My hypothesis was that the tobacco companies put multiple chemicals into their cigarettes to make quitting more difficult. Also, that without those multiple chemicals, I would be able to slowly cut down.
Test: I switched to an organic cigarette (Sherman's: at the time it may have been the only choice). After switching I waited a week for the short term addictive chemicals in the normal cigarettes to eliminate their effects. Then I slowly started cutting down on the number of cigarettes I smoked. When I'd gotten down to six per day, I started cutting down the amount of each cigarette I smoked. Eventually I just quit. That was 20 years ago. I remained addicted for about 5 years after the last cigarette... (I measure this by my reaction to smoke from others who were smoking.), but it was only bothersome for about a week.
This was the second time that I quit. The first time I just quit cold. That worked, but after a year I presumed that I was no longer addicted. Bad mistake. Quitting the second time was much harder.
A) It's never going to happen that way. Some people aren't going to have a girl, other will have several.
B) It has/is happening close enough to that way to cause massive social impacts, which we haven't yet adjusted to. How we *should* adjust to it isn't totally clear. (E.g., what about child support? What's reasonable, and how should compliance be enforced? And what about visitation? etc.)
I happen to think it's a poor one, but it *is* one model.
Personally, I'm all in favor of most drugs being illegal...with a $.50 fine for possession or use, and a $50,000 fine per instance of advertising. (I'd be in favor of legal, but if it's not illegal, the fine on advertising would be thrown out by the courts.)
FWIW, hunter-gatherers also had this problem. This often caused them to degrade their habitat over time until they could no longer live there. Because they didn't have anyone to stop them.
People aren't very good at abstaining from short-term benefits for the sake of long-term benefits. Can you make yourself go to a gym? I can't. O, for a few months at a time, yes, but not over a longer period, even though I know it would benefit me. Because I'd rather use my time enjoyably NOW!
Only thing it, when you give some organization the power to do things for your own benefit, the people in charge are people, with they typical weaknesses of people. Someone will run off with the treasury. Someone will start a propaganda campaign to increase their political power. You just can't trust people with power, not even if there are, officially, rules to prevent them from abusing it. They'll find a way around the rules, or say that a word doesn't mean what it clearly means. If you can't think of blatantly obvious examples, it's because you don't want to.
So, no, I don't think these things should be prohibited. And yes, I do think that they should be studied. And yes, I do think that the cartridges used by them should be carefully evaluated by the FDA...and the inclusion of unapproved materials reason for prosecution of the manufacturers.
(N.B.: Actually, I think the FDA should only have the power to require warning labels and accurate lists of ingredients. But given the way they are allowed to regulate other things, the prior paragraph is my recommendations in context.)
Given the large number of chemicals in a cigarette, I wouldn't be so sure that an allergy to them is impossible.
Also, if it's possible to have an allergy to tobacco leaves, then what are the grounds for presuming that it's impossible to have an allergy to the smoke from such leaves burning?
I really doubt that you have any grounds for saying that such an allergy is impossible. Not that your hypothesis that it's a sensitivity to smoke, and tobacco only because it's in smoke form. That may be a reasonable conjecture. (I don't have enough evidence to tell.) But I really doubt your assertion that it's impossible.
He may, or may not, have been a sufficiently powerful churchman to be safe. What he *did* do, however, is publish posthumously. This effectively minimized his risk.
How about also assuming that even before the three wrong guesses, you are required to wait 10 seconds between guesses, and 5 seconds between the first char of the password and the time the computer starts trying it for validity.
If is person is going to be typing the password, there's no reason to allow really fast entry.
In fact, lets put a speed limit on. If you enter the password over a period of less than two seconds, it is automatically rejected, whether or not you made the correct guess.
Of course they can beat this speed bump by trying lots of different accounts at once, so you need to limit the number of simultaneous log-ons from the same IP address to something sane. This depends on your system, but for me one (1) would be the correct number.
This can still be beaten, but now they need to be using lots of simultaneous IP addresses. So now you're probably being attacked by a bot-net. (Which means that they don't know which attacks have already failed, and when they were tried.) So now your "15 minute delay after 3 successive wrong attempts" is really effective. (Note: you don't tell them the account is locked. If it's not coming from a known IP address, then it's got to look just like a wrong password result. So you've got to warn your users what to expect.)
And, of course, you log each time the account gets locked. If it happens three times from different IP addressed, you lock the account either for the day, or until it's unlocked by the sysadmin.
How seriously you take this proposal depends on just how valuable what you're protecting is. For most purposes it's overkill. For some, it means you take that account off the network (or replace it by a honeypot).
The current release is meaningful enough that I've decided to forever vote against the party that gets this passed. How much more meaningful do you want?
(Yeah, I read what you quoted. So they're liars. What else is new.)
Cameras tend to get their lenses covered with gum & paper. And people do care about tags, but that isn't the limit of vandalism. Damaged windows are common, even WITH a driver on board and in charge.
Any automated system is going to need to deal with vandalism. If it can't, it will just fail.
Of course, this isn't just a problem for automated systems, but people generally have ways for dealing with vandalism. It's not, however, a minor cost of doing business. And it goes well beyond tagging.
Sorry, Borland *isn't* an example. They were repeatedly sabotaged by MS. I'll admit that when they eventually tried to move to Linux their offering was inadequate, but by that point they'd been so beaten down by MS that they were nearly out of business. If they'd decided not to trust MS a few years sooner, they might still be quite an important software house.
I really don't know why so many companies make the same mistake. Management just seems incapable of learning. Or maybe they just can't believe that the FOSS environment would be any different...so the initial problems seem an insurmountable obstacle. (After all, if it's not going to be any better anyway, then why bother.)
I have only minor experience with Oracle, and that a decade ago.
The company that I was with was trying to move to Oracle for some reason. They asked Oracle to recommend a consultant to do some basic development. After over 6 months work, the consultant still hadn't delivered even a Gui data entry screen.
Now this doesn't really mean that Oracle is a lousy product, but it does mean that I don't trust their recommendations, proposals, or predictions.
You left out one of the major functions of the bus driver. Deterring vandalism. Vandalism is a major expense for bus companies, and without a driver it would get MUCH worse.
To an adult money may have intrinsic value, because the government insists on being paid with government approved money. If you don't, it will take your property away.
To a child, money allows you to buy a candy bar, Cheetos, or to save for a bicycle. It's fiat nature doesn't become apparent until the late teens usually, if then.
In neither case is it a payment of nothing for nothing. There are good reasons why fiat currency is bad, but you's is silly.
(OTOH, the roman Senate debased the denarius by decreasing the amount of gold / coin. So that a coinage has nominal intrinsic value isn't sure protection.)
What it takes to qualify as an "orphan work" in this context doesn't, I believe, match your characterization, though it does need to be out of print. I understand why they don't want to make extensive attempts to contact authors they don't immediately know where are, but this doesn't altogether excuse them. Were I to do it I'd be risking hefty fines. (Still, one can make a plausible argument that it's the legal system that evil rather than Google.)
There is no legal way for anyone to acquire such a deal. Nobody. Google had to clearly break the law to get the deal. So would anyone else. And the group that Google made the deal with didn't, and don't, have the rights to the works they bargained away. The court just gave them that authority for the duration of the trial. I would argue that the court acted illegally, but IANAL. Nobody powerful enough to interfere chose to. But this doesn't mean that the group has to right to make deals with anyone else outside the context of that trial. Those aren't their copyrights.
I'd heard that Google was offering their database to selected other companies in non-competitive businesses at good prices. I hadn't heard that it was a blanket offer. How certain are you that it was?
Sorry, but that's not the context of evolutionary programming. The system does the refactoring, and no human expects to EVER understand why the code works as it does except in *very* simple cases. (Also, the refactoring is not intended to avoid changes in design. It's intended to automatically change the code actions so they they more nearly approach some defined optimum.)
Sometimes the code can be understood by people. Not usually though. It tends to produce spaghetti code with many global variables. Ugly code that's nigh impossible to understand any of without understanding all of.
It also tends to get stuck in blind alleys...so lots of irrelevant techniques are used to break out of the blind alleys...automatically. The whole point of Evolutionary Programming is that almost the entire process is automatic, once the basic starting point is defined, and the function to be optimized is selected. (Though even there there exist variations.)
But the original code is the "human readable version" that's maintained. The eventual optimized code is never refactored into a human readable form. (OTOH, the process has LOTS of randomness. Starting from the same starting point a second time should be expected to wind up with a different "optimized" executable.)
That's 1/3 or 1/4 to remove the law. Not to pass it. I'm not proposing that the state legislatures be able to pass a federal law.
And there are LOTS of yes/no choices that require much more than 50% in order to be passed. Consider, e.g., what's required to pass a constitutional amendment.
It's true, my proposal is generally biased against laws. This isn't by happenstance. I feel that our current system has allowed a great number of abusive laws to become entrenched, with no reasonable chance of their being repealed.
If it's true, as I've heard reported, one thing that makes their actions evil was that the contract with the libraries generally forbid the libraries to allow any other company to do as Google had done.
That's evil.
Then there's the deal on works that ARE within copyright, where Google, and Google alone, has the right to scan them and make them available without actual agreement by the copyright holders. This involved breaking the law, and settling a "class action" suit brought by a group that represented a small minority of the people whose works were covered by the suit. And it involved nominal attempts to find the authors whose rights are being trampled upon. But most of those authors didn't know about the deal until after it had been settled, and it's quite probable that most still don't know.
Mind you, I think the copyright laws are absurdly long, and in clear violation of the constitutional mandate. The Supreme Court, however, disagrees with me. So Google has broken the law and thereby gained an exclusive monopoly on a very large number of works for essentially a pittance.
Mind you, if it weren't an exclusive monopoly I'd think much more favorably about it. As it is, I consider it evil. But there's the curious "fact" that the settlement was proposed by the judge, and then agreed to by both sides. So unless there was some underhanded dealing that was hidden from public view, it's hard to say that Google was evil. But it they take advantage of it without sub-licensing it to all others requesting it at a nominal rate, then I've got to say "Yes, it's evil, and Google is responsible." And I've got to suspect underhanded dealings in the court that just never became public. (Anyone who trusts the court system hasn't been following the SCOx case[s] the last seven years.)
You mean that these effects are caused by religion, or that you think they would be prevented by religion? I can't tell.
I know that *I* see the effects as being caused by religion, and not even all religions, but only by a group who are destructive of society in an attempt to increase the number of followers.
E,g,, I don't blame the Unitarians, the Friends, or the Mennonites (among others). I don't blame any religion that emphasized responsibility more than ignorance and self-control. (N.B.: self-control is a delusion. The ego is not the center of the mind. But blending ignorance with a belief in self-control is a true recipe for disaster.)
Yes. Memristors don't require that power be applied in order to retain memory state. Heat might limit write and retrieval rate, but it wouldn't limit the number of layers. I suspect that it might make heat pipes built into the memory boards to be a highly desirable option, but that would be to enable faster access, not to allow a greater number of layers.
Why would you give a PDF reader the ability to modify or delete files on the disk? If you're running it in a virtual machine that's designed for security, I'd think that would be one of the things that would be prevented. Have it think of the disk as a really fast CD.
I call it tyranny, and I could make a reasonable case for treason.
I tend to think of myself as a conservative, but most people tend to think of me as a liberal. Perhaps I'm both. I do believe that the government has an obligation to "protect the general welfare", but I consider that no less of an obligation than the one to "secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity". And no greater. Much of the rest of the document I consider to be implementation guidelines...and subject to amendment. I don't consider those principles as being subject to amendment. (That's me. I make no pretense that that is the legal interpretation.)
N.B.: To pretend that because you don't declare something to be a war it doesn't require the approval of 2/3 of the Senate is blatant hypocrisy, and violation of the oath of office. I can see that being justified in case of actual on-going emergency, but asserting that that is the current case, or has been within the last 68 years is absurd. (A case could, barely, be made that the attack on Pearl Harbor constituted such an emergency. But it would be a pretty weak case. The attack had already happened by the time we heard about it, and there was no imminent invasion. The Senate could easily have voted to declare war. [Anyone who didn't vote in favor of such a bill would have been lucky to live until the next election threw him out of office.])
That Bush argued that the executive was allowed to unilaterally search due to a commander in chief doctrine was what really got him in trouble with the left, and, I think on that score the lefties were correct. What's interesting, though, is that the present administration seems to be adopting the same doctrine, but is making the "personality" argument, and really, once you start using personality arguments, rather than supportive of a legal process, you've shredded civil rights. To wit, just because Obama might be a nicer dictator for some people doesn't mean that he is still not a dictator. If it is bad for a President to do something when you voted against him, it is bad for a President to do it when you vote against, and vice versa.
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Anecdotal evidence claims that you are mistaken.
My hypothesis was that the tobacco companies put multiple chemicals into their cigarettes to make quitting more difficult. Also, that without those multiple chemicals, I would be able to slowly cut down.
Test: I switched to an organic cigarette (Sherman's: at the time it may have been the only choice). After switching I waited a week for the short term addictive chemicals in the normal cigarettes to eliminate their effects. Then I slowly started cutting down on the number of cigarettes I smoked. When I'd gotten down to six per day, I started cutting down the amount of each cigarette I smoked. Eventually I just quit. That was 20 years ago. I remained addicted for about 5 years after the last cigarette... (I measure this by my reaction to smoke from others who were smoking.), but it was only bothersome for about a week.
This was the second time that I quit. The first time I just quit cold. That worked, but after a year I presumed that I was no longer addicted. Bad mistake. Quitting the second time was much harder.
A) It's never going to happen that way. Some people aren't going to have a girl, other will have several.
B) It has/is happening close enough to that way to cause massive social impacts, which we haven't yet adjusted to. How we *should* adjust to it isn't totally clear. (E.g., what about child support? What's reasonable, and how should compliance be enforced? And what about visitation? etc.)
That actually *is* one model of legalized drugs.
I happen to think it's a poor one, but it *is* one model.
Personally, I'm all in favor of most drugs being illegal...with a $.50 fine for possession or use, and a $50,000 fine per instance of advertising. (I'd be in favor of legal, but if it's not illegal, the fine on advertising would be thrown out by the courts.)
FWIW, hunter-gatherers also had this problem. This often caused them to degrade their habitat over time until they could no longer live there. Because they didn't have anyone to stop them.
People aren't very good at abstaining from short-term benefits for the sake of long-term benefits. Can you make yourself go to a gym? I can't. O, for a few months at a time, yes, but not over a longer period, even though I know it would benefit me. Because I'd rather use my time enjoyably NOW!
Only thing it, when you give some organization the power to do things for your own benefit, the people in charge are people, with they typical weaknesses of people. Someone will run off with the treasury. Someone will start a propaganda campaign to increase their political power. You just can't trust people with power, not even if there are, officially, rules to prevent them from abusing it. They'll find a way around the rules, or say that a word doesn't mean what it clearly means. If you can't think of blatantly obvious examples, it's because you don't want to.
So, no, I don't think these things should be prohibited. And yes, I do think that they should be studied. And yes, I do think that the cartridges used by them should be carefully evaluated by the FDA...and the inclusion of unapproved materials reason for prosecution of the manufacturers.
(N.B.: Actually, I think the FDA should only have the power to require warning labels and accurate lists of ingredients. But given the way they are allowed to regulate other things, the prior paragraph is my recommendations in context.)
Given the large number of chemicals in a cigarette, I wouldn't be so sure that an allergy to them is impossible.
Also, if it's possible to have an allergy to tobacco leaves, then what are the grounds for presuming that it's impossible to have an allergy to the smoke from such leaves burning?
I really doubt that you have any grounds for saying that such an allergy is impossible. Not that your hypothesis that it's a sensitivity to smoke, and tobacco only because it's in smoke form. That may be a reasonable conjecture. (I don't have enough evidence to tell.) But I really doubt your assertion that it's impossible.
He may, or may not, have been a sufficiently powerful churchman to be safe. What he *did* do, however, is publish posthumously. This effectively minimized his risk.
How about also assuming that even before the three wrong guesses, you are required to wait 10 seconds between guesses, and 5 seconds between the first char of the password and the time the computer starts trying it for validity.
If is person is going to be typing the password, there's no reason to allow really fast entry.
In fact, lets put a speed limit on. If you enter the password over a period of less than two seconds, it is automatically rejected, whether or not you made the correct guess.
Of course they can beat this speed bump by trying lots of different accounts at once, so you need to limit the number of simultaneous log-ons from the same IP address to something sane. This depends on your system, but for me one (1) would be the correct number.
This can still be beaten, but now they need to be using lots of simultaneous IP addresses. So now you're probably being attacked by a bot-net. (Which means that they don't know which attacks have already failed, and when they were tried.) So now your "15 minute delay after 3 successive wrong attempts" is really effective. (Note: you don't tell them the account is locked. If it's not coming from a known IP address, then it's got to look just like a wrong password result. So you've got to warn your users what to expect.)
And, of course, you log each time the account gets locked. If it happens three times from different IP addressed, you lock the account either for the day, or until it's unlocked by the sysadmin.
How seriously you take this proposal depends on just how valuable what you're protecting is. For most purposes it's overkill. For some, it means you take that account off the network (or replace it by a honeypot).
The current release is meaningful enough that I've decided to forever vote against the party that gets this passed. How much more meaningful do you want?
(Yeah, I read what you quoted. So they're liars. What else is new.)
Well, these days the only CRTs in the house are connected to computers...without TV tuners. So I've taken the first step.
But my wife won't stop listening to the radio. O, well. At least those ads are cheaper.
Cameras tend to get their lenses covered with gum & paper. And people do care about tags, but that isn't the limit of vandalism. Damaged windows are common, even WITH a driver on board and in charge.
Any automated system is going to need to deal with vandalism. If it can't, it will just fail.
Of course, this isn't just a problem for automated systems, but people generally have ways for dealing with vandalism. It's not, however, a minor cost of doing business. And it goes well beyond tagging.
And bus stops get vandalized. But buses are much more expensive, and also more delicate.
Sorry, Borland *isn't* an example. They were repeatedly sabotaged by MS. I'll admit that when they eventually tried to move to Linux their offering was inadequate, but by that point they'd been so beaten down by MS that they were nearly out of business. If they'd decided not to trust MS a few years sooner, they might still be quite an important software house.
I really don't know why so many companies make the same mistake. Management just seems incapable of learning. Or maybe they just can't believe that the FOSS environment would be any different...so the initial problems seem an insurmountable obstacle. (After all, if it's not going to be any better anyway, then why bother.)
But that's NOT the same problem.
I have only minor experience with Oracle, and that a decade ago.
The company that I was with was trying to move to Oracle for some reason. They asked Oracle to recommend a consultant to do some basic development. After over 6 months work, the consultant still hadn't delivered even a Gui data entry screen.
Now this doesn't really mean that Oracle is a lousy product, but it does mean that I don't trust their recommendations, proposals, or predictions.
You left out one of the major functions of the bus driver. Deterring vandalism. Vandalism is a major expense for bus companies, and without a driver it would get MUCH worse.
To an adult money may have intrinsic value, because the government insists on being paid with government approved money. If you don't, it will take your property away.
To a child, money allows you to buy a candy bar, Cheetos, or to save for a bicycle. It's fiat nature doesn't become apparent until the late teens usually, if then.
In neither case is it a payment of nothing for nothing. There are good reasons why fiat currency is bad, but you's is silly.
(OTOH, the roman Senate debased the denarius by decreasing the amount of gold / coin. So that a coinage has nominal intrinsic value isn't sure protection.)
Also, if "book retailer" means they sell printed books, then they are in non-competitive businesses.
What it takes to qualify as an "orphan work" in this context doesn't, I believe, match your characterization, though it does need to be out of print. I understand why they don't want to make extensive attempts to contact authors they don't immediately know where are, but this doesn't altogether excuse them. Were I to do it I'd be risking hefty fines. (Still, one can make a plausible argument that it's the legal system that evil rather than Google.)
There is no legal way for anyone to acquire such a deal. Nobody. Google had to clearly break the law to get the deal. So would anyone else. And the group that Google made the deal with didn't, and don't, have the rights to the works they bargained away. The court just gave them that authority for the duration of the trial. I would argue that the court acted illegally, but IANAL. Nobody powerful enough to interfere chose to. But this doesn't mean that the group has to right to make deals with anyone else outside the context of that trial. Those aren't their copyrights.
I'd heard that Google was offering their database to selected other companies in non-competitive businesses at good prices. I hadn't heard that it was a blanket offer. How certain are you that it was?
Sorry, but that's not the context of evolutionary programming. The system does the refactoring, and no human expects to EVER understand why the code works as it does except in *very* simple cases. (Also, the refactoring is not intended to avoid changes in design. It's intended to automatically change the code actions so they they more nearly approach some defined optimum.)
Sometimes the code can be understood by people. Not usually though. It tends to produce spaghetti code with many global variables. Ugly code that's nigh impossible to understand any of without understanding all of.
It also tends to get stuck in blind alleys...so lots of irrelevant techniques are used to break out of the blind alleys...automatically. The whole point of Evolutionary Programming is that almost the entire process is automatic, once the basic starting point is defined, and the function to be optimized is selected. (Though even there there exist variations.)
But the original code is the "human readable version" that's maintained. The eventual optimized code is never refactored into a human readable form. (OTOH, the process has LOTS of randomness. Starting from the same starting point a second time should be expected to wind up with a different "optimized" executable.)
That's 1/3 or 1/4 to remove the law. Not to pass it. I'm not proposing that the state legislatures be able to pass a federal law.
And there are LOTS of yes/no choices that require much more than 50% in order to be passed. Consider, e.g., what's required to pass a constitutional amendment.
It's true, my proposal is generally biased against laws. This isn't by happenstance. I feel that our current system has allowed a great number of abusive laws to become entrenched, with no reasonable chance of their being repealed.
If it's true, as I've heard reported, one thing that makes their actions evil was that the contract with the libraries generally forbid the libraries to allow any other company to do as Google had done.
That's evil.
Then there's the deal on works that ARE within copyright, where Google, and Google alone, has the right to scan them and make them available without actual agreement by the copyright holders. This involved breaking the law, and settling a "class action" suit brought by a group that represented a small minority of the people whose works were covered by the suit. And it involved nominal attempts to find the authors whose rights are being trampled upon. But most of those authors didn't know about the deal until after it had been settled, and it's quite probable that most still don't know.
Mind you, I think the copyright laws are absurdly long, and in clear violation of the constitutional mandate. The Supreme Court, however, disagrees with me. So Google has broken the law and thereby gained an exclusive monopoly on a very large number of works for essentially a pittance.
Mind you, if it weren't an exclusive monopoly I'd think much more favorably about it. As it is, I consider it evil. But there's the curious "fact" that the settlement was proposed by the judge, and then agreed to by both sides. So unless there was some underhanded dealing that was hidden from public view, it's hard to say that Google was evil. But it they take advantage of it without sub-licensing it to all others requesting it at a nominal rate, then I've got to say "Yes, it's evil, and Google is responsible." And I've got to suspect underhanded dealings in the court that just never became public. (Anyone who trusts the court system hasn't been following the SCOx case[s] the last seven years.)
???
You mean that these effects are caused by religion, or that you think they would be prevented by religion? I can't tell.
I know that *I* see the effects as being caused by religion, and not even all religions, but only by a group who are destructive of society in an attempt to increase the number of followers.
E,g,, I don't blame the Unitarians, the Friends, or the Mennonites (among others). I don't blame any religion that emphasized responsibility more than ignorance and self-control. (N.B.: self-control is a delusion. The ego is not the center of the mind. But blending ignorance with a belief in self-control is a true recipe for disaster.)
Yes. Memristors don't require that power be applied in order to retain memory state. Heat might limit write and retrieval rate, but it wouldn't limit the number of layers. I suspect that it might make heat pipes built into the memory boards to be a highly desirable option, but that would be to enable faster access, not to allow a greater number of layers.
Why would you give a PDF reader the ability to modify or delete files on the disk? If you're running it in a virtual machine that's designed for security, I'd think that would be one of the things that would be prevented. Have it think of the disk as a really fast CD.
I call it tyranny, and I could make a reasonable case for treason.
I tend to think of myself as a conservative, but most people tend to think of me as a liberal. Perhaps I'm both. I do believe that the government has an obligation to "protect the general welfare", but I consider that no less of an obligation than the one to "secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity". And no greater. Much of the rest of the document I consider to be implementation guidelines...and subject to amendment. I don't consider those principles as being subject to amendment. (That's me. I make no pretense that that is the legal interpretation.)
N.B.: To pretend that because you don't declare something to be a war it doesn't require the approval of 2/3 of the Senate is blatant hypocrisy, and violation of the oath of office. I can see that being justified in case of actual on-going emergency, but asserting that that is the current case, or has been within the last 68 years is absurd. (A case could, barely, be made that the attack on Pearl Harbor constituted such an emergency. But it would be a pretty weak case. The attack had already happened by the time we heard about it, and there was no imminent invasion. The Senate could easily have voted to declare war. [Anyone who didn't vote in favor of such a bill would have been lucky to live until the next election threw him out of office.])
That Bush argued that the executive was allowed to unilaterally search due to a commander in chief doctrine was what really got him in trouble with the left, and, I think on that score the lefties were correct. What's interesting, though, is that the present administration seems to be adopting the same doctrine, but is making the "personality" argument, and really, once you start using personality arguments, rather than supportive of a legal process, you've shredded civil rights. To wit, just because Obama might be a nicer dictator for some people doesn't mean that he is still not a dictator. If it is bad for a President to do something when you voted against him, it is bad for a President to do it when you vote against, and vice versa.
+5 insightful
(emphasis added)