During the energy crisis. It consisted of a small "Smart Car" style front end that could be docked to a rear end to form a station wagon style car.
The front, I think may have been electric and the rear had an ICE engine. The idea was that you'd run your errands and commute in the little car, then dock to the ICE rear unit for long trips.
I actually like that concept in theory, but I can imagine that many people might not like having the unused rear half hanging around taking up space (although carrying the excess space around is kind of silly too). I can also see how such a configuration might deliver less than the "best of both worlds" it promises.
Now having *two* independently usable halves might be more attractive. The problem is that each half and the combined vehicle is bound to be so unconventional I wouldn't bet on its market or technical success. The 70s concept was pretty conventional both as a small commuter car and a docked long distance travel car.
OK, so some conservative law professor thinks the Amendment IX is effectively dead. How about this:
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment, in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner, is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment, in its Self-Incrimination Clause, enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
From Griswold v. Connecticut, the ruling that says government can't prevent people from using birth control.
Let me point out two things here. First, the whole argument in Griswold hinges on Amendment IX. It's trying to figure out whether contraception is a right. It seems obvious to us, maybe, but the courts can't reason that way. They have to point to evidence in the law.
Now you might take issue with this line of reasoning and say the case should have been argued from a strict construction standpoint. But then we're talking about a state law, so that wouldn't work, and the Fourteen Amendment (remember that one?) says "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Again, that is interpreted *broadly*, not narrowly as Barnett and Hamilton suggest is somehow inevitable.
The second point is that Griswold was decided in 1965, which is considerably later than the "New Deal". This makes Barnett's argument that there is no presumption of liberty since then sound hollow to me.
A few years I took a course in Information Privacy Law, and read a *lot* of case law on the 4th Amendment. The view of the courts does not at all agree with what most people seem to think it does. And if you read the holdings, you can see that's reasonable. It *doesn't*.
The bottom line is that the Constitution allows the government to do too much. We depend a great deal on statutory law in the US to restrict many of the abuses that generally fall under the enumerated powers of the Executive branch in particular, but which violate the common man's sense of what his rights should be.
I'm not being disingenuous (although I realize you probably think I'm lying when I say that).
I fail to see how anybody can interpret such an enumeration given the presence of the Ninth Amendment. Again, if you could explain how an enumeration of rights somehow is inconsistent with the Ninth Amendment, I'm totally with you.
Look. You seem to think I'm taking an ideological position about what the government *should* be able to do and what the rights of a citizen under the Constitution *should* be.
I'm not.
I'm talking about what the current state of Constitutional law *says* and what the Constitution actually *is*.
There's a reason we need the Wiretap Act. It's because according to the cases brought before the Supreme Court the government can do things which most Americans regard as falling within their 4th Amendment rights, and which in *my* opinion should fall under their 9th Amendment protections.
That's just the current state of Constitutional law. *I* think the Constitution should make the Wiretap Act unnecessary, but it doesn't. If you'd actually bothered to study case law on this (which isn't all that hard for a non-lawyer) you'd realize that that is one of the most important jobs Congress has: fixing holes in the Constitution.
Actually, having read the whole thread, it's clear that what you were saying is that 'the Constitution is outdated and therefore doesn't apply in today's situations',
No, I think the Constitution, has worked and continues to work remarkably well, but it was *never* as good as it ought to have been. It *is* true that over time we keep discovering more flaws in the Constitution. Sometimes acts that were benign in the 1700s take on a different character when the government can automate surveillance of its citizens, or fly over their properties in helicopters and photographic gear.
and you were also clearly saying that the government has a right to do things that aren't specifically forbidden in the Constitution
OK, I think you must not be expressing yourself clearly. *Of course* the government is allowed to do *some* things it is not expressly forbidden to do. I should think that is a non-controversial position. To take the contrary position is to suggest that the government has no right to do things it is expressly allowed to do.
And there is the rub. It's allowed to do too much.
I'm not worried about the things it is not authorized to do, I'm worried about the things it is generally authorized to do that in specific instances should be forbidden.
Here's an important thing to remember: the government is allowed to suspect its citizens of crimes. It is allowed to engage in many investigative activities without a warrant. That takes on a different character when they can tail you using your electronic signature; collect data from cameras over computer networks; write programs to automate "suspecting" you of being an airline bomber.
A very clear and unequivocal statement of an individual's right to privacy would be a very good thing, and not as some seem to think logically inconsistent with the Ninth Amendment.
Unfortunately what is clear to *you* that the Constitution means has not held up in court, even, maybe even especially conservative courts that have a high degree of deference to the exercise of executive power.
So: if you write a letter on paper someone else paid for, not only do you magically lose your right to be secure in your effects, that someone else loses theirs, too?
It's not a matter of paid for, but a matter of ownership. If you inscribe a piece of private information in somebody else's diary, that diary doe snot become your personal effects.
Every teensiest little deviation from the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the limits on the Almighty Executive Authority throws you into the realm of unbridled tyranny?
I have no idea what you are talking about here. It seems to me to be an emotional tirade.
The reason for the Bill of Rights is that the powers of the Federal Government is explicitly granted in the Constitution are sufficient to infringe on what were generally agreed to be the rights Americans enjoy. Unfortunately, the Fourth is written as a limitation of a specific set of government abuses. For many years, until 1928 in fact, the courts took the Fourth Amendment literally. Now there are a whole set of legal doctrines like "substantive due process" which using the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments as justification try to get at what the Fourth Amendment was trying to accomplish.
Why is it so hard to accept that the Bill of Rights, while generally a good idea, was less than infallibly drafted?
One of the main Federalist arguments against adding the Bill of Rights was that (a) it didn't say anything the Constitution didn't already imply
Yes, but they were wrong. The Bill of Rights says plenty that cannot be logically deduced from the Constitution.
cretinous martinets would try to argue that those were the only limits. And here we have one, doing just that.
I don't know how to respond to this. What I'm saying is that you can't just say "the Constitution protects my rights." You've got to take positive political actions if you want to secure those rights.
I never said the Constitution "grants" rights to the people. That's a tired old strawman that conservatives like to trot out whenever it's pointed out that Constitution's protections of individual liberties is weaker than it ought to be.
What I said amounts to this: the Constitution fails to secure certain rights most of us take for granted.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are important but they don't effectively secure the basic rights of Americans even against the Federal government. There are powers the Federal government has that can be used to infringe on individual liberty. That's why the Bill of Rights was needed. If the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were enough to secure unnamed liberties, then the First through Eighth Amendments wouldn't have been necessary.
And while we are at it let's not forget the 14th Amendment. That, by the way, does limit the powers of the individual states to infringe on citizen liberties.
Now if we only had a better authoritative list, things would be better. Not exhaustive of course, but we can do a hell of a lot better than the Bill of Rights.
I understand most of Americans agree that the Constitution says certain things. But not many of us have actual read the Constitution, at least not carefully.
The Constitution does not expressly forbid something like this. And when you pull out the Bill of Rights to disprove me, read it carefully and objectively. What you'll see is that
(a) the people's right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizures is protected [although from whom is not said. Everyone agrees this includes the feds, some think it's only the feds but not the states, and most people seem to think it applies to other private individuals, which it does not but probably should.]
(b) it sets certain conditions on what is needed to justify a warrant, and requires that warrants apply to specific persons and things.
(c) it does not say when warrants must be used for a search to be reasonable. You have to know the kinds of instances that customarily required warrants at the end of the 1700s. Many kinds of searches don't require warrants: hot pursuit, administrative law searches etc. Some of these cases might be *wrong*, but they're not prohibited. It is not even explicitly prohibited to get around these restrictions by simply not using warrants, although most reasonable people would infer that.
(d) it applies to "papers" and "personal effects"; it wasn't until 1928 that SCOTUS reversed itself and began to consider a privacy interest in the information per se, not the carrier of the information. People who want to return to the state of law in the 19th Century don't realize this means giving up almost all modern legal protections for privacy.
The problems of the US Constitution with regard to privacy aren't unlike the problems with copyright in the digital era. The Constitution was drafted in an era where almost all information about a person remained with that person, and moving that information around was an exceptional situation. If he posted a letter, the physical embodiment of that letter was his property, it was one of his "papers", until it was received by the addressee.
Email or text messages don't work that way. The information is inscribed onto the carrier's property. If people knew how little Constitutional protection they have in this situation, they'd be shocked.
Stretching the Constitution to cover this takes the kind of creative constitutional exegesis that leads to Griswold v. Connecticut (birth control) and Roe v. Wade.
There's little doubt the Constitution is almost hopelessly broken with respect to 21st Century privacy concerns. We have to look to statutory law for protection.
Methinks we have found a new tag for articles about politicians who are bit by their own stupid security practices. Release Word file with revision history still in it? Bang the table. Secret government data stolen because of malware you downloaded from a porn site? Bang the table.
Well, I'd put it this way. The Nazis, intellectually speaking, weren't anything.
Tyrannies of that type use ideology, but aren't about ideology. Trying to take their "ideologies" seriously as ideologies only leads to confusion, because they weren't interested in consistency, much less truth. They used language purely for its utility.
Take their idea of "Jewish science". You can't take that notion seriously, because it's all a fantasy they cooked up to target people they were afraid of. So they just lump them in together. It's telling that Himmler wanted to label Heisenberg as a "White Jew". "Jew" doesn't mean "person of historically Jewish descent" or "person who adheres to the Jewish law". It's just the verbal equivalent of a punch in the face.
The same goes for Hitler's views about atheists. Atheists tend to be free thinkers, and therefore likely to oppose the regime. So you take two despised groups and you manufacture a bigger "threat" by glomming them together.
Scapegoating is so critical to tyranny that where there aren't ready made hatreds, the tyrant invents groups to be hated. Stalin invented the "kulik", or rich peasant, as the scapegoat for his failed agricultural policies. They kuliks weren't rich by any means, but if your family were starving and your neighbor's had food, that gave you a satisfying, concrete target for your rage right within reach.
As far as the "Christianity" is concerned, it's about as meaningful as their notion of "Jew". If they'd been living in a predominantly Buddhist society, they'd be filling their propaganda with Buddhist trappings. If they'd been living in a Jewish society, then they'd avail themselves of Jewish symbols and scapegoat Christians and Muslims.
You can connect what the tyrant wants to what he says in this way: The tyrant wants power. To obtain and hold onto it, he needs a compliant people. To make the people compliant, he arouses fear, anger and hatred in them. To arouse those emotions he uses words, not to tell people anything, but to goad them.
Hatred and fear are for the politician like the nose ring a farmer puts on a bull. It allows him to safely lead a big, dumb dangerous animal where he wants it to go. This works for both right wing tyrants and left wing tyrants like Stalin. Remember that next time you are tempted to latch on to some popular political hatred.
I wanted to see just how inadvisable something like this was. So I sent a whole passel of George Bush quotes through Google's English to Arabic translator, then took the translation and fed it back through the Arabic to English translator, looking for cases where the sense of the words might be disastrously mangled. Immediately, this example popped out:
The truth in this matter is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he was president of the United States and the world would be better off.
Now going back to the original text, what Bush actually said was...
On the other hand... Methane is over twenty times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. So potentially you could burn methane in this thing, and even though you're emitting more CO2 earn a carbon credit or even $$$ under a cap and trade arrangement.
It's not a simple tradeoff though. Methane decays more rapidly in the atmosphere, so you really oughtn't get a 21:1 trade of methane for CO2. If we begin to do carbon sequestration, though, this might be a bigger win. We'd be converting methane, we we aren't sequestering, into CO2, which we are.
In any case, you're comparing this to current energy prices. If your electricity comes from oil, and oil goes way up, you'll expect natural gas to go up too -- but not as much. If you are in a oil price shock situation, you can't conjure new natural gas electric plants into existence in a year or two, but you could install a few of these.
Finally there are some "free" sources of methane. Municipal landfills have to flare off methane. So you set up your fuel cell on our newly capped landfill. After a couple years the volume drops off and you cell your fuel cell to a different municipality, recouping some of the investment.
*We* spend a lot more per person on health care than Canada, even *counting* all the people we don't insure. 87% more per capita.
So to avoid having to pay more taxes, we pay a *huge* amount more per person to private insurance. We get some nice bennies for that like short waits for nose jobs. On the other hand what we don't get is any guarantee we'll be able to keep paying our bills if we get really sick.
They also spend 3,895 per person on health care, as opposed to 7,290 per person in the US. If they were willing to increase their per person expenditure by 87% to match the US expenditure, they could afford some pretty sweet chronic care.
When you need heart surgery, you choose the surgeon, not the medical insurance policies of the country.
From the article he cites:
"He has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done," said Ms. Dunderdale, who will become acting premier while Mr. Williams is away for three to 12 weeks.
OK, so the story is this guy asked his Canadian doctors who was the best doctor to do this procedure, and they referred him to a guy in the US. Well good for that guy, but the best guy in the country isn't representative of the country as a whole.
My brother was in a similar situation. He needed heart surgery, *and* he had insurance. He lived in Philly, and the best doctor to do that surgery was right there, *and* available *and* in his network, but the insurance company was going to force him to travel up to some rinky-dink hospital in north Jersey suburb of NYC to get treated by some surgeon his cardiologist had never heard of. The cardiologist hit the roof when he found out. Finally, he wrote a letter saying that my brother was too sick to travel.
Yeah, 'cause Toronto is hell compared to, say, Detroit or Saint Louis
The cleanliness, the low crime rate, the public transportation, the the socialized medicine, museums, shopping, restaurants, theater, schools, culture, tolerance, diversity... ugh!
You're going to have to pry my filthy, morally degenerate, violence ravaged, disease infested American city from my cold dead hands...
Well, that seems to be contrary to the conventional view of our military leaders of how war should be conducted.
For example, what does "unlawful combatant" mean unless there is some kind of expectation of what fair rules for warfare would be?
You can gain unfair advantage by not wearing uniforms. This means you can look like a civilian, hit your foe, then melt into the civilian population again.
You can gain unfair advantage by secretly executing all the prisoners you take on the battlefield.
You can gain unfair advantage by maximizing civilian casualties without regard to whether it has a direct effect on the war fighting effort, because the military can't guard all civilians.
You can gain unfair advantage by pretending to negotiate under a flag of truce, then opening fire.
The list goes on. Now if you don't propose some standard of fairness, any insistence that "illegal combatants" fight according to "the laws of war" is morally hypocritical. The laws impose restrictions on the enemy (you must wear clearly identifiable insignia), in return they impose restrictions on you (you must treat them as POWs).
Your argument is specious, because you have not proposed a definition of "fairness" to argue against.
The Rawls criteria can still be applied even if you have two sides trying to kill as many of the other guys as possible. Given that you will find yourself in that situation, what rules would you accept, given that you don't know which role you get to play. This subsumes all considerations you might raise, such as "it's better to kill than be killed" and "it's better to win than lose". If you can't come up with any such rules, you have just proven that as far as you know any kind of warfare is intrinsically immoral.
Rawls served with the Marines in the pacific theater of WW2. After witnessing the aftermath of Hiroshima, he turned down an invitation to officer candidate school and went back home to earn a doctorate in philosophy.
It's probable that Rawls knew more about war than you did. It's almost certain he knew more about ethics.
This thread is about killing people half way around the world from the comfort of the sofa.
OK. You answered my question, which is that this is something that does not have to be done in your opinion. You've come to the logical conclusion that it is wrong for these people to do it. So far so good. Then you bring up the fact they're doing it from half way around the world a if it has anything to do with anything. It doesn't.
Look at it this way. Would it *excuse* the killing in any way if the person doing it is standing right in front of the victim? If you would, then your problem isn't with killing. It's with technology per se. Making a big deal over the fact it's done from half-way around the world only suggests that you can condone murder if it is done by the proper method, or if other people are sufficiently hurt to balance the score.
You can't balance the ledger of suffering. Conflicts where people think that way don't ever get resolved no matter how many generations of victims they consume.
The ultimate example of this broken reasoning is the suicide bomber. The fact he gets killed himself doesn't do anything to make the act more worthy of respect.
As for orders, you're inviting the same sloppy thinking. That is an irrelevant factor. Both following and disobeying orders can be the right thing to do, depending on the nature of the order.
I understand you're angry about this thing, but it makes no sense to be angry in a way that seems to excuse the same act done in a slightly different way.
I never minded UAC much. Many of the problems were the kind of thing you'd expect when programs weren't updated to be aware of tighter security. Some of the inconsistency in the anti spyware measures bothered me, because MS gave a pass to its own products whereas you had inexplicable behavior from third party software trying the same thing. Yes, protecting the/program files directory was a sensible thing (at last) but the policy should be uniform for all vendors.
The thing that really soured me on Vista, ironically, was its crappy memory management. I had to repartition my hard drive to put te pagefile on a separate partition (like it is in Linux), because many of the aggressive optimizations in Vista involved memory pages that couldn't just be marked available. Doing this or turning of disk paging entirely resulted in (barely) usable performance when I allocated large blocks (1GB) of RAM. I'll never forget running defrag and seeing something like a hundred thousand fragments in pagefile.sys. Apparently when Vista realized how deep in the hole it was, it started stuffing RAM pages whereever the disk head happened to be. That's the only possible explanation.
Aside from memory management, Vista wasn't too bad if you had plenty of horsepower to run it on. But memory management is a pretty big fault for an OS to have. I'm looking forward to trying Windows 7, but right now I'm happy running XFCE on Ubuntu. I don't ask for a lot of whizbang eye candy from an OS. Just consist responsiveness.
Well, there's an initial question you have to ask which determines everything else about how we should feel about this.
Is this something which, to the best of our knowledge, has to be done?
If the answer is no, go ahead and disrespect these guys.
If the answer is yes, then doing it this way is obviously better than exposing somebody who is doing a dirty job that needs doing to physical danger. That said, what we are talking about are *psychological casualties*.
That's what the question leads you to. Either these people are wrestling with their conscience about something they ought not be doing, or they are psychological casualties.
On the other hand is it just to go after container ships who have absolutely nothing to do with the fishing problem then? I don't think so, so I for one continue to blame them.
If they were boarding fishing vessels that would be a different matter, and the world would see them differently.
I really detest this mode of reasoning. Some braves from Indian tribe A commit an atrocity, so I kill all of tribe B. Hamas has been shooting rockets at my cities, so I'm going to bulldoze entire villages. Rapacious owners have been exploiting the workers so it's open season on capitalists. It's not only that it's unjust. It's *stupid*.
Slashdot Mirror
During the energy crisis. It consisted of a small "Smart Car" style front end that could be docked to a rear end to form a station wagon style car.
The front, I think may have been electric and the rear had an ICE engine. The idea was that you'd run your errands and commute in the little car, then dock to the ICE rear unit for long trips.
I actually like that concept in theory, but I can imagine that many people might not like having the unused rear half hanging around taking up space (although carrying the excess space around is kind of silly too). I can also see how such a configuration might deliver less than the "best of both worlds" it promises.
Now having *two* independently usable halves might be more attractive. The problem is that each half and the combined vehicle is bound to be so unconventional I wouldn't bet on its market or technical success. The 70s concept was pretty conventional both as a small commuter car and a docked long distance travel car.
The hair. Don't forget the purple metallic hair color. Moon babes in skintight white catsuits and purple hair. Mmmm.
I'm all for Gerry Anderson's vision of future fashion.
OK, so some conservative law professor thinks the Amendment IX is effectively dead. How about this:
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. See Poe v. Ullman, 367 U.S. 497, 516-522 (dissenting opinion). Various guarantees create zones of privacy. The right of association contained in the penumbra of the First Amendment is one, as we have seen. The Third Amendment, in its prohibition against the quartering of soldiers "in any house" in time of peace without the consent of the owner, is another facet of that privacy. The Fourth Amendment explicitly affirms the "right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures." The Fifth Amendment, in its Self-Incrimination Clause, enables the citizen to create a zone of privacy which government may not force him to surrender to his detriment. The Ninth Amendment provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
From Griswold v. Connecticut, the ruling that says government can't prevent people from using birth control.
Let me point out two things here. First, the whole argument in Griswold hinges on Amendment IX. It's trying to figure out whether contraception is a right. It seems obvious to us, maybe, but the courts can't reason that way. They have to point to evidence in the law.
Now you might take issue with this line of reasoning and say the case should have been argued from a strict construction standpoint. But then we're talking about a state law, so that wouldn't work, and the Fourteen Amendment (remember that one?) says "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Again, that is interpreted *broadly*, not narrowly as Barnett and Hamilton suggest is somehow inevitable.
The second point is that Griswold was decided in 1965, which is considerably later than the "New Deal". This makes Barnett's argument that there is no presumption of liberty since then sound hollow to me.
I doubt you know it as well as you think you do.
A few years I took a course in Information Privacy Law, and read a *lot* of case law on the 4th Amendment. The view of the courts does not at all agree with what most people seem to think it does. And if you read the holdings, you can see that's reasonable. It *doesn't*.
The bottom line is that the Constitution allows the government to do too much. We depend a great deal on statutory law in the US to restrict many of the abuses that generally fall under the enumerated powers of the Executive branch in particular, but which violate the common man's sense of what his rights should be.
I'm not being disingenuous (although I realize you probably think I'm lying when I say that).
I fail to see how anybody can interpret such an enumeration given the presence of the Ninth Amendment. Again, if you could explain how an enumeration of rights somehow is inconsistent with the Ninth Amendment, I'm totally with you.
Look. You seem to think I'm taking an ideological position about what the government *should* be able to do and what the rights of a citizen under the Constitution *should* be.
I'm not.
I'm talking about what the current state of Constitutional law *says* and what the Constitution actually *is*.
There's a reason we need the Wiretap Act. It's because according to the cases brought before the Supreme Court the government can do things which most Americans regard as falling within their 4th Amendment rights, and which in *my* opinion should fall under their 9th Amendment protections.
That's just the current state of Constitutional law. *I* think the Constitution should make the Wiretap Act unnecessary, but it doesn't. If you'd actually bothered to study case law on this (which isn't all that hard for a non-lawyer) you'd realize that that is one of the most important jobs Congress has: fixing holes in the Constitution.
Actually, having read the whole thread, it's clear that what you were saying is that 'the Constitution is outdated and therefore doesn't apply in today's situations',
No, I think the Constitution, has worked and continues to work remarkably well, but it was *never* as good as it ought to have been. It *is* true that over time we keep discovering more flaws in the Constitution. Sometimes acts that were benign in the 1700s take on a different character when the government can automate surveillance of its citizens, or fly over their properties in helicopters and photographic gear.
and you were also clearly saying that the government has a right to do things that aren't specifically forbidden in the Constitution
OK, I think you must not be expressing yourself clearly. *Of course* the government is allowed to do *some* things it is not expressly forbidden to do. I should think that is a non-controversial position. To take the contrary position is to suggest that the government has no right to do things it is expressly allowed to do.
And there is the rub. It's allowed to do too much.
I'm not worried about the things it is not authorized to do, I'm worried about the things it is generally authorized to do that in specific instances should be forbidden.
It's just wishful thinking to imagine that we do not need The Electronic Communications Privacy Act.
Here's an important thing to remember: the government is allowed to suspect its citizens of crimes. It is allowed to engage in many investigative activities without a warrant. That takes on a different character when they can tail you using your electronic signature; collect data from cameras over computer networks; write programs to automate "suspecting" you of being an airline bomber.
A very clear and unequivocal statement of an individual's right to privacy would be a very good thing, and not as some seem to think logically inconsistent with the Ninth Amendment.
Unfortunately what is clear to *you* that the Constitution means has not held up in court, even, maybe even especially conservative courts that have a high degree of deference to the exercise of executive power.
listing rights of individuals in any form would imply a limitation on those rights.
Prove why this is necessarily true, and I will agree to everything you say.
So: if you write a letter on paper someone else paid for, not only do you magically lose your right to be secure in your effects, that someone else loses theirs, too?
It's not a matter of paid for, but a matter of ownership. If you inscribe a piece of private information in somebody else's diary, that diary doe snot become your personal effects.
Every teensiest little deviation from the microscopically-narrowest-conceivable construction of the limits on the Almighty Executive Authority throws you into the realm of unbridled tyranny?
I have no idea what you are talking about here. It seems to me to be an emotional tirade.
The reason for the Bill of Rights is that the powers of the Federal Government is explicitly granted in the Constitution are sufficient to infringe on what were generally agreed to be the rights Americans enjoy. Unfortunately, the Fourth is written as a limitation of a specific set of government abuses. For many years, until 1928 in fact, the courts took the Fourth Amendment literally. Now there are a whole set of legal doctrines like "substantive due process" which using the Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments as justification try to get at what the Fourth Amendment was trying to accomplish.
Why is it so hard to accept that the Bill of Rights, while generally a good idea, was less than infallibly drafted?
One of the main Federalist arguments against adding the Bill of Rights was that (a) it didn't say anything the Constitution didn't already imply
Yes, but they were wrong. The Bill of Rights says plenty that cannot be logically deduced from the Constitution.
cretinous martinets would try to argue that those were the only limits. And here we have one, doing just that.
I don't know how to respond to this. What I'm saying is that you can't just say "the Constitution protects my rights." You've got to take positive political actions if you want to secure those rights.
That makes me a "cretinous martinet"?
I never said the Constitution "grants" rights to the people. That's a tired old strawman that conservatives like to trot out whenever it's pointed out that Constitution's protections of individual liberties is weaker than it ought to be.
What I said amounts to this: the Constitution fails to secure certain rights most of us take for granted.
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments are important but they don't effectively secure the basic rights of Americans even against the Federal government. There are powers the Federal government has that can be used to infringe on individual liberty. That's why the Bill of Rights was needed. If the Ninth and Tenth Amendments were enough to secure unnamed liberties, then the First through Eighth Amendments wouldn't have been necessary.
And while we are at it let's not forget the 14th Amendment. That, by the way, does limit the powers of the individual states to infringe on citizen liberties.
Now if we only had a better authoritative list, things would be better. Not exhaustive of course, but we can do a hell of a lot better than the Bill of Rights.
I understand most of Americans agree that the Constitution says certain things. But not many of us have actual read the Constitution, at least not carefully.
The Constitution does not expressly forbid something like this. And when you pull out the Bill of Rights to disprove me, read it carefully and objectively. What you'll see is that
(a) the people's right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizures is protected [although from whom is not said. Everyone agrees this includes the feds, some think it's only the feds but not the states, and most people seem to think it applies to other private individuals, which it does not but probably should.]
(b) it sets certain conditions on what is needed to justify a warrant, and requires that warrants apply to specific persons and things.
(c) it does not say when warrants must be used for a search to be reasonable. You have to know the kinds of instances that customarily required warrants at the end of the 1700s. Many kinds of searches don't require warrants: hot pursuit, administrative law searches etc. Some of these cases might be *wrong*, but they're not prohibited. It is not even explicitly prohibited to get around these restrictions by simply not using warrants, although most reasonable people would infer that.
(d) it applies to "papers" and "personal effects"; it wasn't until 1928 that SCOTUS reversed itself and began to consider a privacy interest in the information per se, not the carrier of the information. People who want to return to the state of law in the 19th Century don't realize this means giving up almost all modern legal protections for privacy.
The problems of the US Constitution with regard to privacy aren't unlike the problems with copyright in the digital era. The Constitution was drafted in an era where almost all information about a person remained with that person, and moving that information around was an exceptional situation. If he posted a letter, the physical embodiment of that letter was his property, it was one of his "papers", until it was received by the addressee.
Email or text messages don't work that way. The information is inscribed onto the carrier's property. If people knew how little Constitutional protection they have in this situation, they'd be shocked.
Stretching the Constitution to cover this takes the kind of creative constitutional exegesis that leads to Griswold v. Connecticut (birth control) and Roe v. Wade.
There's little doubt the Constitution is almost hopelessly broken with respect to 21st Century privacy concerns. We have to look to statutory law for protection.
"Bang the Table".
Methinks we have found a new tag for articles about politicians who are bit by their own stupid security practices. Release Word file with revision history still in it? Bang the table. Secret government data stolen because of malware you downloaded from a porn site? Bang the table.
Well, I'd put it this way. The Nazis, intellectually speaking, weren't anything.
Tyrannies of that type use ideology, but aren't about ideology. Trying to take their "ideologies" seriously as ideologies only leads to confusion, because they weren't interested in consistency, much less truth. They used language purely for its utility.
Take their idea of "Jewish science". You can't take that notion seriously, because it's all a fantasy they cooked up to target people they were afraid of. So they just lump them in together. It's telling that Himmler wanted to label Heisenberg as a "White Jew". "Jew" doesn't mean "person of historically Jewish descent" or "person who adheres to the Jewish law". It's just the verbal equivalent of a punch in the face.
The same goes for Hitler's views about atheists. Atheists tend to be free thinkers, and therefore likely to oppose the regime. So you take two despised groups and you manufacture a bigger "threat" by glomming them together.
Scapegoating is so critical to tyranny that where there aren't ready made hatreds, the tyrant invents groups to be hated. Stalin invented the "kulik", or rich peasant, as the scapegoat for his failed agricultural policies. They kuliks weren't rich by any means, but if your family were starving and your neighbor's had food, that gave you a satisfying, concrete target for your rage right within reach.
As far as the "Christianity" is concerned, it's about as meaningful as their notion of "Jew". If they'd been living in a predominantly Buddhist society, they'd be filling their propaganda with Buddhist trappings. If they'd been living in a Jewish society, then they'd avail themselves of Jewish symbols and scapegoat Christians and Muslims.
You can connect what the tyrant wants to what he says in this way: The tyrant wants power. To obtain and hold onto it, he needs a compliant people. To make the people compliant, he arouses fear, anger and hatred in them. To arouse those emotions he uses words, not to tell people anything, but to goad them.
Hatred and fear are for the politician like the nose ring a farmer puts on a bull. It allows him to safely lead a big, dumb dangerous animal where he wants it to go. This works for both right wing tyrants and left wing tyrants like Stalin. Remember that next time you are tempted to latch on to some popular political hatred.
citation please.
OK:
[1] Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Enjoy. I look forward to your comments... after you've read this POS.
I wanted to see just how inadvisable something like this was. So I sent a whole passel of George Bush quotes through Google's English to Arabic translator, then took the translation and fed it back through the Arabic to English translator, looking for cases where the sense of the words might be disastrously mangled. Immediately, this example popped out:
The truth in this matter is, if you listen carefully, Saddam would still be in power if he was president of the United States and the world would be better off.
Now going back to the original text, what Bush actually said was ...
Oh.
Never mind.
On the other hand ... Methane is over twenty times as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. So potentially you could burn methane in this thing, and even though you're emitting more CO2 earn a carbon credit or even $$$ under a cap and trade arrangement.
It's not a simple tradeoff though. Methane decays more rapidly in the atmosphere, so you really oughtn't get a 21:1 trade of methane for CO2. If we begin to do carbon sequestration, though, this might be a bigger win. We'd be converting methane, we we aren't sequestering, into CO2, which we are.
In any case, you're comparing this to current energy prices. If your electricity comes from oil, and oil goes way up, you'll expect natural gas to go up too -- but not as much. If you are in a oil price shock situation, you can't conjure new natural gas electric plants into existence in a year or two, but you could install a few of these.
Finally there are some "free" sources of methane. Municipal landfills have to flare off methane. So you set up your fuel cell on our newly capped landfill. After a couple years the volume drops off and you cell your fuel cell to a different municipality, recouping some of the investment.
*We* spend a lot more per person on health care than Canada, even *counting* all the people we don't insure. 87% more per capita.
So to avoid having to pay more taxes, we pay a *huge* amount more per person to private insurance. We get some nice bennies for that like short waits for nose jobs. On the other hand what we don't get is any guarantee we'll be able to keep paying our bills if we get really sick.
They also spend 3,895 per person on health care, as opposed to 7,290 per person in the US. If they were willing to increase their per person expenditure by 87% to match the US expenditure, they could afford some pretty sweet chronic care.
Shows you what an idiot AC is.
When you need heart surgery, you choose the surgeon, not the medical insurance policies of the country.
From the article he cites:
"He has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done," said Ms. Dunderdale, who will become acting premier while Mr. Williams is away for three to 12 weeks.
OK, so the story is this guy asked his Canadian doctors who was the best doctor to do this procedure, and they referred him to a guy in the US. Well good for that guy, but the best guy in the country isn't representative of the country as a whole.
My brother was in a similar situation. He needed heart surgery, *and* he had insurance. He lived in Philly, and the best doctor to do that surgery was right there, *and* available *and* in his network, but the insurance company was going to force him to travel up to some rinky-dink hospital in north Jersey suburb of NYC to get treated by some surgeon his cardiologist had never heard of. The cardiologist hit the roof when he found out. Finally, he wrote a letter saying that my brother was too sick to travel.
Yeah, 'cause Toronto is hell compared to, say, Detroit or Saint Louis
The cleanliness, the low crime rate, the public transportation, the the socialized medicine, museums, shopping, restaurants, theater, schools, culture, tolerance, diversity ... ugh!
You're going to have to pry my filthy, morally degenerate, violence ravaged, disease infested American city from my cold dead hands...
Well, that seems to be contrary to the conventional view of our military leaders of how war should be conducted.
For example, what does "unlawful combatant" mean unless there is some kind of expectation of what fair rules for warfare would be?
You can gain unfair advantage by not wearing uniforms. This means you can look like a civilian, hit your foe, then melt into the civilian population again.
You can gain unfair advantage by secretly executing all the prisoners you take on the battlefield.
You can gain unfair advantage by maximizing civilian casualties without regard to whether it has a direct effect on the war fighting effort, because the military can't guard all civilians.
You can gain unfair advantage by pretending to negotiate under a flag of truce, then opening fire.
The list goes on. Now if you don't propose some standard of fairness, any insistence that "illegal combatants" fight according to "the laws of war" is morally hypocritical. The laws impose restrictions on the enemy (you must wear clearly identifiable insignia), in return they impose restrictions on you (you must treat them as POWs).
Your argument is specious, because you have not proposed a definition of "fairness" to argue against.
The Rawls criteria can still be applied even if you have two sides trying to kill as many of the other guys as possible. Given that you will find yourself in that situation, what rules would you accept, given that you don't know which role you get to play. This subsumes all considerations you might raise, such as "it's better to kill than be killed" and "it's better to win than lose". If you can't come up with any such rules, you have just proven that as far as you know any kind of warfare is intrinsically immoral.
Rawls served with the Marines in the pacific theater of WW2. After witnessing the aftermath of Hiroshima, he turned down an invitation to officer candidate school and went back home to earn a doctorate in philosophy.
It's probable that Rawls knew more about war than you did. It's almost certain he knew more about ethics.
This thread is about killing people half way around the world from the comfort of the sofa.
OK. You answered my question, which is that this is something that does not have to be done in your opinion. You've come to the logical conclusion that it is wrong for these people to do it. So far so good. Then you bring up the fact they're doing it from half way around the world a if it has anything to do with anything. It doesn't.
Look at it this way. Would it *excuse* the killing in any way if the person doing it is standing right in front of the victim? If you would, then your problem isn't with killing. It's with technology per se. Making a big deal over the fact it's done from half-way around the world only suggests that you can condone murder if it is done by the proper method, or if other people are sufficiently hurt to balance the score.
You can't balance the ledger of suffering. Conflicts where people think that way don't ever get resolved no matter how many generations of victims they consume.
The ultimate example of this broken reasoning is the suicide bomber. The fact he gets killed himself doesn't do anything to make the act more worthy of respect.
As for orders, you're inviting the same sloppy thinking. That is an irrelevant factor. Both following and disobeying orders can be the right thing to do, depending on the nature of the order.
I understand you're angry about this thing, but it makes no sense to be angry in a way that seems to excuse the same act done in a slightly different way.
I never minded UAC much. Many of the problems were the kind of thing you'd expect when programs weren't updated to be aware of tighter security. Some of the inconsistency in the anti spyware measures bothered me, because MS gave a pass to its own products whereas you had inexplicable behavior from third party software trying the same thing. Yes, protecting the /program files directory was a sensible thing (at last) but the policy should be uniform for all vendors.
The thing that really soured me on Vista, ironically, was its crappy memory management. I had to repartition my hard drive to put te pagefile on a separate partition (like it is in Linux), because many of the aggressive optimizations in Vista involved memory pages that couldn't just be marked available. Doing this or turning of disk paging entirely resulted in (barely) usable performance when I allocated large blocks (1GB) of RAM. I'll never forget running defrag and seeing something like a hundred thousand fragments in pagefile.sys. Apparently when Vista realized how deep in the hole it was, it started stuffing RAM pages whereever the disk head happened to be. That's the only possible explanation.
Aside from memory management, Vista wasn't too bad if you had plenty of horsepower to run it on. But memory management is a pretty big fault for an OS to have. I'm looking forward to trying Windows 7, but right now I'm happy running XFCE on Ubuntu. I don't ask for a lot of whizbang eye candy from an OS. Just consist responsiveness.
Well, there's an initial question you have to ask which determines everything else about how we should feel about this.
Is this something which, to the best of our knowledge, has to be done?
If the answer is no, go ahead and disrespect these guys.
If the answer is yes, then doing it this way is obviously better than exposing somebody who is doing a dirty job that needs doing to physical danger. That said, what we are talking about are *psychological casualties*.
That's what the question leads you to. Either these people are wrestling with their conscience about something they ought not be doing, or they are psychological casualties.
On the other hand is it just to go after container ships who have absolutely nothing to do with the fishing problem then? I don't think so, so I for one continue to blame them.
If they were boarding fishing vessels that would be a different matter, and the world would see them differently.
I really detest this mode of reasoning. Some braves from Indian tribe A commit an atrocity, so I kill all of tribe B. Hamas has been shooting rockets at my cities, so I'm going to bulldoze entire villages. Rapacious owners have been exploiting the workers so it's open season on capitalists. It's not only that it's unjust. It's *stupid*.