That was not the issue. The issue is whenether the treaty does supplant the constitution or is complementary to it. I find it difficult to believe that a treaty ratified without constitutional problems in every other western democracy, is somehow incompatible with the US constition.
I don't. The US constitution comes from a different place than that those of european countries. It appears that the ICC will at, the very least, violate the 6th amendment right to jury trial, replacing the jury with a panel of judges.
I find it even harder to believe that this is such a certainty that it shouldn't even be tried by the Supreme Court.
I see no need for it to be so. There's no great desire in the US to join the ICC. It's quite possible that if put before the senate it would be rejected (like Kyoto would be), and any President that did so would be commiting political suicide.
Said governments have all ratified the UN declaration of human rights.
I can't put my faith in a document that claims:
"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."
Here in the US, my rights are natural, and not granted because I do not interfere with a country.
Unless you mean that states aren't bound to the treaties they sign (in which case there can be no law whatsoever)
First of all, there's a difference between signing a treaty and ratifying it. The misguided Clinton adminstration signed many treaties that stand no chance of being ratified.
Second, there's plenty law without international treaties. The laws against murder, for example, are not due to any international treaty, but rather due to people within a state or country deciding to make them illegal, in a framework where they can be enforced.
Indeed, a treaty that is not enforcable by force is not worth the paper it's written on. Remember the Kellog-Bryant pact, which outlawed war, and was signed by Germany and Japan?
The morality of actions is independant of what other countries think of them. If the war in Iraq was moral (and I think it was), then France's opposition does not change that. If it was not, then it would not become so simply because of French support.
Besides that, out of the 18 Judges in the ICC, not a single one of them originates from a non-democratic country.
Today. Sorry, but I've seen the world change too much in my lifetime to beleive that the composition of the ICC today will represent the composition of the ICC in the future. After all, right now Libya is the head of the UN human rights committee.
The Supreme Court considers treaties to be of equal precedence to the Constitution.
No, that's not the case. In Reid v. Covert, the Court wrote: "This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty."
That is quite debatable. A good number of politicians feel differently.
Not really. A treaty can't take precedence over the constitution. (Would the US be allowed to abridge free speech just because a treaty demanded it of us? Then why should it be the case with double jeopardy?)
The same argument could be used by any nation. Are we supposed to belive the USA is somehow unique?
Ignoring the fact that the US (as an economic and military hyperpower) is unique, no. It's a bad treaty for everyone.
Faith in justice is one of the American ideals I mentioned. There is no reason besides xenophobia to think that America should not extend this faith to the international scene.
I have faith in the decision of 12 randomly-picked Americans, coming from a society in which many people have a common background and ideas. I don't have much faith in the members of an international tribunal, picked not by people by by governments, which do not share my ideals. Indeed, the problem with many international organizations (such as thew UN) is that they derive legitimacy from governments, rather than from people.
Re:Iraqi, U.S., or international trial appropriate
on
Saddam Hussein Arrested
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes it would. There already is such a court, the International Criminal Court.. The problem is, the USA opposes it.
For good reason, mind you. The US could not join any ICC treaty, as the terms of the treaty are not acceptable under the US constitution. More pragmatically, it seems quite likely that the tranzis would use the ICC to bring frivilous charges against various officials in the US.
War-crimes tribunals should be short-term, focusing on the results of a single conflict and then dissolved. To do otherwise leads to mission creep, and the defining down of crimes against humanity merely to give the tribunal something to do.
I have to agree with this. After reading 1632 for free online, I went out and immediately bought a copy of 1633, in hardcover. I probably would have bought a paper copy of 1632 as well, but it was out of stock. I still might, should I need to pad up an order for free shipping purposes.
Um... Shenzhou 5 will hardly be the first launch attempt. On the other hand, the space shuttle flew manned on its first launch attempt, with a crew of two.
I used *works* in a slightly broader sense, as in a good system that's *widely deployed* and *non-vaporware*.
I have in my hand a CDMA phone that works. It's upward compatible with CDMA2000, which has been deployed, and working today. You're supporting the European standard UMTS, which is W-CDMA based, and hasn't been proven to work.
The Economist points out that there are 2.3 million customers for CDMA2000 in Japan, compared to 135 thousand for UMTS.
I have no problems whatsover with the EU lengthening the technical generations a bit. It's better for interoperability, creates a bigger market, and avoids vendor lock-in.
The problem is, the EU is doing this by specifying a winner. They anoint a standard, and then everyone goes back to there own companies, and see if they can make it work. In the case of UMTS, the answer seems to be "no", or at least "not yet".
In the US, on the other hand, new technologies are rolled out when the service providers deem the technology is mature enough for it to work. Several competing technologies can be tried at once, and the winner can be used as the base of the next generation designs.
Does this lead to lock in to carriers? Yes, to some extent. The contracts that carriers force people to sign is probably more effective than the technological barriers.
The idea that the EU will use GSM till eternity is as stupid as saying that the US will universally adopt CDMA2K, and that is the last mobile technology ever to be invented.
I think nothing of the sort. The problem is, the EU is picking a winner that isn't. The Economist points out the the telecom carriers there are having problems with the technology, and that's stopping 3G deployment in the EU. In the US, 3G is already out (CDMA2K). And if UMTS winds up being the better system in the long run, providers can adopt it instead, without the FCC revoking their license.
Until one can have 1 single phone with CDMA working in 5 continents, it won't win.
First, I see this as being a basically useless criteria for selecting a phone. My CDMA phone works anywhere in the US, and that's generally good enough. Europeans forget the the US is basically comparable with the EU, and not a single country, at least where things like size and travel are concerned.
Second, this isn't a competition between GSM and CDMA, it's between WCDMA and CDMA2000. CDMA2000 works, WCDMA doesn't. Just ask the companies that want to switch the standard.
Den Beste's problem is with the European tendency to pick a winner (even if it's a loser), as compared to the American way of allowing competition to pick.
GSM is technically superior for two reasons. The first is that it is modular. You can stick a SIM card in anything that has a GSM slot - your mobile phone, your PDA, your laptop, your anything, and then that device becomes your communication tool, with your address book and account information.
I should just point out that this has little or nothing to do with GSM itself, and much to do with the phone-culture that has sprung up in Europe. If the European carriers were to adopt CDMA-2000 rather than UMTS (as they want to do), there's no reason why they could not insist on a SIM card feature being included in the phones. That would be trivial to add to a working CDMA-2000 phone, while it's pointless on a non-functional W-CDMA system.
The same goes for the arguments about pricing schemes in Europe as compared to the US. There's no reason to believe that the European pricing model will change at all, simply because they've decided to use CDMA-2000 as opposed to UMTS.
Of course it may take a little while longer for Europe to adopt the latest whizz-bang RF layer in their mobile communication systems. But in the mean time, we've been able for *years* to use an *implemented* system that *works*.
This doesn't even make any sense. I'm here in the US, and I have a cell phone that *works*. Just about everyone I know has a cell phone, and they all work reasonably well.
SDB's point is less about cellular technology, and more about the approaches to regulation that were applied in the US and Europe. In the US, the market was allowed to decide which technology would be the winner. As a result, when CDMA emerged victorious as an RF-layer, there was a base of experience in the US with using CDMA technology, that lead to easy and compatible deployment of CDMA2000. Compare that to Europe, where TDMA-based GSM was the mandatory standard. The new mandatory standard is W-CDMA, but there's no experience to implement it, and carriers are forbidden to use the working system CDMA2000.
This is not-invented-here on a continental scale.
Of course CDMA adoption will still be partial, with the next better transmission system (full-spectrum wavelets?) already appearing on the horizon.
And this is another reason why the US model is better than the European one. In the US, a carrier can at any time implement whatever technology he considers best, subject to FCC limitations on interference and the like.
In Europe, the EU has decided to pick a winner, and forbids spectrum from being used in any other way. A result is that they'll wind up being stuck a generation behind while the US and Japan deploy new technology whenever it's economically feasable.
The depths of an ocean isn't really a hinderance to a major world power who really wants to know what's being said on a cable. Search 'IVY BELLS' for the details of one of these programs.
For those who are interested, a CG movie is being made based on Bonestell's space art. It's called Man Conquers Space, and it's due out eventually... but you can find the home page and trailers on the web at http://users.bigpond.net.au/surfacesrendered/MCSHo mepage.html.
This doesn't strike me as all that impressive. They need to customize hardware for any city they wish to model. One can consider this to be a form of preprocessing, and for a fair comparison to be made, one must also allow preprocessing to be done using the computational method. After preprocessing, results can be obtained using an array lookup.
This may be interesting, but I doubt it's all that revolutionary.
The slew of bogus press releases on april fools day made me think of a relatively evil business strategy.
Take a big, formerly im- or amoral company whose name has become associated with killing or otherwise harming consumers and investors. (Think a Phillip Morris or an Enron)
These companies routinely change their names to try to create a new image. Well, if I was {in charge, evil}, I would announce such a name change late on March 31st. The name change would get lost in a deluge of similar, pointless, april fools joke stories.
Hm... perhaps I should get a business methods patent on this one.
+ C# is completely OO - even an Int32 is an Object. Java uses primitive types.
I think that saying that C# is completely OO is a bit of an exaggeration. An Int32 is a struct, which cannot be inherited from or accessed through a reference. I think that having such a degenerate class of objects detracts from its OO-nature.
It's still slightly more object-oriented than Java, however.
Of course, one had to register before last September to get orbital elements from nasa. So, it's a bit misleading to claim that september had anything to do with it. This is a relatively September-agnostic sort of thing, which IIRC was implemented to keep people from hammering the servers.
"Pirates seek to profit off the enormous popularity of DVDs by using the latest in technology to illegally manufacture DVD copies of Hollywood films, and again dupe consumers into purchasing a wholly inferior product," MPAA Chief Executive Jack Valenti said in a statement.
Hm... This is an interesting statement. I wonder if the people who they busted were actualy copying existing DVDs, or whether they were instead videotaping movies in theaters (or from other sources) and burning them onto DVDs. In the latter case, I don't think that CSS would be involved at all.
I think it IS safe to assume that the satellite could fit in the cargo area...assuming they can retract any commucation antena they had to extend.
I'm not so sure about that. This TDRS is a newer models, not like the ones launched by the shuttle.
It also is probably pointless to do a rescue mission. IIRC, NASA contracted to take delivery on orbit, so if the mission fails, it doesn't cost taxpayers anything. Why risk a rescue mission when they can just wait for a new satellite to be built?
I'm just a CS geek, but I don't seem to remember skin cancer rates being linked to global warming. Ozone depletion due to CFCs, yes, but there are now treaties banning that.
The reason behind this is that distributing one time pads to everyone you may want to communicate with is not really feasable. If you can get a large amount of random bits to your compatriot securely, why not simply give him the message over that channel?
One-time-pads must be just that, one time, because reuse of the keys makes them eaiser to crack. (Aparrently, this is how the NSA's VENONA intercepts worked.)
Pgp is nice because it doesn't presume that a secure channel exists, and it allows a large amount of data to be exchanged without a high probabilty of decryption. (Unless the NSA knows something we don't.)
BTW, if you're ever in the Washington DC area, visit the National Cryptologic Museum, just outside the NSA compound in Ft. Meade, MD. They have some really neat stuff there, including Enigma machines that people can just use.
Actually, there were a few achievments that the US did get to first. Specifically:
First rendezvous between two manned spacecraft. (Gemini 76)
First docking of a manned spacecraft. (Gemini VIII)
First manned craft to orbit the moon. (Apollo 8)
First manned moon landing. (Apollo 11)
That's just by the manned program. There are also a few firsts by the US in the unmanned arena, including the first flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. IIRC, the US was also the first to flyby Mercury, and to land on an asteroid.
I just wouldn't say the Soviets were ahead on every major score, especially after Gemini got going.
Right now the service module is scheduled for launch on 2000-07-12. That assumes that the proton launches before then all launch successfully. (There have been some mission failures as of late.) ISTR there are some constraints on Russian ground stations that would make it hard to launch much later and still dock in daylight... Remember, the Russians can only track spacecraft when they are over Russia itself, more or less.
Also note that Canada and Europe have been fairly good about respecting their commitments to the international station, from what I've heard.
Actually that's an ever better question, and a nice student project: write a Difference engine (or even Analytical Engine) simulator -- ideally with graphics showing the simulated machine in operation, but failing that, just simulating the abstract operations.
IIRC, there is an analytical engine simulator floating around on the new. My gut says fourmilab.ch has it, but I don't have time to check, sorry.
Slashdot Mirror
That was not the issue. The issue is whenether the treaty does supplant the constitution or is complementary to it.
I find it difficult to believe that a treaty ratified without constitutional problems in every other western democracy, is somehow incompatible with the US constition.
I don't. The US constitution comes from a different place than that those of european countries. It appears that the ICC will at, the very least, violate the 6th amendment right to jury trial, replacing the jury with a panel of judges.
I find it even harder to believe that this is such a certainty that it shouldn't even be tried by the Supreme Court.
I see no need for it to be so. There's no great desire in the US to join the ICC. It's quite possible that if put before the senate it would be rejected (like Kyoto would be), and any President that did so would be commiting political suicide.
Said governments have all ratified the UN declaration of human rights.
I can't put my faith in a document that claims:
"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."
Here in the US, my rights are natural, and not granted because I do not interfere with a country.
Unless you mean that states aren't bound to the treaties they sign (in which case there can be no law whatsoever)
First of all, there's a difference between signing a treaty and ratifying it. The misguided Clinton adminstration signed many treaties that stand no chance of being ratified.
Second, there's plenty law without international treaties. The laws against murder, for example, are not due to any international treaty, but rather due to people within a state or country deciding to make them illegal, in a framework where they can be enforced.
Indeed, a treaty that is not enforcable by force is not worth the paper it's written on. Remember the Kellog-Bryant pact, which outlawed war, and was signed by Germany and Japan?
The morality of actions is independant of what other countries think of them. If the war in Iraq was moral (and I think it was), then France's opposition does not change that. If it was not, then it would not become so simply because of French support.
Besides that, out of the 18 Judges in the ICC, not a single one of them originates from a non-democratic country.
Today. Sorry, but I've seen the world change too much in my lifetime to beleive that the composition of the ICC today will represent the composition of the ICC in the future. After all, right now Libya is the head of the UN human rights committee.
The Supreme Court considers treaties to be of equal precedence to the Constitution.
No, that's not the case. In Reid v. Covert, the Court wrote: "This Court has regularly and uniformly recognized the supremacy of the Constitution over a treaty."
That is quite debatable. A good number of politicians feel differently.
Not really. A treaty can't take precedence over the constitution. (Would the US be allowed to abridge free speech just because a treaty demanded it of us? Then why should it be the case with double jeopardy?)
The same argument could be used by any nation. Are we supposed to belive the USA is somehow unique?
Ignoring the fact that the US (as an economic and military hyperpower) is unique, no. It's a bad treaty for everyone.
Faith in justice is one of the American ideals I mentioned. There is no reason besides xenophobia to think that America should not extend this faith to the international scene.
I have faith in the decision of 12 randomly-picked Americans, coming from a society in which many people have a common background and ideas. I don't have much faith in the members of an international tribunal, picked not by people by by governments, which do not share my ideals. Indeed, the problem with many international organizations (such as thew UN) is that they derive legitimacy from governments, rather than from people.
Yes it would. There already is such a court, the International Criminal Court..
The problem is, the USA opposes it.
For good reason, mind you. The US could not join any ICC treaty, as the terms of the treaty are not acceptable under the US constitution. More pragmatically, it seems quite likely that the tranzis would use the ICC to bring frivilous charges against various officials in the US.
War-crimes tribunals should be short-term, focusing on the results of a single conflict and then dissolved. To do otherwise leads to mission creep, and the defining down of crimes against humanity merely to give the tribunal something to do.
Yes, but I think you have the order reversed.
I have to agree with this. After reading 1632 for free online, I went out and immediately bought a copy of 1633, in hardcover. I probably would have bought a paper copy of 1632 as well, but it was out of stock. I still might, should I need to pad up an order for free shipping purposes.
Um... Shenzhou 5 will hardly be the first launch attempt. On the other hand, the space shuttle flew manned on its first launch attempt, with a crew of two.
I used *works* in a slightly broader sense, as in a good system that's *widely deployed* and *non-vaporware*.
I have in my hand a CDMA phone that works. It's upward compatible with CDMA2000, which has been deployed, and working today. You're supporting the European standard UMTS, which is W-CDMA based, and hasn't been proven to work.
The Economist points out that there are 2.3 million customers for CDMA2000 in Japan, compared to 135 thousand for UMTS.
I have no problems whatsover with the EU lengthening the technical generations a bit. It's better for interoperability, creates a bigger market, and avoids vendor lock-in.
The problem is, the EU is doing this by specifying a winner. They anoint a standard, and then everyone goes back to there own companies, and see if they can make it work. In the case of UMTS, the answer seems to be "no", or at least "not yet".
In the US, on the other hand, new technologies are rolled out when the service providers deem the technology is mature enough for it to work. Several competing technologies can be tried at once, and the winner can be used as the base of the next generation designs.
Does this lead to lock in to carriers? Yes, to some extent. The contracts that carriers force people to sign is probably more effective than the technological barriers.
The idea that the EU will use GSM till eternity is as stupid as saying that the US will universally adopt CDMA2K, and that is the last mobile technology ever to be invented.
I think nothing of the sort. The problem is, the EU is picking a winner that isn't. The Economist points out the the telecom carriers there are having problems with the technology, and that's stopping 3G deployment in the EU. In the US, 3G is already out (CDMA2K). And if UMTS winds up being the better system in the long run, providers can adopt it instead, without the FCC revoking their license.
Get near the end of your minutes and you'll be pissed when you spend 2 minutes of airtime to get a telemarketer to stop calling you.
In the US, it's illegal for a telemarketer to call a mobile phone. Probably for just this reason.
Until one can have 1 single phone with CDMA working in 5 continents, it won't win.
First, I see this as being a basically useless criteria for selecting a phone. My CDMA phone works anywhere in the US, and that's generally good enough. Europeans forget the the US is basically comparable with the EU, and not a single country, at least where things like size and travel are concerned.
Second, this isn't a competition between GSM and CDMA, it's between WCDMA and CDMA2000. CDMA2000 works, WCDMA doesn't. Just ask the companies that want to switch the standard.
Den Beste's problem is with the European tendency to pick a winner (even if it's a loser), as compared to the American way of allowing competition to pick.
GSM is technically superior for two reasons. The first is that it is modular. You can stick a SIM card in anything that has a GSM slot - your mobile phone, your PDA, your laptop, your anything, and then that device becomes your communication tool, with your address book and account information.
I should just point out that this has little or nothing to do with GSM itself, and much to do with the phone-culture that has sprung up in Europe. If the European carriers were to adopt CDMA-2000 rather than UMTS (as they want to do), there's no reason why they could not insist on a SIM card feature being included in the phones. That would be trivial to add to a working CDMA-2000 phone, while it's pointless on a non-functional W-CDMA system.
The same goes for the arguments about pricing schemes in Europe as compared to the US. There's no reason to believe that the European pricing model will change at all, simply because they've decided to use CDMA-2000 as opposed to UMTS.
Of course it may take a little while longer for Europe to adopt the latest whizz-bang RF layer in their mobile communication systems. But in the mean time, we've been able for *years* to use an *implemented* system that *works*.
This doesn't even make any sense. I'm here in the US, and I have a cell phone that *works*. Just about everyone I know has a cell phone, and they all work reasonably well.
SDB's point is less about cellular technology, and more about the approaches to regulation that were applied in the US and Europe. In the US, the market was allowed to decide which technology would be the winner. As a result, when CDMA emerged victorious as an RF-layer, there was a base of experience in the US with using CDMA technology, that lead to easy and compatible deployment of CDMA2000. Compare that to Europe, where TDMA-based GSM was the mandatory standard. The new mandatory standard is W-CDMA, but there's no experience to implement it, and carriers are forbidden to use the working system CDMA2000.
This is not-invented-here on a continental scale.
Of course CDMA adoption will still be partial, with the next better transmission system (full-spectrum wavelets?) already appearing on the horizon.
And this is another reason why the US model is better than the European one. In the US, a carrier can at any time implement whatever technology he considers best, subject to FCC limitations on interference and the like.
In Europe, the EU has decided to pick a winner, and forbids spectrum from being used in any other way. A result is that they'll wind up being stuck a generation behind while the US and Japan deploy new technology whenever it's economically feasable.
The depths of an ocean isn't really a hinderance to a major world power who really wants to know what's being said on a cable. Search 'IVY BELLS' for the details of one of these programs.
For those who are interested, a CG movie is being made based on Bonestell's space art. It's called Man Conquers Space, and it's due out eventually... but you can find the home page and trailers on the web at http://users.bigpond.net.au/surfacesrendered/MCSHo mepage.html.
This doesn't strike me as all that impressive. They need to customize hardware for any city they wish to model. One can consider this to be a form of preprocessing, and for a fair comparison to be made, one must also allow preprocessing to be done using the computational method. After preprocessing, results can be obtained using an array lookup.
This may be interesting, but I doubt it's all that revolutionary.
The slew of bogus press releases on april fools day made me think of a relatively evil business strategy.
Take a big, formerly im- or amoral company whose name has become associated with killing or otherwise harming consumers and investors. (Think a Phillip Morris or an Enron)
These companies routinely change their names to try to create a new image. Well, if I was {in charge, evil}, I would announce such a name change late on March 31st. The name change would get lost in a deluge of similar, pointless, april fools joke stories.
Hm... perhaps I should get a business methods patent on this one.
+ C# is completely OO - even an Int32 is an Object. Java uses primitive types.
I think that saying that C# is completely OO is a bit of an exaggeration. An Int32 is a struct, which cannot be inherited from or accessed through a reference. I think that having such a degenerate class of objects detracts from its OO-nature.
It's still slightly more object-oriented than Java, however.
Of course, one had to register before last September to get orbital elements from nasa. So, it's a bit misleading to claim that september had anything to do with it. This is a relatively September-agnostic sort of thing, which IIRC was implemented to keep people from hammering the servers.
"Pirates seek to profit off the enormous popularity of DVDs by using the latest in technology to illegally manufacture DVD copies of Hollywood films, and again dupe consumers into purchasing a wholly inferior product," MPAA Chief Executive Jack Valenti said in a statement.
Hm... This is an interesting statement. I wonder if the people who they busted were actualy copying existing DVDs, or whether they were instead videotaping movies in theaters (or from other sources) and burning them onto DVDs. In the latter case, I don't think that CSS would be involved at all.
I'm not so sure about that. This TDRS is a newer models, not like the ones launched by the shuttle.
It also is probably pointless to do a rescue mission. IIRC, NASA contracted to take delivery on orbit, so if the mission fails, it doesn't cost taxpayers anything. Why risk a rescue mission when they can just wait for a new satellite to be built?
I'm just a CS geek, but I don't seem to remember skin cancer rates being linked to global warming. Ozone depletion due to CFCs, yes, but there are now treaties banning that.
The reason behind this is that distributing one time pads to everyone you may want to communicate with is not really feasable. If you can get a large amount of random bits to your compatriot securely, why not simply give him the message over that channel?
One-time-pads must be just that, one time, because reuse of the keys makes them eaiser to crack. (Aparrently, this is how the NSA's VENONA intercepts worked.)
Pgp is nice because it doesn't presume that a secure channel exists, and it allows a large amount of data to be exchanged without a high probabilty of decryption. (Unless the NSA knows something we don't.)
BTW, if you're ever in the Washington DC area, visit the National Cryptologic Museum, just outside the NSA compound in Ft. Meade, MD. They have some really neat stuff there, including Enigma machines that people can just use.
That's just by the manned program. There are also a few firsts by the US in the unmanned arena, including the first flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. IIRC, the US was also the first to flyby Mercury, and to land on an asteroid.
I just wouldn't say the Soviets were ahead on every major score, especially after Gemini got going.
Also note that Canada and Europe have been fairly good about respecting their commitments to the international station, from what I've heard.
IIRC, there is an analytical engine simulator floating around on the new. My gut says fourmilab.ch has it, but I don't have time to check, sorry.