but the satellite simply responds to your location request.
No, it doesn't do that either. It just broadcasts. It doesn't have any idea that you (or your receiver) want location information, any more than a DJ at a local radio station knows when you tune in to his show.
Why is it not an *essential* liberty that I have some privacy in my financial transactions? It's not as if financial transactions are some minut, inconsequential portion of our lives. How do we tell which liberties are essential and which aren't? Shall that be determined by which ones the current administration wants to take away from us? Or are we simply willing to give them all up, one by one, in the vague but ultimately futile hope that maybe it might make us a bit safer?
Exactly which of the Powers of Congress enumerated in the Constitution authorizes the government to mandate that credit card companies divulge "suspicious" transactions to the government?
If someone were involved in the shifting of huge amounts of funds around and planning the next WTC, Pentagon, Waco or Bali bombing, you mean you all wouldn't want to know about it?
Yes, if "knowing about it" means that the government has the financial transactions of hundreds of millions of citizens under a microscope at all times, in order to (not) catch a few terrorists here and there, I definitely don't want it. It's a huge expense to taxpayers, and a huge intrusion into citizen's privacy, for no real benefit.
Whenever people try to defend the latest ridiculous things that DHS is doing, they always trot out the line "but you want the government to catch terrorists, don't you?" That's a completely specious and indefensible argument; the government had more than enough information to catch the 9/11 terrorists before the act, and failed to do it because they had too much information and not enough ability (or willingness) to correlate it. Thus collecting MORE information is not the answer, especially since it encroaches that much more on the liberty of citizens.
Terrorism should not be dealt with differently than any other crime. As in, "innocent until proven guilty", and "better to let ten guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man". The Constitution requires search warrants for investigations of other crimes (though King George the W claims otherwise); they should be required for terrorism investigations as well, including searching financial transactions.
These "know your customer" banking regulations, the transaction reporting threshold, the instructions to report suspicious transactions even below that threshold, and the prohibition of "structuring" transactions all actually came about before 9/11, but have been stepped up significantly since then. The original rationale was the so-called "war on drugs". But that's not any better reason than the so-called "war on terrorists".
"They that can give up essential liberty for temporary security deserve neither."
I wouldn't count on it. RIM may have decided that they're better off paying for a patent license, then joining forces with NTP to sue the pants off anyone else that tries to offer a similer product/service. If RIM no longer pushes the patent office to invalidate NTP patents, then it is likely that they won't get invalidated, and that the ones that have had non-final (or even final) rejections will be reinstated on appeal.
Tell me how email works under this hare-brained micropayment scheme. Who controls it? Who's in charge? Who prevents abuse? How do payments get from point A to point B?
An overview is in the link in my original posting. There would be multiple competing clearinghouses for the payments. Mail senders and recipients would have accounts with a clearinghouse. This does NOT require that they even have bank accounts, much less tie such accounts to their email address. In practice, anyone that sends a lot of unsolicited email would probably want to make arrangements for credit with their clearinghouse, which *might* involve a bank account.
ISPs might act as default clearinghouses for their customers, just as post-divestiture RBOCs originally assigned default long distance carriers to their customers. That would simplify billing for sending and payment for recipients, because it could just be integrated into their existing monthly ISP bill. But ISP customers should be able to choose a different clearinghouse if they so desire.
A would configure (possibly via a setting in your MUA) how much they're willing to pay to send an email. A recipient would configure how much to charge to receive for unsolicited email. Typically a recipient would set up a white list (possibly with some auto-whitelisting feature) so that people that you actually expect and want to receive email from don't pay. The key is that the setup has to be easy, and it has to normally be set-and-forget. Anything that requires you do hassle with extra menus or buttons on a per message basis isn't going to be accepted.
When someone sends email to a party that wants to be paid, if they haven't made payment arrangements via a clearinghouse, or they don't want to pay the requested amount, the mail doesn't go through.
If a recipient doesn't want to charge to receive email, he or she doesn't have to have a clearinghouse account. In that case, they'll receive all email that anyone wants to send them. They can continue to use filtering, RBLs, etc. just as today.
The payment for an email would pass from the sender's clearinghouse to the recipient's clearinghouse, and periodically (perhaps quarterly or even annually) the recipients clearinghouse would send a check to the recipient.
Naturally the clearinghouses won't opperate for free; they'll take some percentage cut of the micropayment. I expect that would likely be around 5 to 25% of the total micropayment, which would still leave at least 50% of it for the recipient.
If there was only a single clearinghosue (as in this AOL fiasco), there would be no incentive to keep the fee low.
The only bureacracy that should be involved is that there should be an organization that accredits clearinghouses. The accreditation would involve doing credit and background checks on the entity operating the clearinghouse, and possibly requiring the clearinghouse to post a bond. It seems likely that a clearinghouse on the email-receiving side of a transaction would not be willing to accept a micropayment from a clearinghouse that is not accredited, since there would be uncertainty about the ability to collect the payment.
The overall idea is that by creating these clearinghouses for the transactions, they are effectively aggregated, even though any one sender-recipient pair may never have very many transactions. This prevents the per-transaction cost from being higher than the actual value of the transaction.
How does this work with national boundaries?
The same way any financial transactions work across national boundaries. If a sender in Nigeria tries to email a recipient in the US, the US clearinghouse may or may not be willing to accept payment from the Nigerian clearinghouse, and either the US government or the Nigerian government may impose a tax on the transaction. Assuming that the claringhouses are willing to enter into a transaction, and the sender's payment threshold is at
It doesn't require any bloated central bureaucracy, nor does it require tying every single email address to a bank acount. Please get half a clue before spouting off about it.
I don't think a petition is going to impress them, but a boycott might. If they want to isolate themselves from the rest of the email world, let them. We should all configure our MTAs (Sendmail, Postfix, etc.) to refuse to deliver ANY email to AOL hosts. When AOL customers can't get email from outside AOL, they will switch to a more enlightened ISP.
I'm actually in favor of using micropayments to solve the spam problem, but the micropayments should go to the actual email recipient, not the ISP or some other company. Obviously part of it would be consumed by processing expenses, but there could be competing clearinghouses. And use of the system would be completely by discretion of the email recipient, NOT the ISP.
The DC-X fuel capacity was over 18,000 Kg (total H2 and O2). I think that would be sufficient for the Level Two requirements of the proposed challenge rules. The DC-Y would have been a larger vehicle, and would have had significantly longer possible hover time.
of the DC-X (Delta Clipper scale test vehicle)? It already did this and more.
After a series of successful DC-X tests the idiots then in charge at NASA picked the unproven VentureStar design instead, and it turned out that even NASA couldn't afford to buy enough unobtanium to build a working VentureStar.
(The DC-X was destroyed by human error in a test, but the vehicle performed well in all the prior tests. There was no good reason not to pursue the Delta Clipper design, other than that apparently the team didn't give NASA bigwigs enough kickbacks.)
Hmmm... maybe the folks at Armadillo Aerospace can win this one, now that they've completed their new vehicle. Check out the photos, from a distance it looks like something on the cover of a 1940s science fiction magazine.:-)
If it isn't illegal there is no problem doing it ?
Yes, for the most part. There are probably some things that are not illegal yet I'd consider unethical. But buying a copy of OS X and running it on a generic PC isn't one of them. If I buy a copy of a piece of software, the publisher doesn't have any right (legal or ethical) to tell me that I can only run it on computers the publisher approves of, regardless of whether the publisher happens to manufacture and/or sell those computers.
For the publisher to have such a right would make about as much sense as the vendor of a laundry detergent having the right to tell you that you're only allowed to use that detergent in the brand of washing machine they choose. Or Chevron having the right to tell you that you can only use their gas in Ford automobiles, not GM or Toyota.
They can "feel" whatever they want, but in point of fact if someone buys a copy of OS X, and installs it on a non-Apple piece of hardware, they haven't "stolen" or even pirated it.
Some people have claimed that doing that in the US violates the DMCA, but I disagree for two reasons:
The DMCA ban on circumvention only applies when "a technological measure 'effectively protects a right of a copyright owner under this title'": 17 USC 1201(b)(2)(B). In other words, the copyright owner can only use the ban on circuvention to enforce a legal right that they already had under copyright law (Title 17), not to create and enforce a new right. In this case, Apple, as the owner of the copyright of MacOS X, doesn't have any legal right unter title 17 to prevent a purchaser to only using the software on hardware manufactured and sold by Apple.
Even if OS X were protected by a technological measure within the meaning of the DMCA, the DMCA has a specific section exempting reverse engineering necessary for interoperability purposes. Reverse engineering OS X to make it work on generic PC hardware is obviously done to make OS X interoperable with non-Apple software such as a non-Apple BIOS.
The point is most people using the intel osx aren't paying for it.
Evidence?
Even if some people do something, that doesn't mean that everyone does it. Apple shouldn't consider everyone trying to run OS X on a non-Apple machine to be a thief, just because some people aren't paying for it.
Some people running OS X on genuine Apple hardware (PowerPC machines that shipped with OS 9) didn't pay for it, but that doesn't make everyone running OS X on a PowerPC machine a thief either.
It's NOT true. If I buy a copy of OS X, and install it on my non-Apple machine, I haven't STOLEN anything.
The MPAA could similarly (and equally speciously) claim that when I buy a DVD of a movie, and play it on Linux, I've "stolen" the movie, since I'm not playing it on licensed hardware.
In order to have a mechanism to hold users accountable for the email they send, you have to pay for that mechanism somehow. And the easiest way to pay for it is to make the mechanism itself consist of payments. No payment, no email. Simple as that.
Rate limiting doesn't solve the problem. Sure, AOL and MSN, and even many smaller ISPs could do that. And many already do. But because it isn't done everywhere, it's not effective. The spammers simply buy service from a provider that doesn't rate-limit SMTP. The problem with the rate limiting approach is that it tries to add the cost at the wrong end of the pipe. Spammers can circumvent attempts to charge at their end, but if the intended recipients charge to receive email, the spammer can't circumvent that.
Perhaps not everyone would charge to receive email, but the proposed system doesn't require that. It would solve the problem for those people that do charge, which would likely wind up being nearly everyone.
Whereas trying to charge or rate limit at the sending end doesn't benefit anyone until all ISPs do it. It only takes a few ISPs that don't charge or rate limit to keep that method from working.
Spam is a social problem, not primarily a technical one, and the solution is social.
No, it's an economic problem, thus the solution is an economic one. As long as it costs essentially nothing for the spammer to blast out a hundred million email messages, he or she will continue to do so, regardless of the social considerations.
Make it cost even a tenth of a cent per recipent, and you'll reduce the probem by more than three orders of magnitude. But realistically, there's no reason why the payment shouldn't be much higher. Why should I bother reading email from a stranger if the stranger wasn't willing to spend ten cents or perhaps even a quarter on sending it?
The obvious solution is a micropayment system, with an SMTP extension so that the recipient can adjust how much he or she charges to receive unsolicited email, and a sender can adjust how much he or she is willing to spend to send the email. Both the sender and recipient can make exceptions, e.g., the recipient can charge no money to senders on his or her whitelist, and an opt-in mailing list sender can set the maximum payment to zero.
The problem is that there is no effective way to handle direct peer-to-peer micropayments, so a clearinghouse is needed. Ideally there would be multiple competing clearinghouses, with gateways between them. If Joe tries to send Bob an email, for which Bob wants to be paid $0.001, the payment might go from Joe to his clearinghouse to Bob's clearinghouse to Bob, with each clearinghouse taking a percentage as a fee. Joe and Bob would probably settle with their clearinghouses every month or every quarter. The percentage would probably be somewhere between 5% and 30% of the payment.
If a spammer tries to blast out ten million email messages without making prior arrangements with his clearinghouse for payment, his clearinghouse is going to reject all payment requests beyond the spammer's credit limit, thus very few spam messages will actually be sent.
You can also get telegrams delivered by Eastern Onion. Their service may be less suitable for urgent messages, but the Western Union's service level had gone down substantially since the 1960s too.
Nonsense. If John Gilmore purchased a ticket from the airline in California, and boarded the plane in California, no interstate commerce is involved in that transaction, so the goverment can't use the interstate commerce clause to justify interfering.
If John purchased the ticket online or by phone, and the airline mailed it to him from another state, then interstate commerce would be involved, so the government could regulate the sale of the ticket. But that doesn't give them any basis for a regulation requiring presentation of ID to board the aircraft, as the act of boarding the aircraft is not commerce.
It's a sad day for personal liberty here in the USA.
The court apparently ruled that the ID requirement is not unconstitutional because the Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of tranportation. This is entirely irrelevant. The Constitution is a limit on the powers of government, not a grant of rights to the people. None of the powers of government enumerated in the Constitution or Amendments give the government the power to restrict US citizens from traveling within the United States by any means they desire. In particular, the government cannot require a passport for domestic travel, yet that is what this requirement does.
Furthermore, the Constitution does not give the government the power to enact and enforce secret laws or regulations. The very concept is anathema to the Rule of Law. If the government did any legitimate power to compel domestic travellers to present identification, it could only exercise that power by publishing laws or regulations that are subject to public scrutiny and judicial oversight.
I very much hope that Mr. Gilmore will appeal this ruling.
I'd have thought that it was possible to rearrange the deck chairs for a lot less than that. Maybe it includes the musicians' salaries as well, though.
Wrong. Congress did use the word war in describing the conflict with Al Qaeda after 9/11.
Sure, Congress throws the word "war" around a lot, informally. Show me where there was a formal declaration of war in a resolution passed by both houses of Congress.
Hint: the last three were issued in 1941.
I've posted elsewhere in this thread on why a declaration of war is important, and not just a meaningless formality that we can disregard.
There was an NPR interview with Bert yesterday after he had given his speech... what he made pretty clear is the reason that FISA wasn't an option was becuase HE IS TOO DAMN LAZY to worry about retroactively respecting the 48 hour FISA rule. Honest to God, when he was speaking I could hear him thinking -- "Man if we have to justify all those taps, I'll have to come into the office on Sunday and maybe even Saturday morning too." It's a damn good thing that this country has DOJ needs that can be handled M-F 8-5.
We're in violent agreement on this part. I cannot conceive of a circumstance in which they can't get a warrant within 48 hours, short of an immense natural disaster, or the country being invaded or bombed on a wide scale. I'd even be willing to cut them some slack if a few of the warrants were issued ten minutes late despite their best efforts to comply with the law. But to just blatantly ignore the law because it is inconvenient (and they've given no other excuse) is admission that the President has committed felony acts in office.
And just because you don't know it, doesn't make it so. Congress has approved the state of war we are currently in. If you would spend a little time looking, you'd know it.
Likewise, just be cause you are ignorant of the US Constitution doesn't make it mean whatever you want it to mean.
I've spent a lot of time looking, and Congress has definitely issued no Declaration of War. They've passed some namby-pamby resolution that mentions the War Powers Act, but NOWHERE does it declare war. They did that knowing full well that they could have included wording in the resolution to declare war, but they chose not to.
For all those of you that think we really are at war (legally), why do you think Congress was unwilling to issue a simple declaration of war? It's not like doing so is particularly difficult; it's just a few words on paper with a few signatures. They could have dusted off any one of the last few they issued (back in 1941) and used it as boilerplate. If they can't find a copy in the Capitol, I suspect that they could get one from the National Archives.
The fact of the matter is that Congress wanted to have a war, but didn't want to accept any responsibility for it. "Go bomb Iraq, but don't blame us for it." So they issued an unconstitutional "authorization of force" instead, to push the responsibility onto the administration.
If the lack of a declaration of war was just some simple oversight ("Oh really? I thought we did that already!"), then as soon as the matter was brought up publicly they could have corrected it by issuing such a declaration. But they have continued to choose not to do that.
The US Congress is a bunch of "girly men" (and women). A good case can be made that the congresspeople that voted for that "authorization of force" should be charged with treason, as should the President for fighting an undeclared war.
And for those that think, "oh, well, a declaration of war is just a formality, we don't really need it", I would point out that apparently the Constitution and Bill of Rights are just formailities, and we don't really need them. That's certainly the stated position (in not so many words) of the current administration.
The point of even having a Constitution, laws, etc., is that we are supposed to abide by them. If we can ignore them whenever they happen to be inconvenient to our immediate needs (even the ill-defined "National Security"), then they ware worthless. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the power to authorize force, and that is an important part of the balance of power of the US government.
If there is a declared war, certain restrictions on the powers of the government are lifted, but if there isn't a declared war, they aren't. That is but one reason why it's very significant that Congress has not seen fit to declare war.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly which of the Powers of Congress enumerated in the Constitution authorizes the government to mandate that credit card companies divulge "suspicious" transactions to the government?
Whenever people try to defend the latest ridiculous things that DHS is doing, they always trot out the line "but you want the government to catch terrorists, don't you?" That's a completely specious and indefensible argument; the government had more than enough information to catch the 9/11 terrorists before the act, and failed to do it because they had too much information and not enough ability (or willingness) to correlate it. Thus collecting MORE information is not the answer, especially since it encroaches that much more on the liberty of citizens.
Terrorism should not be dealt with differently than any other crime. As in, "innocent until proven guilty", and "better to let ten guilty men go free than to wrongly convict one innocent man". The Constitution requires search warrants for investigations of other crimes (though King George the W claims otherwise); they should be required for terrorism investigations as well, including searching financial transactions.
These "know your customer" banking regulations, the transaction reporting threshold, the instructions to report suspicious transactions even below that threshold, and the prohibition of "structuring" transactions all actually came about before 9/11, but have been stepped up significantly since then. The original rationale was the so-called "war on drugs". But that's not any better reason than the so-called "war on terrorists".
I wouldn't count on it. RIM may have decided that they're better off paying for a patent license, then joining forces with NTP to sue the pants off anyone else that tries to offer a similer product/service. If RIM no longer pushes the patent office to invalidate NTP patents, then it is likely that they won't get invalidated, and that the ones that have had non-final (or even final) rejections will be reinstated on appeal.
An overview is in the link in my original posting. There would be multiple competing clearinghouses for the payments. Mail senders and recipients would have accounts with a clearinghouse. This does NOT require that they even have bank accounts, much less tie such accounts to their email address. In practice, anyone that sends a lot of unsolicited email would probably want to make arrangements for credit with their clearinghouse, which *might* involve a bank account.
ISPs might act as default clearinghouses for their customers, just as post-divestiture RBOCs originally assigned default long distance carriers to their customers. That would simplify billing for sending and payment for recipients, because it could just be integrated into their existing monthly ISP bill. But ISP customers should be able to choose a different clearinghouse if they so desire.
A would configure (possibly via a setting in your MUA) how much they're willing to pay to send an email. A recipient would configure how much to charge to receive for unsolicited email. Typically a recipient would set up a white list (possibly with some auto-whitelisting feature) so that people that you actually expect and want to receive email from don't pay. The key is that the setup has to be easy, and it has to normally be set-and-forget. Anything that requires you do hassle with extra menus or buttons on a per message basis isn't going to be accepted.
When someone sends email to a party that wants to be paid, if they haven't made payment arrangements via a clearinghouse, or they don't want to pay the requested amount, the mail doesn't go through.
If a recipient doesn't want to charge to receive email, he or she doesn't have to have a clearinghouse account. In that case, they'll receive all email that anyone wants to send them. They can continue to use filtering, RBLs, etc. just as today.
The payment for an email would pass from the sender's clearinghouse to the recipient's clearinghouse, and periodically (perhaps quarterly or even annually) the recipients clearinghouse would send a check to the recipient.
Naturally the clearinghouses won't opperate for free; they'll take some percentage cut of the micropayment. I expect that would likely be around 5 to 25% of the total micropayment, which would still leave at least 50% of it for the recipient.
If there was only a single clearinghosue (as in this AOL fiasco), there would be no incentive to keep the fee low.
The only bureacracy that should be involved is that there should be an organization that accredits clearinghouses. The accreditation would involve doing credit and background checks on the entity operating the clearinghouse, and possibly requiring the clearinghouse to post a bond. It seems likely that a clearinghouse on the email-receiving side of a transaction would not be willing to accept a micropayment from a clearinghouse that is not accredited, since there would be uncertainty about the ability to collect the payment.
The overall idea is that by creating these clearinghouses for the transactions, they are effectively aggregated, even though any one sender-recipient pair may never have very many transactions. This prevents the per-transaction cost from being higher than the actual value of the transaction.
The same way any financial transactions work across national boundaries. If a sender in Nigeria tries to email a recipient in the US, the US clearinghouse may or may not be willing to accept payment from the Nigerian clearinghouse, and either the US government or the Nigerian government may impose a tax on the transaction. Assuming that the claringhouses are willing to enter into a transaction, and the sender's payment threshold is at
It doesn't require any bloated central bureaucracy, nor does it require tying every single email address to a bank acount. Please get half a clue before spouting off about it.
I'm actually in favor of using micropayments to solve the spam problem, but the micropayments should go to the actual email recipient, not the ISP or some other company. Obviously part of it would be consumed by processing expenses, but there could be competing clearinghouses. And use of the system would be completely by discretion of the email recipient, NOT the ISP.
The DC-X fuel capacity was over 18,000 Kg (total H2 and O2). I think that would be sufficient for the Level Two requirements of the proposed challenge rules. The DC-Y would have been a larger vehicle, and would have had significantly longer possible hover time.
After a series of successful DC-X tests the idiots then in charge at NASA picked the unproven VentureStar design instead, and it turned out that even NASA couldn't afford to buy enough unobtanium to build a working VentureStar.
(The DC-X was destroyed by human error in a test, but the vehicle performed well in all the prior tests. There was no good reason not to pursue the Delta Clipper design, other than that apparently the team didn't give NASA bigwigs enough kickbacks.)
Hmmm... maybe the folks at Armadillo Aerospace can win this one, now that they've completed their new vehicle. Check out the photos, from a distance it looks like something on the cover of a 1940s science fiction magazine. :-)
For the publisher to have such a right would make about as much sense as the vendor of a laundry detergent having the right to tell you that you're only allowed to use that detergent in the brand of washing machine they choose. Or Chevron having the right to tell you that you can only use their gas in Ford automobiles, not GM or Toyota.
Some people have claimed that doing that in the US violates the DMCA, but I disagree for two reasons:
Even if some people do something, that doesn't mean that everyone does it. Apple shouldn't consider everyone trying to run OS X on a non-Apple machine to be a thief, just because some people aren't paying for it.
Some people running OS X on genuine Apple hardware (PowerPC machines that shipped with OS 9) didn't pay for it, but that doesn't make everyone running OS X on a PowerPC machine a thief either.
The MPAA could similarly (and equally speciously) claim that when I buy a DVD of a movie, and play it on Linux, I've "stolen" the movie, since I'm not playing it on licensed hardware.
Rate limiting doesn't solve the problem. Sure, AOL and MSN, and even many smaller ISPs could do that. And many already do. But because it isn't done everywhere, it's not effective. The spammers simply buy service from a provider that doesn't rate-limit SMTP. The problem with the rate limiting approach is that it tries to add the cost at the wrong end of the pipe. Spammers can circumvent attempts to charge at their end, but if the intended recipients charge to receive email, the spammer can't circumvent that.
Perhaps not everyone would charge to receive email, but the proposed system doesn't require that. It would solve the problem for those people that do charge, which would likely wind up being nearly everyone.
Whereas trying to charge or rate limit at the sending end doesn't benefit anyone until all ISPs do it. It only takes a few ISPs that don't charge or rate limit to keep that method from working.
Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five
You can also get telegrams delivered by Eastern Onion. Their service may be less suitable for urgent messages, but the Western Union's service level had gone down substantially since the 1960s too.
The SCOTUS' view of the commerce clause is not as clear-cut as that. They rejected that kind of thinking in United States v. Lopez (1995).
If John purchased the ticket online or by phone, and the airline mailed it to him from another state, then interstate commerce would be involved, so the government could regulate the sale of the ticket. But that doesn't give them any basis for a regulation requiring presentation of ID to board the aircraft, as the act of boarding the aircraft is not commerce.
The court apparently ruled that the ID requirement is not unconstitutional because the Constitution does not guarantee the right to travel by any particular form of tranportation. This is entirely irrelevant. The Constitution is a limit on the powers of government, not a grant of rights to the people. None of the powers of government enumerated in the Constitution or Amendments give the government the power to restrict US citizens from traveling within the United States by any means they desire. In particular, the government cannot require a passport for domestic travel, yet that is what this requirement does.
Furthermore, the Constitution does not give the government the power to enact and enforce secret laws or regulations. The very concept is anathema to the Rule of Law. If the government did any legitimate power to compel domestic travellers to present identification, it could only exercise that power by publishing laws or regulations that are subject to public scrutiny and judicial oversight.
I very much hope that Mr. Gilmore will appeal this ruling.
Your local electric company doesn't sell you any electrons. They only trade electrons with you.
I'd have thought that it was possible to rearrange the deck chairs for a lot less than that. Maybe it includes the musicians' salaries as well, though.
Hint: the last three were issued in 1941.
I've posted elsewhere in this thread on why a declaration of war is important, and not just a meaningless formality that we can disregard.
We're in violent agreement on this part. I cannot conceive of a circumstance in which they can't get a warrant within 48 hours, short of an immense natural disaster, or the country being invaded or bombed on a wide scale. I'd even be willing to cut them some slack if a few of the warrants were issued ten minutes late despite their best efforts to comply with the law. But to just blatantly ignore the law because it is inconvenient (and they've given no other excuse) is admission that the President has committed felony acts in office.Likewise, just be cause you are ignorant of the US Constitution doesn't make it mean whatever you want it to mean.
I've spent a lot of time looking, and Congress has definitely issued no Declaration of War. They've passed some namby-pamby resolution that mentions the War Powers Act, but NOWHERE does it declare war. They did that knowing full well that they could have included wording in the resolution to declare war, but they chose not to.
For all those of you that think we really are at war (legally), why do you think Congress was unwilling to issue a simple declaration of war? It's not like doing so is particularly difficult; it's just a few words on paper with a few signatures. They could have dusted off any one of the last few they issued (back in 1941) and used it as boilerplate. If they can't find a copy in the Capitol, I suspect that they could get one from the National Archives.
The fact of the matter is that Congress wanted to have a war, but didn't want to accept any responsibility for it. "Go bomb Iraq, but don't blame us for it." So they issued an unconstitutional "authorization of force" instead, to push the responsibility onto the administration.
If the lack of a declaration of war was just some simple oversight ("Oh really? I thought we did that already!"), then as soon as the matter was brought up publicly they could have corrected it by issuing such a declaration. But they have continued to choose not to do that.
The US Congress is a bunch of "girly men" (and women). A good case can be made that the congresspeople that voted for that "authorization of force" should be charged with treason, as should the President for fighting an undeclared war.
And for those that think, "oh, well, a declaration of war is just a formality, we don't really need it", I would point out that apparently the Constitution and Bill of Rights are just formailities, and we don't really need them. That's certainly the stated position (in not so many words) of the current administration.
The point of even having a Constitution, laws, etc., is that we are supposed to abide by them. If we can ignore them whenever they happen to be inconvenient to our immediate needs (even the ill-defined "National Security"), then they ware worthless. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, not the power to authorize force, and that is an important part of the balance of power of the US government.
If there is a declared war, certain restrictions on the powers of the government are lifted, but if there isn't a declared war, they aren't. That is but one reason why it's very significant that Congress has not seen fit to declare war.