Yes, of course I want to chew plastic, because it's not sticky.
Just like smokers everywhere have switched from smoking burning cigarettes to chewing tobacco, because chewing means others aren't bothered by the smoke and butt litter.
I suggest that you consider that your post is a troll. Who cares what you think when that's all you've got to say, when the only one who cares about seeing it is you?
One of the reasons the Moon is so attractive for solar power bases is that there is so much silicon, not just heavier metals (like iron and nickel). The solar infrastructure would need a lot more silicon than conductive metals.
The Moon's advantages (of which I'd like to see more analysis) for human bases isn't just a way to get into space. It's an end in itself: "homo cosmos" is what we must become, and so we must actually have humans living in space, preferably for generations without visiting Earth.
The Moon is also far enough away that it's a lot easier to reach the rest of the Solar System from it than from the bottom of the Earth's gravity well. And if the Moon is a power station, then it's good for at least an anchor in a systemwide network of energy "rails" powering vehicles (some manned) around the neighborhood. Such a base would need a human crew, for operations and also just as a way to justify humans living in space. The Moon, if it's indeed better for humans to live in than true microgravity in orbit (around something, not necessarily the Earth, Sun or Moon), could be the natural choice for basing the entire new enterprise.
Plus, since it's an achievable goal, that makes it a great first step to inspire further investment.
The movie The Right Stuff explained perfectly why manned space exploration is the goal, not just a means to an end of science: we're doing this for the human adventure, not just the best way to accumulate info.
I'm a computer geek, but I recognize that we switched priorities (funding and vision) too extremely in the 1980s from space to computers. I recognize that investment in space exploration also improves computers, networks, software, but it's mainly just a lot cooler and more inspiring than even getting every human able to talk meaningfully with each other.
The core problem is the endless selfishness. The telescope guy just thinks manned exploration competes with his budgets, so he's against it. Can't be bothered to be inspired by the greatest adventure of all time. I understand, and sometimes agree with, people who complain about spending money on "blue sky" science while some essential research (cure for AIDS, irrigation, etc) is un/der funded. But just wanting the money to flood your fetish at the expense of the guy down the hall in the same department, when their mission is universally inspiring, is pathetic.
The selfishness is a product of a relentless corporate myth. In America, the truth of even the frontier West - that everyone had to help each other to survive, and has been continuously subsidized by everyone else, especially on the Northeast coast - has been replaced with lies about "individualism" and "self reliance". The corporations work overtime to interfere with the human compassion on which social exchange is based, because corporations can't get the benefit of that, and they prey on weakened humans in competition with us.
But I do see some hope. Young people have more social connections now than ever, thanks to the last generation's emphasis on computers and telecom. I really do hope that some brilliant storyteller can capture their imaginations with real characters, inspiring attitudes, set in space exploitation game scenarios. Putting millions of kids in space, up against its fascinating challenges, with each other, could reignite more than just a passion for space. It could put us back on the frontier, pulling together. For fun and profit. Just like we need a balance between computer and space tech vision and projects, a rebalance of human and corporate space ambitions could get us there together.
What about the "Water Memory" that is a basis of homeopathy, and has been demonstrated by some (not uncontested) experiments?
Jokes and put downs that aren't actually scientific aren't really welcome in response here. A pointer to actual scientific disproof, or some further discussion of how it has been proven, or even an actually funny scientific joke would be.
That is a very plausible scenario (series). I wish we had someone like Heinlein (as if;) to write an updated "Man Who Sold the Moon". It's my favorite storyline by Heinlein, possibly his most inspiring, especially as "libertarianism". A generation fixated on computer SF instead of space has left us without such visionaries. Unless I'm missing something...
No, I replied to a specific poster who asked for some facts to back up what I said, saying they don't believe it for a minute. I supplied detailed facts, and they rejected it again, this time on the irrelevant (to our discussion) basis of costs.
I'm happy to discuss costs with someone else. Because, as I posted, their moving the goalposts to try to "win" an argument they'd just lost, instead of acknowledging they were wrong (and maybe that they were baselessly obnoxious), made me reject the idea of discussing anything with them, since they' were being such a jerk.
Now I get you, an Anonymous Coward, just repeating their same obnoxious charge. Why would I want to waste my time discussing it with you, when you've indicated only that you'll be as unpleasant to educate as they were?
These clues are free only so long as it amuses me. Bickering like a child is a turnoff.
The Moon has the advantage of lots of material from which to make the machinery, including the solar panels (and more machinese to make more machinery). And also probably enough materials to support humans, including O2, and even H2 flying from the Sun to make H2O. Plus mass to shield from all kinds of radiation. And a base there would be a much bigger propaganda victory (for encouraging people to support the mission), because everyone can at least see the Moon (if not the base) to remind them, rather than what amounts to an abstraction elsewhere.
Do you know of any detailed analysis of the comparative costs:benefits of astronauts living in orbit rather than on the Lunar surface? With a short executive summary;)?
The real scam is actually somewhere in the middle. Bush is (literally) promising us the Moon to get us to support his Star Wars militarization of space.
I am hoping American private enterprise gets first crack at NASA research that will use the Moon for energy, and as a base (guiding slingshots) for further solar system expansion (for more American claims). The mining/manufacting/materials up there (other than energy) are mostly advantageous over Earthbound matter only because they're already out of the gravity well, closer to space targets.
And more like praying for open access by any American, not this rampant cronyism that mainly locks out everyone else while the cronies squander most of the opportunities in waste.
In other words, I hope we nothing about it for another year and a half, then pull out all the stops. Preferably switching most of our military budgets to space industry. The Clinton "defense economy" of investment in retooling for peace technology and finance.
Lasers to platforms floating at sea, then cables to land. The laser need send only 10x sunlight or so, not enough to cause real damage in any mishap, even though they should be in a looped interlock "dead man's switch" (ie. transistor). Just as long as they steadily transmit, unlike sunlight subject to weather, night and seasons.
This part of the technology was demo'ed to me and the Planetary Society by Grumman as long as 17 years ago. And they were pitching the Society (at Columbia U) on backing their going to Russia to get tech they knew was superior, for exactly this app: space-based solar platforms to return energy in lasers to the Earth's surface.
No, I didn't discuss costs at all. I just said there is enough power. You denied that. Now you're moving the goalposts to talk about costs.
Besides, it's not even necessary to travel back and forth repeatedly. We could send a robot that manufactures the solar panels and other infrastructure on site, as has already been demonstrated. Your idea about storage and "conversion" costs is similarly hairsplitting. They're more than matched by the longterm political (eg. war) and materials costs of our current energy system, especially as the cheap oil runs out.
So I posted the correct outlook. And then I documented it with facts. You just want to say "no", regardless of the facts. Which is trivially easy, and doesn't earn any more work from me to clue you.
Japan and China (and probably India, too) have made clear that their plans to "explore" the Moon all target exploiting the Moon, for mining and energy extraction.
When will the US leverage our huge, pioneering, and still leading Moon exploration to harness that energy? Solar panels on or orbiting the moon could send enough energy back to the Earth to power everything we do, without pumping a single barrel of oil from under treacherous sands, or emitting another gram (net) of Greenhouse gases. The way out of our 21st Century's greatest political and economic problems could lead through the Moon. Will we let these foreign countries stand on our shoulders, or reach for greatness ourselves?
By Relativity, we must all be accelerating. How much more energy in the universe does 1:1E9 extra mass represent? Since that's probably more than in the equivalent 50ug, there's probably mass missing from all over the place.
Who's converting our extra mass to energy? This great criminal must be found before we all blueshift past the event horizon!
Or, this is just the greatest museum heist Paris has ever seen.
For one, as I said, he opened with an obnoxious insult. I explained why I didn't bother wasting more time with a liar.
FWIW, the only reason I'm replying to your similar, standard Republican lie machine post is because you're linked to Fred Thompson's website. You really are a shithead.
You're an idiot. You called me a nutjob, and are exactly that yourself, yet in the same post you think that I'll slap you down because you're a "man".
Look, I specifically said that McConnell is lying. And now here's the story that he is. All I did was quote a news item as evidence that he was lying. Just because you Republicans are always pulling magical flowery bullshit out of your ass doesn't mean that the rest of us can't use evidence to tell you that you're lying.
I'm right. And the things I'm right about, most people, the sane people, care about. You Republicans might not care that you've been sending to positions of power fascists who are illegally spying on us all, but that's only because it's your fault. Which is why, now that so many people like me have been telling the truth about you pigs long enough, you Republicans can muster only about 30% of the country, less than 2:1, to believe your bullshit.
You Republicans have been screeching about armageddeon whenever the mic has been on. I have not - I've just been pointing out you evil, but run of the mill, bastards when I see you screwing up and lying. Typical of you to project your worst fears about yourself onto me. Your Republican dysfunctions have become so old and tired that it's fun to predict them only because it's better than just watching you peddle them as if we believed them.
You've broken yourselves, and your brand. Now swim in the bloodbath you begged for with all your bad acting when you had the spotlight.
I'm telling you straight up that I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of your comment. I didn't "automatically" dismiss your comment. I destroyed it with simple analysis. Helped by some true facts. Including calling you out for your support of the proven lies used to defend this illegal spying.
You reply with obnoxios insults that aren't backed up by any facts. And obviously haven't been able to digest what I carefully sent back to you, except to notice that it's "opposing" your point of view.
Until you act with some dignity, I have zero interest in reading your tortured "logic". You don't understand America, you don't understand justice, you don't understand rights, you don't even understand how to have a debate with someone. Go jerk your rightwing paranoid delusions by yourself. I'm not going to dignify them with any attention any more.
How about running on my Inspiron 8000 nVidia GeForce2Go?
I thought it would work in 7.4, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Maybe I'm not just setting it on right. I just want to offload some X processing from my CPU to my graphics chip, to make the workstation run faster overall. I don't need the fancy tricks to work, though it would be nice to try them once.
Is there a list of testing progress per graphics chip somewhere?
"Imagine" the opposing viewpoint to my own? I've been watching it ravage my liberties, and my neighbors', for at least 6 long years. Don't try to pretend that you're starting out this conflict of rights vs liberty in you long attempts to frame the debate the way you'd like everyone to see it.
There are two issues here, not just the one you'd like to compartmentalize into.
One is indeed whether the government can wiretap people. There is a very clear law, that has been regularly updated to keep pace with both technology and threats, the FISA. It is already an exception to the Constitutional requirement for any wiretap to be allowed by a warrant after evaluation by a judge under Congress' laws, to ensure the Executive doesn't just wiretap whoever it wants. Any wiretap without a warrant is by definition not reasonable. The FISA makes an exception to the usual requirement that the evidence on which the warrant is based be subject to argument, making the court hearing it and the proceedings secret.Then it makes another exception, a really extraordinary one, that allows warrants to be obtained even after the wiretap, for 72 hours. In other words, legalizing warrantless wiretaps to accommodate emergencies, after which the wiretappers can get a warrant on evidence they already had, or, if they really took a gamble without evidence but on a "hunch" that proved correct, with the contents of the 72 hours of the tap. The Executive even gets to assign the secret members of the FISA court, and its chief judge.
That court issued something like 18,000 authorizations, and rejected something like 20, in the year before Bush started ignoring it. But there weren't really 18,000 emergency terrorist threats, or anywhere near the number of wiretaps the FISA court has issued in its 30 years of operation. It's easy to convince that court. Too easy already, given that its procedures are unconstitutional, but there are emergencies and we tend to err on the side of caution when "national security" is invoked. At least the FISA is a way to track the circumventions of the Constitution - and therefore, the abuse of our rights by our government we create to protect them. So we can try for overall oversight down the road, even if "a few eggs are broken to make the omlet" along the way.
Of course, there's a bigger issue: these rights are inalienable, not given by the Constitution or any other feature of being American (or just living here). So violating those rights abroad, for US citizens or foreigners, also violates the rights that are America's basic ideology. But we make the exception to protect ourselves more easily, quickly and cheaply, rationalized on the grounds that we create our government here to protect our rights; foreigners can create their own governments to protect their rights if they want. But of course the accumulated rights abuses abroad have made it that much easier for our enemies to recruit allies and attack us. The tradeoff is probably a losing one, when our greatest threats are terrorists, and we're alienating even our allies.
The undeniable issue here is that Bush has ignored even the easy FISA court. So there's no oversight. Instead, there's lawbreaking by the Executive, as has been found even after due process in binding Federal court with proper jurisdiction. Violating the Constitution, and then breaking the FISA. Even the 4th Amendment that's being broken is itself an extra statement of what's already implicit in the Constitution, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights. That's how important our right to privacy is. And how likely is an abusive ruler to violate it.
The other issue is that Bush cannot be trusted with this power. The FBI, for example, lied to Congress when reporting that there were no reported examples of their abusing the Patriot Acts, but there were indeed hundreds. The guy running these wiretaps, Alberto Gonzales, led a career of lying to Congress, hounded out j
Those German wiretaps didn't need to go around the FISA law that protected us from them without warrants. They didn't need the FISA law weakened last month by Congress the way Bush wanted. McConnel is lying, and the NY Times knows it, though it didn't report that.
Now I want to know why, though the NY Times knew McConnell was lying, it didn't report that in that important original story.
And what will Lieberman, the Republican pretending to be a Democrat, do to a lying spook like McConnell? There's got to be a punishment for being a bad liar, even if we expect spooks like McConnell to lie. We expect them to do it competently. This clown is just another Bush chump who can't even lie straight.
If that fair use money were pumping bribes back to Congress as much as the much tinier copyright money were, we'd have a lot more fair use protection, and a lot less abusive copyright.
The copyright industry just lost its great, politically powerful champion in Jack Valenti. Valenti was completely tight with fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson (who was called "Master of the Senate" before becoming Kennedy's VP, then president by assassination), handling the press for him. Until Valenti left the White House in 1966, with Johnson's endorsement, to become head of the MPAA, just as Hollywood's products got a copyright venue in the TV explosion. Valenti just died this past Spring.
This is the time for the copying industries that really "promote the progress of science and useful arts" to push back the copyright monopoly industry. Let's finally get our First Amendment rights to free expression to trump the synthetic government monopolies on content that are holding us all back.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't virtual gum, in a game, be as nonsticky as its "sticky" parameter is set to? And why bother chewing it at all?
Yes, of course I want to chew plastic, because it's not sticky.
Just like smokers everywhere have switched from smoking burning cigarettes to chewing tobacco, because chewing means others aren't bothered by the smoke and butt litter.
I suggest that you consider that your post is a troll. Who cares what you think when that's all you've got to say, when the only one who cares about seeing it is you?
One of the reasons the Moon is so attractive for solar power bases is that there is so much silicon, not just heavier metals (like iron and nickel). The solar infrastructure would need a lot more silicon than conductive metals.
The Moon's advantages (of which I'd like to see more analysis) for human bases isn't just a way to get into space. It's an end in itself: "homo cosmos" is what we must become, and so we must actually have humans living in space, preferably for generations without visiting Earth.
The Moon is also far enough away that it's a lot easier to reach the rest of the Solar System from it than from the bottom of the Earth's gravity well. And if the Moon is a power station, then it's good for at least an anchor in a systemwide network of energy "rails" powering vehicles (some manned) around the neighborhood. Such a base would need a human crew, for operations and also just as a way to justify humans living in space. The Moon, if it's indeed better for humans to live in than true microgravity in orbit (around something, not necessarily the Earth, Sun or Moon), could be the natural choice for basing the entire new enterprise.
Plus, since it's an achievable goal, that makes it a great first step to inspire further investment.
The movie The Right Stuff explained perfectly why manned space exploration is the goal, not just a means to an end of science: we're doing this for the human adventure, not just the best way to accumulate info.
I'm a computer geek, but I recognize that we switched priorities (funding and vision) too extremely in the 1980s from space to computers. I recognize that investment in space exploration also improves computers, networks, software, but it's mainly just a lot cooler and more inspiring than even getting every human able to talk meaningfully with each other.
The core problem is the endless selfishness. The telescope guy just thinks manned exploration competes with his budgets, so he's against it. Can't be bothered to be inspired by the greatest adventure of all time. I understand, and sometimes agree with, people who complain about spending money on "blue sky" science while some essential research (cure for AIDS, irrigation, etc) is un/der funded. But just wanting the money to flood your fetish at the expense of the guy down the hall in the same department, when their mission is universally inspiring, is pathetic.
The selfishness is a product of a relentless corporate myth. In America, the truth of even the frontier West - that everyone had to help each other to survive, and has been continuously subsidized by everyone else, especially on the Northeast coast - has been replaced with lies about "individualism" and "self reliance". The corporations work overtime to interfere with the human compassion on which social exchange is based, because corporations can't get the benefit of that, and they prey on weakened humans in competition with us.
But I do see some hope. Young people have more social connections now than ever, thanks to the last generation's emphasis on computers and telecom. I really do hope that some brilliant storyteller can capture their imaginations with real characters, inspiring attitudes, set in space exploitation game scenarios. Putting millions of kids in space, up against its fascinating challenges, with each other, could reignite more than just a passion for space. It could put us back on the frontier, pulling together. For fun and profit. Just like we need a balance between computer and space tech vision and projects, a rebalance of human and corporate space ambitions could get us there together.
Here's hoping.
What about the "Water Memory" that is a basis of homeopathy, and has been demonstrated by some (not uncontested) experiments?
Jokes and put downs that aren't actually scientific aren't really welcome in response here. A pointer to actual scientific disproof, or some further discussion of how it has been proven, or even an actually funny scientific joke would be.
That is a very plausible scenario (series). I wish we had someone like Heinlein (as if ;) to write an updated "Man Who Sold the Moon". It's my favorite storyline by Heinlein, possibly his most inspiring, especially as "libertarianism". A generation fixated on computer SF instead of space has left us without such visionaries. Unless I'm missing something...
Damn straight.
No, I replied to a specific poster who asked for some facts to back up what I said, saying they don't believe it for a minute. I supplied detailed facts, and they rejected it again, this time on the irrelevant (to our discussion) basis of costs.
I'm happy to discuss costs with someone else. Because, as I posted, their moving the goalposts to try to "win" an argument they'd just lost, instead of acknowledging they were wrong (and maybe that they were baselessly obnoxious), made me reject the idea of discussing anything with them, since they' were being such a jerk.
Now I get you, an Anonymous Coward, just repeating their same obnoxious charge. Why would I want to waste my time discussing it with you, when you've indicated only that you'll be as unpleasant to educate as they were?
These clues are free only so long as it amuses me. Bickering like a child is a turnoff.
The Moon has the advantage of lots of material from which to make the machinery, including the solar panels (and more machinese to make more machinery). And also probably enough materials to support humans, including O2, and even H2 flying from the Sun to make H2O. Plus mass to shield from all kinds of radiation. And a base there would be a much bigger propaganda victory (for encouraging people to support the mission), because everyone can at least see the Moon (if not the base) to remind them, rather than what amounts to an abstraction elsewhere.
;)?
Do you know of any detailed analysis of the comparative costs:benefits of astronauts living in orbit rather than on the Lunar surface? With a short executive summary
The real scam is actually somewhere in the middle. Bush is (literally) promising us the Moon to get us to support his Star Wars militarization of space.
I am hoping American private enterprise gets first crack at NASA research that will use the Moon for energy, and as a base (guiding slingshots) for further solar system expansion (for more American claims). The mining/manufacting/materials up there (other than energy) are mostly advantageous over Earthbound matter only because they're already out of the gravity well, closer to space targets.
And more like praying for open access by any American, not this rampant cronyism that mainly locks out everyone else while the cronies squander most of the opportunities in waste.
In other words, I hope we nothing about it for another year and a half, then pull out all the stops. Preferably switching most of our military budgets to space industry. The Clinton "defense economy" of investment in retooling for peace technology and finance.
Lasers to platforms floating at sea, then cables to land. The laser need send only 10x sunlight or so, not enough to cause real damage in any mishap, even though they should be in a looped interlock "dead man's switch" (ie. transistor). Just as long as they steadily transmit, unlike sunlight subject to weather, night and seasons.
This part of the technology was demo'ed to me and the Planetary Society by Grumman as long as 17 years ago. And they were pitching the Society (at Columbia U) on backing their going to Russia to get tech they knew was superior, for exactly this app: space-based solar platforms to return energy in lasers to the Earth's surface.
No, I didn't discuss costs at all. I just said there is enough power. You denied that. Now you're moving the goalposts to talk about costs.
Besides, it's not even necessary to travel back and forth repeatedly. We could send a robot that manufactures the solar panels and other infrastructure on site, as has already been demonstrated. Your idea about storage and "conversion" costs is similarly hairsplitting. They're more than matched by the longterm political (eg. war) and materials costs of our current energy system, especially as the cheap oil runs out.
So I posted the correct outlook. And then I documented it with facts. You just want to say "no", regardless of the facts. Which is trivially easy, and doesn't earn any more work from me to clue you.
Goodbye.
Moderation +3
80% Funny
20% Offtopic
TrollMods think proving you landed is "Offtopic" to claiming you landed. Who are these people?
Why don't you believe it?
The Sun lands over 1.3KW:m^2 on the Moon's surface. The Moon's surface is 3.8E7Km^2, or 3.8E13m^2. The world consumes about 15TW. 15TW is 3 hundredths of a percent of the Lunar insolation. Even at 10% efficiency, only 0.3% of the Lunar surface would power the Earth. Since the US consumes only about 3.3TW, we'd need only about 0.075% of the Lunar surface.
Facty enough for you?
Japan and China (and probably India, too) have made clear that their plans to "explore" the Moon all target exploiting the Moon, for mining and energy extraction.
When will the US leverage our huge, pioneering, and still leading Moon exploration to harness that energy? Solar panels on or orbiting the moon could send enough energy back to the Earth to power everything we do, without pumping a single barrel of oil from under treacherous sands, or emitting another gram (net) of Greenhouse gases. The way out of our 21st Century's greatest political and economic problems could lead through the Moon. Will we let these foreign countries stand on our shoulders, or reach for greatness ourselves?
By Relativity, we must all be accelerating. How much more energy in the universe does 1:1E9 extra mass represent? Since that's probably more than in the equivalent 50ug, there's probably mass missing from all over the place.
Who's converting our extra mass to energy? This great criminal must be found before we all blueshift past the event horizon!
Or, this is just the greatest museum heist Paris has ever seen.
For one, as I said, he opened with an obnoxious insult. I explained why I didn't bother wasting more time with a liar.
FWIW, the only reason I'm replying to your similar, standard Republican lie machine post is because you're linked to Fred Thompson's website. You really are a shithead.
You're an idiot. You called me a nutjob, and are exactly that yourself, yet in the same post you think that I'll slap you down because you're a "man".
Look, I specifically said that McConnell is lying. And now here's the story that he is. All I did was quote a news item as evidence that he was lying. Just because you Republicans are always pulling magical flowery bullshit out of your ass doesn't mean that the rest of us can't use evidence to tell you that you're lying.
I'm right. And the things I'm right about, most people, the sane people, care about. You Republicans might not care that you've been sending to positions of power fascists who are illegally spying on us all, but that's only because it's your fault. Which is why, now that so many people like me have been telling the truth about you pigs long enough, you Republicans can muster only about 30% of the country, less than 2:1, to believe your bullshit.
You Republicans have been screeching about armageddeon whenever the mic has been on. I have not - I've just been pointing out you evil, but run of the mill, bastards when I see you screwing up and lying. Typical of you to project your worst fears about yourself onto me. Your Republican dysfunctions have become so old and tired that it's fun to predict them only because it's better than just watching you peddle them as if we believed them.
You've broken yourselves, and your brand. Now swim in the bloodbath you begged for with all your bad acting when you had the spotlight.
How do I prove I landed a robot on the Moon? Can I just email a link to a YouTube video (that I shot at Capricorn One Studios)?
I'm telling you straight up that I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of your comment. I didn't "automatically" dismiss your comment. I destroyed it with simple analysis. Helped by some true facts. Including calling you out for your support of the proven lies used to defend this illegal spying.
You reply with obnoxios insults that aren't backed up by any facts. And obviously haven't been able to digest what I carefully sent back to you, except to notice that it's "opposing" your point of view.
Until you act with some dignity, I have zero interest in reading your tortured "logic". You don't understand America, you don't understand justice, you don't understand rights, you don't even understand how to have a debate with someone. Go jerk your rightwing paranoid delusions by yourself. I'm not going to dignify them with any attention any more.
Goodbye.
How about running on my Inspiron 8000 nVidia GeForce2Go?
I thought it would work in 7.4, but it didn't seem to make any difference. Maybe I'm not just setting it on right. I just want to offload some X processing from my CPU to my graphics chip, to make the workstation run faster overall. I don't need the fancy tricks to work, though it would be nice to try them once.
Is there a list of testing progress per graphics chip somewhere?
"Imagine" the opposing viewpoint to my own? I've been watching it ravage my liberties, and my neighbors', for at least 6 long years. Don't try to pretend that you're starting out this conflict of rights vs liberty in you long attempts to frame the debate the way you'd like everyone to see it.
There are two issues here, not just the one you'd like to compartmentalize into.
One is indeed whether the government can wiretap people. There is a very clear law, that has been regularly updated to keep pace with both technology and threats, the FISA. It is already an exception to the Constitutional requirement for any wiretap to be allowed by a warrant after evaluation by a judge under Congress' laws, to ensure the Executive doesn't just wiretap whoever it wants. Any wiretap without a warrant is by definition not reasonable. The FISA makes an exception to the usual requirement that the evidence on which the warrant is based be subject to argument, making the court hearing it and the proceedings secret.Then it makes another exception, a really extraordinary one, that allows warrants to be obtained even after the wiretap, for 72 hours. In other words, legalizing warrantless wiretaps to accommodate emergencies, after which the wiretappers can get a warrant on evidence they already had, or, if they really took a gamble without evidence but on a "hunch" that proved correct, with the contents of the 72 hours of the tap. The Executive even gets to assign the secret members of the FISA court, and its chief judge.
That court issued something like 18,000 authorizations, and rejected something like 20, in the year before Bush started ignoring it. But there weren't really 18,000 emergency terrorist threats, or anywhere near the number of wiretaps the FISA court has issued in its 30 years of operation. It's easy to convince that court. Too easy already, given that its procedures are unconstitutional, but there are emergencies and we tend to err on the side of caution when "national security" is invoked. At least the FISA is a way to track the circumventions of the Constitution - and therefore, the abuse of our rights by our government we create to protect them. So we can try for overall oversight down the road, even if "a few eggs are broken to make the omlet" along the way.
Of course, there's a bigger issue: these rights are inalienable, not given by the Constitution or any other feature of being American (or just living here). So violating those rights abroad, for US citizens or foreigners, also violates the rights that are America's basic ideology. But we make the exception to protect ourselves more easily, quickly and cheaply, rationalized on the grounds that we create our government here to protect our rights; foreigners can create their own governments to protect their rights if they want. But of course the accumulated rights abuses abroad have made it that much easier for our enemies to recruit allies and attack us. The tradeoff is probably a losing one, when our greatest threats are terrorists, and we're alienating even our allies.
The undeniable issue here is that Bush has ignored even the easy FISA court. So there's no oversight. Instead, there's lawbreaking by the Executive, as has been found even after due process in binding Federal court with proper jurisdiction. Violating the Constitution, and then breaking the FISA. Even the 4th Amendment that's being broken is itself an extra statement of what's already implicit in the Constitution, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights. That's how important our right to privacy is. And how likely is an abusive ruler to violate it.
The other issue is that Bush cannot be trusted with this power. The FBI, for example, lied to Congress when reporting that there were no reported examples of their abusing the Patriot Acts, but there were indeed hundreds. The guy running these wiretaps, Alberto Gonzales, led a career of lying to Congress, hounded out j
Now I want to know why, though the NY Times knew McConnell was lying, it didn't report that in that important original story.
And what will Lieberman, the Republican pretending to be a Democrat, do to a lying spook like McConnell? There's got to be a punishment for being a bad liar, even if we expect spooks like McConnell to lie. We expect them to do it competently. This clown is just another Bush chump who can't even lie straight.
If that fair use money were pumping bribes back to Congress as much as the much tinier copyright money were, we'd have a lot more fair use protection, and a lot less abusive copyright.
The copyright industry just lost its great, politically powerful champion in Jack Valenti. Valenti was completely tight with fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson (who was called "Master of the Senate" before becoming Kennedy's VP, then president by assassination), handling the press for him. Until Valenti left the White House in 1966, with Johnson's endorsement, to become head of the MPAA, just as Hollywood's products got a copyright venue in the TV explosion. Valenti just died this past Spring.
This is the time for the copying industries that really "promote the progress of science and useful arts" to push back the copyright monopoly industry. Let's finally get our First Amendment rights to free expression to trump the synthetic government monopolies on content that are holding us all back.