I see a lot of people comparing this piece of propoganda with the early 80's propoganda of "Just Say No."
Since you people vehemently defend the copying of music, do you also vehemently defend the use of drugs? Simply because there was a propoganda campaign against it?
My point is not that drugs are bad; I would be hypocritical to claim such (well then again, I don't consider marijuana a drug). My point is, when does propoganda become bad? Is there such a thing as "good propoganda?"
I was under the illusion that if you apply a natural heat gradient acroos a thermo electric material you will actually get power out of it.
Right. A gradient produces a current. Because of symmetry, driving a current through the material in the opposite direction produces a temperature gradient, in the opposite direction. One side gets cold, and the other gets hot. Since the cold side is colder than room temperature, thermal energy is transferred faster from the processor than it would be ordinarily.
<Calculus>
In essence,
dQ/dt = -k * dT/dx,
-- the larger dT/dx is (the higher the temperature gradient), the faster heat (Q) is transferred. k is the coefficient of heat transfer, sort of a measure of the "heat conductivity".
Analogously, the current in a circuit is proportional to the voltage and inversely with the resistance; in other words,
dq/dt = 1/R * dE/dx
In this instance, q represents charge and E is the electric field. Many many many things in physics work this way.
</Calculus>
Is it worth it to set these things up at power stations where the "cool" water is actually warmer than the surroundings? Probably not. A thermoelectric material of any appreciable efficiency is very costly to manufacture. I don't think you'd gain very much energy, and you'd certainly lose money. Efficiency goes down with the temperature gradient. I think the double-cycle power plants currently in use extract just about as much energy as possible (and we're not even talking 50% efficiency here -- that's thermodynamics for you).
I mean, I understand "700 watts"--that's 700 Joules/second. So presumably a cm^2 of this material can "cool" 700 Joules of heat energy every second. But surely the limiting factor here is how quickly the *air* (or other surrounding medium) can *accept* energy, not how fast the device can pump it out....right?
The two rates (heat in and heat out) are equal. Otherwise the thermoelectric gets hotter, and hotter, and... The way the TE works is by driving a current across a junction of two different materials. This creates a thermal interface where heat can be exchanged very rapidly. This means the side of the TE in contact with the processor cools down, so that heat is transferred faster from the processor.
Of course, you are putting energy into the TE device in the form of electric current, and this energy must also go somewhere. Therefore the hot side of the TE becomes very hot indeed, hotter than the surface of the processor. This higher temperature gradient allows the heat to be dropped to the surrounding air faster that an ordinary heatsink.
Some people have been saying this device produces power. This is not correct; the device is a power sink, and that power is ultimately converted to heat. The real question is, when the device is operating at full transfer capacity of 700W, how much power is it drawing itself?
Ultimately, this scheme requires more power, placing more stress on your power supply and burning more fossil fuel. I'd be much more excited to see a Plain Old Heatsink that could transfer at 700W.
Excellent. Linus shuts 'em down. The techno-religious wars people so often have on Slashdot are pretty ridiculous, aren't they?
On the other hand, Linus speculated about computers being used to create new life forms. So perhaps he has a little/. blood after all.
Emacs is not an editor, really
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As always, the vi people misunderstand Emacs. Emacs does not aim to be an editor. It aims to be a cohesive environment. Perhaps this rubs the vi people the wrong way because, as we all know, UNIX is supposed to be based on small, powerful tools that perform one, and only one, function (or group of closely related functions).
Emacs violates that philosophy. And the vi users hate that. Ok, that's fine. But a philosophy cannot be right or wrong. Get over it already.
Emacs has strengths, particularly as a programming tool. Integrated (and fully customizable) debugging. Version control (perhaps vi does this as well). Hex-editing mode. Automated compilation. And anything else you can think of: if it there isn't a ELISP module out there to do it already, someone can hack it together quite quickly.
If you stop thinking of Emacs as an editor, and begin thinking of it as a more comprehensive environment, it stops seeming outrageous. vi may be the best editor out there. But Emacs is the best integrated solution for complex environments.
Hopefully, the people involved in this thread are all still reading it. Otherwise I'm just talking to the air:)
Gzipped data, while certainly not random, has a very high entropy. In a crunch, I think it would work OK. On Linux,/dev/random is a good source of randomness. Unlike/dev/urandom,/dev/random is constantly re-stocked with fresh entropy from things like interrupt timings. It isn't as good as, say, a true entropy source that is constantly reseeded with cosmic ray timings and chaotic oscillators, but it's very close.
The beauty of the one time pad is that the pad doesn't have to be truly random to be effective. There is still absolutely no way to know if you have decrypted the message "correctly."
But you know, I really think that encryption's best use is to prevent computer crime; e.g., stealing credit card numbers or personal information. Anyone who wants to communicate secret plans will undoubtedly use something less technological but more difficult to crack: codewords agreed upon in secret (the military still uses this, even though encryption is very strong now); or body language signals.
Hell, even security through obscurity can work. We used the Navajo language in World War II. They never broke it. I can invent a code based on clicks and whistles (pseudo-dolphin-speak), then MP3 compress that, then gzip it, then encrypt it with PGP. I can invent a new language from scratch -- a linguist will eventually figure it out, but will he figure it out soon enough?
There are a million reasons why a bad on encryption is a ban plan. It'll only serve to further weaken our economy. If I knew my credit information was only weakly encrypted across-the-wire, I would never buy anything online again.
As I mentioned in another post in this discussion, even quantum computers are unable to break the one time pad, provided the pad is at least as large as the message.
For those who are confused, this is absolutely unbreakable. It mime decodes to a 128-byte block. There are a practically infinite number of English-language messages that might fit into 128 bytes. Take a simple example:
The message is: "I love Dubya"
Since the pad is random, even if you somehow decrypted the data to get "I love Dubya" there would be no way to know if the message was really supposed to be "I hate Dubya" instead. It's not a matter of computing power. It is simply impossible, without knowing the pad.
The problem then becomes, how do we exchange pads among cohorts without eavesdropping? That was the problem solved by public-key cryptography. Even if an adversary eavesdrops on the key communication, he can only encrypt messages, not decrypt them. And cryptographic signatures can protect against the encryption of false messages.
Unfortunately, public-key crypto might be broken at some point. One common implementation will instantly break once we figure out how to quickly factor huge numbers. The one time pad is immune. Even with a quantum computer, you will never be able to tell if you have decrypted the message correctly.
I can't get to www.spammimic.com. traceroute seems to show the packets going away somewhere inside psi.net. Is it just me? Is it just an outage somewhere? Or are the feds doing something...
Well guys, we're in the minority. The media and the man-on-the-street are professing their agreement with these sick restrictions. How does a minority get heard?
Perhaps we should immediately begin setting up the framework for an organized civil disobedience campaign. Write servers and clients for us to all run on our systems that send packets of purely random garbage to and from each other. If it looks like cryptography, it must be, right? Let them haul me off to jail as they try and fail to crack the code.
Perhaps a large-scale gathering in a major city where we profess our grievances. Every third person can bring a megaphone. What are they gonna do, arrest all of us? I'd like to see them try. In the process, they'll be in gross violation of the First Amendment, and it will come back to bite them in the ass.
Go out and learn Arabic. Speak it everywhere you go. See what they do.
A minority can still make itself heard. What are other peoples' ideas?
Perhaps the current government and officials
will not abuse the laws, but remember that we'll be passing these new abilities forward, and we can only assume that they'll be used in every way that the
law allows. Which includes some bad ways.
I already said, and you acknowledged, that I disagree with the wording of this bill. In a different discussion I was more accepting of it, but that was overly hasty on my part, and I made that statement before fully understanding the ramifications of the language.
Why, then, if key-escrow is patently absurd and ineffective against the very groups it targets, WHY is OUR GOVERNMENT proposing it?
It's been proposed in the past. I haven't yet heard anything to suggest people are proposing it now, in response to this particular incident. If they do, they will truly prove themselves to be idiots. Touche.
Finally, you claim that if all communications can't be constantly monitored, then there is no reason for concern, hence no infringements of your rights.
That is not what I claimed. Such monitoring, were it possible, would certainly be infringement. My point was that even if the government wanted to do this, they would be unable to. I didn't say "I'm not worried" because I have nothing to hide, I said it because I don't believe the government could ever possibly do it. If they try, not only will people object (including myself, please realize that I'm on your side here), they will soon discover that they are kidding themselves.
This warrantless-wiretap stuff is scary. It would be one thing if it were windowed (a sunset date,
say, 90 days from now), which I think we could tolerate for the purpose of the immediate crisis. But to forever and ever have wiretaps without a court
order? That's no good.
I posted about this earlier and was subjected to the Slashdot-equivalent of a machine gun assault. Anyway, the recent bill about communications monitoring and warrantless wiretapping is indeed too broadly worded, but: I don't think this is an intentional assault on privacy, but instead a too-quickly-written bill that was motivated by a lot of scared (and rightly so) congressmen. Simply because people are in government doesn't mean they are immune to knee-jerk.
Why is everyone so quick to jump to the conclusion that our government will do whatever it takes to fuck us? If that is your position, why even vote? Instead of voting, go out and shoot all the candidates, since clearly none of them are satisfactory to you, and if given the chance, will ruin your lives. Jesus, this country is still a democracy!
Anyway, I don't think crypto is threatened. Banning crypto would be suicide, since that would basically destroy e-business (would YOU buy anything online knowing your credit information was going clear-over-the-wire?). They aren't going to institute key-escrow because what, are the terrorists going to switch over to the escrow system just because we passed a law? Whether you want to believe it or not, there are intelligent people in the government who do indeed realize these things.
And finally, as for wiretapping, even if the government had the right to listen to everyone's traffic, do they even remotely have the capacity to do so? So much information is exchanged every day that everyone in the country would have to be recruited as information-monitors. I'm not particularly worried about it.
I see it as just a way to make the.com owners pay more money to Verisign so they have to protect their name.
Precisely. This is all a massive scam. Here's the loophole they are exploiting: in order for a company to retain rights over its trademark, it must protect that trademark against infringement. If, say, Sun Micro failed to stop someone from registering sun.biz, that would be seen as failure to protect the mark. End result? Verisign (or whoever) ends up collecting their money again.
Once they cash out.biz, they'll start it all over again with.e-biz,.corp,.tech, and.fck-me-in-the-goatass.
Of course, it will eventually be stopped, since our government is all about protecting corporations. They won't stand for this for too long.
I have never seen, in person, a grenade, a grenade launcher or a sub-machine gun, and that I don't understand how the presence of one could make anyone Feel safe!
The thing is, while in Israel you are acutely aware of the danger to your person, soldiers-with-machine-guns or not. The fact is, had those people not been present, I would have felt even more insecure. Someone earlier made the point that soldiers are a target, and anyone in the company of soldiers is at risk of becoming collateral damage. This is quite true. Ironically, even though I realized this, I didn't care.
My statements were not geared to make any sort of political point. The fact is, I did indeed feel safer because of the military presence. My emotional response cannot be argued with; it is truth. If you are ever in the same situation, maybe you will understand. I hope that you never will be placed in those circumstances!
First of all, since you seem to disagree with many of my assessments, I'd like to thank you for remaining civil about it.
To counter some of your (good) points: I am in fact not arab. I'm a vanilla American. But realize that the Israelis are not looking for arabs; they are looking for Islamic fundamentalists. Since many of these people are arab, the arabs are targeted for suspicion in an incidental, not direct, way. I could just as well have been a Muslim from eastern Europe or Chechenya. They would have scrutinized me just as carefully.
Also, your experience in Jerusalem is typical of that city. It is an extremely volatile place, and I admit that I felt unsafe there. You mentioned you were there last October, after the al-Aqsa situation flared up. The situation was different when I was there.
My girlfriend, and to the letter every single one of her friends there, bore no hatred toward arabs. The Palestinians are not the only arabs in Israel. In Haifa I visited many arab-owned shops and the people seemed friendly. The Jewish patrons of the shops didn't seem to fear or resent the arabs, either. The reason Israel profiles arabs seems pretty obvious to me; the people who blow themselves up while surrounded by innocent people (some of which are ARAB by the way) are arab. It is a very unfortunate situation, but remember that many Israelis had nothing to do with it; they inherited this problem from their parents.
It is truly a vicious cycle of violence, but you must realize that the fault lies on both sides, and goes back in time. Look at the situation in Belfast. No one foreign to the situation there would blame only the Protestants or only the Catholics. It is a symtom of common human bigotry.
Unfortunately once the cycle starts it is almost impossible to stop. Both sides (yes, the Palestinians too) are unable to listen to reason and the end result will probably be the obliteration of one side or the other.
My girlfriend now lives here in the States, about 20 minutes from me. I hope she never goes back there.
Peace and love,
Scott
Regarding civil liberties
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Disclaimer: I am not Israeli, nor Jewish, but I did spend about a month in Israel in spring of 2000. I invite any Israelis in the readership to comment.
While in Israel, my first experience with liberty in that country was in passing through customs. It was actually quite easy to get into the country, compared to leaving. I was asked the purpose of my visit (a standard question) and asked to give a list of places I would be visiting. Since I didn't really know where I would be going yet, I said so. I was greeted with suspicious looks and incredulity, but allowed to pass through. I fit the profile of "single male, travelling alone."
Upon entering the country I immediately took a bus to Ashdod where my girlfriend lived. There were several soldiers on the bus. This seemed odd, but my girlfriend assured me they were there merely as travelers, not guardians. I still felt safer knowing there were several people with assault rifles on the bus.
Over the course of my visit, I was in many busy public places, including restaurants, night clubs, transit centers, malls, etc. In the malls and transit centers I was asked to show the contents of my bag upon entering. I didn't feel violated by this. I felt safer knowing these checks were being made. The people were friendly and expeditious.
Everywhere I went in Israel I saw soldiers. All had rifles; some had rifles with grenade launchers. You actually get used to this after a while. I was only there a month, but by the end of my visit I hardly noticed anymore.
But the most important thing I noticed in Israel was the degree of freedom I had. I didn't have to pass through checkpoints (except when I went to Bethlehem, which is a Palestinian area, and even then we weren't even stopped, just looked at as we drove through) and was never asked what I was doing or where I was going.
Look people. America has been changed, and not by choice. Security must be enhanced, or we will continue to be blown to small pieces on a whim. I ask people to look at Israel as an example of how to conduct security without impinging unduly on people's liberties. There are necessary steps which must be taken. There is simply no option. But it needn't be an end to liberty. If Israel (a country that clearly has its own governmental problems) can do it, so surely can the United States.
You have the very important right to disagree with me. But I have several things to say: I've seen the Ben Franklin quote thrown around quite a lot recently, but it is consistently misquoted. Franklin said: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
The current federal investigation will not provide us with temporary safety. It aims to provide not only us, but the entire world, with a permanent, and certain not little safety against terroristic attacks. I support every measure taken to this effect.
Since you seem so fond of quoting Franklin, allow me to quote him further:
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do."
"A little neglect may breed great mischief."
"The sleeping fox catches no poultry."
Benjamin Franklin, unlike many others, appreciated the deep complexities and difficulties associated with civil liberties, and in keeping them in balance with security and protection. The issue is not cut-and-dry, but instead is a dynamic, changing landscape.
Shall we put laws into effect allowing random strip searches? Of course we should not. Simply because an idea can be taken to an extreme should not mean that we abandon the idea "just in case" it should reach that extreme. Deal with things one step at a time. I, for one, believe this is a prudent and necessary step.
And accusing me of being un-American is backstabbing and cruel at this time where we are all feeling great sorrow. I am just as concerned as you are about our liberties. It seems to me my most important liberty at the moment is being able to walk down the streets of my beautiful city (Portland, Oregon) without being blown to smithereens.
All this bill does is gives US attorneys the same rights as beaurocratic prosecutors to execute warrentless wiretaps for specific reasons.
So, people have been able to do this for years already. Why didn't all you people whine about it before? I know why. Because warrantless wiretaps quite rightly had no f*cking impact on your lives whatsoever. Believe it or not, the government is not spying on you. Therefore, you didn't notice that this law even existed.
So please, explain why, if this law has no f*cking impact on your lives whatsoever, you are suddenly bitching about it? Are you really that afraid and hateful of prosecutors, the very people who defend you when you are the victim of a criminal act?
I am sure there is a very important reason for this bill. The current FBI investigation is so wide in scope that forcing everybody to go through a judge or the US Attorney General to get a wiretap would quite likely allow people to get away who otherwise would have been caught. If you really are so offended by this, at least wait until this horrible and necessary investigation is over with before beginning your uninformed, childish bitching.
Pakistan's nukes cannot reach us. Israel has several that can. And they are much higher-yield. And they would love to kill the Israelis anyway. And as I said, I'm being paranoid.
Re:Pray Or Meditate Or Whatever For President Bush
on
Handling the Loads
·
· Score: 1
You're paranoid. And I completely understand! I was coming up with all sorts of worst-case scenarios yesterday as well (although most of them were worst-case terrorist response, not worst-case US response).
The reason we won't use nukes: it is simply ineffective. Chances are, bin Laden is a very low-level player in the grand scheme of things, and chances are, the real masterminds here are probably up in Alaska, or right here in the continental US.
If all of us here are smart enough to figure these things out, then our government, messed up as it is, is also smart enough. Nuking the entire Middle East will not only destroy our only ally over there (Israel) but will seriously piss off the remaining Muslims in the world and turn them all against us.
Perhaps that is their true plan. By provoking the US in this way, they may have tricked us into initiating our own destruction. But we're smarter than that. I really hope so.
PS -- my most recent worst-case scenario was this: as we rush to respond to this crisis, and as soon as we begin to feel like we have it under control, they do it again. The result of this is such incredible anger in the US that we are blinded, and swarm Afghanistan. Afghanistan is rigged as a massive booby trap, and we will be destroyed there, or at least tied up long enough for the countries surrounding Israel (who have profferred their support, but may be lying) to storm it. Once they have Israel, they have Israel's nukes. End of the world is now inevitable. Is this paranoia? Of course it is! But it scares me deeply to even contemplate it.
Sorry. I have no problem with the name "York," I was just illustrating my point, which is that no matter how strange a name may sound you eventually get used to it.
By the way, the next city over from Tualatin is called Beaverton.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you people vehemently defend the copying of music, do you also vehemently defend the use of drugs? Simply because there was a propoganda campaign against it?
My point is not that drugs are bad; I would be hypocritical to claim such (well then again, I don't consider marijuana a drug). My point is, when does propoganda become bad? Is there such a thing as "good propoganda?"
Right. A gradient produces a current. Because of symmetry, driving a current through the material in the opposite direction produces a temperature gradient, in the opposite direction. One side gets cold, and the other gets hot. Since the cold side is colder than room temperature, thermal energy is transferred faster from the processor than it would be ordinarily.
<Calculus>
In essence,
dQ/dt = -k * dT/dx,
-- the larger dT/dx is (the higher the temperature gradient), the faster heat (Q) is transferred. k is the coefficient of heat transfer, sort of a measure of the "heat conductivity".
Analogously, the current in a circuit is proportional to the voltage and inversely with the resistance; in other words,
dq/dt = 1/R * dE/dx
In this instance, q represents charge and E is the electric field. Many many many things in physics work this way.
</Calculus>
Is it worth it to set these things up at power stations where the "cool" water is actually warmer than the surroundings? Probably not. A thermoelectric material of any appreciable efficiency is very costly to manufacture. I don't think you'd gain very much energy, and you'd certainly lose money. Efficiency goes down with the temperature gradient. I think the double-cycle power plants currently in use extract just about as much energy as possible (and we're not even talking 50% efficiency here -- that's thermodynamics for you).
The two rates (heat in and heat out) are equal. Otherwise the thermoelectric gets hotter, and hotter, and... The way the TE works is by driving a current across a junction of two different materials. This creates a thermal interface where heat can be exchanged very rapidly. This means the side of the TE in contact with the processor cools down, so that heat is transferred faster from the processor.
Of course, you are putting energy into the TE device in the form of electric current, and this energy must also go somewhere. Therefore the hot side of the TE becomes very hot indeed, hotter than the surface of the processor. This higher temperature gradient allows the heat to be dropped to the surrounding air faster that an ordinary heatsink.
Some people have been saying this device produces power. This is not correct; the device is a power sink, and that power is ultimately converted to heat. The real question is, when the device is operating at full transfer capacity of 700W, how much power is it drawing itself?
Ultimately, this scheme requires more power, placing more stress on your power supply and burning more fossil fuel. I'd be much more excited to see a Plain Old Heatsink that could transfer at 700W.
On the other hand, Linus speculated about computers being used to create new life forms. So perhaps he has a little /. blood after all.
Emacs violates that philosophy. And the vi users hate that. Ok, that's fine. But a philosophy cannot be right or wrong. Get over it already.
Emacs has strengths, particularly as a programming tool. Integrated (and fully customizable) debugging. Version control (perhaps vi does this as well). Hex-editing mode. Automated compilation. And anything else you can think of: if it there isn't a ELISP module out there to do it already, someone can hack it together quite quickly.
If you stop thinking of Emacs as an editor, and begin thinking of it as a more comprehensive environment, it stops seeming outrageous. vi may be the best editor out there. But Emacs is the best integrated solution for complex environments.
Gzipped data, while certainly not random, has a very high entropy. In a crunch, I think it would work OK. On Linux, /dev/random is a good source of randomness. Unlike /dev/urandom, /dev/random is constantly re-stocked with fresh entropy from things like interrupt timings. It isn't as good as, say, a true entropy source that is constantly reseeded with cosmic ray timings and chaotic oscillators, but it's very close.
The beauty of the one time pad is that the pad doesn't have to be truly random to be effective. There is still absolutely no way to know if you have decrypted the message "correctly."
But you know, I really think that encryption's best use is to prevent computer crime; e.g., stealing credit card numbers or personal information. Anyone who wants to communicate secret plans will undoubtedly use something less technological but more difficult to crack: codewords agreed upon in secret (the military still uses this, even though encryption is very strong now); or body language signals.
Hell, even security through obscurity can work. We used the Navajo language in World War II. They never broke it. I can invent a code based on clicks and whistles (pseudo-dolphin-speak), then MP3 compress that, then gzip it, then encrypt it with PGP. I can invent a new language from scratch -- a linguist will eventually figure it out, but will he figure it out soon enough?
There are a million reasons why a bad on encryption is a ban plan. It'll only serve to further weaken our economy. If I knew my credit information was only weakly encrypted across-the-wire, I would never buy anything online again.
As I mentioned in another post in this discussion, even quantum computers are unable to break the one time pad, provided the pad is at least as large as the message.
The message is: "I love Dubya"
Since the pad is random, even if you somehow decrypted the data to get "I love Dubya" there would be no way to know if the message was really supposed to be "I hate Dubya" instead. It's not a matter of computing power. It is simply impossible, without knowing the pad.
The problem then becomes, how do we exchange pads among cohorts without eavesdropping? That was the problem solved by public-key cryptography. Even if an adversary eavesdrops on the key communication, he can only encrypt messages, not decrypt them. And cryptographic signatures can protect against the encryption of false messages.
Unfortunately, public-key crypto might be broken at some point. One common implementation will instantly break once we figure out how to quickly factor huge numbers. The one time pad is immune. Even with a quantum computer, you will never be able to tell if you have decrypted the message correctly.
I can't get to www.spammimic.com. traceroute seems to show the packets going away somewhere inside psi.net. Is it just me? Is it just an outage somewhere? Or are the feds doing something...
Perhaps we should immediately begin setting up the framework for an organized civil disobedience campaign. Write servers and clients for us to all run on our systems that send packets of purely random garbage to and from each other. If it looks like cryptography, it must be, right? Let them haul me off to jail as they try and fail to crack the code.
Perhaps a large-scale gathering in a major city where we profess our grievances. Every third person can bring a megaphone. What are they gonna do, arrest all of us? I'd like to see them try. In the process, they'll be in gross violation of the First Amendment, and it will come back to bite them in the ass.
Go out and learn Arabic. Speak it everywhere you go. See what they do.
A minority can still make itself heard. What are other peoples' ideas?
How so? "Congress shall make no law..."
Last time I checked, Microsoft was not Congress. Sick, but some judges would probably uphold it.
Perhaps the current government and officials will not abuse the laws, but remember that we'll be passing these new abilities forward, and we can only assume that they'll be used in every way that the law allows. Which includes some bad ways.
I already said, and you acknowledged, that I disagree with the wording of this bill. In a different discussion I was more accepting of it, but that was overly hasty on my part, and I made that statement before fully understanding the ramifications of the language.
Why, then, if key-escrow is patently absurd and ineffective against the very groups it targets, WHY is OUR GOVERNMENT proposing it?
It's been proposed in the past. I haven't yet heard anything to suggest people are proposing it now, in response to this particular incident. If they do, they will truly prove themselves to be idiots. Touche.
Finally, you claim that if all communications can't be constantly monitored, then there is no reason for concern, hence no infringements of your rights.
That is not what I claimed. Such monitoring, were it possible, would certainly be infringement. My point was that even if the government wanted to do this, they would be unable to. I didn't say "I'm not worried" because I have nothing to hide, I said it because I don't believe the government could ever possibly do it. If they try, not only will people object (including myself, please realize that I'm on your side here), they will soon discover that they are kidding themselves.
I posted about this earlier and was subjected to the Slashdot-equivalent of a machine gun assault. Anyway, the recent bill about communications monitoring and warrantless wiretapping is indeed too broadly worded, but: I don't think this is an intentional assault on privacy, but instead a too-quickly-written bill that was motivated by a lot of scared (and rightly so) congressmen. Simply because people are in government doesn't mean they are immune to knee-jerk.
Why is everyone so quick to jump to the conclusion that our government will do whatever it takes to fuck us? If that is your position, why even vote? Instead of voting, go out and shoot all the candidates, since clearly none of them are satisfactory to you, and if given the chance, will ruin your lives. Jesus, this country is still a democracy!
Anyway, I don't think crypto is threatened. Banning crypto would be suicide, since that would basically destroy e-business (would YOU buy anything online knowing your credit information was going clear-over-the-wire?). They aren't going to institute key-escrow because what, are the terrorists going to switch over to the escrow system just because we passed a law? Whether you want to believe it or not, there are intelligent people in the government who do indeed realize these things.
And finally, as for wiretapping, even if the government had the right to listen to everyone's traffic, do they even remotely have the capacity to do so? So much information is exchanged every day that everyone in the country would have to be recruited as information-monitors. I'm not particularly worried about it.
Precisely. This is all a massive scam. Here's the loophole they are exploiting: in order for a company to retain rights over its trademark, it must protect that trademark against infringement. If, say, Sun Micro failed to stop someone from registering sun.biz, that would be seen as failure to protect the mark. End result? Verisign (or whoever) ends up collecting their money again.
Once they cash out .biz, they'll start it all over again with .e-biz, .corp, .tech, and .fck-me-in-the-goatass.
Of course, it will eventually be stopped, since our government is all about protecting corporations. They won't stand for this for too long.
The thing is, while in Israel you are acutely aware of the danger to your person, soldiers-with-machine-guns or not. The fact is, had those people not been present, I would have felt even more insecure. Someone earlier made the point that soldiers are a target, and anyone in the company of soldiers is at risk of becoming collateral damage. This is quite true. Ironically, even though I realized this, I didn't care.
My statements were not geared to make any sort of political point. The fact is, I did indeed feel safer because of the military presence. My emotional response cannot be argued with; it is truth. If you are ever in the same situation, maybe you will understand. I hope that you never will be placed in those circumstances!
How kind of the Palestinians.
To counter some of your (good) points: I am in fact not arab. I'm a vanilla American. But realize that the Israelis are not looking for arabs; they are looking for Islamic fundamentalists. Since many of these people are arab, the arabs are targeted for suspicion in an incidental, not direct, way. I could just as well have been a Muslim from eastern Europe or Chechenya. They would have scrutinized me just as carefully.
Also, your experience in Jerusalem is typical of that city. It is an extremely volatile place, and I admit that I felt unsafe there. You mentioned you were there last October, after the al-Aqsa situation flared up. The situation was different when I was there.
My girlfriend, and to the letter every single one of her friends there, bore no hatred toward arabs. The Palestinians are not the only arabs in Israel. In Haifa I visited many arab-owned shops and the people seemed friendly. The Jewish patrons of the shops didn't seem to fear or resent the arabs, either. The reason Israel profiles arabs seems pretty obvious to me; the people who blow themselves up while surrounded by innocent people (some of which are ARAB by the way) are arab. It is a very unfortunate situation, but remember that many Israelis had nothing to do with it; they inherited this problem from their parents.
It is truly a vicious cycle of violence, but you must realize that the fault lies on both sides, and goes back in time. Look at the situation in Belfast. No one foreign to the situation there would blame only the Protestants or only the Catholics. It is a symtom of common human bigotry.
Unfortunately once the cycle starts it is almost impossible to stop. Both sides (yes, the Palestinians too) are unable to listen to reason and the end result will probably be the obliteration of one side or the other.
My girlfriend now lives here in the States, about 20 minutes from me. I hope she never goes back there.
Peace and love,
Scott
While in Israel, my first experience with liberty in that country was in passing through customs. It was actually quite easy to get into the country, compared to leaving. I was asked the purpose of my visit (a standard question) and asked to give a list of places I would be visiting. Since I didn't really know where I would be going yet, I said so. I was greeted with suspicious looks and incredulity, but allowed to pass through. I fit the profile of "single male, travelling alone."
Upon entering the country I immediately took a bus to Ashdod where my girlfriend lived. There were several soldiers on the bus. This seemed odd, but my girlfriend assured me they were there merely as travelers, not guardians. I still felt safer knowing there were several people with assault rifles on the bus.
Over the course of my visit, I was in many busy public places, including restaurants, night clubs, transit centers, malls, etc. In the malls and transit centers I was asked to show the contents of my bag upon entering. I didn't feel violated by this. I felt safer knowing these checks were being made. The people were friendly and expeditious.
Everywhere I went in Israel I saw soldiers. All had rifles; some had rifles with grenade launchers. You actually get used to this after a while. I was only there a month, but by the end of my visit I hardly noticed anymore.
But the most important thing I noticed in Israel was the degree of freedom I had. I didn't have to pass through checkpoints (except when I went to Bethlehem, which is a Palestinian area, and even then we weren't even stopped, just looked at as we drove through) and was never asked what I was doing or where I was going.
Look people. America has been changed, and not by choice. Security must be enhanced, or we will continue to be blown to small pieces on a whim. I ask people to look at Israel as an example of how to conduct security without impinging unduly on people's liberties. There are necessary steps which must be taken. There is simply no option. But it needn't be an end to liberty. If Israel (a country that clearly has its own governmental problems) can do it, so surely can the United States.
I am hopeful.
Fine. I admit I missed that. Substitute "communications monitoring" for "wiretaps" in my original post.
My rant still stands.
The current federal investigation will not provide us with temporary safety. It aims to provide not only us, but the entire world, with a permanent, and certain not little safety against terroristic attacks. I support every measure taken to this effect.
Since you seem so fond of quoting Franklin, allow me to quote him further:
"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do."
"A little neglect may breed great mischief."
"The sleeping fox catches no poultry."
Benjamin Franklin, unlike many others, appreciated the deep complexities and difficulties associated with civil liberties, and in keeping them in balance with security and protection. The issue is not cut-and-dry, but instead is a dynamic, changing landscape.
Shall we put laws into effect allowing random strip searches? Of course we should not. Simply because an idea can be taken to an extreme should not mean that we abandon the idea "just in case" it should reach that extreme. Deal with things one step at a time. I, for one, believe this is a prudent and necessary step.
And accusing me of being un-American is backstabbing and cruel at this time where we are all feeling great sorrow. I am just as concerned as you are about our liberties. It seems to me my most important liberty at the moment is being able to walk down the streets of my beautiful city (Portland, Oregon) without being blown to smithereens.
So, people have been able to do this for years already. Why didn't all you people whine about it before? I know why. Because warrantless wiretaps quite rightly had no f*cking impact on your lives whatsoever. Believe it or not, the government is not spying on you. Therefore, you didn't notice that this law even existed.
So please, explain why, if this law has no f*cking impact on your lives whatsoever, you are suddenly bitching about it? Are you really that afraid and hateful of prosecutors, the very people who defend you when you are the victim of a criminal act?
I am sure there is a very important reason for this bill. The current FBI investigation is so wide in scope that forcing everybody to go through a judge or the US Attorney General to get a wiretap would quite likely allow people to get away who otherwise would have been caught. If you really are so offended by this, at least wait until this horrible and necessary investigation is over with before beginning your uninformed, childish bitching.
Probably won't be the last time I snap to an incorrect conclusion in the next few weeks, however. Same goes for many others I would imagine.
Pakistan's nukes cannot reach us. Israel has several that can. And they are much higher-yield. And they would love to kill the Israelis anyway. And as I said, I'm being paranoid.
The reason we won't use nukes: it is simply ineffective. Chances are, bin Laden is a very low-level player in the grand scheme of things, and chances are, the real masterminds here are probably up in Alaska, or right here in the continental US.
If all of us here are smart enough to figure these things out, then our government, messed up as it is, is also smart enough. Nuking the entire Middle East will not only destroy our only ally over there (Israel) but will seriously piss off the remaining Muslims in the world and turn them all against us.
Perhaps that is their true plan. By provoking the US in this way, they may have tricked us into initiating our own destruction. But we're smarter than that. I really hope so.
PS -- my most recent worst-case scenario was this: as we rush to respond to this crisis, and as soon as we begin to feel like we have it under control, they do it again. The result of this is such incredible anger in the US that we are blinded, and swarm Afghanistan. Afghanistan is rigged as a massive booby trap, and we will be destroyed there, or at least tied up long enough for the countries surrounding Israel (who have profferred their support, but may be lying) to storm it. Once they have Israel, they have Israel's nukes. End of the world is now inevitable. Is this paranoia? Of course it is! But it scares me deeply to even contemplate it.
By the way, the next city over from Tualatin is called Beaverton.