... it does seem that some things are being grossly overstated, such as the risks of anthrax.
The implications of what your are saying, if there are any implications, is that people shouldn't worry about anthrax until more than 41,611 people are infected per year. Reasonable people do not look at risk this way.
People typically make a rough risk/reward calculation when they take an action. The benefits of driving are high and the risk fairly low. If there are alternatives to using airplanes and the mail and thereby reduce the risk, however remote, the reasonable thing is to use them.
In addition, the perceived risks of driving and terrorism are not comparable. Drivers can take reasonable precautions to reduce their risk such as obeying traffic laws, not drinking, keeping their car in repair, etc. There are no similar ways for prudent individuals to reduce the risk from hijacking and bioterrorism except not flying and not using mail.
So far, the level of panic resulting from the terrorist attacks and the threat of bioterrorism has been low, perhaps unexpectedly low, both in the general public and in public officials. So far, the American public should be complemented for their coolness, not mocked, with irrelevant statistics.
The fact of the matter is that biological and chemical weapons just aren't practical.
In fact, there has already been a successful biological attack on American soil. It was carried out in 1984 by a bunch of amateurs, followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who poisoned over 700 people with botulism that they spread on salad bars in Oregon.
The 9/11 terrorists have shown themselves to be resourceful, if not practical, and ruthless enough to use biological weapons. One could have once argued, with equal logic, that hijacking airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers "was just not practical".
If news reports are to be believed, the U.S. mail has already proved to be viable way of spreading two different kinds of anthrax. The only constraint of using the mail is the thousands of dollars involved in postage for a mass mailing.
It's much cheaper, easier and kills a lot more people to just set off a bomb in some building.
On a cost per thousand basis, there's nothing cheaper than biological weapons, particularly if you use a contageous one like smallpox, as the article you cite suggests at the end. The writer of that article seems to think the fact that the terrorists themselves might be at risk is a deterent.
Although there may be some technological hurdles, the payoff both in terms of casualties and creating terror is unbeatable.
If people are complacent about the threat of biological terrorism, the terrorists have already overcome their biggest obstacle.
As recently as June, 1981, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the draft and found that "Congress acted well within its constitutional authority to raise and regulate armies and navies" under Article I, Section 8.
In ruling on the draft for World War I, the Supreme Court said: ``As we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement."
The presumption here is that the draft is a noble duty, not servitude. Somewhere in there might be the basis for ID cards: carrying them is a duty like paying taxes, not an invasion of privacy.
Still, the police need probably cause to stop a citizen and demand identification. I can't see how carrying the ID card would give the police any greater powers to demand to see it.
some of us want the republic that we were promised back in civics, oh and in those founding documents
America's system of democratic pluralism grew naturally out of two provision of the First Amendment: the right of the people to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Democratic pluralism recognizes that people of similar interests naturally flock together. People will thus present their case to the government as part of a group rather than as individuals. The system of political parties, which is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, is a manifestation of this process.
The system is only broken in so far as people do not participate and thus abandon the field to those who do.
I was trying to suggest some ways to limit its impact on our freedoms
I think the best way to limit the impact on our freedoms is sundown clauses. Fighting domestic terrorism is uncharted territory and it will be hard to calibrate with precision how much of our traditional rights and privileges must be constrained.
At least a sundown clause will mean the constraints will all expire unless they can be justified by current facts and arguments.
I think a bigger danger than government abuse of additional powers is that a new generation will grow up without knowledge of the rights they once had. Over time, the love of individual freedom will atrophy and die from lack of use.
The idea of influencing an elected official by writing a letter betrays a common naive notion about the way representative democracy works in general and the way it works in the United States in particular.
The factors that influence a Congressman's or Senator's vote are
what the majority of people in his district think about an issue
how strongly those people feel about an issue
his own informed or uninformed opinion on an issue
the need to co-operate and compromise with his colleagues in order to get his favorite legislation passed or some other bill defeated.
If you want your elected rep's attention, join some organization of like-minded people that can guarantee your rep some votes on election day or some money for his campaign. The president of that organization will have the ear of the representative on a regular basis. You will also find that this president will listen closely to your opinion because he wants your vote in the organization's next election and because he wants you to renew your membership and pay your dues.
If you want to talk directly to your elected representative, get elected president of that organization.
This system makes sense in a crude kind of way because by joining an organization you show you feel strongly enough about an issue to contribute money and attend meetings. It also allows the elected rep to talk to someone who speaks for more than just himself.
As an individual citizen, your influence is properly limited to the vote you cast on election day. If you want more influence, you have to get out from behind the keyboard and hustle a bit.
If legislation requiring a national ID card is passed, I for one will not apply for it.
The type of penalties you would face might be similar to those faced by men between the age of 18 and 26 who fail to register for the draft: Failure to register or otherwise comply with the Military Selective Service Act is upon conviction, punishable by a fine of up to $250,000, imprisonment for up to five years, or both. In addition, federal and certain state laws require registration as a prerequisite for obtaining student financial aid, job training, government employment, and U.S. naturalization.
The loss of liberties from a national ID card, though onerous, are many times less than the loss of liberty entailed by being drafted. If the draft is constitutional, I can't see how a national ID card wouldn't also be constitutional.
In fact, the loss of privacy involved in filing income tax forms every year is at least as great as that of a national ID card. Conceivably the same sort of restrictions on the disclosure of tax information would apply to the ID card.
If there is a national ID card and if it sustains a Supreme Court challenge and if you don't want to go to jail for 5 years, you might want to consider immigrating to Canada, which has a long history of accepting refugees from the United States.
I think the main objection here is loss of privacy.
The first question is whether ID cards will make it easier for the police to identify terrorists. If the answer is "yes" then one can discuss the trade-off of loss of privacy vs. increased safety.
However, if the answer is "no", then the privacy question becomes irrelevant because there is no justification for the card.
The terrorism we have just witnessed is conducted by people from outside the United States who could arrive with false identities. I can't see how a domestic ID system would address that tactic at all.
We can make a trade. National ID card in exchange for more open governance.
If you want more "open governance" and government accountability, you don't need to make any kind of trade. You are entitled to both as a citizen of a democracy. Except in some very narrow areas, the fight against terrorism doesn't require any additional government secrecy. The longstanding campaign for more open government can proceed without fear of impeding the search for terrorists.
There are millions of people whose lives are so disorganized that they won't get the ID cards or they'll lose them when they get them or they'll fail to get them renewed.
For instance, in 1993-97, 3.7 percent of drivers were unlicensed, 7.4 percent were driving on an invalid (e.g., suspended, revoked, etc.) license, and 2.7 percent were of unknown license status.
The result is that if the police have to investigate everyone they stop without a valid ID card, they will be spending thousands of useless man hours verifying the identities of non-terrorists. Possibly they will be investigating the same hopeless people over and over again.
At best, a national ID system will prove a short term impediment until the terrorists figure out a way to acquire the cards illegally.
In fact, one can imagine a large black market for ID cards that would be a further drain on the resources of the police.
The traditional news media--the TV networks and newspapers -- have colonized the Web and turned it into another channel for their content. The Web offers plenty of new sources for rumour and opinion but authoritative news comes from the same sources as it always has with all the benefits and drawbacks they entail.
As a result, the Web is less immediate than television and a more immediate than the daily newspaper but the content is fundamentally the same.
The future of the Web as a news medium is almost certainly not in broadcasting but in narrowcasting. Information can be selected, packaged and distributed to niche markets and special interest groups more quickly and cheaply than other media.
Here the Web is not fulfilling its potential for breaking news. For instance, groups involved in the Sept. 11 disaster such as the NYPD, the N.Y. Fire Dept., the companies in the WTC, the airlines, etc., could have begun posting information as it became available for interested parties. They would have provided authoritative information not available from the broadcast media that have a wider mandate.
Existing broadcast news media could turn over part of their Web sites for this type of information so that users would have a portal rather than having to go to numerous separate sites.
Given such a platform, companies, government agencies and non-profit groups that normally slant their press releases so that they will be picked up by conventional broadcast news media could instead provide detailed information for the specific groups that need it.
Add a "what's new" page and a search engine to such a site, and you have the news site of the future.
I'd like to not have to sit in jail while waiting for my rights to be restored by a judge when they shouldn't have been taken away in the first place.
If you are sitting in jail, what's at stake is your right to beat the rap by claiming unreasonable search and seizure. If, for instance, you were a terrorist who had been arrested because of information provided by a foreign intelligence service obtained by a wiretap, you would not be able to argue that the evidence was inadmissable.
None of the things the ACLU is protesting would get you arrested. They make it easier for the prosecution to get a conviction by admiting things into evidence that would have previously been excluded.
It's curious that none of these provisions mention internment without trial, which is a big feature of the Britain's protection against terrorism act. The U.S. is holding approximately 600 people as material witnesses without trial. Apparently, when it comes to getting around habeus corpus, the FBI already has all the power it needs.
Obviously the best restriction on traditional liberties is no restriction. However, given the terrorist threat, the ACLU would be more helpful by saying what restrictions it thinks are acceptable or useful or even necessary rather than dismissing them all as if nothing changed on Sept. 11.
For instance, it says: "Few of the provisions being discussed are needed for the current terrorism investigations, so Congress should take the time to do it right." But it does not say which of the "few" it feels are necessary and that Congress should therefore act on expeditiously.
In addition, all of these acts are subject to judicial review under the Constitution. No Constitutional right can be removed by an act of Congress. If there is a problem, it is that some of the so-called rights we take for granted are not protected by the Constitution.
The ACLU only says a few provisions explicitely violate the U.S. Constitution: (1) Nationwide pen register/trap and trace orders and roving wiretaps, and (2) Criminal evidence uncovered using an intelligence (FISA) wiretap. It doesn't mention a Constitutional test for the others, which should be the first objection raised.
One question is whether the terrorists pose a greater real and immediate threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than the provisions mentioned by the ACLU. If so, the laws that are providing shelter for the terrorists are going to have to be changed.
We're probably not in disagreement in any fundamental way but I'm compelled to qualify some of your comments for the sake of discussion, if nothing else.
And so is the kind of "go and live there and get to know the locals" work that the US Special Forces A Teams are so good at
It takes many months or years to develop this kind of rapport with the locals. I imagine that in this conflict, special forces will be employed more for their ability to operate in hostile territory in order to identify targets for air strikes. Once again, the infantry is the eyes of the artillery.
So cordon and sweep operations will be the order of the day.
I suspect that this phase of high-casualty warfare will be properly left to the Northern Alliance, with the U.S. supplying food and ammo. In addition, I'd bet the Taliban will retreat to the mountains rather than whatever passes for an urban area. They'll face a cold, hungry winter while their enemies fortify themselves with U.S. Army rations and wait for the snows to melt. Once again, U.S. supply and logistics will be decisive, not the quality of the soldiers.
Welcome to the world of rebuilding a shattered nation, which is pretty much what the USA seems to be planning.
I'm predicting disaster here: waring factions, conflicts with the Pakistanis and Iranians, protracted resistance from the Taliban, fights over the drug trade. This battle will increase the level of disorder, not decrease it. The U.S. will probably clear out as soon as its short term objectives are achieved or, if necessary, declare a victory.
In a way, the bigger the disaster the U.S. leaves behind, the better. First, the whole incident will serve as a warning to nations that harbour terrorists. Second, the chaos will disrupt bin Laden's operations by ending the cosy relationships that allowed him to work in relative peace.
If the average Afgani somehow manages to come out ahead, so much the better.
The core of this, and every other conflict, is the soldier. The core of any operation involving taking ground and holding it, or in denying that ground to an enemy, is the infantry.
There are two ideas here: one outmoded, the other just wrong.
Since World War II, the purpose of the American infantry is to bring the enemy within range of the artillery. This strategy accounts for the low number of American casualties compared to enemy soldiers. The core of the conflict is artillery and air power. Direct encounters between American soldiers and enemy soldiers, when it happens, is a kind of failure of strategy.
Second, the objective of battle is not to take ground but to destroy the enemy's army in the field. Use of superior mobility and airpower make actually occupying ground for any length of time a liability.
Further, even on the ground only about a tenth of soldiers are engaged in combat. The rest are involved in logistics or held in reserve.
The soldiers' role is certainly critical but unfortunately they absorb a level of risk out of all proportion to their contribution.
Re:Imperial vs. Metric: SERIOUSLY OFFTOPIC!
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
·
· Score: 2
The US is JUST DOMINANT ENOUGH to keep Imperial measurements around about as long as they want. Like it or not.
Not dominant enough at all. It's America's isolation from the rest of the world that keeps Imperial measurements around. The domestic retail and construction markets are the bastions of Imperial measurements. American's international trade, its military, and Federal government construction use metric. Trade, for instance, forced the U.S. auto industry to metricate.
In the military in particular, you can see that the requirements of speed and accuracy support the metric system. Soldiers calling in artillery strikes have better things to do than trying to remember how many yards in a half mile.
By practicing these conversions, we are constantly honing our math skills
The metric system will hone them even further, as those of us who grew up with Imperial and lived through metrication will attest. Mentally converting hectares to acres, kilopascals to pounds per square inch, BTUs to Joules, and bushels to cubic meters will provide hours of profitable exercise in elementary math, the mental equivalent of pushups and kneebends.
Is there some confusion, perhaps on my part, between client and server here? Your previous comment said, "Return-Receipt-To is a standard, so lack of support for it is a problem of non-standard compliant e-mail client." I assumed you were saying that return receipt was a function of the client rather than the server.
Reading over the SMTP specs there seems to be more handshaking than I thought. Certainly, servers are prompt in sending "mailbox not found" messages back to the sender.
I was under the impression that mail could be delayed at some point in the relay chain without the sender being aware of it or being notified of it until much later. If I'm wrong, I appreciate you taking the time to make it clear.
There should be a way of returning undeserved karma points in such cases.
I believe that all those problems are appliable to fax, and/or telex, and/or any other means of communication.
No method can guarantee the message was read but voice mail, fax and telex almost guarantee that the message was received. With email, you can never be sure. If the sender or receipient is having server problems, email can be stuck in a variety of holding queues for hours or days.
Return-Receipt-To is a standard, so lack of support for it is a problem of non-standard compliant e-mail client.
Email delivery problems occur before the email reaches the client. My point was that depending upon the email reaching the client for confirmation is not sufficient. The email may never reach the client because of problems upstream.
As companies depend more on email they've made their email servers more reliable. However, what is needed is a protocol by which a server automatically sends back an acknowledgement that a message was received. Without this protocol, the usefulness of email for urgent and time-sensitive messages is impaired.
Englebart was no doubt years ahead of his time but email as we know it is traced back to Tomlinson.
As the article about Ray Tomlinson says: Like a number of then existing electronic message programs, the oldest dating from the early 1960s, SNDMSG only worked locally; it was designed to allow the exchange of messages between users who shared the same machine. Such users could create a text file and deliver it to a designated "mail box."
Tomlinson's achievement seems to have been "transferring files among linked computers at remote sites within ARPANET", that is creating users' mail boxes accessable over ARPNET, which did not exist as such before 1968.
As Englebart describes the system: "Each individual has private file space, and the group has community space, on a high-speed disc with a capacity of 96 million characters." The system therefore doesn't appear to be the network environment that Tomlinson was working in.
Englebart's list of Pioneering Firsts is said to include "integrated hypermedia email" but the term email may be an anachronism in this context.
There are 3 problems with return receipt as it is now implemented:
Some email clients to support it, like mine (elm).
The user may not look at his email for days, as I often don't.
The user may ignore it, as I often do when I use Outlook.
What's needed is some standard. The fact that there isn't one after all these years suggests that users are happy with the level of reliability for the urgency of the messages.
The inventor of email said he invented email not because anyone wanted it but because it was a neat idea. Probably if he had thought automatic return receipt was a neat idea, we'd have it now.
Email is come-from-behind technology. Although it predates voice mail and fax by nearly 15 years, it is only in the last 5 years or so that it rivals them in popularity.
Despite its success, email hasn't supplanted either voice mail or fax. Nearly everyone who has email also uses voice mail or fax, often both at work and at home. In spite of the fact that both voice mail and fax can be sent as an email attachment, those two technologies show no signs of disappearing. The sales of fax machines continues to rise and voice mail appears to be at saturation.
As near as I can surmise, both voice mail and fax have a higher degree of perceived urgency than email does. This urgency comes from the urgency of the technology they supplement or replace. Voice mail is a stand in for a telephone call itself, the most urgent form of communication. Faxes replaced couriers, which also were reserved for the most important documents.
Email seems to be primarily used for non-urgent communication. Part of the reason is, perhaps, that the sender of email cannot be sure if the message has arrived. For voice mail, if you get the greeting and the beep, you are reasonably sure of delivery. For fax, the fax standard guarantees that the fax will not be sent unless it is being received at the other end.
In one way, the urgency of email will probably not be determined by the message but by the attachments. The ability of email to move, store and forward electronic documents in a standardized way may determine its future development.
In another way, the urgency of email will be raised by email messages generated by computer. Because email can be generated by computer much easier than voice mail and fax, more and more email could be of the alert variety that tells the recipient that something needs his attention.
As a result I would look for some kind of encoding that flagged an email as urgent beyond simply the opinion of the sender. For instance, the email addresses that users give out might someday contain some unique priority designation so that priority could be determined by the source of the message.
One can see the process at work now when sys admins have computers send email alerts to their pagers and cell phones.
Once urgency can be reliably defined in an email message it could change its fundamental characteristic, which at the moment is convenience.
This is indeed the definition of a "university": its goal is not to educate you so much as prevent you from being ignorant.
The purpose of education is a very old debate and the term "well-rounded" is a much watered-down version of the a principle defended by Cicero (106 - 43 B.C) that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is a defining human characteristic.
In contrast, Cato the Elder (234 - 149 BC) insisted that knowledge be judged by what it produce and held what might now be called a liberal education in contempt.
The definitive exposition of the issue is Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University. He makes a useful distinction between "servile" education ("mechanical employment, and the like, in which the mind has little or no part") as being the opposite of "liberal" education, which "is the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence."
Newman does not disparage the professions as being devoid of intellectual value. However, one can see in his distinction between the two types of education that putting one's mind purely in the service of earning a living ignores a much larger world beyond one's immediate needs.
Newman argues: "Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;--these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University."
One thing you will find when you go to work in a large corporation is that the people who get ahead generally don't know what they are doing. They are selected for advancement based on personality factors that allow them to tolerate a high degree of meaningless, bureaucratic routine and get along with others so inclined.
No university is going to teach those skills, nor should it, although many of the professors are exceptionally adept at departmental politics themselves.
I've found that for being well-rounded, nothing beats mathematics. The ability to apply mathematical concepts in analyzing a wide range of problems has been an enormous and unexpected asset. I've found my technical progress barred by the limits of my mathematical training more than any other area.
Personally, I've found that after many years, the courses that seemed most useless in college have afforded me the greatest enjoyment in later life. The literature and history courses never go out of date and form the basis of the contemplative pleaures that supply most of life's satisfaction.
I hesitated to respond to your original post because I didn't want to be associated with the uncouth slashdotters who used the fact they disagreed with you as an excuse to behave in a rude and abusive manner.
If I were in your position, I would have found the tone of the debate disheartening and been tempted to forget the whole thing.
First you say: Do you really think West "intended" to modify someone else's messy Perl script and make a business out of it? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
Then you say: I never defended the guy or made assumptions about his guilt or innocence.
Can you see why readers might be confused here? In the first statement you appear to be defending him and suggesting he didn't intend to commit a crime. In the second statement you are denying defending him.
If he's innocent, as you imply in the first statement, then the issue isn't whether it is a waste of money to prosecute him. The issue is that a miscarriage of justice occurred.
If he's guilty, which implies intent, then that intent becomes as big an issue as the value of what he stole. For instance, attempted murder receives a heavy sentence even though the victim may have suffered no actual harm.
In addition, this prosecution may have a deterent effect upon his future behavior, thus saving the cost of a more expensive prosecution in the future.
I'd say the taxpayers got good value for their money. Now if you were to argue that jail time in this case would be a waste of money, you might have a point.
Slashdot Mirror
The implications of what your are saying, if there are any implications, is that people shouldn't worry about anthrax until more than 41,611 people are infected per year. Reasonable people do not look at risk this way.
People typically make a rough risk/reward calculation when they take an action. The benefits of driving are high and the risk fairly low. If there are alternatives to using airplanes and the mail and thereby reduce the risk, however remote, the reasonable thing is to use them.
In addition, the perceived risks of driving and terrorism are not comparable. Drivers can take reasonable precautions to reduce their risk such as obeying traffic laws, not drinking, keeping their car in repair, etc. There are no similar ways for prudent individuals to reduce the risk from hijacking and bioterrorism except not flying and not using mail.
So far, the level of panic resulting from the terrorist attacks and the threat of bioterrorism has been low, perhaps unexpectedly low, both in the general public and in public officials. So far, the American public should be complemented for their coolness, not mocked, with irrelevant statistics.
The fact of the matter is that biological and chemical weapons just aren't practical.
In fact, there has already been a successful biological attack on American soil. It was carried out in 1984 by a bunch of amateurs, followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who poisoned over 700 people with botulism that they spread on salad bars in Oregon.
The 9/11 terrorists have shown themselves to be resourceful, if not practical, and ruthless enough to use biological weapons. One could have once argued, with equal logic, that hijacking airliners and crashing them into skyscrapers "was just not practical".
If news reports are to be believed, the U.S. mail has already proved to be viable way of spreading two different kinds of anthrax. The only constraint of using the mail is the thousands of dollars involved in postage for a mass mailing.
It's much cheaper, easier and kills a lot more people to just set off a bomb in some building.
On a cost per thousand basis, there's nothing cheaper than biological weapons, particularly if you use a contageous one like smallpox, as the article you cite suggests at the end. The writer of that article seems to think the fact that the terrorists themselves might be at risk is a deterent.
Although there may be some technological hurdles, the payoff both in terms of casualties and creating terror is unbeatable.
If people are complacent about the threat of biological terrorism, the terrorists have already overcome their biggest obstacle.
Well, the draft isn't constitutional...
As recently as June, 1981, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the draft and found that "Congress acted well within its constitutional authority to raise and regulate armies and navies" under Article I, Section 8.
In ruling on the draft for World War I, the Supreme Court said: ``As we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation, as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people, can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement."
The presumption here is that the draft is a noble duty, not servitude. Somewhere in there might be the basis for ID cards: carrying them is a duty like paying taxes, not an invasion of privacy.
Still, the police need probably cause to stop a citizen and demand identification. I can't see how carrying the ID card would give the police any greater powers to demand to see it.
some of us want the republic that we were promised back in civics, oh and in those founding documents
America's system of democratic pluralism grew naturally out of two provision of the First Amendment: the right of the people to peaceably assemble and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Democratic pluralism recognizes that people of similar interests naturally flock together. People will thus present their case to the government as part of a group rather than as individuals. The system of political parties, which is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, is a manifestation of this process.
The system is only broken in so far as people do not participate and thus abandon the field to those who do.
I was trying to suggest some ways to limit its impact on our freedoms
I think the best way to limit the impact on our freedoms is sundown clauses. Fighting domestic terrorism is uncharted territory and it will be hard to calibrate with precision how much of our traditional rights and privileges must be constrained.
At least a sundown clause will mean the constraints will all expire unless they can be justified by current facts and arguments.
I think a bigger danger than government abuse of additional powers is that a new generation will grow up without knowledge of the rights they once had. Over time, the love of individual freedom will atrophy and die from lack of use.
The idea of influencing an elected official by writing a letter betrays a common naive notion about the way representative democracy works in general and the way it works in the United States in particular.
The factors that influence a Congressman's or Senator's vote are
what the majority of people in his district think about an issue
how strongly those people feel about an issue
his own informed or uninformed opinion on an issue
the need to co-operate and compromise with his colleagues in order to get his favorite legislation passed or some other bill defeated.
If you want your elected rep's attention, join some organization of like-minded people that can guarantee your rep some votes on election day or some money for his campaign. The president of that organization will have the ear of the representative on a regular basis. You will also find that this president will listen closely to your opinion because he wants your vote in the organization's next election and because he wants you to renew your membership and pay your dues.
If you want to talk directly to your elected representative, get elected president of that organization.
This system makes sense in a crude kind of way because by joining an organization you show you feel strongly enough about an issue to contribute money and attend meetings. It also allows the elected rep to talk to someone who speaks for more than just himself.
As an individual citizen, your influence is properly limited to the vote you cast on election day. If you want more influence, you have to get out from behind the keyboard and hustle a bit.
If legislation requiring a national ID card is passed, I for one will not apply for it.
The type of penalties you would face might be similar to those faced by men between the age of 18 and 26 who fail to register for the draft:
Failure to register or otherwise comply with the Military Selective Service Act is upon conviction, punishable by a fine of up to $250,000, imprisonment for up to five years, or both. In addition, federal and certain state laws require registration as a prerequisite for obtaining student financial aid, job training, government employment, and U.S. naturalization.
The loss of liberties from a national ID card, though onerous, are many times less than the loss of liberty entailed by being drafted. If the draft is constitutional, I can't see how a national ID card wouldn't also be constitutional.
In fact, the loss of privacy involved in filing income tax forms every year is at least as great as that of a national ID card. Conceivably the same sort of restrictions on the disclosure of tax information would apply to the ID card.
If there is a national ID card and if it sustains a Supreme Court challenge and if you don't want to go to jail for 5 years, you might want to consider immigrating to Canada, which has a long history of accepting refugees from the United States.
I think the main objection here is loss of privacy.
The first question is whether ID cards will make it easier for the police to identify terrorists. If the answer is "yes" then one can discuss the trade-off of loss of privacy vs. increased safety.
However, if the answer is "no", then the privacy question becomes irrelevant because there is no justification for the card.
The terrorism we have just witnessed is conducted by people from outside the United States who could arrive with false identities. I can't see how a domestic ID system would address that tactic at all.
We can make a trade. National ID card in exchange for more open governance.
If you want more "open governance" and government accountability, you don't need to make any kind of trade. You are entitled to both as a citizen of a democracy. Except in some very narrow areas, the fight against terrorism doesn't require any additional government secrecy. The longstanding campaign for more open government can proceed without fear of impeding the search for terrorists.
There are millions of people whose lives are so disorganized that they won't get the ID cards or they'll lose them when they get them or they'll fail to get them renewed.
For instance, in 1993-97, 3.7 percent of drivers were unlicensed, 7.4 percent were driving on an invalid (e.g., suspended, revoked, etc.) license, and 2.7 percent were of unknown license status.
The result is that if the police have to investigate everyone they stop without a valid ID card, they will be spending thousands of useless man hours verifying the identities of non-terrorists. Possibly they will be investigating the same hopeless people over and over again.
At best, a national ID system will prove a short term impediment until the terrorists figure out a way to acquire the cards illegally.
In fact, one can imagine a large black market for ID cards that would be a further drain on the resources of the police.
The traditional news media--the TV networks and newspapers -- have colonized the Web and turned it into another channel for their content. The Web offers plenty of new sources for rumour and opinion but authoritative news comes from the same sources as it always has with all the benefits and drawbacks they entail.
As a result, the Web is less immediate than television and a more immediate than the daily newspaper but the content is fundamentally the same.
The future of the Web as a news medium is almost certainly not in broadcasting but in narrowcasting. Information can be selected, packaged and distributed to niche markets and special interest groups more quickly and cheaply than other media.
Here the Web is not fulfilling its potential for breaking news. For instance, groups involved in the Sept. 11 disaster such as the NYPD, the N.Y. Fire Dept., the companies in the WTC, the airlines, etc., could have begun posting information as it became available for interested parties. They would have provided authoritative information not available from the broadcast media that have a wider mandate.
Existing broadcast news media could turn over part of their Web sites for this type of information so that users would have a portal rather than having to go to numerous separate sites.
Given such a platform, companies, government agencies and non-profit groups that normally slant their press releases so that they will be picked up by conventional broadcast news media could instead provide detailed information for the specific groups that need it.
Add a "what's new" page and a search engine to such a site, and you have the news site of the future.
I'd like to not have to sit in jail while waiting for my rights to be restored by a judge when they shouldn't have been taken away in the first place.
If you are sitting in jail, what's at stake is your right to beat the rap by claiming unreasonable search and seizure. If, for instance, you were a terrorist who had been arrested because of information provided by a foreign intelligence service obtained by a wiretap, you would not be able to argue that the evidence was inadmissable.
None of the things the ACLU is protesting would get you arrested. They make it easier for the prosecution to get a conviction by admiting things into evidence that would have previously been excluded.
It's curious that none of these provisions mention internment without trial, which is a big feature of the Britain's protection against terrorism act. The U.S. is holding approximately 600 people as material witnesses without trial. Apparently, when it comes to getting around habeus corpus, the FBI already has all the power it needs.
Obviously the best restriction on traditional liberties is no restriction. However, given the terrorist threat, the ACLU would be more helpful by saying what restrictions it thinks are acceptable or useful or even necessary rather than dismissing them all as if nothing changed on Sept. 11.
For instance, it says: "Few of the provisions being discussed are needed for the current terrorism investigations, so Congress should take the time to do it right." But it does not say which of the "few" it feels are necessary and that Congress should therefore act on expeditiously.
In addition, all of these acts are subject to judicial review under the Constitution. No Constitutional right can be removed by an act of Congress. If there is a problem, it is that some of the so-called rights we take for granted are not protected by the Constitution.
The ACLU only says a few provisions explicitely violate the U.S. Constitution: (1) Nationwide pen register/trap and trace orders and roving wiretaps, and (2) Criminal evidence uncovered using an intelligence (FISA) wiretap. It doesn't mention a Constitutional test for the others, which should be the first objection raised.
One question is whether the terrorists pose a greater real and immediate threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than the provisions mentioned by the ACLU. If so, the laws that are providing shelter for the terrorists are going to have to be changed.
We're probably not in disagreement in any fundamental way but I'm compelled to qualify some of your comments for the sake of discussion, if nothing else.
And so is the kind of "go and live there and get to know the locals" work that the US Special Forces A Teams are so good at
It takes many months or years to develop this kind of rapport with the locals. I imagine that in this conflict, special forces will be employed more for their ability to operate in hostile territory in order to identify targets for air strikes. Once again, the infantry is the eyes of the artillery.
So cordon and sweep operations will be the order of the day.
I suspect that this phase of high-casualty warfare will be properly left to the Northern Alliance, with the U.S. supplying food and ammo. In addition, I'd bet the Taliban will retreat to the mountains rather than whatever passes for an urban area. They'll face a cold, hungry winter while their enemies fortify themselves with U.S. Army rations and wait for the snows to melt. Once again, U.S. supply and logistics will be decisive, not the quality of the soldiers.
Welcome to the world of rebuilding a shattered nation, which is pretty much what the USA seems to be planning.
I'm predicting disaster here: waring factions, conflicts with the Pakistanis and Iranians, protracted resistance from the Taliban, fights over the drug trade. This battle will increase the level of disorder, not decrease it. The U.S. will probably clear out as soon as its short term objectives are achieved or, if necessary, declare a victory.
In a way, the bigger the disaster the U.S. leaves behind, the better. First, the whole incident will serve as a warning to nations that harbour terrorists. Second, the chaos will disrupt bin Laden's operations by ending the cosy relationships that allowed him to work in relative peace.
If the average Afgani somehow manages to come out ahead, so much the better.
The core of this, and every other conflict, is the soldier. The core of any operation involving taking ground and holding it, or in denying that ground to an enemy, is the infantry.
There are two ideas here: one outmoded, the other just wrong.
Since World War II, the purpose of the American infantry is to bring the enemy within range of the artillery. This strategy accounts for the low number of American casualties compared to enemy soldiers. The core of the conflict is artillery and air power. Direct encounters between American soldiers and enemy soldiers, when it happens, is a kind of failure of strategy.
Second, the objective of battle is not to take ground but to destroy the enemy's army in the field. Use of superior mobility and airpower make actually occupying ground for any length of time a liability.
Further, even on the ground only about a tenth of soldiers are engaged in combat. The rest are involved in logistics or held in reserve.
The soldiers' role is certainly critical but unfortunately they absorb a level of risk out of all proportion to their contribution.
The US is JUST DOMINANT ENOUGH to keep Imperial measurements around about as long as they want. Like it or not.
Not dominant enough at all. It's America's isolation from the rest of the world that keeps Imperial measurements around. The domestic retail and construction markets are the bastions of Imperial measurements. American's international trade, its military, and Federal government construction use metric. Trade, for instance, forced the U.S. auto industry to metricate.
In the military in particular, you can see that the requirements of speed and accuracy support the metric system. Soldiers calling in artillery strikes have better things to do than trying to remember how many yards in a half mile.
By practicing these conversions, we are constantly honing our math skills
The metric system will hone them even further, as those of us who grew up with Imperial and lived through metrication will attest. Mentally converting hectares to acres, kilopascals to pounds per square inch, BTUs to Joules, and bushels to cubic meters will provide hours of profitable exercise in elementary math, the mental equivalent of pushups and kneebends.
Is there some confusion, perhaps on my part, between client and server here? Your previous comment said, "Return-Receipt-To is a standard, so lack of support for it is a problem of non-standard compliant e-mail client." I assumed you were saying that return receipt was a function of the client rather than the server.
Reading over the SMTP specs there seems to be more handshaking than I thought. Certainly, servers are prompt in sending "mailbox not found" messages back to the sender.
I was under the impression that mail could be delayed at some point in the relay chain without the sender being aware of it or being notified of it until much later. If I'm wrong, I appreciate you taking the time to make it clear.
There should be a way of returning undeserved karma points in such cases.
I believe that all those problems are appliable to fax, and/or telex, and/or any other means of communication.
No method can guarantee the message was read but voice mail, fax and telex almost guarantee that the message was received. With email, you can never be sure. If the sender or receipient is having server problems, email can be stuck in a variety of holding queues for hours or days.
Return-Receipt-To is a standard, so lack of support for it is a problem of non-standard compliant e-mail client.
Email delivery problems occur before the email reaches the client. My point was that depending upon the email reaching the client for confirmation is not sufficient. The email may never reach the client because of problems upstream.
As companies depend more on email they've made their email servers more reliable. However, what is needed is a protocol by which a server automatically sends back an acknowledgement that a message was received. Without this protocol, the usefulness of email for urgent and time-sensitive messages is impaired.
Englebart was no doubt years ahead of his time but email as we know it is traced back to Tomlinson.
As the article about Ray Tomlinson says:
Like a number of then existing electronic message programs, the oldest dating from the early 1960s, SNDMSG only worked locally; it was designed to allow the exchange of messages between users who shared the same machine. Such users could create a text file and deliver it to a designated "mail box."
Tomlinson's achievement seems to have been "transferring files among linked computers at remote sites within ARPANET", that is creating users' mail boxes accessable over ARPNET, which did not exist as such before 1968.
As Englebart describes the system: "Each individual has private file space, and the group has community space, on a high-speed disc with a capacity of 96 million characters." The system therefore doesn't appear to be the network environment that Tomlinson was working in.
Englebart's list of Pioneering Firsts is said to include "integrated hypermedia email" but the term email may be an anachronism in this context.
There are 3 problems with return receipt as it is now implemented:
Some email clients to support it, like mine (elm).
The user may not look at his email for days, as I often don't.
The user may ignore it, as I often do when I use Outlook.
What's needed is some standard. The fact that there isn't one after all these years suggests that users are happy with the level of reliability for the urgency of the messages.
The inventor of email said he invented email not because anyone wanted it but because it was a neat idea. Probably if he had thought automatic return receipt was a neat idea, we'd have it now.
Email is come-from-behind technology. Although it predates voice mail and fax by nearly 15 years, it is only in the last 5 years or so that it rivals them in popularity.
Despite its success, email hasn't supplanted either voice mail or fax. Nearly everyone who has email also uses voice mail or fax, often both at work and at home. In spite of the fact that both voice mail and fax can be sent as an email attachment, those two technologies show no signs of disappearing. The sales of fax machines continues to rise and voice mail appears to be at saturation.
As near as I can surmise, both voice mail and fax have a higher degree of perceived urgency than email does. This urgency comes from the urgency of the technology they supplement or replace. Voice mail is a stand in for a telephone call itself, the most urgent form of communication. Faxes replaced couriers, which also were reserved for the most important documents.
Email seems to be primarily used for non-urgent communication. Part of the reason is, perhaps, that the sender of email cannot be sure if the message has arrived. For voice mail, if you get the greeting and the beep, you are reasonably sure of delivery. For fax, the fax standard guarantees that the fax will not be sent unless it is being received at the other end.
In one way, the urgency of email will probably not be determined by the message but by the attachments. The ability of email to move, store and forward electronic documents in a standardized way may determine its future development.
In another way, the urgency of email will be raised by email messages generated by computer. Because email can be generated by computer much easier than voice mail and fax, more and more email could be of the alert variety that tells the recipient that something needs his attention.
As a result I would look for some kind of encoding that flagged an email as urgent beyond simply the opinion of the sender. For instance, the email addresses that users give out might someday contain some unique priority designation so that priority could be determined by the source of the message.
One can see the process at work now when sys admins have computers send email alerts to their pagers and cell phones.
Once urgency can be reliably defined in an email message it could change its fundamental characteristic, which at the moment is convenience.
This is indeed the definition of a "university": its goal is not to educate you so much as prevent you from being ignorant.
The purpose of education is a very old debate and the term "well-rounded" is a much watered-down version of the a principle defended by Cicero (106 - 43 B.C) that the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is a defining human characteristic.
In contrast, Cato the Elder (234 - 149 BC) insisted that knowledge be judged by what it produce and held what might now be called a liberal education in contempt.
The definitive exposition of the issue is Cardinal Newman's The Idea of a University. He makes a useful distinction between "servile" education ("mechanical employment, and the like, in which the mind has little or no part") as being the opposite of "liberal" education, which "is the cultivation of the intellect, as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence."
Newman does not disparage the professions as being devoid of intellectual value. However, one can see in his distinction between the two types of education that putting one's mind purely in the service of earning a living ignores a much larger world beyond one's immediate needs.
Newman argues: "Liberal Education makes not the Christian, not the Catholic, but the gentleman. It is well to be a gentlemen, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in the conduct of life;--these are the connatural qualities of a large knowledge; they are the objects of a University."
One thing you will find when you go to work in a large corporation is that the people who get ahead generally don't know what they are doing. They are selected for advancement based on personality factors that allow them to tolerate a high degree of meaningless, bureaucratic routine and get along with others so inclined.
No university is going to teach those skills, nor should it, although many of the professors are exceptionally adept at departmental politics themselves.
I've found that for being well-rounded, nothing beats mathematics. The ability to apply mathematical concepts in analyzing a wide range of problems has been an enormous and unexpected asset. I've found my technical progress barred by the limits of my mathematical training more than any other area.
Personally, I've found that after many years, the courses that seemed most useless in college have afforded me the greatest enjoyment in later life. The literature and history courses never go out of date and form the basis of the contemplative pleaures that supply most of life's satisfaction.
what I *really* would like to see, if it's even possible, is a working model of Babbage's Analytical Engine
FYI, here is a review of a recent book entitled The Difference Engine by Doron Swade that addresses some of the issues you raise.
A collection of Babbage links is here.
I hesitated to respond to your original post because I didn't want to be associated with the uncouth slashdotters who used the fact they disagreed with you as an excuse to behave in a rude and abusive manner.
If I were in your position, I would have found the tone of the debate disheartening and been tempted to forget the whole thing.
I appreciate you taking the time for a rejoinder.
First you say: Do you really think West "intended" to modify someone else's messy Perl script and make a business out of it? Seems pretty unlikely to me.
Then you say: I never defended the guy or made assumptions about his guilt or innocence.
Can you see why readers might be confused here? In the first statement you appear to be defending him and suggesting he didn't intend to commit a crime. In the second statement you are denying defending him.
If he's innocent, as you imply in the first statement, then the issue isn't whether it is a waste of money to prosecute him. The issue is that a miscarriage of justice occurred.
If he's guilty, which implies intent, then that intent becomes as big an issue as the value of what he stole. For instance, attempted murder receives a heavy sentence even though the victim may have suffered no actual harm.
In addition, this prosecution may have a deterent effect upon his future behavior, thus saving the cost of a more expensive prosecution in the future.
I'd say the taxpayers got good value for their money. Now if you were to argue that jail time in this case would be a waste of money, you might have a point.