What I wouldn't give for a truly cooperative Real Time Strategy game. And not just a basic alliance, which usually just means a non-aggression and map-sharing pact. But imagine for a moment full resource and control sharing. At that point you can differentiate roles and responsibilities. One person to manage resource and production while the other leads the...expansion.... The complexity players have achieved in tactics prove that given the freedom to do so, players will plan, cooperate and organize well beyond what you may anticipate.
s/players/workers/ . It already exists -- it's called, er, Work World. Takes forever to level, though -- and talk about *grinding*! 8^P Nobody really wants to play, though: they actually have to pay the 'players' to get them to show up (although at some 4500 Lindens/ hour it's more lucrative than camping). The avatars are pretty lame, though -- very little customization allowed (no furries for example). And the 'players' have to be there -- in meatspace, no less -- 5 days a week. I'd say that, as a MMORG, it's pretty unsustainable...
But unfortunately, the "free download" amount has reached it's limit for the day and I was told to try again the following day.
So he is using the scarcity model! You trade your time for a shot at getting his book for free. But what is his payoff here? Multiple visits to his website?
If you want to paid, provide something to people that is in limited supply. Digital music is infinite in supply.
It's *good* digital music that is in limited supply. Unfortunately, every geek in a bedroom with ProTools thinks *his* music falls into that rather limited space. That's why gigging will never die: talent + ambition will rise to the top through (first) word-of-mouth and (second) free media exposure. (Who gets reviewed? Bands that passed the word-of-mouth test.) Success requires passing a test with multiple parts: you have to have at least a passing grade on all the parts, and that only gets you in the door.
The problem, though, you need a better quality of AI to generate arbitrary easy-but-obscure questions as you do to solve them... Keep in mind you need questions that anyone with a 3rd-grade education could read and solve, which limits you to simple grammar, small words, concrete ideas, and no math harder than addition, subtraction, and inequality.
Why not exploit humans' visual pattern matching ability? For example, a small version of the Traveling Salesman problem (say 15-20) points is easy to generate, and a typical human could easily solve it at a glance, or answer questions about a partial path: (Of the remaining open points, which one would be the best one for point number 7 to connect to?)
The holy grail of course is to find something that humans can do easily, but is impossible (or very very unlikely statistically) for a program to be able to do.
Solve a small version (15-20) points of the traveling salesman problem. Most humans can just look at it and solve it. Or you could ask questions: "Here is a partial path. Point 7 should now connect to 1) point 4, 2) point 9, 3) point 16, 4) point 5, e) point 19."
The underlying problem is that we're running out of things that are easy for people but hard for computers.
How about solving a small traveling salesman problem -- at least to within 10% of minimal path length? Maybe 15-20 points to quickly connect -- most humans can see the best path at a glance. Let's see a computer solve that.
Look at it like this: hardware == automobile; software == human choices and decisions.
Right, and which one of your analogies gets a patent (hint: automobile)? Which one gets a copyright (hint: human ideas/decisions)? I think you'll find you just stated my position.
---
It's the *manual in the glove compartment* that is under copyright: *those* are the instructions on how to drive and maintain the car. As I mentioned in my first post, I have no problem with information that *just sits on a page* being copyrighted. But you can't copyright a human being: the *actualizor* of the instructions. Similarly, software is the *actualizor* of instructions: it *does things*.
Also, your argument is like arguing that an animal can live *only* in water *or* on land. There is no place in such an analogy for amphibians, yet they exist. Software can appear to fall into either camp, *depending on your standpoint*.
I think the problem that we are dancing around is: how to deal with 'embedded human-decision capacity that is not embedded in a human'? It appears that *neither* patent nor copyright is quite the right way to look at it.
Perhaps we *do* need a third class of protected data that is neither patent nor copyright, and that was not envisioned by the founding fathers: things which are *both* implementations *and* expressions. That's where we need to put "business method" patents too, as they also are 'mechanisms that are processes which give rise to objective outputs'.
In these terms, copyrights protect 'mechanisms which are objects which give rise to subjective outputs' and patents protect 'mechanisms which are objects which give rise to objective outputs'. Neither of those two protect 'mechanisms which are *not* objects'. Of course, 'ideas' are the fourth case: 'mechanisms which are processes which give rise to subjective outputs': such things are already covered by being explicitly excluded from the protection process.
The code does nothing but sit.The hardware does stuff.
Exactly backwards. The *hardware* sits until *animated by the software*. Without the software *making the hardware work*, the hardware is nothing but a bunch of metal.
And you missed my point: software itself *is* a machine: virtual, true -- but it *does* stuff: it operates on input -- making decisions -- and produces output.
Look at it like this: hardware == automobile; software == human choices and decisions. Hardware does nothing until activated by software.
The speed of light is also the maximum speed of causation...if these "super structures" are outside the observable universe, how in the hell are they affecting anything within the observable universe? If they can exert causal influence on these galaxies, and the light from these galaxies has time to reach us... I could be wrong but I feel like someone, somewhere, is seriously contradicting themselves.
Think of it like this: they *expect* to see a certain red-shift from something at 6 billion light-years: it is moving away from us, and the radiation that we receive from it is "red-shifted" by a well-known amount. What they are apparently seeing is *more red-shift than they expect* and the vector of this extra red-shift points toward a certain section of space. Thus, they are deducing that "something out there" is *pulling* that group of galaxies, and the only force (that we currently know of) that operates at that scale is gravity.
Scientists are looking out past that group of galaxies at 6 billion light-years to *as far as they can see* (13.7 billion light-years), but they are not finding enough *matter* there to account for the gravitational action of this cluster of galaxies at 6 billion light-years. So whatever is pulling the galaxies is *beyond* 13.7 light-years.
The problem is that we have assumed -- until now -- that *everything in the universe* is within our little bubble with a radius of 13.7 billion light-years. Now, apparently, we've discovered that *this is not the case*. Something... else... is out there.
A 20-year-old Carleton University student faces criminal charges after a hacker accessed the electronic accounts of 32 students.
The writer, who used a pseudonym, claimed he easily broke into the accounts using a program that captures computer keystrokes.
Det. Michel Villeneuve of the Ottawa Police high-tech crime unit said yesterday that a suspect used Keylogger software and magnetic stripe-card reader software to acquire students' information. The suspect then put together a 16-page document addressed to the university secretary's office, later e-mailing the document to 37 students.
Sooo....this guy deliberately broke into 32 accounts using both software and hardware. Then he rationalized that he shouldn't be punished for it by preemptively confessing.
Make the punishment fit the crime: throw the book at him, then give him probation. But he definitely should get some academic sanction for this: he knew what he was doing, in both the technical and actionable sense. Oh, and fix the problem: don't allow your users to install keylogging software. He does have a point there.
...the reality is that Heinlein didn't foresee electronic computing...
Good Lord, Mathinker: have you never read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"??? In case you haven't, it is the story of a libertarian revolt on the Moon, aided and abetted by a self-aware computer named Mycroft (aka "Mike") --- waaay before HAL, Harlie and that nasty one in Ellison's "I have no mouth and I must scream!"
I'm no expert in that, but it seems like a vicious cycle of no one purifies lipids because there hasn't been much work done to come up with a cheap and fast way of purifying lipids because no one purifies lipids. If anyone knows of a way to purify lipids for as cheap as you can DNA, let me know.
Other than the risk of deliberate damage to a plant (e.g. terrorists), I don't understand why nuclear is so terrible.
[snip]
--
The government can't save you.
Nuclear power isn't terrible *in itself*: it's just a little controlled fission heating up some water. It's just that it requires -- on one hand -- a ginormous capital investment *per plant* and -- on the other -- the Price-Anderson Act to indemnify the electric generation companies against the costs of a potential nuclear accident. So, you're right, in a way: the government can't save *you* -- but it can save *your local electric generation company*. Thus, it is the *political bargain* that was struck long ago that causes nuclear power to be "so terrible". If anything happens (Remember [1979] Three Mile Island? Remember [1967] "We Almost Lost Detroit"?), and thousands or millions of taxpayers die (immediately, or -- agonizingly -- later), the supreme irony is that taxpayers end up bailing out the nuclear power industry in the *biggest corporate welfare giveaway EVER*. And don't even get me started on the inevitable truck accidents that will happen when we starting shipping nuclear waste from all over the United States to the single, earthquake-fault-ridden sarcophagus of Yucca Mountain -- which may never happen. (And if it doesn't, there will be little nuclear radiation leaks *all over the United States* as the "temporary" storage casks now containing dangerous nuclear waste start getting 'eaten through' and leaking into the air and water.) All of your scientific "proof" as to how "safe" nuclear power is will be swept away before the rising storm of the environmental cancers epidemic. People caught up in the emotional process of dying are rarely comforted by logic.
The failure to take human emotive factors into account is often the cause of failure of a purely technocratic solution. Your little isle of logic is surrounded by the vast sea of emotion: don't think you can walk on water just because you can stride across the land. People don't *like* nuclear power, because they intuitively analyze the risks involved and don't like the answers they come up with: "logic" loses hands down.
Nobody is talking about covering every US roof with solar panels
Just California with the Million Roof Initiative. And California contains about 20% of the U.S. Population. It wouldn't take "decades": more like "a decade".
The first thing that leapt to mind was: "Is there a gravitational influence creeping in here?" I know that they are talking about the fine structure constant, but this idea might point the way to the Theory of Everything.
If that's true, then our perception of (say) dark energy might be significantly related to our (relative) nearness to the galactic core. Our various instruments might be subtly compromised, and our measurements distorted, by the immense amount of gravitational influence locked in the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Our apparent perception of the increasing acceleration of the Universe might turn out to be nothing more than a local phenomenon.
One way to test this theory would be to send off two spacecraft with decaying isotopes: one heading directly coreward, and one going in exactly the opposite direction. If scientists were able to tease out a shift in decay rates based on our distance from the sun, a mere decade of data from these two spacecraft might yield amazing results!
Don't vote for the candidate who merely claims to serve your interests. Vote for the one who will lay the cultural groundwork for the change you wish to see in your country.
You are absolutely right in your analysis.
That's why I'm voting for Nader -- again. For the *fourth* time in a row. The change that *I* wish to see is precisely the disenfranchisement of corporations in the political sphere -- the same message that Nader has been consistently putting out for over forty years. Even Libertarians can see that unrestrained corporate power is bad for both the free market and -- especially -- *liberty*.
My guy may not win, but I will have neither buyer's remorse nor voter's disillusionment -- unlike the other 99 million of you. He's right and you know it: you just want to be on the side that's "winning". (Seriously: check out who's funding *your* candidate at www.fec.gov -- you might be surprised!
It's up to you to be that change, regardless of who wins.
Yep. I've been working in the trenches of little political parties for 25 years now. I never developed any illusions about the way the political landscape lay, so I've never had to be disillusioned, and fall into cynicism and despair. Every election, more and more people wake up to the ultimate futility of a bipartisan system that changes only names but never its fundamental anti-human culture -- I've seen it happen many times.
After the election -- and your subsequent mourning or disillusionment -- I invite you to look up one of the little parties (whichever one is best for you) and *join* them. Before you know it, you too will feel empowered by making your own free choice. And four years from now (or maybe even just at the next school board election), you too will find yourself urging your neighbors to think for themselves, and stop being manipulated by politicians. He who stands up for nothing good will ultimately fall for anything that sounds good.
No, no --- not the one. Super-Crunchers simply postulates that, by extracting patterns from peta-scale data, new insights can be gained. Ayers' idea is simply that quantity *will lead to* quality. That's not the thesis of The Numerati *at all*.
Since the border search statute was enacted in 1789, customs officials have been authorized to stop and examine any vehicle, person, or baggage arriving in the United States on suspicion that merchandise is concealed which is subject to duty or which cannot be legally imported into the United States.
So when did concealed merchandise become whatever we want to take from you? That's a pretty big stretch! Someone has to take the DHS to court over this one: I'm sure a quick glance at Congress' intent by the Federal judiciary will trash this little bit of administrative law.
The policies cover 'any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,' including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover 'all papers and other written documentation,' including books, pamphlets and 'written materials commonly referred to as "pocket trash...
Amendment 4
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What is particularly odious is that they try to sidestep this Article by arguing that they are not actually *seizing* these items -- just *detaining* them *for an unspecified period of time*. Why, if they tried to do that to a human being, we could invoke habeas corp...oh, wait. Damn.
Slashdot Mirror
What I wouldn't give for a truly cooperative Real Time Strategy game. And not just a basic alliance, which usually just means a non-aggression and map-sharing pact. But imagine for a moment full resource and control sharing. At that point you can differentiate roles and responsibilities. One person to manage resource and production while the other leads the ...expansion. ... The complexity players have achieved in tactics prove that given the freedom to do so, players will plan, cooperate and organize well beyond what you may anticipate.
s/players/workers/ . It already exists -- it's called, er, Work World. Takes forever to level, though -- and talk about *grinding*! 8^P Nobody really wants to play, though: they actually have to pay the 'players' to get them to show up (although at some 4500 Lindens/ hour it's more lucrative than camping). The avatars are pretty lame, though -- very little customization allowed (no furries for example). And the 'players' have to be there -- in meatspace, no less -- 5 days a week. I'd say that, as a MMORG, it's pretty unsustainable...
But unfortunately, the "free download" amount has reached it's limit for the day and I was told to try again the following day.
So he is using the scarcity model! You trade your time for a shot at getting his book for free. But what is his payoff here? Multiple visits to his website?
If you want to paid, provide something to people that is in limited supply. Digital music is infinite in supply.
It's *good* digital music that is in limited supply. Unfortunately, every geek in a bedroom with ProTools thinks *his* music falls into that rather limited space. That's why gigging will never die: talent + ambition will rise to the top through (first) word-of-mouth and (second) free media exposure. (Who gets reviewed? Bands that passed the word-of-mouth test.) Success requires passing a test with multiple parts: you have to have at least a passing grade on all the parts, and that only gets you in the door.
The problem, though, you need a better quality of AI to generate arbitrary easy-but-obscure questions as you do to solve them... Keep in mind you need questions that anyone with a 3rd-grade education could read and solve, which limits you to simple grammar, small words, concrete ideas, and no math harder than addition, subtraction, and inequality.
Why not exploit humans' visual pattern matching ability? For example, a small version of the Traveling Salesman problem (say 15-20) points is easy to generate, and a typical human could easily solve it at a glance, or answer questions about a partial path: (Of the remaining open points, which one would be the best one for point number 7 to connect to?)
The holy grail of course is to find something that humans can do easily, but is impossible (or very very unlikely statistically) for a program to be able to do.
Solve a small version (15-20) points of the traveling salesman problem. Most humans can just look at it and solve it. Or you could ask questions: "Here is a partial path. Point 7 should now connect to 1) point 4, 2) point 9, 3) point 16, 4) point 5, e) point 19."
Let's see a computer just do that.
The underlying problem is that we're running out of things that are easy for people but hard for computers.
How about solving a small traveling salesman problem -- at least to within 10% of minimal path length? Maybe 15-20 points to quickly connect -- most humans can see the best path at a glance. Let's see a computer solve that.
Look at it like this: hardware == automobile; software == human choices and decisions.
Right, and which one of your analogies gets a patent (hint: automobile)? Which one gets a copyright (hint: human ideas/decisions)? I think you'll find you just stated my position.
---
It's the *manual in the glove compartment* that is under copyright: *those* are the instructions on how to drive and maintain the car. As I mentioned in my first post, I have no problem with information that *just sits on a page* being copyrighted. But you can't copyright a human being: the *actualizor* of the instructions. Similarly, software is the *actualizor* of instructions: it *does things*.
Also, your argument is like arguing that an animal can live *only* in water *or* on land. There is no place in such an analogy for amphibians, yet they exist. Software can appear to fall into either camp, *depending on your standpoint*.
I think the problem that we are dancing around is: how to deal with 'embedded human-decision capacity that is not embedded in a human'? It appears that *neither* patent nor copyright is quite the right way to look at it.
Perhaps we *do* need a third class of protected data that is neither patent nor copyright, and that was not envisioned by the founding fathers: things which are *both* implementations *and* expressions. That's where we need to put "business method" patents too, as they also are 'mechanisms that are processes which give rise to objective outputs'.
In these terms, copyrights protect 'mechanisms which are objects which give rise to subjective outputs' and patents protect 'mechanisms which are objects which give rise to objective outputs'. Neither of those two protect 'mechanisms which are *not* objects'. Of course, 'ideas' are the fourth case: 'mechanisms which are processes which give rise to subjective outputs': such things are already covered by being explicitly excluded from the protection process.
Exactly backwards. The *hardware* sits until *animated by the software*. Without the software *making the hardware work*, the hardware is nothing but a bunch of metal.
And you missed my point: software itself *is* a machine: virtual, true -- but it *does* stuff: it operates on input -- making decisions -- and produces output.
Look at it like this: hardware == automobile; software == human choices and decisions. Hardware does nothing until activated by software.
Hey ... me too! (Except you misspelled random and didn't capitalize it: that should be: "Select politicans by Randym." Fixed that for you. 8^D )
1) Aquifer depletion: overuse of the currently existing resource.
2) Drought: lack of rain where there once was rain; clearly, this is exacerbated by global warming, as the monsoon belts shift.
3) Pollution: otherwise potable water is made unusable by waste or commercial contamination.
Think of it like this: they *expect* to see a certain red-shift from something at 6 billion light-years: it is moving away from us, and the radiation that we receive from it is "red-shifted" by a well-known amount. What they are apparently seeing is *more red-shift than they expect* and the vector of this extra red-shift points toward a certain section of space. Thus, they are deducing that "something out there" is *pulling* that group of galaxies, and the only force (that we currently know of) that operates at that scale is gravity.
Scientists are looking out past that group of galaxies at 6 billion light-years to *as far as they can see* (13.7 billion light-years), but they are not finding enough *matter* there to account for the gravitational action of this cluster of galaxies at 6 billion light-years. So whatever is pulling the galaxies is *beyond* 13.7 light-years.
The problem is that we have assumed -- until now -- that *everything in the universe* is within our little bubble with a radius of 13.7 billion light-years. Now, apparently, we've discovered that *this is not the case*. Something ... else ... is out there.
1) A copyright protects information that simply lies on a page and "does" nothing.
2) A patent protects machines by protecting the information that tells how to build them.
3) Software is an information machine: software does not simply 'lie on a page'. Software "does" something.
4) Therefore, "patents" are the proper way to protect software, not copyright.
If you are going to issue a patent then you should not receive a copyright on it.
5) No disagreement from me on that one.
The writer, who used a pseudonym, claimed he easily broke into the accounts using a program that captures computer keystrokes.
Det. Michel Villeneuve of the Ottawa Police high-tech crime unit said yesterday that a suspect used Keylogger software and magnetic stripe-card reader software to acquire students' information. The suspect then put together a 16-page document addressed to the university secretary's office, later e-mailing the document to 37 students.
Sooo....this guy deliberately broke into 32 accounts using both software and hardware. Then he rationalized that he shouldn't be punished for it by preemptively confessing.
Make the punishment fit the crime: throw the book at him, then give him probation. But he definitely should get some academic sanction for this: he knew what he was doing, in both the technical and actionable sense. Oh, and fix the problem: don't allow your users to install keylogging software. He does have a point there.
Good Lord, Mathinker: have you never read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"??? In case you haven't, it is the story of a libertarian revolt on the Moon, aided and abetted by a self-aware computer named Mycroft (aka "Mike") --- waaay before HAL, Harlie and that nasty one in Ellison's "I have no mouth and I must scream!"
Sounds like a job for http://innocentive.com .
[snip]
--
The government can't save you.
Nuclear power isn't terrible *in itself*: it's just a little controlled fission heating up some water. It's just that it requires -- on one hand -- a ginormous capital investment *per plant* and -- on the other -- the Price-Anderson Act to indemnify the electric generation companies against the costs of a potential nuclear accident. So, you're right, in a way: the government can't save *you* -- but it can save *your local electric generation company*. Thus, it is the *political bargain* that was struck long ago that causes nuclear power to be "so terrible". If anything happens (Remember [1979] Three Mile Island? Remember [1967] "We Almost Lost Detroit"?), and thousands or millions of taxpayers die (immediately, or -- agonizingly -- later), the supreme irony is that taxpayers end up bailing out the nuclear power industry in the *biggest corporate welfare giveaway EVER*. And don't even get me started on the inevitable truck accidents that will happen when we starting shipping nuclear waste from all over the United States to the single, earthquake-fault-ridden sarcophagus of Yucca Mountain -- which may never happen. (And if it doesn't, there will be little nuclear radiation leaks *all over the United States* as the "temporary" storage casks now containing dangerous nuclear waste start getting 'eaten through' and leaking into the air and water.) All of your scientific "proof" as to how "safe" nuclear power is will be swept away before the rising storm of the environmental cancers epidemic. People caught up in the emotional process of dying are rarely comforted by logic.
The failure to take human emotive factors into account is often the cause of failure of a purely technocratic solution. Your little isle of logic is surrounded by the vast sea of emotion: don't think you can walk on water just because you can stride across the land. People don't *like* nuclear power, because they intuitively analyze the risks involved and don't like the answers they come up with: "logic" loses hands down.
Just California with the Million Roof Initiative. And California contains about 20% of the U.S. Population. It wouldn't take "decades": more like "a decade".
If that's true, then our perception of (say) dark energy might be significantly related to our (relative) nearness to the galactic core. Our various instruments might be subtly compromised, and our measurements distorted, by the immense amount of gravitational influence locked in the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. Our apparent perception of the increasing acceleration of the Universe might turn out to be nothing more than a local phenomenon.
One way to test this theory would be to send off two spacecraft with decaying isotopes: one heading directly coreward, and one going in exactly the opposite direction. If scientists were able to tease out a shift in decay rates based on our distance from the sun, a mere decade of data from these two spacecraft might yield amazing results!
You are absolutely right in your analysis.
That's why I'm voting for Nader -- again. For the *fourth* time in a row. The change that *I* wish to see is precisely the disenfranchisement of corporations in the political sphere -- the same message that Nader has been consistently putting out for over forty years. Even Libertarians can see that unrestrained corporate power is bad for both the free market and -- especially -- *liberty*.
My guy may not win, but I will have neither buyer's remorse nor voter's disillusionment -- unlike the other 99 million of you. He's right and you know it: you just want to be on the side that's "winning". (Seriously: check out who's funding *your* candidate at www.fec.gov -- you might be surprised!
It's up to you to be that change, regardless of who wins.
Yep. I've been working in the trenches of little political parties for 25 years now. I never developed any illusions about the way the political landscape lay, so I've never had to be disillusioned, and fall into cynicism and despair. Every election, more and more people wake up to the ultimate futility of a bipartisan system that changes only names but never its fundamental anti-human culture -- I've seen it happen many times.
After the election -- and your subsequent mourning or disillusionment -- I invite you to look up one of the little parties (whichever one is best for you) and *join* them. Before you know it, you too will feel empowered by making your own free choice. And four years from now (or maybe even just at the next school board election), you too will find yourself urging your neighbors to think for themselves, and stop being manipulated by politicians. He who stands up for nothing good will ultimately fall for anything that sounds good.
Police states are more *efficient*, not more *innovative*. But I'm pretty sure that large corporations can't really tell the difference.
No, no --- not the one. Super-Crunchers simply postulates that, by extracting patterns from peta-scale data, new insights can be gained. Ayers' idea is simply that quantity *will lead to* quality. That's not the thesis of The Numerati *at all*.
Since the border search statute was enacted in 1789, customs officials have been authorized to stop and examine any vehicle, person, or baggage arriving in the United States on suspicion that merchandise is concealed which is subject to duty or which cannot be legally imported into the United States.
So when did concealed merchandise become whatever we want to take from you? That's a pretty big stretch! Someone has to take the DHS to court over this one: I'm sure a quick glance at Congress' intent by the Federal judiciary will trash this little bit of administrative law.
Corporations might still have some rights as citizens in this society.
Now if only humans did also....
I liked your .sig, but thought I might verify it through Google. Unfortunately, here's what *they* thought of it:
Did you mean to search for: "If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guys of fighting a foreign enemy. "
WTF? How did they come up with *that*???
I guess I'm lucky they didn't parse it like this:
Did you mean to search for: "If tranny and oppossum come to this land, it will be in the guys of fighting a foreign enema. "
Frighteningly, that almost makes sense...8^P
The policies cover 'any device capable of storing information in digital or analog form,' including hard drives, flash drives, cell phones, iPods, pagers, beepers, and video and audio tapes. They also cover 'all papers and other written documentation,' including books, pamphlets and 'written materials commonly referred to as "pocket trash...
Amendment 4
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
What is particularly odious is that they try to sidestep this Article by arguing that they are not actually *seizing* these items -- just *detaining* them *for an unspecified period of time*. Why, if they tried to do that to a human being, we could invoke habeas corp ...oh, wait. Damn.