I haven't seen such an unconvincing self-defense since the Taliban announced that they would never surrender Osama, who was their guest, and had already left the country, and was holed up incommunicado in one of the local mountain caves, but that they'd consider sending him to a neutral country for trial if we quit bombing them.
Try and imagine what it would have been like if the FBI or CIA would of had the extra bit of power to do the things they want to do now.
It's not necessary to "imagine" government agencies with all the power they want; we've seen the results in reality again and again (and again and again and again and again).
No, the tax was thought up, because it's inconsistent to have items taxed when they're purchased locally but not taxed if they're purchased by mail order.
Mail-order stores only use the local infrastructure in those jurisdictions where they have a physical presence. Ergo, the current law (requiring sales tax to be collected in jurisdicitons of physical presence) is the correct approach. Collecting sales taxes outside areas of physical presence is simply pandering to politicians' greed.
Following up on the "Terrorist Risk: Reg. disobeys airport orders not to land" led to this charming anecdote:
Chances are Larry Ellison -- the brilliant, but boneheaded, bossman at Oracle -- is not a warm and fuzzy kind of guy. Not the kind of buddy you'd belly up to the bar with, one hand hanging onto a brew, the other his shoulder, singing college fight songs after the big game. No, he's definitely more of a my-way-or-the-highway kind of guy.
For instance, in a display of pique that rolled eyes even in consumer-crazed Silicon Valley, Ellison has threatened to sue San Jose, California, because the city won't let him land his personal jet at city-owned San Jose International Airport after 11:30 at night or before 6:30 in the morning. "San Jose has no right to tell me when I can land my airplane," Ellison said.
In an effort to improve the quality of life for city residents who live near the airport, San Jose prohibits airplanes of a certain size or greater from landing in the middle of the night. Small planes, or those experiencing air-traffic delays or mechanical difficulties, can land. Ellison's top-of-the-line Gulfstream Aerospace G-5 jet falls into the too-big-to-land-at-night category. It is worth noting, of course, that not only does Ellison not live near the airport, he doesn't even live in San Jose. But then laws put in place for the public welfare apparently don't apply to Ellison -- he's continued to land late at night at least nine times over the past two years, ignoring pleas from sleepy residents and the city.
No wonder he couldn't care less about government encroachments -- he considers himself above the law.
But AFAIK, none of the terrorists HAD criminal records.
Some of them had overstayed their visas (making them illegal aliens).
One legitimate security measure would be restoring the old requirement for legal aliens to check in every so often, and go looking for any that didn't. (When I was a kid, there were PSAs reminding aliens to register every January -- we might want to make it a bit more frequent under the circumstances.)
to instead suggest alternative solutions that increase national security while protecting personal liberties and freedoms
For starters, there's the one we're already doing (albeit insufficiently) -- take down terrorists and their state sponsors, hard. It should be done rather harder than it is: since we aren't going to be loved over there anytime in my lifetime, fear will have to do.
On the home front, we can start with rational policies for self and community defense (e.g. nationwide CCW for people with proven clean records, laws giving a strong but rebuttable presumption that anyone using force against a criminal is in the right). Special circumstances (such as boarding aircraft) would have corresponding special requirements, but there should be at least one armed person unknown to any but the crew on any given flight.
If permitting passengers with firearms is not politically feasable, then let them have clubs -- after 9/11, the "cooperate and you'll be OK" model is obsolete, so we just need to make sure that the non-terrorist passengers' advantage of numbers is sufficiently decisive.
Weapons are only one part of local defense, to be sure -- comprehensive local civil defense, including medical and infrastructure response as well as peacekeeping, should be in place in any populated area.
You might wind up having to use a closed-source program for multimedia playback at worst.
Images are copyrightable. Words are copyrightable. The SSSCA would require closed-source for any software capable of processing or displaying words and images. QED.
Many of the arguments used here against key escrow are weak and unconvincing
On the contrary -- I've already shot down the argument that key escrow could "work" by showing that it has to be perfect (which is obviously absurd) to prevent massive compromise of data (read: instant counterfeiting on any scale you like, given that electronic transfer is a much bigger business than trading green slips of paper with dead Presidents' pictures).
Combined with the other responses to the original post, this assertion sounds like one of the de-limbed Black Knight's taunts.
Advocates of unbreakable crypto want to roll back the power of governments to tap into communications.
Here we come to a more fundamental issue. Some technological advances roll government power forward, others roll it back. Allowing only the former to proceed creates a one-way ratchet toward increased government power, which is clearly incompatible with Constitutional balances.
Arguments equating unbreakable encryption with various tools or envelopes for private mail are specious. Envelopes are easily opened - and can be opened under a court order.
Crypto is also easily opened -- just use a key logger or an old-fashioned hidden camera aimed at the suspect's keyboard.
Of course, this is only practical against a reasonably small group of suspects. An attempt at dragnet fishing expeditions would be too difficult, and the risk of detection would increase more or less linearly with the number of targets.
Thus, any argument in favor of using a technology that lends itself to fishing expeditions (key escrow) rather than one that lends itself to specifically targeted surveillance (key loggers and bugs) raises a red flag that the former is on somebody's agenda.
the vast majority of the value of crypto could *theoretically* be retained with well managed (i.e. privately owned and run, paid for by crypto users) key escrow
One corrupted escrow agent, and an arbitrarily large number of people's communications are compromised.
If you say that your definition of "well managed" excludes that possibility, then you ought to admit that what you're really saying is: "the value of crypto could *theoretically* be retained with perfect key escrow".
Requiring all communication using strong encryption to use key escrow has the flip side of making other forms of encrypted communication illegal.
In general, this cannot be detected without fishing expeditions. In specific cases, see above re key loggers, etc.
The entire language is adjusted in a thoroughly Orwellian fashion. When people on our side die, the "terrorists" cause the "murder of innocent, men, women and children". Fine, this is accurate. However, when we do start beating up on Afghanistan. "Military commanders" will replace "terrorists" and "inevitable collateral damage during surgical strikes" will replace "bombing civilans".
The difference is terminology implies that the terrorist's actions were targeted at innocent people, whereas the military actions will be targeted at the terrorists and their sponsors. Since this happens to be the truth (unless you can show some reason to believe that we're planning to attack civilian populations), I fail to see the problem.
At this point, we can pretty much say that encryption was not used. If the various organizations that begin in darkness and end in the letter "A" had been able to come up with something -- anything -- other than "We Blew It" as a reason for not catching this, they would have mentioned it by now.
With a plan like this, set up years in advance and not needing to be executed on any specific date, they only needed to transmit one of two messages: 1)"Proceed According To Plan" and 2)"Stop; Wait For The Next Courier From Jihadistan". It's trivial to come up with two utterly unnoticeable code words.
For the kind of limited-scope communications involved in a terrorist mission (they've already decided the basic plan face-to-face; they only need to coordinate where and when to strike), they can just develop a small set of code phrases. This can be minimized to just two codes -- one for "go ahead" and one for "scrub the mission and meet to discuss new plans".
We are telling them to hand over bin Laden or we will destroy them, completely ignoring their reasonable call for proof.
Possibilies:
1. The Taliban is trying to delay the fall of the hammer.
2. The Taliban is hoping to glean some clues as to where we got our evidence.
3. The Taliban has suddenly developed a respect for the rule of law and the rights of the accused.
Personally, I find the credibility gap between the first two theories and the last one to be comparable to the gap between "Mommy and Daddy put the presents under the tree" and "There really is a Santa Claus".
If we were able to definitely connect him to the older trade center bombing, two US embassy bombings, and the bombing of a US Destroyer, why only now do we really get forceful?
Er, how about the obvious: 1)this was a bigger attack and 2)the US has a different administration?
In any event, I do think we need to get bin Laden, we cannot rightfully do it under the public pretense of justice for the WTC, but rather the more sensible pretense of trying to end terrorism
1. The government requires the publishers of crypto software to install some sort of digital "skeleton key".
2a. Corrupt politicians use the back door to dig up dirt on their political opponents, like Filegate and COINTELPRO.
2b. Crooks compromise one of the agents who knows about the back door, and use it to forge big money transfers to themselves and a free ticket to the Cayman Islands.
2c. Terrorists get hold of the back door, and use it to forge all sorts of false communications to create chaos.
2d. An 3133t hacq3r d00d cracks the back door, and uses it to replace your bank records with a picture of Natalie Portman engaged in topless grits-wrestling.
Oh... you meant to ask how crypto back doors are supposed to work? Ask the people who came up with this hare-brained scheme.
it lets a contressperson say to his constituents "I voted for $FOO, it isn't my fault that the courts overturned it.
The fact that there is no penalty for breaking the supreme law of the land is the fundamental problem.
These people are sworn to uphold the Constitution. Passing blatantly* un-Constitutional laws and letting the courts clean up their mess is malpractice. It's as if a surgeon didn't bother to keep track of his sponges (what the heck, another surgeon can always get them later).
*I'd cut them some slack if the issue falls into a legitimate grey area.
There ought to be clear civil and criminal penalties for wanton violations of privacy and excessive monitoring.
OK -- get back to me when the government has established a credible track record of prosecuting its agents and sending them to prison (the real kind, not Club Fed) when they commit such abuses. As it is, these guys get away with murder (literally, as in the case of Lon Horiuchi).
You're probably going to reply to me and say "but the Constitution says...!". Do you honestly mean to tell me that you are construing a document written hundreds of years ago as being directly applicable to this situation?
It's the highest law of the land. The rule of law is a fundamental part of what distinguishes civilization from barbarism in the first place.
Certainly the creators of the Constitution never could have forseen the kind of cowardly attacks we faced recently.
I had no idea that the Politically Correct view of the Noble Red Man had so completely displaced the historical facts.
One of our government's greatest strengths is that it is NOT rigid. It must constantly evolve to maintain the balance of liberty while giving due powers to those who must protect us and our way of life.
The procedure for doing so is described in Article V. You will note that it's a bit more involved than a mere assertion that Things Are Different Now[tm].
1.Set clear limits on the use and storage of personal information gathered by technical means.
2.Create credible methods of verification that these limits are actually being observed.
The government also needs to:
3. Establish a convincing track record of punishing violations of these limits (with real don't-bend-over-for-the-soap prison time, not a few weeks at Club Fed).
This is part of any real definition of "credible" in point 2, but sufficiently important to be listed separately.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything on the release notes indicating that Composer gained the ability to actually upload a web page to the server after you edit it.
I haven't seen such an unconvincing self-defense since the Taliban announced that they would never surrender Osama, who was their guest, and had already left the country, and was holed up incommunicado in one of the local mountain caves, but that they'd consider sending him to a neutral country for trial if we quit bombing them.
It's not necessary to "imagine" government agencies with all the power they want; we've seen the results in reality again and again (and again and again and again and again).
Personal responsibility is a more promising approach.
How are they going to get this money without raising taxes?
By doing the same thing you and I do if we have unanticipated emergency expenses: cut back on lower-priority spending.
Mail-order stores only use the local infrastructure in those jurisdictions where they have a physical presence. Ergo, the current law (requiring sales tax to be collected in jurisdicitons of physical presence) is the correct approach. Collecting sales taxes outside areas of physical presence is simply pandering to politicians' greed.
IIRC, the reason we have this butt-ugly new $5-$100 bill design in the US is because of high-quality counterfeits Made in Iran[tm]....
This is a great improvement over the old days, when it took a lot of inking, cutting, and retouching to convert someone into a non-person.
Some of them had overstayed their visas (making them illegal aliens).
One legitimate security measure would be restoring the old requirement for legal aliens to check in every so often, and go looking for any that didn't. (When I was a kid, there were PSAs reminding aliens to register every January -- we might want to make it a bit more frequent under the circumstances.)
For starters, there's the one we're already doing (albeit insufficiently) -- take down terrorists and their state sponsors, hard. It should be done rather harder than it is: since we aren't going to be loved over there anytime in my lifetime, fear will have to do.
On the home front, we can start with rational policies for self and community defense (e.g. nationwide CCW for people with proven clean records, laws giving a strong but rebuttable presumption that anyone using force against a criminal is in the right). Special circumstances (such as boarding aircraft) would have corresponding special requirements, but there should be at least one armed person unknown to any but the crew on any given flight.
If permitting passengers with firearms is not politically feasable, then let them have clubs -- after 9/11, the "cooperate and you'll be OK" model is obsolete, so we just need to make sure that the non-terrorist passengers' advantage of numbers is sufficiently decisive.
Weapons are only one part of local defense, to be sure -- comprehensive local civil defense, including medical and infrastructure response as well as peacekeeping, should be in place in any populated area.
Images are copyrightable. Words are copyrightable. The SSSCA would require closed-source for any software capable of processing or displaying words and images. QED.
On the contrary -- I've already shot down the argument that key escrow could "work" by showing that it has to be perfect (which is obviously absurd) to prevent massive compromise of data (read: instant counterfeiting on any scale you like, given that electronic transfer is a much bigger business than trading green slips of paper with dead Presidents' pictures).
Combined with the other responses to the original post, this assertion sounds like one of the de-limbed Black Knight's taunts.
Advocates of unbreakable crypto want to roll back the power of governments to tap into communications.
Here we come to a more fundamental issue. Some technological advances roll government power forward, others roll it back. Allowing only the former to proceed creates a one-way ratchet toward increased government power, which is clearly incompatible with Constitutional balances.
"Do it to Julia!"
Crypto is also easily opened -- just use a key logger or an old-fashioned hidden camera aimed at the suspect's keyboard.
Of course, this is only practical against a reasonably small group of suspects. An attempt at dragnet fishing expeditions would be too difficult, and the risk of detection would increase more or less linearly with the number of targets.
Thus, any argument in favor of using a technology that lends itself to fishing expeditions (key escrow) rather than one that lends itself to specifically targeted surveillance (key loggers and bugs) raises a red flag that the former is on somebody's agenda.
the vast majority of the value of crypto could *theoretically* be retained with well managed (i.e. privately owned and run, paid for by crypto users) key escrow
One corrupted escrow agent, and an arbitrarily large number of people's communications are compromised.
If you say that your definition of "well managed" excludes that possibility, then you ought to admit that what you're really saying is: "the value of crypto could *theoretically* be retained with perfect key escrow".
Requiring all communication using strong encryption to use key escrow has the flip side of making other forms of encrypted communication illegal.
In general, this cannot be detected without fishing expeditions. In specific cases, see above re key loggers, etc.
The difference is terminology implies that the terrorist's actions were targeted at innocent people, whereas the military actions will be targeted at the terrorists and their sponsors. Since this happens to be the truth (unless you can show some reason to believe that we're planning to attack civilian populations), I fail to see the problem.
Mark Lenard (1927-1996) isn't just too old, he's too dead. Were you thinking of somebody else?
With a plan like this, set up years in advance and not needing to be executed on any specific date, they only needed to transmit one of two messages: 1)"Proceed According To Plan" and 2)"Stop; Wait For The Next Courier From Jihadistan". It's trivial to come up with two utterly unnoticeable code words.
For the kind of limited-scope communications involved in a terrorist mission (they've already decided the basic plan face-to-face; they only need to coordinate where and when to strike), they can just develop a small set of code phrases. This can be minimized to just two codes -- one for "go ahead" and one for "scrub the mission and meet to discuss new plans".
Possibilies:
Personally, I find the credibility gap between the first two theories and the last one to be comparable to the gap between "Mommy and Daddy put the presents under the tree" and "There really is a Santa Claus".If we were able to definitely connect him to the older trade center bombing, two US embassy bombings, and the bombing of a US Destroyer, why only now do we really get forceful?
Er, how about the obvious: 1)this was a bigger attack and 2)the US has a different administration?
In any event, I do think we need to get bin Laden, we cannot rightfully do it under the public pretense of justice for the WTC, but rather the more sensible pretense of trying to end terrorism
That's the position Dubya set forth last night.
The fact that there is no penalty for breaking the supreme law of the land is the fundamental problem.
These people are sworn to uphold the Constitution. Passing blatantly* un-Constitutional laws and letting the courts clean up their mess is malpractice. It's as if a surgeon didn't bother to keep track of his sponges (what the heck, another surgeon can always get them later).
OK -- get back to me when the government has established a credible track record of prosecuting its agents and sending them to prison (the real kind, not Club Fed) when they commit such abuses. As it is, these guys get away with murder (literally, as in the case of Lon Horiuchi).
It's the highest law of the land. The rule of law is a fundamental part of what distinguishes civilization from barbarism in the first place.
Certainly the creators of the Constitution never could have forseen the kind of cowardly attacks we faced recently.
I had no idea that the Politically Correct view of the Noble Red Man had so completely displaced the historical facts.
One of our government's greatest strengths is that it is NOT rigid. It must constantly evolve to maintain the balance of liberty while giving due powers to those who must protect us and our way of life.
The procedure for doing so is described in Article V. You will note that it's a bit more involved than a mere assertion that Things Are Different Now[tm].
The government also needs to:
What color is the sky in your world?