If the Imperial system consisted of definitions like "Measure this like King George III would have", I'm sure people would argue against that being a standard also.
About investigating charges of corruption of the voting process:
We reviewed the process before it started, all the while during its course and afterwards as well. While the voting on ISO/IEC 29500 has attracted exceptional publicity, it needs to be put in context. ISO and IEC have collections of more than 17 000 and 7 000 successful standards respectively, these being revised and added to every month. This suggests that the standards development process is credible, works well and is delivering the standards needed, and widely implemented, by the market. Because continual improvement is an underlying aim of standardization, ISO and IEC will certainly be continuing to review and improve its standards development procedures.
So they're basically saying: "Since we've done a lot of successful standards before, there can't possibly be anything wrong with how this one was carried out."
"It's rather like raising children. Constantly exploring and pushing their limits and no matter how often you cite the rules to them, they will break the rules and require punishment. When a child exclaims, "I don't need punishment I'll be good!" I doubt anyone actually believes that child. So why should we believe Comcast?"
This brought to mind my experiences raising my 4 year old. He's constantly trying to push the limits and as a result is constantly getting into trouble. Mostly simple stuff like turning on the TV right after Mommy and Daddy told him not to or using potty talk when we warned him about it already. (Much of the bad behavior we attribute to him copying a very bad influence in school, but that's a different issue.) His main punishment is being put in his bed in his room. He has to sit there for at least 4 minutes (perhaps longer depending on the offense and on how loudly he complains).
Invariably, when he's told that he's going to his room, he insists that he'll be good now. Of course, we don't believe him and even if we did it doesn't change the punishment. The time for being good is *before* you do something bad, not *after* it.
You're right to compare this action to the actions of companies. Companies try to get away with whatever they can. They'll often behave nicely when someone (press, government, public) is looking, but will "misbehave" as soon as backs are turned to them. They do it with a subtly that my son has yet to learn, of course. If my son tells me "Don't look at me now" it's a sure sign he's about to misbehave. Companies rarely say "don't look at how I'm running this operation" when they're doing something illegal. Of course, they'll often say "government interference/regulation isn't needed, we can self-regulate" so perhaps that is the corporate equivalent to "Daddy, look away from me now."
I'm not a fan of too much government regulation, but with large corporations there is definitely a need for it. Otherwise the corporations will run roughshod over the rights of the people for the sake of a slightly larger profit.
You're not misquoting. That's one of the main problems with the GM crop lawsuits. Farmer Bob decides that he's not going to use GM seeds and only plants non-GM seeds. His neighbor, Farmer Jim, though, plants GM seeds. One day a breeze blows a few seeds from Farmer Jim's property to Farmer Bob's property. These seeds take root and grow. The crops are similar, just GM versus non-GM, so there's no way for Farmer Bob to tell the difference.
Monsanto, knowing that Jim is using GM seeds but Bob isn't, sues Bob for infringing their rights. They check his field and find a few GM plants growing. He's then forced to pay Monsanto for the "right" to have those plants growing in his field. (Whether he wanted them or not is irrelevant to Monsanto.) And since the GM plants might pop back up in subsequent years or might blow over from Farmer Jim's field again, Farmer Bob's field is now contaminated and he must pay yearly fees to Monsanto or face legal action enough to make him lose his farm.
The lesson here is: Buy genetically modified seeds from Monsanto or you'll lose your farm.
Or put another way: Dat's a nice farm you've got dere. If you buy these seeds from us, we can ensure that you'll be "protected." Otherwise.... Well, it'd be a shame if something *happened* to dat farm of yours.
Making duplicates and selling copies would be different. However, if you are sent something in the mail that you didn't ask for, it is yours. No amount of pleading, billing, or lawsuit threats can force you to return it. And once an item is yours, you are free to sell it. We're not talking about selling copies here, but the original that you received. So if Universal sends me a CD out of the blue, I can put it on eBay to sell even if there was a big sticker on it that said "Do Not Sell." They would have no rights to tell me to send it back or to tell me that I need to keep it and not sell it. If I made copies of that CD and sold them, I would still be in the wrong, however.
Since when are Cease and Desist orders, especially ones issues by the state police, "petty technicalities"? If I was to violate such an order, I can guarantee you that the judge wouldn't just shrug his shoulders and call it a technicality. Media Sentry violating the law is not acceptable even if doing so results in them getting evidence of other illegal activity. First of all, such evidence would be thrown out in any trial. Secondly, companies can't just violate the law when it's convenient for them without consequence. (Queue the cynic in me saying "Of course they don't violate the law. They pay some congressman to change it for them.")
Some even had billions of _public_ money handed to them by Governments to build their _future_ networks.
And after having been handed billions, they pocketed it, didn't build the networks they promised to build, and then tried to claim that they did build it:
I'm definitely not saying that they shouldn't hold back from making 3D films because a small group of people (my mother included) won't be able to view them. (After all, we don't stop making TV shows and movies because blind people can't view them. And I'm sure there are more blind people than people with double-vision like my mother has.) My post was more of a follow up on the parent poster noting that he can't see 3D movies being blind on one eye. At most, they should probably release movies in 3D and 2D formats. (Which is what Pixar is planning on doing, I believe.)
Given that the guy filmed himself pulling the records out of the trash, the fact that the police confiscated boxes of the records from him, and the fact that he didn't work in a bank (or have other access to the records), I think that the dumped in the trash explanation is true. It makes me wonder how many other banks give lip service to keeping customer records secure and then dump sensitive papers in the trash figuring no one would find out. It was probably a "cost saving" measure by some idiot middle manager. He probably figured that it was cheaper to dump the records than to shred them.
3D doesn't work for my mother either. She has double vision. When the images that her eyes take go to her brain, her brain doesn't combine them fully into one image. Instead, she sees one version of the object and another version slightly above and to the side. Understandably, she has trouble working on the computer as she sees two of all of the icons, duplicate text (insert joke about seeing quadruple Slashdot stories here), etc. She's gotten used to it enough to drive and function in society normally, but her eyes are prone to fatigue and she can get headaches from time to time due to the strain.
Apparently, when she was younger, she had surgery to correct her double vision, and they corrected a problem with her eyes only to find out that her brain wasn't combining the signals properly. She's had other treatments over the years (vision therapy and the like) but they haven't worked.
When it comes to 3D movies, the people who make them assume that the images are going to line up perfectly in your brain to make the 3D effect. The images don't line up right for her so the 3D effect is ruined.
Copyright? I have a copyright on my name? Can I sue anyone that violates that copyright? I thought you couldn't copyright a fact.
Sure you can. Just try publishing baseball statistics without MLB chasing you down.;-)
Seriously, though, if you can copyright a name, what happens if someone else has the same name? I know for a fact that I'm not the only "Jason Levine" in the USA. I'm not even the only "Jason Levine" in New York state. I might not even be the only "Jason Levine" in the city I live in. If I registered on a forum with my name, city, and state, could the other Jason Levine that lived there sue me for copyright infringement? Could he only sue if he was older than me (and thus had the name before me)? Are parents going to have to do a copyright search before naming their children now? What if you own the copyright to your name in City A but then move to City B where someone else owns the copyright to your name? Do they sue you? Do you take possession of the copyright if you are older? Do you have a duel at high noon? ("This town ain't big enough for the both of us Jason Levines!")
The very idea that you can copyright your name should make any reasonable person burst out in laughter. That a judge actually deemed that Jane Doe's bogus profiles infringed on her "intellectual property rights" is scary. Just how much information do you need to add to a profile before you infringe on someone's "intellectual property rights?" I run a website where people sign up and can give their names, cities, and states. If someone signed up using as "John Doe from Somewhere, NY", and began acting like an idiot, could I be sued by the real "John Doe from Somewhere, NY"? If the information was really the poster's correct information, but there was another "John Doe" in "Somewhere, NY", could the other "John Doe" sue me?
Hey, you go to war with the Rebels with the armor that the Empire gives you, not the armor you wish you'd have. I have heard reports of some particularly creative Stormtroopers adding additional armor to their suits. I find this lack of faith in the Empire disturbing.
Security is best in layers. So you don't download cracks or warez. Great. You've eliminated a big source of virus infestation. I'll go out on a limb and assume that you don't open e-mail attachments or download screensavers from websites either. But perhaps you just bought a brand new hard drive and connected it to your system. Congrats. You now have a trojan on your system. Since you're not running an antivirus application, you won't know that your system is infected. If you were running a firewall, it might pick up a rogue process trying to connect to the Internet and alert you to this. If you ran a program like Startup Monitor, it might alert you that the trojan was trying to get itself to run at Windows startup.
If you ran an anti-spyware application, you might find out that that application that you know and trust recently added some spyware into the install. Perhaps the spyware addition wasn't even listed as an option for disabling. However, again, a firewall or Startup Monitor would alert you to the presence of this infection based on its behavior (trying to access the Internet and setting itself to run on startup). An anti-spyware application would find and clean the spyware off your system.
Even the most careful user will slip up (or be blindsided) once or twice. The security layers will prevent your system from being infected (or will minimize the damage) when those slipups occur.
As a side note, I'm always amused when people say "I've never run an anti-virus scan and I have never had a virus infection, EVER!" If you don't run antivirus, how do you know that you're not infected. (This last point isn't directed at you specifically, but at a general attitude I've seen over the years.)
So, feel free to think less of him for it (I'm sure that while he disagreed with what you had to say, he would have defended to the death your right to say it) but while you're doing so, also think about the notion that if you start to pick and choose what rights you think people ought to have, and try to redefine those rights out of existence, then someone else later will have an easier time of stripping the citizenry of the rights that YOU yourself hold dear. One need look no further than the current occupant of the white house to see such a process in action.
Basically:
They came for the Second Amendment by taking away our right to own a gun. I didn't own a gun so I remained silent.
They came for the Fifth Amendment with warrantless wiretapping. I didn't think I had anything to hide so I remained silent.
They came for the Sixth Amendment by declaring people "enemy combatants" and detaining them indefinitely without trial. I wanted to seem Patriotic so I remained silent.
They came for the First Amendment with DCMA Censorship and by marking off Free Speech Zones. I didn't want to rock the boat so I remained silent.
Then they came for me and I realized that I had no rights left.
That was my thought. One curve does not make them confusingly similar. I'm not going to see the GreeNYC logo and think "Is that logo the for the company that makes iPods?" If Apple actually files suit, it should be tossed out. They don't have a case.
This brings to mind a line from one of Jeff Dunham's recent performances:
(Achmed The Dead Terrorist realizes that he is dead. He looks out into the crowd for his 72 virgins.)
Achmed: "Are you my virgins? I hope not!" Jeff: "Why not?" Achmed: "There's a bunch of ugly-ass guys out there! If this is Paradise, I've been screwed!" Jeff: "Did they say they would only be female virgins?" Achmed: "Holy crap!"
In theory, I agree. If OOXML were truly an open standard, but just differed from ODF in some ways (perhaps better in some ways and worse in others), but otherwise was a fully implementable standard, I would be all for making it an ISO standard and having OpenOffice.org able to read/save OOXML files.
In practice, however, Microsoft has shown that they don't really care about OOXML as a standard. They've said themselves that they aren't going to implement it. If they aren't going to implement it, then how is anyone else supposed to? Besides, it's littered with awful "explanations" like AutoSpaceLikeWord95. How do you AutoSpace like Word95? OOXML doesn't explain this. You're just expected to know. OOXML is really just an attempt by Microsoft to get to claim support for open standards without actually having to support open standards.
In short, I would have no problem with someone else coming up with a format to compete with ODF, but I don't think Microsoft is willing to do it.
I wonder if they're still taking a cut out for "breakage." For those who don't know, back in the vinyl days many shipped records would wind up broken. There was no good way of accounting for broken vinyl records and not counting those as sales (and thus not paying artists royalties on sales that never happened), so the record labels make some assumptions about the average number of broken records that would result in each shipment. However, when they started shipping CDs, they didn't update the breakage figures. (CDs don't break quite as much as vinyl does during shipping.) They were still taking out large breakage fees even though breakage had significantly dropped.
So now that the distribution is digital and there's nothing really to "break" (sure the download could be corrupt, but you can re-download it without buying it again), I wonder if they've done away with breakage fees or (more likely) they are still charging breakage fees against the artists' royalty payments in an attempt to keep as much money as possible in the labels' own bank accounts.
I'm not against the American government per se. Just against the overreaching, unbalanced version that the Bush Administration and the neocons seem to want. When did the Republican party become the party of Big Government? I thought the Democrats were supposed to be for overreaching Big Government and the Republicans were Rule of Law, Small Government, Stick to the Constitution-types. (I know there are still plenty of "Classic Republicans" out there. Here's hoping they take their party back from the Neocons.)
As a result, arguing that someone is or could be a terrorist is the same as arguing that someone is doing something that makes people afraid.
I know that a lot of the things that the Bush Administration has done has made a lot of people (including me) afraid. In fact, I'm a whole lot more afraid that the federal government will seize my rights in a power grab (under the guise of "fighting terrorism") than I am that some guy will detonate an anthrax bomb while I'm shopping at my local supermarket.
If I'm following their reasoning correctly, the US government spying on its citizens without a warrant would be wrong and would violate the 4th Amendment. However, because their intention is to catch terrorists, it suddenly makes the spying part of the "War on Terror", a military operation, and therefore not covered by the 4th Amendment. It seems that all the government needs to do to bypass all rules and restrictions is cry terrorism. Of course, the fact that this power of the government's would make the whole 4th Amendment pointless (due to the government saying terrorism to justify the spying even if no terrorism occurred) escapes them. Terrorism is the new communism. Either you're with them or you're against America.
For the record, I'm against America... at least America as they define it. I'm for the America where people didn't have to worry about their government spying on them or having no checks on its power simply because some government official cried out "Terrorism!"
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I don't know, we might have to follow the ISO's reasoning on this:
;-)
All other years before weren't "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" so therefore this year won't be either.
I was referring to clauses in OOXML such as "FormatLikeWord95".
If the Imperial system consisted of definitions like "Measure this like King George III would have", I'm sure people would argue against that being a standard also.
So they're basically saying: "Since we've done a lot of successful standards before, there can't possibly be anything wrong with how this one was carried out."
"It's rather like raising children. Constantly exploring and pushing their limits and no matter how often you cite the rules to them, they will break the rules and require punishment. When a child exclaims, "I don't need punishment I'll be good!" I doubt anyone actually believes that child. So why should we believe Comcast?"
This brought to mind my experiences raising my 4 year old. He's constantly trying to push the limits and as a result is constantly getting into trouble. Mostly simple stuff like turning on the TV right after Mommy and Daddy told him not to or using potty talk when we warned him about it already. (Much of the bad behavior we attribute to him copying a very bad influence in school, but that's a different issue.) His main punishment is being put in his bed in his room. He has to sit there for at least 4 minutes (perhaps longer depending on the offense and on how loudly he complains).
Invariably, when he's told that he's going to his room, he insists that he'll be good now. Of course, we don't believe him and even if we did it doesn't change the punishment. The time for being good is *before* you do something bad, not *after* it.
You're right to compare this action to the actions of companies. Companies try to get away with whatever they can. They'll often behave nicely when someone (press, government, public) is looking, but will "misbehave" as soon as backs are turned to them. They do it with a subtly that my son has yet to learn, of course. If my son tells me "Don't look at me now" it's a sure sign he's about to misbehave. Companies rarely say "don't look at how I'm running this operation" when they're doing something illegal. Of course, they'll often say "government interference/regulation isn't needed, we can self-regulate" so perhaps that is the corporate equivalent to "Daddy, look away from me now."
I'm not a fan of too much government regulation, but with large corporations there is definitely a need for it. Otherwise the corporations will run roughshod over the rights of the people for the sake of a slightly larger profit.
You're not misquoting. That's one of the main problems with the GM crop lawsuits. Farmer Bob decides that he's not going to use GM seeds and only plants non-GM seeds. His neighbor, Farmer Jim, though, plants GM seeds. One day a breeze blows a few seeds from Farmer Jim's property to Farmer Bob's property. These seeds take root and grow. The crops are similar, just GM versus non-GM, so there's no way for Farmer Bob to tell the difference.
Monsanto, knowing that Jim is using GM seeds but Bob isn't, sues Bob for infringing their rights. They check his field and find a few GM plants growing. He's then forced to pay Monsanto for the "right" to have those plants growing in his field. (Whether he wanted them or not is irrelevant to Monsanto.) And since the GM plants might pop back up in subsequent years or might blow over from Farmer Jim's field again, Farmer Bob's field is now contaminated and he must pay yearly fees to Monsanto or face legal action enough to make him lose his farm.
The lesson here is: Buy genetically modified seeds from Monsanto or you'll lose your farm.
Or put another way: Dat's a nice farm you've got dere. If you buy these seeds from us, we can ensure that you'll be "protected." Otherwise.... Well, it'd be a shame if something *happened* to dat farm of yours.
Just make sure that your aim is good and that you don't switch the baseballs by mistake!
Making duplicates and selling copies would be different. However, if you are sent something in the mail that you didn't ask for, it is yours. No amount of pleading, billing, or lawsuit threats can force you to return it. And once an item is yours, you are free to sell it. We're not talking about selling copies here, but the original that you received. So if Universal sends me a CD out of the blue, I can put it on eBay to sell even if there was a big sticker on it that said "Do Not Sell." They would have no rights to tell me to send it back or to tell me that I need to keep it and not sell it. If I made copies of that CD and sold them, I would still be in the wrong, however.
Since when are Cease and Desist orders, especially ones issues by the state police, "petty technicalities"? If I was to violate such an order, I can guarantee you that the judge wouldn't just shrug his shoulders and call it a technicality. Media Sentry violating the law is not acceptable even if doing so results in them getting evidence of other illegal activity. First of all, such evidence would be thrown out in any trial. Secondly, companies can't just violate the law when it's convenient for them without consequence. (Queue the cynic in me saying "Of course they don't violate the law. They pay some congressman to change it for them.")
And after having been handed billions, they pocketed it, didn't build the networks they promised to build, and then tried to claim that they did build it:
http://www.teletruth.org/PennBroadbandfraud.html
I'm definitely not saying that they shouldn't hold back from making 3D films because a small group of people (my mother included) won't be able to view them. (After all, we don't stop making TV shows and movies because blind people can't view them. And I'm sure there are more blind people than people with double-vision like my mother has.) My post was more of a follow up on the parent poster noting that he can't see 3D movies being blind on one eye. At most, they should probably release movies in 3D and 2D formats. (Which is what Pixar is planning on doing, I believe.)
Given that the guy filmed himself pulling the records out of the trash, the fact that the police confiscated boxes of the records from him, and the fact that he didn't work in a bank (or have other access to the records), I think that the dumped in the trash explanation is true. It makes me wonder how many other banks give lip service to keeping customer records secure and then dump sensitive papers in the trash figuring no one would find out. It was probably a "cost saving" measure by some idiot middle manager. He probably figured that it was cheaper to dump the records than to shred them.
3D doesn't work for my mother either. She has double vision. When the images that her eyes take go to her brain, her brain doesn't combine them fully into one image. Instead, she sees one version of the object and another version slightly above and to the side. Understandably, she has trouble working on the computer as she sees two of all of the icons, duplicate text (insert joke about seeing quadruple Slashdot stories here), etc. She's gotten used to it enough to drive and function in society normally, but her eyes are prone to fatigue and she can get headaches from time to time due to the strain.
Apparently, when she was younger, she had surgery to correct her double vision, and they corrected a problem with her eyes only to find out that her brain wasn't combining the signals properly. She's had other treatments over the years (vision therapy and the like) but they haven't worked.
When it comes to 3D movies, the people who make them assume that the images are going to line up perfectly in your brain to make the 3D effect. The images don't line up right for her so the 3D effect is ruined.
When apparently you can just dumpster dive behind your local bank to get all the bank accounts you would ever need?
Sure you can. Just try publishing baseball statistics without MLB chasing you down.
Seriously, though, if you can copyright a name, what happens if someone else has the same name? I know for a fact that I'm not the only "Jason Levine" in the USA. I'm not even the only "Jason Levine" in New York state. I might not even be the only "Jason Levine" in the city I live in. If I registered on a forum with my name, city, and state, could the other Jason Levine that lived there sue me for copyright infringement? Could he only sue if he was older than me (and thus had the name before me)? Are parents going to have to do a copyright search before naming their children now? What if you own the copyright to your name in City A but then move to City B where someone else owns the copyright to your name? Do they sue you? Do you take possession of the copyright if you are older? Do you have a duel at high noon? ("This town ain't big enough for the both of us Jason Levines!")
The very idea that you can copyright your name should make any reasonable person burst out in laughter. That a judge actually deemed that Jane Doe's bogus profiles infringed on her "intellectual property rights" is scary. Just how much information do you need to add to a profile before you infringe on someone's "intellectual property rights?" I run a website where people sign up and can give their names, cities, and states. If someone signed up using as "John Doe from Somewhere, NY", and began acting like an idiot, could I be sued by the real "John Doe from Somewhere, NY"? If the information was really the poster's correct information, but there was another "John Doe" in "Somewhere, NY", could the other "John Doe" sue me?
Hey, you go to war with the Rebels with the armor that the Empire gives you, not the armor you wish you'd have. I have heard reports of some particularly creative Stormtroopers adding additional armor to their suits. I find this lack of faith in the Empire disturbing.
Security is best in layers. So you don't download cracks or warez. Great. You've eliminated a big source of virus infestation. I'll go out on a limb and assume that you don't open e-mail attachments or download screensavers from websites either. But perhaps you just bought a brand new hard drive and connected it to your system. Congrats. You now have a trojan on your system. Since you're not running an antivirus application, you won't know that your system is infected. If you were running a firewall, it might pick up a rogue process trying to connect to the Internet and alert you to this. If you ran a program like Startup Monitor, it might alert you that the trojan was trying to get itself to run at Windows startup.
If you ran an anti-spyware application, you might find out that that application that you know and trust recently added some spyware into the install. Perhaps the spyware addition wasn't even listed as an option for disabling. However, again, a firewall or Startup Monitor would alert you to the presence of this infection based on its behavior (trying to access the Internet and setting itself to run on startup). An anti-spyware application would find and clean the spyware off your system.
Even the most careful user will slip up (or be blindsided) once or twice. The security layers will prevent your system from being infected (or will minimize the damage) when those slipups occur.
As a side note, I'm always amused when people say "I've never run an anti-virus scan and I have never had a virus infection, EVER!" If you don't run antivirus, how do you know that you're not infected. (This last point isn't directed at you specifically, but at a general attitude I've seen over the years.)
Basically:
They came for the Second Amendment by taking away our right to own a gun.
I didn't own a gun so I remained silent.
They came for the Fifth Amendment with warrantless wiretapping.
I didn't think I had anything to hide so I remained silent.
They came for the Sixth Amendment by declaring people "enemy combatants" and detaining them indefinitely without trial.
I wanted to seem Patriotic so I remained silent.
They came for the First Amendment with DCMA Censorship and by marking off Free Speech Zones.
I didn't want to rock the boat so I remained silent.
Then they came for me and I realized that I had no rights left.
That was my thought. One curve does not make them confusingly similar. I'm not going to see the GreeNYC logo and think "Is that logo the for the company that makes iPods?" If Apple actually files suit, it should be tossed out. They don't have a case.
In theory, I agree. If OOXML were truly an open standard, but just differed from ODF in some ways (perhaps better in some ways and worse in others), but otherwise was a fully implementable standard, I would be all for making it an ISO standard and having OpenOffice.org able to read/save OOXML files.
In practice, however, Microsoft has shown that they don't really care about OOXML as a standard. They've said themselves that they aren't going to implement it. If they aren't going to implement it, then how is anyone else supposed to? Besides, it's littered with awful "explanations" like AutoSpaceLikeWord95. How do you AutoSpace like Word95? OOXML doesn't explain this. You're just expected to know. OOXML is really just an attempt by Microsoft to get to claim support for open standards without actually having to support open standards.
In short, I would have no problem with someone else coming up with a format to compete with ODF, but I don't think Microsoft is willing to do it.
I wonder if they're still taking a cut out for "breakage." For those who don't know, back in the vinyl days many shipped records would wind up broken. There was no good way of accounting for broken vinyl records and not counting those as sales (and thus not paying artists royalties on sales that never happened), so the record labels make some assumptions about the average number of broken records that would result in each shipment. However, when they started shipping CDs, they didn't update the breakage figures. (CDs don't break quite as much as vinyl does during shipping.) They were still taking out large breakage fees even though breakage had significantly dropped.
So now that the distribution is digital and there's nothing really to "break" (sure the download could be corrupt, but you can re-download it without buying it again), I wonder if they've done away with breakage fees or (more likely) they are still charging breakage fees against the artists' royalty payments in an attempt to keep as much money as possible in the labels' own bank accounts.
I'm not against the American government per se. Just against the overreaching, unbalanced version that the Bush Administration and the neocons seem to want. When did the Republican party become the party of Big Government? I thought the Democrats were supposed to be for overreaching Big Government and the Republicans were Rule of Law, Small Government, Stick to the Constitution-types. (I know there are still plenty of "Classic Republicans" out there. Here's hoping they take their party back from the Neocons.)
I know that a lot of the things that the Bush Administration has done has made a lot of people (including me) afraid. In fact, I'm a whole lot more afraid that the federal government will seize my rights in a power grab (under the guise of "fighting terrorism") than I am that some guy will detonate an anthrax bomb while I'm shopping at my local supermarket.
If I'm following their reasoning correctly, the US government spying on its citizens without a warrant would be wrong and would violate the 4th Amendment. However, because their intention is to catch terrorists, it suddenly makes the spying part of the "War on Terror", a military operation, and therefore not covered by the 4th Amendment. It seems that all the government needs to do to bypass all rules and restrictions is cry terrorism. Of course, the fact that this power of the government's would make the whole 4th Amendment pointless (due to the government saying terrorism to justify the spying even if no terrorism occurred) escapes them. Terrorism is the new communism. Either you're with them or you're against America.
For the record, I'm against America... at least America as they define it. I'm for the America where people didn't have to worry about their government spying on them or having no checks on its power simply because some government official cried out "Terrorism!"