I imagine it's probably also kind of hard to aim, since neutrinos are so hard to see in the first place...
Actually, it is (relatively) easy to aim, as long as you are done aiming before the neutrinos are produced... neutrino beams are made by accelerating protons into targets, which produces beams of charged pions, which are collimated and sent down a beam pipe pointing directly at Super-K. Some fraction of the pions (checking... checking... 99.9877% ) of the pions decay to a muon and a muon neutrino, going in the same direction as the pion (i.e., pointed directly at Super-K). All the muons and undecayed pions are stopped at the end of the beam pipe, and don't contribute to the beam. The hardest part of aiming is digging the tunnel in the right direction, but GPS makes that relatively easy these days.
As you pointed out, the size and shape of the earth is miniscule compared to variations in the orbit. However, if neutrinos oscillate between different mass eigenstates during their travels, then you would expect the oscillation rate inside matter (i.e. the earth) to be different from the rate of oscillation outside matter (i.e. the vacuum of space), and from knowledge of the oscillation rate in one, you can predict the oscillation rate in the other (well, given some other information that doesn't concern us here...). The day/night variation would arise because the neutrinos from the sun that are detected during the day travel through less matter than do the neutrinos at night, which have to travel all the way through the earth first, and hence would have reached a different point in their oscillation. You would also expect to see a seasonal variation as the earth moves radially toward or away from the sun during the year, because the distance over which the neutrinos oscillate would change. Finally, from knowledge of the matter effects, you would also predict a difference in the number of neutrino events passing through the detector from teh top and from the bottom. It was actually the last effect which was the evidence for oscillations, if I'm not mistaken.
Yes it is: if you don't like the legal reality of a given industry, don't work in that industry. Do something else. If I don't like the types of offers I get for postdoctoral positions in my field, and I sign a contract and take a job anyway, I can't very well complain that the postdoctoral market is "unfair" and that by not signing I will have "no career". Life isn't fair sometimes, but it isn't because other people are "evil" or "lying"; that's just the way life is. There are many times in your life when you have to make a decision that you might not like; it isn't everyone else's fault when that happens.
...then the majority of labels make the mistake of writing contracts that deceive artists.
No, it doesn't mean that at all. Contracts are a way of spelling out, in detail, the rights and responsibilities of all parties to the contract. As they are legal instruments, the language they are written in is the language of the legal system, and what words mean in the legal system, they don't necessarily mean in common usage. This is no different than the way language is used in other specialized areas: "quantum leap" in physics and in common usage not only have different meaning, they are almost antonyms! "Hacker" means different things to the general public and to the computer literati. If you call a computer geek a "cracker" and he may get mad at you because he thinks of himself as a "hacker"; you call someone a "cracker" on the street, and you may find yourself with a major racial incident on your hands. Similarly, if you read a legally binding contract assigning words the meaning they have in general parlance, you have screwed up; what is very straightforward and unimpeachable legal language to a lawyer may mean an entirely different thing to someone with no legal training. But when that contract is interpreted by the courts, don't expect to be able to get away with the "it doesn't mean what I thought it meant" argument. To call legal language "deceptive" because it means something other than what its colloquial interpretation would be is not a defense, and doesn't make sense. If a non-programmer tells you that your use of "branch" in a discussion about your latest program is wrong because "everyone knows that a branch is a part of a tree", who's the one that is wrong?
Does that mean that I think all contracts are clear and unquestionable, or that no contracts are deceptive? Of course not; there are many lawsuits every year over the interpretation of contracts. But most contracts are _not_ legally ambiguous and deceptive, and most clauses of most contracts are also not legally ambiguous and deceptive. Most contract lawsuits come down to one of the parties not understanding what is clearly written in the contract, or not being happy with what they signed and claiming that the meaning is different than what it is in order to try and renegotiate the deal.
The bottom line: if you aren't a practitioner in a field, don't believe or pretend that you understand the ins and outs, the language, or the meaning of actions in that field. You do that, you will get screwed. And if you don't like the details of the contract, don't sign it; you may have to choose a different career, but is that really any worse than being miserable in the one you chose because you agreed to things you didn't want to do?
Except that there's no real competition over what the terms of the contract are
Which doesn't change the fact that you can choose not to sign that contract if you don't like its terms.
the terms of the contract are generally misrepresented to the artist and
Which is why you don't sign the contract if you don't understand each and every word in it; if you don't, go see a lawyer and have it explained to you, section by section. If you don't understand the terms of a contract, or it is vague, or it gives the corporation more than you are willing to give it, and you sign it anyway, that is your problem, and has no bearing on the legality of the contractual obligation. This is just as true for artists as it is for contract programmers, or engineering consultants, or any other employee or corporation bound by a contractual obligation.
worst of all, the record companies are infamous for not abiding by the terms of these contracts when it suits them
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that this statement bears any true resemblance to the facts of the industry. If what you MEANT is that the "record companies are infamous for not abiding by what the artist thought were the terms of the contract", then I you might be right, if the majority of artists make the mistake of signing contracts that they don't understand. But again, that is irrelevant. If the contract means something other than what you thought it means, you are screwed, plain and simple, and it isn't because the company is some "evil corporation". The contract says what it says, and if you don't know what it says you shouldn't have signed it.
Do you know how impossible it is for an artist to get a fair and accurate audit of his business with a company?
Again, I don't believe this. There are literally tens of thousands of artists under contract worldwide; if the business was as corrupt as you claim, and if the companies were really violating their contractual obligations as frequently as you claim, then those corporations would be sued out of existence in huge class actions by disgruntled artists whose contractual rights were violated, and, they would also be sued out of existence by the US, Canadian, and European tax agencies for tax fraud. But that isn't happening.
Am I claiming that the corporations are lily white, and never violate a contract clause or lie, cheat, or steal? No, of course not, I'm am more certain that violations occur all the time than of anything else in this post. But it can't be as widespread as you claim, or there would be legal hell to pay; and in our "litigous society" they would pay. If what you meant is that it is "impossible for an artists to get an audit that he thinks is fair and accurate", that is something else entirely, and completely separated from the legal reality of the audits that actually occur.
This is a good example of what goes around comes around.
And even if everything you claim is happening actually IS happening, that doesn't make the illegal actions of music copyright infringers any less illegal. Under this type of logic the record companies could just as easily consider the DMCA and SSSCA a good example of "what goes around comes around", and be completely justified in their beliefs, couldn't they?
It's worth remembering in all of this that the US constitution grants congress a limited power to enact copyright law.
From the great document itself:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
As has been pointed out in the past on Slashdot, note very carefully that "limited" applies only to the time duration of the copy and patent rights; the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to grant rights of any scope as long as those rights are limited in duration, and as long as those rights do not infringe on any constitutionally protected rights.
The constitution does not grant congress any power of any kind to use copyright law to defend the profitability of corporations, or guarantee them that their business models will remain unchanged by technology.
I don't see that restriction anywhere in the Constitution; if Congress believes that such a provision would "promote... science and the useful arts", it certainly could use its copyright power for such purposes. However, I challenge you to locate any section of the U.S. Code that actually authorizes the government to do that. What you will find are provisions in the Code that "secure for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", and that among those Rights is: the Right to transfer of copyright (from artist ot music company); the Right to restrict the forms and methods by which those writings and discoveries are initially distributed (they aren't required to sell scribed wax cylinders or vinyl records); the Right to encrypt those writings and discoveries and to solely distribute the rights to decrypt them under terms decided by the holder of the copyright (DMCA); and many others rights.
Whether these Rights that have been granted by copyright law satisfy the Constitutional requirements is not clear, as they haven't been tested in court, nor is it clear that they are good public policy; you and I may not like them, and you and I may think that some of them go too far, but it is not at all clear that they are unconstitutional (I would guess that most of them ARE constitutional, but bad public policy). And even if the law satisfies I.8.8, it is not clear that it doesn't violate some OTHER portion of the Constitution (some claim First Amendment rights are violated, others claim Fair Use and First Sale are constitutionally protected rights, just like the right of privacy), or if the law is in conflict with other legislation in certain circumstances (DMCA appears to many of us to conflict with the fair use provisions of the rest of the Copyright Act). I certainly think that some of the provisions of the DMCA are not Constitutional, but not because they violate the Copyright Clause.
All that aside, claiming that the law has been written to "defend the profitability of corporations", or to "guarantee... business models" is, frankly, silly. If that were the case, then the protections in the law would not apply to you and the things you create or discover (since you aren't a corporation); and the protections most certainly DO apply to you. That you don't like the way some corporations are utilizing their granted copyrights has no bearing on the question of whether the granted rights are Constitutional; certainly, I don't like the way government contractors are required to bid on a project as if they were a union shop even when they aren't, but that doesn't mean the laws requiring such things are unconstitutional.
So, ask yourselves, does file sharing... promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Certainly this is irrelevant to the copyright argument! Sharing files may or may not promote progress; sharing of copyrighted sound files without the express permission of the copyright holder, even without the DMCA, is certainly illegal, and making it so was certainly within the purview of the Congress -- that you are using FreeNet instead of SneakerNet, or that you are using mp3 instead of analog-casette, simple changes of technology, doesn't make it any less illegal. The technology in this case is irrelevant to the legality of exchange; the Napster case (and all other similar cases) was not about technology, but whether by being an enabler of copyright infringement to the near exclusion of all other business, Napster was an infringer itself. The question of whether copyright infringement itself occurred was never questioned by anyone associated with the case, because it was crystal clear that infringement had occurred. Trying to hide from this fact and claim that Congress doesn't have the power to make that type of infringing illegal is only going to get you ignored by the public, the legislators, and the courts.
Everyone knows it's legally wrong, but most people do not believe it is ethically wrong (as proven by the sheer usage volume of services like Napster and MusicCity). Record companies commit original sins by denying musicians fair compensation, price gouging, and denying consumers fair use rights. In committing these wrongs they are forfeiting their ethical rights.
I don't think it is clear that "most people" think it is ethically acceptable; most people, even in the United States, have never even been to sites like Napster and MusicCity.
Further, justifying what "most people" may or may not believe to be ethically bankrupt or justified by claiming that record companies are unethical is just silly. Record companies are not "denying musicians fair compensation"; the musicians voluntarily agreed to the compensation they are getting when they signed a contract. If they didn't like the terms of the contract, they weren't required to sign it. Ergo, no denial of compensation. Record companies are also not "price gouging"; you aren't obligated to pay for any album in the first place, so you can't claim that you were obligated to pay too much. If you think an album is too expensive, don't buy it. Ergo, not price gouging. And no record company is denying you your "fair use rights"; since those are protected by law to the extent that they exist, you can sue them if they are denying you those rights. Ergo, no "denial of rights". That they may be trying to have the definition of fair use modified is not relevant to the point you made; you have the same rights to try and convince your legislator to advocate changes in the laws relating to fair use that they do. And you can vote, while the corporation can only lobby; that gives you the real power, not them.
Look, I don't like the direction that fair use rights and DRM are going any more than you do, but don't try to turn it into a "righteous individual vs. evil corporation" argument; you'll loose, and we'll all look like idiots in the process. Fair use can best be protected by making logical arguments that accept the reality of the situation (i.e. most people use/used Napster to avoid paying for music they liked, that is, to break the law), and pointing out that the huge societal benefits that come from fair use greatly outweigh the few negatives, and that those negatives can in fact be addressed in ways that don't need to reduce the strength of fair use provisions.
Small correction: Nitrogen is not a noble gas. N2 is not reactive (hence, we have a nice, non-reactive atmosphere that doesn't chemically decompose us), because it is tightly bound. Atomic nitrogen, however, is highly reactive (that's why N2 is bound so tightly, and why most chemical explosives are nitrogen compounds). Nitrogen interrupts the CFC cycle because, when N2 is photo-dissociated into atmomic N, if the atomic N interacts with a CFC molecule, the molecule is broken up. CFCs live so long in the upper atmosphere because solar emissions contain relatively little radiation with sufficient energy to cause the photo-dissociation of nitrogen. Of course, it's been a while since I did any chemistry, so I may have something wrong here.
there is a lot of antagonism in New Zealand towards the US because of Bush's decision to boycott the Kyoto(sp?) Protocol.
Perhaps, then, you could convince the government of New Zealand to advocate a protocol treaty that, unlike Kyoto,
has an enforcement mechanism
doesn't exclude the vast majority of nations from its provisions
doesn't expect the US to pay an amount disproportionate to our environmental impact,
and
deals comprehensively with the issue of global warming instead of dealing piecemeal with one emission at a time.
Personally, while I am not convinced that the science has shown that there is or will be human induced global warming, I don't see that there is any long term negative impact from addressing what might be a huge problem. In the long run, even if there is no real danger of global warming, it would be to our economic benefit to have cleaner burning, more efficient vehicles, and lower emissions from power plants. I would love for there to be an international treaty that really makes an impact on pollution and emissions globally. But the Kyoto treaty is not going to have any real environmental impact long term, will cost an incredible amount in terms of cash and jobs up front, is not enforceable, is not manageable, is not extensible, and is really nothing more than a feel good measure for politicians to wave in front of their populations to say "see, we're doing something". I'm glad the US backed out without ratifying the treaty; I hope that by staying out, we force a reevaluation of the initial goals of Kyoto, and that we eventually end up with a comprehensive treaty that results in a cleaner environment for the future. But Kyoto is fundamentally broken and is certainly not the way to get there
Last I checked, Bush obtained a majority of the votes in the Electoral College; hence, he won the election. Furthermore, the recounts in Florida by the news outlets down there have (last I saw) shown rather conclusively that his electors in Florida won a plurality of votes, contrary to the claims of the Gore-Lieberman campaign.
Furthermore, on the issue of the Kyoto treaty, the Clinton-Gore administration had many years during which to push the Kyoto treaty through the Senate to ratification, and didn't even try. Perhaps you ought to direct some of your displeasure toward them instead of toward an administration that is doing exactly what it said it would do during the campaign?
Individuals are often conscious of environmental issues, but company executives who have oil fields destroying the earth whilst living comfortably in Aspen typically just don't care.
Executives are individuals too, and corporations are owned, operated, and staffed by individuals. Companies do the things that they do because their customers (individuals!) tell them what to do: people (individuals!) buy gas guzzling SUVs because they like them - no one is forcing them to do so, and suggesting that the reason is "greedy corporations" is ludicrous. People (individuals!) buy the bigger SUV, not the more efficient one, because the bigger one is cheaper - no one is forcing them to spend less money, they just want to.
Suggesting that individuals care and corporations don't is inane and a refuge of the weak willed; corporations do what it takes to make a profit by providing individuals with the goods and services they want at the lowest price possible. Individuals do now and always have had the power to influence what corporatios do, by voting with their dollars (or euros or pounds or rupees etc) If you want a "greener" world, then you need to convince other "individuals" that they should be willing to pay for it, and you need to put your wallet where your mouth is. Don't try to absolve yourself by passing the buck to the "greedy corporation"; it is the collective decisions of millions of individuals that dictate what those corporations do.
I realize you didn't want G.W. Bush elected, but you ought to get your facts straight when criticizing him and his family, since your errors make you look like an idiot to those who are more informed:
G.H.W. Bush went to YALE.
The next presidential election is NOT next year; elections are every FOUR years, and the next one will not be until 2004.
Whether or not John McCain cares about your rights has no bearing on whether or not G.W. Bush cares about your rights; your implication is unsupported by any argument that you have made. In particular, you might want to go look up some of the legislation McCain has supported... your assertion that "he doesn't care whether we're Satan worshipping Sodomites" looks pretty silly comparison to some of his positions...
That is, O3 losses and volcanic activity appear to be uncoupled in time (lack temporal consistency)
Out of curiosity, how has that statement been confirmed? Detecting delayed effects in time series of earlier causes is an incredibly tricky business when the intervening steps are affected by a host of other variables.
To make those statements less theoretical, let me put it this way:
Hypothesis: Volcanic activity causes the majority of the depletion of ozone. How do we rule this out?
Facts: Volcanoes emit HCl and other Cl compounds, which rise into the atmosphere. Some are washed out before they reach the stratosphere, some are not. How long do they take to get there, how is that timing affected by other things (solar storms, El Nino, the atlantic hurricane season, monsoon season in the Indian Ocean, weather patterns over Africa, etc...). Which of these (and other facts that I don't know about) are important, and which aren't, and how do they affect the data?
Other hypotheses: Ozone is affected by more than just Cl and F compounds, but also has natural cycles, is affected by stratospheric wind patterns, which also have cycles, is affected by El Nino, which also has cycles, etc. etc. etc. What other variables affect stratospheric ozone, and how do you control for them? There have to be literally thousands of them, and I'm certain that not all have been studied. How were they ruled out?
The question, then, is "How can you show conclusively that variations in stratospheric ozone are NOT caused primarily by natural effects?" "How do you show conclusively that volcanic activity is uncorreclated with ozone fluctuations when the delay in volcanic emissions arriving in the stratosphere is unknown?"
I'm very curious as to how this was done; from my experience in physics experiments, attempting to show correlation when there are variable time delays between cause and effect is incredibly difficult. Even more difficult is ruling OUT a correlation when there are variable time delays. Do you have primary references by any chance?
Re:Before people start bitching
on
Poor NASA
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Do we "need" the ISS? Not really. Should we cut funding, or quit making it? Definitely not.
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here. At what point would you recommend cutting funding to ISS? The report discussed here shows conclusively that the ISS is vastly over its construction budget, vastly under capable, and vastly more expensive in terms of both astronaut time and NASA funding than anyone had ever dreamed possible. The report says that EVEN IF they cut back the plans by halting construction at the current, scientifically worthless state, and EVEN IF they only maintain a skeleton crew of 3, the minimum necessary to maintain the ISS at its current level of scientific uselessness (a crew of 3 can do less than 20 hours a WEEK of science according to the report), EVEN THEN the ISS will vastly overrun its OPERATING budget every year, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And this doesn't count the vast cost overruns in the shuttle program for missions assigned to service ISS.
At what point do the immense cost overruns with no conceivable scientific return justify a restructuring of the program in your mind? Could the billions spent in cost overruns be better allocated to other scientific programs that have had to be cut as a result, both within and outside NASA? Seeing as the cost overruns CAN'T be fixed, would you really advocate just giving NASA what it needs to maintain the program it wanted when it promised it could do it for substantially less than what it is currently spending?
Another way to put it: how many years of delay in going back to the moon, or going to Mars is the ISS program worth to you? Or: how many unmanned deep space missions is the ISS worth to you? Or, if you advocate taking money out of non-NASA programs to pay for the ISS, how many years of delay in cancer research, or materials research, or faster computers, or smarter networks, or cleaner burning cars, or longer battery life, etc. are you willing to give up so that a few people can orbit the earth in a scientifically-worthless tin can?
I support manned exploration of space, and I support NASA science programs; I just find that the support for the current ISS program among the population to be bordering on ridiculous, since the money could be so much better spent on cheaper programs with real goals and a real chance to return on investment in both human and scientific terms.
They always abide to government regulations and listen to what their customers say. By selling well made software.
I realize that you were being sarcastic, but I didn't say any of that. I said "pleasing regulators", not "always abiding by regulations". And I never said that a monopoly had to listen to what each and every customer says. And I certainly never said anything about selling well made software or other products.
A monopoly only has to please regulators more often than it pisses them off, keep the "average" customer happy, and sell products that are "good-enough". Blow any of those items, and you will eventually get shot down. But MS really hasn't done any of those things; they likely aren't going to be broken up because they haven't obviously pissed the government off enough, the "average" customer is perfectly happy with them, and most people think they're software is "good enough" for what they need it to do.
But my point is that the vast, vast majority of "the people" can neither do the coding themselves (inability to code, lack of time, etc.), nor can they afford to hire someone to do it for them, nor can they convince or cajole anyone in the OSS world to write what they need. It is just cheaper and easier for someone/some company to pay for a less-than-perfect closed source program that can do more or less what they need to do and that comes with more or less competent on-demand support, and to stick with that software once it has been chosen, than to modify, write or have written the code that does exactly what they want. Most of the closed source "monopolies" got to where they are by providing exactly the less-than-perfect code that did more or less what was needed by the largest number of people. Unless the OSS model manages to respond to the needs of people who neither have the time, the money, the knowledge, nor the inclination to do have the coding done "for them", the closed model will always survive to feed them almost-what-they-need. And I suspect that an OSS monopoly would generally be less responsive to those needs than a closed source monopoly.
if it is an OSS monopoly, would that not mean that the people are in total control?
If I understand what you imply by "the people", the the answer is "no". Just take a look at most (NOT ALL!!!!!) OSS projects today: while there are some notable exceptions, the developers are not interested in making "better software for the people", but "better software for themselves". I am not making a negative value judgement here; there is nothing wrong with this attitude! If you are going to write software for free in your own time, I EXPECT that you will write the software you want, with the features you want, and document it however you want, even if those things don't advance the needs of the larger user base.
But this model doesn't put "the people" in control any more than a closed source model does! In fact, while it might make the monopoly a little more transparent, it completely removes all incentive to be responsive to the "needs" of the "users" (i.e., those users who are not also active developers); in this sense, an OSS monopoly may actually be WORSE for the "the people" than a closed source monopoly is. The closed source monopoly at least has to worry about pleasing government regulators and large volume customers; OSS projects don't even have those hurdles to overcome.
Actually, no. The quote was: "Never before have we seen energy extracted from a black hole". Since we have never seen the Hawking radiation emitted by any known black hole, this statement is true (we've also never seen energy extraction occur by the Penrose process); the Hawking temperature of any black hole currently observable would be lower than the cosmic background radiation temperature, and certainly orders of magnitude below the black hole's local thermal environment, that we would never have a prayer to observe the HR.
Actually, orbits are only elliptical around isolated, spherically symmetric objects in Newtonian gravity. Planets are neither isolated, nor spherically symmetric, and gravity is not Newtonian:-) In the real universe, planets are approximately oblate spheroids with "small" surface ripples, like mountains, valleys, etc, which result in radial variations that make individual orbits look like "wavy ellipses" (which is actually a major source of systematic error in the GPS system that needs to be regularly corrected); further, the non-Newtonian nature of gravity (read General Relativity) causes orbits, even around perfectly symmetrical objects, to not close into ellipses, but to precess with time. And there are all sorts of other effects that you need to worry about (other planets, the sun, atmospheric drag, etc. etc. etc.) that further modify the orbit of spacecraft, guaranteeing that they're orbits won't actually look anything like ellipses on all but an "average basis" over a few orbital periods.
Do you know what stops the shepherd moons from breaking up? (they are within the Roche limit)
Well, it is not the case that ALL objects within the Roche Limit will break up. The Roche Limit is defined as the orbital radius at which an object with _no tensile strength_ (that is, with no internal forces holding it together) will be torn apart by the tidal forces of the parent body. Objects with non-vanishing tensile strength (rocky or icy moons, or space probes, for instance) can survive at an orbital radius well within the Roche Limit; exactly how far inside that radius is dependent on many factors (the material, the orbital eccentricity, the rotation speed of the object, etc.), and isn't generally easy to calculate.
I thought I might elaborate (since I'm trying to avoid work and all). It may be true that most people don't use 95% of the features of a given software product (I use 95% as an example...I don't actually believe that number). BUT, that doesn't mean that 95% of the features of a given product aren't used. If you turn the statement around, you will probably find that MOST of the features of a given software product are used by SOMEONE in the user pool. Another way to say the same thing is to say that while most people only use 5% of the features in a product, they use a DIFFERENT 5% than another user. That is what makes it a good idea from a programmer's perspective to put the feature in, even if most people don't use that particular feature; someone, somewhere, sometime will need it.
the constitution forbids "blank" warrants. You must describe exactly where the tapping is to take place.
You are referring of course to the Fourth Amendment, which says in part: "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You must be careful when you are claiming what the Constitution does and doesn't guarantee, of course; clearly, the Constitution does not guarantee that warrants will be made public, nor that they must be made by a judge, nor that they be made available to the person who is going to be searched! The Constitution also doesn't talk about "wiretaps"; phone lines are not a "place to be searched" nor is a conversation a "thing" that can be literally seized; while it is not clear that roaming wiretaps will be found to be constitutional (although it is my understanding that in certain areas (organized crime, RICO, cross-border smuggling are a few) that roving taps are already used and are legal), you must admit that the issue is not as cut and dried Constitutionally as you seem to imply.
The USA and PATRIOT acts would allow nationwide taps. This completely disregards the jurisdiction of a judge (except some higher courts).
No, it emphatically does not disregard the "jursidiction of a judge", because the jurisdiction of a given court over warrant authority is whatever the Congress says that it is. There are only a few jurisdictional issues discussed in the Constitution, and all others are left to the Congress to decide (see U.S. Constitution, Article III, Secs 1 and 2); warrants are not one of the issues covered, and as I noted above, there is no guarantee that they will even be issued by judicial authority! (see Findlaw for an in-depth discussion of the state of 4th Amendment Law, warrants, oversight authority, and electronic wiretap warrants).
The problem with a roving wiretap, is precisely that it follows the suspect around, and can capture the conversations of non-suspects in the suspect's vicinity.
And the non-roving wiretap has exactly the same problem: it can capture the conversations of non-suspects in the suspect's vicinity. How does that issue argue against roving wiretaps, but not argue against the non-roving version? I just don't see a difference, but perhaps I'm missing something?
You aren't paying attention.... the correct statement would be "Everything the Administration wants to do, it can do right now if judges approve." The administration argument on many of these items is that, when conducting nationwide investigations to prevent or prosecute terrorism and organized crime, the current need to obtain many approvals from many judges in many different jurisdictions is so time consuming and beaurocratically stifling, that they aren't able to effectively carry out their job. And in certain instances they are correctly claiming that they are not allowed to do certain things (they can't tap the phone used by a given individual, but can only tap a given phone line, for example, or having to avoid official criminal investigations in situations which might also have counterintelligence and antiterrorism components, because they have different, mutually exclusive requirements and conditions)
As to your claim that this is just a power trip: not liking Ashcroft is one thing, but distorting his words to support your desires is intellectually dishonest. You ought to be clear of the facts before spouting your opinion about them.
If you reread what the part just before what you highlighted (the part that says "striking the following each place it occurs"), you will see that they are REMOVING the restriction on overtime pay, exactly the opposite of what you are complaining about.
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine it's probably also kind of hard to aim, since neutrinos are so hard to see in the first place...
Actually, it is (relatively) easy to aim, as long as you are done aiming before the neutrinos are produced... neutrino beams are made by accelerating protons into targets, which produces beams of charged pions, which are collimated and sent down a beam pipe pointing directly at Super-K. Some fraction of the pions (checking... checking... 99.9877% ) of the pions decay to a muon and a muon neutrino, going in the same direction as the pion (i.e., pointed directly at Super-K). All the muons and undecayed pions are stopped at the end of the beam pipe, and don't contribute to the beam. The hardest part of aiming is digging the tunnel in the right direction, but GPS makes that relatively easy these days.
As you pointed out, the size and shape of the earth is miniscule compared to variations in the orbit. However, if neutrinos oscillate between different mass eigenstates during their travels, then you would expect the oscillation rate inside matter (i.e. the earth) to be different from the rate of oscillation outside matter (i.e. the vacuum of space), and from knowledge of the oscillation rate in one, you can predict the oscillation rate in the other (well, given some other information that doesn't concern us here...). The day/night variation would arise because the neutrinos from the sun that are detected during the day travel through less matter than do the neutrinos at night, which have to travel all the way through the earth first, and hence would have reached a different point in their oscillation. You would also expect to see a seasonal variation as the earth moves radially toward or away from the sun during the year, because the distance over which the neutrinos oscillate would change. Finally, from knowledge of the matter effects, you would also predict a difference in the number of neutrino events passing through the detector from teh top and from the bottom. It was actually the last effect which was the evidence for oscillations, if I'm not mistaken.
Is that much of a choice?
Yes it is: if you don't like the legal reality of a given industry, don't work in that industry. Do something else. If I don't like the types of offers I get for postdoctoral positions in my field, and I sign a contract and take a job anyway, I can't very well complain that the postdoctoral market is "unfair" and that by not signing I will have "no career". Life isn't fair sometimes, but it isn't because other people are "evil" or "lying"; that's just the way life is. There are many times in your life when you have to make a decision that you might not like; it isn't everyone else's fault when that happens.
No, it doesn't mean that at all. Contracts are a way of spelling out, in detail, the rights and responsibilities of all parties to the contract. As they are legal instruments, the language they are written in is the language of the legal system, and what words mean in the legal system, they don't necessarily mean in common usage. This is no different than the way language is used in other specialized areas: "quantum leap" in physics and in common usage not only have different meaning, they are almost antonyms! "Hacker" means different things to the general public and to the computer literati. If you call a computer geek a "cracker" and he may get mad at you because he thinks of himself as a "hacker"; you call someone a "cracker" on the street, and you may find yourself with a major racial incident on your hands. Similarly, if you read a legally binding contract assigning words the meaning they have in general parlance, you have screwed up; what is very straightforward and unimpeachable legal language to a lawyer may mean an entirely different thing to someone with no legal training. But when that contract is interpreted by the courts, don't expect to be able to get away with the "it doesn't mean what I thought it meant" argument. To call legal language "deceptive" because it means something other than what its colloquial interpretation would be is not a defense, and doesn't make sense. If a non-programmer tells you that your use of "branch" in a discussion about your latest program is wrong because "everyone knows that a branch is a part of a tree", who's the one that is wrong?
Does that mean that I think all contracts are clear and unquestionable, or that no contracts are deceptive? Of course not; there are many lawsuits every year over the interpretation of contracts. But most contracts are _not_ legally ambiguous and deceptive, and most clauses of most contracts are also not legally ambiguous and deceptive. Most contract lawsuits come down to one of the parties not understanding what is clearly written in the contract, or not being happy with what they signed and claiming that the meaning is different than what it is in order to try and renegotiate the deal.
The bottom line: if you aren't a practitioner in a field, don't believe or pretend that you understand the ins and outs, the language, or the meaning of actions in that field. You do that, you will get screwed. And if you don't like the details of the contract, don't sign it; you may have to choose a different career, but is that really any worse than being miserable in the one you chose because you agreed to things you didn't want to do?
Except that there's no real competition over what the terms of the contract are
Which doesn't change the fact that you can choose not to sign that contract if you don't like its terms.
the terms of the contract are generally misrepresented to the artist and
Which is why you don't sign the contract if you don't understand each and every word in it; if you don't, go see a lawyer and have it explained to you, section by section. If you don't understand the terms of a contract, or it is vague, or it gives the corporation more than you are willing to give it, and you sign it anyway, that is your problem, and has no bearing on the legality of the contractual obligation. This is just as true for artists as it is for contract programmers, or engineering consultants, or any other employee or corporation bound by a contractual obligation.
worst of all, the record companies are infamous for not abiding by the terms of these contracts when it suits them
I'm sorry, but I don't believe that this statement bears any true resemblance to the facts of the industry. If what you MEANT is that the "record companies are infamous for not abiding by what the artist thought were the terms of the contract", then I you might be right, if the majority of artists make the mistake of signing contracts that they don't understand. But again, that is irrelevant. If the contract means something other than what you thought it means, you are screwed, plain and simple, and it isn't because the company is some "evil corporation". The contract says what it says, and if you don't know what it says you shouldn't have signed it.
Do you know how impossible it is for an artist to get a fair and accurate audit of his business with a company?
Again, I don't believe this. There are literally tens of thousands of artists under contract worldwide; if the business was as corrupt as you claim, and if the companies were really violating their contractual obligations as frequently as you claim, then those corporations would be sued out of existence in huge class actions by disgruntled artists whose contractual rights were violated, and, they would also be sued out of existence by the US, Canadian, and European tax agencies for tax fraud. But that isn't happening.
Am I claiming that the corporations are lily white, and never violate a contract clause or lie, cheat, or steal? No, of course not, I'm am more certain that violations occur all the time than of anything else in this post. But it can't be as widespread as you claim, or there would be legal hell to pay; and in our "litigous society" they would pay. If what you meant is that it is "impossible for an artists to get an audit that he thinks is fair and accurate", that is something else entirely, and completely separated from the legal reality of the audits that actually occur.
This is a good example of what goes around comes around.
And even if everything you claim is happening actually IS happening, that doesn't make the illegal actions of music copyright infringers any less illegal. Under this type of logic the record companies could just as easily consider the DMCA and SSSCA a good example of "what goes around comes around", and be completely justified in their beliefs, couldn't they?
It's worth remembering in all of this that the US constitution grants congress a limited power to enact copyright law.
From the great document itself:
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
As has been pointed out in the past on Slashdot, note very carefully that "limited" applies only to the time duration of the copy and patent rights; the Constitution explicitly gives Congress the power to grant rights of any scope as long as those rights are limited in duration, and as long as those rights do not infringe on any constitutionally protected rights.
The constitution does not grant congress any power of any kind to use copyright law to defend the profitability of corporations, or guarantee them that their business models will remain unchanged by technology.
I don't see that restriction anywhere in the Constitution; if Congress believes that such a provision would "promote ... science and the useful arts", it certainly could use its copyright power for such purposes. However, I challenge you to locate any section of the U.S. Code that actually authorizes the government to do that. What you will find are provisions in the Code that "secure for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", and that among those Rights is: the Right to transfer of copyright (from artist ot music company); the Right to restrict the forms and methods by which those writings and discoveries are initially distributed (they aren't required to sell scribed wax cylinders or vinyl records); the Right to encrypt those writings and discoveries and to solely distribute the rights to decrypt them under terms decided by the holder of the copyright (DMCA); and many others rights.
Whether these Rights that have been granted by copyright law satisfy the Constitutional requirements is not clear, as they haven't been tested in court, nor is it clear that they are good public policy; you and I may not like them, and you and I may think that some of them go too far, but it is not at all clear that they are unconstitutional (I would guess that most of them ARE constitutional, but bad public policy). And even if the law satisfies I.8.8, it is not clear that it doesn't violate some OTHER portion of the Constitution (some claim First Amendment rights are violated, others claim Fair Use and First Sale are constitutionally protected rights, just like the right of privacy), or if the law is in conflict with other legislation in certain circumstances (DMCA appears to many of us to conflict with the fair use provisions of the rest of the Copyright Act). I certainly think that some of the provisions of the DMCA are not Constitutional, but not because they violate the Copyright Clause.
All that aside, claiming that the law has been written to "defend the profitability of corporations", or to "guarantee ... business models" is, frankly, silly. If that were the case, then the protections in the law would not apply to you and the things you create or discover (since you aren't a corporation); and the protections most certainly DO apply to you. That you don't like the way some corporations are utilizing their granted copyrights has no bearing on the question of whether the granted rights are Constitutional; certainly, I don't like the way government contractors are required to bid on a project as if they were a union shop even when they aren't, but that doesn't mean the laws requiring such things are unconstitutional.
So, ask yourselves, does file sharing ... promote the progress of science and the useful arts?
Certainly this is irrelevant to the copyright argument! Sharing files may or may not promote progress; sharing of copyrighted sound files without the express permission of the copyright holder, even without the DMCA, is certainly illegal, and making it so was certainly within the purview of the Congress -- that you are using FreeNet instead of SneakerNet, or that you are using mp3 instead of analog-casette, simple changes of technology, doesn't make it any less illegal. The technology in this case is irrelevant to the legality of exchange; the Napster case (and all other similar cases) was not about technology, but whether by being an enabler of copyright infringement to the near exclusion of all other business, Napster was an infringer itself. The question of whether copyright infringement itself occurred was never questioned by anyone associated with the case, because it was crystal clear that infringement had occurred. Trying to hide from this fact and claim that Congress doesn't have the power to make that type of infringing illegal is only going to get you ignored by the public, the legislators, and the courts.
Everyone knows it's legally wrong, but most people do not believe it is ethically wrong (as proven by the sheer usage volume of services like Napster and MusicCity). Record companies commit original sins by denying musicians fair compensation, price gouging, and denying consumers fair use rights. In committing these wrongs they are forfeiting their ethical rights.
I don't think it is clear that "most people" think it is ethically acceptable; most people, even in the United States, have never even been to sites like Napster and MusicCity.
Further, justifying what "most people" may or may not believe to be ethically bankrupt or justified by claiming that record companies are unethical is just silly. Record companies are not "denying musicians fair compensation"; the musicians voluntarily agreed to the compensation they are getting when they signed a contract. If they didn't like the terms of the contract, they weren't required to sign it. Ergo, no denial of compensation. Record companies are also not "price gouging"; you aren't obligated to pay for any album in the first place, so you can't claim that you were obligated to pay too much. If you think an album is too expensive, don't buy it. Ergo, not price gouging. And no record company is denying you your "fair use rights"; since those are protected by law to the extent that they exist, you can sue them if they are denying you those rights. Ergo, no "denial of rights". That they may be trying to have the definition of fair use modified is not relevant to the point you made; you have the same rights to try and convince your legislator to advocate changes in the laws relating to fair use that they do. And you can vote, while the corporation can only lobby; that gives you the real power, not them.
Look, I don't like the direction that fair use rights and DRM are going any more than you do, but don't try to turn it into a "righteous individual vs. evil corporation" argument; you'll loose, and we'll all look like idiots in the process. Fair use can best be protected by making logical arguments that accept the reality of the situation (i.e. most people use/used Napster to avoid paying for music they liked, that is, to break the law), and pointing out that the huge societal benefits that come from fair use greatly outweigh the few negatives, and that those negatives can in fact be addressed in ways that don't need to reduce the strength of fair use provisions.
Small correction: Nitrogen is not a noble gas. N2 is not reactive (hence, we have a nice, non-reactive atmosphere that doesn't chemically decompose us), because it is tightly bound. Atomic nitrogen, however, is highly reactive (that's why N2 is bound so tightly, and why most chemical explosives are nitrogen compounds). Nitrogen interrupts the CFC cycle because, when N2 is photo-dissociated into atmomic N, if the atomic N interacts with a CFC molecule, the molecule is broken up. CFCs live so long in the upper atmosphere because solar emissions contain relatively little radiation with sufficient energy to cause the photo-dissociation of nitrogen. Of course, it's been a while since I did any chemistry, so I may have something wrong here.
there is a lot of antagonism in New Zealand towards the US because of Bush's decision to boycott the Kyoto(sp?) Protocol.
Perhaps, then, you could convince the government of New Zealand to advocate a protocol treaty that, unlike Kyoto,
and
Personally, while I am not convinced that the science has shown that there is or will be human induced global warming, I don't see that there is any long term negative impact from addressing what might be a huge problem. In the long run, even if there is no real danger of global warming, it would be to our economic benefit to have cleaner burning, more efficient vehicles, and lower emissions from power plants. I would love for there to be an international treaty that really makes an impact on pollution and emissions globally. But the Kyoto treaty is not going to have any real environmental impact long term, will cost an incredible amount in terms of cash and jobs up front, is not enforceable, is not manageable, is not extensible, and is really nothing more than a feel good measure for politicians to wave in front of their populations to say "see, we're doing something". I'm glad the US backed out without ratifying the treaty; I hope that by staying out, we force a reevaluation of the initial goals of Kyoto, and that we eventually end up with a comprehensive treaty that results in a cleaner environment for the future. But Kyoto is fundamentally broken and is certainly not the way to get there
Last I checked, Bush obtained a majority of the votes in the Electoral College; hence, he won the election. Furthermore, the recounts in Florida by the news outlets down there have (last I saw) shown rather conclusively that his electors in Florida won a plurality of votes, contrary to the claims of the Gore-Lieberman campaign.
Furthermore, on the issue of the Kyoto treaty, the Clinton-Gore administration had many years during which to push the Kyoto treaty through the Senate to ratification, and didn't even try. Perhaps you ought to direct some of your displeasure toward them instead of toward an administration that is doing exactly what it said it would do during the campaign?
Individuals are often conscious of environmental issues, but company executives who have oil fields destroying the earth whilst living comfortably in Aspen typically just don't care.
Executives are individuals too, and corporations are owned, operated, and staffed by individuals. Companies do the things that they do because their customers (individuals!) tell them what to do: people (individuals!) buy gas guzzling SUVs because they like them - no one is forcing them to do so, and suggesting that the reason is "greedy corporations" is ludicrous. People (individuals!) buy the bigger SUV, not the more efficient one, because the bigger one is cheaper - no one is forcing them to spend less money, they just want to.
Suggesting that individuals care and corporations don't is inane and a refuge of the weak willed; corporations do what it takes to make a profit by providing individuals with the goods and services they want at the lowest price possible. Individuals do now and always have had the power to influence what corporatios do, by voting with their dollars (or euros or pounds or rupees etc) If you want a "greener" world, then you need to convince other "individuals" that they should be willing to pay for it, and you need to put your wallet where your mouth is. Don't try to absolve yourself by passing the buck to the "greedy corporation"; it is the collective decisions of millions of individuals that dictate what those corporations do.
I realize you didn't want G.W. Bush elected, but you ought to get your facts straight when criticizing him and his family, since your errors make you look like an idiot to those who are more informed:
That is, O3 losses and volcanic activity appear to be uncoupled in time (lack temporal consistency)
Out of curiosity, how has that statement been confirmed? Detecting delayed effects in time series of earlier causes is an incredibly tricky business when the intervening steps are affected by a host of other variables.
To make those statements less theoretical, let me put it this way:
The question, then, is "How can you show conclusively that variations in stratospheric ozone are NOT caused primarily by natural effects?" "How do you show conclusively that volcanic activity is uncorreclated with ozone fluctuations when the delay in volcanic emissions arriving in the stratosphere is unknown?"
I'm very curious as to how this was done; from my experience in physics experiments, attempting to show correlation when there are variable time delays between cause and effect is incredibly difficult. Even more difficult is ruling OUT a correlation when there are variable time delays. Do you have primary references by any chance?
Do we "need" the ISS? Not really. Should we cut funding, or quit making it? Definitely not.
Let me play devil's advocate for a minute here. At what point would you recommend cutting funding to ISS? The report discussed here shows conclusively that the ISS is vastly over its construction budget, vastly under capable, and vastly more expensive in terms of both astronaut time and NASA funding than anyone had ever dreamed possible. The report says that EVEN IF they cut back the plans by halting construction at the current, scientifically worthless state, and EVEN IF they only maintain a skeleton crew of 3, the minimum necessary to maintain the ISS at its current level of scientific uselessness (a crew of 3 can do less than 20 hours a WEEK of science according to the report), EVEN THEN the ISS will vastly overrun its OPERATING budget every year, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. And this doesn't count the vast cost overruns in the shuttle program for missions assigned to service ISS.
At what point do the immense cost overruns with no conceivable scientific return justify a restructuring of the program in your mind? Could the billions spent in cost overruns be better allocated to other scientific programs that have had to be cut as a result, both within and outside NASA? Seeing as the cost overruns CAN'T be fixed, would you really advocate just giving NASA what it needs to maintain the program it wanted when it promised it could do it for substantially less than what it is currently spending?
Another way to put it: how many years of delay in going back to the moon, or going to Mars is the ISS program worth to you? Or: how many unmanned deep space missions is the ISS worth to you? Or, if you advocate taking money out of non-NASA programs to pay for the ISS, how many years of delay in cancer research, or materials research, or faster computers, or smarter networks, or cleaner burning cars, or longer battery life, etc. are you willing to give up so that a few people can orbit the earth in a scientifically-worthless tin can?
I support manned exploration of space, and I support NASA science programs; I just find that the support for the current ISS program among the population to be bordering on ridiculous, since the money could be so much better spent on cheaper programs with real goals and a real chance to return on investment in both human and scientific terms.
They always abide to government regulations and listen to what their customers say. By selling well made software.
I realize that you were being sarcastic, but I didn't say any of that. I said "pleasing regulators", not "always abiding by regulations". And I never said that a monopoly had to listen to what each and every customer says. And I certainly never said anything about selling well made software or other products.
A monopoly only has to please regulators more often than it pisses them off, keep the "average" customer happy, and sell products that are "good-enough". Blow any of those items, and you will eventually get shot down. But MS really hasn't done any of those things; they likely aren't going to be broken up because they haven't obviously pissed the government off enough, the "average" customer is perfectly happy with them, and most people think they're software is "good enough" for what they need it to do.
But my point is that the vast, vast majority of "the people" can neither do the coding themselves (inability to code, lack of time, etc.), nor can they afford to hire someone to do it for them, nor can they convince or cajole anyone in the OSS world to write what they need. It is just cheaper and easier for someone/some company to pay for a less-than-perfect closed source program that can do more or less what they need to do and that comes with more or less competent on-demand support, and to stick with that software once it has been chosen, than to modify, write or have written the code that does exactly what they want. Most of the closed source "monopolies" got to where they are by providing exactly the less-than-perfect code that did more or less what was needed by the largest number of people. Unless the OSS model manages to respond to the needs of people who neither have the time, the money, the knowledge, nor the inclination to do have the coding done "for them", the closed model will always survive to feed them almost-what-they-need. And I suspect that an OSS monopoly would generally be less responsive to those needs than a closed source monopoly.
if it is an OSS monopoly, would that not mean that the people are in total control?
If I understand what you imply by "the people", the the answer is "no". Just take a look at most (NOT ALL!!!!!) OSS projects today: while there are some notable exceptions, the developers are not interested in making "better software for the people", but "better software for themselves". I am not making a negative value judgement here; there is nothing wrong with this attitude! If you are going to write software for free in your own time, I EXPECT that you will write the software you want, with the features you want, and document it however you want, even if those things don't advance the needs of the larger user base.
But this model doesn't put "the people" in control any more than a closed source model does! In fact, while it might make the monopoly a little more transparent, it completely removes all incentive to be responsive to the "needs" of the "users" (i.e., those users who are not also active developers); in this sense, an OSS monopoly may actually be WORSE for the "the people" than a closed source monopoly is. The closed source monopoly at least has to worry about pleasing government regulators and large volume customers; OSS projects don't even have those hurdles to overcome.
Except for Hawking radiation
Actually, no. The quote was: "Never before have we seen energy extracted from a black hole". Since we have never seen the Hawking radiation emitted by any known black hole, this statement is true (we've also never seen energy extraction occur by the Penrose process); the Hawking temperature of any black hole currently observable would be lower than the cosmic background radiation temperature, and certainly orders of magnitude below the black hole's local thermal environment, that we would never have a prayer to observe the HR.
All orbits are elliptical, anyway.
Actually, orbits are only elliptical around isolated, spherically symmetric objects in Newtonian gravity. Planets are neither isolated, nor spherically symmetric, and gravity is not Newtonian :-) In the real universe, planets are approximately oblate spheroids with "small" surface ripples, like mountains, valleys, etc, which result in radial variations that make individual orbits look like "wavy ellipses" (which is actually a major source of systematic error in the GPS system that needs to be regularly corrected); further, the non-Newtonian nature of gravity (read General Relativity) causes orbits, even around perfectly symmetrical objects, to not close into ellipses, but to precess with time. And there are all sorts of other effects that you need to worry about (other planets, the sun, atmospheric drag, etc. etc. etc.) that further modify the orbit of spacecraft, guaranteeing that they're orbits won't actually look anything like ellipses on all but an "average basis" over a few orbital periods.
Oops... I hate responding to my own posts, but I do need to correct a slight error. I said:
that is, with no internal forces holding it together
I should, of course, have said:
that is, with no internal forces other than gravity holding it together
Do you know what stops the shepherd moons from breaking up? (they are within the Roche limit)
Well, it is not the case that ALL objects within the Roche Limit will break up. The Roche Limit is defined as the orbital radius at which an object with _no tensile strength_ (that is, with no internal forces holding it together) will be torn apart by the tidal forces of the parent body. Objects with non-vanishing tensile strength (rocky or icy moons, or space probes, for instance) can survive at an orbital radius well within the Roche Limit; exactly how far inside that radius is dependent on many factors (the material, the orbital eccentricity, the rotation speed of the object, etc.), and isn't generally easy to calculate.
I thought I might elaborate (since I'm trying to avoid work and all). It may be true that most people don't use 95% of the features of a given software product (I use 95% as an example...I don't actually believe that number). BUT, that doesn't mean that 95% of the features of a given product aren't used. If you turn the statement around, you will probably find that MOST of the features of a given software product are used by SOMEONE in the user pool. Another way to say the same thing is to say that while most people only use 5% of the features in a product, they use a DIFFERENT 5% than another user. That is what makes it a good idea from a programmer's perspective to put the feature in, even if most people don't use that particular feature; someone, somewhere, sometime will need it.
the constitution forbids "blank" warrants. You must describe exactly where the tapping is to take place.
You are referring of course to the Fourth Amendment, which says in part: "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." You must be careful when you are claiming what the Constitution does and doesn't guarantee, of course; clearly, the Constitution does not guarantee that warrants will be made public, nor that they must be made by a judge, nor that they be made available to the person who is going to be searched! The Constitution also doesn't talk about "wiretaps"; phone lines are not a "place to be searched" nor is a conversation a "thing" that can be literally seized; while it is not clear that roaming wiretaps will be found to be constitutional (although it is my understanding that in certain areas (organized crime, RICO, cross-border smuggling are a few) that roving taps are already used and are legal), you must admit that the issue is not as cut and dried Constitutionally as you seem to imply.
The USA and PATRIOT acts would allow nationwide taps. This completely disregards the jurisdiction of a judge (except some higher courts).
No, it emphatically does not disregard the "jursidiction of a judge", because the jurisdiction of a given court over warrant authority is whatever the Congress says that it is. There are only a few jurisdictional issues discussed in the Constitution, and all others are left to the Congress to decide (see U.S. Constitution, Article III, Secs 1 and 2); warrants are not one of the issues covered, and as I noted above, there is no guarantee that they will even be issued by judicial authority! (see Findlaw for an in-depth discussion of the state of 4th Amendment Law, warrants, oversight authority, and electronic wiretap warrants).
The problem with a roving wiretap, is precisely that it follows the suspect around, and can capture the conversations of non-suspects in the suspect's vicinity.
And the non-roving wiretap has exactly the same problem: it can capture the conversations of non-suspects in the suspect's vicinity. How does that issue argue against roving wiretaps, but not argue against the non-roving version? I just don't see a difference, but perhaps I'm missing something?
You aren't paying attention.... the correct statement would be "Everything the Administration wants to do, it can do right now if judges approve." The administration argument on many of these items is that, when conducting nationwide investigations to prevent or prosecute terrorism and organized crime, the current need to obtain many approvals from many judges in many different jurisdictions is so time consuming and beaurocratically stifling, that they aren't able to effectively carry out their job. And in certain instances they are correctly claiming that they are not allowed to do certain things (they can't tap the phone used by a given individual, but can only tap a given phone line, for example, or having to avoid official criminal investigations in situations which might also have counterintelligence and antiterrorism components, because they have different, mutually exclusive requirements and conditions)
As to your claim that this is just a power trip: not liking Ashcroft is one thing, but distorting his words to support your desires is intellectually dishonest. You ought to be clear of the facts before spouting your opinion about them.
If you reread what the part just before what you highlighted (the part that says "striking the following each place it occurs"), you will see that they are REMOVING the restriction on overtime pay, exactly the opposite of what you are complaining about.