation.
I sat in on a presentation about a next-generation HDTV chip, about a year back. There was more extra hardware on that chip dedicated to encryption that I could believe. They made sure that clear signal was never present on ANY chip pin, and was even re-encrypted when it had to go to other chips in the same system, then decrypted at the other chip, etc.
You can swallow incredible amounts of encryption when you've got a budget of tens or hundreds of millions of transistors.
In this particular situation, we appear to have 3 possibilities for the legal status of Gitmo: 1 - The laws of Cuba apply 2 - The laws of the US apply 3 - No laws apply whatsoever
I guess you could argue that there is a fourth option, but it's really a subset of (3) 3a - Since no laws apply, military rules apply
Two points about this. First, I'm not sure the administration is wanting even military rules to hold, because from what I've heard what has happened at Gitmo isn't even up to the standards by which our military does business or treats prisoners of any kind. Second, we have *in some way* already extended US territory to Gitmo. If we hadn't, then this would be a subject for the Cuban courts to handle, and we would have to answer to them. Since we are not answering to Cuban courts we have in some way given ourselves domain over that little patch of land. Maybe it's not a "US Territory" under any sort of official designation, but it is clearly under US control, and the US is responsible for what happens there.
As for Johnson v. Eisentrager, there is a key difference here. At least the Germans were tried, and the argument was whether it should be in a military court, or not. In this case, the defendants are simply on ice. There has been no trial, civil or military. The point here is to force some sort of action. Had there been reasonably prompt action, even in a military court, this case never would have gotten this far. So imho it's really about being on ice, not about military court. It so happens that civil court has this nifty thing called Habeas Corpus that can be used as a mechanism - I'm not sure the military rules do. You use what you can get.
As for "seize and resell property," in this case, I'm with you. I can conceive of a "public good" that might merit such acts, but higher tax rates do not fit my definition of such.
It is, but the "default condition" always use to be to grant power to people, then to states, then to the federal government, if such power was not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. In the past some of these same 4 Justices have stated that, "Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the right to privacy. That right has been inferred and extended from not having to quarter soldiers." That opinion completely misses the point, and the original will of the framers.
Actually, we may have to turn them out on the street. It turns out that for some of these people, we've already tried to send them home, and their home nations don't want them. Nor did we do our proper homework to make sure we could build a good legal case against them. So it's entirely possible that some of these people will get their day in court and be freed onto US soil, because there's nothing else we can do with them, and we can't legally hold them forever.
But still, the blame isn't this decision. It's an administration with a slap-dash "Do what I wanna do, and don't bother me with the details..." attitude.
If you're detaining people, detain the right people. If you've made a mistake, admit it, apologize, and transport them home - promptly. If you haven't made a mistake, document that fact and get it ready for court.
Don't just "round up some suspects," slap them in a cell, and hope you'll never have to deal with it again.
In real life, very few of us get to gloss over our mistakes, and never pay the price. With nations, the possibilities for blowback last even longer than with people.
But McCain is on record as favoring the appointment of judges like Scalia. Or was that Alito? Either way, favoring judges on the side of selective implementation of the Constitution.
> The fact that this decision was a slim 5-4 majority, with this President's > two appointees making up half the dissenting view, is a frightening thought.
This is the scariest part of it all. These are the people who are the ultimate protectors of the Constitution, and 4 of them want to grant the Executive branch the power to whisk it out from under people, at will. (Given certain seemingly easy conditions are met.)
Anyone to bet that if it were to stand, this power wouldn't be "extended?" Obviously National Security has been the original reason. How about the "War on Drugs" next?
For a moment, forget Roe vs Wade. John McCain has said that he will seek the appointment of Supreme Court justice(s) after the model of Justice Scalia. (or was that Justice Alito?) That is, one of the 4 dissenting opinions.
I wonder how this opinion would have gone, and how Conservative opinions would have sounded, had it been Bill Clinton (or Pres. Barack Obama or Pres. Hillary Clinton) requesting this Executive power.
Slashdot Mirror
There are now at least two people who have been stripped of their citizenship and sent to Gitmo. I won't argue that they are likely the type of people that should go to Gitmo, if anyone should. To reduce argument I'll grant that, though I don't agree with it.
The issue is the process.
The Executive gets to decide who is a "probably terrorist" and can strip them of their citizenship - no checks, no balances. Just because it has only happened to two (?) people doesn't mean it can't happen to others - in fact it means that there is now a "simplified, efficient" process for doing so, easing the way for future occurrences. The people in Gitmo are beginning to get some rights, but for 6 years they've had practically none.
I don't deny the occasional necessity, but that doesn't remove the need for checks and balances, indeed only makes them more necessary. Even if it's necessary to do things NOW, there should always be followup review, and restoration and compensation where appropriate.
> (especially if it involves the hanging of Bush and his oil cronies)
Never happen. Even if/when it all falls apart they have enough money to float through, high and dry. The ones to suffer will be the ones who always suffer, plus their neighbors just up the curve.
Your progression seems to assume that it's a line.
I suspect it's really more of a closed loop, but we don't know how big it is, or how desperate things will have to get in the US before it comes back here.
I suspect that part of the loop is seeking places where the workers are desperate enough to accept poor working conditions and low wages.
Think of it as crop rotation - in people.
> b) Blast furnaces in the US are likely more environmentally friendly.
I saw a talk once that indicated that this wasn't necessarily the case. The talk was in the 80's, so they weren't comparing American steel to Chinese steel, rather to European and Japanese steel. The upshot of the talk was that the US infrastructure and factories came through WWII unscathed, whereas the industrial infrastructure in Europe and Japan was pretty badly damaged. So to get into the steel industry, they had to build anew - with newer, more modern, more capable, more efficient machinery. Once they came online they were much better poised than our pre-WWII era steelmaking equipment. At the very least, a more efficient machine uses fewer resources and has that level of environmentalism.
OTOH the surviving US steelmaking industry has likely modernized, and isn't running on pre-WWII machinery any more. In addition, I have this nagging, perhaps stereotyped attitude that Chinese steel is made on do-it-fast, do-it-now, nothing else matters tools, which could well be quite dirty.
One word: Tying
(IANAL, but I can recognize a duck when I see it waddle and hear it quack.)
What a porkbarrel spending bill! There are much wiser and better ways to spend this money. For instance, simplify the requirements for specifying no-bid contracts, and we could easily spend 10 times as much that way.
(For the sarcasm impaired, add appropriate emoticon here.)
> One word: multicast
>
> Uni-casting VOD over the Internet will keep doing this over and over again
But multicast is not VOD, because the stream happens when the stream happens. You'd have to consult some sort of schedule, and connect to the multicast stream at the right time. I'll bet that given time, there would even be publications, either online or perhaps even dead-tree, to distribute these schedules. Whatta concept.
We've accused the cable companies of trying to turn the Internet into TV. I guess at least now we telling them that if they're going to do it, please do it efficiently. The missing point is that we want to leave enough bandwidth for the rest of us, and I suspect that that's what the ISPs really don't care about. They're rather serve more re-runs.
I surely wish I had mod points for this one. But of course they expired last week.
Either that, or PROFIT!!, of course.
Actually, I don't think I agree with either statement. What really matters most is that we keep bringing forth the next generation in a sustainable way, so the cycle can continue. In the process it would be best if we were all something a bit more than mere animals - realizing more of our own potential, too. Sometimes the path to those ends isn't clear. Sometimes "benefit" is the hard word to define. Sometimes it seems we can survive, even thrive, in any hardship except prosperity.
That's why legislation is required.
While you're busy turning the Internet into cable tv, why don't you roll back rural electrification and pervasive telephone access.
Certain things are deemed "strategic" for the country, and those things are fostered.
For that matter, why not deconstruct the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System. Oh wait, we're starting to do that. Oops.
Maybe you're right... Maybe we would be best off with our corporate overlords granting us access to the material we deem fit.
Too many people reserve the term "sheeple" for use with respect to the government. Corporations are fully capable of as much stupidity as the government, and IMHO greater evil.
Unfortunately it IS that companies can't be trusted. We've adopted the meme that companies are responsible ONLY for returning stockholder value, within the framework of the law. If the law doesn't require a common-carrier style Internet - if that law permits them to turn it into cable-tv-on-steroids, extracting maximum value from content providers and shutting small content out, they may well do it. If the extra revenue from the content providers is greater than the revenue loss from the few "net neutrality extremists" that leave, they will do it. Not only will they, but by today's corporate meme they MUST do it, because it makes more money and to maintain a neutral Internet would be fiscally irresponsible. Unless LARGE numbers of people are ready and willing to give up broadband, net neutrality legislation is the only thing that will save the Internet.
> Net Neutrality is a hot-button issue for a lot of people.
> But I can't help thinking that without a very tough
> adversarial system, none of these concerns would ever have
> come up. What we need is not less competition; it's less
> sore winners and losers. We might be going about things
> differently, but the goal is still the same: advancement
> over stagnation.
Problem 1: Define "advancement" and "stagnation". For different people, you can pretty much swap the definitions. Whose definition should rule?
Problem 2: hindsight - less sore winners and losers - Legislation in hindsight sometimes works, but sometimes you can't reverse what has become a new status quo. Unless you're really an ISP or a content provider partnered to one, without preemptive legislation you're about to be a loser, so SMILE.
> Any ISP that tried to block access to GooTube would
> have no customers within 12 months.
You seem to presume that there's a choice. About the best that most can do is to choose between DSL and cable, and if both pull tricks like this, it's no choice. Many don't even have that choice of 2 for broadband, but get DSL *OR* cable - again, no choice.
This is not a free market, in any way shape, or form.
The real goal of net neutrality is to at least make it act like a common-carrier.
This entire article is a red herring, not on Slashdot's part, but on the part of an industry that wants badly to kill the Internet by turning it into cable-tv-on-steroids. They've found what looks like a valid technical objection to net neutrality and blown that appearance into a foregone conclusion. Then they're using that foregone conclusion to try to convince everyone that net neutrality is a bad thing that hinders innovation.
They belong in the same afterlife as the ??AA!
At least they're truthful - they call themselves an "asylum."
I wasn't approving, I was more surprised at silicon lengths they were going to.
It's already there.
I sat in on a presentation about a next-generation HDTV chip, about a year back. There was more extra hardware on that chip dedicated to encryption that I could believe. They made sure that clear signal was never present on ANY chip pin, and was even re-encrypted when it had to go to other chips in the same system, then decrypted at the other chip, etc.
You can swallow incredible amounts of encryption when you've got a budget of tens or hundreds of millions of transistors.
I forgot to mention that I was limiting my specifics to fire-breathing dragons.
In this particular situation, we appear to have 3 possibilities for the legal status of Gitmo:
1 - The laws of Cuba apply
2 - The laws of the US apply
3 - No laws apply whatsoever
I guess you could argue that there is a fourth option, but it's really a subset of (3)
3a - Since no laws apply, military rules apply
Two points about this. First, I'm not sure the administration is wanting even military rules to hold, because from what I've heard what has happened at Gitmo isn't even up to the standards by which our military does business or treats prisoners of any kind. Second, we have *in some way* already extended US territory to Gitmo. If we hadn't, then this would be a subject for the Cuban courts to handle, and we would have to answer to them. Since we are not answering to Cuban courts we have in some way given ourselves domain over that little patch of land. Maybe it's not a "US Territory" under any sort of official designation, but it is clearly under US control, and the US is responsible for what happens there.
As for Johnson v. Eisentrager, there is a key difference here. At least the Germans were tried, and the argument was whether it should be in a military court, or not. In this case, the defendants are simply on ice. There has been no trial, civil or military. The point here is to force some sort of action. Had there been reasonably prompt action, even in a military court, this case never would have gotten this far. So imho it's really about being on ice, not about military court. It so happens that civil court has this nifty thing called Habeas Corpus that can be used as a mechanism - I'm not sure the military rules do. You use what you can get.
As for "seize and resell property," in this case, I'm with you. I can conceive of a "public good" that might merit such acts, but higher tax rates do not fit my definition of such.
The pressure is not to be applied to SCOTUS, but to be kept in mind in November.
It is, but the "default condition" always use to be to grant power to people, then to states, then to the federal government, if such power was not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution. In the past some of these same 4 Justices have stated that, "Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the right to privacy. That right has been inferred and extended from not having to quarter soldiers." That opinion completely misses the point, and the original will of the framers.
Not to be insulting or disrespectful, but something about this post makes me think back to "Hogan's Heros," which I watched as a kid.
Actually, we may have to turn them out on the street. It turns out that for some of these people, we've already tried to send them home, and their home nations don't want them. Nor did we do our proper homework to make sure we could build a good legal case against them. So it's entirely possible that some of these people will get their day in court and be freed onto US soil, because there's nothing else we can do with them, and we can't legally hold them forever.
But still, the blame isn't this decision. It's an administration with a slap-dash "Do what I wanna do, and don't bother me with the details..." attitude.
If you're detaining people, detain the right people.
If you've made a mistake, admit it, apologize, and transport them home - promptly.
If you haven't made a mistake, document that fact and get it ready for court.
Don't just "round up some suspects," slap them in a cell, and hope you'll never have to deal with it again.
In real life, very few of us get to gloss over our mistakes, and never pay the price. With nations, the possibilities for blowback last even longer than with people.
But McCain is on record as favoring the appointment of judges like Scalia. Or was that Alito? Either way, favoring judges on the side of selective implementation of the Constitution.
> The fact that this decision was a slim 5-4 majority, with this President's
> two appointees making up half the dissenting view, is a frightening thought.
This is the scariest part of it all. These are the people who are the ultimate protectors of the Constitution, and 4 of them want to grant the Executive branch the power to whisk it out from under people, at will. (Given certain seemingly easy conditions are met.)
Anyone to bet that if it were to stand, this power wouldn't be "extended?"
Obviously National Security has been the original reason.
How about the "War on Drugs" next?
For a moment, forget Roe vs Wade. John McCain has said that he will seek the appointment of Supreme Court justice(s) after the model of Justice Scalia. (or was that Justice Alito?) That is, one of the 4 dissenting opinions.
I wonder how this opinion would have gone, and how Conservative opinions would have sounded, had it been Bill Clinton (or Pres. Barack Obama or Pres. Hillary Clinton) requesting this Executive power.
After all, we don't want to loose track of the thread, otherwise we might be accused of lose reasoning.