if Mr. X puts a bomb in a plane to kill his wife, that's first degree murder (though not terrorism).
Consider your logic here: Mr. X bombs Pearl Harbor and kills thousands of people. That's mass murder but not war. The Japanese do the same thing for a political cause. Why don't we arrest the Japanese instead of declaring war?
More explicitely, the acts of 9/11 were organized outside the United States and carried out by agents of an organization that is protected by a foreign government.
If the methods of terrorists were conventional like the methods of murders, then changing the laws wouldn't be necessary. The terrorists methods -- their planning, communication, funding -- are designed to evade detection under current law. They are using current law and the restraint placed on police as part of their methods.
The laws are being changed not just to aid the police but to ensure that the terrorists can be convicted once they are caught. Exactly like a conventional crime, the objective seems to be to bring the terrorists to trial and to ensure that the evidence presented at trial will not be dismissed because it was collected illegally.
America does not seem to be able to think outside its Constitutional box. A more effective approach to catching terrorists would be to empower special police and have the terrorists tried before special courts, possibly secret, where the conventional rules of evidence and the right to be confronted by the accuser don't apply.
However, the Constitution seems to be so imbeded in fabric of America that justice takes precedence over efficiency. Lawmaker are thinking "how will this law stand up in court" even as they are still burying the victims of 9/11.
Ultimately, the terrorists, like any accused, will be tried by a jury based on evidence presented at trial. If they cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to defend them.
Actually, television is becoming common in prisons all over the world as a tool to control inmate behavior.
Perhaps one useful approach would be to use closed circuit television to control what the prisoners see. Educational, religious, or therapeutic programs might provide them with more understanding of the world than the deceptive images and stories that they see on commercial television.
A prison should never ban commercial television. Rather, it should set up a contrast between the amoral, consumer oriented ethos and a fundamentally moral one. Some prisoners would get it and some wouldn't. However, simply showing commercial television might calm their behavior while in prison but it is possible it would do nothing to discourage criminal behavior when they are out of prison.
This view of prison life says: The most senseless use of time in prison has to be constant television watching. There are adult men in prison who watch cartoons and soap operas for hours each day. They know all the soaps' characters, plots, and can figure all the possible scenarios of upcoming episodes. They live through the tube. They call television the "Boob Tube" because it will make you dumb if you aren't already. Its shameless, naked images will poison your mind and spirit. Its fantasy will rob you of all original creative thinking abilities. Constant television watching develops the dangerous habit of always wanting to be entertained, which causes laziness.
One can see that television watching as a solution may be as bad as the disease.
Actually, the Whiskey Rebellion was about the government laying sin taxes for the purpose of taxes and not for the purpose of reducing sin.
True and I agree the connection between controling drugs and taxing liquor is not perfect. George Washington himself ran a successful distillery at Mt. Vernon, which further emphasizes the difference.
However, in the context of this discussion, taxing liquor illustrates how the U.S. has historically treated intoxicants like any other substance for the purposes of taxation and. regulation. Therefore, there's no new loss of rights in the U.S.'s current efforts to control drugs, which might broadly be called intoxicants.
Even when Prohibition was repealed, the repeal amendment specifically left control of liquor to the states. Similarly, even if the federal government were to get out of the drug enforcement business, the states could continue to ban them.
There are many good reasons to legalize drugs but a Constitutional right isn't one of them. Such a right might make it illegal to fire airline pilots and bus drivers who were under the influence of drugs the way they can't be fired for their political opinions.
Re:Subscriptions should add value
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot already offers good enough value to pay for without giving subscribers any additional privileges.
Encouraging as many thoughtful people as possible to post enhances the value of the service. Therefore, saying only subscribers can post comments, only subscribers can submit stories, and subscribers get a posting bonus reduces the value of service from what it is now.
Besides those three, the other features might warrant an additional charge above the subscription fee. These features would require additional development and thus justify charging the readers who want them.
A Slashdot poll of which new features people want and were willing to pay for might be in order.
Nowhere in it is any plausible grant of power to regulate the substances used by Americans.
Actually, one of the first acts of the new republic was to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania and thereby assert its right to that very thing. This power is not new. It is as old as the country. Every state of the union and every country in the West proscribes the use of drugs. Narcotics are treated as a public health issue, rightly or wrongly, and the authority of the government is clear in this area.
...they result from plea bargains coerced from defendants under the threat of draconian sentences.
Plea bargaining is a result of the high crime rate, which has overwhelmed the justice system. Prosecutors are more often criticized for letting criminals get a lighter sentence to avoid the expense of a trial. What you are calling for is improvements to the current legal aid system, which is already an improvement over pre-Gideon vs. Wainwright.
However, how do you explain the fact that a much larger percentage of black Americans are in prison now than were imprisoned during the worst of Jim Crow?
I've never heard a single black commentator or politician suggest that blacks are worse off now than under segregation. Not one.
Recent rulings have advanced the notion that formerly inadmissable evidence may now be admitted if the police *believed* they were acting in "good faith."
Here you are glomming onto exceptions rather than rules. Mapp v. OH is a huge constraint on police lawlessness in collecting evidence.
It seems to me your whole method of inquiry is to use exceptions and anomalies to support your thesis rather than the obvious trends. There is plenty wrong with the United States that should be corrected. But in nearly every category the U.S. appears headed in the right direction although more slowly that many would like.
If there had been none of the 15 Supreme Court rulings I cited except Brown vs. Board of Education, America would still set the standard for civil liberties in the world, as it always has. It's pointless, even self-defeating, to hold America to a high standard by denying it's successes.
Since we're going to continue this thread a bit...
Justice so unevenly applied must be regarded as injustice...
It's a scandal what the rich and well-connected get away with but it is no worse now than it ever was. I can't see that using drugs is a right however harmless it may be. Refraining from using drugs, like refraining from jaywalking, doesn't put an intolerable burden on anyone. You're free to advocate changing the law but not to disobey it. No one fought and died at Concord for the right to smoke dope.
Is it your feeling that Americans are simply morally inferior to most of the other people in the world?
There is a general upward trend in the crime rate in Western countries in recent decades, although not as great as the U.S. In recent years the trend has reversed in the U.S. without any changes in the laws.
During the Jim Crow years, you would have regarded criticisms of the justice system as "ingenuous?"
The justice system is never above criticism. However, if there are a large number of miscarriages of justice it is not because people's legal rights have been systematically abridged or denied as they were under segregation. The right to an attorney and a speedy trial has been extended. The right to trial by jury is intact. The rules for probable cause are more strictly enforced than ever. The use of DNA testing exonerates people that would have previously been convicted.
Freedom encompases more than legal rights:
Most people feel more constrained by the pressure to conform to social norms than the law. In the last 30 years that social pressure has declined drastically as indicated by the rising divorce rate and the prevalence of cohabitation. People have more freedom in their private lives that ever before.
The vast increase in the size of public universities means that more people than ever have access to higher education and the resulting upward mobility that education allows.
More people have access to health care and better healthcare than ever before. The improvement in the nation's health is roughly indicated by the increase in the average lifespan.
The U.S. is coming off the greatest period of economic growth in its history, which allowed more people to earn a decent living and even achieve great wealth. That prosperity provides the real freedom of choice that comes with economic security.
These increases in tangible personal freedoms combined with the previously mentioned Supreme Court rulings make people alive today more free than any previous generation. If there is a challenge, it is to get people to exercise their political freedom. Rights that are unused tend to atrophy and that possibility poses a greater threat to freedom than government regulations.
I said you could have the last word but I'm compelled to respond to a couple of points.
Your assertion that the vast number of citizens in prison is due to higher crime rates is difficult to defend logically, because incarceration rates have vastly outgained crime rates.
It's ingenuous to compare the treatment of criminals to the treatment of law abiding citizens. There have been miscarriages of justice throughout American history and it is similarly ingenuous use them to pillary the whole justice system. Of all the dangers of modern life in America, being arrested for a crime you didn't commit and being arrested for exercising your rights under the Constitution must rank the lowest.
And if you are arrested and can't afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to defend you. And if you blow up the McMurrich Building in Oklahoma City and the evidence against you is overwhelming, the state will spend millions of dollars assuring that your rights have not been violated. As it should.
Look at Great Britain: in the 70's they passed an anti-terrorism act that allowed indefinite detention without charges
I believe suspects can only be held for 7 days before being brought before a magistrate. The magistrate may extend the detention if
(a) there are reasonable grounds for believing that the further detention of the person to whom the application relates is necessary to obtain relevant evidence whether by questioning him or otherwise or to preserve relevant evidence, and
(b) the investigation in connection with which the person is detained is being conducted diligently and expeditiously
This procedure is a bit of an improvement over the previous act, which required only the permission of the Secretary of State.
It had a 1-year sunset provision, so it's only temporary, right?
The new Anti-Terrorism Act 2000 has been made permanent.
The British national experience is quite different from the U.S. In Britain the government is usually seen as a bulwark against anarchy rather than a potential tyrant. The opposition always presents an alternative to the government at the next general election and can be counted on to challenge abuse of authority.
The idea that politicians in the U.S. will rubber stamp demands for greater executive power is not borne out by the passage of the current bill. In addition, the laws are still subject to judicial review.
In any case, the anti-terrorism provisions of the current law are relatively mild. The danger isn't that the sunset law will be ignored. It is that the terrorist threat will increase and new, stricter provisions will be required.
The LA Times says: Under the compromise, roving wiretap authority and many other provisions would expire after four years, and the president would not have discretion to extend them. An exception was made, however, for continuing to use the new powers in ongoing investigations that continue past the sunset date.
Apparently the 4 year limit was a compromise between the desire of the President for no limit, which the Senate accepted, and desire of House to impose a 5 year limit, which was already a compromise from their initial preference for 3 year limit.
You'd think that a compromise would have been longer than 5 years rather than less. Perhaps there was a compromise downward as part of the House's agreement to include money laundering in the bill instead of passing a separate bill.
There are apparently some right-to-privacy issues in the money laundering provisions but nobody seems too worried except the bankers.
Can I have some examples of increased civil liberties?
Certainly.
Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963. Right to counsel extended.
Barker v. Wingo, 1972. Right to speedy trial extended
Miranda v Arizona, 1963. Right to be informed of your rights.
Murray v. Curlett, 1963. Mandatory school prayer outlawed.
Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 Desegregation of public schools.
Griswold v. CT, 1963, "sphere of privacy" recognized under 4th amendment.
Mapp v. OH, 1961, evidence acquired illegally is inadmissable
Roth v. US, 1957, definition of obscenity restricted.
NY Times v. Sullivan, 1954, reduces "libel chill" on freedom of press.
Roe v. Wade, 1973, mother's right to make health decisions during pregnancy.
TX v. Johnson, 1989, state cannot force patriotism or ban unpatriotic activities
Buckley v. Valeo, 1976, Campaign spending may not be limited
RENO v. ACLU, 1997. CDA struck down.
The Levinson article also mentions
Brandenburg v. OH, 1969, hate speech protected
Pentagon papers, 1971, Newspapers protected by 1st Amendment.
All these cases substantially extended the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights. There are many more lesser cases including some under the 8th Amendment resticting the death penalty.
There have been some rulings that do not extend rights:
Lewis v. United States, 1980, defendants convicted unders state law can be tried for related offense under Federal law.
Bennis v. Michigan, 1996, property belong to an innocent party can be confiscated if used in a crime.
Aside from these, virtually all Supreme Court rulings have come down on the side of individual rights. Freedom of speech not only has fewer restrictions than ever but the Internet is a major enhancement.
As for your list, I don't see how you can assert that more laws equal fewer rights.
You would expect more laws today than 100 years ago, there being no cars, airplanes or radio spectra to regulate in 1900. Traffic laws and airline safety regulations, for instance, extend our freedom, not restrict it. These are complex issues but the extra laws are not signs of a government running out of control but of a government doing its job.
The millions of people in prison are a result of a high crime rate. The accused have more rights and better representation than anywhere in else the world. Crime itself is a greater restraint on personal freedom than the laws trying to control it.
As for James Bovard, he is one of a number of commentators who's made a career out of making things sound worse than they are to the point that he has a vested interested in twisting every government action to support his thesis.
An example is this paragraph about a U.S. Post Office requirement that private postal boxes be identified as such: The Postal Service justifies the new burden by warning of the dangers of mail fraud. However, the Postal Service can provide no information as to the number of fraud convictions related to private post office boxes compared to its own mailboxes. Instead, a few anecdotes are deemed sufficient to sanction new restrictions on millions of citizens.
Aside from the fact that the requirement is hardly onerous, he criticizes the Post Office for using anecdotal evidence, which is his own primary method of exposition as in this essay on the IRS. The incidents he relates are outrageous enough but they do not support his sweeping conclusions or justify his blatantly sensationlist tone, e.g., "The IRS, like many stalkers, has a special affinity for unattached women." This tone, along with his tendency to quickly dismiss evidence that undermines his thesis, should raise one's suspicions both of his methods and his motives.
If you want the last word here, I'd be pleased to read it.
Restrict federal government power to foreign defense, and you'll see far fewer violations of our civil liberties.
As Levinson's article points out, the greatest threat to civil liberties is during wartime.
During peacetime, the Supreme Court part of the government has been a stalwart defender of civil liberties and the Executive branch has played its role in implementing court decisions. State governments violate civil liberties far more often than the Federal government and the Supreme Court is the natural refuge of victims under the 14th Amendment.
The U.S. Constitution provides judicial review as a perfectly good way to reduce government intervention without abolishing the other roles for government invisioned by the Founding Fathers.
Most government legislation exists to solve specific problems. Abolishing government isn't going to make those problems go away or any easier to solve.
So, we can expect to lose 'rights', and we can expect to gain some of them back when the 'war' is over. The problem being, our current war has no defined ending...
Sundown provisions would appear to be the solution to the problem. The House version of the current anti-terrorism law has such a provision, the Senate version does not. The House version of the law would expire in 5 years.
At the end of wartime, we never regain back all that we have lost.
The history of civil liberties since World War II has been one of expansion. Americans enjoy more freedoms today than at any previous period in their history.
What is lost in wartime and never regained is the lives and health of citizens and soldiers who are casualties in the war.
Levinson, in establishing that Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend habeas corpus, clearly established that Congress does have the authority. In September, 1863, Congress subsequently granted Lincoln the authority he had assumed.
The threat today of detention without trial does not come from presidential decree but from Congress. The current anti-terrorism law imposes detention without trial on non-citizens for up to 7 days.
There is no doubt that detention without trial, along with denying access to a lawyer, are very useful tools in fighting terrorism. The pressure to adopt them doesn't have to come from a government bent on despotism but from an honest concern for protecting the lives of citizens. Given Congress' authority to enact such laws, people who oppose them on the grounds that they threaten civil liberties are in effect saying that their elected government poses a greater threat than the terrorists.
After 9/11, who can doubt where the greater threat lies?
I think the idea that a desktop detector can stop this kinda of terror attack is naive.
Early detection doesn't stop the attacks, it reduces the consequences by alerting people that the are in danger the way smoke detectors do not stop fires but still save lives.
Why not just vaccinate everyone who could be in a position of risk??
It depends on the level of the threat. It's easy to conceive of a bioterrorist threat that is so persistent that mass vaccination will be a feature of normal life the way polio and smallpox vaccination used to be.
However, insofar as we are dealing with threats, not actual attacks, detection devices in public areas might be cheaper than mass vaccination. They would also raise public confidence that public areas were safe. Because vaccination programs are not 100 per cent effective, you might still need detection devices.
Finally, it might be faster to deploy detection devices against a new threat than to set up a mass vaccination program.
I don't see the anti-creationists admitting to any of this stuff... e.g. Dawkins.
Dawkins' aggressive style is a common approach in scientific debate when the scientist feels the evidence is strong. His attacks are as forceful on his fellow Darwinists like Stephen Gould when he disagrees with them as on creationists.
Generally, scientists who think their case is strong will welcome a forceful attack as a good test of the strength of their position. From such clashes of ideas and evidence truth will somehow emerge.
Consistent with this approach, Dawkins has said: "I really have less trouble than some of my colleagues with so-called creation science being taught in the public schools as long as evolution is taught as well. By all means let creation science be taught in the schools....children can be allowed to make up their own minds in the face of evidence."
Re:Too bad we don't have these things today?
on
Desktop Biodetectors
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
statistically you're still in pretty good shape
But potentially we're in very bad shape.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, people on the mainland were as statistically safe as they were the day before. The difference was the country was at war and many more casualties were certain.
What the anthrax statistics mean is that people have biological agents and are willing to use them. There no reason to think they will stop with anthrax. The threat will continue for many years.
There's some hope that this attack will be limited because of the crudeness of the delivery mechanism and the fact that anthrax wasn't engineered to resist antibiotics. There even a faint hope that this attack isn't part of the events of 9/11.
However, no other terrorist organization has ever stopped with one attack. If bioterrorism is part of their arsenal, we can expect the terrorists to use it again the way the IRA continues to plant bombs.
It's reasonable to expect devices like the one in this article to become as common as smoke detectors.
There are still critical assumptions that have yet to be proven right.
Actually, these aren't assumptions, they're theories. Inevitably, all our knowledge of the distant past is going to depend on theories and conjectures. The radioisotope method of dating has been endorsed by a Nobel Prize, which certainly does not prove it but lends assurance to laymen that it has some plausibility.
Until someone comes up with evidence from some more reliable technique that contradicts radioisotope dating, it makes sense to use it to enhance our picture of the past.
Certainty is not one of the things that theories can guarantee. Ultimately, all you can say is that radioisotope dating is consistent with other things we know about the past. In the absence of direct observation, consistency may be as close as we can come to the truth.
According to Fred Brooks' classic, The Mythical Man Month, you should build your team around gurus, not try to integrate them. This guy may have been a dud but gurus are still worth looking for because they can be as much as 20 times more productive than other programmers when used properly.
They are cheaper, even when highly paid, not only because they are more productive but because they reduce project management problems since fewer programmers are needed.
A better approach than recruiting gurus may be to take good programmers and make them better and mediocre programmers and make them good. You can achieve this objective by training, incentives and sometimes just asking a programmer what he needs to be better. A manager who tries this approach should steel himself for what he may hear.
you're confusing the study of these people's knowledge with studying the people
Further evidence for your point is the fact that programming manuals and documentation never contain any historical references beyond the odd anecdote and the change log.
The technology itself incorporates the lessons of history in a more useful way than trying to draw those lessons from a history book yourself. In fact, if you want to understand the history, you really need to understand the present technology rather than the other way around.
Finally, the true history of computer science is bound up in some heavy duty math so if there is anything to be learned it is beyond the ken of the average programmer. For instance, understanding Turing machines apparently requires understanding the the decidability of mathematical assertions. As a character in a Woody Allen film said, when asked why God permits evil to exist: "I don't even know how the can opener works."
They are as irrelevant to your daily needs as are Babbage, Turing, Hopper, Shannon and Ritchie.
I'd still like to see an example, perhaps from your personal experience, of how the study of computer history helps you learn a programing language faster, write code faster, write code with fewer bugs, or write programs that are easier to maintain, which is how I make a living.
Even the name of a programming manual that includes some history would be interesting. I've never seen any and I have a ton of O'Reilly books, the best in the field.
The examples raised in an earlier post by mav[LAG] were throw away lines meriting only a flippant response. Some weren't even primarily historical like the reference to Turing machines, which is taught in basic computer science. Knowing who Turing was and his tragic life does not deepen one's understanding of computability.
Many mathematicians are quite knowledgeable about the history of mathematics because even the oldest problems and solutions are relevant to their work. I know of nothing comparable in computer science.
arkanes makes a similar point in a comment in this thread: you're confusing the study of these people's knowledge with studying the people themselves.
you'll do fine for the most part without knowledge of computer history
My original post, which started this thread, said that my knowledge of computer history had not helped me as a programmer, not that I had no knowledge of computer history.
For the record, here are some reasons why a knowledge of computer history could not possibly help with programming:
history is largely a record of obsolete and failed technology. As a programmer you only need a knowledge of successful technology. The lessons to be learned from failure have already been incorporated in the successful technology, which is in the manuals.
computer history has the same limitations of all history: the sources are unreliable and incomplete and the facts are selected by the biases of the historian. As a result, one can not draw any solid conclusions from computer history or any other kind of history.
much of the history has nothing to do with technology. It concerns business decisions, marketing, the personality of key people, and office politics. None of it affects writing code.
many of the important documents in the history of computer science are locked away in corporate archives and trade secrets and therefore unavailable for historians.
many of the key participants in computer history are very much alive and have not set down their memoires or released their archives for historians to collect.
Change in computer science is so rapid and overthrows previous knowledge so completely that knowing what is happening now is nearly impossible, never mind what happened years ago.
None of the foregoing means that you shouldn't know computer history. It just means it isn't useful for one's career.
Slashdot Mirror
if Mr. X puts a bomb in a plane to kill his wife, that's first degree murder (though not terrorism).
Consider your logic here: Mr. X bombs Pearl Harbor and kills thousands of people. That's mass murder but not war. The Japanese do the same thing for a political cause. Why don't we arrest the Japanese instead of declaring war?
More explicitely, the acts of 9/11 were organized outside the United States and carried out by agents of an organization that is protected by a foreign government.
If the methods of terrorists were conventional like the methods of murders, then changing the laws wouldn't be necessary. The terrorists methods -- their planning, communication, funding -- are designed to evade detection under current law. They are using current law and the restraint placed on police as part of their methods.
The laws are being changed not just to aid the police but to ensure that the terrorists can be convicted once they are caught. Exactly like a conventional crime, the objective seems to be to bring the terrorists to trial and to ensure that the evidence presented at trial will not be dismissed because it was collected illegally.
America does not seem to be able to think outside its Constitutional box. A more effective approach to catching terrorists would be to empower special police and have the terrorists tried before special courts, possibly secret, where the conventional rules of evidence and the right to be confronted by the accuser don't apply.
However, the Constitution seems to be so imbeded in fabric of America that justice takes precedence over efficiency. Lawmaker are thinking "how will this law stand up in court" even as they are still burying the victims of 9/11.
Ultimately, the terrorists, like any accused, will be tried by a jury based on evidence presented at trial. If they cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to defend them.
Actually, television is becoming common in prisons all over the world as a tool to control inmate behavior.
Perhaps one useful approach would be to use closed circuit television to control what the prisoners see. Educational, religious, or therapeutic programs might provide them with more understanding of the world than the deceptive images and stories that they see on commercial television.
A prison should never ban commercial television. Rather, it should set up a contrast between the amoral, consumer oriented ethos and a fundamentally moral one. Some prisoners would get it and some wouldn't. However, simply showing commercial television might calm their behavior while in prison but it is possible it would do nothing to discourage criminal behavior when they are out of prison.
This view of prison life says:
The most senseless use of time in prison has to be constant television watching. There are adult men in prison who watch cartoons and soap operas for hours each day. They know all the soaps' characters, plots, and can figure all the possible scenarios of upcoming episodes. They live through the tube. They call television the "Boob Tube" because it will make you dumb if you aren't already. Its shameless, naked images will poison your mind and spirit. Its fantasy will rob you of all original creative thinking abilities. Constant television watching develops the dangerous habit of always wanting to be entertained, which causes laziness.
One can see that television watching as a solution may be as bad as the disease.
Actually, the Whiskey Rebellion was about the government laying sin taxes for the purpose of taxes and not for the purpose of reducing sin.
True and I agree the connection between controling drugs and taxing liquor is not perfect. George Washington himself ran a successful distillery at Mt. Vernon, which further emphasizes the difference.
However, in the context of this discussion, taxing liquor illustrates how the U.S. has historically treated intoxicants like any other substance for the purposes of taxation and. regulation. Therefore, there's no new loss of rights in the U.S.'s current efforts to control drugs, which might broadly be called intoxicants.
Even when Prohibition was repealed, the repeal amendment specifically left control of liquor to the states. Similarly, even if the federal government were to get out of the drug enforcement business, the states could continue to ban them.
There are many good reasons to legalize drugs but a Constitutional right isn't one of them. Such a right might make it illegal to fire airline pilots and bus drivers who were under the influence of drugs the way they can't be fired for their political opinions.
Slashdot already offers good enough value to pay for without giving subscribers any additional privileges.
Encouraging as many thoughtful people as possible to post enhances the value of the service. Therefore, saying only subscribers can post comments, only subscribers can submit stories, and subscribers get a posting bonus reduces the value of service from what it is now.
Besides those three, the other features might warrant an additional charge above the subscription fee. These features would require additional development and thus justify charging the readers who want them.
A Slashdot poll of which new features people want and were willing to pay for might be in order.
Nowhere in it is any plausible grant of power to regulate the substances used by Americans.
Actually, one of the first acts of the new republic was to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania and thereby assert its right to that very thing. This power is not new. It is as old as the country. Every state of the union and every country in the West proscribes the use of drugs. Narcotics are treated as a public health issue, rightly or wrongly, and the authority of the government is clear in this area.
Plea bargaining is a result of the high crime rate, which has overwhelmed the justice system. Prosecutors are more often criticized for letting criminals get a lighter sentence to avoid the expense of a trial. What you are calling for is improvements to the current legal aid system, which is already an improvement over pre-Gideon vs. Wainwright.
However, how do you explain the fact that a much larger percentage of black Americans are in prison now than were imprisoned during the worst of Jim Crow?
I've never heard a single black commentator or politician suggest that blacks are worse off now than under segregation. Not one.
Recent rulings have advanced the notion that formerly inadmissable evidence may now be admitted if the police *believed* they were acting in "good faith."
Here you are glomming onto exceptions rather than rules. Mapp v. OH is a huge constraint on police lawlessness in collecting evidence.
It seems to me your whole method of inquiry is to use exceptions and anomalies to support your thesis rather than the obvious trends. There is plenty wrong with the United States that should be corrected. But in nearly every category the U.S. appears headed in the right direction although more slowly that many would like.
If there had been none of the 15 Supreme Court rulings I cited except Brown vs. Board of Education, America would still set the standard for civil liberties in the world, as it always has. It's pointless, even self-defeating, to hold America to a high standard by denying it's successes.
Since we're going to continue this thread a bit...
Justice so unevenly applied must be regarded as injustice...
It's a scandal what the rich and well-connected get away with but it is no worse now than it ever was. I can't see that using drugs is a right however harmless it may be. Refraining from using drugs, like refraining from jaywalking, doesn't put an intolerable burden on anyone. You're free to advocate changing the law but not to disobey it. No one fought and died at Concord for the right to smoke dope.
Is it your feeling that Americans are simply morally inferior to most of the other people in the world?
There is a general upward trend in the crime rate in Western countries in recent decades, although not as great as the U.S. In recent years the trend has reversed in the U.S. without any changes in the laws.
During the Jim Crow years, you would have regarded criticisms of the justice system as "ingenuous?"
The justice system is never above criticism. However, if there are a large number of miscarriages of justice it is not because people's legal rights have been systematically abridged or denied as they were under segregation. The right to an attorney and a speedy trial has been extended. The right to trial by jury is intact. The rules for probable cause are more strictly enforced than ever. The use of DNA testing exonerates people that would have previously been convicted.
Freedom encompases more than legal rights:
Most people feel more constrained by the pressure to conform to social norms than the law. In the last 30 years that social pressure has declined drastically as indicated by the rising divorce rate and the prevalence of cohabitation. People have more freedom in their private lives that ever before.
The vast increase in the size of public universities means that more people than ever have access to higher education and the resulting upward mobility that education allows.
More people have access to health care and better healthcare than ever before. The improvement in the nation's health is roughly indicated by the increase in the average lifespan.
The U.S. is coming off the greatest period of economic growth in its history, which allowed more people to earn a decent living and even achieve great wealth. That prosperity provides the real freedom of choice that comes with economic security.
These increases in tangible personal freedoms combined with the previously mentioned Supreme Court rulings make people alive today more free than any previous generation. If there is a challenge, it is to get people to exercise their political freedom. Rights that are unused tend to atrophy and that possibility poses a greater threat to freedom than government regulations.
I said you could have the last word but I'm compelled to respond to a couple of points.
Your assertion that the vast number of citizens in prison is due to higher crime rates is difficult to defend logically, because incarceration rates have vastly outgained crime rates.
It's ingenuous to compare the treatment of criminals to the treatment of law abiding citizens. There have been miscarriages of justice throughout American history and it is similarly ingenuous use them to pillary the whole justice system. Of all the dangers of modern life in America, being arrested for a crime you didn't commit and being arrested for exercising your rights under the Constitution must rank the lowest.
And if you are arrested and can't afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to defend you. And if you blow up the McMurrich Building in Oklahoma City and the evidence against you is overwhelming, the state will spend millions of dollars assuring that your rights have not been violated. As it should.
Our government is far more powerful than the terrorists.
And a good thing, too. We're counting on the government to win this one and they aren't going to do it by waving the Bill of Rights at the terrorists.
As for rampaging old ladies, consider this story from from the Daily Telegraph.
Look at Great Britain: in the 70's they passed an anti-terrorism act that allowed indefinite detention without charges
I believe suspects can only be held for 7 days before being brought before a magistrate. The magistrate may extend the detention if
This procedure is a bit of an improvement over the previous act, which required only the permission of the Secretary of State.
It had a 1-year sunset provision, so it's only temporary, right?
The new Anti-Terrorism Act 2000 has been made permanent.
The British national experience is quite different from the U.S. In Britain the government is usually seen as a bulwark against anarchy rather than a potential tyrant. The opposition always presents an alternative to the government at the next general election and can be counted on to challenge abuse of authority.
The idea that politicians in the U.S. will rubber stamp demands for greater executive power is not borne out by the passage of the current bill. In addition, the laws are still subject to judicial review.
In any case, the anti-terrorism provisions of the current law are relatively mild. The danger isn't that the sunset law will be ignored. It is that the terrorist threat will increase and new, stricter provisions will be required.
The LA Times says: Under the compromise, roving wiretap authority and many other provisions would expire after four years, and the president would not have discretion to extend them. An exception was made, however, for continuing to use the new powers in ongoing investigations that continue past the sunset date.
Apparently the 4 year limit was a compromise between the desire of the President for no limit, which the Senate accepted, and desire of House to impose a 5 year limit, which was already a compromise from their initial preference for 3 year limit.
You'd think that a compromise would have been longer than 5 years rather than less. Perhaps there was a compromise downward as part of the House's agreement to include money laundering in the bill instead of passing a separate bill.
There are apparently some right-to-privacy issues in the money laundering provisions but nobody seems too worried except the bankers.
Can I have some examples of increased civil liberties?
Certainly.
Gideon v. Wainwright, 1963. Right to counsel extended.
Barker v. Wingo, 1972. Right to speedy trial extended
Miranda v Arizona, 1963. Right to be informed of your rights.
Murray v. Curlett, 1963. Mandatory school prayer outlawed.
Brown v. Board of Education, 1954 Desegregation of public schools.
Griswold v. CT, 1963, "sphere of privacy" recognized under 4th amendment.
Mapp v. OH, 1961, evidence acquired illegally is inadmissable
Roth v. US, 1957, definition of obscenity restricted.
NY Times v. Sullivan, 1954, reduces "libel chill" on freedom of press.
Roe v. Wade, 1973, mother's right to make health decisions during pregnancy.
TX v. Johnson, 1989, state cannot force patriotism or ban unpatriotic activities
Buckley v. Valeo, 1976, Campaign spending may not be limited
RENO v. ACLU, 1997. CDA struck down.
The Levinson article also mentions
Brandenburg v. OH, 1969, hate speech protected
Pentagon papers, 1971, Newspapers protected by 1st Amendment.
All these cases substantially extended the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendment rights. There are many more lesser cases including some under the 8th Amendment resticting the death penalty.
There have been some rulings that do not extend rights:
Lewis v. United States, 1980, defendants convicted unders state law can be tried for related offense under Federal law.
Bennis v. Michigan, 1996, property belong to an innocent party can be confiscated if used in a crime.
Aside from these, virtually all Supreme Court rulings have come down on the side of individual rights. Freedom of speech not only has fewer restrictions than ever but the Internet is a major enhancement.
As for your list, I don't see how you can assert that more laws equal fewer rights.
You would expect more laws today than 100 years ago, there being no cars, airplanes or radio spectra to regulate in 1900. Traffic laws and airline safety regulations, for instance, extend our freedom, not restrict it. These are complex issues but the extra laws are not signs of a government running out of control but of a government doing its job.
The millions of people in prison are a result of a high crime rate. The accused have more rights and better representation than anywhere in else the world. Crime itself is a greater restraint on personal freedom than the laws trying to control it.
As for James Bovard, he is one of a number of commentators who's made a career out of making things sound worse than they are to the point that he has a vested interested in twisting every government action to support his thesis.
An example is this paragraph about a U.S. Post Office requirement that private postal boxes be identified as such:
The Postal Service justifies the new burden by warning of the dangers of mail fraud. However, the Postal Service can provide no information as to the number of fraud convictions related to private post office boxes compared to its own mailboxes. Instead, a few anecdotes are deemed sufficient to sanction new restrictions on millions of citizens.
Aside from the fact that the requirement is hardly onerous, he criticizes the Post Office for using anecdotal evidence, which is his own primary method of exposition as in this essay on the IRS. The incidents he relates are outrageous enough but they do not support his sweeping conclusions or justify his blatantly sensationlist tone, e.g., "The IRS, like many stalkers, has a special affinity for unattached women." This tone, along with his tendency to quickly dismiss evidence that undermines his thesis, should raise one's suspicions both of his methods and his motives.
If you want the last word here, I'd be pleased to read it.
Restrict federal government power to foreign defense, and you'll see far fewer violations of our civil liberties.
As Levinson's article points out, the greatest threat to civil liberties is during wartime.
During peacetime, the Supreme Court part of the government has been a stalwart defender of civil liberties and the Executive branch has played its role in implementing court decisions. State governments violate civil liberties far more often than the Federal government and the Supreme Court is the natural refuge of victims under the 14th Amendment.
The U.S. Constitution provides judicial review as a perfectly good way to reduce government intervention without abolishing the other roles for government invisioned by the Founding Fathers.
Most government legislation exists to solve specific problems. Abolishing government isn't going to make those problems go away or any easier to solve.
So, we can expect to lose 'rights', and we can expect to gain some of them back when the 'war' is over. The problem being, our current war has no defined ending...
Sundown provisions would appear to be the solution to the problem. The House version of the current anti-terrorism law has such a provision, the Senate version does not. The House version of the law would expire in 5 years.
At the end of wartime, we never regain back all that we have lost.
The history of civil liberties since World War II has been one of expansion. Americans enjoy more freedoms today than at any previous period in their history.
What is lost in wartime and never regained is the lives and health of citizens and soldiers who are casualties in the war.
Levinson, in establishing that Lincoln did not have the authority to suspend habeas corpus, clearly established that Congress does have the authority. In September, 1863, Congress subsequently granted Lincoln the authority he had assumed.
The threat today of detention without trial does not come from presidential decree but from Congress. The current anti-terrorism law imposes detention without trial on non-citizens for up to 7 days.
There is no doubt that detention without trial, along with denying access to a lawyer, are very useful tools in fighting terrorism. The pressure to adopt them doesn't have to come from a government bent on despotism but from an honest concern for protecting the lives of citizens. Given Congress' authority to enact such laws, people who oppose them on the grounds that they threaten civil liberties are in effect saying that their elected government poses a greater threat than the terrorists.
After 9/11, who can doubt where the greater threat lies?
For the benefit of the humor-impaired...
To undersand the joke here it helps to know that Brian Billick is known for using his Powerbook and Excel98 to select plays during the game.
I think the idea that a desktop detector can stop this kinda of terror attack is naive.
Early detection doesn't stop the attacks, it reduces the consequences by alerting people that the are in danger the way smoke detectors do not stop fires but still save lives.
Why not just vaccinate everyone who could be in a position of risk??
It depends on the level of the threat. It's easy to conceive of a bioterrorist threat that is so persistent that mass vaccination will be a feature of normal life the way polio and smallpox vaccination used to be.
However, insofar as we are dealing with threats, not actual attacks, detection devices in public areas might be cheaper than mass vaccination. They would also raise public confidence that public areas were safe. Because vaccination programs are not 100 per cent effective, you might still need detection devices.
Finally, it might be faster to deploy detection devices against a new threat than to set up a mass vaccination program.
I don't see the anti-creationists admitting to any of this stuff ... e.g. Dawkins.
Dawkins' aggressive style is a common approach in scientific debate when the scientist feels the evidence is strong. His attacks are as forceful on his fellow Darwinists like Stephen Gould when he disagrees with them as on creationists.
Generally, scientists who think their case is strong will welcome a forceful attack as a good test of the strength of their position. From such clashes of ideas and evidence truth will somehow emerge.
Consistent with this approach, Dawkins has said: "I really have less trouble than some of my colleagues with so-called creation science being taught in the public schools as long as evolution is taught as well. By all means let creation science be taught in the schools. ...children can be allowed to make up their own minds in the face of evidence."
statistically you're still in pretty good shape
But potentially we're in very bad shape.
The day after the attack on Pearl Harbor, people on the mainland were as statistically safe as they were the day before. The difference was the country was at war and many more casualties were certain.
What the anthrax statistics mean is that people have biological agents and are willing to use them. There no reason to think they will stop with anthrax. The threat will continue for many years.
There's some hope that this attack will be limited because of the crudeness of the delivery mechanism and the fact that anthrax wasn't engineered to resist antibiotics. There even a faint hope that this attack isn't part of the events of 9/11.
However, no other terrorist organization has ever stopped with one attack. If bioterrorism is part of their arsenal, we can expect the terrorists to use it again the way the IRA continues to plant bombs.
It's reasonable to expect devices like the one in this article to become as common as smoke detectors.
There are still critical assumptions that have yet to be proven right.
Actually, these aren't assumptions, they're theories. Inevitably, all our knowledge of the distant past is going to depend on theories and conjectures. The radioisotope method of dating has been endorsed by a Nobel Prize, which certainly does not prove it but lends assurance to laymen that it has some plausibility.
Until someone comes up with evidence from some more reliable technique that contradicts radioisotope dating, it makes sense to use it to enhance our picture of the past.
Certainty is not one of the things that theories can guarantee. Ultimately, all you can say is that radioisotope dating is consistent with other things we know about the past. In the absence of direct observation, consistency may be as close as we can come to the truth.
The lone genius may just be an anachronism.
According to Fred Brooks' classic, The Mythical Man Month, you should build your team around gurus, not try to integrate them. This guy may have been a dud but gurus are still worth looking for because they can be as much as 20 times more productive than other programmers when used properly.
They are cheaper, even when highly paid, not only because they are more productive but because they reduce project management problems since fewer programmers are needed.
A better approach than recruiting gurus may be to take good programmers and make them better and mediocre programmers and make them good. You can achieve this objective by training, incentives and sometimes just asking a programmer what he needs to be better. A manager who tries this approach should steel himself for what he may hear.
you're confusing the study of these people's knowledge with studying the people
Further evidence for your point is the fact that programming manuals and documentation never contain any historical references beyond the odd anecdote and the change log.
The technology itself incorporates the lessons of history in a more useful way than trying to draw those lessons from a history book yourself. In fact, if you want to understand the history, you really need to understand the present technology rather than the other way around.
Finally, the true history of computer science is bound up in some heavy duty math so if there is anything to be learned it is beyond the ken of the average programmer. For instance, understanding Turing machines apparently requires understanding the the decidability of mathematical assertions. As a character in a Woody Allen film said, when asked why God permits evil to exist: "I don't even know how the can opener works."
They are as irrelevant to your daily needs as are Babbage, Turing, Hopper, Shannon and Ritchie.
I'd still like to see an example, perhaps from your personal experience, of how the study of computer history helps you learn a programing language faster, write code faster, write code with fewer bugs, or write programs that are easier to maintain, which is how I make a living.
Even the name of a programming manual that includes some history would be interesting. I've never seen any and I have a ton of O'Reilly books, the best in the field.
The examples raised in an earlier post by mav[LAG] were throw away lines meriting only a flippant response. Some weren't even primarily historical like the reference to Turing machines, which is taught in basic computer science. Knowing who Turing was and his tragic life does not deepen one's understanding of computability.
Many mathematicians are quite knowledgeable about the history of mathematics because even the oldest problems and solutions are relevant to their work. I know of nothing comparable in computer science.
arkanes makes a similar point in a comment in this thread: you're confusing the study of these people's knowledge with studying the people themselves.
oop's a space popped up in the middle, sorry
You can avoid the problem by embeding the link in an html anchor tag and specify "HTML formatted" instead of Plain Old Text:
Here's the link
At least, I've never had a problem.
Somewhere there is someone who is a better programmer than you.
Everything I know about programming I learned from better programmers. None of them were historians.
you'll do fine for the most part without knowledge of computer history
My original post, which started this thread, said that my knowledge of computer history had not helped me as a programmer, not that I had no knowledge of computer history.
For the record, here are some reasons why a knowledge of computer history could not possibly help with programming:
history is largely a record of obsolete and failed technology. As a programmer you only need a knowledge of successful technology. The lessons to be learned from failure have already been incorporated in the successful technology, which is in the manuals.
computer history has the same limitations of all history: the sources are unreliable and incomplete and the facts are selected by the biases of the historian. As a result, one can not draw any solid conclusions from computer history or any other kind of history.
much of the history has nothing to do with technology. It concerns business decisions, marketing, the personality of key people, and office politics. None of it affects writing code.
many of the important documents in the history of computer science are locked away in corporate archives and trade secrets and therefore unavailable for historians.
many of the key participants in computer history are very much alive and have not set down their memoires or released their archives for historians to collect.
Change in computer science is so rapid and overthrows previous knowledge so completely that knowing what is happening now is nearly impossible, never mind what happened years ago.
None of the foregoing means that you shouldn't know computer history. It just means it isn't useful for one's career.