> Just curious... Would you say the same thing if they were on their way to YOUR neighborhood?
Damn straight I would.
> You: "Gee, they got two year's probation. I'm glad they got due-process."
> Me: "Put 'em in the same room as the bomb."
If they actually have any evidence for it they can take him to court and prove it to a jury. Otherwise, they don't have any more business holding him than they do you or me.
Notice in passing that they got the scoop from a foreign POW who is already suspected of fabricating threat yarns just to disrupt US society.
The point is, who gets to decide if you're fighting for the enemy? Is the mere accusation sufficient for revoking your constitutional rights?
No, the whole point of the constitutional guarantee of a trial by a jury of your peers is to keep the state from arbitrary acts of "justice". The jury acts as a buffer between the state and their accused peer.
> The cable news networks have had pretty good discussion of all of this stuff -- I'll try to dig up some transcripts, as they come online.
I don't do cable, but I'll probably catch Peter Jennings and Jim Lehrer tonight. They were pretty ignorant yesterday, though. Jennings did probe a bit on the counsel and trial issues, and he seemed to get "no" for the answers.
A Web link would be nice too, though. I respect Jennings and Lehrer more than I do most of the talking heads on the telly, but I'm not under any illusion that they're keeping me well informed.
> The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] and others have had coverage of this over the last day and a half.
I meant the bit about it all being public knowledge for over a month, him having an attourney and declining to contest the military detention, and all that stuff that I haven't seen anywhere.
> With due respect, I suggest you read more about Mr. al-Mujahir's case before you start drawing wild conclusions.
> In particular, Mr. al-Mujahir had a lawyer while he was being held in New York, and waived the opportunity to contest being transferred to military jurisdiction. He is more than welcome to contest this transfer if a later date if he wishes to. Likewise, your claim that this case was kept secret is simply false. It is certainly true that the media became more interested in Mr. al-Mujahir's case when the larger charges of attempting to explode a dirty nuclear device in the US were added to his case, but his detention was a matter of public record at all times.
Thank you. Do you have a source where I can read up on it, since the US media can't be bothered to keep us informed?
> As for Mr. al-Mujahir being subject to military jurisdiction, the precedent for trying US citizens caught entering the nation as an act of war on behalf of a foreign power dates back to the earliest days of this nations' history, with cases in the early nineteenth century, the Civil war, and the Second World War.
Yes, I'm aware of this. I also have a big problem with it: he is accused of entering the nation as an act of war on behalf of a foreign power. The constitutional guarantee of a trial by a jury of your peers decouples "accusation" from "guilt", and exists to protect citizens from things like secret trials. IMO the precedent should be ditched... though of course there's no reason to ask or present SCOTUS to examine the question.
> He was legally elected. The only people who doubt that are those who didn't know how to punch a damned hole into a piece of paper, or how to follow an arrow.
Let's not forget overseas military votes that were counted even though they missed the legal deadline.
> was simply the Supreme court confirming what is clearly written in the Constitution -- that a state judiciary (SCOFLA in this case) may not step in and overturn the results of a federal election.
Care to point out where in the constitution that is said?
The issue is (was) that the Florida legislature exercised its constitutional right to legislate how presidential electors would be appointed in Florida. However, under Florida's constitution the Florida supreme court has the final judicial word on cases of Florida law. Plaintifs claimed that Florida law was not being followed and the case was escalated all the way up to the FSC -- exactly as it should be under the Florida constitution.
The SCOTUS ruling was nothing but a bunch of special pleading to ensure that their man got the job. The majority abandoned their long-held principles on this case, and then tried to cover their asses by saying "this ruling shall not be a precedent for the future".
But if it was the correct ruling, why shouldn't it be a precedent?
BTW, Bush-vs-Gore isn't the issue. It's the precedent -- legally binding or not -- that scares the hell out of me. Now all of America's political machines know that if they can rig an election and then run out the clock on the challenges, the rigged results will stand -- if they have friends in the Supreme Court.
And of course, it might not be the Republicans that 'win' next time. The Democrats have big scary political machines in other states, and will probably 0wn the SCOTUS someday too. I won't cheer a SC that hands an election to the Democrats, either.
> the fact remains that England has impositions on the privacy and other civil liberties of its citizens that would be unimaginable here in the US.
Dunno 'bout England, but we're certainly on a slippery slope here in the USA. E.g., we found out yesterday that a US citizen has been in custody for over a month without anyone knowing about it, and even now that they've announced it he still isn't being given his constitutional right to counsel and there's no prospect of a trial by a jury of his peers in store for him.
How many other US citizens are being held under similar circumstances? I doubt we would have ever heard of this one if not for the Adminstration's pressing need to show the public that our spy agencies are protecting us.
And if they take offense at this post, what's to stop them from declaring me an "enemy combatant" and disappearing me without any rights, too?
A "state of emergency" has always been a popular excuse for setting aside constitutions. The US public needs to speak out on this now, before it goes any further.
> This risk factor is somewhat mitigated in commercial software, where the distribution is typically through CDs and other trusted media. Of course, someone can still somehow compromise a software developer's network, but it isn't exactly hanging out a sign saying "I'm the source code, hack me!" like the open source projects.
And then there's the pirates' CDs that consumers buy thinking they are getting the real thing. What's to stop a pirate from turning evil (heh) and burning a trojanized bootleg rather than a straight copy?
Who's to say they haven't already done that...?
> Just imagine, for a minute, how devastating it would be if Sourceforge was hacked and malicious code was inserted into a ton of the projects without anyone noticing for long enough that it could cause real damage? The danger is clear.
There was a notorious case a couple of years ago where someone put a hax0red version of a popular OSS product on a popular FTP site. It was caught in about 4 hours, and the site admins used their FTP logs to identify and notify everyone who had downloaded it during that period.
> You don't need artists to make a "playable and interesting game", you need smart game designers. Nice visuals is icing on the cake. Sadly, many game design companies these days make the same mistake: they assume that great graphics makes for great game play. In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents--the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.
I play Angband with the graphical display, but otherwise I agree with the gist of your post. I used to keep a Windows partition for the sole purpose of booting up to play a game now and then, but in the mid-late 90's I bought several games in a row that had first-rate graphics and fourth-rate play, and I simply lost interest in commercial games. (Actually, even more recently I bought Lokisoft's CivIII for Linux, and found that the trend has continued: the graphics are dazzling, but the game is boring as hell. I find myself playing crappy-graphics Freeciv instead.)
Like so much else in IT (and as some of the other replies to your post seem to tacitly admit), marketing has taken the driver's seat in commercial game design, and products have suffered for it.
> First there was that 4-bit microprocessor, then it went to 8-bit, then 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit....will we see microprocessors with giga-bit (or even exa-bit) path ?
> Historical science? You weren't there...the scientific method can not be applied, you can not prove something you didn't yourself see
How come I'm not surprised to see effect-of-pollution deniers invoking the same lame arguments that evolution deniers invoke?
There are lots of ways of knowing what the earth was like in both the recent and distant past. The "Were you there?" argument is simply a desperate strategem for people who want to assert their beliefs in the face of the evidence.
> I don't understand scientists...how long have we been seriously studying global climate? half a century reliably by my best guess, how long do these scientists say the earth has been around...MANY MANY times longer...and they somehow think they can understand what's going on...
I don't suppose you've ever seen the plots of CO2 content vs. time derived from many thousands of years of annual ice packs then, have you.
> And if evolution were to be true, why would one species (us) "evolve" into intelligence and one that had the nascent beginnings just stagnate for vast amounts of time?
Once a population splits the theory of evolution does not predict that they will evolve in parallel -- all the more if they move into distinct environments or adopt distinct lifestyles.
Also, don't underrate the intelligence of chimps. I suspect that an objective measure would put them a lot closer to the intelligence of humans than to the intelligence of, say, snails.
> I have never seen an open-source style game that didn't look like a pile of crap.
So what's wrong with nethack? On my screen the symbols are drawn very clearly and elegantly.
> Or is it just that the whole open-source concept breaks down when applied to things like art?
That's an interesting question. Is it the case that programming is easier than drawing, with the result that programmers are easier to come by than artists? (If so, let's not let HR find out!)
> t's too bad most of the Slashdot crowd is so progressive. This is one of those perfect articles to get into flame wars about whether or not evolution really happened.
I'm curious why you use the word "progressive" in this regard. The issue isn't progressive ideas vs. others, but rather whether you are going to let your views on the history of the world be guided by the evidence. This hardly strikes me as a "progressive" viewpoint, since the basic issue was resolved by all but the religion-dominated somewhere around 200-300 years ago.
Also, re -
>...whether or not evolution really happened.
That evolution happened is beyond doubt, since the fossil record very clearly shows that the collection of species inhabiting the earth varies greatly over time, at least on geological timescales. The only thing open to rational discussion is what the mechanism for the changes was, not whether the the changes happened.
It happens that we have a theory that appears to explain that mechanism very well, to the point of making predictions about what you'll see if you go down to the lab and do some gene sequencing tomorrow. Some people object to that theory because it contradicts their religious beliefs, and it is commonly believed that others object to it due to a peculiar political ideology (namely that religion-as-opiate-of-masses is a good thing), but neither party has actually done any science that calls the current theory into question. So they resort to bogus pseudo-scientific claims, handwave arguments, misrepresentation of facts, mendacity (e.g., carven human footprints at Paluxy), attempts to poison the well by undercutting the public's trust of science in general, attempts to misportray their ancient mythology as science, attempts to bring science down into the gutter with their own beliefs by labelling it as a mere philosophy or even a religion, and sometimes to arguments that are so truly loopy that it is often commented that creationism is impossible to parody.
But something is needed to explain the changes to the species over time, and right now the only available explanations are the theory of evolution and magic. And the only theory constrained by the facts is the theory of evolution.
> To be sure, I don't want computers flagging people to be arrested. But computers sift through enormous amounts of information, making them ideal for a first pass. If they are used to flag people to be scrutinized by humans, I don't have any objections.
Are those humans going to be highly-trained well-paid experts like those who work airport security?
The basic expectation is that the human 'supervisors' will adopt a strategy of either (a) waiving everyone that the computer identifies because they're tired of taking the heat for false positives, or else (b) calling for the cops every time the computer identifies someone, so they won't have to take the heat if a terrorist does get through. (Interesting problem, that. I would guess that we would see a lot of variety of individual behavior early on, after which it would settle into a state where all 'supervisors' behave the same. Presumably that would be state (a) except for during 'alerts' and for relatively short periods after real incidents.)
The only optimal position between those extremes is get it right almost every time, i.e. to have a real expert (or team of experts) looking over the computer's shoulder. And I seriously doubt that society is going to be willing to pay for that.
Slashdot Mirror
> Just curious... Would you say the same thing if they were on their way to YOUR neighborhood?
Damn straight I would.
> You: "Gee, they got two year's probation. I'm glad they got due-process."
> Me: "Put 'em in the same room as the bomb."
If they actually have any evidence for it they can take him to court and prove it to a jury. Otherwise, they don't have any more business holding him than they do you or me.
Notice in passing that they got the scoop from a foreign POW who is already suspected of fabricating threat yarns just to disrupt US society.
> especially since they're already receiving so much from Jerry Falwell and other cross-burning conservatives who use phrases like "Left Coast".
How funny. "Left Coast" was pot-smoking-hippie jargon for "California" back in the '60s.
> Yes, if you're fighting for the enemy.
The point is, who gets to decide if you're fighting for the enemy? Is the mere accusation sufficient for revoking your constitutional rights?
No, the whole point of the constitutional guarantee of a trial by a jury of your peers is to keep the state from arbitrary acts of "justice". The jury acts as a buffer between the state and their accused peer.
> The cable news networks have had pretty good discussion of all of this stuff -- I'll try to dig up some transcripts, as they come online.
I don't do cable, but I'll probably catch Peter Jennings and Jim Lehrer tonight. They were pretty ignorant yesterday, though. Jennings did probe a bit on the counsel and trial issues, and he seemed to get "no" for the answers.
A Web link would be nice too, though. I respect Jennings and Lehrer more than I do most of the talking heads on the telly, but I'm not under any illusion that they're keeping me well informed.
> The Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] and others have had coverage of this over the last day and a half.
I meant the bit about it all being public knowledge for over a month, him having an attourney and declining to contest the military detention, and all that stuff that I haven't seen anywhere.
> With due respect, I suggest you read more about Mr. al-Mujahir's case before you start drawing wild conclusions.
> In particular, Mr. al-Mujahir had a lawyer while he was being held in New York, and waived the opportunity to contest being transferred to military jurisdiction. He is more than welcome to contest this transfer if a later date if he wishes to. Likewise, your claim that this case was kept secret is simply false. It is certainly true that the media became more interested in Mr. al-Mujahir's case when the larger charges of attempting to explode a dirty nuclear device in the US were added to his case, but his detention was a matter of public record at all times.
Thank you. Do you have a source where I can read up on it, since the US media can't be bothered to keep us informed?
> As for Mr. al-Mujahir being subject to military jurisdiction, the precedent for trying US citizens caught entering the nation as an act of war on behalf of a foreign power dates back to the earliest days of this nations' history, with cases in the early nineteenth century, the Civil war, and the Second World War.
Yes, I'm aware of this. I also have a big problem with it: he is accused of entering the nation as an act of war on behalf of a foreign power. The constitutional guarantee of a trial by a jury of your peers decouples "accusation" from "guilt", and exists to protect citizens from things like secret trials. IMO the precedent should be ditched... though of course there's no reason to ask or present SCOTUS to examine the question.
Notice my
> He was legally elected. The only people who doubt that are those who didn't know how to punch a damned hole into a piece of paper, or how to follow an arrow.
Let's not forget overseas military votes that were counted even though they missed the legal deadline.
> was simply the Supreme court confirming what is clearly written in the Constitution -- that a state judiciary (SCOFLA in this case) may not step in and overturn the results of a federal election.
Care to point out where in the constitution that is said?
The issue is (was) that the Florida legislature exercised its constitutional right to legislate how presidential electors would be appointed in Florida. However, under Florida's constitution the Florida supreme court has the final judicial word on cases of Florida law. Plaintifs claimed that Florida law was not being followed and the case was escalated all the way up to the FSC -- exactly as it should be under the Florida constitution.
The SCOTUS ruling was nothing but a bunch of special pleading to ensure that their man got the job. The majority abandoned their long-held principles on this case, and then tried to cover their asses by saying "this ruling shall not be a precedent for the future".
But if it was the correct ruling, why shouldn't it be a precedent?
BTW, Bush-vs-Gore isn't the issue. It's the precedent -- legally binding or not -- that scares the hell out of me. Now all of America's political machines know that if they can rig an election and then run out the clock on the challenges, the rigged results will stand -- if they have friends in the Supreme Court.
And of course, it might not be the Republicans that 'win' next time. The Democrats have big scary political machines in other states, and will probably 0wn the SCOTUS someday too. I won't cheer a SC that hands an election to the Democrats, either.
> the fact remains that England has impositions on the privacy and other civil liberties of its citizens that would be unimaginable here in the US.
Dunno 'bout England, but we're certainly on a slippery slope here in the USA. E.g., we found out yesterday that a US citizen has been in custody for over a month without anyone knowing about it, and even now that they've announced it he still isn't being given his constitutional right to counsel and there's no prospect of a trial by a jury of his peers in store for him.
How many other US citizens are being held under similar circumstances? I doubt we would have ever heard of this one if not for the Adminstration's pressing need to show the public that our spy agencies are protecting us.
And if they take offense at this post, what's to stop them from declaring me an "enemy combatant" and disappearing me without any rights, too?
A "state of emergency" has always been a popular excuse for setting aside constitutions. The US public needs to speak out on this now, before it goes any further.
> provided by microsoft perhaps?
Yeah, those guys can't brook competition anywhere, can they.
> This risk factor is somewhat mitigated in commercial software, where the distribution is typically through CDs and other trusted media. Of course, someone can still somehow compromise a software developer's network, but it isn't exactly hanging out a sign saying "I'm the source code, hack me!" like the open source projects.
And then there's the pirates' CDs that consumers buy thinking they are getting the real thing. What's to stop a pirate from turning evil (heh) and burning a trojanized bootleg rather than a straight copy?
Who's to say they haven't already done that...?
> Just imagine, for a minute, how devastating it would be if Sourceforge was hacked and malicious code was inserted into a ton of the projects without anyone noticing for long enough that it could cause real damage? The danger is clear.
There was a notorious case a couple of years ago where someone put a hax0red version of a popular OSS product on a popular FTP site. It was caught in about 4 hours, and the site admins used their FTP logs to identify and notify everyone who had downloaded it during that period.
> Where are the "think tanks" that actually have people who can think critically?
Think tanks only need to think critically enough to fool their intended audience.
And this is for consumption by businessmen, legislators, and bureaucrats, so...
> Mark me as flamebait, but if this were done in flash, would it really be any different? It's just a series of still images...
Yeah, if they wanted to show off their geekiness they should have converted it to powers of two instead.
> You don't need artists to make a "playable and interesting game", you need smart game designers. Nice visuals is icing on the cake. Sadly, many game design companies these days make the same mistake: they assume that great graphics makes for great game play. In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents--the monsters I can imagine in my head are a lot more interesting than the cheesy commercial graphics that kills the imagination.
I play Angband with the graphical display, but otherwise I agree with the gist of your post. I used to keep a Windows partition for the sole purpose of booting up to play a game now and then, but in the mid-late 90's I bought several games in a row that had first-rate graphics and fourth-rate play, and I simply lost interest in commercial games. (Actually, even more recently I bought Lokisoft's CivIII for Linux, and found that the trend has continued: the graphics are dazzling, but the game is boring as hell. I find myself playing crappy-graphics Freeciv instead.)
Like so much else in IT (and as some of the other replies to your post seem to tacitly admit), marketing has taken the driver's seat in commercial game design, and products have suffered for it.
...I guess that's why there aren't thousands and thousands of OSS titles.
> First there was that 4-bit microprocessor, then it went to 8-bit, then 16-bit, 32-bit, and 64-bit.
No one should ever need more than 640 bits.
> Historical science? You weren't there...the scientific method can not be applied, you can not prove something you didn't yourself see
How come I'm not surprised to see effect-of-pollution deniers invoking the same lame arguments that evolution deniers invoke?
There are lots of ways of knowing what the earth was like in both the recent and distant past. The "Were you there?" argument is simply a desperate strategem for people who want to assert their beliefs in the face of the evidence.
> What if they find something down there that should not be brought back up?
You mean, like, Cthulhu?
> I don't understand scientists...how long have we been seriously studying global climate? half a century reliably by my best guess, how long do these scientists say the earth has been around...MANY MANY times longer...and they somehow think they can understand what's going on...
I don't suppose you've ever seen the plots of CO2 content vs. time derived from many thousands of years of annual ice packs then, have you.
> I second the PDA vote.
Personal Dildo Accessory?
> And if evolution were to be true, why would one species (us) "evolve" into intelligence and one that had the nascent beginnings just stagnate for vast amounts of time?
Once a population splits the theory of evolution does not predict that they will evolve in parallel -- all the more if they move into distinct environments or adopt distinct lifestyles.
Also, don't underrate the intelligence of chimps. I suspect that an objective measure would put them a lot closer to the intelligence of humans than to the intelligence of, say, snails.
> We do have some decent graphics for Freeciv. There is the Cevo tileset, which looks quite good. Head and shoulders above the rest.
Unfortunately, the consensus is that Cevo contains copyrighted material that would be illegal to distribute with Freeciv.
> I have never seen an open-source style game that didn't look like a pile of crap.
So what's wrong with nethack? On my screen the symbols are drawn very clearly and elegantly.
> Or is it just that the whole open-source concept breaks down when applied to things like art?
That's an interesting question. Is it the case that programming is easier than drawing, with the result that programmers are easier to come by than artists? (If so, let's not let HR find out!)
> t's too bad most of the Slashdot crowd is so progressive. This is one of those perfect articles to get into flame wars about whether or not evolution really happened.
I'm curious why you use the word "progressive" in this regard. The issue isn't progressive ideas vs. others, but rather whether you are going to let your views on the history of the world be guided by the evidence. This hardly strikes me as a "progressive" viewpoint, since the basic issue was resolved by all but the religion-dominated somewhere around 200-300 years ago.
Also, re -
>
That evolution happened is beyond doubt, since the fossil record very clearly shows that the collection of species inhabiting the earth varies greatly over time, at least on geological timescales. The only thing open to rational discussion is what the mechanism for the changes was, not whether the the changes happened.
It happens that we have a theory that appears to explain that mechanism very well, to the point of making predictions about what you'll see if you go down to the lab and do some gene sequencing tomorrow. Some people object to that theory because it contradicts their religious beliefs, and it is commonly believed that others object to it due to a peculiar political ideology (namely that religion-as-opiate-of-masses is a good thing), but neither party has actually done any science that calls the current theory into question. So they resort to bogus pseudo-scientific claims, handwave arguments, misrepresentation of facts, mendacity (e.g., carven human footprints at Paluxy), attempts to poison the well by undercutting the public's trust of science in general, attempts to misportray their ancient mythology as science, attempts to bring science down into the gutter with their own beliefs by labelling it as a mere philosophy or even a religion, and sometimes to arguments that are so truly loopy that it is often commented that creationism is impossible to parody.
But something is needed to explain the changes to the species over time, and right now the only available explanations are the theory of evolution and magic. And the only theory constrained by the facts is the theory of evolution.
> To be sure, I don't want computers flagging people to be arrested. But computers sift through enormous amounts of information, making them ideal for a first pass. If they are used to flag people to be scrutinized by humans, I don't have any objections.
Are those humans going to be highly-trained well-paid experts like those who work airport security?
The basic expectation is that the human 'supervisors' will adopt a strategy of either (a) waiving everyone that the computer identifies because they're tired of taking the heat for false positives, or else (b) calling for the cops every time the computer identifies someone, so they won't have to take the heat if a terrorist does get through. (Interesting problem, that. I would guess that we would see a lot of variety of individual behavior early on, after which it would settle into a state where all 'supervisors' behave the same. Presumably that would be state (a) except for during 'alerts' and for relatively short periods after real incidents.)
The only optimal position between those extremes is get it right almost every time, i.e. to have a real expert (or team of experts) looking over the computer's shoulder. And I seriously doubt that society is going to be willing to pay for that.