The Islamist goal is not simple destruction of certain features of Western society, but the replacement of its lifestyle and beliefs with sharia.
At least so say the conspiracy theoriests. On possible reason for not wanting a case to be heard by a court would be if the entire accusation were nothing but unsubstatiated conspiracy theory. (Judges tend to require prosecutors to present reasonable proof of their claims.)
You either have the rule of law, or you have "national security." They are mutually exclusive.
Actually without rule of law your nation is unlikely to be that secure in the first place.
All too often "national security" is code for "CYA for someone associated with government". Most of the time actual "national security" would require showing him or her for the fool that they are.
This is a "we don't tell you how much but we cut you off anyhow" issue.
Which can equate to "we can cut you off whenever we feel like it". Which could well be rather dodgy if you have already paid them and they don't refund your money PDQ.
State lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a bill that proposes that 'as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.'
If the legal code in New Mexico is so good that there's no need to pass, repeal or ammend any laws maybe all the "lawmakers" should go home and give the people there a refund on their taxes instead... Alternativly maybe they should do their actual jobs!
I'm not an expert, but why would a volunteer army attack its own country? I think if you saw a true revolution in this country (or any country with a volunteer army, and even most with a compulsory army) the army would quickly be either on the civilian side or split into warring factions.
There have also been revolutions in recent history where the regular army have just stayed in their barracks until things were over. Consider that in order to put down the Tiananmen Square protest the Chinese had to get soliders from a completly different part of china. In the case of both the UK and the US there's also the little matter of how much army isn't several thousand miles away too...
As usual, there is a happy medium in there somewhere, which I think in the U.S. we generally overshoot. As someone said here on Slashdot, the problem with the "Something Must Be Done" philosophy, is that it lends itself too easily to "this is something, therefore, it must be done."
All too often the somthing dosn't really have much to do with the whatever in hand. It can be a political adgenda which someone is pushing.
People will do things, simply for the sake of doing them, even if they're not productive (or counter-productive). They are so preoccupied with doing that they don't think about the long term effects, or even the efficacy, of what's being done.
Though the lobbiests who told the politicans what the "something" should be may well have some idea...
Obviously it's not good if hundreds of people get food poisoning at a restaurant, and everyone who's in a position to do something about it just shrugs and says "hey, that's life."
Food poisoning in a restaurant is something unusual. A huge number of people eat in a huge number of resturants and don't get food poisoning. That is the norm for people eating food in a resturant. Thus it makes sense to investigate what was unusual about that resturant or those diners (or both).
But just as obviously, it ought to be clear that it's counterproductive to have a reaction that's disconnected either logically or in scope, with the original event.
Which is especially useless if done as an alternative to a proper investigation.
And too often, that's what we do here. We seem to go after things that have the appearance or 'gut feeling' of being helpful, but without really thinking about them too hard.
"gut feelings" can easily be manipulated by propaganda. Which can also encourage not thinking "too much".
Somewhere between catatonia (not giving a shit) and mania (caring too much, to the point where there's not time to think about what should really be done), there's got to be a better way.
That would be starting with a calm and rational investigation. Also allowing it to take however long it was going to take and allowing it to "follow the evidence" even if that evidence lead somewhere politically incorrect.
I think the OP was trying to make the comment that people have knee jerk reactions. A lot of the reactions are stupid and the priorities have been inverted. These things have caused a lot of problems on their own.
Problems which may well be worst that the whatever was ment to be solved (possibly still leaving the original problem).
Politicians like to make pronouncements about how they'll fix the system. Almost 100% of the time this is just propaganda because what they really believe or what the experts really support "doesn't have a nice ring to it".
The real experts may not have a politically correct "solution". The worst case senario is where the "solution" actually causes the "problem" and the politicans are either too stupid to understand positive feedback or too boneheaded to admit they made a mistake. e.g. drug prohibition
Security is an obvious one.
Security is hard, most people don't understand security very well, sometimes things are even counterintuitive.
People are giving up freedoms with no real benefit.
But possibly at a real cost. These loss of freedoms may make people no safer from the likes of terrorist boogymen. Which are very rare even in comparison with other criminal acts. Whilst increasing the risk from corrupt, criminal or simply incompetent government officials.
I've had one of the more famous professors in data mining directly tell us how stupid it is to try and find "terrorism" in these sorts of data sets. There are too few training data points (actual terrorists) and too much data with a lot of variability. In essence false positives alone would make it all worthless.
Thus the question needs to be asked is what kind of activities is such a system good at spotting. Then how many of these are those these people should be looking for in the first place. Note that "security services" have often been doing plenty of things they shouldn't be doing even if they arn't failing to do things they should be doing. There's no reason to believe the Swedes are any better than anywhere else in this respect.
Crucially, the security services in many countries now have to give themselves a reason for being, wasting taxpayers money and continuing the old boy's network - which is where the exagerrated levels of terrorism and foreign threats come from.
It's odd that they tend to downplay the likes of Robert Cottage and David Jackson or Miles Cooper (let alone anti-abortionist and "animal rights" groups). Prefering instead to come up with elaborate conspiracy theories which might be better sent to the drama, rather than news, departments of TV stations.
We've had a ton of these arguments in the UK, and none of them stand up to scrutiny or evidence.
Some of them don't stand up to any scrutiny at all.
Call me crazy, but isn't it a lot simpler to just arrest people committing or suspected of committing these heavy crimes, and then ID them later (and even if you can't ID them, they're still arrested),
Assuming it is the job of the police to prevent and investigate crimes.
and not even approach people who are doing nothing more than jogging?
If the police have been given quotas for arrests it's probably a good idea for joggers to check they are carrying their IDs at the end of the month...
The real trouble is that the Patriot Act wasn't written with the possibility in mind that it might be abused.
This is hardly a problem with just that piece of legislation.
The best thing that can come of this is that our senators grow a collective set of balls, realize that Patriot Act makes a mockery of our professed idea of freedom, and pull in the reigns on this heinous piece of legislation.
Actually it's more along the lines of "realise that any piece of legislation is likely to be abused by anyone who thinks they can get away with it". Thus they should "do their job" which includes carefully reading every bill and thinking how it could be abused. Including insisting that any part which they don't understand is either removed or reworded.
All this government has to do is use the word "terrorist" in a sentence and all of your civil liberties are thrown out a window.
Even if this might be reasonable with people who actually acted like terrorists this isn't the case. The term is applied purely politically. Not only are a lot of people incorrectly labled as "terrorists" quite a few who should be are not. Thus even with the "war on terror" going on we have people being caught enguaged in terrorist acts not being prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws. So far only the Canadians appear to have realised...
No, if you see exhaust coming from anywhere under the vehicle other than the tailpipe, the cop has to check it.
If it was leaking into the cabin, any occupants would pass out, then die, possibly while doing 70 mph.
This sort of thing is very common, and cops hand out fix-it tickets probably 10-1 over anything else.
If fumes were actually entering the vehicle hopefully the cop would call an ambulance for the occupants and a tow truck for the car rather than just writing a ticket though.
That's probably because that judge knows a load of bullshit when he hears it. I mean, seriously, he decided to search the trunk because he noticed an exhaust leak?!?! Give me a break.
Probably to check that there were no holes which could allow exhaust fumes to enter. Being poisoned by exhaust fumes makes the driver a danger to themselves and other road users.
Is violation of the Constitution criminal or noncriminal?
Not really relevent since since the US Constitution is a statment of what the US Federal Government can and can't do as an entity. AFAIK the FBI isn't mentioned anywhere in the US Consitution. About the only way it might become relevent is in the context of people in the FBI taking an oath to uphold the US Consitution...
What this means is that information seized illegally, outside of the bounds of the statute, will not be available to federal prosecutors, not that anyone in the FBI will be prosecuted, because they may not have violated a specific criminal statute in doing so.
Except for "theft", "burglary", "armed robbery", "vandalism", etc. By the letter of the law a law enforcement officer is no different from a "common criminal".
It's like the man says: "Politicians are great at inventing a problem we'd like to solve, so that we can ignore problems we don't want to solve."
It can also be the case that politicans can be good at comming up with "solutions" which at best won't solve anything (or even make the problems in question worst). Actually solving problems can be very much against the interests of a politican.
Maybe the government should just build a Children's Earth and send all the children there, and ship them back when they turn 18. Maybe they should also build a Stupid Idiot planet and go there themselves.
The latter would be a lot cheaper since there's no need to get anyone back again. For a further economy just rename Venus and send them there...
If the patent is newer than about 1996, then I wouldn't say that making phone calls over the net wasn't quite obvious by then. Probably much earlier than that actually.
Considering that many "net" connections were telephone lines (of some kind or other) something more like 1976 might be a better date. Even earlier if you allow "sci-fi" to be considered "prior art".
In my opinion the obvious problem is Corporate greed and lack of ethics.
IIRC this is mandated by law. i.e. "corporate people" are intended to be what, if observed, in real people would be dangerously mentally ill "people" by design...
However, another problem (probably understated) are all the old judges, who did not grow up with any of this technology and have absolutely no clue what the hell the patent lawyers are saying.
There is also the issue of patent examiners who are similarly ignorant. Actually the problem is more that these people don't know that they are ignorant, that the ignorance itself. You'd expect a judge who knew he or she didn't understand the case to demand that the the sides explained it in terms they could understand or dismiss the case if they couldn't/wouldn't.
But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice.
It is also very different from previous versions of MS Office
Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience.
With the emphesis of "eventually" commercial orgainisations are very reluctant to spend money simply to make a "fashion statement".
Or, they could have a switch that turns on the new Military Puke Ray to incapacitate the terrorists (and passengers). After all, a plane-load of puking people has a certain zen quality about it.
You don't actually need some fancy device. Just the knowlage that pilots (and drivers) tend not to get motion sick...
Slashdot Mirror
The Islamist goal is not simple destruction of certain features of Western society, but the replacement of its lifestyle and beliefs with sharia.
At least so say the conspiracy theoriests. On possible reason for not wanting a case to be heard by a court would be if the entire accusation were nothing but unsubstatiated conspiracy theory. (Judges tend to require prosecutors to present reasonable proof of their claims.)
You either have the rule of law, or you have "national security." They are mutually exclusive.
Actually without rule of law your nation is unlikely to be that secure in the first place.
All too often "national security" is code for "CYA for someone associated with government". Most of the time actual "national security" would require showing him or her for the fool that they are.
The US tax base paid for the bombs that blew the hell out of the middle east,
Wrong tense, the US hasn't stopped doing this yet. The signs don't look good for this happening any time soon either.
now they're paying billions of dollars to a big company to fix the middle east,
Maybe paying lots of money, but where's the evidence of anything being fixed?
After which your DSL provider's technical support people informed you that your Linux box is not supported. :-)
Not that an ISP should really be supporting any OS in the first place.
This is a "we don't tell you how much but we cut you off anyhow" issue.
Which can equate to "we can cut you off whenever we feel like it". Which could well be rather dodgy if you have already paid them and they don't refund your money PDQ.
... that two college students think they're smarter than a bunch of politicians?
Or rather than a bunch of politicians think they are smarter than two PhD students.
State lawmakers will vote Tuesday on a bill that proposes that 'as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico's excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.'
If the legal code in New Mexico is so good that there's no need to pass, repeal or ammend any laws maybe all the "lawmakers" should go home and give the people there a refund on their taxes instead... Alternativly maybe they should do their actual jobs!
I'm not an expert, but why would a volunteer army attack its own country? I think if you saw a true revolution in this country (or any country with a volunteer army, and even most with a compulsory army) the army would quickly be either on the civilian side or split into warring factions.
There have also been revolutions in recent history where the regular army have just stayed in their barracks until things were over. Consider that in order to put down the Tiananmen Square protest the Chinese had to get soliders from a completly different part of china.
In the case of both the UK and the US there's also the little matter of how much army isn't several thousand miles away too...
As usual, there is a happy medium in there somewhere, which I think in the U.S. we generally overshoot. As someone said here on Slashdot, the problem with the "Something Must Be Done" philosophy, is that it lends itself too easily to "this is something, therefore, it must be done."
All too often the somthing dosn't really have much to do with the whatever in hand. It can be a political adgenda which someone is pushing.
People will do things, simply for the sake of doing them, even if they're not productive (or counter-productive). They are so preoccupied with doing that they don't think about the long term effects, or even the efficacy, of what's being done.
Though the lobbiests who told the politicans what the "something" should be may well have some idea...
Obviously it's not good if hundreds of people get food poisoning at a restaurant, and everyone who's in a position to do something about it just shrugs and says "hey, that's life."
Food poisoning in a restaurant is something unusual. A huge number of people eat in a huge number of resturants and don't get food poisoning. That is the norm for people eating food in a resturant. Thus it makes sense to investigate what was unusual about that resturant or those diners (or both).
But just as obviously, it ought to be clear that it's counterproductive to have a reaction that's disconnected either logically or in scope, with the original event.
Which is especially useless if done as an alternative to a proper investigation.
And too often, that's what we do here. We seem to go after things that have the appearance or 'gut feeling' of being helpful, but without really thinking about them too hard.
"gut feelings" can easily be manipulated by propaganda. Which can also encourage not thinking "too much".
Somewhere between catatonia (not giving a shit) and mania (caring too much, to the point where there's not time to think about what should really be done), there's got to be a better way.
That would be starting with a calm and rational investigation. Also allowing it to take however long it was going to take and allowing it to "follow the evidence" even if that evidence lead somewhere politically incorrect.
I think the OP was trying to make the comment that people have knee jerk reactions. A lot of the reactions are stupid and the priorities have been inverted. These things have caused a lot of problems on their own.
Problems which may well be worst that the whatever was ment to be solved (possibly still leaving the original problem).
Politicians like to make pronouncements about how they'll fix the system. Almost 100% of the time this is just propaganda because what they really believe or what the experts really support "doesn't have a nice ring to it".
The real experts may not have a politically correct "solution". The worst case senario is where the "solution" actually causes the "problem" and the politicans are either too stupid to understand positive feedback or too boneheaded to admit they made a mistake. e.g. drug prohibition
Security is an obvious one.
Security is hard, most people don't understand security very well, sometimes things are even counterintuitive.
People are giving up freedoms with no real benefit.
But possibly at a real cost. These loss of freedoms may make people no safer from the likes of terrorist boogymen. Which are very rare even in comparison with other criminal acts. Whilst increasing the risk from corrupt, criminal or simply incompetent government officials.
I've had one of the more famous professors in data mining directly tell us how stupid it is to try and find "terrorism" in these sorts of data sets. There are too few training data points (actual terrorists) and too much data with a lot of variability. In essence false positives alone would make it all worthless.
Thus the question needs to be asked is what kind of activities is such a system good at spotting. Then how many of these are those these people should be looking for in the first place.
Note that "security services" have often been doing plenty of things they shouldn't be doing even if they arn't failing to do things they should be doing. There's no reason to believe the Swedes are any better than anywhere else in this respect.
Crucially, the security services in many countries now have to give themselves a reason for being, wasting taxpayers money and continuing the old boy's network - which is where the exagerrated levels of terrorism and foreign threats come from.
It's odd that they tend to downplay the likes of Robert Cottage and David Jackson or Miles Cooper (let alone anti-abortionist and "animal rights" groups). Prefering instead to come up with elaborate conspiracy theories which might be better sent to the drama, rather than news, departments of TV stations.
We've had a ton of these arguments in the UK, and none of them stand up to scrutiny or evidence.
Some of them don't stand up to any scrutiny at all.
Call me crazy, but isn't it a lot simpler to just arrest people committing or suspected of committing these heavy crimes, and then ID them later (and even if you can't ID them, they're still arrested),
Assuming it is the job of the police to prevent and investigate crimes.
and not even approach people who are doing nothing more than jogging?
If the police have been given quotas for arrests it's probably a good idea for joggers to check they are carrying their IDs at the end of the month...
The real trouble is that the Patriot Act wasn't written with the possibility in mind that it might be abused.
This is hardly a problem with just that piece of legislation.
The best thing that can come of this is that our senators grow a collective set of balls, realize that Patriot Act makes a mockery of our professed idea of freedom, and pull in the reigns on this heinous piece of legislation.
Actually it's more along the lines of "realise that any piece of legislation is likely to be abused by anyone who thinks they can get away with it". Thus they should "do their job" which includes carefully reading every bill and thinking how it could be abused. Including insisting that any part which they don't understand is either removed or reworded.
All this government has to do is use the word "terrorist" in a sentence and all of your civil liberties are thrown out a window.
Even if this might be reasonable with people who actually acted like terrorists this isn't the case. The term is applied purely politically. Not only are a lot of people incorrectly labled as "terrorists" quite a few who should be are not. Thus even with the "war on terror" going on we have people being caught enguaged in terrorist acts not being prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws. So far only the Canadians appear to have realised...
No, if you see exhaust coming from anywhere under the vehicle other than the tailpipe, the cop has to check it.
If it was leaking into the cabin, any occupants would pass out, then die, possibly while doing 70 mph.
This sort of thing is very common, and cops hand out fix-it tickets probably 10-1 over anything else.
If fumes were actually entering the vehicle hopefully the cop would call an ambulance for the occupants and a tow truck for the car rather than just writing a ticket though.
That's probably because that judge knows a load of bullshit when he hears it. I mean, seriously, he decided to search the trunk because he noticed an exhaust leak?!?! Give me a break.
Probably to check that there were no holes which could allow exhaust fumes to enter. Being poisoned by exhaust fumes makes the driver a danger to themselves and other road users.
Is violation of the Constitution criminal or noncriminal?
Not really relevent since since the US Constitution is a statment of what the US Federal Government can and can't do as an entity. AFAIK the FBI isn't mentioned anywhere in the US Consitution.
About the only way it might become relevent is in the context of people in the FBI taking an oath to uphold the US Consitution...
What this means is that information seized illegally, outside of the bounds of the statute, will not be available to federal prosecutors, not that anyone in the FBI will be prosecuted, because they may not have violated a specific criminal statute in doing so.
Except for "theft", "burglary", "armed robbery", "vandalism", etc. By the letter of the law a law enforcement officer is no different from a "common criminal".
It's like the man says: "Politicians are great at inventing a problem we'd like to solve, so that we can ignore problems we don't want to solve."
It can also be the case that politicans can be good at comming up with "solutions" which at best won't solve anything (or even make the problems in question worst). Actually solving problems can be very much against the interests of a politican.
Maybe the government should just build a Children's Earth and send all the children there, and ship them back when they turn 18. Maybe they should also build a Stupid Idiot planet and go there themselves.
The latter would be a lot cheaper since there's no need to get anyone back again. For a further economy just rename Venus and send them there...
If the patent is newer than about 1996, then I wouldn't say that making phone calls over the net wasn't quite obvious by then. Probably much earlier than that actually.
Considering that many "net" connections were telephone lines (of some kind or other) something more like 1976 might be a better date. Even earlier if you allow "sci-fi" to be considered "prior art".
In my opinion the obvious problem is Corporate greed and lack of ethics.
IIRC this is mandated by law. i.e. "corporate people" are intended to be what, if observed, in real people would be dangerously mentally ill "people" by design...
However, another problem (probably understated) are all the old judges, who did not grow up with any of this technology and have absolutely no clue what the hell the patent lawyers are saying.
There is also the issue of patent examiners who are similarly ignorant. Actually the problem is more that these people don't know that they are ignorant, that the ignorance itself. You'd expect a judge who knew he or she didn't understand the case to demand that the the sides explained it in terms they could understand or dismiss the case if they couldn't/wouldn't.
But the interface of Office 2007 is vastly different from that of OpenOffice.
It is also very different from previous versions of MS Office
Those students may eventually be employed by someone who uses Office 2007 internally within their organization, and wants new employees to be familiar with it without any training, mandating prior experience.
With the emphesis of "eventually" commercial orgainisations are very reluctant to spend money simply to make a "fashion statement".
Or, they could have a switch that turns on the new Military Puke Ray to incapacitate the terrorists (and passengers). After all, a plane-load of puking people has a certain zen quality about it.
You don't actually need some fancy device. Just the knowlage that pilots (and drivers) tend not to get motion sick...