> Fine it's a secret test, but why on Earth would you do it near the coast? Why not just do it out in the ocean where it's substantially less public? I mean, it's supposed to be secret, why do it in plain view?
(1) Maybe something about the test required it to be at that location at that time. Maybe it was intercepting something, or monitoring something, or delivering something, that needed to be at a certain position and velocity a short time later. Maybe it was even something that required having a city nearby, though I can't easily imagine what. (2) Maybe they've done this before, it's not a big deal, and usually nobody gets it on camera and reports it. Would the news have reported it if they didn't have the footage? And seriously, if you see a missile launch, does the average Joe expect it to be the navy and not bother reporting it, or does he report it to the local police, or to the news?
> So, the two likely scenarios would be: 1) The US test firing something, but nobody knows who or what just yet because it is being kept secret. 2) Someone else firing off missiles off the coast of the US to demonstrate a point.
3) Somebody or something messed up and an automated or stray missile was launched. 4) Someone else firing off missiles off the US coast to determine US detection and response capabilities, either for detection of the missile launch or for detection of whatever launched it. (An uber-quiet submarine, perhaps.)
My admittedly limited understanding of this is that of course it costs us jobs, because it's very expensive to hire US employees compared to the costs of hiring employees in most other countries in the world. (The transaction costs of all of the employee rights and rules and regulations are massive. It's helpful to live in a society with some of them, but there's a massive cost. Think of how massive and absurd so much of HR is.) So between that and the standard of living, labor is cheaper elsewhere. Which means that companies make more money by producing products or services elsewhere. Which both drives prices of products and services down. This in turn raises the standard of living by making products and services less expensive. But the beneficial effects are spread across the entire economy, while the losses are concentrated and massive to the people who lose their jobs.
Economists say the widespread effects are a net gain. I don't know if I believe them--because I haven't done the math, and I've known a lot of economists who aren't very empirical.
At the same time, our gini coefficient (i.e. the divide between the rich and the poor) is increasing, which is probably a bigger problem.
> On the flip side, I went to a top tier school and found that many people have an inferiority complex after they see what university I went to.
It's interesting socially. A higher-tier school gives you a leg up in some conversations and a leg down in others. Lower-tier-school students have to show they work hard or do interesting things, while higher-tier-students have to show they're not a stereotypical gifted-but-selfish brat; they start with different sets of expectations. The more you know about the schools, the more specific the expectations become. (Yale gets the most brilliant intellectuals, for example, while Harvard gets the absurdly productive. You expect a Yale student to be smarter, but more laid back and intuitive. You expect a Harvard student to publish more.)
I have a huge ego. But I also don't mind mopping floors. The two aren't really in conflict. It's more a question of diligence, I think, than it is of ego.
Most institutions are concerned with whether they are legally covered and covered adequately for insurance purposes. Merely being covered to prevent customers from having money stolen is much, much less important. The concern of the higher-ups will be "did they sign our agreement that says we're protected" more than "Are our customers actually protected?"
IT systems are a tool, like an axe or a chainsaw. The problem is you may not realize you want steel-toed boots until your foot protests strenuously at being attacked.
> So, for 3 years, they plundered their customers with bogus fees and now they're walking away paying back less than 1/3rd of the REALLY LOW END estimate of their misbegotten gains.
Yes, it's almost as if they were trying to announce a settlement fee/fine due to an upcoming election.
> If the term was outside of the reasonable expectations of the person who did not write the contract, and if the parties were contracting on an unequal basis, then it will not be enforceable
Maybe--notably if it's really far outside. "Reasonable expectations" is not something to rely on in court unless you have no actual legal argument. It's like raising your hand and telling the judge it's unfair. Maybe it is--but you need an actual legal theory to rely on, too. "Reasonable expectations" is the kind of argument you throw in at the end in case a judge seizes on it, or if you have nothing else to argue with, but everything I've read or heard says it's a very unfavored argument in most jurisdictions. So a judge may use it to stop truly horrid behavior, but it doesn't have any real argumentative force on its own.
Contracts of adhesion are scrutinized a little more closely by the court because they're not between co-equal business partners, but they're still contracts. Usually. YMMV from state to state, and check with a lawyer.
> Contracts do not have to be signed to be binding (though it helps) with the exception of Real Estate (here in the US).
Purchase of real estate is a typical example, but there are other things, too. To be sure, always consult a lawyer in your state--and always do that when lots of money is at stake, just in case.
Historically, the "statute of frauds" in England listed a bunch of things that had to be in writing if they were to be binding, as opposed to a contract for the sale of a watch, for example, which can be made by swapping the watch for some cash. (Although laws in most states create default rules about what happens if the watch is defective, for example, and you try to return it.) Hundreds of years ago, you couldn't sell land without a signature, or make a contract that by its terms would last for more than one year, or make a wedding contract (IIRC) without a signature, and there are other things on the list.
The idea is "formalism," requiring written contracts and specific procedures. Formal laws are useful beforehand because they tell you what you're getting into and make it clear what you have to do to get it done, but they're bad afterwards because you often can't point out to the court afterwords that you were trying to do something else and you messed it up, or that it might not make sense to do what the documents say. Formalism is appropriate for the things in the statute of frauds because they're important contracts that you don't want someone to be able to lie about, so you want the evidentiary function of a clear-cut document saying what you've agreed to.
A classic example of the downsides to formalism is accidentally building a foundation an inch into your neighbor's yard: formalism says you have to tear down your new house, realism says you have to pay for the land at fair market value. Unless there's evidence you did it deliberately, in which case the court will hit you over the head with a baseball bat. (As always, consult a lawyer for the rules in your particular state.)
> but don't both parties have to agree to a contract to make it binding?
Contract law varies a bit from state to state. Traditionally, both parties have to agree, but in most consumer relationships the drafter has all the power and can leverage it to change the default rules a bit. That being said, how this comes out will depend partially on what judge gets it and partially on how obvious they make the language in the contract, and partially on the law of the particular state.
In olden times, there were fairly formal rules about how a contract worked. Today there are still very formal rules, but one of the one's that's been relaxed a bit is the manner in which parties signal consent. The Uniform Commercial Code often governs, and in most states it lets parties signal consent in a fairly wide range of ways. That being said, you'd need to look at the case law of a particular state before knowing whether a particular way worked--if there's a lot of money at stake, always consult a lawyer. They cost a lot, but you pay to make it more likely you're right and less likely you've shot yourself in the foot.
> My understanding is that they can't have an empirical wing.
> Appeals courts jobs are to answer questions of law, not questions of fact. Questions of fact are determined at the original trial. They are decided by the judge or by the jury.
> For the supreme court, the finders of fact are the original court and/or the Congress.
> From my, admittedly few, conversations with lawyers or judges, appeals courts tend to be pretty leery about overturning findings of fact from the original trial.
Yes and no. Questions of fact are handled by the original court--but that doesn't mean that empirical information has no place in a policy decision. On appeal, courts will consider how to set the rules of law and what implication that will have on the ground. They draw conclusions based in significant part based on policy arguments that are not "questions of fact" having to do with the particular trial.
An empirical wing would be useful to test the assumptions on which some of their decisions are based. Empiricism is classically a legislative function, but practically, its absence from courts makes for bad law. If they were as strict about logic as they are about rules of evidence, the law would be far more coherent and fair.
> I'd not heard this about the clerks...do you have some links with stories about this??
Alas, no, though I haven't made a study of it. This is based on everything I've heard from those who do. (Law Professors, former SCOTUS Clerks, etc...)
I don't *think* any of the justices write their own opinions right now--it's very rare. I believe that... Stevens? Either Stevens or Scalia used to do it, but stopped somewhere along the way.
To be fair, they are very good clerks, but I still think we should at least have competition. The cases have varying opinions authored by clerks of different justices according to those justices' positions, but IMHO they should also have multiple versions of opinions with the same position and pick the one that's best, since it will guide people across the country for many years.
> Courts make rulings and set precedents, but that doesn't mean future judges have to obey. For example if previous precedent established "segregating blacks from whites in Chicago is okay", that doesn't mean a judge is bound to it.
Not really. Future judges don't have to obey in the sense that they won't be locked up, but if they are obviously wrong under the law, they will frequently be corrected. When the Supreme Court said that segregation was okay, that was pretty much the ballgame for a long time. It takes a pretty major change in our entire culture, usually, for SCOTUS to override a prior decision, and that decision is the law of the land until they do. Lower courts follow it or risk being overturned by intermediate courts, and no judge wants to be overturned.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey is an obvious example--the court refused to overturn Roe v. Wade, not really necessarily because they believed in it, but because overturning their precedent on such a divisive and active political area, where there had been no shift in the national culture, would greatly undermine the legitimacy of the court. That's why courts follow stare decisis, and why they pretend to. It's admittedly a fairly weak motivator, but it frequently works.
> The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable.
Generally unavoidable, although they could do a better job, most of the time. We have the most important cases in the country being written by wet-behind-the-ears clerks, once. They're good clerks, but their words become law. One of the biggest developments in eminent domain in the last 20 years came from a case where the clerks were trying to finish an opinion over the weekend without making any new law, for example.
At the very least, there should be multiple people drafting the majority opinion and they should pick the most well-reasoned and well-articulated one.
They also need an empirical wing. They make massive policy decisions without data, using intuition which is often wrong. Lawyers are used to doing that, but that doesn't make it in intelligent way to run a government.
> Perhaps so, but I could see where such a rule could come from, and it could instill a discipline of making sure things are properly cited. Without any other context, obviously the rule is rubbish, but I could see it as an excellent rule to live by when taking freshman courses in writing/composition.
But that's half the problem. The rule may come from a desire to instill discipline, but it's just a bad rule, because it teaches that plagiarism of ideas isn't plagiarism at all, and that stringing five words together in a way that's been used before is, and that rewriting something in your own words makes it no longer plagiarism.
Demand students live by a childish rule, and you will at best be someone they have to ignore as they try to actually learn things.
> I once had an English teacher who said, "If you have more than five consecutive words matching a source, without a citation then it's plagiarism." Perhaps that's how freshman writing assignments are graded, but it's silly when applied to scientific papers.
No. Just... no. It is not "silly," it is insulting, in either freshman english lit or scientific papers. Any teacher who defines plagiarism that way has a lot more to learn than he has to teach.
Reading the constitution isn't nearly enough to understand even the hundredth part of it, much less to understand why it matters that we defend it.
One simple example: we tell kids it takes a simple majority of Congress to pass a bill into law, then a 2/3rds majority to overrule the president's veto, and we give them the constitution to read. But technically, Congress can pass laws any way it wants for the initial passage--it can deem them passed, or require sixty votes to end a philibuster, or require a unanimous vote. Just reading the constitution without thought isn't enough, and even with thought isn't enough, unless you're actually studying it.
Another example: Miranda rights are NOT in the constitution. The Supreme Court made them up a few years ago as a way to protect constitutional rights and has been slowly taking them away since.
Another example: There is a debate over changing the language of the Fourteenth Amendment to not grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. The sentence they're thinking about changing is the one we insisted on writing in because of the civil war--it's what we fought the civil war over: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." To the casual reader, it just seems to make people born here citizens of the US--but in reality, it granted black northerners *federal* citizenship, as opposed to merely state citizenship, meaning the federal government now had a legal avenue to fight discriminatory state action.
It would take a year of a *good* school for most of us to begin to understand the constitution.
Are these the cards you keep in your wallet, picking one of the sequences (which one not being indicated on the card) to confirm your identity in case you're called upon to satisfy the two-man rule for authorizing a nuclear strike?
First, someone would be guessing randomly as to which sequence to use. Second, someone would have to convince the guy at the other end of the phone--or in person--he was the right person. In DC, that can be tricky, because everyone knows everyone. Third, You'd need a SECOND person to help. Fourth, when it goes missing, surely you could call NORAD and say "Yo, I'm missing my card."
Oh, I skimmed the article. The problem isn't that they were missing, it's that President Clinton's aides were afraid to say they'd lost them. They should have been fired or arrested, putting their pride ahead of a fairly important--though hopefully unneeded--element of national security like that.
Nations do, sometimes, listen to the UN. This happens mostly when the UN is doing something well that doesn't impinge too badly on the nation's interests. We might let them make decisions about who owns nonstrategic islands, for example, or how certain international conventions should be interpreted. It also happens when the UN arranges peacekeeping forces and the nation cares about upsetting the countries supplying those forces. It also happens when the UN works to provide aid, or to expose atrocities. International Law is a part of the Law of the United States, at least nominally, and the UN has at least some say on what international law is.
Response based on shared attributes: No, who's on first.
Response based on shared attributes: Who is not surprised; he is in his TARDIS, and "Who" isn't really his name.
Response based on friendship: anrvsdfnlawecs'dfk
All strangers were friends once, but a friend is more likely to respond to an anrvsdfnlawecs'dfk. This is also one reason social networking is important: our brains are coded to care more about people who have networked with us socially than about people who happen to have a shared interest, at least when it comes to paying attention to them in the first place.
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> Apache Declares War On Oracle Over Java
Sometimes it seems like the world hasn't changed much in the last two thousand years.
> Fine it's a secret test, but why on Earth would you do it near the coast? Why not just do it out in the ocean where it's substantially less public? I mean, it's supposed to be secret, why do it in plain view?
(1) Maybe something about the test required it to be at that location at that time. Maybe it was intercepting something, or monitoring something, or delivering something, that needed to be at a certain position and velocity a short time later. Maybe it was even something that required having a city nearby, though I can't easily imagine what. (2) Maybe they've done this before, it's not a big deal, and usually nobody gets it on camera and reports it. Would the news have reported it if they didn't have the footage? And seriously, if you see a missile launch, does the average Joe expect it to be the navy and not bother reporting it, or does he report it to the local police, or to the news?
> So, the two likely scenarios would be: 1) The US test firing something, but nobody knows who or what just yet because it is being kept secret. 2) Someone else firing off missiles off the coast of the US to demonstrate a point.
3) Somebody or something messed up and an automated or stray missile was launched. 4) Someone else firing off missiles off the US coast to determine US detection and response capabilities, either for detection of the missile launch or for detection of whatever launched it. (An uber-quiet submarine, perhaps.)
My admittedly limited understanding of this is that of course it costs us jobs, because it's very expensive to hire US employees compared to the costs of hiring employees in most other countries in the world. (The transaction costs of all of the employee rights and rules and regulations are massive. It's helpful to live in a society with some of them, but there's a massive cost. Think of how massive and absurd so much of HR is.) So between that and the standard of living, labor is cheaper elsewhere. Which means that companies make more money by producing products or services elsewhere. Which both drives prices of products and services down. This in turn raises the standard of living by making products and services less expensive. But the beneficial effects are spread across the entire economy, while the losses are concentrated and massive to the people who lose their jobs.
Economists say the widespread effects are a net gain. I don't know if I believe them--because I haven't done the math, and I've known a lot of economists who aren't very empirical.
At the same time, our gini coefficient (i.e. the divide between the rich and the poor) is increasing, which is probably a bigger problem.
> On the flip side, I went to a top tier school and found that many people have an inferiority complex after they see what university I went to.
It's interesting socially. A higher-tier school gives you a leg up in some conversations and a leg down in others. Lower-tier-school students have to show they work hard or do interesting things, while higher-tier-students have to show they're not a stereotypical gifted-but-selfish brat; they start with different sets of expectations. The more you know about the schools, the more specific the expectations become. (Yale gets the most brilliant intellectuals, for example, while Harvard gets the absurdly productive. You expect a Yale student to be smarter, but more laid back and intuitive. You expect a Harvard student to publish more.)
I have a huge ego. But I also don't mind mopping floors. The two aren't really in conflict. It's more a question of diligence, I think, than it is of ego.
Most institutions are concerned with whether they are legally covered and covered adequately for insurance purposes. Merely being covered to prevent customers from having money stolen is much, much less important. The concern of the higher-ups will be "did they sign our agreement that says we're protected" more than "Are our customers actually protected?"
IT systems are a tool, like an axe or a chainsaw. The problem is you may not realize you want steel-toed boots until your foot protests strenuously at being attacked.
One of the signs today at the Rally to Restore Sanity asked "What would Optimus Prime do?"
> So, for 3 years, they plundered their customers with bogus fees and now they're walking away paying back less than 1/3rd of the REALLY LOW END estimate of their misbegotten gains.
Yes, it's almost as if they were trying to announce a settlement fee/fine due to an upcoming election.
> Verizon Wireless said in a news release that its overcharges were inadvertent.
Also, Bank of America is kindhearted and bankrolls Santa's elves.
> If the term was outside of the reasonable expectations of the person who did not write the contract, and if the parties were contracting on an unequal basis, then it will not be enforceable
Maybe--notably if it's really far outside. "Reasonable expectations" is not something to rely on in court unless you have no actual legal argument. It's like raising your hand and telling the judge it's unfair. Maybe it is--but you need an actual legal theory to rely on, too. "Reasonable expectations" is the kind of argument you throw in at the end in case a judge seizes on it, or if you have nothing else to argue with, but everything I've read or heard says it's a very unfavored argument in most jurisdictions. So a judge may use it to stop truly horrid behavior, but it doesn't have any real argumentative force on its own.
Contracts of adhesion are scrutinized a little more closely by the court because they're not between co-equal business partners, but they're still contracts. Usually. YMMV from state to state, and check with a lawyer.
> Contracts do not have to be signed to be binding (though it helps) with the exception of Real Estate (here in the US).
Purchase of real estate is a typical example, but there are other things, too. To be sure, always consult a lawyer in your state--and always do that when lots of money is at stake, just in case.
Historically, the "statute of frauds" in England listed a bunch of things that had to be in writing if they were to be binding, as opposed to a contract for the sale of a watch, for example, which can be made by swapping the watch for some cash. (Although laws in most states create default rules about what happens if the watch is defective, for example, and you try to return it.) Hundreds of years ago, you couldn't sell land without a signature, or make a contract that by its terms would last for more than one year, or make a wedding contract (IIRC) without a signature, and there are other things on the list.
The idea is "formalism," requiring written contracts and specific procedures. Formal laws are useful beforehand because they tell you what you're getting into and make it clear what you have to do to get it done, but they're bad afterwards because you often can't point out to the court afterwords that you were trying to do something else and you messed it up, or that it might not make sense to do what the documents say. Formalism is appropriate for the things in the statute of frauds because they're important contracts that you don't want someone to be able to lie about, so you want the evidentiary function of a clear-cut document saying what you've agreed to.
A classic example of the downsides to formalism is accidentally building a foundation an inch into your neighbor's yard: formalism says you have to tear down your new house, realism says you have to pay for the land at fair market value. Unless there's evidence you did it deliberately, in which case the court will hit you over the head with a baseball bat. (As always, consult a lawyer for the rules in your particular state.)
> but don't both parties have to agree to a contract to make it binding?
Contract law varies a bit from state to state. Traditionally, both parties have to agree, but in most consumer relationships the drafter has all the power and can leverage it to change the default rules a bit. That being said, how this comes out will depend partially on what judge gets it and partially on how obvious they make the language in the contract, and partially on the law of the particular state.
In olden times, there were fairly formal rules about how a contract worked. Today there are still very formal rules, but one of the one's that's been relaxed a bit is the manner in which parties signal consent. The Uniform Commercial Code often governs, and in most states it lets parties signal consent in a fairly wide range of ways. That being said, you'd need to look at the case law of a particular state before knowing whether a particular way worked--if there's a lot of money at stake, always consult a lawyer. They cost a lot, but you pay to make it more likely you're right and less likely you've shot yourself in the foot.
> My understanding is that they can't have an empirical wing.
> Appeals courts jobs are to answer questions of law, not questions of fact. Questions of fact are determined at the original trial. They are decided by the judge or by the jury.
> For the supreme court, the finders of fact are the original court and/or the Congress.
> From my, admittedly few, conversations with lawyers or judges, appeals courts tend to be pretty leery about overturning findings of fact from the original trial.
Yes and no. Questions of fact are handled by the original court--but that doesn't mean that empirical information has no place in a policy decision. On appeal, courts will consider how to set the rules of law and what implication that will have on the ground. They draw conclusions based in significant part based on policy arguments that are not "questions of fact" having to do with the particular trial.
An empirical wing would be useful to test the assumptions on which some of their decisions are based. Empiricism is classically a legislative function, but practically, its absence from courts makes for bad law. If they were as strict about logic as they are about rules of evidence, the law would be far more coherent and fair.
> I'd not heard this about the clerks...do you have some links with stories about this??
Alas, no, though I haven't made a study of it. This is based on everything I've heard from those who do. (Law Professors, former SCOTUS Clerks, etc...)
I don't *think* any of the justices write their own opinions right now--it's very rare. I believe that... Stevens? Either Stevens or Scalia used to do it, but stopped somewhere along the way.
To be fair, they are very good clerks, but I still think we should at least have competition. The cases have varying opinions authored by clerks of different justices according to those justices' positions, but IMHO they should also have multiple versions of opinions with the same position and pick the one that's best, since it will guide people across the country for many years.
> Courts make rulings and set precedents, but that doesn't mean future judges have to obey. For example if previous precedent established "segregating blacks from whites in Chicago is okay", that doesn't mean a judge is bound to it.
Not really. Future judges don't have to obey in the sense that they won't be locked up, but if they are obviously wrong under the law, they will frequently be corrected. When the Supreme Court said that segregation was okay, that was pretty much the ballgame for a long time. It takes a pretty major change in our entire culture, usually, for SCOTUS to override a prior decision, and that decision is the law of the land until they do. Lower courts follow it or risk being overturned by intermediate courts, and no judge wants to be overturned.
Planned Parenthood v. Casey is an obvious example--the court refused to overturn Roe v. Wade, not really necessarily because they believed in it, but because overturning their precedent on such a divisive and active political area, where there had been no shift in the national culture, would greatly undermine the legitimacy of the court. That's why courts follow stare decisis, and why they pretend to. It's admittedly a fairly weak motivator, but it frequently works.
> The Court did apparently make assumptions about the implications of a particular interpretation, but that's pretty much unavoidable.
Generally unavoidable, although they could do a better job, most of the time. We have the most important cases in the country being written by wet-behind-the-ears clerks, once. They're good clerks, but their words become law. One of the biggest developments in eminent domain in the last 20 years came from a case where the clerks were trying to finish an opinion over the weekend without making any new law, for example.
At the very least, there should be multiple people drafting the majority opinion and they should pick the most well-reasoned and well-articulated one.
They also need an empirical wing. They make massive policy decisions without data, using intuition which is often wrong. Lawyers are used to doing that, but that doesn't make it in intelligent way to run a government.
> Perhaps so, but I could see where such a rule could come from, and it could instill a discipline of making sure things are properly cited. Without any other context, obviously the rule is rubbish, but I could see it as an excellent rule to live by when taking freshman courses in writing/composition.
But that's half the problem. The rule may come from a desire to instill discipline, but it's just a bad rule, because it teaches that plagiarism of ideas isn't plagiarism at all, and that stringing five words together in a way that's been used before is, and that rewriting something in your own words makes it no longer plagiarism.
Demand students live by a childish rule, and you will at best be someone they have to ignore as they try to actually learn things.
> I once had an English teacher who said, "If you have more than five consecutive words matching a source, without a citation then it's plagiarism." Perhaps that's how freshman writing assignments are graded, but it's silly when applied to scientific papers.
No. Just... no. It is not "silly," it is insulting, in either freshman english lit or scientific papers. Any teacher who defines plagiarism that way has a lot more to learn than he has to teach.
Reading the constitution isn't nearly enough to understand even the hundredth part of it, much less to understand why it matters that we defend it.
One simple example: we tell kids it takes a simple majority of Congress to pass a bill into law, then a 2/3rds majority to overrule the president's veto, and we give them the constitution to read. But technically, Congress can pass laws any way it wants for the initial passage--it can deem them passed, or require sixty votes to end a philibuster, or require a unanimous vote. Just reading the constitution without thought isn't enough, and even with thought isn't enough, unless you're actually studying it.
Another example: Miranda rights are NOT in the constitution. The Supreme Court made them up a few years ago as a way to protect constitutional rights and has been slowly taking them away since.
Another example: There is a debate over changing the language of the Fourteenth Amendment to not grant citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. The sentence they're thinking about changing is the one we insisted on writing in because of the civil war--it's what we fought the civil war over: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." To the casual reader, it just seems to make people born here citizens of the US--but in reality, it granted black northerners *federal* citizenship, as opposed to merely state citizenship, meaning the federal government now had a legal avenue to fight discriminatory state action.
It would take a year of a *good* school for most of us to begin to understand the constitution.
Are these the cards you keep in your wallet, picking one of the sequences (which one not being indicated on the card) to confirm your identity in case you're called upon to satisfy the two-man rule for authorizing a nuclear strike?
First, someone would be guessing randomly as to which sequence to use.
Second, someone would have to convince the guy at the other end of the phone--or in person--he was the right person. In DC, that can be tricky, because everyone knows everyone.
Third, You'd need a SECOND person to help.
Fourth, when it goes missing, surely you could call NORAD and say "Yo, I'm missing my card."
Oh, I skimmed the article. The problem isn't that they were missing, it's that President Clinton's aides were afraid to say they'd lost them. They should have been fired or arrested, putting their pride ahead of a fairly important--though hopefully unneeded--element of national security like that.
Thank you.
Care to ad a link to recommendations to all that? :)
Nations do, sometimes, listen to the UN. This happens mostly when the UN is doing something well that doesn't impinge too badly on the nation's interests. We might let them make decisions about who owns nonstrategic islands, for example, or how certain international conventions should be interpreted. It also happens when the UN arranges peacekeeping forces and the nation cares about upsetting the countries supplying those forces. It also happens when the UN works to provide aid, or to expose atrocities. International Law is a part of the Law of the United States, at least nominally, and the UN has at least some say on what international law is.
> Who is surprised by their results?
Response based on shared attributes: No, who's on first.
Response based on shared attributes: Who is not surprised; he is in his TARDIS, and "Who" isn't really his name.
Response based on friendship: anrvsdfnlawecs'dfk
All strangers were friends once, but a friend is more likely to respond to an anrvsdfnlawecs'dfk. This is also one reason social networking is important: our brains are coded to care more about people who have networked with us socially than about people who happen to have a shared interest, at least when it comes to paying attention to them in the first place.