Ruthless competition is how China moved into being an economic powerhouse. The pollution and body count for the US was pretty high too (and so long ago it is largely forgotten) but that was the price of "progress".
That's the kind of argument that sounds attractive if you don't look too close. But it can be stood on its head with equal justification -- if not more.
Ruthless exploitation has been a permanent fixture of human civilization, and progress has not been its reliable result. I would argue then that ruthless exploiters are not creators of progress. They're parasites on progress. Exploitation in the time of progress is not something new, it's jut the old exploitation robbing a richer bank.
The dire predictions of economic disaster and stagnating innovation have not for the most part come true when society has stepped in to regulate abuses like child labor, food adulteration, inhumane treatment of workers. Rather, progress has on the whole accelerated.
Of course, progressive policies do hurt many exploitative enterprises, but they don't harm innovation. Businesses that require the ability to exploit people or the environment to thrive are fundamentally non-innovative. It's making money the old -- very, very old -- way. First you get some power (in this case capital), and then you look for somebody weaker than you to exploit, either directly or by leaving them holding a very expensive bag.
You can see the architectural proof of the antiquity of this business model in Europe. You find yourself a nice river valley on a trading route and you build yourself a castle to shake down everybody who wants to pass.
I agree the fallout from the subprime debacle, and ongoing tight credit are a factor. There are also feedback loops which we can't discount either between global economic uncertainty and behavior both of consumers and producers.
I don't agree that a modest amount of supply, well into the future, could have such a powerful and immediate behavioral influence on the market today. Not when you're talking more than five years out and compare it to what the Saudis could do next quarter -- if they wanted to.
You're right to talk about the demand curve. The curve has steepened, causing prices to drop. that's in response to the global financial crisis, which is happening right now. But in order to suppose that "drill baby drill" has a role in price changes, you have to argue that the supply curve is now rising more steeply as a result of future US increases in production.
This is implausible on several grounds.
The oil fields aren't in production today. Even if we knew all the right places to drill today, we couldn't bring them into anything like full capacity for many years because nobody has the logistical capacity to bring that much oil into production overnight.
Even if we could, we're adding only a modest amount of oil in a world where new oil fields are being a rarity. That's an argument, possibly, for starting production in new US oil fields, but it is not an argument that suppliers are anticipating oil price declines.
The efficacy of "drill baby drill" is an article of faith -- it's not a falsifiable proposition so far as I can see.
I thought you were going to say it was not entirely correct because it was not the first picture of a planet orbiting a sun-like star.
Almost every picture I've ever taken is of a planet orbiting a sun-like star, excepting those pictures I've taken of the night sky. The Earth is, in fact, a planet and as the Sun is very sun-like indeed, the Earth is a planet orbiting a sun-like star.
Especially in international, multi-cultural enterprises.
When the executives said they wanted "Cracking software" on the CD, they meant it in the same way that Wallace does when he compliments Gromit on breakfast: "Cracking toast, Gromit!"
Yes. I've been saying they were going to fall for over six months now, much to the chagrin of my fellow environmentalists who see high oil prices as a chance to get people to start thinking about the long term problem of peak oil. While I agree that this is an opportunity, I don't think that unwarranted panic is a good thing, and the "drill everywhere" response illustrates the correctness of this position.
The reason that oil prices were coming down was that they were supported by a speculative bubble. Bubbles collapse, and when they do their momentum is hard to stop, which is why oil prices have continued to drop even though there has been bad news on the supply end.
Anybody who says that the threat of offshore drilling is what sent world prices down only proves this point. If the fundamentals were such that the supply was inadequate for the upcoming demand, the prospect of a relatively small reserve being brought on line some years hence would have no effect on short prices unless investors were looking for an excuse to bail.
Personally, I think the initiating factor was a slight thawing in the stance of the administration towards Iran. The thaw is now long gone, but it started prices moving in the other direction and as I said, once this starts it is hard to stop. I don't see any way to correlate making the "drill everywhere" plank in the Republican platform to any specific price drop events. I think that's wishful thinking, although it is possible. Anything can burst a bubble when the time is ripe.
Bubbles always burst. The proverbial butterfly wing can be what initiates the collapse, but it doesn't mean the butterfly caused it.
Well, it's aimed at the desktop, maybe they could call it "Desktop-BSD". Except that "Desktop" as a word is somewhat anachronistic. Not only are small mobile form factors the flavor du jour, even traditional "Desktop" users are using laptops instead of "desktops".
So, PC-BSD is an operating system aimed at computers which offer a wide variety of services for personal use. The target platforms provide a comprehensive set of services, as opposed to devices like music players or GPS navigators, so they are general purpose computers. They chiefly provide services to one person at a time, in contrast to servers,so they are personal. "Personal computer" is much more descriptive than "desktop", although perhaps "general purpose personal computer" would be more precise.
Computing has historically been like surfing. If you miss one wave you just set up for the next one, although it may come from a slightly different direction. Minicomputers were eclipsed by personal computers, only to reemerge as servers. In information technology, obsolescence in a concept has to be judged modulo the length of a generation.
"Do everything" only sounds like a strategy to people who don't have the foggiest idea of what to do.
The coastal reserves and ANWR might be a bridge towards alternative energy, but not any time in the next couple of decades, given the total amount of productive capacity worldwide.
At least based on what we believe to be true today. If it turns out everybody else is fibbing about the size of their reserves, we might find ourselves tapping these in a hurry. Which is still no excuse for pretending it's going to help with energy prices today, or that it has anything to do with the market bubble in energy prices over the last few years.
Well, pretty much every IDE will do everything you ask and then some. Many extensible programmer's editors like JEdit (and obviously emacs) do too. It's been possible to edit/compile/debug/build in emacs for almost thirty years now.
So, no, we in the non-Win32 world don't have to reach of the manual every time we need an API; we don't have to switch consoles to go between debugging and editing; we don't have to leave the editor to do a compile.
For me, at least, the dividing line between an editor and an IDE is refactoring support. It's really the only must-have feature, although if you do have it its pretty nice to have a convenient source control interface.
I started back around 1980 using emacs. Historically, the IDE became important as the need for Windows programmers outstripped the supply of competent programmers. It was hard enough dealing with Windows, but put MFC on top of that and there was a lot of baloney you had to learn. The IDE, framework and preprocessor were tied together in truly appalling ways when you consider how simple it is to do corresponding things in toolkits like GTK or wxWidgets. It's one of the reasons I never became a Win32 programmer, it was just aesthetically loathsome.
Eclipse was the first IDE that sold me on the idea of an IDE, and it was refactoring support alone that did it. I otherwise found Eclipse to be a bit overcomplicated given its generic but malleable nature. Netbeans on the other hand was too sluggish in the early days; I don't like having my thought processes held up. It seems OK on modern hardware. They both offer excellent refactoring support.
Without refactoring support, I'd still be using emacs or even vim. There's less reason to use emacs than back in the days of character terminals where it provided something like a desktop. I still use emacs for its macro capabilities when dealing with large data files. I should probably use PERL rather than a mixture of emacs an awk, but y'know. Old dogs.
Not really. NASA is not run as a profit center, so this doesn't add a nickel to its budget. If you want to know where the money is going, you've got to look at the budget busters for current spending: the Iraq war, federal highway spending, flood insurance, that sort of thing.
This is just a kind of LBO style ideological stunt. When the constituent assets of a company are seen as more valuable than the company, you start selling them off.
What is worse, by selling the patent, the government in effect competes with other inventors. If the government beats an private inventor to the punch, he is not only deprived of the patent, he is unable to use the invention, unless the government chooses to license the patent as widely as possible. In that case, any work he does around that invention is not only usable, it may result in new inventions. So government inventions benefit everybody working in the field, until they are sold. At that point they benefit the highest bidder exclusively. And that's what this is about: turning public property to somebody's private benefit. The money is a minor side effect.
We can see the same attitude in attempts to hinder public access to public data like weather forecasts, except through a third party vendor who ponies up considerable dough. It's not the income that matters, it's the exclusivity. Like clean air, information has no market value until you are forced to pay for it.
The inability to see a common good in something like technological spinoffs from space exploration means that the whole activity is seen as worth less than the sum of its assets. This is not about enriching NASA, it's about liquidating any value it might have.
It's called self deprecating humor. It's like when Biden notes he isn't as pretty as Sarah Palin.
I think McCain can be called to task over the way he's run his 2008 campaign. This particular "issue" is just phony, like the one about his supposedly crashing five jets.
(1) Yes, it was forty years ago. That's a long time not being able to do things like comb your hair. If he's not comfortable on a keyboard, I'm OK with that.
(2) Not being a user doesn't preclude understanding the economic and strategic technology issues. If he had spent the last ten years working a help desk, it wouldn't make him one wit more ready to be president.
(3) That's clearly an exaggeration.
I'm sorry. I'm quite comfortable in my belief McCain has the temperament to be a good president, I don't feel the need to gild the lily, especially if the material we're gilding with is BS.
Yes, but that's also the easiest way for Hawking to communicate. If Hawking could speak, I'd bet he'd have somebody typing for him rather than tapping out his words using his cheek. Then, presumably, you'd be criticizing Hawking for not being a computer user.
If you're going to argue by analogy, at least pick and analogous analogy.
The real reason is that they're mired in a system that makes them pay for their employees' and retirees' health care.
There was a kind of semi-socialistic system that grew up in America: the Big 3 got labor stability, and in return they took real good care of the workers. Mix in a little free trade, and they're at a huge disadvantage. Let's say as a first approximation that Toyota is a foreign car company. Yes they assemble cars here, but a lot of the value is created overseas, so lets ignore that for a minute.
When GM tries to sell a car in Japan, they pay for the health care of Toyota workers. When Toyota sells a car here, they only pay for their own worker's health care (albeit indirectly through taxes). Given that the health care gets paid either way, it's advantage for the importer.
Really? A large car is more comfortable? Why would that be?
The only reason that is necessarily so is a philosophy that a small car is simply a large car shrunk proportionally in every dimension. The only reason I can see for that philosophy is market segmentation. Small cars are for people with small wallets and big cars are for people with big wallets. If you don't get a little discomfort in a small car, you might not want to "move up".
Really, it's only the US automakers who ever made small, uncomfortable cars. I haven't driven any small US cars in the last decade. I'm not even sure that the term is meaningful any longer in the modern automative world. But I think its fairly obvious that the so called American car companies aren't interested in duplicating the success of a VW Beetle or the BMW Mini. Weight is value, and if you want other kinds of value you have to take the weight along with it.
Well, a smart person can understand a lot of things. An amazing number of things, really.
I think we can take it that such responses are not drafted by the candidates, but they are approved at a reasonably high level (ideally by the candidate himself) as reflecting the campaign election message and candidate philosophy. If the responses reflect poorly on the candidate, it is ultimately his fault.
One thing I always look for in these things is semantic bullshit. You can't always now whether candidate A's cap-and-trade proposal is better than candidate B's, but certain kinds of BS show from internal evidence alone. "Proactive initiation of a synergistic framework" kind of stuff.
OK, first let me say I'm a Barack Obama supporter. I just sent Obama what (for me) is a pretty big donation.
But I don't have to demonize McCain just because I think he'll be a lousy president. There's lots of people in the country who are OK where they are, but would be lousy presidents. Practically everybody.
So, give the guy a break here. He never learned to use email because his arms got so messed up in the Hanoi Hilton he can't use a keyboard.
I don't give this guy a POW get out of jail free on things like his tax plan (bad), his proposing to put a creationist a heartbeat away from the Presidency (bad), or his flip flopping on offshore drilling (pretending this will make us the kind of power Saudi Arabia has over oil prices -- bad). But on this one, he gets a POW get out of jail card.
In any case, it wouldn't matter if his arms were fine. Give me somebody who understands the economy and values human and civil rights and understands the Constitution. Then I won't care if he uses white out on his computer screen.
We went through this years ago with a device called a pen register. You clipped it onto the old analog phone lines, which used voltage changes driven by a spring loaded rotary dial to transmit phone numbers to mechanical switches. Because you disclosed the phone number to the carrier (obviously, you'd have to), it wasn't yours personally; it wasn't your papers, your effects and was not in your home. Therefore it didn't fall under the fourth amendment.
There's an important constitutional theory (decried by some conservatives) that says the Bill of Rights isn't just about what it says, that we have to reinterpret it as circumstances. Certain right fall into the so-called "penumbra" of the Bill; they aren't right in the shadow, but they're close to the edge. This view stems from the Ninth, which says we aren't allowed to treat the Bill of Rights as a bill -- an exhaustive list.
The problem with the penumbra is nobody can say where it stops.
That's where it's Congress's role to step in with laws that regulate the activity of the government near the penumbra. And they did. They created the "Pen Register Act" which says you need to meet the same standards as a search of somebody's home if you want to use a pen register.
Wherever this ruling found its justification, it was probably not in Constitutional law because that would overturn long established precedent. If that was so, I'd expect it to get overturned, unless we can get a SCOTUS ruling that overturns existing precedent in favor of limiting executive power in a way no prior court has done. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.
If it gets its justification in statutory law, then it may or may not be overturned. For example, nobody uses a pen register any longer. If you want to use the Pen Register Act you've got to have some thing that is close enough in function to a pen register to fall under the law, which I don't think GPS records are. It might be justified under some other kind of law regulating the use of telecomm records.
The important take home lesson is: if you don't like this, don't count on the Constitution to protect you. It won't. Elect congress critters who see this your way.
You can dispose of any information you have gained by proper means any way you like, with a few exceptions like when you have a fiduciary duty. It's not fundamentally different from anything else you have a right to do. You're free to spread the information, but in some cases there might be consequences.
If information about other people you got by legitimate means were their property, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it without their opt-in. It's not hard to think of examples of where this personal information as property thing doesn't work. This is pretty much the argument Scientology uses against people who spread information about their secret doctrines.
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Ruthless competition is how China moved into being an economic powerhouse. The pollution and body count for the US was pretty high too (and so long ago it is largely forgotten) but that was the price of "progress".
That's the kind of argument that sounds attractive if you don't look too close. But it can be stood on its head with equal justification -- if not more.
Ruthless exploitation has been a permanent fixture of human civilization, and progress has not been its reliable result. I would argue then that ruthless exploiters are not creators of progress. They're parasites on progress. Exploitation in the time of progress is not something new, it's jut the old exploitation robbing a richer bank.
The dire predictions of economic disaster and stagnating innovation have not for the most part come true when society has stepped in to regulate abuses like child labor, food adulteration, inhumane treatment of workers. Rather, progress has on the whole accelerated.
Of course, progressive policies do hurt many exploitative enterprises, but they don't harm innovation. Businesses that require the ability to exploit people or the environment to thrive are fundamentally non-innovative. It's making money the old -- very, very old -- way. First you get some power (in this case capital), and then you look for somebody weaker than you to exploit, either directly or by leaving them holding a very expensive bag.
You can see the architectural proof of the antiquity of this business model in Europe. You find yourself a nice river valley on a trading route and you build yourself a castle to shake down everybody who wants to pass.
What about when two politicians, who formerly wouldn't agree even on the time of day, attempt to occupy the same position?
I think we could call that the Palin Exclusion Principle, with apologies to Joe Biden because "Biden Exclusion Principle" isn't as funny.
I agree the fallout from the subprime debacle, and ongoing tight credit are a factor. There are also feedback loops which we can't discount either between global economic uncertainty and behavior both of consumers and producers.
I don't agree that a modest amount of supply, well into the future, could have such a powerful and immediate behavioral influence on the market today. Not when you're talking more than five years out and compare it to what the Saudis could do next quarter -- if they wanted to.
You're right to talk about the demand curve. The curve has steepened, causing prices to drop. that's in response to the global financial crisis, which is happening right now. But in order to suppose that "drill baby drill" has a role in price changes, you have to argue that the supply curve is now rising more steeply as a result of future US increases in production.
This is implausible on several grounds.
The oil fields aren't in production today. Even if we knew all the right places to drill today, we couldn't bring them into anything like full capacity for many years because nobody has the logistical capacity to bring that much oil into production overnight.
Even if we could, we're adding only a modest amount of oil in a world where new oil fields are being a rarity. That's an argument, possibly, for starting production in new US oil fields, but it is not an argument that suppliers are anticipating oil price declines.
The efficacy of "drill baby drill" is an article of faith -- it's not a falsifiable proposition so far as I can see.
I thought you were going to say it was not entirely correct because it was not the first picture of a planet orbiting a sun-like star.
Almost every picture I've ever taken is of a planet orbiting a sun-like star, excepting those pictures I've taken of the night sky. The Earth is, in fact, a planet and as the Sun is very sun-like indeed, the Earth is a planet orbiting a sun-like star.
Especially in international, multi-cultural enterprises.
When the executives said they wanted "Cracking software" on the CD, they meant it in the same way that Wallace does when he compliments Gromit on breakfast: "Cracking toast, Gromit!"
Yes. I've been saying they were going to fall for over six months now, much to the chagrin of my fellow environmentalists who see high oil prices as a chance to get people to start thinking about the long term problem of peak oil. While I agree that this is an opportunity, I don't think that unwarranted panic is a good thing, and the "drill everywhere" response illustrates the correctness of this position.
The reason that oil prices were coming down was that they were supported by a speculative bubble. Bubbles collapse, and when they do their momentum is hard to stop, which is why oil prices have continued to drop even though there has been bad news on the supply end.
Anybody who says that the threat of offshore drilling is what sent world prices down only proves this point. If the fundamentals were such that the supply was inadequate for the upcoming demand, the prospect of a relatively small reserve being brought on line some years hence would have no effect on short prices unless investors were looking for an excuse to bail.
Personally, I think the initiating factor was a slight thawing in the stance of the administration towards Iran. The thaw is now long gone, but it started prices moving in the other direction and as I said, once this starts it is hard to stop. I don't see any way to correlate making the "drill everywhere" plank in the Republican platform to any specific price drop events. I think that's wishful thinking, although it is possible. Anything can burst a bubble when the time is ripe.
Bubbles always burst. The proverbial butterfly wing can be what initiates the collapse, but it doesn't mean the butterfly caused it.
Well, better the Fibonacci sequence than the Mersenne primes.
Well, it's aimed at the desktop, maybe they could call it "Desktop-BSD". Except that "Desktop" as a word is somewhat anachronistic. Not only are small mobile form factors the flavor du jour, even traditional "Desktop" users are using laptops instead of "desktops".
So, PC-BSD is an operating system aimed at computers which offer a wide variety of services for personal use. The target platforms provide a comprehensive set of services, as opposed to devices like music players or GPS navigators, so they are general purpose computers. They chiefly provide services to one person at a time, in contrast to servers,so they are personal. "Personal computer" is much more descriptive than "desktop", although perhaps "general purpose personal computer" would be more precise.
Computing has historically been like surfing. If you miss one wave you just set up for the next one, although it may come from a slightly different direction. Minicomputers were eclipsed by personal computers, only to reemerge as servers. In information technology, obsolescence in a concept has to be judged modulo the length of a generation.
Well, I was thinking more Terry Jones.
After all, he as already done a novel in the HTTG universe, one that was warmly received by Douglas Adams himself.
Putting a pig on lipstick.
"Do everything" only sounds like a strategy to people who don't have the foggiest idea of what to do.
The coastal reserves and ANWR might be a bridge towards alternative energy, but not any time in the next couple of decades, given the total amount of productive capacity worldwide.
At least based on what we believe to be true today. If it turns out everybody else is fibbing about the size of their reserves, we might find ourselves tapping these in a hurry. Which is still no excuse for pretending it's going to help with energy prices today, or that it has anything to do with the market bubble in energy prices over the last few years.
Well, pretty much every IDE will do everything you ask and then some. Many extensible programmer's editors like JEdit (and obviously emacs) do too. It's been possible to edit/compile/debug/build in emacs for almost thirty years now.
So, no, we in the non-Win32 world don't have to reach of the manual every time we need an API; we don't have to switch consoles to go between debugging and editing; we don't have to leave the editor to do a compile.
For me, at least, the dividing line between an editor and an IDE is refactoring support. It's really the only must-have feature, although if you do have it its pretty nice to have a convenient source control interface.
I started back around 1980 using emacs. Historically, the IDE became important as the need for Windows programmers outstripped the supply of competent programmers. It was hard enough dealing with Windows, but put MFC on top of that and there was a lot of baloney you had to learn. The IDE, framework and preprocessor were tied together in truly appalling ways when you consider how simple it is to do corresponding things in toolkits like GTK or wxWidgets. It's one of the reasons I never became a Win32 programmer, it was just aesthetically loathsome.
Eclipse was the first IDE that sold me on the idea of an IDE, and it was refactoring support alone that did it. I otherwise found Eclipse to be a bit overcomplicated given its generic but malleable nature. Netbeans on the other hand was too sluggish in the early days; I don't like having my thought processes held up. It seems OK on modern hardware. They both offer excellent refactoring support.
Without refactoring support, I'd still be using emacs or even vim. There's less reason to use emacs than back in the days of character terminals where it provided something like a desktop. I still use emacs for its macro capabilities when dealing with large data files. I should probably use PERL rather than a mixture of emacs an awk, but y'know. Old dogs.
Not really. NASA is not run as a profit center, so this doesn't add a nickel to its budget. If you want to know where the money is going, you've got to look at the budget busters for current spending: the Iraq war, federal highway spending, flood insurance, that sort of thing.
This is just a kind of LBO style ideological stunt. When the constituent assets of a company are seen as more valuable than the company, you start selling them off.
What is worse, by selling the patent, the government in effect competes with other inventors. If the government beats an private inventor to the punch, he is not only deprived of the patent, he is unable to use the invention, unless the government chooses to license the patent as widely as possible. In that case, any work he does around that invention is not only usable, it may result in new inventions. So government inventions benefit everybody working in the field, until they are sold. At that point they benefit the highest bidder exclusively. And that's what this is about: turning public property to somebody's private benefit. The money is a minor side effect.
We can see the same attitude in attempts to hinder public access to public data like weather forecasts, except through a third party vendor who ponies up considerable dough. It's not the income that matters, it's the exclusivity. Like clean air, information has no market value until you are forced to pay for it.
The inability to see a common good in something like technological spinoffs from space exploration means that the whole activity is seen as worth less than the sum of its assets. This is not about enriching NASA, it's about liquidating any value it might have.
It's called self deprecating humor. It's like when Biden notes he isn't as pretty as Sarah Palin.
I think McCain can be called to task over the way he's run his 2008 campaign. This particular "issue" is just phony, like the one about his supposedly crashing five jets.
Eh?
(1) Yes, it was forty years ago. That's a long time not being able to do things like comb your hair. If he's not comfortable on a keyboard, I'm OK with that.
(2) Not being a user doesn't preclude understanding the economic and strategic technology issues. If he had spent the last ten years working a help desk, it wouldn't make him one wit more ready to be president.
(3) That's clearly an exaggeration.
I'm sorry. I'm quite comfortable in my belief McCain has the temperament to be a good president, I don't feel the need to gild the lily, especially if the material we're gilding with is BS.
Yes, but that's also the easiest way for Hawking to communicate. If Hawking could speak, I'd bet he'd have somebody typing for him rather than tapping out his words using his cheek. Then, presumably, you'd be criticizing Hawking for not being a computer user.
If you're going to argue by analogy, at least pick and analogous analogy.
The real reason is that they're mired in a system that makes them pay for their employees' and retirees' health care.
There was a kind of semi-socialistic system that grew up in America: the Big 3 got labor stability, and in return they took real good care of the workers. Mix in a little free trade, and they're at a huge disadvantage. Let's say as a first approximation that Toyota is a foreign car company. Yes they assemble cars here, but a lot of the value is created overseas, so lets ignore that for a minute.
When GM tries to sell a car in Japan, they pay for the health care of Toyota workers. When Toyota sells a car here, they only pay for their own worker's health care (albeit indirectly through taxes). Given that the health care gets paid either way, it's advantage for the importer.
Really? A large car is more comfortable? Why would that be?
The only reason that is necessarily so is a philosophy that a small car is simply a large car shrunk proportionally in every dimension. The only reason I can see for that philosophy is market segmentation. Small cars are for people with small wallets and big cars are for people with big wallets. If you don't get a little discomfort in a small car, you might not want to "move up".
Really, it's only the US automakers who ever made small, uncomfortable cars. I haven't driven any small US cars in the last decade. I'm not even sure that the term is meaningful any longer in the modern automative world. But I think its fairly obvious that the so called American car companies aren't interested in duplicating the success of a VW Beetle or the BMW Mini. Weight is value, and if you want other kinds of value you have to take the weight along with it.
Well, a smart person can understand a lot of things. An amazing number of things, really.
I think we can take it that such responses are not drafted by the candidates, but they are approved at a reasonably high level (ideally by the candidate himself) as reflecting the campaign election message and candidate philosophy. If the responses reflect poorly on the candidate, it is ultimately his fault.
One thing I always look for in these things is semantic bullshit. You can't always now whether candidate A's cap-and-trade proposal is better than candidate B's, but certain kinds of BS show from internal evidence alone. "Proactive initiation of a synergistic framework" kind of stuff.
OK, first let me say I'm a Barack Obama supporter. I just sent Obama what (for me) is a pretty big donation.
But I don't have to demonize McCain just because I think he'll be a lousy president. There's lots of people in the country who are OK where they are, but would be lousy presidents. Practically everybody.
So, give the guy a break here. He never learned to use email because his arms got so messed up in the Hanoi Hilton he can't use a keyboard.
I don't give this guy a POW get out of jail free on things like his tax plan (bad), his proposing to put a creationist a heartbeat away from the Presidency (bad), or his flip flopping on offshore drilling (pretending this will make us the kind of power Saudi Arabia has over oil prices -- bad). But on this one, he gets a POW get out of jail card.
In any case, it wouldn't matter if his arms were fine. Give me somebody who understands the economy and values human and civil rights and understands the Constitution. Then I won't care if he uses white out on his computer screen.
Actually, you are mistaken on this.
We went through this years ago with a device called a pen register. You clipped it onto the old analog phone lines, which used voltage changes driven by a spring loaded rotary dial to transmit phone numbers to mechanical switches. Because you disclosed the phone number to the carrier (obviously, you'd have to), it wasn't yours personally; it wasn't your papers, your effects and was not in your home. Therefore it didn't fall under the fourth amendment.
There's an important constitutional theory (decried by some conservatives) that says the Bill of Rights isn't just about what it says, that we have to reinterpret it as circumstances. Certain right fall into the so-called "penumbra" of the Bill; they aren't right in the shadow, but they're close to the edge. This view stems from the Ninth, which says we aren't allowed to treat the Bill of Rights as a bill -- an exhaustive list.
The problem with the penumbra is nobody can say where it stops.
That's where it's Congress's role to step in with laws that regulate the activity of the government near the penumbra. And they did. They created the "Pen Register Act" which says you need to meet the same standards as a search of somebody's home if you want to use a pen register.
Wherever this ruling found its justification, it was probably not in Constitutional law because that would overturn long established precedent. If that was so, I'd expect it to get overturned, unless we can get a SCOTUS ruling that overturns existing precedent in favor of limiting executive power in a way no prior court has done. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one.
If it gets its justification in statutory law, then it may or may not be overturned. For example, nobody uses a pen register any longer. If you want to use the Pen Register Act you've got to have some thing that is close enough in function to a pen register to fall under the law, which I don't think GPS records are. It might be justified under some other kind of law regulating the use of telecomm records.
The important take home lesson is: if you don't like this, don't count on the Constitution to protect you. It won't. Elect congress critters who see this your way.
No the GP has it right, legally speaking.
You can dispose of any information you have gained by proper means any way you like, with a few exceptions like when you have a fiduciary duty. It's not fundamentally different from anything else you have a right to do. You're free to spread the information, but in some cases there might be consequences.
If information about other people you got by legitimate means were their property, you wouldn't be able to do anything with it without their opt-in. It's not hard to think of examples of where this personal information as property thing doesn't work. This is pretty much the argument Scientology uses against people who spread information about their secret doctrines.
You mean "crurotarsan" might be derived from a Japanese proper name like "Krurota-san"?
OK, now I'm going to guess, approximately, when you were born.
The last Austin Powers movie came out in 2002, and had a PG-13 rating, so I'm guessing you were born after 1989.