"Shakespeare wrote it before sarcasm tags were around, but anyone with passing familiarity with the subtext of that scene would never toss that quote up to support this particular point."
I got "The Wisdom of Crowds" for Christmas. It recounts a story of an entymologist studying fire ants. Fire ants generally move by following each other when there are other fire ants ahead of them. But with a certain group of ants, the leaders ended up running into the tail of the group, forming a huge circle.
The ants marched in the circle for three days before the entire colony starved to death.
I don't want to starve to death in my car, thank you very much.
The legislative branch makes the law, the executive branch executes the law, and the judicial branch interprets the law. Thanks for the fifth grade civics lesson.
The "Authorization to Use Military Force" passed just after September 11 cannot be interpreted as broadly as you claim. The fact is, while the measure was being debated, the Administration specifically asked Congress to add the words "in the United States" to the resolution. That demand was rejected. Therefore, Congress couldn't have intended for it to be interpreted the way you and Shrub are interpreting it.
You're a complete loon, you know that? U.S. citizens have the expectation that they will be secure in their "persons and papers", which has been interpreted to include their phone, e-mail, and other private communications. If the NSA is regularly monitoring or intercepting these phone calls, that is illegal. If the President authorized it, that means he committed an illegal act. The NSA has never been granted the authorization to conduct surveillance inside the U.S., and for good reason. The routine monitoring of citizens is not a slippery slope you right-wing nutjobs will be dragging us down.
I know you're a loon, because you claim that Bush's critics don't want us recording Bin Laden's phone calls to U.S. citizens. Bull. If a known terrorist contacts someone inside the U.S., then that lead should be pursued, using an easily granted court order.
You pretend that law enforcement is completely hogtied so long as the NSA is forbidden from listening in to any phone call they like. If law enforcement finds a lead, they can even ask for a warrant after the fact.
I still stand by my earlier premise: Either Bush circumvented the FISA process because he wanted the NSA to do data mining (which would require huge volumes of warrants, each of which would lack critical probable cause), or he wanted to do surveillance on people who had been named in tortured confessions. Nobody has presented me with a compelling third option, because in every case I've seen proposed, the succinct answer is, "Dude, they could get a warrant to do that."
If you think my thoughts on that point are absurd*, then tell me what it is that Bush might be doing that requires that he circumvent the warrant process. So far, all you've proposed is "listen in on Osama's phone calls," a case in which a warrant would certainly be granted.
* Not that it's clear you even read them carefully, since you responded with "Which is it? You can't have it both ways." I said it might be one or the other, so your response leaves me scratching my head.
You're basically saying that, because one in every 100,000 Americans died in a terrorist attack on September 11, that the other 99,999 need to give up "liberty" and "pursuit of happiness" until such a time as our infallible leaders in the government ensure that there is zero risk of "life" ever being taken away from its citizens again.
That's nothing but a recipe for eternal dictatorship. If the founders of this country had wanted the government to be able to protect our lives by any necessary means, then they wouldn't have written the Bill of Rights to specifically forbid the government from doing certain things, regardless of whether those actions are "for our own good."
Voters didn't tell him "keep doing what you're doing." Here's what the voters really told him:
"We're not sure. We're not sure of your competence, your honesty, or your motivations. But you've managed to convince a lot of fence-sitters that even you--embarassing little chimp-man that you are--are less dangerous for this country than That Other Guy. So here's your job back. If it were up to us, we'd want to come back and rethink our choice next year, but that's not how the Constitution says we do things. But remember, we don't like you, we don't trust you, many of us who voted for you wish desperately that there had been another candidate. So don't think you have our wholehearted support."
My interpretation seems justified by the data. Narrowest re-election margin of any president. The fizzling sounds made by just about every major initiative Bush has tried. The debacle surrounding his appointment of Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court. His inability to hold his own party together, and the number of congressfolk who have distanced themself from him.
It all adds up to a president who doesn't have the confidence of his country.
Besides being incorrect in your interpretation of the 2004 results, you're also incorrect in your interpretation of the grandparent post. The claim being made is not that President Bush wasn't elected by a fair-and-square democratic process, but that he doesn't listen to the voters. He has this belief that God is leading him, and it's that voice that drives his decisions, much more than the will of the people.
It's true, and important, but once you look into what's really going on with this executive order (and the similar one issued by Clinton in 1995), it serves only to highlight the excesses of the Bush administration and the intellectual poverty of those who use this as evidence of a double standard.
Here is the relevant section of law which Carter is invoking as justification for his actions. Here is a post I wrote in response to some dude who claimed that these orders prove that Carter and Clinton were just as bad.
The basic thing you have to remember whenever this bit of FUD arises: Clinton and Carter's executive orders invoked the authority granted to them by Congress under FISA. Bush's executive order claimed authority specifically denied to him under that same law.
Another thing to remember is that Bush is claiming that the congressional authorization he received prior to invading Iraq allows him to do this also. However, the Administration specifically asked Congress to add language that would make such a reading of the law more plausible, and it was soundly rejected.
You're beyond full of crap. You're beyond a troll. Trolls show nuance and plausibility.
If the phone calls only involved known terrorists, then getting a warrant from FISA would have been childs play. The fact that this program specifically avoided getting warrants implies one of two things:
1) The program was monitoring a large sampling of international calls for which no probable cause could be justified.
2) The program was only monitoring "suspected terrorists," but those people were only known as such due to intelligence gathered via torture. If law enforcement went to FISA with "we tortured person W and got the names of persons X, Y, and Z, whom we'd like to wiretap," it would be thrown out.
Neither of these options is legal, neither of these options is ethical, and neither of these options can be dismissed by your trollish "Of COURSE the government monitors communications!"
Your craptitude also extends to your constitutional scholarship. I don't think even Bush has claimed that, because "Life is first on the list" means that the government can ignore the rest of the Constitution whenever doing so might save lives.
Your argument about "U.S. Persons" not being "U.S. Citizens" is a nonsensical one, because the only relevant definition of "U.S. Persons" in this discussion comes from FISA itself. That law explicitly states that U.S. Persons are not to be the subject of searches and wiretaps without a court order. You are correct that a U.S. Person can cease to be one, but the only example I can think of is when an immigrant has his or her greencard revoked. At that point, the person at least has the ability to know that he or she is no longer protected under FISA.
You seem to be arguing the absurd: that even though I am a U.S. Citizen, I cease to be a U.S. Person while I'm on the phone to Spain, or when I'm on the phone with someone who happens to be under investigation, or when I've posted a communist screed to my blog. If that's not what you're trying to imply, then please be a dear and explain how the distinction between "U.S. Citizen" and "U.S. Person" (a broader category that is also protected under FISA) is germane to this discussion.
Your claim that our enemies operated unobserved prior to September 11 is overstated. They certainly weren't "unfettered and unobserved" when U.S. agencies were able to stop the Millennium attacks. The dots were there to be connected prior to September 11 as well.
Finally, at best you've made a coherent argument that FISA is insufficient to the task of hunting terrorists. Even if doing an end-run around the law is making us safer, that doesn't make Bush's actions legal, and your attempts to justify the legality (as opposed to the necessity) of this program border on the ridiculous. You've made three arguments:
1) US Citizen != US Person: Irrelevant, because under FISA both are categories of people who cannot be wiretapped without a warrant from the Court.
3) The Fourth Amendment only protects against unreasonable searches and seizures: Yes, when speed is of the essence, a warrant might not be needed, or might be obtained retroactively. But there still needs to be probable cause, and "She's making a phone call to Afghanistan" doesn't cut it.
The way FISA is written, in order to conduct a warrantless search against a "foreign power", the person conducting the search must have a reasonable expectation that they're not going to get information about a U.S. Person (citizen, legal alien, or U.S. corporation). That means that neither end of the transaction is a U.S. Person. The President cannot violate FISA just because he believes that doing so will help him conduct his "war on terror".
Finally, to preemptively counter a popular defense: Bush is not a wartime president, much as he'd like to think he is. He will not be one until such a time as Congress makes a formal declaration of war.
Nobody here has "forgottent here are bad people out there who wish to destroy the US and are even now engaged in the attempts to do so." What you seem to have forgotten is that sometimes, those people are politicians burdened by their own sense of moral authority. A "slip" in one direction doesn't just result in lawsuits. It results in government organizations using torture as an intelligence-gathering tool. It results in people being detained indefinitely, without having charges brought against them and without access to legal counsel.
In short, these "slips" result in an America that commits the same sort of human rights violations that enrage and sicken us when they are done by third-world dictators. These "slips" dilute and tarnish the message of freedom and democracy that we want the world to understand and share. These "slips" encourage and excuse tyrannical governments around the world, and destroy the moral authority our country desperately needs when speaking out against them.
I agree with Bush on one matter: the world will always be unsafe so long as people live under regimes of fear, oppression, and tyranny. America is setting an example for all those regimes, right now. The message? Things like "civil liberties" and "the rule of law" can be set aside whenever those in power feel that such ideals interfere with the pursuit of their own safety and security.
You are the one who needs to wake up. In the "post-September 11th world" you keep talking about, it is more important than ever that we cling to our love of freedom, and set an example that can inspire and rally the forces of good around the world. If that course of action made it easier for terrorists to function, I would still recommend it. But besides being good for the American soul, I think it would give us the leverage to do good in the world, push for necessary reforms, and inspire moderate and peace-loving Muslims around the world to stand up against the bloodthirsty few.
I'm going to momentarily set aside the fact that this guy is a total nitwit, and pretend that an enlightened and rational person has raised that objection. Why do people care? Why would anyone spend time shilling for a free product, when doing so cuts into their porn-browsing time? In short, who gives a rat?
To answer the question, look back just a couple of years. IE had around 95% marketshare, despite not having done anything terribly interesting to improve the browser since it killed Netscape. Microsoft wasn't working towards supporting new, useful standards like CSS, XML, SVG, RSS, etc., because the incentives just weren't there. MSHTML was the standard, because there was no market for anything else. Security was awful, but the people who made the software just didn't care. Seriously, how much pride can you take in "doing things the right way," when you know for certain that the people developing for your browser will whine, complain, then find whatever dirty hack it takes to get things looking right on your browser?
Times have changed, and it's thanks in large part to the creation of Firefox and the Evangelical Geek Hordes swarming behind it. IE has lost a good chunk of marketshare, lazy webmasters are starting to understand that their website needs to work on multiple browsers. There is renewed interest in web standards.
Even IE is starting to improve its security and standards-compliance, while adding new features.
Before Firefox arrived, Internet Explorer was well on its way to becoming the MSWeb. Microsoft could decide which standards they thought were relevant to the user experience they wanted us to have, and to what extent they would be implemented. But since this power didn't translate well to revenue streams, they gave us the half-baked, annoying web browsing experience that they couldn't get us to pay for.
So long as alternative browsers have double-digit usage, the web will continue to be a more standards-friendly place. Standards don't sound terribly exciting at first, but they allow for all sorts of exciting niftiness that simply wouldn't be possible under a MS monoculture.
As promised, the response from my girlfriend's dad:
Lots of ink has been spilled on the subject of how evolution gets through suboptimal states. Here are a couple of items:
1. When a new mutation arises, it is present in just a single copy. For several generations thereafter, the number of copies will be small. Because of these small numbers, the evolution of new mutants is dominated by chance, not by selection. Even a favorable mutation is very likely to be lost by chance during the first few generations. For example, suppose that the new mutatant survives with a probability that is 1+s times as large as the common type. In other words, its selective advantage is s. Then it will ultimately become fixed throughout the population with probability 2s. If s=0.01 (fairly strong selection), then the mutant will ultimately be lost with probability 0.98. (This result is a classic, derived by Fisher and Haldane.) It is not until the mutant becomes relatively common that its fate is governed mainly by selection.
2. Sewall Wright studied the problem of evolution on an "adaptive surface", where the horizontal dimensions represent the phenotype, and the vertical one is fitness. Selection tends to move a population to the top of the nearest hill. So how does it get across valleys? Wright's idea was that large populations get stuck on little hills, and never make it across valleys. Small populations, on the other hand, are overwhelmed by stochastic forces and do not respond much to selection. But if a large population is subdivided into 1000 local groups, then each group explores the surface 1000 times as fast, and the whole population evolves a million times as fast. Several skeptical papers on this have been published in the past decade. I don't know where the issue stands now.
I'm sending this to you because I don't have a Slashdot account.
I was going to link to my post deflating this lie (hmm, come to think of it, I just did), but it looks like the previous respondent did a better job.
The executive orders in both cases specified that they were following sections of FISA that allowed them to conduct such searches, so long as the searches weren't collecting information on U.S. citizens. Read the very title of Clinton's executive order: EXECUTIVE ORDER 12949 : FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE PHYSICAL SEARCHES. IOW, doing physical searches to collect foreign intelligence. Not domestic intelligence. Not intelligence on U.S. citizens. Intelligence about foreign powers and persons.
Whether the searches actually met the standards claimed is a different question. The title of this executive order means about as much as the title of Bush's Clean Skies Act. But the simple existence of this order doesn't show that Clinton broke the law. If anything, it highlights the distinction between the actions of Clinton and those of his successor: the man who came to office claiming he would restore to the White House the dignity and respect for law that Clinton supposedly took from it.
No, I didn't. But it looks like this executive order is just saying, "Hi, it's me, the President. I'm going to start using powers already granted to me by FISA. Hope everything is well with you and the kids."
This section of the law (which the order cites) seems to specifically say that Clinton was authorized to do this.
Also, the certifications required by the AG include the following:
1) The search is being conducted on property exclusively used by a foreign power.
2) There isn't a real chance of getting information about a U.S. citizen.
Name the section of law that specifically authorizes Bush to perform the searches he's doing. The President himself hasn't done that. Instead he's basing the searches on the following legal syllogism:
Premise: Bush is conducting a war on terror.
Lemma: Bush is therefore a wartime president.
Premise: Wartime presidents can do whatever the hell they want.
Conclusion: Yeehaw.
Unless you can find some troubling facts about the way the Clinton Administration actually used the searches authorized by this executive order, you've got nothing. Clinton appears to have followed the law in this matter. Bush appears to have made up new legal doctrines to suit his intentions. That's the difference.
If I had red paint thrown on me for wearing fur (what can I say? I have odd fashion sensibilities), I wouldn't be in fear of my life. However, I would probably be fearful of wearing fur again.
It's still using intimidation in order to pressure people into behaving in the way we want. Therefore, I would argue that it fits the dictionary definition of terrorism.
But you're both placing too much emphasis on semantics. The question you two should be arguing is whether paint-flingers ought to be combatted using the same counterterrorism laws we use against people who are trying to kill hundreds. My hunch is that the vast majority of the paint-flingers can distinguish between property damage and murder. Therefore, any focus on them does nothing but dilute more serious counterterrorism efforts.
No, a gene doesn't have to confer a survival advantage in order for the gene to get passed on. But if it confers even a slight disadvantage (with no counterbalancing advantages), then the gene quickly disappears from the population. Even a 1% advantage is enough to allow a new mutation to wipe out competing genes within a few hundred generations, when the competing genes are firmly entrenched.
As a statistical matter, there need to be lots of copies of a gene in the population before you're likely to start seeing new mutations of that gene. So it's very unlikely that a disadvantageous gene is going to hang around long enough to change into something advantageous. I'm going to double check this with someone who actually knows something about population genetics (read: not me), but I'm pretty sure that, as a matter of principle, evolutionary theorists assume that locally suboptimal paths are never taken.
Now to your dilemma: how does evolution occur at all? Without the ability to traverse suboptimal paths, won't critters be stuck the way they are?
Two solutions present themselves. First, motion along the proverbial "fitness terrain" is more like quantum tunneling than standard Newtonian mechanics. Descendants don't wander away from their parent; they appear a certain distance away. So a sufficiently weird mutation will simply "appear" on the other hill.
The other possibility: The fitness terrain itself is constantly changing. Changes in the environment, changes in other species, etc., all work to constrain the sorts of traits that are useful for survival. So a seemingly imposssible jump might happen simply because the environment provided some intermediate niche at the time, which subsequently disappeared.
Finally, the whole concept of the fitness terrain may just be a useful analogy. Don't take it too seriously or it will make your head hurt.
My GF is the daughter of two evolutionary anthropologists. I'll run this by them.
1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States...
My interpretation is that state and local laws cannot infringe on the rights outlined in the first ten amendments. Therefore, the citizens of Dover, PA are also citizens of the U.S., and if the federal government believes that teaching ID is a violation of the establishment clause, it has the authority to order the government of Dover, PA to stop teaching ID in public schools.
There are a lot of fields where just getting a few extra percentage points of accuracy on a hard problem is considered important enough to publish. Natural language processing, for example. I think the real demonstration of this system would be to see how the movie studios' best guesses compare at the same task.
I knew Bryce was a bit of a Mormon name, but this is the first time anyone has explicitly told me as much. One person did tell me it sounded like a character in a really bad romance novel.
Bryce Anderson? check Utah native? check Junior in college? check
Plus my web site is hosted on www.cs.utah.edu, which should allow anyone to guess both my major and college of choice.
Even worse, most modern traffic lights use energy efficient LEDs, and therefore don't use nearly as much electricity as they used to.
I don't know how many light installations one of these is supposed to power, but the only easy way to power more than one would be to hook it directly into the grid. So basically they're taking the amount of energy being produced by these things and subtracting it off the city-wide electricity bill.
If Salt Lake ever starts looking at these, I'll be looking over the city charter, trying to figure out where it requires the city to generate electricity at all, much less in the most inefficient and annoying way possible.
Maybe if you only installed them on downhill slopes....
All right, all you college types. Time to give something back to the society that has either given you so very very much or at least failed thus far to kill you. Go to your university library, and try to order Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. Preferably using inter-library loan, and preferably order it in the original Chinese. Knowing a foreign language has to be a red flag, right?
Maybe if we flood the world with bogus information, they'll have to go back to, you know, actually running proper investigations instead of wasting our time and scaring people whose only sin is having interests.
In an ideal world, an SSN/SIN would be something you could plaster on a bumper sticker, and nobody would be able to "steal" it. All it should be is an identifier, not an authenticator.
If somebody is able to take something from me, or run up charges on my behalf, just by knowing my SSN, it's because somewhere along the way, some person or organization said, "Hmm. He knows the information about the person referred to by SSN 555-55-5555. Therefore he must be the person referred to by SSN 555-55-5555." Which is lunacy.
Well, you've got "herd mentality," nonsensical "common wisdom", over/under-reliance on certain factors, and a litany of other impediments to making proper decisions. Neural nets have a rather different set of impediments, and in an ideal world the two approaches can compensate for some of each others weaknesses.
In the real world, this tool will be touted when it's saying what the execs want to hear, and dismissed as hogwash when it predicts failure. So I really don't see it making a big difference either way. But neural networks can be good for teasing out hidden relationships in data.
The thing isn't trying to judge artistic quality or entertainment value, any more than it's trying to judge "social responsibility" or any other abstract concept. The only goal is to figure out how commercially successful the film will be.
If the factors you listed as important were the only factors that really influenced the outcome, that would have manifested in the strengths of the neural net. It's very possible that the creator had a couple of other factors he was looking at, which didn't significantly improve results. That's just the way NN-based systems work.
Corner cases like "The Blair Witch Project" demonstrate the limitations of NN-based approaches to prediction, not necessarily the futility of them. I'm not convinced that the overall effect of this tool would be positive or negative, but you seem to dismiss the entire approach.
I doubt they'll be turning over the entire film-selection process to this software, or any of its descendants. For one thing, too many jobs are at stake. Rather, this may end up effectively automating the sorts of formulas the industry already uses to guess at the success of movies, which will save labor without significantly changing the results.
One of the best things you can do when coming up with a system like this is to create some sort of baseline to compare it against. For example, if you want to know if your movie predictor is doing well, compare its results to several absolutely brain-dead alternatives. For example, six months before release, take the average of a hundred studio execs' ballpark guesses, and see if their predictions consistently outperform your own system. If they do, you've found a good system for predicting movie success (it just isn't the one you built).
The point is, it's simply a tool, whose abilities and limitations ought to be explored. Some people will use it well, others will use it poorly. But nobody in Hollywood is going to want to remove themselves from the loop entirely.
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I got "The Wisdom of Crowds" for Christmas. It recounts a story of an entymologist studying fire ants. Fire ants generally move by following each other when there are other fire ants ahead of them. But with a certain group of ants, the leaders ended up running into the tail of the group, forming a huge circle.
The ants marched in the circle for three days before the entire colony starved to death.
I don't want to starve to death in my car, thank you very much.
The legislative branch makes the law, the executive branch executes the law, and the judicial branch interprets the law. Thanks for the fifth grade civics lesson.
The "Authorization to Use Military Force" passed just after September 11 cannot be interpreted as broadly as you claim. The fact is, while the measure was being debated, the Administration specifically asked Congress to add the words "in the United States" to the resolution. That demand was rejected. Therefore, Congress couldn't have intended for it to be interpreted the way you and Shrub are interpreting it.
You're a complete loon, you know that? U.S. citizens have the expectation that they will be secure in their "persons and papers", which has been interpreted to include their phone, e-mail, and other private communications. If the NSA is regularly monitoring or intercepting these phone calls, that is illegal. If the President authorized it, that means he committed an illegal act. The NSA has never been granted the authorization to conduct surveillance inside the U.S., and for good reason. The routine monitoring of citizens is not a slippery slope you right-wing nutjobs will be dragging us down.
I know you're a loon, because you claim that Bush's critics don't want us recording Bin Laden's phone calls to U.S. citizens. Bull. If a known terrorist contacts someone inside the U.S., then that lead should be pursued, using an easily granted court order.
You pretend that law enforcement is completely hogtied so long as the NSA is forbidden from listening in to any phone call they like. If law enforcement finds a lead, they can even ask for a warrant after the fact.
I still stand by my earlier premise: Either Bush circumvented the FISA process because he wanted the NSA to do data mining (which would require huge volumes of warrants, each of which would lack critical probable cause), or he wanted to do surveillance on people who had been named in tortured confessions. Nobody has presented me with a compelling third option, because in every case I've seen proposed, the succinct answer is, "Dude, they could get a warrant to do that."
If you think my thoughts on that point are absurd*, then tell me what it is that Bush might be doing that requires that he circumvent the warrant process. So far, all you've proposed is "listen in on Osama's phone calls," a case in which a warrant would certainly be granted.
* Not that it's clear you even read them carefully, since you responded with "Which is it? You can't have it both ways." I said it might be one or the other, so your response leaves me scratching my head.
Still you spout absurdities.
You're basically saying that, because one in every 100,000 Americans died in a terrorist attack on September 11, that the other 99,999 need to give up "liberty" and "pursuit of happiness" until such a time as our infallible leaders in the government ensure that there is zero risk of "life" ever being taken away from its citizens again.
That's nothing but a recipe for eternal dictatorship. If the founders of this country had wanted the government to be able to protect our lives by any necessary means, then they wouldn't have written the Bill of Rights to specifically forbid the government from doing certain things, regardless of whether those actions are "for our own good."
Ah, another member of the "51% mandate" crowd.
Voters didn't tell him "keep doing what you're doing." Here's what the voters really told him:
"We're not sure. We're not sure of your competence, your honesty, or your motivations. But you've managed to convince a lot of fence-sitters that even you--embarassing little chimp-man that you are--are less dangerous for this country than That Other Guy. So here's your job back. If it were up to us, we'd want to come back and rethink our choice next year, but that's not how the Constitution says we do things. But remember, we don't like you, we don't trust you, many of us who voted for you wish desperately that there had been another candidate. So don't think you have our wholehearted support."
My interpretation seems justified by the data. Narrowest re-election margin of any president. The fizzling sounds made by just about every major initiative Bush has tried. The debacle surrounding his appointment of Harriet Meyers to the Supreme Court. His inability to hold his own party together, and the number of congressfolk who have distanced themself from him.
It all adds up to a president who doesn't have the confidence of his country.
Besides being incorrect in your interpretation of the 2004 results, you're also incorrect in your interpretation of the grandparent post. The claim being made is not that President Bush wasn't elected by a fair-and-square democratic process, but that he doesn't listen to the voters. He has this belief that God is leading him, and it's that voice that drives his decisions, much more than the will of the people.
It's true, and important, but once you look into what's really going on with this executive order (and the similar one issued by Clinton in 1995), it serves only to highlight the excesses of the Bush administration and the intellectual poverty of those who use this as evidence of a double standard.
Here is the relevant section of law which Carter is invoking as justification for his actions. Here is a post I wrote in response to some dude who claimed that these orders prove that Carter and Clinton were just as bad.
The basic thing you have to remember whenever this bit of FUD arises: Clinton and Carter's executive orders invoked the authority granted to them by Congress under FISA. Bush's executive order claimed authority specifically denied to him under that same law.
Another thing to remember is that Bush is claiming that the congressional authorization he received prior to invading Iraq allows him to do this also. However, the Administration specifically asked Congress to add language that would make such a reading of the law more plausible, and it was soundly rejected.
You're beyond full of crap. You're beyond a troll. Trolls show nuance and plausibility.
If the phone calls only involved known terrorists, then getting a warrant from FISA would have been childs play. The fact that this program specifically avoided getting warrants implies one of two things:
1) The program was monitoring a large sampling of international calls for which no probable cause could be justified.
2) The program was only monitoring "suspected terrorists," but those people were only known as such due to intelligence gathered via torture. If law enforcement went to FISA with "we tortured person W and got the names of persons X, Y, and Z, whom we'd like to wiretap," it would be thrown out.
Neither of these options is legal, neither of these options is ethical, and neither of these options can be dismissed by your trollish "Of COURSE the government monitors communications!"
Your craptitude also extends to your constitutional scholarship. I don't think even Bush has claimed that, because "Life is first on the list" means that the government can ignore the rest of the Constitution whenever doing so might save lives.
Your argument about "U.S. Persons" not being "U.S. Citizens" is a nonsensical one, because the only relevant definition of "U.S. Persons" in this discussion comes from FISA itself. That law explicitly states that U.S. Persons are not to be the subject of searches and wiretaps without a court order. You are correct that a U.S. Person can cease to be one, but the only example I can think of is when an immigrant has his or her greencard revoked. At that point, the person at least has the ability to know that he or she is no longer protected under FISA.
You seem to be arguing the absurd: that even though I am a U.S. Citizen, I cease to be a U.S. Person while I'm on the phone to Spain, or when I'm on the phone with someone who happens to be under investigation, or when I've posted a communist screed to my blog. If that's not what you're trying to imply, then please be a dear and explain how the distinction between "U.S. Citizen" and "U.S. Person" (a broader category that is also protected under FISA) is germane to this discussion.
Your claim that our enemies operated unobserved prior to September 11 is overstated. They certainly weren't "unfettered and unobserved" when U.S. agencies were able to stop the Millennium attacks. The dots were there to be connected prior to September 11 as well.
Finally, at best you've made a coherent argument that FISA is insufficient to the task of hunting terrorists. Even if doing an end-run around the law is making us safer, that doesn't make Bush's actions legal, and your attempts to justify the legality (as opposed to the necessity) of this program border on the ridiculous. You've made three arguments:
1) US Citizen != US Person: Irrelevant, because under FISA both are categories of people who cannot be wiretapped without a warrant from the Court.
2) The president has broad authorities under Article II of the Constitution: Where, specifically? Where does it say that the president can ignore the laws of Congress?
3) The Fourth Amendment only protects against unreasonable searches and seizures: Yes, when speed is of the essence, a warrant might not be needed, or might be obtained retroactively. But there still needs to be probable cause, and "She's making a phone call to Afghanistan" doesn't cut it.
The way FISA is written, in order to conduct a warrantless search against a "foreign power", the person conducting the search must have a reasonable expectation that they're not going to get information about a U.S. Person (citizen, legal alien, or U.S. corporation). That means that neither end of the transaction is a U.S. Person. The President cannot violate FISA just because he believes that doing so will help him conduct his "war on terror".
Finally, to preemptively counter a popular defense: Bush is not a wartime president, much as he'd like to think he is. He will not be one until such a time as Congress makes a formal declaration of war.
Nobody here has "forgottent here are bad people out there who wish to destroy the US and are even now engaged in the attempts to do so." What you seem to have forgotten is that sometimes, those people are politicians burdened by their own sense of moral authority. A "slip" in one direction doesn't just result in lawsuits. It results in government organizations using torture as an intelligence-gathering tool. It results in people being detained indefinitely, without having charges brought against them and without access to legal counsel.
In short, these "slips" result in an America that commits the same sort of human rights violations that enrage and sicken us when they are done by third-world dictators. These "slips" dilute and tarnish the message of freedom and democracy that we want the world to understand and share. These "slips" encourage and excuse tyrannical governments around the world, and destroy the moral authority our country desperately needs when speaking out against them.
I agree with Bush on one matter: the world will always be unsafe so long as people live under regimes of fear, oppression, and tyranny. America is setting an example for all those regimes, right now. The message? Things like "civil liberties" and "the rule of law" can be set aside whenever those in power feel that such ideals interfere with the pursuit of their own safety and security.
You are the one who needs to wake up. In the "post-September 11th world" you keep talking about, it is more important than ever that we cling to our love of freedom, and set an example that can inspire and rally the forces of good around the world. If that course of action made it easier for terrorists to function, I would still recommend it. But besides being good for the American soul, I think it would give us the leverage to do good in the world, push for necessary reforms, and inspire moderate and peace-loving Muslims around the world to stand up against the bloodthirsty few.
I'm going to momentarily set aside the fact that this guy is a total nitwit, and pretend that an enlightened and rational person has raised that objection. Why do people care? Why would anyone spend time shilling for a free product, when doing so cuts into their porn-browsing time? In short, who gives a rat?
To answer the question, look back just a couple of years. IE had around 95% marketshare, despite not having done anything terribly interesting to improve the browser since it killed Netscape. Microsoft wasn't working towards supporting new, useful standards like CSS, XML, SVG, RSS, etc., because the incentives just weren't there. MSHTML was the standard, because there was no market for anything else. Security was awful, but the people who made the software just didn't care. Seriously, how much pride can you take in "doing things the right way," when you know for certain that the people developing for your browser will whine, complain, then find whatever dirty hack it takes to get things looking right on your browser?
Times have changed, and it's thanks in large part to the creation of Firefox and the Evangelical Geek Hordes swarming behind it. IE has lost a good chunk of marketshare, lazy webmasters are starting to understand that their website needs to work on multiple browsers. There is renewed interest in web standards.
Even IE is starting to improve its security and standards-compliance, while adding new features.
Before Firefox arrived, Internet Explorer was well on its way to becoming the MSWeb. Microsoft could decide which standards they thought were relevant to the user experience they wanted us to have, and to what extent they would be implemented. But since this power didn't translate well to revenue streams, they gave us the half-baked, annoying web browsing experience that they couldn't get us to pay for.
So long as alternative browsers have double-digit usage, the web will continue to be a more standards-friendly place. Standards don't sound terribly exciting at first, but they allow for all sorts of exciting niftiness that simply wouldn't be possible under a MS monoculture.
As promised, the response from my girlfriend's dad:
Lots of ink has been spilled on the subject of how evolution gets through
suboptimal states. Here are a couple of items:
1. When a new mutation arises, it is present in just a single copy. For
several generations thereafter, the number of copies will be small.
Because of these small numbers, the evolution of new mutants is dominated
by chance, not by selection. Even a favorable mutation is very likely to
be lost by chance during the first few generations. For example, suppose
that the new mutatant survives with a probability that is 1+s times as
large as the common type. In other words, its selective advantage is s.
Then it will ultimately become fixed throughout the population with
probability 2s. If s=0.01 (fairly strong selection), then the mutant will
ultimately be lost with probability 0.98. (This result is a classic,
derived by Fisher and Haldane.) It is not until the mutant becomes
relatively common that its fate is governed mainly by selection.
2. Sewall Wright studied the problem of evolution on an "adaptive surface",
where the horizontal dimensions represent the phenotype, and the vertical
one is fitness. Selection tends to move a population to the top of the
nearest hill. So how does it get across valleys? Wright's idea was that
large populations get stuck on little hills, and never make it across
valleys. Small populations, on the other hand, are overwhelmed by
stochastic forces and do not respond much to selection. But if a large
population is subdivided into 1000 local groups, then each group explores
the surface 1000 times as fast, and the whole population evolves a million
times as fast. Several skeptical papers on this have been published in the
past decade. I don't know where the issue stands now.
I'm sending this to you because I don't have a Slashdot account.
Wow. This is more fun than Space Invaders!
I was going to link to my post deflating this lie (hmm, come to think of it, I just did), but it looks like the previous respondent did a better job.
The executive orders in both cases specified that they were following sections of FISA that allowed them to conduct such searches, so long as the searches weren't collecting information on U.S. citizens. Read the very title of Clinton's executive order: EXECUTIVE ORDER 12949 : FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE PHYSICAL SEARCHES. IOW, doing physical searches to collect foreign intelligence. Not domestic intelligence. Not intelligence on U.S. citizens. Intelligence about foreign powers and persons.
Whether the searches actually met the standards claimed is a different question. The title of this executive order means about as much as the title of Bush's Clean Skies Act. But the simple existence of this order doesn't show that Clinton broke the law. If anything, it highlights the distinction between the actions of Clinton and those of his successor: the man who came to office claiming he would restore to the White House the dignity and respect for law that Clinton supposedly took from it.
When is that going to happen, by the way?
No, I didn't. But it looks like this executive order is just saying, "Hi, it's me, the President. I'm going to start using powers already granted to me by FISA. Hope everything is well with you and the kids."
This section of the law (which the order cites) seems to specifically say that Clinton was authorized to do this.
Also, the certifications required by the AG include the following:
1) The search is being conducted on property exclusively used by a foreign power.
2) There isn't a real chance of getting information about a U.S. citizen.
Name the section of law that specifically authorizes Bush to perform the searches he's doing. The President himself hasn't done that. Instead he's basing the searches on the following legal syllogism:
Premise: Bush is conducting a war on terror.
Lemma: Bush is therefore a wartime president.
Premise: Wartime presidents can do whatever the hell they want.
Conclusion: Yeehaw.
Unless you can find some troubling facts about the way the Clinton Administration actually used the searches authorized by this executive order, you've got nothing. Clinton appears to have followed the law in this matter. Bush appears to have made up new legal doctrines to suit his intentions. That's the difference.
If I had red paint thrown on me for wearing fur (what can I say? I have odd fashion sensibilities), I wouldn't be in fear of my life. However, I would probably be fearful of wearing fur again.
It's still using intimidation in order to pressure people into behaving in the way we want. Therefore, I would argue that it fits the dictionary definition of terrorism.
But you're both placing too much emphasis on semantics. The question you two should be arguing is whether paint-flingers ought to be combatted using the same counterterrorism laws we use against people who are trying to kill hundreds. My hunch is that the vast majority of the paint-flingers can distinguish between property damage and murder. Therefore, any focus on them does nothing but dilute more serious counterterrorism efforts.
You're arguing counter to statistics here.
No, a gene doesn't have to confer a survival advantage in order for the gene to get passed on. But if it confers even a slight disadvantage (with no counterbalancing advantages), then the gene quickly disappears from the population. Even a 1% advantage is enough to allow a new mutation to wipe out competing genes within a few hundred generations, when the competing genes are firmly entrenched.
As a statistical matter, there need to be lots of copies of a gene in the population before you're likely to start seeing new mutations of that gene. So it's very unlikely that a disadvantageous gene is going to hang around long enough to change into something advantageous. I'm going to double check this with someone who actually knows something about population genetics (read: not me), but I'm pretty sure that, as a matter of principle, evolutionary theorists assume that locally suboptimal paths are never taken.
Now to your dilemma: how does evolution occur at all? Without the ability to traverse suboptimal paths, won't critters be stuck the way they are?
Two solutions present themselves. First, motion along the proverbial "fitness terrain" is more like quantum tunneling than standard Newtonian mechanics. Descendants don't wander away from their parent; they appear a certain distance away. So a sufficiently weird mutation will simply "appear" on the other hill.
The other possibility: The fitness terrain itself is constantly changing. Changes in the environment, changes in other species, etc., all work to constrain the sorts of traits that are useful for survival. So a seemingly imposssible jump might happen simply because the environment provided some intermediate niche at the time, which subsequently disappeared.
Finally, the whole concept of the fitness terrain may just be a useful analogy. Don't take it too seriously or it will make your head hurt.
My GF is the daughter of two evolutionary anthropologists. I'll run this by them.
My interpretation is that state and local laws cannot infringe on the rights outlined in the first ten amendments. Therefore, the citizens of Dover, PA are also citizens of the U.S., and if the federal government believes that teaching ID is a violation of the establishment clause, it has the authority to order the government of Dover, PA to stop teaching ID in public schools.
In summary, you will respect their authorit-ah.
There are a lot of fields where just getting a few extra percentage points of accuracy on a hard problem is considered important enough to publish. Natural language processing, for example. I think the real demonstration of this system would be to see how the movie studios' best guesses compare at the same task.
I knew Bryce was a bit of a Mormon name, but this is the first time anyone has explicitly told me as much. One person did tell me it sounded like a character in a really bad romance novel.
Bryce Anderson? check
Utah native? check
Junior in college? check
Plus my web site is hosted on www.cs.utah.edu, which should allow anyone to guess both my major and college of choice.
Even worse, most modern traffic lights use energy efficient LEDs, and therefore don't use nearly as much electricity as they used to.
I don't know how many light installations one of these is supposed to power, but the only easy way to power more than one would be to hook it directly into the grid. So basically they're taking the amount of energy being produced by these things and subtracting it off the city-wide electricity bill.
If Salt Lake ever starts looking at these, I'll be looking over the city charter, trying to figure out where it requires the city to generate electricity at all, much less in the most inefficient and annoying way possible.
Maybe if you only installed them on downhill slopes....
All right, all you college types. Time to give something back to the society that has either given you so very very much or at least failed thus far to kill you. Go to your university library, and try to order Mao Zedong's Little Red Book. Preferably using inter-library loan, and preferably order it in the original Chinese. Knowing a foreign language has to be a red flag, right?
Maybe if we flood the world with bogus information, they'll have to go back to, you know, actually running proper investigations instead of wasting our time and scaring people whose only sin is having interests.
In an ideal world, an SSN/SIN would be something you could plaster on a bumper sticker, and nobody would be able to "steal" it. All it should be is an identifier, not an authenticator.
If somebody is able to take something from me, or run up charges on my behalf, just by knowing my SSN, it's because somewhere along the way, some person or organization said, "Hmm. He knows the information about the person referred to by SSN 555-55-5555. Therefore he must be the person referred to by SSN 555-55-5555." Which is lunacy.
Make the bad people stop!
Well, you've got "herd mentality," nonsensical "common wisdom", over/under-reliance on certain factors, and a litany of other impediments to making proper decisions. Neural nets have a rather different set of impediments, and in an ideal world the two approaches can compensate for some of each others weaknesses.
In the real world, this tool will be touted when it's saying what the execs want to hear, and dismissed as hogwash when it predicts failure. So I really don't see it making a big difference either way. But neural networks can be good for teasing out hidden relationships in data.
The thing isn't trying to judge artistic quality or entertainment value, any more than it's trying to judge "social responsibility" or any other abstract concept. The only goal is to figure out how commercially successful the film will be.
If the factors you listed as important were the only factors that really influenced the outcome, that would have manifested in the strengths of the neural net. It's very possible that the creator had a couple of other factors he was looking at, which didn't significantly improve results. That's just the way NN-based systems work.
Corner cases like "The Blair Witch Project" demonstrate the limitations of NN-based approaches to prediction, not necessarily the futility of them. I'm not convinced that the overall effect of this tool would be positive or negative, but you seem to dismiss the entire approach.
I doubt they'll be turning over the entire film-selection process to this software, or any of its descendants. For one thing, too many jobs are at stake. Rather, this may end up effectively automating the sorts of formulas the industry already uses to guess at the success of movies, which will save labor without significantly changing the results.
One of the best things you can do when coming up with a system like this is to create some sort of baseline to compare it against. For example, if you want to know if your movie predictor is doing well, compare its results to several absolutely brain-dead alternatives. For example, six months before release, take the average of a hundred studio execs' ballpark guesses, and see if their predictions consistently outperform your own system. If they do, you've found a good system for predicting movie success (it just isn't the one you built).
The point is, it's simply a tool, whose abilities and limitations ought to be explored. Some people will use it well, others will use it poorly. But nobody in Hollywood is going to want to remove themselves from the loop entirely.