Between the way various article postings lately are all but Slashddot-sanctioned trolls (EU-only internet, anyone?), the fact that I don't think even Microsoft is so stupid as to try something like that when Judge Kolar-Kotelly hasn't signed off on anything one way or the other (Ballmer wouldn't want to find himself in a cell for contempt of court), and the story comes from "some sysadmin" whose "e-mail address" is in the Hotmail domain...
Well, let's just say I'll believe this story once it's verified by a third party.
"There only difference, in my mind, between a "guerilla" and a "terrorist" is which side the person talking is affiliated with."
Insightful... yeah, whatever
Apparently I was just too subtle for you in my last post. Let me spell out the difference in as simple terms as I can:
Geurilla: uses stick-and-move tactics to attack military targets only when they have a distinct tactical advantage, quickly blending into the background when the attack is over.
Terrorist: deliberately attacks civillian populations in an effort to sway public policy. Uses tactics that would run them afoul of the Hague accords.
Even simpler terms:
Guerilla: Aims specifically at military targets
Terrorist: Aims specifically at civillian targets.
Now for some examples:
Flying planes into skyscrapers: Terrorism.
Blowing up a destroyer: Guerilla warfare
Flying a plane into the Pentagon: Would have been guerilla warfare if it weren't for all the civillians on the plane
Blowing up a bus full of Israeli soldiers: guerilla warfare
Blowing up a bus full of Israeli schoolchildren: terrorism
Figured it out yet? I know you'd rather go back to the volley system but just because you don't agree with the tactics used doesn't make it terrorism.
"a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on)."
Because everybody knows that if you were born in a certain time period you must be a hippie.
No, I'm sorry, this whole "generational" bullshit is just another marketing gimick by the media moguls that are behind this current crack-down to begin with. I'm not going to put on a "Generation X" moniker just so you can make it easier for pollsters to water down my opinion with those of millions of others. Not by them and certainly not by you.
"A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors."
In case you haven't noticed the "younger generation" your cheerleading for is now the one in office in both the White House and Congress. Kinda screws up your theory there a bit, don't it?
"Another front on an intergenerational war, between the dinasaurs of the Jack Valenti Generation of Greed and the emerging, technically savvy information generation they seek to repress and quite possibly destroy."
No, I'm an individual and I refuse to be herded into the flock of sheep you're tending to. This ain't a God damned Pepsi commercial.
"Worse, we'll have to listen to even more self-righteous tripe along the lines"
Like the kind you just typed?
"Hell, I haven't even finished writing a novel..."
" The U.S.A. of 1776 was a heaping lot of terrorists.
They were BRITISH CITIZENS and they took up arms and killed HER MAJESTY'S soliders."
A few things:
1.) In the late 18th century, they were his majesty's soldiers. Haven't had that talk with your parents about birds and bees I see...
2.) If you care to notice there were repeated efforts to resolve our disputes with London diplomaticly. For various reasons, those broke down. Thing might have ended differently if we actually had representation in Parliament...
3.) Even after the fighting began (around 1774 IIRC) the Continental Congress was still interested in ending things amicably. It wasn't until 1776 that they finally gave into the extremists and sought independence.
4.) On 4 July 1776 they sat down and and wrote a big fuckin' grocery list of complaints against King George II and the policies of his government. Some of them were a bit extreme, but most of them were not.
5.) Congress and the higher-ups in the Continental Army never sanctioned attacks against civillians. Ever. Though I can't say for sure I wouldn't be surprised if such instances when caught were punished severely (ie. firing squad).
6.) The cause itself had many supporters in Great Britain. To them, George Washington was an English nobleman leading a fight against a German pretender to the throne.
Now if you want to talk about state-sponsored amoral acts, would you be interested in talking about some of the history of the British Raj? How about the Opium War?
"Fact: in 1900, if you wanted to see the President, an appointment was nice, but not necessary."
Actually, my last post reminded me: Bush has to worry about Tecumseh's Curse. Since 1840 the only president that's escaped that one is Reagan, and only barely at that. Can you blame him for being worried?:)
"Today's Internet is a poor respecter of national boundaries, as many repressive governments have found to their cost. Unfortunately this freedom has been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium."
Make up your damn mind. Don't sit there and extoll the virtues of a global information medium in one breath and state the need for artificial borders the next. Seriously, you all but cheer free speech one moment and then bring up the need for government censorship (which is exactly what you're asking for) the next.
"We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability."
To my knowledge there has only been one European detained for possible violations of the DMCA, while countless perpetrators of various US laws wander free in Europe because those governments often refuse extradition. The fact that one particular European government decided to let the US do what it will is the fault of that European government, not the US. By your logic the Vichy government should be held blameless for enforcing Nazi policies.
"US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws; and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will. "
Free speech bad! Four legs good!
I ask you this: If you were on an EU-only network, established and controlled by the EU government, would you have the option of bad-mouthing them on said network as you're doing now?
"we will end up with an Internet which serves the imperial ambitions of only one country instead of the legitimate aspirations of the whole world."
I seem to have forgotten... are you talking about the current global information network of your EU-only vision of one?
"While this would greatly please the US, it would not be in the interests of the majority of Internet users, who want a network that allows them to express their own values, respects their own laws and supports their own cultures and interests. "
You seem to have left out a few words. What you actually want is an internet that allows people sharing your own values to be able to express them without anybody disagreeing with them. What you actually want is an internet that imposes the cultures or your choosing on its users, sheilding them from anything you consider "wrong" without letting them have the benefit of making up their own mind. Let's not mince words here, what you're advocating is exactly what the PRC has been trying to do for years. You don't want the internet, you want an EU version of AOL.
"Yet today's United States is a country which respects freedom so much that if I, a European citizen, set foot there I can be interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret."
... which is completely different from what the UK does to suspected IRA members, where they're treated to a free weeekend in a luxury bed-and-breakfast, similar to what Greece does with suspected November 14th members. Spain and suspected ETA members? France and Corsicans?
"It has a government which respects free speech yet tries to persuade postal workers to spy on people as they delivered their mail."
To my knowledge these efforts have not been successful. On the other hand, I recall complaints in France's last presidential election that France's post offices showed political bias in delivering (or not) campaign advertising.
Of course, it would be very difficult for the federal government to convince the USPS to do anything because not only would it be a violation of several federal laws (enforced by US Postal Inspectors, completely different chain of command from either the FBI or CIA) there is little benefit that the USPS can receive for doing this (it's not like Congress can cut their funds or anything... )
"ICANN, the body it established to manage DNS, had to be ordered by a court to let one of its own directors examine the company accounts for fear he may discover something untoward."
A US court, I might add...
"And elected representatives -like the aforementioned Howard Berman -are paid vast amounts by firms lobbying for laws which serve their corporate interests."
Welcome to democracy. And it can be argued that this problem is actually worse in Europe. We may have bad politicians over here, but they're either not as bad or as powerful as Chriac or Berlusconi.
"These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution. Unfortunately today's Internet, with its permissive architecture and lack of effective boundaries or user authentication, makes it almost impossible to resist this technological imperialism."
You've done Karl Marx proud...
"Fortunately the technology itself - in the form of trusted computer architectures, secure networks and digital rights management - can be used to rescue the Net from US control."
Let me pick my jaw up off the floor. I thought your support of government censorship is bad enough, but now advocating DRM... I take back what I said a few days about about being scared of Europe. I'm now fucking terrified!
"I believe that the time has come to speak out in favour of a regulated network; an Internet where each country can set its own rules for how its citizens, companies, courts and government work with and manage those parts of the network that fall within its jurisdiction; an Internet that reflects the diversity of the world's legal, moral and cultural choices instead of simply propagating US hegemony; an Internet that is subject to political control instead of being an uncontrolled experiment in radical capitalism."
OK, replace amorphous threat of US hegemony with much more tacticle threat of EU police state... riiiight...
"Why, then, do we act as if our interactions with screen, mouse and keyboard are different? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system?"
Nice straw man there. Fraud is fraud is fraud and is prosecuted as such. You don't see a separate "fraud over the internet" law on the books just as you don't see a separate "fraud over the telephone" law (though you imply otherwise). The only moderate difference between the two is that fraud via e-mail is slightly more difficult to track down (but not impossible, since in your example the defrauder would have to access the bank account in question).
"The other thing we need to lose is the ridiculous belief that when we are online we are somehow in 'another place' outside the real world. We need to reject the philosophical bullshit which argues that there is an equivalence between being simultaneously a 'citizen' of Maine and of the United States and our co-existence in the real world and the online world *, and accept instead the mundane reality that nobody has any real form of existence online - either now or in the foreseeable future."
You're confusing the foolish concept of being a "citizen of the internet" with the quite real concept of being a "member of an on-line community." Ideas are communicated and exchanged in a way that they would not be without the internet, conclusions are formed, and actions are taken based on those conclusions. Take a look at the Free Sklyarov protests that sprung up. Without places like Slashdot and The Register reporting it as front-page news, nobody would really even be aware of the situation.
Of course this view of things is toxic to your argument, since you'd rather artificially impose physical communities onto the internet whether the participants want to or not.
"We can also deal with the problems of jurisdiction for online activity in the same way as we deal with it elsewhere: in the UK we're perfectly happy to prosecute someone for war crimes committed fifty years ago in another country, so why are there problems if the crime involved the Internet?"
Say it with me:
extradition
The UK wouldn't be prosecuting Pinochet if he wasn't stupid enough to set foot there.
"Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?"
The difference is:
1.) Limey dumbfuck came home to UK jurisdiction
2.) No state would turn someone over to the federal government for some foreign speech crime, even if the federal government was dumb enough to bother asking (somebody just lost the next election)
Once again, the word of the day is "extradition." Kinda funny how you're looking to artificially enforce national boundaries when it comes to violations but want them to magically disappear when it comes to extradition...
Fuck it, I'm getting too appalled by the views and fallacies your espousing for me to contue to try to offer rational arguments. Go ahead and establish your own EU internet ("censor-net") over there, see if I give a damn. Just don't try to force it down my throat and don't be surprised when you've just argued yourself out of a medium on which to argue.
"been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium"
As in the political wrangling done by US politicians and businesses, or because European governments aren't happy with the US acting as a safe haven from European anti-speech laws?
Tech support operators are rewarded not for how well they solve a problem but for how quickly they clear the phone line (he with the most calls per hour wins). Beyond that, more and more PC companies practically hide their support phone number, instead trying to herd their customers into e-mailing over-generalized bots that pay almost as little attention to their customers as their phone support techies. And woe to the person who actually knows more than the average phone techie who has to call tech support.
Customer satisfaction doesn't do much for profits one way or the other. Maintaining support facilities costs money, but the most money can be saved by getting people in and out as quickly as possible (satisfaction be damned). In the continuing quest of investors for the quick buck, is anybody really surprised by the amount of disdain the average computer manufacturer shows their customers?
First off, I was talking about television, not gaming. If you're worried about latency with reguards to television signals, you need to get away from the TV a little more often.
Secondly, with respect to television signals, satellite has something that cable does not: Bandwidth. While the cable companies are left scratching their heads trying to figure out how to squeeze HDTV signals through one wire, the satellite folks just have to throw up another satellite (which they've done). Poof, problem solved. And there's no reason to believe that this solution can't also be used with respect to internet connections if the technology catches on.
Now, if you want to talk about internet connections, "realtime interactive" stuff isn't broadband's killer app, it's MP3s and pr0n and warez. Big downloads are what broadband relies on. Nobody there cares if latency is 0.3 seconds from the satellite bounce if it shaves 40 minutes from the total download time.
On the other hand if your game requires low latency and high bandwidth, then you've just relied on server-side processing enough to market yourself out of the dial-up audience. And since they're still 90%+ of your gaming audience, you're now flat broke. Clients have hardware, use it!
"As technically-minded people, we should never back an inferior technology purely for political reasons."
Dude, my reasons are free-market reasons. DSS TV is cheaper than cable TV for all values of cable TV. Cable TV companies have a long history of crappy customer service, relying instead on their state-mandated monopolies to force customers to buy their services. And when all is said and done I've never heard of some idiot managing to put a shovel into a satellite because they were too damned stupid to call Miss Utility. "But what about rain fade?" you ask. I've never seen rain fade last for more than a half-hour while the moron down the street can kill cable for the block for most of the week until the cable company gets around to fixing it (see previous customer service reference).
And going back to the internet service angle, you'd no longer be stuck with solutions that rely on local population density. When all is said and done, ground-based solutions (be they wired or wireless) in a free market will always follow the population densities because population = fast money. They won't go out much beyond middle suburbia unless outright forced to by the government (profits may be possible but they're slow in coming, and their investors are interested in the quick buck).
So fuck the cable companies. They have the option of trying to compete, but all I see them doing is bad-mouthing digital satellite to both their own customers and to the government that they're already milking for all they're worth. If they can't be bothered to try actually improving their product, they don't deserve to stay in business (Marxism be damned) and they certainly don't deserve my money.
"Services that I pay for are forcing advertising upon me and/or harvesting my "consumer information" and using it against my desires (email spam, junk mail, telemarketing, etc..). Services include telephone service,"
Get a cell phone and either ditch the land line entirely or put a fax machine on it to piss off any telemarketers that do call.
"internet service,"
A little research goes a long way when it comes to picking an ISP. I know about two dozen/.ers will jump down my throat for saying it but I'm satisfied with EarthLink so far.
"cable TV,"
The problem here is that you still have cable insteed of digital satellite. I don't know about where you live but here DirecTV is cheaper than Cox Cable. And I'm not even talking about digital cable here, just the basics. More channels, less money. Up-front costs? Sure, but nothing that won't pay for itself in a few months with that kind of cost savings...
Plus, you have two added benefits:
1.) You get to tell a state-mandated monopoly to shove their coaxial where the sun don't shine
2.) Gets rid of all those fucking annoying "Please don't switch to satellite!" commercials. The satellite folks don't have an inferiority complex when it comes to their competition...
"my grocery store and my credit cards. (For years I refused to get a store card, but now I moved and the only two close grocery stores have store cards; it's pay up, drive far or give in, and I gave in, put I'm pissed off about it and will switch in a second if something better comes by.)"
If you're talking about store credit cards, cash is always accepted.
If you're talking about "savings" cards, tell the cashier you left yours in your other pants and would they please scan their card for you thankyouvermuch.
I'm going to go ahead and start saving up to buy a digital tuner now (RCA has a model that doubles as a DSS receiver for ~$550) before the MPAA and RIAA get a chance to force DRM into the standard. It will probably be pricey, but if this the only way I'll be guaranteed to record broadcast television, so be it.
I heard reference to his algorithm (only way I heard about him) and just pegged him as another Renaissance man with too much free time on his hands (like Fourier).
Junk mailers tend to do all their own sorting, research the validity of their addresses in the USPS database and print POSTNET barcodes on them so that any USPS sorting equipment just has to scan the barcode.
First class postage went up because your chicken-scratch handwriting is just too damned hard for the OCR equipment to read and you're too damned lazy to go to usps.com to check to see if you have the right ZIP+4 code.
"We all pay for the amount of pollution it takes to make paper and deliver the mail."
Trees grow back and paper biodegrades (and as you noted in your post, recyclable). The coal used in the power plants to generate the electricity your e-mail rides on doesn't grow back (at least not in our lifetimes) and dumps carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Your call.
We have a few major AP articles on the state of spam today and where it's going, plus we have this tidbit hitting the national news.
This is an election year in the US!
Print out these articles and mail them off to your congresscritter and your class II senator if you have one. Include a letter talking about how spam is an issue to you and how you'd like to see things like this happen to junk e-mailers as well. Maybe talk about how similar the two are (using the recipients expensive communications equipment without permission or reimbursemet). Mail some letters off to anybody else running for those seats that you know of.
Write them! Now! You don't even have to get up off your asses for this one! Just open the damned StarWrite window and write!
It's only a matter of time before legislation similar to this gets passed by Congress targeting unsolicited e-mail advertisements (AP writes an article about the problems of spam, it's an election year... you do the math). Change your line of business soon, unless you want to see if you can break that record...
"If all a TV station is doing is sending out data for someone else to compile, they have been commoditized;"
Anybody that can take a look at broadcast television and still say that they aren't already commodities is either a fool or lying. Anything vaguely unique on a television station stays so only as long as it takes for the other networks to launch their copy-cats. They've all been around long enough and have consulted with their marketoids enough to know exactly what formula to use to reach the lowest common denominator, and they all have access to the same formula.
This is true for just about any big movie corp I can think of as well. People have favorite actors and actresses, directors and producers, but nobody has even bothered to try to extoll the virtues of movies made by Corporation X over Corporation Y. This even goes down as far as the movie theater corporations, where one of them (I can't remember which they're all so damned generic) has to try to convince its customers that "There Is A Difference" in their slogans and trailers. Can they name one difference? Fuck no, but they claim there's one there somewhere!
"Jack Valenti [...] has said that without proper security measures, the industry won't allow its movies to be broadcast because they don't want viewers to record 'perfect copies' of movies."
Alright, so you're saying that if you don't deny digital recording of digital television, you won't sell your product to TV broadcasters. So you're getting less money from fewer sales to broadcasters and you're also getting less money from people who might have bought a real copy if they were exposed to your movie via TV. All in all the consumer gets to keep more of their spending cash, or at least buy other things while MPAA sales dwindle.
Does anybody not see this as the MPAA shooting itself in the foot? Broadcasters only buy movies to fill up time slots they don't bother to try to fill with their own programming and only tend to buy movies (instead of airing more reruns) so they can compete with all the other broadcasters showing movies. Yank the movies out of the equation, you have a poorer MPAA while the broadcasters just fill the time slots with more reruns. Wah.
Of course, the MPAA doesn't give a rat's ass about customers, they (like all other corporations, by definition) care only about the investors. If they weren't so damned worried about appearing profitable to Wall Street, they'd be all for letting customers make their own perfect digital copies.
It's amazing how high you can get modded up around here when pretend you know what you're talking about...
"the thing about opening our minds is right."
Opening one's mind is one thing. Recreational drug use is something else entirely.
"We have always lived in three dimensions,"
I don't know about you, but I was born and raised in 4-D space-time. If you live in three dimensions, then your life would be (by definition) quite short. Just because our perception of time differs from length, bredth and height doesn't mean that it's not a dimension just the same.
Don't think of 3 * 10^8 m/s as a speed limit, think of it more like "300,000 km = 1 s."
"For example if youwere a 2 dimensional being(thats not possible coz 3 is the minumum number of dimensions to sustain life)"
Look, string theorists are having a hard enough time trying to figure out if we're living in 11 or 12 dimensions (let alone whether we're talking about space-like or time-like dimensions), the quantum mechanics folks are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what happens to all those other states that get resolved away, so could you please hold off on the xenobiological conclusions at least until those two juries come back?
"and a 3D sphere passed through your space, you will see a point, growing into a circle and then again into a point."
... so you'd see a shape that changes over (wait for it...) TIME! Hey, look folks! This kid just proved 1=1! Give him a medal!
And what's this "time" I speak of? Why, it's the fourth dimension, it's that thing you have to add to space before you can start talking about constants in this relativistic universe of ours. It's the dimension along which our universe is expanding.
"So if a 4D object came it would look like a morphing 3D object."
Morphing? As in "change in time?" As in "a change in space-time coordinates?" That's like saying "You wouldn't see a cone, you'd see a circle whose radius changes with height." What's "height" you ask? Why, it's the third dimension! Dur!
"If mankind were able to create and use 4D's travel would be a whole new frontier."
I use 4-D travel every time I get up and walk to the damn bathroom. Same thing with that morning communte. Hell, I sit on my ass and do nothing and I'm whipping about through space-time like a bat out of hell. Moving from point (x1, y1, z1, t1) to (x2, y2, z2, t2) is by definition moving through all four dimensions of space-time.
"Esp since space-time is curved"
You came so close to realizing how silly your whole post sounded... so close yet so far...
"Just imagine traveling a million miles instantaniosly Confused! Go through stephen hawkings works! you will be even more so:-)"
You just used the word "instantaneously" in a sentence. You obviously need to graduate from Einstein before trying to figure out Hawking.
"This was particularly popular in the US between the 1930's and 1960's, complete with government-sponsored blackmail and employment discrimination."
Sounds like you're referencing McCarthyism. It might be interesting to know that McCarthy was slammed by the rest of the Senate not long afterwards and was all but removed from office.
Until the Cold War communists pretty much had free reign in the country. As I recall they brought a lot of attention to themsevlves during the whole Scottsboro affair, when they hired a lawyer (Jewish, no less) to defend the boys accused of rape.
I never said that nothing bad happens in the US, I'm trying to point out that when something wrong does happen, it rarely goes by without a lot of people complaining loudly until the problem gets solved. At the very least voicing a complaint in the EU is more difficult in the US, with anti-speech laws (even anti-government speech) more resembling those of the Middle East and North Africa than of the US.
"The simple fact is that having a national ID system has little to do with privacy or lack thereof. Privacy legislation has to do with privacy. And what protects your from government abuse of power is not the ability to hide in some hole somewhere, it is creating a democratic and responsible government."
Democracy is a pretty name for mob rule. The more democratic a culture is, the more power is given to the majority to quiet minority opinion. We're talking about the same system of government that voted the hemlock one day and the statues the next.
As for privacy issues, you seem to ignore the issue of privacy from your own government against unreasonable search and seizure. Every bit of information that the government is legally required to know is one less bit of information that needs to be pulled kicking and screaming from a judge. Compulsory national ID cards are little more than an overbroad blanket search warrant.
Power corrupts. Period. Sooner or later that information your government has will be abused, and the only guaranteed way to prevent that is no not let them have all that information to begin with. Relying on privacy laws is little more than hoping that the government (who both holds the information and makes such laws to begin with) won't abuse their power this particular election term.
"By the time you have to hide in some hole somewhere (probably toting a gun), hiding from your government, it's already too late."
It's interesting to note that that option is outright illegal in most European countries. You are not legally allowed to hide from your government whether you wanted to or not (with or without a gun). I find a government that outlaws hiding more disturbing than a government that would give reason to hide. Heck, outlawing privacy in that respect in and of itself is the best reason to try to hide.
"The US government is becoming increasingly corrupt and undemocratic."
IMO, it is becoming corrupt because it is getting too democratic. Modifications of the federal constitution to allow direct election of senators and nearly-direct election of the president have guaranteed that only those who can afford media exposure become elected.
"And Americans blissfully and ignorantly throw away their civil rights and privacy rights because the US government manipulates them into a hysteria about terrorism (it used to be the cold war; maybe it will be space aliens next year)."
Conveniently enough, those are also the same Americans that tend not to vote.
Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, less than a year after the attacks various civil rights and special interests groups are making headway against those policies. Already the federal government is being forced to name names of those they have in Camp X-ray. Americans have the right to bitch and moan about our government and we're often listened to instead of silenced (since we also happen to be in the 50% of people that vote).
And while we're on the topic of power abuses via a boogey man, the US gets attacked last September, and European governments use it as an excuse to all but seal their borders. Neat trick! AFAIK, the only real effect the 9/11 attacks have had on US immigration policy is that pending reforms of our policy with Mexico has been put on the back burner.
"You should also worry about privacy violations by US companies, which are largely unregulated. They can wreck your life with various forms of discrimination, and you are nearly powerless to get the data, let alone challenge it."
While it may be difficult, I am given the legal option of not disclosing my information to begin with. Not an option in Europe. And if I don't like a corporation, I can avoid doing business with them. But you can't avoid a government you don't like if for no other reason than they're the people you have to get a passport from.
"Europeans understand privacy and totalitarianism much better than Americans--Europeans have lived through it."
If Europeans learned from their mistakes as you claim, Dutch troops probably wouldn't have allowed Srebrenica to happen...
"It's the Americans that are at risk of repeating the European mistakes because Americans are so blissfully ignorant of it all and think that it just can't happen here."
As I mentioned before, while enforcement of policy has changed dramatically, the policy itself on immigration and visas and such have not. This is in stark contrast to European governments like Denmark that have used the attacks to all but declare every non-European in the place persona-non-grata.
When all is said and done the US is still a patchwork conglomeration of opposing peoples and ideals, and not even 9/11 has succeeded in creating a unified front where every American can agree on one thing. When you get right down to it, what frightens me most about Europe is how totally sterile and uniform the culture is. Too many people agree on too many things to be healthy, establishing an environment that's ripe for absuses against the "others" that just don't fit into the totalitarian majority.
Slashdot Mirror
Between the way various article postings lately are all but Slashddot-sanctioned trolls (EU-only internet, anyone?), the fact that I don't think even Microsoft is so stupid as to try something like that when Judge Kolar-Kotelly hasn't signed off on anything one way or the other (Ballmer wouldn't want to find himself in a cell for contempt of court), and the story comes from "some sysadmin" whose "e-mail address" is in the Hotmail domain...
Well, let's just say I'll believe this story once it's verified by a third party.
"There only difference, in my mind, between a "guerilla" and a "terrorist" is which side the person talking is affiliated with."
Insightful... yeah, whatever
Apparently I was just too subtle for you in my last post. Let me spell out the difference in as simple terms as I can:
Geurilla: uses stick-and-move tactics to attack military targets only when they have a distinct tactical advantage, quickly blending into the background when the attack is over.
Terrorist: deliberately attacks civillian populations in an effort to sway public policy. Uses tactics that would run them afoul of the Hague accords.
Even simpler terms:
Guerilla: Aims specifically at military targets
Terrorist: Aims specifically at civillian targets.
Now for some examples:
Flying planes into skyscrapers: Terrorism.
Blowing up a destroyer: Guerilla warfare
Flying a plane into the Pentagon: Would have been guerilla warfare if it weren't for all the civillians on the plane
Blowing up a bus full of Israeli soldiers: guerilla warfare
Blowing up a bus full of Israeli schoolchildren: terrorism
Figured it out yet? I know you'd rather go back to the volley system but just because you don't agree with the tactics used doesn't make it terrorism.
sigh
"a War on Drugs, which was essentially a euphemism for a war on the lifestyle of the youth of that era and the values it represented (chemical experimentation, casual sex, a healthy skepticism of authority, and so on)."
Because everybody knows that if you were born in a certain time period you must be a hippie.
No, I'm sorry, this whole "generational" bullshit is just another marketing gimick by the media moguls that are behind this current crack-down to begin with. I'm not going to put on a "Generation X" moniker just so you can make it easier for pollsters to water down my opinion with those of millions of others. Not by them and certainly not by you.
"A War on Ourselves indeed, or at least a war on the younger generation, one that began under Nixon, was escalated out of control under Reagan and Bush Senior, to the point where we now have over fifty beaurocracies fighting for the collected spoils seized from non-violent drug offendors."
In case you haven't noticed the "younger generation" your cheerleading for is now the one in office in both the White House and Congress. Kinda screws up your theory there a bit, don't it?
"Another front on an intergenerational war, between the dinasaurs of the Jack Valenti Generation of Greed and the emerging, technically savvy information generation they seek to repress and quite possibly destroy."
No, I'm an individual and I refuse to be herded into the flock of sheep you're tending to. This ain't a God damned Pepsi commercial.
"Worse, we'll have to listen to even more self-righteous tripe along the lines"
Like the kind you just typed?
"Hell, I haven't even finished writing a novel..."
Like I said, a cheap marketing gimmick...
" The U.S.A. of 1776 was a heaping lot of terrorists.
They were BRITISH CITIZENS and they took up arms and killed HER MAJESTY'S soliders."
A few things:
1.) In the late 18th century, they were his majesty's soldiers. Haven't had that talk with your parents about birds and bees I see...
2.) If you care to notice there were repeated efforts to resolve our disputes with London diplomaticly. For various reasons, those broke down. Thing might have ended differently if we actually had representation in Parliament...
3.) Even after the fighting began (around 1774 IIRC) the Continental Congress was still interested in ending things amicably. It wasn't until 1776 that they finally gave into the extremists and sought independence.
4.) On 4 July 1776 they sat down and and wrote a big fuckin' grocery list of complaints against King George II and the policies of his government. Some of them were a bit extreme, but most of them were not.
5.) Congress and the higher-ups in the Continental Army never sanctioned attacks against civillians. Ever. Though I can't say for sure I wouldn't be surprised if such instances when caught were punished severely (ie. firing squad).
6.) The cause itself had many supporters in Great Britain. To them, George Washington was an English nobleman leading a fight against a German pretender to the throne.
Now if you want to talk about state-sponsored amoral acts, would you be interested in talking about some of the history of the British Raj? How about the Opium War?
"Fact: in 1900, if you wanted to see the President, an appointment was nice, but not necessary."
:)
Actually, my last post reminded me: Bush has to worry about Tecumseh's Curse. Since 1840 the only president that's escaped that one is Reagan, and only barely at that. Can you blame him for being worried?
"Fact: in 1900, if you wanted to see the President, an appointment was nice, but not necessary."
Fact: In 1901 the president was assassinated by an anarchist.
Any relation? You be the judge.
Make up your damn mind. Don't sit there and extoll the virtues of a global information medium in one breath and state the need for artificial borders the next. Seriously, you all but cheer free speech one moment and then bring up the need for government censorship (which is exactly what you're asking for) the next.
"We have already seen US law, in the form of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, used to persuade hosts in other countries to pull material or limit its availability."
To my knowledge there has only been one European detained for possible violations of the DMCA, while countless perpetrators of various US laws wander free in Europe because those governments often refuse extradition. The fact that one particular European government decided to let the US do what it will is the fault of that European government, not the US. By your logic the Vichy government should be held blameless for enforcing Nazi policies.
"US-promoted 'anti-censor' software is routinely provided to enable citizens of other countries to break local laws; and US companies like Yahoo! disregard the judgements of foreign courts at will. "
Free speech bad! Four legs good!
I ask you this: If you were on an EU-only network, established and controlled by the EU government, would you have the option of bad-mouthing them on said network as you're doing now?
"we will end up with an Internet which serves the imperial ambitions of only one country instead of the legitimate aspirations of the whole world."
I seem to have forgotten... are you talking about the current global information network of your EU-only vision of one?
"While this would greatly please the US, it would not be in the interests of the majority of Internet users, who want a network that allows them to express their own values, respects their own laws and supports their own cultures and interests. "
You seem to have left out a few words. What you actually want is an internet that allows people sharing your own values to be able to express them without anybody disagreeing with them. What you actually want is an internet that imposes the cultures or your choosing on its users, sheilding them from anything you consider "wrong" without letting them have the benefit of making up their own mind. Let's not mince words here, what you're advocating is exactly what the PRC has been trying to do for years. You don't want the internet, you want an EU version of AOL.
"Yet today's United States is a country which respects freedom so much that if I, a European citizen, set foot there I can be interned without any notice or due process, tried by a military tribunal and executed in secret."
"It has a government which respects free speech yet tries to persuade postal workers to spy on people as they delivered their mail."
To my knowledge these efforts have not been successful. On the other hand, I recall complaints in France's last presidential election that France's post offices showed political bias in delivering (or not) campaign advertising.
Of course, it would be very difficult for the federal government to convince the USPS to do anything because not only would it be a violation of several federal laws (enforced by US Postal Inspectors, completely different chain of command from either the FBI or CIA) there is little benefit that the USPS can receive for doing this (it's not like Congress can cut their funds or anything... )
"ICANN, the body it established to manage DNS, had to be ordered by a court to let one of its own directors examine the company accounts for fear he may discover something untoward."
A US court, I might add...
"And elected representatives -like the aforementioned Howard Berman -are paid vast amounts by firms lobbying for laws which serve their corporate interests."
Welcome to democracy. And it can be argued that this problem is actually worse in Europe. We may have bad politicians over here, but they're either not as bad or as powerful as Chriac or Berlusconi.
"These are clearly not the people who should be setting the rules for the Net's evolution. Unfortunately today's Internet, with its permissive architecture and lack of effective boundaries or user authentication, makes it almost impossible to resist this technological imperialism."
You've done Karl Marx proud...
"Fortunately the technology itself - in the form of trusted computer architectures, secure networks and digital rights management - can be used to rescue the Net from US control."
Let me pick my jaw up off the floor. I thought your support of government censorship is bad enough, but now advocating DRM... I take back what I said a few days about about being scared of Europe. I'm now fucking terrified!
"I believe that the time has come to speak out in favour of a regulated network; an Internet where each country can set its own rules for how its citizens, companies, courts and government work with and manage those parts of the network that fall within its jurisdiction; an Internet that reflects the diversity of the world's legal, moral and cultural choices instead of simply propagating US hegemony; an Internet that is subject to political control instead of being an uncontrolled experiment in radical capitalism."
OK, replace amorphous threat of US hegemony with much more tacticle threat of EU police state... riiiight...
"Why, then, do we act as if our interactions with screen, mouse and keyboard are different? If I send an email suggesting that I am in possession of $50m and will hand it over in return for your bank details, why can't it just be that I also am breaking the law in two countries, not in some mythical 'cyberspace' with its own legal system?"
Nice straw man there. Fraud is fraud is fraud and is prosecuted as such. You don't see a separate "fraud over the internet" law on the books just as you don't see a separate "fraud over the telephone" law (though you imply otherwise). The only moderate difference between the two is that fraud via e-mail is slightly more difficult to track down (but not impossible, since in your example the defrauder would have to access the bank account in question).
"The other thing we need to lose is the ridiculous belief that when we are online we are somehow in 'another place' outside the real world. We need to reject the philosophical bullshit which argues that there is an equivalence between being simultaneously a 'citizen' of Maine and of the United States and our co-existence in the real world and the online world *, and accept instead the mundane reality that nobody has any real form of existence online - either now or in the foreseeable future."
You're confusing the foolish concept of being a "citizen of the internet" with the quite real concept of being a "member of an on-line community." Ideas are communicated and exchanged in a way that they would not be without the internet, conclusions are formed, and actions are taken based on those conclusions. Take a look at the Free Sklyarov protests that sprung up. Without places like Slashdot and The Register reporting it as front-page news, nobody would really even be aware of the situation.
Of course this view of things is toxic to your argument, since you'd rather artificially impose physical communities onto the internet whether the participants want to or not.
"We can also deal with the problems of jurisdiction for online activity in the same way as we deal with it elsewhere: in the UK we're perfectly happy to prosecute someone for war crimes committed fifty years ago in another country, so why are there problems if the crime involved the Internet?"
Say it with me:
extradition
The UK wouldn't be prosecuting Pinochet if he wasn't stupid enough to set foot there.
"Under English law a sex tourist can be prosecuted here even if he has sex with a child in Thailand: surely prosecuting someone for promoting racial hatred on a US-hosted website can't be that different?"
The difference is:
1.) Limey dumbfuck came home to UK jurisdiction
2.) No state would turn someone over to the federal government for some foreign speech crime, even if the federal government was dumb enough to bother asking (somebody just lost the next election)
Once again, the word of the day is "extradition." Kinda funny how you're looking to artificially enforce national boundaries when it comes to violations but want them to magically disappear when it comes to extradition...
Fuck it, I'm getting too appalled by the views and fallacies your espousing for me to contue to try to offer rational arguments. Go ahead and establish your own EU internet ("censor-net") over there, see if I give a damn. Just don't try to force it down my throat and don't be surprised when you've just argued yourself out of a medium on which to argue.
"been so extensively abused by the United States and its politicians, lawyers and programmers that it has become a serious threat to the continued survival of the network as a global communications medium"
As in the political wrangling done by US politicians and businesses, or because European governments aren't happy with the US acting as a safe haven from European anti-speech laws?
Be careful what you wish for...
Tech support operators are rewarded not for how well they solve a problem but for how quickly they clear the phone line (he with the most calls per hour wins). Beyond that, more and more PC companies practically hide their support phone number, instead trying to herd their customers into e-mailing over-generalized bots that pay almost as little attention to their customers as their phone support techies. And woe to the person who actually knows more than the average phone techie who has to call tech support.
Customer satisfaction doesn't do much for profits one way or the other. Maintaining support facilities costs money, but the most money can be saved by getting people in and out as quickly as possible (satisfaction be damned). In the continuing quest of investors for the quick buck, is anybody really surprised by the amount of disdain the average computer manufacturer shows their customers?
First off, I was talking about television, not gaming. If you're worried about latency with reguards to television signals, you need to get away from the TV a little more often.
Secondly, with respect to television signals, satellite has something that cable does not: Bandwidth. While the cable companies are left scratching their heads trying to figure out how to squeeze HDTV signals through one wire, the satellite folks just have to throw up another satellite (which they've done). Poof, problem solved. And there's no reason to believe that this solution can't also be used with respect to internet connections if the technology catches on.
Now, if you want to talk about internet connections, "realtime interactive" stuff isn't broadband's killer app, it's MP3s and pr0n and warez. Big downloads are what broadband relies on. Nobody there cares if latency is 0.3 seconds from the satellite bounce if it shaves 40 minutes from the total download time.
On the other hand if your game requires low latency and high bandwidth, then you've just relied on server-side processing enough to market yourself out of the dial-up audience. And since they're still 90%+ of your gaming audience, you're now flat broke. Clients have hardware, use it!
"As technically-minded people, we should never back an inferior technology purely for political reasons."
Dude, my reasons are free-market reasons. DSS TV is cheaper than cable TV for all values of cable TV. Cable TV companies have a long history of crappy customer service, relying instead on their state-mandated monopolies to force customers to buy their services. And when all is said and done I've never heard of some idiot managing to put a shovel into a satellite because they were too damned stupid to call Miss Utility. "But what about rain fade?" you ask. I've never seen rain fade last for more than a half-hour while the moron down the street can kill cable for the block for most of the week until the cable company gets around to fixing it (see previous customer service reference).
And going back to the internet service angle, you'd no longer be stuck with solutions that rely on local population density. When all is said and done, ground-based solutions (be they wired or wireless) in a free market will always follow the population densities because population = fast money. They won't go out much beyond middle suburbia unless outright forced to by the government (profits may be possible but they're slow in coming, and their investors are interested in the quick buck).
So fuck the cable companies. They have the option of trying to compete, but all I see them doing is bad-mouthing digital satellite to both their own customers and to the government that they're already milking for all they're worth. If they can't be bothered to try actually improving their product, they don't deserve to stay in business (Marxism be damned) and they certainly don't deserve my money.
timothy timothy timothy... It's not an opera, it's Latin! It means "Why'd the fuck y'all stab me in the back like that for?"
"Services that I pay for are forcing advertising upon me and/or harvesting my "consumer information" and using it against my desires (email spam, junk mail, telemarketing, etc..). Services include telephone service,"
/.ers will jump down my throat for saying it but I'm satisfied with EarthLink so far.
Get a cell phone and either ditch the land line entirely or put a fax machine on it to piss off any telemarketers that do call.
"internet service,"
A little research goes a long way when it comes to picking an ISP. I know about two dozen
"cable TV,"
The problem here is that you still have cable insteed of digital satellite. I don't know about where you live but here DirecTV is cheaper than Cox Cable. And I'm not even talking about digital cable here, just the basics. More channels, less money. Up-front costs? Sure, but nothing that won't pay for itself in a few months with that kind of cost savings...
Plus, you have two added benefits:
1.) You get to tell a state-mandated monopoly to shove their coaxial where the sun don't shine
2.) Gets rid of all those fucking annoying "Please don't switch to satellite!" commercials. The satellite folks don't have an inferiority complex when it comes to their competition...
"my grocery store and my credit cards. (For years I refused to get a store card, but now I moved and the only two close grocery stores have store cards; it's pay up, drive far or give in, and I gave in, put I'm pissed off about it and will switch in a second if something better comes by.)"
If you're talking about store credit cards, cash is always accepted.
If you're talking about "savings" cards, tell the cashier you left yours in your other pants and would they please scan their card for you thankyouvermuch.
I'm going to go ahead and start saving up to buy a digital tuner now (RCA has a model that doubles as a DSS receiver for ~$550) before the MPAA and RIAA get a chance to force DRM into the standard. It will probably be pricey, but if this the only way I'll be guaranteed to record broadcast television, so be it.
"from the quarks-coming-next dept."
Dude, quarks have a hard enough time remembering where they are themselves! Why would you expect them to remember stuff for us as well?
Ahem.
> > "dumps carbon monoxide into the atmosphere."
> "they'd be able to eliminate all that CO2"
I can't explain this any further without getting extremely sarcastic.
We have a /. article talking about an unsolicited junk faxer, and this yahoo posts an article talking about solicited ads.
Where's the "-1 Disinformation" option when you need it? Probably right next to the "-1 Has No Clue" one...
I heard reference to his algorithm (only way I heard about him) and just pegged him as another Renaissance man with too much free time on his hands (like Fourier).
"and indirectly for increased cost of postage."
Junk mailers tend to do all their own sorting, research the validity of their addresses in the USPS database and print POSTNET barcodes on them so that any USPS sorting equipment just has to scan the barcode.
First class postage went up because your chicken-scratch handwriting is just too damned hard for the OCR equipment to read and you're too damned lazy to go to usps.com to check to see if you have the right ZIP+4 code.
"We all pay for the amount of pollution it takes to make paper and deliver the mail."
Trees grow back and paper biodegrades (and as you noted in your post, recyclable). The coal used in the power plants to generate the electricity your e-mail rides on doesn't grow back (at least not in our lifetimes) and dumps carbon monoxide into the atmosphere. Your call.
We have a few major AP articles on the state of spam today and where it's going, plus we have this tidbit hitting the national news.
This is an election year in the US!
Print out these articles and mail them off to your congresscritter and your class II senator if you have one. Include a letter talking about how spam is an issue to you and how you'd like to see things like this happen to junk e-mailers as well. Maybe talk about how similar the two are (using the recipients expensive communications equipment without permission or reimbursemet). Mail some letters off to anybody else running for those seats that you know of.
Write them! Now! You don't even have to get up off your asses for this one! Just open the damned StarWrite window and write!
FCC hands out record $5.4 million fine to junk faxer.
It's only a matter of time before legislation similar to this gets passed by Congress targeting unsolicited e-mail advertisements (AP writes an article about the problems of spam, it's an election year... you do the math). Change your line of business soon, unless you want to see if you can break that record...
"Unfortunately, since we're not responsible for sending it, there is little we can do to stop it."
I may not be a lawyer, but this sounds like somebody asking to be bitchslapped by a slander/libel lawsuit to me...
"If all a TV station is doing is sending out data for someone else to compile, they have been commoditized;"
Anybody that can take a look at broadcast television and still say that they aren't already commodities is either a fool or lying. Anything vaguely unique on a television station stays so only as long as it takes for the other networks to launch their copy-cats. They've all been around long enough and have consulted with their marketoids enough to know exactly what formula to use to reach the lowest common denominator, and they all have access to the same formula.
This is true for just about any big movie corp I can think of as well. People have favorite actors and actresses, directors and producers, but nobody has even bothered to try to extoll the virtues of movies made by Corporation X over Corporation Y. This even goes down as far as the movie theater corporations, where one of them (I can't remember which they're all so damned generic) has to try to convince its customers that "There Is A Difference" in their slogans and trailers. Can they name one difference? Fuck no, but they claim there's one there somewhere!
"Jack Valenti [...] has said that without proper security measures, the industry won't allow its movies to be broadcast because they don't want viewers to record 'perfect copies' of movies."
Alright, so you're saying that if you don't deny digital recording of digital television, you won't sell your product to TV broadcasters. So you're getting less money from fewer sales to broadcasters and you're also getting less money from people who might have bought a real copy if they were exposed to your movie via TV. All in all the consumer gets to keep more of their spending cash, or at least buy other things while MPAA sales dwindle.
Does anybody not see this as the MPAA shooting itself in the foot? Broadcasters only buy movies to fill up time slots they don't bother to try to fill with their own programming and only tend to buy movies (instead of airing more reruns) so they can compete with all the other broadcasters showing movies. Yank the movies out of the equation, you have a poorer MPAA while the broadcasters just fill the time slots with more reruns. Wah.
Of course, the MPAA doesn't give a rat's ass about customers, they (like all other corporations, by definition) care only about the investors. If they weren't so damned worried about appearing profitable to Wall Street, they'd be all for letting customers make their own perfect digital copies.
"the thing about opening our minds is right."
Opening one's mind is one thing. Recreational drug use is something else entirely.
"We have always lived in three dimensions,"
I don't know about you, but I was born and raised in 4-D space-time. If you live in three dimensions, then your life would be (by definition) quite short. Just because our perception of time differs from length, bredth and height doesn't mean that it's not a dimension just the same.
Don't think of 3 * 10^8 m/s as a speed limit, think of it more like "300,000 km = 1 s."
"For example if youwere a 2 dimensional being(thats not possible coz 3 is the minumum number of dimensions to sustain life)"
Look, string theorists are having a hard enough time trying to figure out if we're living in 11 or 12 dimensions (let alone whether we're talking about space-like or time-like dimensions), the quantum mechanics folks are still scratching their heads trying to figure out what happens to all those other states that get resolved away, so could you please hold off on the xenobiological conclusions at least until those two juries come back?
"and a 3D sphere passed through your space, you will see a point, growing into a circle and then again into a point."
And what's this "time" I speak of? Why, it's the fourth dimension, it's that thing you have to add to space before you can start talking about constants in this relativistic universe of ours. It's the dimension along which our universe is expanding.
"So if a 4D object came it would look like a morphing 3D object."
Morphing? As in "change in time?" As in "a change in space-time coordinates?" That's like saying "You wouldn't see a cone, you'd see a circle whose radius changes with height." What's "height" you ask? Why, it's the third dimension! Dur!
"If mankind were able to create and use 4D's travel would be a whole new frontier."
I use 4-D travel every time I get up and walk to the damn bathroom. Same thing with that morning communte. Hell, I sit on my ass and do nothing and I'm whipping about through space-time like a bat out of hell. Moving from point (x1, y1, z1, t1) to (x2, y2, z2, t2) is by definition moving through all four dimensions of space-time.
"Esp since space-time is curved"
You came so close to realizing how silly your whole post sounded... so close yet so far...
"Just imagine traveling a million miles instantaniosly
Confused! Go through stephen hawkings works! you will be even more so
You just used the word "instantaneously" in a sentence. You obviously need to graduate from Einstein before trying to figure out Hawking.
Burn, karma, burn!
"This was particularly popular in the US between the 1930's and 1960's, complete with government-sponsored blackmail and employment discrimination."
Sounds like you're referencing McCarthyism. It might be interesting to know that McCarthy was slammed by the rest of the Senate not long afterwards and was all but removed from office.
Until the Cold War communists pretty much had free reign in the country. As I recall they brought a lot of attention to themsevlves during the whole Scottsboro affair, when they hired a lawyer (Jewish, no less) to defend the boys accused of rape.
I never said that nothing bad happens in the US, I'm trying to point out that when something wrong does happen, it rarely goes by without a lot of people complaining loudly until the problem gets solved. At the very least voicing a complaint in the EU is more difficult in the US, with anti-speech laws (even anti-government speech) more resembling those of the Middle East and North Africa than of the US.
"The simple fact is that having a national ID system has little to do with privacy or lack thereof. Privacy legislation has to do with privacy. And what protects your from government abuse of power is not the ability to hide in some hole somewhere, it is creating a democratic and responsible government."
Democracy is a pretty name for mob rule. The more democratic a culture is, the more power is given to the majority to quiet minority opinion. We're talking about the same system of government that voted the hemlock one day and the statues the next.
As for privacy issues, you seem to ignore the issue of privacy from your own government against unreasonable search and seizure. Every bit of information that the government is legally required to know is one less bit of information that needs to be pulled kicking and screaming from a judge. Compulsory national ID cards are little more than an overbroad blanket search warrant.
Power corrupts. Period. Sooner or later that information your government has will be abused, and the only guaranteed way to prevent that is no not let them have all that information to begin with. Relying on privacy laws is little more than hoping that the government (who both holds the information and makes such laws to begin with) won't abuse their power this particular election term.
"By the time you have to hide in some hole somewhere (probably toting a gun), hiding from your government, it's already too late."
It's interesting to note that that option is outright illegal in most European countries. You are not legally allowed to hide from your government whether you wanted to or not (with or without a gun). I find a government that outlaws hiding more disturbing than a government that would give reason to hide. Heck, outlawing privacy in that respect in and of itself is the best reason to try to hide.
"The US government is becoming increasingly corrupt and undemocratic."
IMO, it is becoming corrupt because it is getting too democratic. Modifications of the federal constitution to allow direct election of senators and nearly-direct election of the president have guaranteed that only those who can afford media exposure become elected.
"And Americans blissfully and ignorantly throw away their civil rights and privacy rights because the US government manipulates them into a hysteria about terrorism (it used to be the cold war; maybe it will be space aliens next year)."
Conveniently enough, those are also the same Americans that tend not to vote.
Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, less than a year after the attacks various civil rights and special interests groups are making headway against those policies. Already the federal government is being forced to name names of those they have in Camp X-ray. Americans have the right to bitch and moan about our government and we're often listened to instead of silenced (since we also happen to be in the 50% of people that vote).
And while we're on the topic of power abuses via a boogey man, the US gets attacked last September, and European governments use it as an excuse to all but seal their borders. Neat trick! AFAIK, the only real effect the 9/11 attacks have had on US immigration policy is that pending reforms of our policy with Mexico has been put on the back burner.
"You should also worry about privacy violations by US companies, which are largely unregulated. They can wreck your life with various forms of discrimination, and you are nearly powerless to get the data, let alone challenge it."
While it may be difficult, I am given the legal option of not disclosing my information to begin with. Not an option in Europe. And if I don't like a corporation, I can avoid doing business with them. But you can't avoid a government you don't like if for no other reason than they're the people you have to get a passport from.
"Europeans understand privacy and totalitarianism much better than Americans--Europeans have lived through it."
If Europeans learned from their mistakes as you claim, Dutch troops probably wouldn't have allowed Srebrenica to happen...
"It's the Americans that are at risk of repeating the European mistakes because Americans are so blissfully ignorant of it all and think that it just can't happen here."
As I mentioned before, while enforcement of policy has changed dramatically, the policy itself on immigration and visas and such have not. This is in stark contrast to European governments like Denmark that have used the attacks to all but declare every non-European in the place persona-non-grata.
When all is said and done the US is still a patchwork conglomeration of opposing peoples and ideals, and not even 9/11 has succeeded in creating a unified front where every American can agree on one thing. When you get right down to it, what frightens me most about Europe is how totally sterile and uniform the culture is. Too many people agree on too many things to be healthy, establishing an environment that's ripe for absuses against the "others" that just don't fit into the totalitarian majority.