It cant possibly be that Venus is 23 million miles closer to the sun. It cant be that Venus is 25% closer to the Sun than the Earth. Has to be the carbon dioxide. After all there can be only one cause for any effect.
You've got to be a true red Republican to deny the greenhouse effect on Venus.
If you do the math, since temperature goes as the 1/4 power of the recieved radiation and the recieved radiation goes as the square of the distance, with all else being equal 25% closer gets you about 15% hotter. In other words without a greenhouse effect venus would be about 45C hotter than earth.
If you put the Earth at the location of Venus, the oceans wouldn't boil. Not immediately at least. What would happen is that the evaporation rate would increase which would put more water vapor in the air. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas that would increase the temperature which would evaporate more water. That's an example of positive feedback. Eventually it would get hot enough for the oceans to boil.
Without the oceans to absorb CO2 and without the life forms in the ocean which take CO2 and turn it into rocks, the CO2 released in volcanos (not to mention the forests catching on fire) stays in the atmosphere where it adds further to the greenhouse effect.
The CO2 and all the water vapor combine to form carbonic acid which increases the weathering of carbonate rocks releasing still more CO2.
Meanwhile UV radiation (sunlight) in the upper atmosphere dissociates the water vapor into oxygen and hydrogen. Because it is light, the hydrogen escapes into space. The oxygen oxidizes any unoxidized materials on the surface. If any of those materials contain accessable carbon, you've just released more CO2 and increased the greenhouse effect.
Plate tectonics continues on for a while releasing more CO2 until the point where the water bearing minerals that enable plate tectonics on the Earth have disappeared. Plate tectonics stops. At this point you've got... you guessed it... Venus. Not that you'd be caring. You died long before the oceans started boiling.
This is what would absolutely happen to the Earth if we were to raise its temperature by 45C. What we don't know is where the dividing line is. Maybe it's 25C. Maybe it's 5C. And so we've decided to raise the temperature by 3C in the next 100 years or so.
The main difference between the Earth and Venus isn't the temperature. It's where the CO2 is. In Venus, it's in the atmosphere. On Earth, it's in the rocks. Pour some vinegar on some limestone if you don't think it can come out again. The oceans are already becoming acidic enough to cause difficulties for some shell building organisms....
That polar vortex is the Venusian greenhouse gas factory.
Sorry to be pedantic, but the proper adjective (despite what you may have heard on the 6 o'clock news) is Venereal. So what you are talking about is the Venereal greenhouse gas factory.
As someone else pointed out the last time this came up as a topic, if demand for new compsci people was really so high, wages would go up. Otherwise, it looks more like an attempt to get more suckers to accept less pay, no overtime, etc.
The main reason wages won't go up is that the workforce demand in the U.S. is finite, whereas for every C.S. graduate in the U.S. there are 10 in other countries willing to work for 10% of the salary. The supply of low wage outsourced workers is essentially unlimited. It'll continue to be that way until the cost of living in the U.S. drops to what it is in India and China.
IBM has no reason not to encourage college age kids to go into C.S. degrees. It'll drive down wages for the small fraction of jobs that can't be outsourced. IBM will more than make up for the fact that more U.S. workers can't afford to buy their products because 1% of the Indian and Chinese populations will be able to afford them.
Of course, the cost of doing nothing is much lower in the long run.
Of course it's lower. For the same reason that suicide is cheaper than medical care. We might have to combat global warming for thousands of years. Or we could do nothing for a couple hundred.
In addition to it being a shrinkwrap license (and probably void for that reason alone), that portion of the license violates the doctrine of first sale and is IMHO unenforceable. If you uninstall it from one PC, you are free to install it on another regardless of what the license says.
A seti@home work unit is a typically a 2097152 bit random number with nearly that many bits of entropy. At any time there are a about a million available. The setiathome data recorder records 5 million random bits every second.
Of course you can do nearly the same thing with a sound card and a microphone. Actually theres a good bet you don't need the microphone.
Recording at 8k samples per second without a microphone I get about 2 kbps of randomness out of my sound card. I mean really, is there any news here? It's not like there aren't any sources for random numbers out there that don't require use of a radio telescope.
Buying favors, and donating money are seperate issues. If I were running, and I got a giant contribution; it would not incline me to vote against what I believe the best for my area is, juect because the giver asked me to.
Yeah, I'm sure you're uncorruptable. What happens when, at the next election, you can't get any campaign "contibutions" because you didn't do the bidding of your contributors. The answer is "you lose" because you can't be corrupted.
That's what the "money is speech" crowd doesn't seem to understand. It isn't really possible to be sucessful in pollitics and incorruptable at the same time. It's the money that corrupts (not the speech). The "money is speech" attitude makes regulating the money impossible.
They regulate speech. . . They regulate money . . . and money is . . . a form of expression.
This is another piece of right wing bullshit. A lie often repeated, but a lie nonetheless. It shows up nearly as often as another lie: "A corporation's only responsibility is to make money for its shareholders."
Despite the propoganda you may have heard, money is not speech and the freedom to do whatever you want with your money is not unrestricted, nor should it be. If you think it is, see what attempting to by crack cocaine from an undercover officer gets you.
It's your right to call up your congressman and ask him to do you a favor. It is not your right to pay him to do you a favor. It is also not your right to pay for his campaign advertising in exchage for a favor.
It is your right to say whatever you want. It is not necessarily a right to get paid for saying it, nor is it necessarily a right to have an anonymous party pay for distributions of your message.
Except in those few cases where the GPL (and/or the FSF's interpretation of it) restricts something that (classic non-DMCA) copyright law does not. They are corner cases to be sure, but a few do exist.
My wife and I also had this problem. We solved them by putting them on shelves, non-fiction grouped by subject, antologies alphabetical by editor (or author for single author), non-anthologized fiction ordered alphabetically by author.
It seems to me I've seen organizations with even larger collections use a similar system.
Am I missing the point? Is this harder than it seems to be? 3500 books is only about 15 standard size (3 foot by 7 foot) bookshelves (assuming no paperbacks).
Yeah, lets replace someone who gained popularity by pretending to be in control after 9/11 with someone who gained popularity by pretending to be in control after 9/11.
The tax system is not the most efficient way to help people. The church is a much better and more efficient way.
The belief that church based charities are somehow fairer, more efficient, or less expensive than others is not based upon evidence. Churches tend to spend their money on upgrades to the facilities used by their parishoners and their clergy. Individual churches tend to segregate their charitable work by race and by religion. Lately churches have started spending their money on political action. (Not to mention that churches are already getting my money by not paying taxes.) And much of that political action has been directed towards making government services less efficient (by strangling them financially) and toward acquisition of funding from the government for themselves. Nothing makes government look inefficient like giving them $10 to do a $1000 job.
As money has been directed away from secular charities and government services toward churches, the number of beds available for the homeless has declined. Prior to the "faith based initiative," faith based organizations that received government funding were actually required to provide the services for which they were being paid and to not use the money as a recruiting tool.
Anyone who thinks that government can't help people has never met a county social worker, didn't go to a public school, doesn't travel on government roads, has never been unemployed, and is pretty much an idiot. Most people who claim that are usually thinking "Government can help people, but I don't want to pay for it. I'd rather give my money to my church so they can by a big screen TV for the "overflow room."
God forbid you become homeless, because your church probably doesn't have a homeless shelter and the preist isn't going to invite you to live with him in the rectory. Try to sleep in the "overflow room" and they'll gladly find you a room in the county lockup.
Plus, whenever you get the government involved, it ads layers of bureaucracy, complexity, censorship, and inflated cost. Not to mention the potential loss of privacy and liberty.
You said it. The high quality, low price, and unversal access of health care in the U.S. is due to the lack of government interference. Let's keep it that way.
Getting real: Prior to the corporate boondoggle prescription drug "benefit," the "inflated cost" due to the "bureaucracy" of Medicare was about 1/20th of the "low cost" of corporate health insurance.
No thanks; I don't want any government anywhere near my connection.
Yeah, its so much better for an unregulated monopoly like AT&T or Comcast to control our connections. I certainly enjoy paying their low low prices.
Why do people buy houses? To get the mortgage deduction.
I'm sorry, but only a fscking idiot would buy a house to get the mortgage deduction. Most people buy them to live in. Some buy them as an investment. But no sane person buys for the mortgage deduction.
Gee, if I pay a bank $15,000 a year in interest I can take $4500 a year off my taxes? Where do I sign up? That's so much better than putting that $15,000 into my 401(k)/403(b)/457/IRA/Keogh plan.
My first computer was a PC-1. I got it for my high school graduation. It came in very handy for any problems that required inverting a matrix or doing a least squares fit. (I can't imagine how people did that stuff with a pocket calculator or a slide rule.)
A set of four hearing aid batteries powered the damn thing for about 5 years. How long do your PDA's batteries last?
Of course I had been writing programs for years before I saw my first computer.
I taught myself BASIC about 2 years before I sat down at a computer keyboard. That computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 with level 1 BASIC. Then again, I taught myself FORTRAN about 7 years before I got to use a computer with a FORTRAN compiler (a VAX 11/730).
So if you rob a bank because you hate banks should you be subject to stiffer penalties?
This isn't and would never be considered a hate crime. This is a strawman thrown out there to obscure the real issues.
If you kill a gay man because you hate gays how is that anything other than a murder?
You've been listening to the right wing talking heads too much.
The intent of the crime does matter because it changes the scope of the crime. In this case the purpose or the result of the murder is to instill fear into a specific class of people or to incite others to commit similar crimes. All members of the class are victimized. That makes it a more serious crime deserving of harsher punishment.
On the other hand, if you kill a gay man because he was sleeping with your boyfriend, there is no crime against a class of people.
Yes, something was missed. Linus wasn't referring to that section of the draft. According to the article, he objects to a part of section 1:
"Complete Corresponding Source Code also includes any encryption or authorization codes necessary to install and/or execute the source code of the work, perhaps modified by you, in the recommended or principal context of use, such that its functioning in all circumstances is identical to that of the work, except as altered by your modifications...."
Torvald says this "is the one that seems to disallow digitally signed binaries (or rather: you can sign the binaries any way you want, but you have to make your private keys available)."
I don't know if English is Linus's second or third language. Maybe we need a Sweedish translation? It doesn't seem that complex to me.
Nothing in the draft GPL version 3 prevents signed binaries provided that unsigned binaries can be created and run.
What it does prevent is any mechanism by which the binary cannot be run without being decrypted with a specific key. It also prevents distribution of encrypted source as a means of avoiding the source distribution requirements of the GPL.
As far as I can tell in the current GPL prevents Linus from getting up tomorrow and deciding that linux kernel binaries and the source will be delivered in encrypted form. Decryption keys that will function for 10 days will be available for the reasonable sum of $250. You can still have your kernel binaries and a source tarball for free. You just can't use them without the keys.
Now, I'm not claiming that Linus has alterior motives. This tale above is a far-fetched scenario. But think about the number of device manufacturers that have attempted to keep their kernel changes to themselves.
I think it's likely that he misinterpreted the draft, made some public statements based upon that misinterpretation, and is now reluctant to admit he made a mistake. It happens to a lot of people.
What usually does work is putting competent people in charge and letting them and the peer review process direct the money to where it is needed. It's also a big help if Congress and the President listen to competent people (instead of listening primarily to their donors) when deciding overall direction for an agency.
It seems like lifetime appointments for senators and single term limits for representatives are opposite approaches to the same problem that really don't form a solution. The last decade of term limits in California have taught us that it increases the number of incompetents in office and prematurely removes the competent. And I'm not sure lifetime appointments remove the greed that seems to accompany power.
How about we just appoint judges that don't equate bribery with free speech. Or ones that think the right to petition the government for redress of grievences doesn't include the right to buy a yacht for a congressman that doesn't even represent you in exchange for favorable votes. How about public funding for campaigns and rendering all out-of-district campaign contributions illegal? How about we stop pretending that corporations should have the same rights as a person?
While we're at it, lets get rid of the practice of earmarking entirely.
Maybe the terrorists are not rational. Maybe they just hate us.
Sorry. Does not compute. Maybe you should try taking a history course. Or read a newspaper. The thing that should probably scare you the most about terrorism is that terrorists are not irriational. The thing that should scare you the least is their bombs, because you are far more likely to be struck by lightning. Or be murdered in prison.
Why do people always look to place blame internally? If you think that we can end terrorism by appeasment, then you are wrong. Failed with Hitler, and it will fail again. The only way to stop it is to remove them completely from the face of the Earth. Country by country, terrorist by terrorist.
Exactly! That's precisely why World War II wasn't won until we had exterminated every last German, Italian, and Japanese.
In the real world (rather than the one you live in,) our "War on Terror," especially the whole Iraq part, has been the best al Qaeda recruiting tool they could have come up with. You don't win the war on terror by making more terrorists than you kill. You win a war on terror by reducing the recruiting base for terrorists. And the only way to do that is to find the problems that cause people to become terrorism. This is not appeasment. It's more like "stop propping up failing dictatorships because they sell us oil and hold our hand when we walk through the garden at our Texas ranch."
So obvious you don't even have to produce evidence that that is the case, right?
Sorry, the way the Constitution and the U.S. Code are written there is supposed to be judicial and congressional oversight of wiretapping. Since the President, in violation of the Constitution and the U.S. Code, refuses to allow oversight, we can presume he is violating the law.
The presumption of innocence belongs to the people, not the government which (in theory) works for us. When the government witholds information from the people, we can presume it is working against our interests.
The concept of liberty is just lost on some people.
The problem is that the government is searching call record databases to see if numbers are calling their list of known bad numbers. Which means they're looking at everyone's calls and not just a select few. Once they find numbers that are calling those known bad numbers they then start the wiretapping.
And then they start wiretapping the lines that called the number that called the number on the "bad list".
And then they start wiretapping the lines that called the numbers that called the number that called the number on the "bad list".
How many iterations do you need before you're on the wiretap list?
Did you know that all the 9/11 hijackers had called a "Domino's Pizza" in the 6 months prior to 9/11. That's probably where they get their orders. After all, they all mentioned the word "order" in their calls. I think we should tap the lines of anyone who has ever called Domino's.
Slashdot Mirror
A: On the other side of this desk explaining why you won't be getting a severence package.
Works every time...
You've got to be a true red Republican to deny the greenhouse effect on Venus.
If you do the math, since temperature goes as the 1/4 power of the recieved radiation and the recieved radiation goes as the square of the distance, with all else being equal 25% closer gets you about 15% hotter. In other words without a greenhouse effect venus would be about 45C hotter than earth.
If you put the Earth at the location of Venus, the oceans wouldn't boil. Not immediately at least. What would happen is that the evaporation rate would increase which would put more water vapor in the air. Since water vapor is a greenhouse gas that would increase the temperature which would evaporate more water. That's an example of positive feedback. Eventually it would get hot enough for the oceans to boil.
Without the oceans to absorb CO2 and without the life forms in the ocean which take CO2 and turn it into rocks, the CO2 released in volcanos (not to mention the forests catching on fire) stays in the atmosphere where it adds further to the greenhouse effect.
The CO2 and all the water vapor combine to form carbonic acid which increases the weathering of carbonate rocks releasing still more CO2. Meanwhile UV radiation (sunlight) in the upper atmosphere dissociates the water vapor into oxygen and hydrogen. Because it is light, the hydrogen escapes into space. The oxygen oxidizes any unoxidized materials on the surface. If any of those materials contain accessable carbon, you've just released more CO2 and increased the greenhouse effect.
Plate tectonics continues on for a while releasing more CO2 until the point where the water bearing minerals that enable plate tectonics on the Earth have disappeared. Plate tectonics stops. At this point you've got... you guessed it... Venus. Not that you'd be caring. You died long before the oceans started boiling.
This is what would absolutely happen to the Earth if we were to raise its temperature by 45C. What we don't know is where the dividing line is. Maybe it's 25C. Maybe it's 5C. And so we've decided to raise the temperature by 3C in the next 100 years or so.
The main difference between the Earth and Venus isn't the temperature. It's where the CO2 is. In Venus, it's in the atmosphere. On Earth, it's in the rocks. Pour some vinegar on some limestone if you don't think it can come out again. The oceans are already becoming acidic enough to cause difficulties for some shell building organisms....
Sorry to be pedantic, but the proper adjective (despite what you may have heard on the 6 o'clock news) is Venereal. So what you are talking about is the Venereal greenhouse gas factory.
And don't you dare mod this as funny.
The main reason wages won't go up is that the workforce demand in the U.S. is finite, whereas for every C.S. graduate in the U.S. there are 10 in other countries willing to work for 10% of the salary. The supply of low wage outsourced workers is essentially unlimited. It'll continue to be that way until the cost of living in the U.S. drops to what it is in India and China.
IBM has no reason not to encourage college age kids to go into C.S. degrees. It'll drive down wages for the small fraction of jobs that can't be outsourced. IBM will more than make up for the fact that more U.S. workers can't afford to buy their products because 1% of the Indian and Chinese populations will be able to afford them.
Of course it's lower. For the same reason that suicide is cheaper than medical care. We might have to combat global warming for thousands of years. Or we could do nothing for a couple hundred.
In addition to it being a shrinkwrap license (and probably void for that reason alone), that portion of the license violates the doctrine of first sale and is IMHO unenforceable. If you uninstall it from one PC, you are free to install it on another regardless of what the license says.
MOD PARENT UP
Of course you can do nearly the same thing with a sound card and a microphone. Actually theres a good bet you don't need the microphone.
Recording at 8k samples per second without a microphone I get about 2 kbps of randomness out of my sound card. I mean really, is there any news here? It's not like there aren't any sources for random numbers out there that don't require use of a radio telescope.
Yeah, I'm sure you're uncorruptable. What happens when, at the next election, you can't get any campaign "contibutions" because you didn't do the bidding of your contributors. The answer is "you lose" because you can't be corrupted.
That's what the "money is speech" crowd doesn't seem to understand. It isn't really possible to be sucessful in pollitics and incorruptable at the same time. It's the money that corrupts (not the speech). The "money is speech" attitude makes regulating the money impossible.
This is another piece of right wing bullshit. A lie often repeated, but a lie nonetheless. It shows up nearly as often as another lie: "A corporation's only responsibility is to make money for its shareholders."
Despite the propoganda you may have heard, money is not speech and the freedom to do whatever you want with your money is not unrestricted, nor should it be. If you think it is, see what attempting to by crack cocaine from an undercover officer gets you.
It's your right to call up your congressman and ask him to do you a favor. It is not your right to pay him to do you a favor. It is also not your right to pay for his campaign advertising in exchage for a favor.
It is your right to say whatever you want. It is not necessarily a right to get paid for saying it, nor is it necessarily a right to have an anonymous party pay for distributions of your message.
Name one.
It seems to me I've seen organizations with even larger collections use a similar system.
Am I missing the point? Is this harder than it seems to be? 3500 books is only about 15 standard size (3 foot by 7 foot) bookshelves (assuming no paperbacks).
Yeah, lets replace someone who gained popularity by pretending to be in control after 9/11 with someone who gained popularity by pretending to be in control after 9/11.
The belief that church based charities are somehow fairer, more efficient, or less expensive than others is not based upon evidence. Churches tend to spend their money on upgrades to the facilities used by their parishoners and their clergy. Individual churches tend to segregate their charitable work by race and by religion. Lately churches have started spending their money on political action. (Not to mention that churches are already getting my money by not paying taxes.) And much of that political action has been directed towards making government services less efficient (by strangling them financially) and toward acquisition of funding from the government for themselves. Nothing makes government look inefficient like giving them $10 to do a $1000 job.
As money has been directed away from secular charities and government services toward churches, the number of beds available for the homeless has declined. Prior to the "faith based initiative," faith based organizations that received government funding were actually required to provide the services for which they were being paid and to not use the money as a recruiting tool.
Anyone who thinks that government can't help people has never met a county social worker, didn't go to a public school, doesn't travel on government roads, has never been unemployed, and is pretty much an idiot. Most people who claim that are usually thinking "Government can help people, but I don't want to pay for it. I'd rather give my money to my church so they can by a big screen TV for the "overflow room."
God forbid you become homeless, because your church probably doesn't have a homeless shelter and the preist isn't going to invite you to live with him in the rectory. Try to sleep in the "overflow room" and they'll gladly find you a room in the county lockup.
You said it. The high quality, low price, and unversal access of health care in the U.S. is due to the lack of government interference. Let's keep it that way.
Getting real: Prior to the corporate boondoggle prescription drug "benefit," the "inflated cost" due to the "bureaucracy" of Medicare was about 1/20th of the "low cost" of corporate health insurance.
No thanks; I don't want any government anywhere near my connection.
Yeah, its so much better for an unregulated monopoly like AT&T or Comcast to control our connections. I certainly enjoy paying their low low prices.
I'm sorry, but only a fscking idiot would buy a house to get the mortgage deduction. Most people buy them to live in. Some buy them as an investment. But no sane person buys for the mortgage deduction.
Gee, if I pay a bank $15,000 a year in interest I can take $4500 a year off my taxes? Where do I sign up? That's so much better than putting that $15,000 into my 401(k)/403(b)/457/IRA/Keogh plan.
In related news: Morrison & Foerster : Legal Updates & News : Press Releases : MoFo One of 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers
A set of four hearing aid batteries powered the damn thing for about 5 years. How long do your PDA's batteries last?
Of course I had been writing programs for years before I saw my first computer. I taught myself BASIC about 2 years before I sat down at a computer keyboard. That computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 with level 1 BASIC. Then again, I taught myself FORTRAN about 7 years before I got to use a computer with a FORTRAN compiler (a VAX 11/730).
This isn't and would never be considered a hate crime. This is a strawman thrown out there to obscure the real issues.
If you kill a gay man because you hate gays how is that anything other than a murder?
You've been listening to the right wing talking heads too much. The intent of the crime does matter because it changes the scope of the crime. In this case the purpose or the result of the murder is to instill fear into a specific class of people or to incite others to commit similar crimes. All members of the class are victimized. That makes it a more serious crime deserving of harsher punishment.
On the other hand, if you kill a gay man because he was sleeping with your boyfriend, there is no crime against a class of people.
I don't know if English is Linus's second or third language. Maybe we need a Sweedish translation? It doesn't seem that complex to me.
Nothing in the draft GPL version 3 prevents signed binaries provided that unsigned binaries can be created and run.
What it does prevent is any mechanism by which the binary cannot be run without being decrypted with a specific key. It also prevents distribution of encrypted source as a means of avoiding the source distribution requirements of the GPL.
As far as I can tell in the current GPL prevents Linus from getting up tomorrow and deciding that linux kernel binaries and the source will be delivered in encrypted form. Decryption keys that will function for 10 days will be available for the reasonable sum of $250. You can still have your kernel binaries and a source tarball for free. You just can't use them without the keys.
Now, I'm not claiming that Linus has alterior motives. This tale above is a far-fetched scenario. But think about the number of device manufacturers that have attempted to keep their kernel changes to themselves.
I think it's likely that he misinterpreted the draft, made some public statements based upon that misinterpretation, and is now reluctant to admit he made a mistake. It happens to a lot of people.
Witholding money usually doesn't work, either.
What usually does work is putting competent people in charge and letting them and the peer review process direct the money to where it is needed. It's also a big help if Congress and the President listen to competent people (instead of listening primarily to their donors) when deciding overall direction for an agency.
It seems like lifetime appointments for senators and single term limits for representatives are opposite approaches to the same problem that really don't form a solution. The last decade of term limits in California have taught us that it increases the number of incompetents in office and prematurely removes the competent. And I'm not sure lifetime appointments remove the greed that seems to accompany power.
How about we just appoint judges that don't equate bribery with free speech. Or ones that think the right to petition the government for redress of grievences doesn't include the right to buy a yacht for a congressman that doesn't even represent you in exchange for favorable votes. How about public funding for campaigns and rendering all out-of-district campaign contributions illegal? How about we stop pretending that corporations should have the same rights as a person?
While we're at it, lets get rid of the practice of earmarking entirely.
Sorry. Does not compute. Maybe you should try taking a history course. Or read a newspaper. The thing that should probably scare you the most about terrorism is that terrorists are not irriational. The thing that should scare you the least is their bombs, because you are far more likely to be struck by lightning. Or be murdered in prison.
Why do people always look to place blame internally? If you think that we can end terrorism by appeasment, then you are wrong. Failed with Hitler, and it will fail again. The only way to stop it is to remove them completely from the face of the Earth. Country by country, terrorist by terrorist.
Exactly! That's precisely why World War II wasn't won until we had exterminated every last German, Italian, and Japanese.
In the real world (rather than the one you live in,) our "War on Terror," especially the whole Iraq part, has been the best al Qaeda recruiting tool they could have come up with. You don't win the war on terror by making more terrorists than you kill. You win a war on terror by reducing the recruiting base for terrorists. And the only way to do that is to find the problems that cause people to become terrorism. This is not appeasment. It's more like "stop propping up failing dictatorships because they sell us oil and hold our hand when we walk through the garden at our Texas ranch."
Sorry, the way the Constitution and the U.S. Code are written there is supposed to be judicial and congressional oversight of wiretapping. Since the President, in violation of the Constitution and the U.S. Code, refuses to allow oversight, we can presume he is violating the law.
The presumption of innocence belongs to the people, not the government which (in theory) works for us. When the government witholds information from the people, we can presume it is working against our interests.
The concept of liberty is just lost on some people.
The illegality of the NSA's wiretapping is obvious. It is only being debated by those that think "is not!" is a strong argument.
And then they start wiretapping the lines that called the number that called the number on the "bad list".
And then they start wiretapping the lines that called the numbers that called the number that called the number on the "bad list".
How many iterations do you need before you're on the wiretap list?
Did you know that all the 9/11 hijackers had called a "Domino's Pizza" in the 6 months prior to 9/11. That's probably where they get their orders. After all, they all mentioned the word "order" in their calls. I think we should tap the lines of anyone who has ever called Domino's.