"Insightful" my ass! You slashbots will harp on about how evil record companies, movie studios and Microsoft are for protecting their property. God forbid a companies innovation infringes on your little game!
Let's change a couple of words in your assinine statement:
This isn't about technology being evil because it can be used for evil. It's about a company showing no fucking respect to the music community or the law and encouraging piracy and copyright infringement to make news. Name some honest uses of Napster and I'll shut up. Otherwise, only get self-righteous about issues that you understand.
Software patents are abhorrent to me insofar as all patentable software is pure math (algorithms - data like text and graphics are copyrightable expressions, but not patentable). To patent software is to grant a government-enforced monopoly on a set of mathematical operations to a person or group.
Yes, that means if you perform or cause to be performed a set of mathematical operations that someone else has patented, and are discovered, men with guns will come and stop you. Only the patent holders (and licensees, if applicable) are allowed to do this math; because it's a patent, it doesn't matter if you derived these mathematical operations independently or not.
It's hard for me to articulate the degree to which I feel this represents an unconsionable hindrance in the advancement of human understanding. What does society gain by having the government say who may perform what mathematical operations by beaurocratic fiat?
If any of your parents or grandparents were born in Ireland, you are considered an Irish citizen, and can register for a passport at and Irish consulate or embassy.
Irish citizenship allows you to live and work in any EU member nation without any restriction. The United States does not recognize this as valid and you cannot travel into or out of the United States on the passport. It does not affect your American citizenship, unless you are a military officer or hold a policy-level federal position.
Note however that you ARE fully subject to any and all European taxes (which are HIGH). Depending on circumstances, you may also be liable for US taxes. Consult a lawyer or CPA who specializes in these matters. It may be very also be difficult to move quanities of cash to and from countries.
This page should refer you to the embassay or consulate you need.
http://www.goireland.com/low/visitorsguide/iremb as sies.html
Randal Schwartz (co-author of Programming Perl) did just this thing and was taken to court and Convicted of three felony counts, with (deferred) jail time. Read all about it at
http://www.lightlink.com/spacenka/fors/
The good news is he likely won't serve any time.
The bad news is quite bad though. As a felon he is legally barred from many rights full citizens (which he NO LONGER IS in the eyes of the law) have.
It is illegal for him to own a firearm ever again everywhere, (in some states, not his state of Oregon) to ever vote again, and of special interest to people in the I.T. field:
It is illegal for him to work in certain technical jobs ever again. Such as working for a certification authority in at least one State.
Also, a lot of people are under the impression that all felons are intrinsically untrustworthy individuals.
The above still applies even if the persons motives were pure.
P.S. Randal Schwartz would likely have not been convicted if he were in Nevada. The laws here provide for implied authorization of an employee to access employer's systems unless their is "clear and convincing" evidence to the contrary. He still could've been fired though (Nevada is an at will state).
Using primary keys is optional in most database implementations. Not using them how ever, is generally considered a bad practice.
I am not familiar with Postgre Object id's, but in DB2, Informix and Sybase they implement rowids to uniquely identify every object in the DBMS.
This works fine for awhile but results in a number of potentially devastating problems:
- Primary keys are contraints which guarantee that each row of a table is unique. (They are also indexed, but that is not why they are present) Without guaranteed uniqueness, maintaining the integrity of your data sits with the application, which is not a good idea.
- Problems will occur when performing non-trivial maintainance tasks. Defragmenting a table, converting to a distributed table model, or initiating a fragmentation plan could destroy your data or not work effectively.
Remember, the primary concern in anything but the most trivial RDBMS is maintaining data integrity. Performance is useless is the data is junk!
I suggesting reading through "An Introduction to Database Systems" by CJ Date or any commercial DBMS vendor's 'Best Practices', Database Design or SQL guides.
Dan Bernstein has very different ideas about intellectual property. His purposes for shipping Qmail and djbdns are a statement against irresponsible software companies (and programmers in general) who continue to ship shit products like Sendmail and Bind year after year. The GNU project proselytizes software 'Freedom'; Berstein proselytizes quality and excellence.
Dr. Bernstein seeks to retain complete control of his product. His reasons are irrelevant. Since he developed it, and retains copyright, he is free to exert whatever control he wishes over his products.
There's nothing in the GPL that prevents you from modifying the source. The only thing the GPL says is that you have to give the source to whomever you give the binary. And that the recipient then can do whatever they like with that source. There's nothing preventing you from charging a million dollars for that binary.
The Apache-example you gave seems a bit weird. If you make a custom modification for custom need, that sounds like a single web-site (or at least custom-built ones ("site" her might be embedded)). And there's nothing in the GPL preventing you from doing that either. You just have to give the customer the source.
Nobody is getting eaten by copying machines, but plenty of shitty things happen to tech workers.
Have you seen marriages collapse since one of the partners works 75 hours a week?
Have you seen kids with no parents? (Both parents work for Intel)
Corporations want you to produce without any regard for you, your family or your personal life. If you are too arrogant or dumb to realize this (or like this) then you deserve whatever misery you get.
You can't blame the Union for your situation. Education institutions are well known for paying their computing people shit.
It's time for you to look for another job.
I worked for a small/mid-size software and application services company as a DBA. The pay was mediocre, but was close to home and allowed me the opportunity to experiment with some technology that I had never seen before. They also expected 24/7 on-call coverage without pay, 45-80 hour weeks and dealing with clients.
My current employer is a union shop that pays 30% more, offers superior benefits and a 38 hour workweek. If they want me on call, I get 2 hours pay per day. If they want me there for 80 hours, fine, I get OT and comp time over 60 hours.
Guess what? I rarely need to work overtime, and on-call coverage is limited to truly critical systems.
You weren't put on this earth to toil. Live and enjoy your life. When I changed jobs I re-discovered the sun and became motivated to do things that *I* like to do. (NOT sit and wait for the beeper to go off!!!)
I have been an engineer for a grid operator in the northeast for the last decade. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Lightly loaded lines lose from 3-7% over short-medium hauls, depending on a number of factors.
Yesterday, power transmission lines between Quebec and New York City lost 28% of the electricity pumped into them at the generating point, as they are operating at 95% capacity.
In late July, when energy usage peaks, those same lines will be operating at 115% of rated capacity and will peak at around 55% marginal power loss. (30-33% overall)
Your ignorance of the value of patents is even more disturbing. Nobody is going to sink millions into development of solar cells without patent protection. Industry is about money. If you don't like it, move to the outback or something.
In the long run, it would be cheap to kill every person living on this earth with a biological weapon. It would be cheap and efficent without producing waste (the bodies will rot quick).
Seriously, how am I comparing apples to oranges?
Solar cells do not produce alot of energy. Nor do windmills. Both are affected aversely by seasonal conditions. You need to build 50% more solar/wind capacity than you need just to account for seaonal factors. (The world isn't simcity 3000, bucko)
On top of that, you are still faced one of the big problems we have today: transmission. As I said before, you have a 30% or more loss of power after transmitting it over power lines. 30% of the energy that we produce gets radiated out of power lines into the enviroment.
'environmentalists' and suburban activists like yourself protest the building of power generation in any convenient place. Power plants in the middle of nowhere waste more natural resources in transmission time and fuel delivery costs.
The process that produces electrictity from the sun's rays is 15-20% efficient, compared to 50-60% for a modern coal plant. My home oil burner is 80% efficent (and cost a pretty penny too)
In addition, since high yields are only gained from large clusters of windmills or solar arrays, the electricity needs to be 'piped' in at long distance. 30% of the electricity pumped into a high-tension line either radiates out or is lost in transformers along the way.
We need small gas/coal/oil plants or small, cool (as in temp) nuclear reactors in urban and suburban areas to get cheap AND efficent power.
Microsoft wants to move to the 'software maintainance' model used by other enterprise vendors.
You pay a fixed licensing fee, then pay an additional fee to upgrade the software as new revisions come out. Costs remain fixed and spread out. Companies want this, because in the end they save money by being able to have predictable cash flow. This is why companies like GE lease everything, despite the additional finance costs associated with leasing.
This pricing model is nothing new either; Sun, Oracle, Informix, Peoplesoft, Lotus, etc all use this pricing model.
"When you have an Windows XP on subscription and the software you have developed works on that platform, but than Windows XP2 comes out, forcing you to either develop a new version of your software pack, investing time and resources, or you could keep using Windows XP, but will have to keep paying!!"
That's sorta like when Redhat upgrades all packages to RPM v4, and you can waste 5 hours searching for a FTP site during the day, since rpmfind.net is unusable during business hours.
Maybe you should show them how you are putting dual Xeons with 512MB of ram on every desktop too, since even simple programs like Netscape requre massive amounts of memory to simply sit there and leak memory.
If you were halfway serious, you'd be talking about some Sun thin-client solution which could maybe replace Windows in an enterprise environment.
DARPA is working on EMP weapons without a nuclear element to do exactly what you were talking about.
These weapons, combined with a ballistic missile shield over the US mainland are designed to provide us with the ability to take offensive action directly to the heartland of hostile nations. (eg China) Using EMP weaponry to stop an UAV attack would have more harmful affect than the actual attack, since it would disable all electronics within a large area.
Implementing large, complex ERP management products like SAP or Baan are not a matter of purchasing some software and loading a CD into your server.
Since ERP software will be the 'data bus' for your entire business, it needs to be customized somewhat for every implementation.
Also, SAP solutions are not standalone projects. In addition to multiple (and distinct) SAP modules, you need to have an installation of Oracle or some other RDBMS (probaly a distributed version) as well as a large investment in 'big iron' hardware configured for high availability.
Add to this employee training (end-user and IT), consulting time, conversion or integration of legacy resources, hardware & software maintainence and you have one hell of a hairball of a project that will be very difficult to plan and cost accurately. (Even after spending thousands on planning everything:) )
What are anarchist ideas? Anarchy is political disorder and confusion. Disorder and confusion are the ideal breeding ground for the corruption and government abuse that you stand against.
I think that organised labor is a generally positive thing. But if you stand in solidarity with labor, maybe you and the people who share your worldview should try and bring unions to abused workers. Throwing bricks and running amok will turn nobody to your cause.
Your movement, whatever it is called, will fail in everything that it tries to do because it fails to define itself. Nobody in the world knows what you are protesting about, because your organisation has failed to define itself as anything more than a coalition of people trying to relive the 60's.
As as the investigation bit goes, let's reexamine that too.
1. A detailed itinerary of the president is posted by a fringe group which is known for coordinated violent and disruptive protests (ie. Seattle, RNC)
This raises redflags for the Secret Service, who are concerned that potential lunatics and/or anarchists may attempt to assassinate the president. (Pres. McKinnely was assassinated by an archist in a crowd in 1900)
2. The FBI gets involved and needs more information to evaluate the threat. The fact that a website supporting violent fringe groups is sufficient cause for a court to issue a warrant to seize appropriate evidence.
There is ample case law and precedent for a search of this type. Nobody was handcuffed or threatened. A warrany was served and a search conducted. The 4th amendent permits such searches.
That's a good question, and is something far more interesting than repealing trade tariffs.
The CIA has a long and sordid history of funding a number of odd projects. In the 50's and 60's they invested millions is Sociology programs in many universities.
CIA funded the publication of many anti-Soviet books for yeras.
CIA employees and contractors have been close advisors to (or even members of government) in several countries.
At one point the largest airline ("Air America") in the Far East was owned and operated by several CIA front-companies.
Nobody audits the books (since they are 'black programs') and I'm sure that millions have been spent over the years furnishing government bigwigs with fancy houses and cars.
You would be very foolish indeed to believe that the FBI is not involved in counter-terrorism. (Either pre- or post- carnivore) The FBI is authorized by acts of congress to conduct counterintelligence investigations in the US and abroad.
From the FBI Mission statement:
"Information obtained through an FBI investigation is presented to the appropriate U. S. Attorney or DOJ official, who decides if prosecution, or other action, is warranted. Top priority has been assigned to the five areas that affect society the most: counterterrorism, drugs/organized crime, foreign counterintelligence, violent crimes, and white-collar crimes."
Counter-terrorism as defined by the FBI:
"The FBI is the lead federal law enforcement agency in the fight against terrorism in the U.S. In carrying out this responsibility, the Domestic Terrorism Program investigates threats involving atomic energy, weapons of mass destruction, sabotage, hostage-taking, and civil unrest."
Counter-intelligence as defined by the FBI:
"The FBI is also the lead counterintelligence agency within the U.S. Intelligence Community. The National Foreign Intelligence Program is tasked with preventing foreign espionage, economic espionage, and with investigating foreign counterintelligence cases within U.S. borders. The program is also involved in international terrorism threats, weapons of mass destruction threats, and attacks on the nation's critical infrastructures (i.e., communications, banking systems, and transportation systems.)"
The actions of groups which Indymedia promotes (WTO Seattle, Republican convention) make these groups potential threats involving civil unrest. Plans by similar groups in other countries (Great Britain) also make these groups a potential threat to 'the nation's critical infrastructures'.
The FBI is doing their job nothing more. If you think that what they are doing isn't right, you should take it to the congress, not to the streets.
Slashdot Mirror
"Insightful" my ass! You slashbots will harp on about how evil record companies, movie studios and Microsoft are for protecting their property. God forbid a companies innovation infringes on your little game!
Let's change a couple of words in your assinine statement:
This isn't about technology being evil because it can be used for evil. It's about a company showing no fucking respect to the music community or the law and encouraging piracy and copyright infringement to make news. Name some honest uses of Napster and I'll shut up. Otherwise, only get self-righteous about issues that you understand.
Grow up.
That would be possible, but only if your grandmother registered her foreign birth before your mother was born.
:(
The only way for you to get citizenship is to emigrate to Ireland, i'm afraid!
Software patents are abhorrent to me insofar as all patentable software is pure math (algorithms - data like text and graphics are copyrightable expressions, but not patentable). To patent software is to grant a government-enforced monopoly on a set of mathematical operations to a person or group.
Yes, that means if you perform or cause to be performed a set of mathematical operations that someone else has patented, and are discovered, men with guns will come and stop you. Only the patent holders (and licensees, if applicable) are allowed to do this math; because it's a patent, it doesn't matter if you derived these mathematical operations independently or not.
It's hard for me to articulate the degree to which I feel this represents an unconsionable hindrance in the advancement of human understanding. What does society gain by having the government say who may perform what mathematical operations by beaurocratic fiat?
If you look on the Irish ministry of state's homepage, I think this explains it.
I *think* that your wife would have had to have registered as a foreign-born citizen before your marraige to take advantage of it.
I'm not positive though, and they might make exceptions.
If any of your parents or grandparents were born in Ireland, you are considered an Irish citizen, and can register for a passport at and Irish consulate or embassy.
b as sies.html
Irish citizenship allows you to live and work in any EU member nation without any restriction. The United States does not recognize this as valid and you cannot travel into or out of the United States on the passport. It does not affect your American citizenship, unless you are a military officer or hold a policy-level federal position.
Note however that you ARE fully subject to any and all European taxes (which are HIGH). Depending on circumstances, you may also be liable for US taxes. Consult a lawyer or CPA who specializes in these matters. It may be very also be difficult to move quanities of cash to and from countries.
This page should refer you to the embassay or consulate you need.
http://www.goireland.com/low/visitorsguide/irem
Can I have some of what you are smoking???
You are going to SAVE money by burying giant heatsinks below an underground bunker????
Randal Schwartz (co-author of Programming Perl) did just this thing and was taken to court and Convicted of three felony counts, with (deferred) jail time. Read all about it at
http://www.lightlink.com/spacenka/fors/
The good news is he likely won't serve any time.
The bad news is quite bad though. As a felon he is legally barred from many rights full citizens (which he NO LONGER IS in the eyes of the law) have.
It is illegal for him to own a firearm ever again everywhere, (in some states, not his state of Oregon) to ever vote again, and of special interest to people in the I.T. field:
It is illegal for him to work in certain technical jobs ever again. Such as working for a certification authority in at least one State.
Also, a lot of people are under the impression that all felons are intrinsically untrustworthy individuals.
The above still applies even if the persons motives were pure.
P.S. Randal Schwartz would likely have not been convicted if he were in Nevada. The laws here provide for implied authorization of an employee to access employer's systems unless their is "clear and convincing" evidence to the contrary. He still could've been fired though (Nevada is an at will state).
Using primary keys is optional in most database implementations. Not using them how ever, is generally considered a bad practice.
I am not familiar with Postgre Object id's, but in DB2, Informix and Sybase they implement rowids to uniquely identify every object in the DBMS.
This works fine for awhile but results in a number of potentially devastating problems:
- Primary keys are contraints which guarantee that each row of a table is unique. (They are also indexed, but that is not why they are present) Without guaranteed uniqueness, maintaining the integrity of your data sits with the application, which is not a good idea.
- Problems will occur when performing non-trivial maintainance tasks. Defragmenting a table, converting to a distributed table model, or initiating a fragmentation plan could destroy your data or not work effectively.
Remember, the primary concern in anything but the most trivial RDBMS is maintaining data integrity. Performance is useless is the data is junk!
I suggesting reading through "An Introduction to Database Systems" by CJ Date or any commercial DBMS vendor's 'Best Practices', Database Design or SQL guides.
No offense, but I think that you missed my point.
- fr eedom.html
On the webpage you cited (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html) it reads:
"The Sun Public License.
This is essentially the same as the Mozilla Public License: a free software license incompatible with the GNU GPL"
Note that it reads 'incompatible with the GNU GPL'. Open Source software does not need to be 'Free' (as in liberty).
This is explained here (in the ambiguity section):
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for
Dan Bernstein has very different ideas about intellectual property. His purposes for shipping Qmail and djbdns are a statement against irresponsible software companies (and programmers in general) who continue to ship shit products like Sendmail and Bind year after year. The GNU project proselytizes software 'Freedom'; Berstein proselytizes quality and excellence.
Dr. Bernstein seeks to retain complete control of his product. His reasons are irrelevant. Since he developed it, and retains copyright, he is free to exert whatever control he wishes over his products.
"I hope this clears up any confusion people may have with whether Dan's license is open source."
This does not clear up any confusion regarding Qmail's open source status.
GPL Compliant != Open Source.
There's nothing in the GPL that prevents you from modifying the source. The only thing the GPL says is that you have to give the source to whomever you give the binary. And that the recipient then can do whatever they like with that source. There's nothing preventing you from charging a million dollars for that binary.
The Apache-example you gave seems a bit weird. If you make a custom modification for custom need, that sounds like a single web-site (or at least custom-built ones ("site" her might be embedded)). And there's nothing in the GPL preventing you from doing that either. You just have to give the customer the source.
Sure, just walk away from your pension, put your family at risk with a gap in your health insurance coverage...
What you suggest is useful for a 22 year old, not someone with a family, house and life.
Nobody is getting eaten by copying machines, but plenty of shitty things happen to tech workers.
Have you seen marriages collapse since one of the partners works 75 hours a week?
Have you seen kids with no parents? (Both parents work for Intel)
Corporations want you to produce without any regard for you, your family or your personal life. If you are too arrogant or dumb to realize this (or like this) then you deserve whatever misery you get.
You can't blame the Union for your situation. Education institutions are well known for paying their computing people shit.
It's time for you to look for another job.
I worked for a small/mid-size software and application services company as a DBA. The pay was mediocre, but was close to home and allowed me the opportunity to experiment with some technology that I had never seen before. They also expected 24/7 on-call coverage without pay, 45-80 hour weeks and dealing with clients.
My current employer is a union shop that pays 30% more, offers superior benefits and a 38 hour workweek. If they want me on call, I get 2 hours pay per day. If they want me there for 80 hours, fine, I get OT and comp time over 60 hours.
Guess what? I rarely need to work overtime, and on-call coverage is limited to truly critical systems.
You weren't put on this earth to toil. Live and enjoy your life. When I changed jobs I re-discovered the sun and became motivated to do things that *I* like to do. (NOT sit and wait for the beeper to go off!!!)
I have been an engineer for a grid operator in the northeast for the last decade. You have no idea what you are talking about.
Lightly loaded lines lose from 3-7% over short-medium hauls, depending on a number of factors.
Yesterday, power transmission lines between Quebec and New York City lost 28% of the electricity pumped into them at the generating point, as they are operating at 95% capacity.
In late July, when energy usage peaks, those same lines will be operating at 115% of rated capacity and will peak at around 55% marginal power loss. (30-33% overall)
Your ignorance of the value of patents is even more disturbing. Nobody is going to sink millions into development of solar cells without patent protection. Industry is about money. If you don't like it, move to the outback or something.
In the long run, it would be cheap to kill every person living on this earth with a biological weapon. It would be cheap and efficent without producing waste (the bodies will rot quick).
Seriously, how am I comparing apples to oranges?
Solar cells do not produce alot of energy. Nor do windmills. Both are affected aversely by seasonal conditions. You need to build 50% more solar/wind capacity than you need just to account for seaonal factors. (The world isn't simcity 3000, bucko)
On top of that, you are still faced one of the big problems we have today: transmission. As I said before, you have a 30% or more loss of power after transmitting it over power lines. 30% of the energy that we produce gets radiated out of power lines into the enviroment.
'environmentalists' and suburban activists like yourself protest the building of power generation in any convenient place. Power plants in the middle of nowhere waste more natural resources in transmission time and fuel delivery costs.
The process that produces electrictity from the sun's rays is 15-20% efficient, compared to 50-60% for a modern coal plant. My home oil burner is 80% efficent (and cost a pretty penny too)
In addition, since high yields are only gained from large clusters of windmills or solar arrays, the electricity needs to be 'piped' in at long distance. 30% of the electricity pumped into a high-tension line either radiates out or is lost in transformers along the way.
We need small gas/coal/oil plants or small, cool (as in temp) nuclear reactors in urban and suburban areas to get cheap AND efficent power.
Microsoft wants to move to the 'software maintainance' model used by other enterprise vendors.
You pay a fixed licensing fee, then pay an additional fee to upgrade the software as new revisions come out. Costs remain fixed and spread out. Companies want this, because in the end they save money by being able to have predictable cash flow. This is why companies like GE lease everything, despite the additional finance costs associated with leasing.
This pricing model is nothing new either; Sun, Oracle, Informix, Peoplesoft, Lotus, etc all use this pricing model.
"When you have an Windows XP on subscription and the software you have developed works on that platform, but than Windows XP2 comes out, forcing you to either develop a new version of your software pack, investing time and resources, or you could keep using Windows XP, but will have to keep paying!!"
That's sorta like when Redhat upgrades all packages to RPM v4, and you can waste 5 hours searching for a FTP site during the day, since rpmfind.net is unusable during business hours.
Sounds great!
Maybe you should show them how you are putting dual Xeons with 512MB of ram on every desktop too, since even simple programs like Netscape requre massive amounts of memory to simply sit there and leak memory.
If you were halfway serious, you'd be talking about some Sun thin-client solution which could maybe replace Windows in an enterprise environment.
DARPA is working on EMP weapons without a nuclear element to do exactly what you were talking about.
These weapons, combined with a ballistic missile shield over the US mainland are designed to provide us with the ability to take offensive action directly to the heartland of hostile nations. (eg China) Using EMP weaponry to stop an UAV attack would have more harmful affect than the actual attack, since it would disable all electronics within a large area.
Implementing large, complex ERP management products like SAP or Baan are not a matter of purchasing some software and loading a CD into your server.
:) )
Since ERP software will be the 'data bus' for your entire business, it needs to be customized somewhat for every implementation.
Also, SAP solutions are not standalone projects. In addition to multiple (and distinct) SAP modules, you need to have an installation of Oracle or some other RDBMS (probaly a distributed version) as well as a large investment in 'big iron' hardware configured for high availability.
Add to this employee training (end-user and IT), consulting time, conversion or integration of legacy resources, hardware & software maintainence and you have one hell of a hairball of a project that will be very difficult to plan and cost accurately. (Even after spending thousands on planning everything
What are anarchist ideas? Anarchy is political disorder and confusion. Disorder and confusion are the ideal breeding ground for the corruption and government abuse that you stand against.
I think that organised labor is a generally positive thing. But if you stand in solidarity with labor, maybe you and the people who share your worldview should try and bring unions to abused workers. Throwing bricks and running amok will turn nobody to your cause.
Your movement, whatever it is called, will fail in everything that it tries to do because it fails to define itself. Nobody in the world knows what you are protesting about, because your organisation has failed to define itself as anything more than a coalition of people trying to relive the 60's.
As as the investigation bit goes, let's reexamine that too.
1. A detailed itinerary of the president is posted by a fringe group which is known for coordinated violent and disruptive protests (ie. Seattle, RNC)
This raises redflags for the Secret Service, who are concerned that potential lunatics and/or anarchists may attempt to assassinate the president. (Pres. McKinnely was assassinated by an archist in a crowd in 1900)
2. The FBI gets involved and needs more information to evaluate the threat. The fact that a website supporting violent fringe groups is sufficient cause for a court to issue a warrant to seize appropriate evidence.
There is ample case law and precedent for a search of this type. Nobody was handcuffed or threatened. A warrany was served and a search conducted. The 4th amendent permits such searches.
That's a good question, and is something far more interesting than repealing trade tariffs.
The CIA has a long and sordid history of funding a number of odd projects. In the 50's and 60's they invested millions is Sociology programs in many universities.
CIA funded the publication of many anti-Soviet books for yeras.
CIA employees and contractors have been close advisors to (or even members of government) in several countries.
At one point the largest airline ("Air America") in the Far East was owned and operated by several CIA front-companies.
Nobody audits the books (since they are 'black programs') and I'm sure that millions have been spent over the years furnishing government bigwigs with fancy houses and cars.
You would be very foolish indeed to believe that the FBI is not involved in counter-terrorism. (Either pre- or post- carnivore) The FBI is authorized by acts of congress to conduct counterintelligence investigations in the US and abroad.
From the FBI Mission statement:
"Information obtained through an FBI investigation is presented to the appropriate U. S. Attorney or DOJ official, who decides if prosecution, or other action, is warranted. Top priority has been assigned to the five areas that affect society the most: counterterrorism, drugs/organized crime, foreign counterintelligence, violent crimes, and white-collar crimes."
Counter-terrorism as defined by the FBI:
"The FBI is the lead federal law enforcement agency in the fight against terrorism in the U.S. In carrying out this responsibility, the Domestic Terrorism Program investigates threats involving atomic energy, weapons of mass destruction, sabotage, hostage-taking, and civil unrest."
Counter-intelligence as defined by the FBI:
"The FBI is also the lead counterintelligence agency within the U.S. Intelligence Community. The National Foreign Intelligence Program is tasked with preventing foreign espionage, economic espionage, and with investigating foreign counterintelligence cases within U.S. borders. The program is also involved in international terrorism threats, weapons of mass destruction threats, and attacks on the nation's critical infrastructures (i.e., communications, banking systems, and transportation systems.)"
The actions of groups which Indymedia promotes (WTO Seattle, Republican convention) make these groups potential threats involving civil unrest. Plans by similar groups in other countries (Great Britain) also make these groups a potential threat to 'the nation's critical infrastructures'.
The FBI is doing their job nothing more. If you think that what they are doing isn't right, you should take it to the congress, not to the streets.