Actually, it's the CIA that is tasked with finding Osama. Well, unless Osama is somewhere in the US and commits a crime that crosses state lines or something.
That was true before 9/11. Now, the CIA and FBI are allowed to collaborate.. in fact, anyone in the DHS is allowed to share information, because they are all one big happy Gestapo now.
I am a bit surprised that Liberals would be against the Federal Government using Data Mining. In the grand scheme of things, if socialism actually could ever be made to work, data mining would be a key tool to do it, because you could use Data mining to do central economic planning and anticipate citizens demands. On a more pragmatic scale, data mining is something that every private firm in the USA does already, to one degree or another, and services for data mining are readily available for those who lack the know-how. If the government is not allowed to data mine, then corporations, who already have all of our data, will ultimately wind up getting a more powerful hand than the government. To wit - if Amazon is allowed to know what sort of books I buy, doesn't that make it, in a way, more powerful than the government? And I haven't even mentioned Walmart, who lives and dies by it.
If you recall, those old displays used 8 bit wide characters, and they weren't the prettiest letters on the planet. But, if you go by that resolution, then 1600 / 8 gives around 200 columns. Since I imagine most people are actually using a larger font, then, it stands to reason that 80 columns is still pretty good.
Or, to put it another way, 80 columns was designed as it was roughly the amount of letters a courier 10 type ball on an IBM selectric typewriter could fit across a printed page 8.5 inches wide, allowing for a margin of.25 inches on either side. How big do you make your Word processing documents, emails and fonts? Probably edit them full screen, in a larger font, and its probably, jeez:
Can I just take an ubuntu DVD and install it over top of Suse Linux 10? I keep reading that Ubuntu's application installer is a lot easier to work with than Yast/RPM, and I'd like to give it a shot.
Plus, I have a shareware game that I'm working on, but, once I flop it out on the MS I'm going to open source it and it would be cool to get it into a hip distro.
I hate to say it, but my Windows XP has been ACPI aware now for what, a few years now? I don't know enough about Linux to know what it does with ACPI, but I do know that if I have the ACPI activated in my BIOS, Linux seems to be pretty happy with it. In the very least, sensors seems to return information about fan speeds and temperatures that fall within reason of what the BIOS says.
We're going to replace a $2.50 pack of cigarettes with a $400 bottle of pills, and declare victory! I would be more than willing to bet that even if you factor in the eventual risk cost of cancer and other smoking related diseases, it might still come in cheaper than the cost of exotic drugs based on nicotine. The moral of the story is, smoke up to avoid depression, and hope science comes up with a cheaper pill to cure cancer.
I would lean towards saying that Microsoft might be better positioned to do that kind of reality, because they have better relationships with all of the hardware vendors. I could see them building something into Windows that has a standard way of obtaining.x files from attached devices on the network, indicating various repair states and problems, and Microsoft would then work with other hardware vendors to come up with a closed spec for making the goggles and wireless actually work.
I do not like it when people mod me down on Slashdot for my political beliefs, and I do not like when you mod someone else down for theirs, either.
Although I completely disagree with his/her post, the argument presented was consistent with a particular ideology and really not all that inflammatory.
tjstork, it's hard to believe that you actually think the Left in America is more like the Royalists of 1776. After all, of the Left and Right in America, who is more inclined to support an authoritarian administration? Who is more inclined to allow government intrusion into the privacy of Americans? Who has more ties to a corporate kleptocracy? Tom Paine
By far, leftists support a totalitarian government more. New laws required by the left to support its causes, from supposed civil rights and workers rights, to the environment, have made the government by definition more totalitarian than any conservative administration. On a whole, if you look at all the deregulation Bush has done, versus the few laws he's added, you would find that the USA is now MORE free under Bush than before. Just start with tax cuts and the relegalization of so-called "assault" weapons, and already, you've made millions of people more free. The moral of the story, just because your totalitarian government has been in favor of your causes does not make it any less totalitarian.
I see you say "corporate kleptocracy", as if, charging money for a good is a form of theft. Hey, I have news for you. If you do not want a good, then do not buy it. No one is stealing from you. If someone is charging more for the good than you want, you STILL do not have to buy it. The reality is that those who would replace private property with public property are really talking about a return to feudalism by any other name, with the same catastrophic economic results.
That comment is so stunningly stupid that I feel obliged to repeat it here, just to give readers some idea of the quality of your "facts", in case they ever encounter another of your posts.
Finally, I would think that some of the founding fathers would find their way right on the bombastic world of today's talk radio. I quote Patrick Henry:
"Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.
The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable -- and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, "Peace! Peace!" -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"
It's all about size and how many people it takes to really build one. A wonder is supposed to be about how many people a civilization can command at a high level of technology. Anyone whose played Age of Empires can see that.
1. Pyramids 2. Great Wall 3. Panama Canal 4. Three Gorges Dam 5. US Interstate System 6. Airbus A380 7. USS George HW Bush
In the eyes of the corporate world, math is something mathematicians do, not computer programmers. If you are a developer and come up with an algorithm, for say, calculating the price of an energy contract or the risk of an insurance policy, chances are that the company, if sufficient large, has a Phd in Mathematics on hand whose job it really is to invent those algorithms.
Your job, in corporate eyes, is just put it into the computer, get it into the database (where appropriate), and put it on screen. Most of the time, the Phd in math has enough computers to produce a C language prototype, and they will just hand that off for use in whatever language the business uses. Frequently, this is going to be VB.NET or C#, and more likely, C#.
Now, this changes if you working for a software development firm. But, in the corporate world, such as working for a utility or a bank or an insurance company, a service industry basically, as a programmer, your job is not to be a math guy, but a computer guy. Let the math people do math, is what the corporate wonks would say.
In today's world there is no need for forced occupation. In today's world the "occupation" is made by the same private group of money grubbing weasels whose families and friends have held the US Federal Government $73 million dollars in debt since 1776
Oh, good lord. One of those! The fact of the matter is that Alexander Hamilton paid off the Federal Debt, no matter what nutcases have edited Wikipedia on that topic.
Your assertion that there was an implied threat in the mass movements is correct, but it was not that guns would be next, but that the economic threats could be carried out. Bus companies could not operate or textile factories would have no market
The thing that the left wing misses is that an economic threat IS a form of violence. What's the difference between burning someone's house down, versus causing an economy that causes a house to be foreclosed? Either way, you lose the house.
In the case of nations, supposedly non-violent sanctions are even worse. You have to have people with guns making sure no goods get through, and then, you have the entire economy of the sanctioned nation slowly withering and dying as surely as if it had been firebombed or attacked.
One of the great failures of the American policy towards Iraq is that 12 years of sanctions imposed by the United States greatly undermined our ability to establish a government there after we did finally get around to deposing Saddam. Had we actually gone in and invaded Iraq in 1991, sure the allies would have been pissed off, but no more so than they are now, and, we would have had much more likely a populace ready to accept us as liberators from Saddam's madness than what we had in 2003.
The bottom line is, if you think sanctions are a way to avoid war, think again. Sanctions are a form of war, just longer and crueler in many ways.
The editors of Slashdot are only doing their duty as citizens, following a precedent set over 230 years ago by guys named "Paine", "Franklin", "Jefferson".
Yeah, right. If the British were occupying the United States today, the American left wing would be a bunch of royalists arguing for accomodotion and decrying the insane and destabilizing acts of those radical merchants that want to stoke up anti-British sentiment in order to avoid paying taxes.
Friend, the sewer has come to us. We're just trying to flush it.
Sewer? After Clinton spent the 8 years of his administration trying to blow every Islamist he could find, we get 9/11. Bush is merely cleaning house, although, even if he might be a bit too tipsy to drive the sweeper, at least he's got the right idea. What we really need is someone like Bush, but who actually knows how to win these sorts of wars.
The president has violated his oath to uphold the constitution
Your argument lacks any historical context.
In historical terms, Bush's wiretaps and even Gitmo are positively tame. Washingon shot suspected British spies in his army on sight. Lincoln flat out suspended Habeas Corpus to deal with Confederate spies / terrorists. Wilson basically suspended the constitution for citizens of German descent during World War I, and Roosevelt broke the Constitution in so many ways that it cannot even really be enumerated.
You talk about Bush's "secrecy", well, Roosevelt built the atomic bomb so secretly that his own VP didn't even know about it. Johnson had the government doing all sorts of crazy research projects on people, like the CIA's MK-ULTRA program or giving plutonium to retards.
And, if you want to talk about power grabs, Roosevelt set aside a long time national tradition of only serving two presidential terms to be elected to a third and a fourth, a tradition re-instated into law only by Republican insistence during the Eisenhower years. For that matter, Roosevelt tried to stuff more Supreme Court justices on the court so that he could get a majority of justices to side with him.
Kennedy and Johnson both used the CIA to spy on US citizens in flagrant violation of the CIA's own charter, Nixon used the CIA to spy on everyone and Clinton used the IRS to go after political opponents.
What Bush is doing is far, far more moderate than any of the above.
And similarly, any of the above is far far more moderate than what our enemies do. In Iraq, Al Qaeda, to terrorize a village, will invite a family that needs convincing to "dinner", and then serve them their own son cooked. Or, they will go and blow up your house. If you disagree with them, they will kill your whole family. You talk about the USA's effort to stop free speech, and to this day the government of Iran not only blocks all free speech in its own country, but has a million dollar bounty on the head of Salmon Rushdie, and has vowed to hunt down a couple of cartoonists for daring to draw a picture of Mohammed. You talk about Bush's oppression of woman's rights, but in the middle east, women are routinely stoned to death or whipped for the "serious" crimes of having an extramarital affair. You talk about the poor defendants in Gitmo, and the need for a Jury trial, but when did Al Qaeda in Iraq have a jury trial for the 75 people they blew up today, the 50 yesterday, and so on? Where was the jury trial for the occupants of the north and south towers of the world trade center? Where was the jury trial for the occupants of the lockerbee flight? For Klinghoffer and a host of others assasinated by the PLO? Where's the jury trial for all those "jewish criminals" engaged in the horrible crime of eating bagles in a restaraunt in Jerusalem?
So, yeah, I see your point about how on some level it is wrong that Bush is harrassing an Islamic organization, but after having carefully considering the track record of Islamic organizations, I can only sanely conclude that Bush's wiretapping of them is entirely appropriate. If it makes you feel better, write the law that says: "any foreign funded political organization is subject to wiretap without warrants", and I dare you to find any nation that does not engage in the same.
Is your Word document secure because Open Office can't perfectly reproduce it? It NTFS secure because nobody has a perfect driver for it in Linux? Is SMB secure because Samba isn't 100% perfect?
It is, in the sense, that, to all of those systems, the MS implementation could theoretically decide that they are a form of an attack. If you look at it from an IP centric way, one could make the argument that using an FOSS version of that data is a sort of a theft in that, MS did all the hard work coming up with a spec and an implementation to get it to work, and, the FOSS people are merely implementing to a spec, which is much easier than the creative process of creating a brand new file system, document format, or network protocol from scratch.
Indeed, I've always wondered why, instead of trying to ape Microsoft's file and print protocol, why one could not make a Linux native file and print protocol and then offer an FOSS driver for Windows to use it. Windows has been multiprotocol capable now, for what, at least a decade. Similarly, why couldn't one create their own file system driver for Windows, like EXT3?
Anyway, you don't have to use violence and it's a good idea not to. Ghandi used economic war. The Dali Lama is using peaceful means
That's absurd. Violence works.
It worked against Saddam and it is working against the US Army in Iraq. If there was no violence, we would have accomplished our objectives, put in the democracy, and would be long gone. As it is, the area is likely to fall into the hands of the most violent people after we leave.
Ghandis mass civil protests were a threat of violence, pure and simple, as was Martin Luther Kings mass protests. The thought was, if you could put 500,000 people on the street carrying signs, you can just easily put them on the street carrying guns. That is why repressive governments kill protestors.
I hate to say it, but, some evidence suggests that obfuscation works if there is enough of it. Cryoptography is ultimately about adding cost and time to an enemies retrieval of message to deter them from attempting to read it, or at least render it less valuable by the time they do, and obfuscation can do that.
I mean, to some extent, even Microsoft's non-crypted formats are somewhat secure. No one knows how to produce an authentic Word document to the last detail. I don't see an open source file system driver for Linux that lets you reliably write to NTFS formatted partitions, the SAMBA team has numerous problems trying to read Microsoft file and print sharing stuff. If you view all of these closed source efforts as a way to "encrypt data", in the very least, MS has successfully made a lot of their software tamper resistent by the mere virtue of not publishing the source code.
I'm in favor of manifest destiny and am in favor of the invasion of Iraq. I thought it was altogether entirely fitting and entirely appropriate that Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even if it meant trumping up or inventing charges of WMD to whip up public support for the war.
I can agree that the war was not managed well, but I do believe it is possible to defeat an insurgency. We have not done well at that, for sure, but I think the answer lies in improved technology and tactics. If we are persistent, we can eliminate this notion that insurgents are invincible, by inventing things to detect their explosives as they smuggle them and not when they use them, by using mass production and mobility to bring rapid electricification and clean water to a community, and any number of things.
The United States is a revolution in progress. When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they did not write that for just a select few white people, but rather, for every man and woman that yearns to breath free on this planet. It is entirely fitting within our national purpose to spread freedom across the globe - mostly through trade and moral suasion, but sometimes too, through military force.
A short war is better than long sanctions, I say. If you are contemplating putting sanctions on a country 20, 30, 40, or even 100 years, and starving the people of trade and communications, for generations, it is better to just invade and get it over with.
Wilson was right, you know. Bush was smart enough to see that much, if not smart enough to execute it correctly. And, you never know, as bad as Iraq looks right now, things might well break our way, and this democracy might actually stick. Already journalists are reporting that Sunnis are starting to actually trust that bringing democracy to Iraq is what we mean to do.
Although I joke about the oil, its really not that. It's about, how much value a free nation of 25 million people will bring to the world. The GDP of a modern nation of that size would dwarf even its sizable energy offerings if those people could be allowed to pursue modern entreprenuerial ideas.
I mean, you really do need hear Dylan swaggering through Highway 61, or exploding through Blonde on Blonde. On a great album, it is as if each song is part of a larger tour, and the artist takes you to a number of places, and then ties all together as part of a larger, mysterous whole.
An album is a work of art as a whole, a sort of a modern symphony with multiple parts. Really, if the industry wants to save the album, it needs to let the artists be artists.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's the CIA that is tasked with finding Osama. Well, unless Osama is somewhere in the US and commits a crime that crosses state lines or something.
That was true before 9/11. Now, the CIA and FBI are allowed to collaborate.. in fact, anyone in the DHS is allowed to share information, because they are all one big happy Gestapo now.
I am a bit surprised that Liberals would be against the Federal Government using Data Mining. In the grand scheme of things, if socialism actually could ever be made to work, data mining would be a key tool to do it, because you could use Data mining to do central economic planning and anticipate citizens demands. On a more pragmatic scale, data mining is something that every private firm in the USA does already, to one degree or another, and services for data mining are readily available for those who lack the know-how. If the government is not allowed to data mine, then corporations, who already have all of our data, will ultimately wind up getting a more powerful hand than the government. To wit - if Amazon is allowed to know what sort of books I buy, doesn't that make it, in a way, more powerful than the government? And I haven't even mentioned Walmart, who lives and dies by it.
If you recall, those old displays used 8 bit wide characters, and they weren't the prettiest letters on the planet. But, if you go by that resolution, then 1600 / 8 gives around 200 columns. Since I imagine most people are actually using a larger font, then, it stands to reason that 80 columns is still pretty good.
.25 inches on either side. How big do you make your Word processing documents, emails and fonts? Probably edit them full screen, in a larger font, and its probably, jeez:
Or, to put it another way, 80 columns was designed as it was roughly the amount of letters a courier 10 type ball on an IBM selectric typewriter could fit across a printed page 8.5 inches wide, allowing for a margin of
1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890
even less than 80 columns across.
Mars is a 4 billion year old desert, and they are worried that it might be dusty.
Can I just take an ubuntu DVD and install it over top of Suse Linux 10? I keep reading that Ubuntu's application installer is a lot easier to work with than Yast/RPM, and I'd like to give it a shot.
Plus, I have a shareware game that I'm working on, but, once I flop it out on the MS I'm going to open source it and it would be cool to get it into a hip distro.
I hate to say it, but my Windows XP has been ACPI aware now for what, a few years now? I don't know enough about Linux to know what it does with ACPI, but I do know that if I have the ACPI activated in my BIOS, Linux seems to be pretty happy with it. In the very least, sensors seems to return information about fan speeds and temperatures that fall within reason of what the BIOS says.
But give me something to work with the vast amounts of unstructured information out there
Google is spending a ton of money working on exactly that.
What are you talking about? The primary assett of a tobacco companies is hundreds of thousands of acres of farms. They could grow anything on them.
We're going to replace a $2.50 pack of cigarettes with a $400 bottle of pills, and declare victory! I would be more than willing to bet that even if you factor in the eventual risk cost of cancer and other smoking related diseases, it might still come in cheaper than the cost of exotic drugs based on nicotine. The moral of the story is, smoke up to avoid depression, and hope science comes up with a cheaper pill to cure cancer.
I would lean towards saying that Microsoft might be better positioned to do that kind of reality, because they have better relationships with all of the hardware vendors. I could see them building something into Windows that has a standard way of obtaining .x files from attached devices on the network, indicating various repair states and problems, and Microsoft would then work with other hardware vendors to come up with a closed spec for making the goggles and wireless actually work.
Please mod this up.
I do not like it when people mod me down on Slashdot for my political beliefs, and I do not like when you mod someone else down for theirs, either.
Although I completely disagree with his/her post, the argument presented was consistent with a particular ideology and really not all that inflammatory.
tjstork, it's hard to believe that you actually think the Left in America is more like the Royalists of 1776. After all, of the Left and Right in America, who is more inclined to support an authoritarian administration? Who is more inclined to allow government intrusion into the privacy of Americans? Who has more ties to a corporate kleptocracy? Tom Paine
By far, leftists support a totalitarian government more. New laws required by the left to support its causes, from supposed civil rights and workers rights, to the environment, have made the government by definition more totalitarian than any conservative administration. On a whole, if you look at all the deregulation Bush has done, versus the few laws he's added, you would find that the USA is now MORE free under Bush than before. Just start with tax cuts and the relegalization of so-called "assault" weapons, and already, you've made millions of people more free. The moral of the story, just because your totalitarian government has been in favor of your causes does not make it any less totalitarian.
I see you say "corporate kleptocracy", as if, charging money for a good is a form of theft. Hey, I have news for you. If you do not want a good, then do not buy it. No one is stealing from you. If someone is charging more for the good than you want, you STILL do not have to buy it. The reality is that those who would replace private property with public property are really talking about a return to feudalism by any other name, with the same catastrophic economic results.
That comment is so stunningly stupid that I feel obliged to repeat it here, just to give readers some idea of the quality of your "facts", in case they ever encounter another of your posts.
Hey, I just go by historical facts, unlike you.
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy05/hist.html Table 1.1, shows that the US government ran a surplus from the inception the Constitution in 1789 up until around 1849.
Finally, I would think that some of the founding fathers would find their way right on the bombastic world of today's talk radio. I quote Patrick Henry:
"Sir, we are not weak, if we make a proper use of the means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.
The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable -- and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!
It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, "Peace! Peace!" -- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!"
It's all about size and how many people it takes to really build one. A wonder is supposed to be about how many people a civilization can command at a high level of technology. Anyone whose played Age of Empires can see that.
1. Pyramids
2. Great Wall
3. Panama Canal
4. Three Gorges Dam
5. US Interstate System
6. Airbus A380
7. USS George HW Bush
Go Kapersky! One look at the trade deficit says that perhaps all Chinese software ought to be blocked.
In the eyes of the corporate world, math is something mathematicians do, not computer programmers. If you are a developer and come up with an algorithm, for say, calculating the price of an energy contract or the risk of an insurance policy, chances are that the company, if sufficient large, has a Phd in Mathematics on hand whose job it really is to invent those algorithms.
Your job, in corporate eyes, is just put it into the computer, get it into the database (where appropriate), and put it on screen. Most of the time, the Phd in math has enough computers to produce a C language prototype, and they will just hand that off for use in whatever language the business uses. Frequently, this is going to be VB.NET or C#, and more likely, C#.
Now, this changes if you working for a software development firm. But, in the corporate world, such as working for a utility or a bank or an insurance company, a service industry basically, as a programmer, your job is not to be a math guy, but a computer guy. Let the math people do math, is what the corporate wonks would say.
In today's world there is no need for forced occupation. In today's world the "occupation" is made by the same private group of money grubbing weasels whose families and friends have held the US Federal Government $73 million dollars in debt since 1776
Oh, good lord. One of those! The fact of the matter is that Alexander Hamilton paid off the Federal Debt, no matter what nutcases have edited Wikipedia on that topic.
Your assertion that there was an implied threat in the mass movements is correct, but it was not that guns would be next, but that the economic threats could be carried out. Bus companies could not operate or textile factories would have no market
The thing that the left wing misses is that an economic threat IS a form of violence. What's the difference between burning someone's house down, versus causing an economy that causes a house to be foreclosed? Either way, you lose the house.
In the case of nations, supposedly non-violent sanctions are even worse. You have to have people with guns making sure no goods get through, and then, you have the entire economy of the sanctioned nation slowly withering and dying as surely as if it had been firebombed or attacked.
One of the great failures of the American policy towards Iraq is that 12 years of sanctions imposed by the United States greatly undermined our ability to establish a government there after we did finally get around to deposing Saddam. Had we actually gone in and invaded Iraq in 1991, sure the allies would have been pissed off, but no more so than they are now, and, we would have had much more likely a populace ready to accept us as liberators from Saddam's madness than what we had in 2003.
The bottom line is, if you think sanctions are a way to avoid war, think again. Sanctions are a form of war, just longer and crueler in many ways.
The editors of Slashdot are only doing their duty as citizens, following a precedent set over 230 years ago by guys named "Paine", "Franklin", "Jefferson".
Yeah, right. If the British were occupying the United States today, the American left wing would be a bunch of royalists arguing for accomodotion and decrying the insane and destabilizing acts of those radical merchants that want to stoke up anti-British sentiment in order to avoid paying taxes.
Friend, the sewer has come to us. We're just trying to flush it.
Sewer? After Clinton spent the 8 years of his administration trying to blow every Islamist he could find, we get 9/11. Bush is merely cleaning house, although, even if he might be a bit too tipsy to drive the sweeper, at least he's got the right idea. What we really need is someone like Bush, but who actually knows how to win these sorts of wars.
The president has violated his oath to uphold the constitution
Your argument lacks any historical context.
In historical terms, Bush's wiretaps and even Gitmo are positively tame. Washingon shot suspected British spies in his army on sight. Lincoln flat out suspended Habeas Corpus to deal with Confederate spies / terrorists. Wilson basically suspended the constitution for citizens of German descent during World War I, and Roosevelt broke the Constitution in so many ways that it cannot even really be enumerated.
You talk about Bush's "secrecy", well, Roosevelt built the atomic bomb so secretly that his own VP didn't even know about it. Johnson had the government doing all sorts of crazy research projects on people, like the CIA's MK-ULTRA program or giving plutonium to retards.
And, if you want to talk about power grabs, Roosevelt set aside a long time national tradition of only serving two presidential terms to be elected to a third and a fourth, a tradition re-instated into law only by Republican insistence during the Eisenhower years. For that matter, Roosevelt tried to stuff more Supreme Court justices on the court so that he could get a majority of justices to side with him.
Kennedy and Johnson both used the CIA to spy on US citizens in flagrant violation of the CIA's own charter, Nixon used the CIA to spy on everyone and Clinton used the IRS to go after political opponents.
What Bush is doing is far, far more moderate than any of the above.
And similarly, any of the above is far far more moderate than what our enemies do. In Iraq, Al Qaeda, to terrorize a village, will invite a family that needs convincing to "dinner", and then serve them their own son cooked. Or, they will go and blow up your house. If you disagree with them, they will kill your whole family. You talk about the USA's effort to stop free speech, and to this day the government of Iran not only blocks all free speech in its own country, but has a million dollar bounty on the head of Salmon Rushdie, and has vowed to hunt down a couple of cartoonists for daring to draw a picture of Mohammed. You talk about Bush's oppression of woman's rights, but in the middle east, women are routinely stoned to death or whipped for the "serious" crimes of having an extramarital affair. You talk about the poor defendants in Gitmo, and the need for a Jury trial, but when did Al Qaeda in Iraq have a jury trial for the 75 people they blew up today, the 50 yesterday, and so on? Where was the jury trial for the occupants of the north and south towers of the world trade center? Where was the jury trial for the occupants of the lockerbee flight? For Klinghoffer and a host of others assasinated by the PLO? Where's the jury trial for all those "jewish criminals" engaged in the horrible crime of eating bagles in a restaraunt in Jerusalem?
So, yeah, I see your point about how on some level it is wrong that Bush is harrassing an Islamic organization, but after having carefully considering the track record of Islamic organizations, I can only sanely conclude that Bush's wiretapping of them is entirely appropriate. If it makes you feel better, write the law that says: "any foreign funded political organization is subject to wiretap without warrants", and I dare you to find any nation that does not engage in the same.
Is your Word document secure because Open Office can't perfectly reproduce it? It NTFS secure because nobody has a perfect driver for it in Linux? Is SMB secure because Samba isn't 100% perfect?
It is, in the sense, that, to all of those systems, the MS implementation could theoretically decide that they are a form of an attack. If you look at it from an IP centric way, one could make the argument that using an FOSS version of that data is a sort of a theft in that, MS did all the hard work coming up with a spec and an implementation to get it to work, and, the FOSS people are merely implementing to a spec, which is much easier than the creative process of creating a brand new file system, document format, or network protocol from scratch.
Indeed, I've always wondered why, instead of trying to ape Microsoft's file and print protocol, why one could not make a Linux native file and print protocol and then offer an FOSS driver for Windows to use it. Windows has been multiprotocol capable now, for what, at least a decade. Similarly, why couldn't one create their own file system driver for Windows, like EXT3?
Anyway, you don't have to use violence and it's a good idea not to. Ghandi used economic war. The Dali Lama is using peaceful means
That's absurd. Violence works.
It worked against Saddam and it is working against the US Army in Iraq. If there was no violence, we would have accomplished our objectives, put in the democracy, and would be long gone. As it is, the area is likely to fall into the hands of the most violent people after we leave.
Ghandis mass civil protests were a threat of violence, pure and simple, as was Martin Luther Kings mass protests. The thought was, if you could put 500,000 people on the street carrying signs, you can just easily put them on the street carrying guns. That is why repressive governments kill protestors.
I hate to say it, but, some evidence suggests that obfuscation works if there is enough of it. Cryoptography is ultimately about adding cost and time to an enemies retrieval of message to deter them from attempting to read it, or at least render it less valuable by the time they do, and obfuscation can do that.
I mean, to some extent, even Microsoft's non-crypted formats are somewhat secure. No one knows how to produce an authentic Word document to the last detail. I don't see an open source file system driver for Linux that lets you reliably write to NTFS formatted partitions, the SAMBA team has numerous problems trying to read Microsoft file and print sharing stuff. If you view all of these closed source efforts as a way to "encrypt data", in the very least, MS has successfully made a lot of their software tamper resistent by the mere virtue of not publishing the source code.
I'm in favor of manifest destiny and am in favor of the invasion of Iraq. I thought it was altogether entirely fitting and entirely appropriate that Bush used 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even if it meant trumping up or inventing charges of WMD to whip up public support for the war.
I can agree that the war was not managed well, but I do believe it is possible to defeat an insurgency. We have not done well at that, for sure, but I think the answer lies in improved technology and tactics. If we are persistent, we can eliminate this notion that insurgents are invincible, by inventing things to detect their explosives as they smuggle them and not when they use them, by using mass production and mobility to bring rapid electricification and clean water to a community, and any number of things.
The United States is a revolution in progress. When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they did not write that for just a select few white people, but rather, for every man and woman that yearns to breath free on this planet. It is entirely fitting within our national purpose to spread freedom across the globe - mostly through trade and moral suasion, but sometimes too, through military force.
A short war is better than long sanctions, I say. If you are contemplating putting sanctions on a country 20, 30, 40, or even 100 years, and starving the people of trade and communications, for generations, it is better to just invade and get it over with.
Wilson was right, you know. Bush was smart enough to see that much, if not smart enough to execute it correctly. And, you never know, as bad as Iraq looks right now, things might well break our way, and this democracy might actually stick. Already journalists are reporting that Sunnis are starting to actually trust that bringing democracy to Iraq is what we mean to do.
Although I joke about the oil, its really not that. It's about, how much value a free nation of 25 million people will bring to the world. The GDP of a modern nation of that size would dwarf even its sizable energy offerings if those people could be allowed to pursue modern entreprenuerial ideas.
I mean, you really do need hear Dylan swaggering through Highway 61, or exploding through Blonde on Blonde. On a great album, it is as if each song is part of a larger tour, and the artist takes you to a number of places, and then ties all together as part of a larger, mysterous whole.
An album is a work of art as a whole, a sort of a modern symphony with multiple parts. Really, if the industry wants to save the album, it needs to let the artists be artists.