The alternative would be direct government funding - either by operating health services, or by simply paying the private sector to provide them. This is not politically viable in the US - the fear of socialism is still strong.
All of these are but legal fictions. The existence of government and of law comes from only one source, one undeniable solid foundation of authority: They have people who will come and physically haul you off to prison if you break the rules.
That is the claim to which ever government owe their existence. All the rest is just procedures for deciding who gets hauled off.
And what happens if they do? The taps continue, only next time they'll just go back to parallel construction: The taps will be denied, the the defense instead told that the vital lead came from an 'anonymous tip' or that an officer just happened to be in earshot by luck alone.
I'm surprised the justice department picked a mere terrorist for this. Usually when trying to set a president like this, it's standard practice to pick a child molester - someone that any jury and almost all judges will hate with such an intense loathing, you could charge them assassinating JFK and still get a guilty verdict.
There we go. Seems I was half-correct in my understanding. It's in the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act 1986, a federal law that excludes private transactions from the background checks require of licensed dealers - the stated purpose is for individuals to be able to sell their guns on a small scale without going through a mountain of specialist paperwork and hireing a lawyer, but it ended up being used at gun shows to allow the mass-sale of guns without checks. Five states have passed laws requiring universal background checks, but such laws face intense political opposition.
Because slashdot is full of engineers. We think in engineering terms.
Supplying data to a floating center is easy - just a few short undersea fibers and a kevlar rope to support it coming up, no problem. Power, though, you are right - you can't just chuck a power cord in the ocean. Undersea power cables are very expensive. It could well be a tax dodge. Risky, though - spending a lot of money on something that could be regulated to uselessness in a few years.
Four floors, and built out of shipping containers - the dirt-cheap construction option. It isn't actually that big, and a lot of it might be empty space. It may well be a testbed to work on those new-fangled cooling systems, refining the technology. Half the energy cost of a datacenter goes on cooling - it's understandable google might be looking into the idea.
Oppression can be ranked. The UK and USA certainly have their oppressive aspects, the spying on individuals being just one of them, but there are plenty that are far, far worse.
If the spies are actively targeting someone, yes. But they can't hack *everyone* - not only would it be expensive, but they'd be detected in no time at all. So if your objective is to avoid the dragnet, it works.
And tell me then, would your death do anything to reduce their suffering? Sure, it might satisfy my desire for vengence, but that is not the purpose of the justice system. The purpose is to protect the innocent and the rule of law - and also to act as a deterrent, to remove the economic incentive and to rehabilitate offenders where possible, because all of these things act indirectly to further the primary aim of protecting the innocent and the rule of law. Vengence goes not further these aims. It's just a cheap way for politicians to win votes.
But there are political concerns too. The FBI is unlikely to take that route because it could be seen as somehow endorsing bitcoins as a currency. More likely they'll just keep the wallet as evidence until all the legal proceedings are over, then destroy it according to routine procedure.
The FBI does have reason to care: Silk Road demonstrated the power of bitcoins in concealing payments for illegal goods, complicating their investigation. If bitcoin usage continues to spread, it could complicate future investigations too. Also, other government departments might apply pressure to the FBI to avoid legitimizing the currency.
He tried low pressure first, and concluded it was effective and painless but impractical: The equipment required is expensive and high-maintainance. That lead him towards nitrogen as a way to achieve the same result but without needing to deal with the engineering challenges of keeping a whole room at low pressure.
He considered the lethal injection too, but rejected it on two grounds: - Requires drugs that could lead to legal problems with supply. - Requires medically trained executioners, an improperly performed execution could be highly painful.
Morally if not legally, a distinction can be made between spying on the governments of other countries and spying on the people of other countries. An interest in military matters is obviously an essential part of national defense. Monitoring political situations is important in foreign policy. But mass-collecting phone calls and emails from tens of millions of people is another thing altogether.
Bush didn't invent the Free Speech Zone. It was actually the democrats who first did that, at their 1988 convention. Bush is associated with the zones because he used them at far more events than any previous president, and under him the Secret Service took a much more active role in establishing the zones and in making sure the protesters were kept in their designated place. During his time the Secret Service also adopted a less politically neutral role in managing the protests - rather than directing all activists into free speech zones they would work to place pro-Bush campaigners in the most visible areas of crowds ahead of time, preemptively denying the prime territory to anti-Bush campaigners and making them easier to separate and shunt off to the FSZ safely out of view of any cameras.
But he didn't invent them. No need to falsely attribute that part to him: The things he actually did do are quite damning enough.
This wasn't a National Security Letter. It was just an old-fashioned search warrant, issued on the grounds that publicly posted photos raised the reasonable suspicion that her husband (a convicted felon) was in illegal possession of a gun. The warrant is blatantly a pretext, if only because the raid was conducted by both local police and the DHS, who don't as a rule get involved in unimportant firearms possession cases. That, and the agents also illegally seized her journalism notes, which the warrant did not cover.
I can imagine easily some employee of the DHS tasked with going through the facebook pages of her and her family, searching for something, anything, that could be seen as reasonable suspicion. They happened across pictures of guns - good enough to get a warrant.
There was no real attempt to hide the intention - she should have no problem challenging the seizure and getting the illegally-confiscated documents returned. After, of course, the DHS has made copies. Which they will then deny making. Coincidentally, all those who spoke to the journalist will later on be fired for unrelated reasons, and find themselves unable to ever work for the government again.
There is. It's a TV program, BBC, called 'How to kill a human being.' Throughout the program a presenter studies various forms of execution, considering the merits and drawbacks of each one in light of the difficulty of obtaining drugs for the lethal injection and considering the moral debate of execution. Towards the end of the program he interviews the head of a minor pro-death-penalty advocacy group (Though he does appear to live out in the sticks) who rejects nitrogen for the reason I gave.
Nitrogen gas is easily manufactured. The equipment is bulky and power-hungry, but it's a common industrial process. Even liquid nitrogen can be made very cheaply.
Because of the euphoria aspect. People have a sense that they like to call justice and treat as a noble ideal, but really covers for a desire to see those who wrong their society made to suffer. They can settle for a painless execution, but a pleasant one? That just feels wrong.
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The alternative would be direct government funding - either by operating health services, or by simply paying the private sector to provide them. This is not politically viable in the US - the fear of socialism is still strong.
If we can't stop them, then we can still make it as expensive as possible. Even the NSA's budget isn't without limit.
Or that they just know that in the event of losing, the worst that can happen is to continue the status quo: Parallel construction.
All of these are but legal fictions. The existence of government and of law comes from only one source, one undeniable solid foundation of authority: They have people who will come and physically haul you off to prison if you break the rules.
That is the claim to which ever government owe their existence. All the rest is just procedures for deciding who gets hauled off.
America still has some catching up to do, but they will get there eventually.
And what happens if they do? The taps continue, only next time they'll just go back to parallel construction: The taps will be denied, the the defense instead told that the vital lead came from an 'anonymous tip' or that an officer just happened to be in earshot by luck alone.
I'm surprised the justice department picked a mere terrorist for this. Usually when trying to set a president like this, it's standard practice to pick a child molester - someone that any jury and almost all judges will hate with such an intense loathing, you could charge them assassinating JFK and still get a guilty verdict.
Not even that. It's governed by tribalism. The voters consider the two parties in much the same as as sports fans consider their teams.
There we go. Seems I was half-correct in my understanding. It's in the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act 1986, a federal law that excludes private transactions from the background checks require of licensed dealers - the stated purpose is for individuals to be able to sell their guns on a small scale without going through a mountain of specialist paperwork and hireing a lawyer, but it ended up being used at gun shows to allow the mass-sale of guns without checks. Five states have passed laws requiring universal background checks, but such laws face intense political opposition.
Because slashdot is full of engineers. We think in engineering terms.
Supplying data to a floating center is easy - just a few short undersea fibers and a kevlar rope to support it coming up, no problem. Power, though, you are right - you can't just chuck a power cord in the ocean. Undersea power cables are very expensive. It could well be a tax dodge. Risky, though - spending a lot of money on something that could be regulated to uselessness in a few years.
Four floors, and built out of shipping containers - the dirt-cheap construction option. It isn't actually that big, and a lot of it might be empty space. It may well be a testbed to work on those new-fangled cooling systems, refining the technology. Half the energy cost of a datacenter goes on cooling - it's understandable google might be looking into the idea.
Oppression can be ranked. The UK and USA certainly have their oppressive aspects, the spying on individuals being just one of them, but there are plenty that are far, far worse.
If the spies are actively targeting someone, yes. But they can't hack *everyone* - not only would it be expensive, but they'd be detected in no time at all. So if your objective is to avoid the dragnet, it works.
And tell me then, would your death do anything to reduce their suffering? Sure, it might satisfy my desire for vengence, but that is not the purpose of the justice system. The purpose is to protect the innocent and the rule of law - and also to act as a deterrent, to remove the economic incentive and to rehabilitate offenders where possible, because all of these things act indirectly to further the primary aim of protecting the innocent and the rule of law. Vengence goes not further these aims. It's just a cheap way for politicians to win votes.
But there are political concerns too. The FBI is unlikely to take that route because it could be seen as somehow endorsing bitcoins as a currency. More likely they'll just keep the wallet as evidence until all the legal proceedings are over, then destroy it according to routine procedure.
The FBI does have reason to care: Silk Road demonstrated the power of bitcoins in concealing payments for illegal goods, complicating their investigation. If bitcoin usage continues to spread, it could complicate future investigations too. Also, other government departments might apply pressure to the FBI to avoid legitimizing the currency.
Both.
He tried low pressure first, and concluded it was effective and painless but impractical: The equipment required is expensive and high-maintainance. That lead him towards nitrogen as a way to achieve the same result but without needing to deal with the engineering challenges of keeping a whole room at low pressure.
He considered the lethal injection too, but rejected it on two grounds:
- Requires drugs that could lead to legal problems with supply.
- Requires medically trained executioners, an improperly performed execution could be highly painful.
Morally if not legally, a distinction can be made between spying on the governments of other countries and spying on the people of other countries. An interest in military matters is obviously an essential part of national defense. Monitoring political situations is important in foreign policy. But mass-collecting phone calls and emails from tens of millions of people is another thing altogether.
Bush didn't invent the Free Speech Zone. It was actually the democrats who first did that, at their 1988 convention. Bush is associated with the zones because he used them at far more events than any previous president, and under him the Secret Service took a much more active role in establishing the zones and in making sure the protesters were kept in their designated place. During his time the Secret Service also adopted a less politically neutral role in managing the protests - rather than directing all activists into free speech zones they would work to place pro-Bush campaigners in the most visible areas of crowds ahead of time, preemptively denying the prime territory to anti-Bush campaigners and making them easier to separate and shunt off to the FSZ safely out of view of any cameras.
But he didn't invent them. No need to falsely attribute that part to him: The things he actually did do are quite damning enough.
This wasn't a National Security Letter. It was just an old-fashioned search warrant, issued on the grounds that publicly posted photos raised the reasonable suspicion that her husband (a convicted felon) was in illegal possession of a gun. The warrant is blatantly a pretext, if only because the raid was conducted by both local police and the DHS, who don't as a rule get involved in unimportant firearms possession cases. That, and the agents also illegally seized her journalism notes, which the warrant did not cover.
I can imagine easily some employee of the DHS tasked with going through the facebook pages of her and her family, searching for something, anything, that could be seen as reasonable suspicion. They happened across pictures of guns - good enough to get a warrant.
There was no real attempt to hide the intention - she should have no problem challenging the seizure and getting the illegally-confiscated documents returned. After, of course, the DHS has made copies. Which they will then deny making. Coincidentally, all those who spoke to the journalist will later on be fired for unrelated reasons, and find themselves unable to ever work for the government again.
There is. It's a TV program, BBC, called 'How to kill a human being.' Throughout the program a presenter studies various forms of execution, considering the merits and drawbacks of each one in light of the difficulty of obtaining drugs for the lethal injection and considering the moral debate of execution. Towards the end of the program he interviews the head of a minor pro-death-penalty advocacy group (Though he does appear to live out in the sticks) who rejects nitrogen for the reason I gave.
Nitrogen gas is easily manufactured. The equipment is bulky and power-hungry, but it's a common industrial process. Even liquid nitrogen can be made very cheaply.
Recording another passenger some distance away, on a moving train, with a mobile phone microphone? You wouldn't make much out.
And the NSA's position is that mass-evesdropping on millions telephone conversations is legal, ethics be damned, and so they shall.
I'm going the own-medicine route here.
Because of the euphoria aspect. People have a sense that they like to call justice and treat as a noble ideal, but really covers for a desire to see those who wrong their society made to suffer. They can settle for a painless execution, but a pleasant one? That just feels wrong.
Nitrogen is very cheap. Just keep venting it in until the pulse monitor stops beeping, and then give them another ten minutes of it to be safe.