You have a few squads. Each squad has a massive amount of fire power. It has everything from small arms, explosives, heavy weapons, and the ability to call in enough support fire from the air or artillery to level a few city blocks in seconds. Hell, just on their own they have enough fire power to rip the face off a building and kill everything inside of it in seconds.
Now, take our few squads and toss them into an area with a large civilian population. Surround the squads with civilian dressed units firing from civilian occupied buildings. Have members of our military squads start dying.
Now freeze the scene for a moment. Would you rather have the people dying be drones or human marines?
Personally, I would much rather have a squad of drones dying. Even if we placed no value on the lives of soldiers and would happily tell them to die rather then return fire with all of the terrifying capability that they have, a squad of drones would still be better. People, even well trained soldiers, don't like to die. Asking a group of soldiers to allow themselves to be killed and to not defend themselves to save civilians is not only a good way to quickly demoralize your military, but an order that will be violated on more then one occasion to bloody effect. The marines might very well decide that screw it, we are going to tear the apartment complex that is firing at us in half and proceed to do so in a way that only marines can. It will be blood and civilians will die in large numbers.
For a squad of drones, the situation is simple. The controller glances at his orders and sees that he is not allowed to engage if there is a high probability of harming civilians. He turns off the heavy weapons on his drone, switches to small arms, and returns fire at the targets that he can see and is reasonably sure will not harm civilians. The drones merrily fight to the bitter end. The drones might not win due to their orders that they are not allowed to level buildings, but it isn't like the consequences of a failure to win is that the operator dies. The operator just sighs, hits the suicide button on his drone which fires the circuits and destroys the weapons, and switches to another unit. Civilians will still certainly die from stray bullets and what not, but the alternative is to have a group of panicking soldiers level entire city blocks in a desperate bide to save their own hides.
Finally, think of the GOOD possibilities that come with 'cheap wars'. War might not be "cheap" in the material sense... in fact it will almost certainly cost more. It might become a lot cheaper in terms of lives. Sure, this might lead to Americans kicking over perfectly functional dictators that piss them off. It might also lead to the nations of the world growing a (robotic) pair of balls and stepping in to prevent things like the Rwandan genocide.
The world looked on as Rwanda purged itself of 10% of its population in one of the most horrific and brutal genocides ever seen by mankind. No one raised a finger because no one relished the idea of getting involved in an African war and taking the loss of life it would take to stem the tied of violence and rape that was sweeping that nation. In Rwanda, one ethnic minority went from being 15% of the population to 5% of the population with the survivors having seen horrific and terrible things in their life and most of the (surviving) women having been brutally raped repeatedly. If the rest of the world had been more willing to act instead of watching and sending angry diplomatic letters, a drone army would not have been a bad thing.
Personally, I see a robotic army as just another step down the long road to minimize civilian casualties. Take a squad of marines armed to the teeth with enough firepower to rip the face off of a building and destroy pretty much everything in a one block radius, and now give them the ability to call fire support from the air and artillery from support bases. We are talking about a group of humans with a superhuman capacity for destruction. Now, surround these super (but still very mortal) humans a few snipers in a heavily populated area. They have the choice of dying or returning fire knowing that civilian losses are likely. Keep killing them and make them desperate, and the amount of firepower that they will pour into the surrounding will only increase. The result is that soldiers often pick their own lives over the lives of those around them. This isn't terribly surprising, this is just human nature at work. Few people willingly let themselves die.
Now, drop a squad of robot soldiers into the same situation. Sure, the controllers don't need to see the carnage that they inflict. That said, they also do not have their life threatened. If the order from up high is to "don't kill any civilians", then they can happily let their little robot squad return fire with the weakest and most precise weapons they have at their disposal and if they are over run? Eh, a few thousand dollars into the shitter. It isn't a happy ending, but hell, when you already pay a few thousand for the lid to a real shitter, it isn't the end of the world.
War might never be 'humane' but it certainly has the capacity to be a lot more humane then it is. The easiest way to make war safer, besides spewing some idealistic crap about 'lets never fight wars!' is to take the survival of soldiers out of the equation. With the survival of soldiers out of the equation and human controlled robots that will happily let themselves die rather then tear apart an apartment complex where a single sniper is shooting from, we have the capacity for a war with far fewer civilian causalities.
As for the squadron being discussed in the article, these are UAVs, not 'soldiers'. The difference between flying a UAV and an attack airplane is that the UAV is cheaper and you don't die if it gets shot down. In both cases, you see what you are blowing up on a little TV screen. UAVs don't go down any 'slippery slops' that we have not already wondered down.
Think of it like this. Defendant offers plaintiff a $1 judgment. The three possible outcomes for the defendant are:
1. Plaintiff accepts. Defendant pays plaintiff $1 and everybody goes home. 2. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is awarded more than $1. This is the same outcome as if the judgment offer was never made at all. Filing pointless motions does two things. First, it pisses off the judge to have to wade through your bullshit. Pissing off the judge is never a good idea because they can and will make your life miserable. Second, it costs money to file anything. Even if the filing itself is free, it costs lawyer time... and by lawyer time costs money out of your pocket.
3. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is not awarded any judgment. Plaintiff has to pay defendant's legal costs. If no damages are awarded, then this rule does not apply. There is a separate mechanism for potentially recouping losses from a civil suit that fails. You can potentially recover lawyer costs (and potentially more in some cases) if someone files a civil suit and you successfully defend yourself, but this is not the mechanism that does it. This mechanism only kicks in if you are found to have committed damage and the amount of damage was less then what you offered.
The point of this mechanism is not punish someone for demanding more money than they are entitled to. The point of this mechanism is to prevent needless litigation. Imagine if your neighbor threw a baseball through your window because he was sick of hearing loud music coming from your house. You take him to court and claim $10,000 worth of damage. Normally, you could be a dick and just carry on suing him because you want to make him pay his legal expenses as extra punishment and see how large of a settlement you can score. You know you are asking for a bullshit amount of money, but lets pretend your a rich jerk and just want to make your neighbor suffer. Your neighbor knows he is going to lose because he did indeed break your window and you can prove that it did damage to you. What he can do is offer to pay up $200 in damages via this mechanism. You can still bring it to court if you want, but if the judge decides that you only did $150 in damages, your neighbor just pays that $150 and then drops a few thousand dollars worth of legal expenses with your lap. So, being wise you grumble and accept the deal because it is a fair amount. By accepting the deal you don't waste the court's time and do your small part to help keep state legal costs down.
The point is just to force people to accept fair settlements before it ends up costing a judge time and the state money to sort out the mess.
First, I believe that the judge has to accept the deal. In other words, it needs to be a good faith attempt to offer reasonable compensation for the 'damage' that has been done.
Second, offering $1 is silly because the 'you pay for me' effect only kicks in if the finial judgment is that less then $1 of damage is done.
Think of it like this. The woman offers up that she did $300 worth of damage. The RIAA at this point can either go to trial or take the $300. If they go to trail and the judge rules that the damage done was less then $300, the RIAA has to pay for her legal defense (which will likely be a pile of money after it is all said and done). The idea is to force the person bringing the lawsuit to really examine how much damage has been done and accept a fair offer instead of wasting the courts time.
The interesting piece to this is that this means that the RIAA might actually have been afraid that the 'damage' done by a little copyright infringement was less than $300. Well, either that or the RIAA just felt like they had made their point by stomping on some single working mom's head enough, and were ready to move on knowing that she had blown $300 + legal bills that she already can't pay for.
Crap like this makes me all warm and fuzzy feeling know that I have not bought music from an RIAA label in years.
It hasn't been done because it is expensive. It is pittance compared to a Mars mission, but it is expensive compared to tossing a few disposable rovers at the planet. The twin rovers cost 800 million. Congress spent 12 billion just to START to think about Mars exploration. That is 12 billion already down the hole before we have anything that can reach the moon, much less get a crew to Mars safely and back.
Even if sending humans was actually a cost effective way to do science (it isn't), it still would not be worth while. There are plenty of other science projects that could use a few hundred billion dollars and would return a whole hell of a lot more then some fun facts about Mars geology.
If NASA wants to do something productive, it can scrap all manned space flight and focuses exclusively on R&D and venture funding to drag the cost of space flight down. Drop the cost of space flight low enough, and hordes of explorers and pioneers will take to the stars without any prompting. That would be a whole hell of a lot more productive then dumping the resources of an entire civilization into show just how big the American cock is, and how we are so damn rich that we can afford to blow a few hundred billion dollars to send a handful of humans to go do Martian geology.
Let's put it this way... What the two rovers have accomplished in three years? Could be accomplished by two trained field geologists in two *weeks*. No doubt, but for the cost it takes to get two trained field geologist there (alive) and keep them breathing for those two weeks (much less get them back alive) you could have dropped a few hundred (or thousand?) Mars rovers on the planet. You could have made a massive kick ass, nuclear powered lab with dozen different robots as big as soccer mom's SUV with all the equipment you could ever dream of.
Moving humans is hard and expensive. We eat, we breath air, we need to move around, and our muscles tend to turn into mush after a few months in space. Drop humans out of the equation and you can toss a nice compact probe devoid of all the irritations that it takes to keep a human alive. If science is the goal, robots are by far the most cost effective way of doing it. If colonization is the goal, then this missions is even more of a waste. If colonization is the goal NASA should be working on figuring out how in the hell you get a human out of this gravity well for less than the millions of dollars it costs now. This Mars mission is a pissing contests. We are not even playing against an opponent like we did in the moon race. We are having a pissing contest with ourselves... and that is as stupid as it sounds.
The goal isn't science. The goal is to set the stage for eventual interplanetary colonization. If the goal is interplanetary colonization, this is a massive waste of funds. The problem with colonization is NOT the challenges of living on the planet. That is secondary to challenge number one... it is WAY the fuck too expensive to toss stuff out of this gravity well. There are plenty of brave and crazy explorers and pioneers in this world. The reason why half of the US is piled up on the west coast is because there are plenty of people desperate to move forward and that damn sea got in their way. Throw a few launch pads in California and tossed anyone at Mars who wanted to go, and you could probably drop the population of the US by a noticeable amount. The challenges of colonization will be solved by meat shields willing to throw their lives into that work. The problem is that they can't get there.
If NASA wants to do something productive, it could scrap this silly Mars mission and work full time on making space access cheap. Make it so that humans can get out of this gravity well without having to expend the resources of an entire civilization, and the details of how to live in a vacuum on a frozen dust ball will solve themselves.
"Dig a 1-foot deep hole in 30 seconds, as opposed to 30 years." "Walk further than 100m per day" "Walk into the bowl of a crater, poke around for interesting rocks, and carry the interesting rocks out." "Immediately discern between 'interesting' and 'uninteresting' rocks without having to wait 24 hours to ask for new instructions." With the amount of money we would need to blow to get a handful of humans there (much less getting them back), we could EASILY build a robot to do each and every single one of those things. You could send a massive unmanned nuclear powered Mars lab complete with every single piece of analytical equipment you could wish for and a dozen rovers that range from toy car size to frigging backhoe. Not only could you dig a hole 1 foot deep, you could excavate a trench 10 feet deep, grab a sample, and throw it under a SEM.
The logistics of sending a human to Mars are silly. The rewards are pittance compared to what you could get for a fraction of the price with unmanned equipment. Sending humans to Mars is silly when we can barely crawl out of our own gravity well as it is. If NASA wants to do something productive, they could directly take on the problem of making space travel cheap so that everyone can do it, not a dozen humans per year. Forget screwing around the edges, NASA should dump the manned space program and pour all of its money into only three things; earth science, astronomy, and making space access as cheap as humanly possible.
As spiffy as the moon landing was, its only real practical value was to show the Soviet Union how big and meaty an American cock could get and how long the Americans could piss with it. Pissing contests are generally silly, but a pissing contest with yourself is just stupid... which is what the Mars mission is.
Take the money we are going to blow on Mars, and start working on a way to get humans into space so that there are actual commercial applications. If we could get the cost of sending a human into orbit down to say a million dollars or so, you could start seeing some real commercial applications and humans living in space full time.
In addition, it will allow the survival of our species. Quick point on this, is where are the dinosaurs? Personally, I would like to think that my descendants will not end up being oil for a new species.
Fleeing to Mars as a way to save humanity easily rates right up there as one of the worst but most often cited ideas to go to Mars.
There are only two types of events that could wipe out human life. You could have some some sort life killer event that just effects earth (comets, asteroids, nuclear war, whatever), or an even that effects the entire solar system (a super nova going off too close). For the later, living on mars will be of no help. For the former, living on Mars is a silly, expensive, and utterly unfeasible way of dealing with the event.
Let's say that the crisis is that a massive dino killing asteroid is going to hit earth. We could either send a few hundred humans to the cold lifeless vacuum that is Mars and wish them the best, OR we could simply build massive undersea colonies and save a few million. An undersea colony is by far a vastly superior way of preserving humanity. An undersea colony far cheaper, take far less equipment, has access to all of humanity for its resources, has breathable air right above its head, and all the water you could wish for. Mars has a big cold vacuum... and when you get sick of sitting in a hollowed out tube, an undersea colonist and merrily leave and go take a hike in a forest. A Mars colonist on the other hand is shit out of luck and better have access to a good head shrink.
We don't need a Mars colony for humanities survival. If we need a Mars colony, it is because there is some commercial application and enough money there to entice a few crazy people to go brave a barren vacuum wasteland. If NASA wants to do anything to preserve humanity, it should be setting up undersea colonies. If NASA wants to get people on to Mars for shits and giggles, it would be doing a hell of a lot more product if NASA spent its time finding cheaper ways into space, rather then blowing money on multi-billion dollar shuttles and rockets that cost tens of millions of dollars to get a single human into space.
Actually, a democracy didn't create this moral panic. Politicians did to distract us from real problems. If anything, a democracy would not bother with this "problem" and focus on real problems like health care and poverty. I am curious as to what on earth you think democracy actually is. Democracy is one thing and one thing alone. Democracy is majority rule and nothing else. If 51% of the population voted to have the other 49% executed, that would be democracy in action. Fluffy crap about democracy having to do something with effective government that focuses on real issues is just taking a perfectly good word and warping it (usually to political ends I might add). Democracy is a method of making decisions and implies nothing about the justice of those decisions other then that a majority of the voting public consented to them.
A Republic with a strong constitution is an inherently undemocratic form of government. It is more 'democratic' than a dictatorship to be sure, but the Bill of Rights for instance is an inherently undemocratic document. The Bill of Rights sets out rights and rules that everyone will receive, regardless if the majority finds it prudent or not. It is an inherently undemocratic document in that it takes FAR more then a simple majority to overturn something like freedom of speech. 51%, 60%, or 65% of the population could vote to revoke the 1st amendment and they would fail. Hell, even with a super majority of 100% of the population begging the government to repeat the first amendment, it would still take a bare minimum years to move the process through. Undemocratic? Sure? One of the pillars keeping society liberal and free (even if not democratic)? Hell yes.
Democracy does not promise a liberal (and I use that in the traditional sense of the word) or free society. Democracy is just a nice clean way to transfer power and run day to day affairs. Non-democratic processes are what protect a liberal and free society from people like Hillary Clinton or the Right-Wing-Nutjob-of-the-Week from setting up a government censorship board.
I personally would just rather the US get its shit together then have to migrate. I couldn't point to a single nation in the world that comes even close to my idealistic mix of laws. I could rattle off a list of bad euro-centric laws that I would rather not have to deal with. I like the US and I like a lot of what makes it the way it is.
More to the point, most bad laws (on either side of the pond) don't effect me. I don't do any illegal drugs (bad US laws) and I don't engage in any 'bad' speech (bad euro-centric laws), but that doesn't mean that I don't want other people to be able to smoke marijuana and have the right to spout racist crap if that is what they really want. If I was just looking out for my own self interest, the US is certainly the best place for me as I get health care through work, the silly substance laws and age restrictions are utterly moot to a 21+ year old who doesn't use any drugs beyond alcohol, I don't pirate any copyrighted works, and to top it all of my taxes are low (by European standards). So, the US is great for me personally, but that doesn't mean I don't want to see change for everyone else. If we were actually enforced all the laws on the books, change would have to come or the vast majority of Americans would find themselves locked up or facing millions of dollars in fines.
I don't really find this to be a disturbing trend. The only reason why such a trend would be disturbing is if we try and apply old ways of thinking to the new reality.
Imagine a world where everything that happens in public space is recorded. We are close to that now with cell phone and security cameras, but as some point it will be even more true as people mount cameras on their bodies and run them non-stop. It is easy to imagine such a world as a nightmare where the most petty of laws are enforced with near perfection and anyone deviating from social norms is ostracized. There is an alternative though.
Imagine if we could catch every single person who has violated the law. What would happen? Every single one of us would be up to our necks in fines and well over half of the population would be in jail. Faced with such a threat, one would hope that a democracy would respond by rethinking laws. In such a world would you really want marijuana laws that we demand tossing half of the nation in jail? Would a $250,000 fine for downloading copywrite material really make sense if it sent the major of people in the nation into bankruptcy? Would a no drinking before 21 law really make sense if it meant drumming the vast majority of college students out of college?
There are a lot of dumb laws out there that are tolerated because we fail to catch even a small fraction of the violators. If you could catch everyone who violated the law, many laws would have to be abolished or we would need set up prison states to dump all the guilty.
So yeah, I can imagine the evil horrible dystopia where everyone follows the massive piles of inane laws that exist to the letter and people get thrown in jail at random for violating obscure laws... but I can also envision a utopia where worthless laws have been tossed, corruption is close to non-existent, hippies don't get their heads busted in for smoking weed in the park, copyright is seriously reworked, and police find something more productive to do with their time then busting under aged parties.
So why is violence acceptable everywhere but in video games? For the exact same reason why Hillary Clinton can advocate setting up a censorship board to rate video games, yet would never in a million years advocate doing the same for books.
The simple reason why video games are a target is that most soccer mom's don't play video games any more complex the Snood or Bejeweled. It is an easy point to score to say that you want to save the children by setting up a government censorship board that will police your children when you are not doing it. Granted, no one says it in terms of 'government censorship board' because somewhere in the minds of voters they might actually start to see this as a violation of free speech. This is also why we don't see anyone running trying to put in laws setting up a body to censor books. If someone advocated rating and censoring books, even the dullest of Americans might realize that they are getting their free speech stomped on and react negatively.
The simple fact is that a disturbing amount of Americans don't recognize new media as speech. They recognize that a book is a form of speech that is protected, but fail to appreciate that a video game (or going back a few years, comic books and D&D) are ALSO forms of speech that need to be protected from government regulation and censorship.
People tend to be weak on principles and only perk up when they feel personally threatened. People will vote down the legalization of marijuana because they don't smoke, but would riot and start lynching politicians if alcohol was banned. People will vote for the right to have an abortion when they are young and having promiscuous sex and fear an unplanned pregnancy, but turn around when they are 50, in menopause, and couldn't have a child if they wanted to and vote against it. People will vote to increase taxes for schools when they have kids, and vote against them once the little buggers are out the door.
The hubbub about violent video games is just another example of this self interest untempered by principle. Advocating rating and censoring books for 'violent content' or sex and you would be crucified and thrown out of office. Do the same thing for video games and your average 40 something mom or dad who struggles to get the photos off of their digital camera will happily pat the politician on the back for doing something 'for the children'.
So, why are video games so easy to kick down? Because not enough of the voting population plays video games and people are too dense or indifferent to realize that free speech applies to all speech, not just the speech that they personally consume.
Thankfully, we have a constitution that recognizes that people are stupid and democracies do a mediocre job at best protecting minorities. We (Americans at least) live in a country that while democratic in nature is blessedly NOT a democracy where majority rules. Stuff like anti-video game crusading that the courts have valiantly stopped cold using the Bill of Rights is a civics lesson on why anything approaching pure democracy is an invitation to tyranny by the political majority.
1) It really, truly, and honestly does marketing well. Apple fans will swear up and down that that has nothing to do with it, but they are deluding themselves. Apple does marketing in a way that few other consumer electronics even begin to contemplate. Whoever the hell is running Apple's marketing campaign needs an extra zero or two tacked on to the end of his salary. I am not saying that Apple doesn't make a good product, but Apple isn't the only company to make a good lap top or MP3 player in the history of mankind... but they are the only ones to market it with so much success. Apple is a marketing god that lays waste it its enemies with fiery bolts of marketing d00m.
2) Apple locks down their products and creates slick interfaces. If you look at the competition against Apple (and this goes for all of their devices, from phones to computers to MP3 players), Apple uses the same strategy. They bust out workable hardware that is more or less about par for the industry, wrap it in a shiny case that was designed by marketers who know what a human eye likes instead of engineers, and then spend a good long time working on slick software that is tied to the hardware. The actual electronics are generally nothing to write home about. The shinny case developed by marketers who actually know what humans like to look at is helpful, but this still is not terribly remarkable. There have been other pretty devices in the history of humanity that have failed. The software is what really completes the package. Apple takes complete control over what goes in and out of the device by exerting a great deal of control over the both the software and hardware of the package.
You see this with the iPod. You use Apple hardware to hook up, and then use Apple software to load up (yes, I realize you don't HAVE to use iTunes, but 99% of the people do). The result is that Apple has control over almost the entire process and can make sure it actually works. If you look at other MP3 devices, they tend to let go of control when it comes to the software. They either don't have the software expertise to build a slick (or even workable) software interface and instead build a bad one, or the rely on a third party that is usually accommodating more then one MP3 player to be the portal in. Things are better today in the non-Apple MP3 market as other companies have caught up, but Apple has already eaten their breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The advantage the iPhone is going to have, despite all of the things that irritate me about it, is that Apple is going to be the first to lock down the phone with a complete software and hardware package. Further, they are taking it a step further and even specifying the carrier so that they have control over that too. This is just classic Apple at work. Grab as much control as possible and sacrifice third party software/hardware/carrier to provide a standardized, controlled, (and as a result) stable package. Apple isn't selling these phones as open phones not because they couldn't convince Best Buy to sell an open iPhone, but because gobbling up as much control as is practical is how Apple operates. Are you really going to notice or care that the iPhone has a hard time communicating with non-Apple products or that AT&T can't slap on their standard cell phone OS?
So, this open phone Vs the iPhone? Eh, I put my money on the iPhone. As much as I might not touch the thing with a ten foot pole (I don't mind switching between devices and padding my ass with a pile of the cashI saved... not to mention not selling my soul to AT&T), Apple is going to win a fair hunk of the market in the end. Coming into the market with control over the software, hardware, and carrier means that Apple is able to offer up an integrated device that the cell phone market has seen very little off. Thrown into the mix some Apple marketing divine intervention, and you have a winner. So, grab the Linux phone if that tickles your fancy (it tickles mine), but I wouldn't invest any money in that company.
The idea that the US government is capable of covering up UFOs, 9/11, or offing a JFK is laughable. The US absolutely terrible at keeping secrets that stick even a toe into controversy. Just Bush's presidency alone is a long series blown secrets. For better or for worse, American officials love to blow the whistle on anything that is sketchy, and the say what you will about the US press, but they love to expose secrets almost as much as they love Paris Hilton.
Personally, I have very little fear about what the US does in secret. US secrets get blown pretty much non-stop all the time. Not little secrets, but big ones. Wire taping, snagging foreign folks on the soil of allies then torturing (or sending them to be tortured elsewhere), the list is endless and spans pretty much every single US president in the past 50 years. In more then one or two people know about it (which is pretty much required in order to do anything useful), someone is going to go to the press.
The idea that the US could conceal the existence of aliens, launch 9/11 against itself, kill JFK, kill cold fusion, or any of the other silly conspiracy theories out there is laughable. For better or for worse, the US sucks at covering things up. What people forget is that the secret holders are still people, and that these people can easily pass information to the press. It takes just one human in the loop to decide that things are not right to have the entire secret blow open.
Your arguments are tired and as old as American has been around. There has not been a single wave of immigration in history that has not stirred up some level of discontent and bemoaning that the immigrants are not American enough. Of course, like every single wave of immigration that has come, it is quickly forgotten within a couple of generations as the children of the immigrants merge seamlessly into the population, regardless of what mom and dad taught them.
Boston is in fact a wonderful example of this. The Irish were hated, loathed, and shuffled off into south end of the city. People bitched about them being lazy bastards that just wanted to take advantage of the American way of life without becoming American. You can pretty much copy and paste the complaints against Irish and they will sound the whining against any other immigrant group. Of course, low and behold, they do integrate and at least one day a year everyone in the city of Boston makes some claim (bull shit or not) on Irish ancestry and gets shit faced in celebration. Boston is certainly a more Irish place then before the Irish came, but you will not hear anyone complain over the fact. At the same time we were integrating the Irish immigrants, or more specifically their children, the Irish were dropping bits and piece of their culture into ours. You might not find many Gaelic speakers in Boston, but you better damn well believe that half of Boston (especially in the south end) can still sing an Irish drinking song or two and has an Irish flag somewhere in their house.
So, take a breather. Nations are not ruined by immigrants. They won't eat your babies, take your jobs, or ruin your culture. At worst, a section of your city might have really good foreign food, a few extra non-American flags, and you might score an extra holiday out of the deal. Your kids might know a drinking song that doesn't have Anglo-Saxon roots. Cries of moral decay and the loss of our culture are just as baseless as they always have been in the past few hundred years of American history. The past waves didn't kills us, and I am sure this wave will be just as harmless. Take a breather. The Irish, Polish, Germans, Jews, etc didn't ruin America, neither will the Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese, Indian, Taiwanese, etc.
The point is that you don't have to go back far. A Norwegian might be able to entertain the logic that immigration is awful and immoral because Norwegians have a relatively low level of immigration and most Norwegians can point to hundreds of years of Norwegians in their line. Sure, if you go back far enough you find an immigration wave, but for Norwegian, it might take 500 years before you start to find a significant amount of immigrants interbreeding with the population.*
With the US, this is not the case. Very few Americans can have a line of ancestry more then three or four generation long that doesn't involve immigrants. We are not talking ancient waves of immigration from the neolithic era, we are talking about the average American having immigrant ancestors in the relatively recent past. Immigration has helped the US and made it extremely strong. You can attribute a great deal of the power that the US wields do to the fact that it accepted massive waves of immigration. This not only led to a high population, but drained the rest of the world of some of its best and brightest. Reading a list of great American scientist is like reading a survey of world names.
*I know nothing about Norwegian immigration history. I just picked it at random because I figured it was an unlikely spot to get lots of immigration. I could certainly be wrong.
Carter has nothing to do with this because all of the stuff being released comes from the time right before Carter took office. Besides, embarrassing to Jimmy Carter is like dynamiting fish in a barrel. He was a terrible president and while he might have had some diplomatic successes in the past, he is a very bad diplomat now. He has done some very good things in this world in terms of his philanthropic causes, but outside of that work the guy does nothing but hug dictators and piss people off. It isn't even that I disagree with all of his positions; I don't. The problem is that even when I agree with his position I wish he would shut up and try and not help.
The reason why this is a big deal is that the CIA did some mighty sketchy ass stuff right up until 1970's. This stuff needs to come out, and the CIA recognizes this. The reason why they are making a big deal about this is because they want to take full credit for coming clean and not try and look like they were trying slip this stuff by. By calling full attention to it, admitting it is bad, and 'preparing' people for what is coming, it will to some extent lessen the shock and revelation.
Uh no dude, this really and truly is a nation of immigrants. Even if we draw a magical line right after the revolution and call everyone before that a settler, we are still talking about a nation of immigrants. The reason why half of Boston is Irish isn't because the Irish have been around in the US for hundreds of years. The US has had countless massive waves of immigration. You would be extremely hard pressed to find people in the US who have no ancestors who didn't come off a boat in the past 100 years. It is virtually impossible to find an American who doesn't have an immigrant in their line in the past 200 years. The only large group in the US that has an even slim chance of not having an immigrant in their line over the past 200 years are, funny enough, decedents of slaves... the one group that didn't come willingly.
So yes, surely the US is strongly influenced by its original settlers, and if you don't want to call them immigrants, fine. That said, while culturally we might be very much tied to early settlers, ancestor wise, you almost certainly have a great deal of immigrants in your line.
No, that really is not true at all. You can call for the murder of all Palestinians, Jews, French, Canadians, whoever, and not only do you not need to censor it, but it isn't even illegal. In order to get in trouble for your speech in the US, you need to be committing conspiracy to commit murder. You can get in trouble for conspiracy (i.e. you need to be taking active steps to commit a crime), but that is about it. There are lots of things to dislike about US laws, but US protection of free speech is not one of them.
Incitement to violence isn't protected speech anywhere, and bloggers have to police their comment areas for such comments (or else leave yourself in the position of promulgating them). That actually is not true. For all of its faults, the US has extremely strong free speech protections and you basically have to be convicted of conspiracy before your speech can get you in trouble. I can merrily call for all the Jews, Palestinians, Blacks, Whites, anyone to go die without even the slightest worry of legal recourse. On the other hand, if I had a stockpile of weapons in my basement, armed some crazy neo-nazis, loaded the weapons, and drew up a plan to go kill some Jews, then I would actually be in trouble. Though, the charge would conspiracy to commit murder, not any sort of anti-hate speech transgression. You basically need to be making a good faith effort to be looking to harm someone before the authorities can actually act.
The result is that hate groups are relatively free to gather and talk about whatever it is that gets their twisted little minds off so long as they are not actively planning to go harm someone. While this isn't exactly a good thing, the protection cuts both ways. There is not a slim chance in hell you could ever get in trouble because someone posted that they want to kill all the Palestinians in your blog. Hell, you could make the post and have no worries about legal troubles.
Personally, I don't believe hate speech crimes do anything productive other then suck the occasional innocent bystander. I love Europe, but when I look at the US and most of Europe, I see very little practical difference in the levels of racism. I doubt many people have given up racist views just because it is illegal to speak them. If anything, the illegality of it helps feed and insulate a subculture instead of exterminating it.
All police officers DO need to be monitored constantly. I would be completely for mandating that every single police officer has a shoulder mounted camera that is always one when they are on the job. When you give someone the level of authority that a police officer gets, you also need to increase the monitoring. If you get wrongly abused by a police officer, most people are rightly terrified to do anything about it. Openly monitoring the people with the authority to use force is the only method of preventing the sort of gross abuse that police officers are able to (and some times do) inflict.
As far as the privacy issues go, there are relatively few. Yes, someone could record you getting pulled over for a traffic stop and post it on YouTube. Personally, I would be far more worried about a drunken college video of me getting out then a video of a police officer hanging in my window as we politely exchange words and documents. Further, the nation has legal proceedings and a presumption of innocence, such that it is trivial to look up someone's police record and find out if they have actually be convinced of crimes. I would happily take a marginally embarrassing video of me getting pulled over for blasting through a red light, then I would NOT having a video of a police officer beating the shit out of me because my hair is too long or what not.
Good point. Let me search around my pocket for $600 and the rights to pay AT&T to take my soul so that I can have Visual Voicemail TM! If you really can't think of anything better to spend $600 on and desperately want to be apart of the wonderful AT&T, bandwidth throttling, men in black suits setting up black boxes attached to the phone lines network... all so you can have Visual Voicemail TM(!), go for it.
Personally, I'll just buy a normal phone, buy a 30gb MP3player, and then stuff my pillow case with the left over money. I am sure I can find a way to suffer through having a MP3 player with 5 times the space at half the cost. True, I will have to switch devices when I want to take a phone call, and I won't have Visual Voicemail TM(!), but I think I can suffer through it. Then again, my lust for brand name products with excellent marketing that prove I am trendy and hip tends to hover roughly around zero.
A) They needed a carrier to support their visual voice mail You seriously believe that Apple can't build a web application to do the visual voice mail and have it connect via the internet through the half a dozen ways that a cell phone (especially one with wi-fi) can? Cries of Apple's technical incompetency always seem to arise whenever the company is doing something that fan boys are not pleased with. I also remember people floating the idea the Apple would find selling DRM free music technically too hard and that is why they refused to offer DRM free to indie labels that want it. It is a joke. Apple is not technically incompetent. They really are just doing something that people dislike because it makes good business sense. Apple really and truly is a corporation, not some sort of hippie youth movement bringing freedom to the masses.
B) The $500 iPhone is the subsidized price and would be even more expensive without tying people to a contract. First, the iPhone by Apple's and AT&T's own account is unsubsidized. In fact, Apple is taking a cut of the AT&T's mandatory data subscription service's profit. Second, if Apple sold the phone like a normal phone the way Nokia does, Apple phones actually WOULD be subsidized as most cell phone purchasing plans give you $100 credit towards the phone of your choice.
If Apple wanted to make the market 'feel fear' it would have had an open phone to begin with instead of tying itself by the balls to AT&T. Nokia seems to be able to sell open phones without getting in bed with a cell phone company. I fail to see why Apple can't either.
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You have a few squads. Each squad has a massive amount of fire power. It has everything from small arms, explosives, heavy weapons, and the ability to call in enough support fire from the air or artillery to level a few city blocks in seconds. Hell, just on their own they have enough fire power to rip the face off a building and kill everything inside of it in seconds.
Now, take our few squads and toss them into an area with a large civilian population. Surround the squads with civilian dressed units firing from civilian occupied buildings. Have members of our military squads start dying.
Now freeze the scene for a moment. Would you rather have the people dying be drones or human marines?
Personally, I would much rather have a squad of drones dying. Even if we placed no value on the lives of soldiers and would happily tell them to die rather then return fire with all of the terrifying capability that they have, a squad of drones would still be better. People, even well trained soldiers, don't like to die. Asking a group of soldiers to allow themselves to be killed and to not defend themselves to save civilians is not only a good way to quickly demoralize your military, but an order that will be violated on more then one occasion to bloody effect. The marines might very well decide that screw it, we are going to tear the apartment complex that is firing at us in half and proceed to do so in a way that only marines can. It will be blood and civilians will die in large numbers.
For a squad of drones, the situation is simple. The controller glances at his orders and sees that he is not allowed to engage if there is a high probability of harming civilians. He turns off the heavy weapons on his drone, switches to small arms, and returns fire at the targets that he can see and is reasonably sure will not harm civilians. The drones merrily fight to the bitter end. The drones might not win due to their orders that they are not allowed to level buildings, but it isn't like the consequences of a failure to win is that the operator dies. The operator just sighs, hits the suicide button on his drone which fires the circuits and destroys the weapons, and switches to another unit. Civilians will still certainly die from stray bullets and what not, but the alternative is to have a group of panicking soldiers level entire city blocks in a desperate bide to save their own hides.
Finally, think of the GOOD possibilities that come with 'cheap wars'. War might not be "cheap" in the material sense... in fact it will almost certainly cost more. It might become a lot cheaper in terms of lives. Sure, this might lead to Americans kicking over perfectly functional dictators that piss them off. It might also lead to the nations of the world growing a (robotic) pair of balls and stepping in to prevent things like the Rwandan genocide.
The world looked on as Rwanda purged itself of 10% of its population in one of the most horrific and brutal genocides ever seen by mankind. No one raised a finger because no one relished the idea of getting involved in an African war and taking the loss of life it would take to stem the tied of violence and rape that was sweeping that nation. In Rwanda, one ethnic minority went from being 15% of the population to 5% of the population with the survivors having seen horrific and terrible things in their life and most of the (surviving) women having been brutally raped repeatedly. If the rest of the world had been more willing to act instead of watching and sending angry diplomatic letters, a drone army would not have been a bad thing.
Personally, I see a robotic army as just another step down the long road to minimize civilian casualties. Take a squad of marines armed to the teeth with enough firepower to rip the face off of a building and destroy pretty much everything in a one block radius, and now give them the ability to call fire support from the air and artillery from support bases. We are talking about a group of humans with a superhuman capacity for destruction. Now, surround these super (but still very mortal) humans a few snipers in a heavily populated area. They have the choice of dying or returning fire knowing that civilian losses are likely. Keep killing them and make them desperate, and the amount of firepower that they will pour into the surrounding will only increase. The result is that soldiers often pick their own lives over the lives of those around them. This isn't terribly surprising, this is just human nature at work. Few people willingly let themselves die.
Now, drop a squad of robot soldiers into the same situation. Sure, the controllers don't need to see the carnage that they inflict. That said, they also do not have their life threatened. If the order from up high is to "don't kill any civilians", then they can happily let their little robot squad return fire with the weakest and most precise weapons they have at their disposal and if they are over run? Eh, a few thousand dollars into the shitter. It isn't a happy ending, but hell, when you already pay a few thousand for the lid to a real shitter, it isn't the end of the world.
War might never be 'humane' but it certainly has the capacity to be a lot more humane then it is. The easiest way to make war safer, besides spewing some idealistic crap about 'lets never fight wars!' is to take the survival of soldiers out of the equation. With the survival of soldiers out of the equation and human controlled robots that will happily let themselves die rather then tear apart an apartment complex where a single sniper is shooting from, we have the capacity for a war with far fewer civilian causalities.
As for the squadron being discussed in the article, these are UAVs, not 'soldiers'. The difference between flying a UAV and an attack airplane is that the UAV is cheaper and you don't die if it gets shot down. In both cases, you see what you are blowing up on a little TV screen. UAVs don't go down any 'slippery slops' that we have not already wondered down.
1. Plaintiff accepts. Defendant pays plaintiff $1 and everybody goes home. 2. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is awarded more than $1. This is the same outcome as if the judgment offer was never made at all. Filing pointless motions does two things. First, it pisses off the judge to have to wade through your bullshit. Pissing off the judge is never a good idea because they can and will make your life miserable. Second, it costs money to file anything. Even if the filing itself is free, it costs lawyer time... and by lawyer time costs money out of your pocket. 3. Plaintiff rejects and the case goes to trial. Plaintiff is not awarded any judgment. Plaintiff has to pay defendant's legal costs. If no damages are awarded, then this rule does not apply. There is a separate mechanism for potentially recouping losses from a civil suit that fails. You can potentially recover lawyer costs (and potentially more in some cases) if someone files a civil suit and you successfully defend yourself, but this is not the mechanism that does it. This mechanism only kicks in if you are found to have committed damage and the amount of damage was less then what you offered.
The point of this mechanism is not punish someone for demanding more money than they are entitled to. The point of this mechanism is to prevent needless litigation. Imagine if your neighbor threw a baseball through your window because he was sick of hearing loud music coming from your house. You take him to court and claim $10,000 worth of damage. Normally, you could be a dick and just carry on suing him because you want to make him pay his legal expenses as extra punishment and see how large of a settlement you can score. You know you are asking for a bullshit amount of money, but lets pretend your a rich jerk and just want to make your neighbor suffer. Your neighbor knows he is going to lose because he did indeed break your window and you can prove that it did damage to you. What he can do is offer to pay up $200 in damages via this mechanism. You can still bring it to court if you want, but if the judge decides that you only did $150 in damages, your neighbor just pays that $150 and then drops a few thousand dollars worth of legal expenses with your lap. So, being wise you grumble and accept the deal because it is a fair amount. By accepting the deal you don't waste the court's time and do your small part to help keep state legal costs down.
The point is just to force people to accept fair settlements before it ends up costing a judge time and the state money to sort out the mess.
First, I believe that the judge has to accept the deal. In other words, it needs to be a good faith attempt to offer reasonable compensation for the 'damage' that has been done.
Second, offering $1 is silly because the 'you pay for me' effect only kicks in if the finial judgment is that less then $1 of damage is done.
Think of it like this. The woman offers up that she did $300 worth of damage. The RIAA at this point can either go to trial or take the $300. If they go to trail and the judge rules that the damage done was less then $300, the RIAA has to pay for her legal defense (which will likely be a pile of money after it is all said and done). The idea is to force the person bringing the lawsuit to really examine how much damage has been done and accept a fair offer instead of wasting the courts time.
The interesting piece to this is that this means that the RIAA might actually have been afraid that the 'damage' done by a little copyright infringement was less than $300. Well, either that or the RIAA just felt like they had made their point by stomping on some single working mom's head enough, and were ready to move on knowing that she had blown $300 + legal bills that she already can't pay for.
Crap like this makes me all warm and fuzzy feeling know that I have not bought music from an RIAA label in years.
It hasn't been done because it is expensive. It is pittance compared to a Mars mission, but it is expensive compared to tossing a few disposable rovers at the planet. The twin rovers cost 800 million. Congress spent 12 billion just to START to think about Mars exploration. That is 12 billion already down the hole before we have anything that can reach the moon, much less get a crew to Mars safely and back.
Even if sending humans was actually a cost effective way to do science (it isn't), it still would not be worth while. There are plenty of other science projects that could use a few hundred billion dollars and would return a whole hell of a lot more then some fun facts about Mars geology.
If NASA wants to do something productive, it can scrap all manned space flight and focuses exclusively on R&D and venture funding to drag the cost of space flight down. Drop the cost of space flight low enough, and hordes of explorers and pioneers will take to the stars without any prompting. That would be a whole hell of a lot more productive then dumping the resources of an entire civilization into show just how big the American cock is, and how we are so damn rich that we can afford to blow a few hundred billion dollars to send a handful of humans to go do Martian geology.
Moving humans is hard and expensive. We eat, we breath air, we need to move around, and our muscles tend to turn into mush after a few months in space. Drop humans out of the equation and you can toss a nice compact probe devoid of all the irritations that it takes to keep a human alive. If science is the goal, robots are by far the most cost effective way of doing it. If colonization is the goal, then this missions is even more of a waste. If colonization is the goal NASA should be working on figuring out how in the hell you get a human out of this gravity well for less than the millions of dollars it costs now. This Mars mission is a pissing contests. We are not even playing against an opponent like we did in the moon race. We are having a pissing contest with ourselves... and that is as stupid as it sounds.
If NASA wants to do something productive, it could scrap this silly Mars mission and work full time on making space access cheap. Make it so that humans can get out of this gravity well without having to expend the resources of an entire civilization, and the details of how to live in a vacuum on a frozen dust ball will solve themselves.
"Walk further than 100m per day"
"Walk into the bowl of a crater, poke around for interesting rocks, and carry the interesting rocks out."
"Immediately discern between 'interesting' and 'uninteresting' rocks without having to wait 24 hours to ask for new instructions." With the amount of money we would need to blow to get a handful of humans there (much less getting them back), we could EASILY build a robot to do each and every single one of those things. You could send a massive unmanned nuclear powered Mars lab complete with every single piece of analytical equipment you could wish for and a dozen rovers that range from toy car size to frigging backhoe. Not only could you dig a hole 1 foot deep, you could excavate a trench 10 feet deep, grab a sample, and throw it under a SEM.
The logistics of sending a human to Mars are silly. The rewards are pittance compared to what you could get for a fraction of the price with unmanned equipment. Sending humans to Mars is silly when we can barely crawl out of our own gravity well as it is. If NASA wants to do something productive, they could directly take on the problem of making space travel cheap so that everyone can do it, not a dozen humans per year. Forget screwing around the edges, NASA should dump the manned space program and pour all of its money into only three things; earth science, astronomy, and making space access as cheap as humanly possible.
As spiffy as the moon landing was, its only real practical value was to show the Soviet Union how big and meaty an American cock could get and how long the Americans could piss with it. Pissing contests are generally silly, but a pissing contest with yourself is just stupid... which is what the Mars mission is.
Take the money we are going to blow on Mars, and start working on a way to get humans into space so that there are actual commercial applications. If we could get the cost of sending a human into orbit down to say a million dollars or so, you could start seeing some real commercial applications and humans living in space full time.
In addition, it will allow the survival of our species. Quick point on this, is where are the dinosaurs? Personally, I would like to think that my descendants will not end up being oil for a new species.
Fleeing to Mars as a way to save humanity easily rates right up there as one of the worst but most often cited ideas to go to Mars.
There are only two types of events that could wipe out human life. You could have some some sort life killer event that just effects earth (comets, asteroids, nuclear war, whatever), or an even that effects the entire solar system (a super nova going off too close). For the later, living on mars will be of no help. For the former, living on Mars is a silly, expensive, and utterly unfeasible way of dealing with the event.
Let's say that the crisis is that a massive dino killing asteroid is going to hit earth. We could either send a few hundred humans to the cold lifeless vacuum that is Mars and wish them the best, OR we could simply build massive undersea colonies and save a few million. An undersea colony is by far a vastly superior way of preserving humanity. An undersea colony far cheaper, take far less equipment, has access to all of humanity for its resources, has breathable air right above its head, and all the water you could wish for. Mars has a big cold vacuum... and when you get sick of sitting in a hollowed out tube, an undersea colonist and merrily leave and go take a hike in a forest. A Mars colonist on the other hand is shit out of luck and better have access to a good head shrink.
We don't need a Mars colony for humanities survival. If we need a Mars colony, it is because there is some commercial application and enough money there to entice a few crazy people to go brave a barren vacuum wasteland. If NASA wants to do anything to preserve humanity, it should be setting up undersea colonies. If NASA wants to get people on to Mars for shits and giggles, it would be doing a hell of a lot more product if NASA spent its time finding cheaper ways into space, rather then blowing money on multi-billion dollar shuttles and rockets that cost tens of millions of dollars to get a single human into space.
A Republic with a strong constitution is an inherently undemocratic form of government. It is more 'democratic' than a dictatorship to be sure, but the Bill of Rights for instance is an inherently undemocratic document. The Bill of Rights sets out rights and rules that everyone will receive, regardless if the majority finds it prudent or not. It is an inherently undemocratic document in that it takes FAR more then a simple majority to overturn something like freedom of speech. 51%, 60%, or 65% of the population could vote to revoke the 1st amendment and they would fail. Hell, even with a super majority of 100% of the population begging the government to repeat the first amendment, it would still take a bare minimum years to move the process through. Undemocratic? Sure? One of the pillars keeping society liberal and free (even if not democratic)? Hell yes.
Democracy does not promise a liberal (and I use that in the traditional sense of the word) or free society. Democracy is just a nice clean way to transfer power and run day to day affairs. Non-democratic processes are what protect a liberal and free society from people like Hillary Clinton or the Right-Wing-Nutjob-of-the-Week from setting up a government censorship board.
I personally would just rather the US get its shit together then have to migrate. I couldn't point to a single nation in the world that comes even close to my idealistic mix of laws. I could rattle off a list of bad euro-centric laws that I would rather not have to deal with. I like the US and I like a lot of what makes it the way it is.
More to the point, most bad laws (on either side of the pond) don't effect me. I don't do any illegal drugs (bad US laws) and I don't engage in any 'bad' speech (bad euro-centric laws), but that doesn't mean that I don't want other people to be able to smoke marijuana and have the right to spout racist crap if that is what they really want. If I was just looking out for my own self interest, the US is certainly the best place for me as I get health care through work, the silly substance laws and age restrictions are utterly moot to a 21+ year old who doesn't use any drugs beyond alcohol, I don't pirate any copyrighted works, and to top it all of my taxes are low (by European standards). So, the US is great for me personally, but that doesn't mean I don't want to see change for everyone else. If we were actually enforced all the laws on the books, change would have to come or the vast majority of Americans would find themselves locked up or facing millions of dollars in fines.
I don't really find this to be a disturbing trend. The only reason why such a trend would be disturbing is if we try and apply old ways of thinking to the new reality.
Imagine a world where everything that happens in public space is recorded. We are close to that now with cell phone and security cameras, but as some point it will be even more true as people mount cameras on their bodies and run them non-stop. It is easy to imagine such a world as a nightmare where the most petty of laws are enforced with near perfection and anyone deviating from social norms is ostracized. There is an alternative though.
Imagine if we could catch every single person who has violated the law. What would happen? Every single one of us would be up to our necks in fines and well over half of the population would be in jail. Faced with such a threat, one would hope that a democracy would respond by rethinking laws. In such a world would you really want marijuana laws that we demand tossing half of the nation in jail? Would a $250,000 fine for downloading copywrite material really make sense if it sent the major of people in the nation into bankruptcy? Would a no drinking before 21 law really make sense if it meant drumming the vast majority of college students out of college?
There are a lot of dumb laws out there that are tolerated because we fail to catch even a small fraction of the violators. If you could catch everyone who violated the law, many laws would have to be abolished or we would need set up prison states to dump all the guilty.
So yeah, I can imagine the evil horrible dystopia where everyone follows the massive piles of inane laws that exist to the letter and people get thrown in jail at random for violating obscure laws... but I can also envision a utopia where worthless laws have been tossed, corruption is close to non-existent, hippies don't get their heads busted in for smoking weed in the park, copyright is seriously reworked, and police find something more productive to do with their time then busting under aged parties.
The simple reason why video games are a target is that most soccer mom's don't play video games any more complex the Snood or Bejeweled. It is an easy point to score to say that you want to save the children by setting up a government censorship board that will police your children when you are not doing it. Granted, no one says it in terms of 'government censorship board' because somewhere in the minds of voters they might actually start to see this as a violation of free speech. This is also why we don't see anyone running trying to put in laws setting up a body to censor books. If someone advocated rating and censoring books, even the dullest of Americans might realize that they are getting their free speech stomped on and react negatively.
The simple fact is that a disturbing amount of Americans don't recognize new media as speech. They recognize that a book is a form of speech that is protected, but fail to appreciate that a video game (or going back a few years, comic books and D&D) are ALSO forms of speech that need to be protected from government regulation and censorship.
People tend to be weak on principles and only perk up when they feel personally threatened. People will vote down the legalization of marijuana because they don't smoke, but would riot and start lynching politicians if alcohol was banned. People will vote for the right to have an abortion when they are young and having promiscuous sex and fear an unplanned pregnancy, but turn around when they are 50, in menopause, and couldn't have a child if they wanted to and vote against it. People will vote to increase taxes for schools when they have kids, and vote against them once the little buggers are out the door.
The hubbub about violent video games is just another example of this self interest untempered by principle. Advocating rating and censoring books for 'violent content' or sex and you would be crucified and thrown out of office. Do the same thing for video games and your average 40 something mom or dad who struggles to get the photos off of their digital camera will happily pat the politician on the back for doing something 'for the children'.
So, why are video games so easy to kick down? Because not enough of the voting population plays video games and people are too dense or indifferent to realize that free speech applies to all speech, not just the speech that they personally consume.
Thankfully, we have a constitution that recognizes that people are stupid and democracies do a mediocre job at best protecting minorities. We (Americans at least) live in a country that while democratic in nature is blessedly NOT a democracy where majority rules. Stuff like anti-video game crusading that the courts have valiantly stopped cold using the Bill of Rights is a civics lesson on why anything approaching pure democracy is an invitation to tyranny by the political majority.
Apple does two things extremely well.
1) It really, truly, and honestly does marketing well. Apple fans will swear up and down that that has nothing to do with it, but they are deluding themselves. Apple does marketing in a way that few other consumer electronics even begin to contemplate. Whoever the hell is running Apple's marketing campaign needs an extra zero or two tacked on to the end of his salary. I am not saying that Apple doesn't make a good product, but Apple isn't the only company to make a good lap top or MP3 player in the history of mankind... but they are the only ones to market it with so much success. Apple is a marketing god that lays waste it its enemies with fiery bolts of marketing d00m.
2) Apple locks down their products and creates slick interfaces. If you look at the competition against Apple (and this goes for all of their devices, from phones to computers to MP3 players), Apple uses the same strategy. They bust out workable hardware that is more or less about par for the industry, wrap it in a shiny case that was designed by marketers who know what a human eye likes instead of engineers, and then spend a good long time working on slick software that is tied to the hardware. The actual electronics are generally nothing to write home about. The shinny case developed by marketers who actually know what humans like to look at is helpful, but this still is not terribly remarkable. There have been other pretty devices in the history of humanity that have failed. The software is what really completes the package. Apple takes complete control over what goes in and out of the device by exerting a great deal of control over the both the software and hardware of the package.
You see this with the iPod. You use Apple hardware to hook up, and then use Apple software to load up (yes, I realize you don't HAVE to use iTunes, but 99% of the people do). The result is that Apple has control over almost the entire process and can make sure it actually works. If you look at other MP3 devices, they tend to let go of control when it comes to the software. They either don't have the software expertise to build a slick (or even workable) software interface and instead build a bad one, or the rely on a third party that is usually accommodating more then one MP3 player to be the portal in. Things are better today in the non-Apple MP3 market as other companies have caught up, but Apple has already eaten their breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
The advantage the iPhone is going to have, despite all of the things that irritate me about it, is that Apple is going to be the first to lock down the phone with a complete software and hardware package. Further, they are taking it a step further and even specifying the carrier so that they have control over that too. This is just classic Apple at work. Grab as much control as possible and sacrifice third party software/hardware/carrier to provide a standardized, controlled, (and as a result) stable package. Apple isn't selling these phones as open phones not because they couldn't convince Best Buy to sell an open iPhone, but because gobbling up as much control as is practical is how Apple operates. Are you really going to notice or care that the iPhone has a hard time communicating with non-Apple products or that AT&T can't slap on their standard cell phone OS?
So, this open phone Vs the iPhone? Eh, I put my money on the iPhone. As much as I might not touch the thing with a ten foot pole (I don't mind switching between devices and padding my ass with a pile of the cashI saved... not to mention not selling my soul to AT&T), Apple is going to win a fair hunk of the market in the end. Coming into the market with control over the software, hardware, and carrier means that Apple is able to offer up an integrated device that the cell phone market has seen very little off. Thrown into the mix some Apple marketing divine intervention, and you have a winner. So, grab the Linux phone if that tickles your fancy (it tickles mine), but I wouldn't invest any money in that company.
The idea that the US government is capable of covering up UFOs, 9/11, or offing a JFK is laughable. The US absolutely terrible at keeping secrets that stick even a toe into controversy. Just Bush's presidency alone is a long series blown secrets. For better or for worse, American officials love to blow the whistle on anything that is sketchy, and the say what you will about the US press, but they love to expose secrets almost as much as they love Paris Hilton.
Personally, I have very little fear about what the US does in secret. US secrets get blown pretty much non-stop all the time. Not little secrets, but big ones. Wire taping, snagging foreign folks on the soil of allies then torturing (or sending them to be tortured elsewhere), the list is endless and spans pretty much every single US president in the past 50 years. In more then one or two people know about it (which is pretty much required in order to do anything useful), someone is going to go to the press.
The idea that the US could conceal the existence of aliens, launch 9/11 against itself, kill JFK, kill cold fusion, or any of the other silly conspiracy theories out there is laughable. For better or for worse, the US sucks at covering things up. What people forget is that the secret holders are still people, and that these people can easily pass information to the press. It takes just one human in the loop to decide that things are not right to have the entire secret blow open.
Your arguments are tired and as old as American has been around. There has not been a single wave of immigration in history that has not stirred up some level of discontent and bemoaning that the immigrants are not American enough. Of course, like every single wave of immigration that has come, it is quickly forgotten within a couple of generations as the children of the immigrants merge seamlessly into the population, regardless of what mom and dad taught them.
Boston is in fact a wonderful example of this. The Irish were hated, loathed, and shuffled off into south end of the city. People bitched about them being lazy bastards that just wanted to take advantage of the American way of life without becoming American. You can pretty much copy and paste the complaints against Irish and they will sound the whining against any other immigrant group. Of course, low and behold, they do integrate and at least one day a year everyone in the city of Boston makes some claim (bull shit or not) on Irish ancestry and gets shit faced in celebration. Boston is certainly a more Irish place then before the Irish came, but you will not hear anyone complain over the fact. At the same time we were integrating the Irish immigrants, or more specifically their children, the Irish were dropping bits and piece of their culture into ours. You might not find many Gaelic speakers in Boston, but you better damn well believe that half of Boston (especially in the south end) can still sing an Irish drinking song or two and has an Irish flag somewhere in their house.
So, take a breather. Nations are not ruined by immigrants. They won't eat your babies, take your jobs, or ruin your culture. At worst, a section of your city might have really good foreign food, a few extra non-American flags, and you might score an extra holiday out of the deal. Your kids might know a drinking song that doesn't have Anglo-Saxon roots. Cries of moral decay and the loss of our culture are just as baseless as they always have been in the past few hundred years of American history. The past waves didn't kills us, and I am sure this wave will be just as harmless. Take a breather. The Irish, Polish, Germans, Jews, etc didn't ruin America, neither will the Mexicans, South Americans, Chinese, Indian, Taiwanese, etc.
The point is that you don't have to go back far. A Norwegian might be able to entertain the logic that immigration is awful and immoral because Norwegians have a relatively low level of immigration and most Norwegians can point to hundreds of years of Norwegians in their line. Sure, if you go back far enough you find an immigration wave, but for Norwegian, it might take 500 years before you start to find a significant amount of immigrants interbreeding with the population.*
With the US, this is not the case. Very few Americans can have a line of ancestry more then three or four generation long that doesn't involve immigrants. We are not talking ancient waves of immigration from the neolithic era, we are talking about the average American having immigrant ancestors in the relatively recent past. Immigration has helped the US and made it extremely strong. You can attribute a great deal of the power that the US wields do to the fact that it accepted massive waves of immigration. This not only led to a high population, but drained the rest of the world of some of its best and brightest. Reading a list of great American scientist is like reading a survey of world names.
*I know nothing about Norwegian immigration history. I just picked it at random because I figured it was an unlikely spot to get lots of immigration. I could certainly be wrong.
Carter has nothing to do with this because all of the stuff being released comes from the time right before Carter took office. Besides, embarrassing to Jimmy Carter is like dynamiting fish in a barrel. He was a terrible president and while he might have had some diplomatic successes in the past, he is a very bad diplomat now. He has done some very good things in this world in terms of his philanthropic causes, but outside of that work the guy does nothing but hug dictators and piss people off. It isn't even that I disagree with all of his positions; I don't. The problem is that even when I agree with his position I wish he would shut up and try and not help.
The reason why this is a big deal is that the CIA did some mighty sketchy ass stuff right up until 1970's. This stuff needs to come out, and the CIA recognizes this. The reason why they are making a big deal about this is because they want to take full credit for coming clean and not try and look like they were trying slip this stuff by. By calling full attention to it, admitting it is bad, and 'preparing' people for what is coming, it will to some extent lessen the shock and revelation.
Uh no dude, this really and truly is a nation of immigrants. Even if we draw a magical line right after the revolution and call everyone before that a settler, we are still talking about a nation of immigrants. The reason why half of Boston is Irish isn't because the Irish have been around in the US for hundreds of years. The US has had countless massive waves of immigration. You would be extremely hard pressed to find people in the US who have no ancestors who didn't come off a boat in the past 100 years. It is virtually impossible to find an American who doesn't have an immigrant in their line in the past 200 years. The only large group in the US that has an even slim chance of not having an immigrant in their line over the past 200 years are, funny enough, decedents of slaves... the one group that didn't come willingly.
So yes, surely the US is strongly influenced by its original settlers, and if you don't want to call them immigrants, fine. That said, while culturally we might be very much tied to early settlers, ancestor wise, you almost certainly have a great deal of immigrants in your line.
No, that really is not true at all. You can call for the murder of all Palestinians, Jews, French, Canadians, whoever, and not only do you not need to censor it, but it isn't even illegal. In order to get in trouble for your speech in the US, you need to be committing conspiracy to commit murder. You can get in trouble for conspiracy (i.e. you need to be taking active steps to commit a crime), but that is about it. There are lots of things to dislike about US laws, but US protection of free speech is not one of them.
The result is that hate groups are relatively free to gather and talk about whatever it is that gets their twisted little minds off so long as they are not actively planning to go harm someone. While this isn't exactly a good thing, the protection cuts both ways. There is not a slim chance in hell you could ever get in trouble because someone posted that they want to kill all the Palestinians in your blog. Hell, you could make the post and have no worries about legal troubles.
Personally, I don't believe hate speech crimes do anything productive other then suck the occasional innocent bystander. I love Europe, but when I look at the US and most of Europe, I see very little practical difference in the levels of racism. I doubt many people have given up racist views just because it is illegal to speak them. If anything, the illegality of it helps feed and insulate a subculture instead of exterminating it.
All police officers DO need to be monitored constantly. I would be completely for mandating that every single police officer has a shoulder mounted camera that is always one when they are on the job. When you give someone the level of authority that a police officer gets, you also need to increase the monitoring. If you get wrongly abused by a police officer, most people are rightly terrified to do anything about it. Openly monitoring the people with the authority to use force is the only method of preventing the sort of gross abuse that police officers are able to (and some times do) inflict.
As far as the privacy issues go, there are relatively few. Yes, someone could record you getting pulled over for a traffic stop and post it on YouTube. Personally, I would be far more worried about a drunken college video of me getting out then a video of a police officer hanging in my window as we politely exchange words and documents. Further, the nation has legal proceedings and a presumption of innocence, such that it is trivial to look up someone's police record and find out if they have actually be convinced of crimes. I would happily take a marginally embarrassing video of me getting pulled over for blasting through a red light, then I would NOT having a video of a police officer beating the shit out of me because my hair is too long or what not.
Good point. Let me search around my pocket for $600 and the rights to pay AT&T to take my soul so that I can have Visual Voicemail TM! If you really can't think of anything better to spend $600 on and desperately want to be apart of the wonderful AT&T, bandwidth throttling, men in black suits setting up black boxes attached to the phone lines network... all so you can have Visual Voicemail TM(!), go for it.
Personally, I'll just buy a normal phone, buy a 30gb MP3player, and then stuff my pillow case with the left over money. I am sure I can find a way to suffer through having a MP3 player with 5 times the space at half the cost. True, I will have to switch devices when I want to take a phone call, and I won't have Visual Voicemail TM(!), but I think I can suffer through it. Then again, my lust for brand name products with excellent marketing that prove I am trendy and hip tends to hover roughly around zero.
If Apple wanted to make the market 'feel fear' it would have had an open phone to begin with instead of tying itself by the balls to AT&T. Nokia seems to be able to sell open phones without getting in bed with a cell phone company. I fail to see why Apple can't either.