I think I'm seeing a trend in movies like this that focus on a small group of "normal" people swept along in some extraordinary, but familiar circumstances - either fictional or historical. Contrast Cloverfield with Godzilla, in which the protagonists are not normal - they're at the heart of the story. Another couple movies that used this idea successfully are Titanic and Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Got other examples?
99.9% of the 1,468 daily newspapers in the United States are the only daily in their cities.
Hmm. Only one in a thousand? I live in Seattle and there's the Times and the Post-Intelligencer. That's 2. So either Seattle is unique and someone rounded up to 99.9% or that stat is bogus.
Also, I've seen Michael Copps speak. He seems to have intelligence and integrity. Great combo.
I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but the probable cause phrase is clearly one of the requirements for issuing a warrant. If I was a judge and was shown probable cause of someone conspiring to inflict casualties, I would certainly issue a warrant.
Did you mistype that last paragraph? The taps were on American citizens, and you need a warrant when one of the parties is an American citizen?
Legality aside, have you heard a rational argument against following the FISA statute? Isn't wiretapping important enough to have some oversight? Remember that the warrants can be issued after the fact. To not even go to the FISA court afterward makes the tappers unaccountable. And in my book, "too much paperwork" doesn't cut it as an excuse.
congress cannot pass any laws restricting the roles that the constitution places on the president unless the constitution specifically allows them to.
It's even simpler than that. Congress does not need to check if the constitution allows them to pass a law restricting warrantless wiretapping. The constitution itself already makes that illegal, in the 4th Amendment. I'll agree with you about Congress being chicken though. The President has publicly admitted to breaking the law, but the Congress will not act.
You're off the mark on this one. First, because the TCP transport layer protocol is inappropriate for real time applications - use UDP with RTP on top of it. For instance, there's no need to retransmit dropped packets; in fact waiting for a retransmitted packet before continuing would be worse than having a few milliseconds of dead air. Second, because the latency is due to the the characteristics of the physical layer. So any physical medium that can handle voice + data can handle data, including VOIP.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt at first, though I thought it very odd. But your ridiculousness convinced me you weren't really so confused, just looking for an argument.
You certainly are a pro at constructing and knocking over straw men.
No, that's a completely false dichotomy.
I was vague originally and you attacked a ridiculous interpretation of it. Before and after my clarification, the dichotomy is only in your mind. There are many more than 2 possible reactions to abuse of power, as if that needed to be said. To avoid further confusion, I am specifically not recommending such other reactions as: apathy, armed rebellion, buying of Halliburton stock or blowing up the whole planet and letting Cthulhu sort 'em out.
Transparency is just one tool, and frankly, it's ridiculous to believe that transparency accomplishes anything on it's own.
Of course that would be ridiculous. So ridiculous that only your own straw man would make such a claim. I, for instance, recommended (right there in the title!) both knowledge of what's going on (transparency) and the power to do something about it (checks and balances).
You seem confrontational, yet agree with me except for my poor wording; "The other" should be "Another" in the 2nd sentence.
Transparency is part of the solution, as I clearly wrote. It is required for informed oversight. Transparency can be improved with legislation (strengthing FOIA), court rulings (limiting executive privilege) and rule changes (no more anonymous holds on Senate bills). Most of the checking and balancing power is in place (congressional review of pardons would be nice), but the courage and principles are lacking in Congress. Improved transparency would help those with the courage and principles, as well as bring more public pressure on those without. We can also improve the quality of congresspeople with things like clean money campaign financing and something like a vote ranking system. That would also do a lot to break up the two party system.
One reaction to abuse of governmental power is to restrict it as much as possible. The other is to have transparency in government and checks and balances. The secrecy of the current administration is a dangerous precedent, even if you agree with their policies. They should be working for us and shouldn't be able to hide so much of their work. Thankfully we have things like the FOIA and the Sunlight Foundation. Checks and balances are part of the foundation of our system of government. Again, the current administration's "unitary executive" theory is a dangerous precedent.
Sounds like one of those Republican talking points - government is bad, and we'll show you just how bad. Do you like the Internet? Do you understand how radically different it would be if there had never been network neutrality? Maybe we'd all be on something like Compuserve, or AOL with only their own content.
In response to your.sig, I think you should amend to cover any alternative energy. Current ethanol programs are mostly giveaways to big agri-business. If it was serious, it would not rely so heavily on corn, as there is so little (if any!) return on energy investment.
We *don't* believe that evolution is a viable means of speciation
So you're willfully ignorant of the science? Why not admit it but say there's an exception for homo sapiens? And the rest happened according to evolution as set in place by god. Neat, tidy, doesn't require any evidence and isn't directly contradicted by facts.
Seriously...some of us have been to Estonia. Get out and see the world sometime! Food was cheap there, but I don't know about computer costs. Tallinn is a modern city and I hear the tech sector is quite advanced. Not sure if Paul's got some connection to Estonia or he just meant some place that might lack the criminal investigation resources to follow up on that sort of thing.
Aha, I hadn't connected your use of treasonous to WindBourne's. Anyway, I still disagree about Pelosi trying to undermine the President's foreign policy. Did she say anything that wasn't in line with our stated foreign policy? Or was meeting regardless of what was said the undermining? If so, that seems to be a new standard not applied in the past, in similar situations and even the exact same situation (both geographically and temporally).
I took Pelosi's trip as an attempt for the first woman Speaker to appear serious and credible in foreign policy. I took the Administration's response as mock outrage since it seemed to be unprecedented outrage, they had plenty of chance to speak up before her trip, the State Department briefed her and our embassy in Damascus offered to help.
Well, yeah, I was kinda assuming that you weren't personally involved in this whole mess.
I think it's okay
Wow. Is there any politicization of any part of government that you think would be going too far? You're apparently on record supporting a President's right to fire anyone so bold as to investigate a member of his own party. Do I have that right? Would you be ok with the next President diverting half the FBI's resources into fishing expeditions targeting political opponents? Where do you draw the line? Or is there no line? Perhaps you think if it becomes too bad the public will voice their opinion at the polls. Well, shouldn't their representatives then be able to gather evidence of what exactly they've been up to so the public has some facts on which to base their votes?
Congress does not have evidence that a crime was committed. The whole point of the investigation is to find evidence.
Wow, you wrote my response for me! When something's suspicious, you investigate. And you don't impeach before the investigation and without the resulting evidence. Our representatives have a constitutional right to demand answers from the Executive and Judicial branches on our behalf.
Most of us want to live in a country where some things are non-partisan as much as possible. We want judges that rule based on the law, not on who the defendant is. We want public servants that don't rewrite scientific conclusions for political gain. We want people qualified for the job appointed, not someone's college friend who'll give lucrative contracts to the right people. And the whole thing falls apart when there are no checks or balances.
Yeah, I was a bit glib with that first sentence. She's continued it herself, not just allowed it. I'll be very disappointed and vocal if there's not some significant effort by this Congress to clean up the pork-o-rama nature of Washington. But if there can be any justification for that sort of thing, an urgent life or death matter is about as good as you'll get.
Re: Syria, I'm just pointing out that it's a vague law that hasn't stood up in court and if it applies in this case, it's been routinely violated over and over and over again. And as far as I can tell, Pelosi didn't undermine anything anyway. I guess your use of the word "treasonous" set me off. Sounded inappropriate and rather Coulterish.
And what if the reason was that they wouldn't bring flimsy charges against Democrats or wouldn't lay off Republicans? Is that okay with you? I'm guessing you'll either say that's ok or that it's not ok but there's no evidence of that.
If it's ok, that sets a chilling precedent. Imagine a Democratic President wielding the full force of the FBI, IRS and Justice to unabashedly attack Republicans 2 years from now. Even apart from the misuse of power, that would take them away from the jobs they ought to be doing. If you're ok with this, maybe you think that the voters will have the final say if an administration gets out of line.
If it's not ok, but you argue that there's no evidence of that...well that could either be that it didn't happen or that it was covered up. If it didn't happen, then what is the reason for the firings? We're still waiting for something plausible. And Gonzalez is still rehearsing to sound plausible for his appearance next Tuesday. If there was evidence of wrongdoing, deleting millions of White House emails might be a good way of covering it up. And if you thought about it in advance, you might not even use White House email...you might use RNC email systems that don't fall under the Presidential Records Act. I've heard righties say that the Libby conviction was unjust because Fitzgerald had no proof of an underlying crime. But that's just it - what would he have been able to prove if Libby had told the truth? What would we know about this case if officials hadn't lied, the administration hadn't stonewalled and millions of records hadn't gone missing? If you obstruct justice, the natural suspicion is that you're covering for something even worse (in some way) than obstruction of justice.
In either case (ok, not ok), I hope we can at least agree that Congress should be able to investigate such things. In my opinion, this molehill is the top of a mountain that's been covered up. Much more to come. Check out the latest from Wisconsin. And Goodling may be granted immunity. Bet she could spill a lot of beans if she wanted.
Darn that Pelosi...she hasn't singlehandedly done away with pork in Congress. You should be asking if it's better or worse than in the last Congress. I don't know the answer to that. But even if pork cleanup is important to her, I could understand having an issue like Iraq as a higher or more urgent priority. I think the minimum we should expect from Congress is a clear record of who adds what to a bill - no more anonymous additions or deletions. And it was only an "emergency" spending bill because Bush refuses to put it in the normal budgets in an apparent effort to hide the enormity of his deficits (i.e. it's really not an unexpected emergency that came up).
Complaining about her going to Syria seems a bit ridiculous. The Logan Act has had 2 indictments in 200+ years and both were dismissed. With so little judicial precedent, the question of whether there's any technicality there is uncertain. Who knows how the current Supreme Court would rule, but I can't imagine them discounting the First Amendment altogether. If there is a technical breach, well there are plenty of Republicans that would be caught in the same technicality, including ones on the same trip with Speaker Pelosi, Speaker Gingrich on his trip to China and Speaker Delay in his dealings with Israel regarding Palestine. Not to mention thousands of other Americans that deal with foreign governments.
Clinton replaced them all at the beginning of his first term, as is the custom, especially when they were appointed by a Prez from the opposition party (GHWB). GWB did the same at the beginning of his first term. What is without precedent is firing several of their own appointees years later and then bungling the story of why they were fired. And there are even emails of people brainstorming excuses for the firings (hey, we could say it's for immigration reasons, that seems plausible). You've got to be pretty gullible to not be suspicious of that.
Keep griping about Democrats by all means; they need their feet held to the fire. But they did just take control of Congress recently. Impeachment has to come after investigations, or there will be a big backlash against them. Every week has a new scandal bubbling up or a major revelation in an existing scandal. Eventually this will lead to impeachment, or in the loss of credibility of any Representative or Senator that sticks with the Prez.
Think of it this way - a criminal prosecutor won't take a case to court until he or she thinks they've got enough evidence to convict. If you go too soon and the suspect beats the rap, you've lost your chance. Political reality says if you try to impeach for something with borderline evidence, you'll need even more evidence the next time you try. This is exactly why the bar is so high right now - public distaste over the Clinton impeachment.
Well, the Clinton impeachment wasn't over a blowjob, it was over lying under oath. Yes, it was slimy tactics to get him to answer questions about legal but embarssing stuff in the first place.
What is this proof of Dem and Reps being part of the same gang you're referring to? Seemed like you were saying Reps were to blame for impeachment over a minor matter and that Reps were corrupt in the current situation as well.
If you want to make the "same gang" argument, try a pork angle or maybe a corporations before citizens angle. I think there's a case to be made there.
Anyone have a good resource link for larger scale than this question is covering? Looking for several (up to dozens) of cabinets in multiple locations. Must have multiple gigabit internet access links available. Concerned about cooling and power - cabinets will be dense and I understand some colo sites have had problems in those areas. Cabinet, power and bandwidth pricing are important as well. Not so concerned about location (though U.S. to start), remote hands and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
I loved it too and was skeptical going in.
I think I'm seeing a trend in movies like this that focus on a small group of "normal" people swept along in some extraordinary, but familiar circumstances - either fictional or historical. Contrast Cloverfield with Godzilla, in which the protagonists are not normal - they're at the heart of the story. Another couple movies that used this idea successfully are Titanic and Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Got other examples?
Here's a classic sci-fi (extremely) short story on the topic of an immense computer. Frederic Brown's "Answer":
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
Hmm. Only one in a thousand? I live in Seattle and there's the Times and the Post-Intelligencer. That's 2. So either Seattle is unique and someone rounded up to 99.9% or that stat is bogus.
Also, I've seen Michael Copps speak. He seems to have intelligence and integrity. Great combo.
I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but the probable cause phrase is clearly one of the requirements for issuing a warrant. If I was a judge and was shown probable cause of someone conspiring to inflict casualties, I would certainly issue a warrant.
Did you mistype that last paragraph? The taps were on American citizens, and you need a warrant when one of the parties is an American citizen?
Legality aside, have you heard a rational argument against following the FISA statute? Isn't wiretapping important enough to have some oversight? Remember that the warrants can be issued after the fact. To not even go to the FISA court afterward makes the tappers unaccountable. And in my book, "too much paperwork" doesn't cut it as an excuse.
It's even simpler than that. Congress does not need to check if the constitution allows them to pass a law restricting warrantless wiretapping. The constitution itself already makes that illegal, in the 4th Amendment. I'll agree with you about Congress being chicken though. The President has publicly admitted to breaking the law, but the Congress will not act.
You're off the mark on this one. First, because the TCP transport layer protocol is inappropriate for real time applications - use UDP with RTP on top of it. For instance, there's no need to retransmit dropped packets; in fact waiting for a retransmitted packet before continuing would be worse than having a few milliseconds of dead air. Second, because the latency is due to the the characteristics of the physical layer. So any physical medium that can handle voice + data can handle data, including VOIP.
I gave you the benefit of the doubt at first, though I thought it very odd. But your ridiculousness convinced me you weren't really so confused, just looking for an argument.
You seem confrontational, yet agree with me except for my poor wording; "The other" should be "Another" in the 2nd sentence.
Transparency is part of the solution, as I clearly wrote. It is required for informed oversight. Transparency can be improved with legislation (strengthing FOIA), court rulings (limiting executive privilege) and rule changes (no more anonymous holds on Senate bills). Most of the checking and balancing power is in place (congressional review of pardons would be nice), but the courage and principles are lacking in Congress. Improved transparency would help those with the courage and principles, as well as bring more public pressure on those without. We can also improve the quality of congresspeople with things like clean money campaign financing and something like a vote ranking system. That would also do a lot to break up the two party system.
One reaction to abuse of governmental power is to restrict it as much as possible. The other is to have transparency in government and checks and balances. The secrecy of the current administration is a dangerous precedent, even if you agree with their policies. They should be working for us and shouldn't be able to hide so much of their work. Thankfully we have things like the FOIA and the Sunlight Foundation. Checks and balances are part of the foundation of our system of government. Again, the current administration's "unitary executive" theory is a dangerous precedent.
Sounds like one of those Republican talking points - government is bad, and we'll show you just how bad. Do you like the Internet? Do you understand how radically different it would be if there had never been network neutrality? Maybe we'd all be on something like Compuserve, or AOL with only their own content.
Nice snark. :)
.sig, I think you should amend to cover any alternative energy. Current ethanol programs are mostly giveaways to big agri-business. If it was serious, it would not rely so heavily on corn, as there is so little (if any!) return on energy investment.
In response to your
And when the public gives you a monopoly, the public deserves some consideration.
So you're willfully ignorant of the science? Why not admit it but say there's an exception for homo sapiens? And the rest happened according to evolution as set in place by god. Neat, tidy, doesn't require any evidence and isn't directly contradicted by facts.
Seriously...some of us have been to Estonia. Get out and see the world sometime! Food was cheap there, but I don't know about computer costs. Tallinn is a modern city and I hear the tech sector is quite advanced. Not sure if Paul's got some connection to Estonia or he just meant some place that might lack the criminal investigation resources to follow up on that sort of thing.
Aha, I hadn't connected your use of treasonous to WindBourne's. Anyway, I still disagree about Pelosi trying to undermine the President's foreign policy. Did she say anything that wasn't in line with our stated foreign policy? Or was meeting regardless of what was said the undermining? If so, that seems to be a new standard not applied in the past, in similar situations and even the exact same situation (both geographically and temporally).
I took Pelosi's trip as an attempt for the first woman Speaker to appear serious and credible in foreign policy. I took the Administration's response as mock outrage since it seemed to be unprecedented outrage, they had plenty of chance to speak up before her trip, the State Department briefed her and our embassy in Damascus offered to help.
Most of us want to live in a country where some things are non-partisan as much as possible. We want judges that rule based on the law, not on who the defendant is. We want public servants that don't rewrite scientific conclusions for political gain. We want people qualified for the job appointed, not someone's college friend who'll give lucrative contracts to the right people. And the whole thing falls apart when there are no checks or balances.
Yeah, I was a bit glib with that first sentence. She's continued it herself, not just allowed it. I'll be very disappointed and vocal if there's not some significant effort by this Congress to clean up the pork-o-rama nature of Washington. But if there can be any justification for that sort of thing, an urgent life or death matter is about as good as you'll get.
Re: Syria, I'm just pointing out that it's a vague law that hasn't stood up in court and if it applies in this case, it's been routinely violated over and over and over again. And as far as I can tell, Pelosi didn't undermine anything anyway. I guess your use of the word "treasonous" set me off. Sounded inappropriate and rather Coulterish.
And what if the reason was that they wouldn't bring flimsy charges against Democrats or wouldn't lay off Republicans? Is that okay with you? I'm guessing you'll either say that's ok or that it's not ok but there's no evidence of that.
If it's ok, that sets a chilling precedent. Imagine a Democratic President wielding the full force of the FBI, IRS and Justice to unabashedly attack Republicans 2 years from now. Even apart from the misuse of power, that would take them away from the jobs they ought to be doing. If you're ok with this, maybe you think that the voters will have the final say if an administration gets out of line.
If it's not ok, but you argue that there's no evidence of that...well that could either be that it didn't happen or that it was covered up. If it didn't happen, then what is the reason for the firings? We're still waiting for something plausible. And Gonzalez is still rehearsing to sound plausible for his appearance next Tuesday. If there was evidence of wrongdoing, deleting millions of White House emails might be a good way of covering it up. And if you thought about it in advance, you might not even use White House email...you might use RNC email systems that don't fall under the Presidential Records Act. I've heard righties say that the Libby conviction was unjust because Fitzgerald had no proof of an underlying crime. But that's just it - what would he have been able to prove if Libby had told the truth? What would we know about this case if officials hadn't lied, the administration hadn't stonewalled and millions of records hadn't gone missing? If you obstruct justice, the natural suspicion is that you're covering for something even worse (in some way) than obstruction of justice.
In either case (ok, not ok), I hope we can at least agree that Congress should be able to investigate such things. In my opinion, this molehill is the top of a mountain that's been covered up. Much more to come. Check out the latest from Wisconsin. And Goodling may be granted immunity. Bet she could spill a lot of beans if she wanted.
Darn that Pelosi...she hasn't singlehandedly done away with pork in Congress. You should be asking if it's better or worse than in the last Congress. I don't know the answer to that. But even if pork cleanup is important to her, I could understand having an issue like Iraq as a higher or more urgent priority. I think the minimum we should expect from Congress is a clear record of who adds what to a bill - no more anonymous additions or deletions. And it was only an "emergency" spending bill because Bush refuses to put it in the normal budgets in an apparent effort to hide the enormity of his deficits (i.e. it's really not an unexpected emergency that came up).
Complaining about her going to Syria seems a bit ridiculous. The Logan Act has had 2 indictments in 200+ years and both were dismissed. With so little judicial precedent, the question of whether there's any technicality there is uncertain. Who knows how the current Supreme Court would rule, but I can't imagine them discounting the First Amendment altogether. If there is a technical breach, well there are plenty of Republicans that would be caught in the same technicality, including ones on the same trip with Speaker Pelosi, Speaker Gingrich on his trip to China and Speaker Delay in his dealings with Israel regarding Palestine. Not to mention thousands of other Americans that deal with foreign governments.
Clinton replaced them all at the beginning of his first term, as is the custom, especially when they were appointed by a Prez from the opposition party (GHWB). GWB did the same at the beginning of his first term. What is without precedent is firing several of their own appointees years later and then bungling the story of why they were fired. And there are even emails of people brainstorming excuses for the firings (hey, we could say it's for immigration reasons, that seems plausible). You've got to be pretty gullible to not be suspicious of that.
Keep griping about Democrats by all means; they need their feet held to the fire. But they did just take control of Congress recently. Impeachment has to come after investigations, or there will be a big backlash against them. Every week has a new scandal bubbling up or a major revelation in an existing scandal. Eventually this will lead to impeachment, or in the loss of credibility of any Representative or Senator that sticks with the Prez.
Think of it this way - a criminal prosecutor won't take a case to court until he or she thinks they've got enough evidence to convict. If you go too soon and the suspect beats the rap, you've lost your chance. Political reality says if you try to impeach for something with borderline evidence, you'll need even more evidence the next time you try. This is exactly why the bar is so high right now - public distaste over the Clinton impeachment.
Well, the Clinton impeachment wasn't over a blowjob, it was over lying under oath. Yes, it was slimy tactics to get him to answer questions about legal but embarssing stuff in the first place.
What is this proof of Dem and Reps being part of the same gang you're referring to? Seemed like you were saying Reps were to blame for impeachment over a minor matter and that Reps were corrupt in the current situation as well.
If you want to make the "same gang" argument, try a pork angle or maybe a corporations before citizens angle. I think there's a case to be made there.
It's a traditional thing, much like the 18.5 minute gap in Nixon's tapes or the shredding of Enron documents:
n _scandal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watergate_tapes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Enro
Anyone have a good resource link for larger scale than this question is covering? Looking for several (up to dozens) of cabinets in multiple locations. Must have multiple gigabit internet access links available. Concerned about cooling and power - cabinets will be dense and I understand some colo sites have had problems in those areas. Cabinet, power and bandwidth pricing are important as well. Not so concerned about location (though U.S. to start), remote hands and so on.