Don't forget, 50% of Americans are below average intelligence.
Not necessarily... it's true that 50% of Americans are below median intelligence, but if the range is skewed then there might be more or fewer than 50% below average intelligence. (As an extreme example, in a room with 99 poor people and Bill Gates, 99% of the people in the room will have below-average wealth for that group)
If my "leaked" you mean "the President is giving stump speeches on how important it is to keep doing this", then yeah. Pretty huge leak though
No, by "leaked" he meant "anonymous sources at the NSA told the press about it because they thought it was unconstitutional". Bush only started talking about it after the cat was already out of the bag, and his first response was to start an investigation to find and punish the leakers. The speeches he gave after that were just damage control, trying to convince gullible people like yourself that he has nothing to hide.
The government is listening to conversations across international borders when they have reason to believe that crimes are being planned. This is not prohibited anywhere in the Constitution.
Better re-read the 4th amendment again. The government needs to get a warrant. What is so hard about that?
Clue: The Constitution was written before phones existed
Are you serious? Do you really think the constitution doesn't apply to anything invented after it was written? A right to privacy is a right to privacy, no matter what communications technologies are in use.
Right now as the President has said it is within the law - they research these things.
The President also said that Iraq had vast quantities of WMDs, and that they knew exactly where they were hidden and it was just a matter of going in and getting them.
So you'll pardon me if I take the President's word with a little bit of salt.
"where I come from people are innocent until proven guilty"
You do realize it's being used to track the international conversations of suspected terrorists, right?
You do realize that an "innocent American" can be a "suspected terrorist", right? i.e. just because the government suspects someone, it doesn't follow that they are guilty of anything?
I don't think any rational person would argue against the Presidents or the military's authority to spy on foreign combatants durign a time of war
Nobody is making that argument. The argument is that the government should follow the law and obtain a warrant for doing so. It's really not that difficult to go to FISA and get a warrant (even retroactively!) unless you are doing something completely inappropriate.
Another point, where are the "innocent Americans" that are being spied on? Can you name one?
I went to the NSA's web site to see the list of people they are currently spying on, but for some reason it wasn't posted. As soon as they post the list I will get back to you about which people on it are innocent. Until then your guess is as good as mine, but the fact that the government didn't want to even tell the (highly sympathetic and secretive) FISA court about their activities suggests that they weren't confident that FISA would find them justified.
Do you think an "innocent American" who had no involvement in terrorism would have any trouble at all getting such evidence thrown out?
You're assuming the evidence is to be used solely in a courtroom. There are many possible (mis)uses for peoples' private information that have nothing to do with presenting them to a jury.
Kindly site three examples of private citizens who have been publicly disgraced as a result of US government surveillance of their embarassing behavior
If the government decided to leak embarrassing details about somebody's private life in order to discredit them, do you think they would hold a press conference and say "here's what we found with our secret wiretapping of Joe Schmoe's bedroom"? Probably not. Much better to secretly leak the details through a few middle men, so that they "just happen" to appear in the press or some blogs. At that point, the media will go into its usual feeding frenzy and the character assassination is complete without anyone ever knowing that the government was involved.
Given that, it would be difficult in most cases to show government wrongdoing. However, the U.S. government does have a known history of wiretapping political enemies, and the Bush Administration's predilection for trying to discredit people using confidential/personal information (even if they have to make up the details to suit their purpose) is so well-known it has earned its own nickname.
So no, I don't have direct examples, but there is clearly a willingness in some parties to do such things, and absent any checks or balances there would be no reason for them not to. Which is what makes it so troubling that they are trying to do away with those very checks and balances.
I do see value in the Constitution. Uphold it, stop worrying about the rest of the country or the rest of the world or even the rest of your state. Focus on your community and not only will these studies not matter, but there won't be any facts to ignore as long as you're living with those you agree with.
This all sounds fine, except that there are some problems that can't be dealt with on a local level. As an example, if every local community in the U.S. had just stuck with their local issues and not worried about what was going on in Europe in the '30s and '40s, would we all be speaking German now?
Proportional representation could also be very helpful. That way each party would receive a percentage of the seats in the legislature that is the same as the percentage of votes it received in the election. Contrast that with the current system, where (in the worst case scenario) a party that receives 49% of the vote in every candidate's race would receive zero seats in the legislature, and thus nearly half of the voters are disenfranchised.
Doublethink is a popular phrase these days, but many people are still surprised to learn the central concept underpinning it: that people can fervently believe something they know not to be true.
FWIW, the 2005 word of the year is truthiness -- "the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts".
This retreat-to-the-castle-and-raise-the-drawbridge mentality that seems to pervade Congress is the reason that elections are so hotly contested and have led to the detestable "red state/blue state" school of politics.
I think the problem is more the opposite: elections aren't hotly contested enough. Consider that in the 2004 elections only 2% of the of the seats in the House of Representatives we're considered "in play". That means that 98% of of congressman pretty much had re-election "in the bag", and didn't have any need to make political compromises in order to get more votes and be re-elected. Because of that, they have no motivation to do anything but play to their established base.
a contradiction in terms (ethical corp - corps by definition only know profit)
Not necessarily. Corporations run according to the rules they set up for themselves, and there is not (AFAIK) any law that says "a corporation must think only of profit and nothing else". Granted, most corporation are set up to be motivated primarily by profits, but they don't have to be. For example, here is a corporation that is not run for profit.
If they failed to advance the cause of free speech in China, then they must have had the potential to do so. Ergo, Google has done evil.
That doesn't make sense, either. I (and you, and most people) have also failed to advance the cause of free speech in China -- but that doesn't mean that we had the potential to do so, or that we've done evil.
He did no such thing, jackass [...] Your knee-jerk hissy fit false accusation frankly paints you as some sort of moonbat Democrat apologist.
Your immature and compulse name-calling doesn't reflect too well on you, either. If you have convincing arguments to make, you can make them just as effectively without insults. If you don't have any good arguments to make, then you shouldn't post.
All those viruses and exploits use OS-specific techniques. So if you want real security through obscurity, get it by browsing the web using an OS no virus-writer has ever heard of, let alone would be tempted to spend time writing a virus for. I might have a copy of BeOS 4.5 around still if you'd like to use it...;^)
I can't think of any reason that God would make the universe where bad things could happen to anyone, unless (A) he made mistakes and didn't intend for the bad things, (B) he actually wants to screw with us/watch some of us fail, or (C) he's not the only one in control.
Before asking why God made the universe with evil in it, you should first ask why God made the universe at all. When you're an omnipotent, omniscient Diety, what is your motivation for doing anything? God could have just as easily just mentally calculated/simulated how a universe would work, down to the last atom, without going to the trouble of actually making one.
So when you're omnipotent, and therefore anything you can think of doing is trivial to do and can be done with a snap of your fingers, what is the sole remaining problem in your life? boredom. Which leads us to the most likely reason for God having created the universe with evil in it... the universe is for His own entertainment, and he enjoys the drama.
God is still here as well. Without faith you are blind to him.
God does indeed exist, as do all the other gods that have believers who think about them. Dieties are a type of meme, and as such are organisms just as real as any biological organism you could name. The difference is that while fish, lemurs, and humans are self-reproducing entities made up of collections of organic cells, memes are self-reproducing entities made up of human beings' collective thoughts and beliefs.
Like their organic counterparts, memes compete for resources (i.e. human attention), fight each other, interbreed, become extinct, adapt and evolve. It's even possible that they could be sentient, although since they are limited by the speed of their "neurons" [i.e. human communication], I suppose they must think and perceive very slowly (perhaps years or decades to complete a thought?).
Note that there isn't anything mystical or supernatural involved here: it's a simple application of functionalism: a clock made out of steel tells the time just as well as a clock made out of wood, (or water, or silicon), and likewise an organism that uses humans as "cells" and speech as its method of reproduction is also valid.
So while I'm rambling, I'd like to point out some of the adaptive features the "Christian God" meme has evolved to help make it so robust and evolutionarily successful in the modern environment:
Exclusivity. "Thou shalt have no other God before me". Like a sperm plug placed by a mating crab in the female to prevent competitor's sperm from gaining access later, this commandment ensures that competing dieties will find it very difficult to gain access to the believer's mind at a later date
Aggression: Variants of this meme often seek not only to snuff out remnants of competing memes in its own followers' minds, but will also direct followers to seek out and destroy competing memes whereever else they exist. This aggressive behaviour helps the meme keep competition to a minimum
Faith. By requiring the believer to reject critical thought and rely on faith alone, the God meme minimizes the risk of rejection by its hosts in response to countervailing evidence.
High communicability: "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men". In its Evangelical forms, the Christian God meme can be highly contagious and can spread through new communities in relatively short periods. The meme often sends out runners across oceans and invades foreign ecosystems. By continually finding new niches in which to establish itself, the meme greatly decreases the likelihood of its being wiped out or marginalized by other memes.
Adaptability: Unlike less flexible memes that only flourish in their native culture, the Christian God meme has proven itself adaptable to many different conditions. For example, in capitalist nations, God takes on capitalist qualities... when the mood is war-like, God supports war. When peace is desired, God is for peace. Because the meme is so abstract, followers are able to easily integrate it into their existing mindsets, and this allows the meme to spread to the greatest number of people
Mimicry: The meme has learned how to mimic the qualities of other memes as a way to attract additional followers. Early Pagan and Roman rituals in particular were incorporated into Christianity for this purpose, and remain present there today.
So yes, God exists, and as a memetic organism it is doing quite well -- it's certainly in the top tier of "charismatic megafauna" of memes, along with Buddha, Allah, Technology, and Money. Congratulations on picking a winner!
There are rules which govern giving money to politicians (yea, I know, funny but true). What Abramoff did is to violate those rules, i.e. ask for very specific favours in exchange for the contributions.
If the above reminds you of the "rules" prostitutes use to avoid getting arrested by undercover cops ("don't ask to exchange money for sex, hon... just leave some money on the table and then we'll just happen to go on a 'date' afterwards")... it's not a coincidence.
The way moderation works does not represent the population of/. posters.
All of your points are correct, but I don't see how any of them skews the results one way or another (except for the troll/flamebait one, and I think we can agree that leaving trolls out is not a bad thing).
For example, it's true that earlier posts are more likely to get modded up than late posts. But unless you think that e.g. somehow environmentalists are faster post-submitters, on average, than pro-business types, I don't see why that would make much difference.
I agree that the process can (and does) miss some quality posts that were posted after most everybody else had moved on, but I don't think that would tilt the range of viewpoints one way or another.
When you build space fairing vehicles you build them on CURRENT tech, not what might be around in a few years.
Well sure, but it's going to be real embarrassing when this vehicle gets passed up in mid-journey by a newer, faster one, and ends up being only the second craft to visit Pluto...
Why do you believe that a nuclear accident is likely?
Given that Iran is working on their own nuclear reactors, I'd say it's pretty likely. If their own technical inexperience doesn't get them, then some other nation's military bombing those reactors will have the same effect.
In the Linux kernel you don't need to do the empty send(). Turning Nagle off causes an imediate flush so it is enough to strobe nagle off and then back on.
That's a good point -- the only reason the send() is in there was because otherwise the trick doesn't work under MacOS/X. I will #ifndef __linux__ that line in my code though.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily... it's true that 50% of Americans are below median intelligence, but if the range is skewed then there might be more or fewer than 50% below average intelligence. (As an extreme example, in a room with 99 poor people and Bill Gates, 99% of the people in the room will have below-average wealth for that group)
Sincerely,
Your Slashdot pedant
No, by "leaked" he meant "anonymous sources at the NSA told the press about it because they thought it was unconstitutional". Bush only started talking about it after the cat was already out of the bag, and his first response was to start an investigation to find and punish the leakers. The speeches he gave after that were just damage control, trying to convince gullible people like yourself that he has nothing to hide.
The government is listening to conversations across international borders when they have reason to believe that crimes are being planned. This is not prohibited anywhere in the Constitution.
Better re-read the 4th amendment again. The government needs to get a warrant. What is so hard about that?
Clue: The Constitution was written before phones existed
Are you serious? Do you really think the constitution doesn't apply to anything invented after it was written? A right to privacy is a right to privacy, no matter what communications technologies are in use.
The President also said that Iraq had vast quantities of WMDs, and that they knew exactly where they were hidden and it was just a matter of going in and getting them.
So you'll pardon me if I take the President's word with a little bit of salt.
"where I come from people are innocent until proven guilty"
I agree. Bush deserves a fair trial.
You do realize that an "innocent American" can be a "suspected terrorist", right? i.e. just because the government suspects someone, it doesn't follow that they are guilty of anything?
I don't think any rational person would argue against the Presidents or the military's authority to spy on foreign combatants durign a time of war
Nobody is making that argument. The argument is that the government should follow the law and obtain a warrant for doing so. It's really not that difficult to go to FISA and get a warrant (even retroactively!) unless you are doing something completely inappropriate.
Another point, where are the "innocent Americans" that are being spied on? Can you name one?
I went to the NSA's web site to see the list of people they are currently spying on, but for some reason it wasn't posted. As soon as they post the list I will get back to you about which people on it are innocent. Until then your guess is as good as mine, but the fact that the government didn't want to even tell the (highly sympathetic and secretive) FISA court about their activities suggests that they weren't confident that FISA would find them justified.
Do you think an "innocent American" who had no involvement in terrorism would have any trouble at all getting such evidence thrown out?
You're assuming the evidence is to be used solely in a courtroom. There are many possible (mis)uses for peoples' private information that have nothing to do with presenting them to a jury.
If the government decided to leak embarrassing details about somebody's private life in order to discredit them, do you think they would hold a press conference and say "here's what we found with our secret wiretapping of Joe Schmoe's bedroom"? Probably not. Much better to secretly leak the details through a few middle men, so that they "just happen" to appear in the press or some blogs. At that point, the media will go into its usual feeding frenzy and the character assassination is complete without anyone ever knowing that the government was involved.
Given that, it would be difficult in most cases to show government wrongdoing. However, the U.S. government does have a known history of wiretapping political enemies, and the Bush Administration's predilection for trying to discredit people using confidential/personal information (even if they have to make up the details to suit their purpose) is so well-known it has earned its own nickname.
So no, I don't have direct examples, but there is clearly a willingness in some parties to do such things, and absent any checks or balances there would be no reason for them not to. Which is what makes it so troubling that they are trying to do away with those very checks and balances.
Yeah, I remember when they tried that one. In Cambodia.
This all sounds fine, except that there are some problems that can't be dealt with on a local level. As an example, if every local community in the U.S. had just stuck with their local issues and not worried about what was going on in Europe in the '30s and '40s, would we all be speaking German now?
Proportional representation could also be very helpful. That way each party would receive a percentage of the seats in the legislature that is the same as the percentage of votes it received in the election. Contrast that with the current system, where (in the worst case scenario) a party that receives 49% of the vote in every candidate's race would receive zero seats in the legislature, and thus nearly half of the voters are disenfranchised.
FWIW, the 2005 word of the year is truthiness -- "the quality of stating concepts one
wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts".
I think the problem is more the opposite: elections aren't hotly contested enough. Consider that in the 2004 elections only 2% of the of the seats in the House of Representatives we're considered "in play". That means that 98% of of congressman pretty much had re-election "in the bag", and didn't have any need to make political compromises in order to get more votes and be re-elected. Because of that, they have no motivation to do anything but play to their established base.
Actually, the motto is "Don't be evil". Whether that makes any difference to your argument or not is left as an exercise for the reader.
Not necessarily. Corporations run according to the rules they set up for themselves, and there is not (AFAIK) any law that says "a corporation must think only of profit and nothing else". Granted, most corporation are set up to be motivated primarily by profits, but they don't have to be. For example, here is a corporation that is not run for profit.
That doesn't make sense, either. I (and you, and most people) have also failed to advance the cause of free speech in China -- but that doesn't mean that we had the potential to do so, or that we've done evil.
The RIAA wouldn't have standing for such a lawsuit, since they weren't harmed by the new/used deceit. The buyer might.
Your immature and compulse name-calling doesn't reflect too well on you, either. If you have convincing arguments to make, you can make them just as effectively without insults. If you don't have any good arguments to make, then you shouldn't post.
I think the proper word would be "escaped".
My aluminum smelting plant uses more standby power than my doorbell. Don't blame the doorbell manufacturer.
All those viruses and exploits use OS-specific techniques. So if you want real security through obscurity, get it by browsing the web using an OS no virus-writer has ever heard of, let alone would be tempted to spend time writing a virus for. I might have a copy of BeOS 4.5 around still if you'd like to use it... ;^)
Before asking why God made the universe with evil in it, you should first ask why God made the universe at all. When you're an omnipotent, omniscient Diety, what is your motivation for doing anything? God could have just as easily just mentally calculated/simulated how a universe would work, down to the last atom, without going to the trouble of actually making one.
So when you're omnipotent, and therefore anything you can think of doing is trivial to do and can be done with a snap of your fingers, what is the sole remaining problem in your life? boredom. Which leads us to the most likely reason for God having created the universe with evil in it... the universe is for His own entertainment, and he enjoys the drama.
God does indeed exist, as do all the other gods that have believers who think about them. Dieties are a type of meme, and as such are organisms just as real as any biological organism you could name. The difference is that while fish, lemurs, and humans are self-reproducing entities made up of collections of organic cells, memes are self-reproducing entities made up of human beings' collective thoughts and beliefs.
Like their organic counterparts, memes compete for resources (i.e. human attention), fight each other, interbreed, become extinct, adapt and evolve. It's even possible that they could be sentient, although since they are limited by the speed of their "neurons" [i.e. human communication], I suppose they must think and perceive very slowly (perhaps years or decades to complete a thought?).
Note that there isn't anything mystical or supernatural involved here: it's a simple application of functionalism: a clock made out of steel tells the time just as well as a clock made out of wood, (or water, or silicon), and likewise an organism that uses humans as "cells" and speech as its method of reproduction is also valid.
So while I'm rambling, I'd like to point out some of the adaptive features the "Christian God" meme has evolved to help make it so robust and evolutionarily successful in the modern environment:
So yes, God exists, and as a memetic organism it is doing quite well -- it's certainly in the top tier of "charismatic megafauna" of memes, along with Buddha, Allah, Technology, and Money. Congratulations on picking a winner!
If the above reminds you of the "rules" prostitutes use to avoid getting arrested by undercover cops ("don't ask to exchange money for sex, hon... just leave some money on the table and then we'll just happen to go on a 'date' afterwards")... it's not a coincidence.
All of your points are correct, but I don't see how any of them skews the results one way or another (except for the troll/flamebait one, and I think we can agree that leaving trolls out is not a bad thing).
For example, it's true that earlier posts are more likely to get modded up than late posts. But unless you think that e.g. somehow environmentalists are faster post-submitters, on average, than pro-business types, I don't see why that would make much difference.
I agree that the process can (and does) miss some quality posts that were posted after most everybody else had moved on, but I don't think that would tilt the range of viewpoints one way or another.
Well sure, but it's going to be real embarrassing when this vehicle gets passed up in mid-journey by a newer, faster one, and ends up being only the second craft to visit Pluto...
Given that Iran is working on their own nuclear reactors, I'd say it's pretty likely. If their own technical inexperience doesn't get them, then some other nation's military bombing those reactors will have the same effect.
That's a good point -- the only reason the send() is in there was because otherwise the trick doesn't work under MacOS/X. I will #ifndef __linux__ that line in my code though.