Not much. All rules should have a clear and obvious enforcement path. The failure of many traffic laws (blinkers, or driving obnoxiously) is linked to the lack of enforcement.
That said, there are some paths that make sense, and some that are draconian. Just because something can veer to the latter does not invalidate the rules, but it should spawn a decent amount of vigilance.
ALL of our rights? Is the freedom of the press or freedom of religion not allowed on planes? How about the right to remain silent? People check you and your luggage to confirm that you don't have any weapons. This is not a suspension of ALL of your rights.
Yes, I like hyperbole. Safety, though, should not suspend any of our big (constitutional) rights, and tread very very lightly on our smaller rights. Our current security regime threatens to tread on the whole "unreasonable search and seizure" thing. I also think that secret lists, lacking in oversight, made by dubious profiling tread rather heavy on our rights.
Plus the idea of treating everyone like a potential criminal goes against the very spirit of our nation. The more we move into this ground, the harsher the future consequences will be. Like hyperbole, I am also a fan of the slippery slope.
ANY cost? No. But, of course, there will be some cost. Do you not put new brake pads on your car? That's at a cost, is it not? I feel that "Absolute freedom, regardless of the risk to me or others" is equally as heinous.
Some people ascribe to this philosophy. Some people are willing to sell their soul, and live in a police state just so the "bad guys don't win". See London and Chicago for example. See the support in some circles for Bush Jr.'s warrantless wiretapping. See the huge amount of support for the completely unread, and constitution stomping PATRIOT act after 9/11. This is why we need a degree of vigilance and vocal outrage.
Sure, there are some people that think that anyone should be able to go to their local 7-11 and purchase an AK-47 complete with scope an ammo like they are buying a pack of smokes, but they are wrong.
I agree. But if these background checks started relying on secretly compiled lists, profiling, and involved searching your possessions for compromising material, then I would say they overstep. Background checks are (forthe most part) sound, but they can reach a level of absurdity too, if we allow them to.
I'm not saying I am against most of our current air-port security, I'm just saying that it teaters on dangerous territory, and thus requires a heaping dose of vigilance and skepticism. We should be willing to fight against those who are "security nuts".
I would rather risk terrorism than have our own government overstep their bounds, or trample on any single right of us, the innocent citizens.
Here is an idea; why doesn't Google start automatically encrypting messages sent between Gmail accounts? This would pretty much close off a small, but decent, percentage of traffic from quasi-lawful snooping? Being that Google is the big player, it would provide impetuous for other email service providers to follow suit, or form agreements to cross encrypt with each other (all main from gmail to gmail will be encrypted, as will all main from gmail to yahoo, or yahoo to yahoo). It would be nice for marketing too.
I fully admit my idea is probably highly naive, and wildly unrealistic.
Having rules that are enforced like "no bombs on planes (REALLY)" is not usurping your civil rights.
I don't think its the rules that bother people, its the enforcement. I doubt you'd find many people who take issues with a "no bombs" policy, the real problem is that we're willing to give up basically all of our rights to enforce it. Worse, we give up all our rights for pretty much negligible results.
The problem is that at some point the cure becomes worse than the disease. Some argue (and I agree) that this point has been passed. "Safety at any cost" is a pretty heinous ideology, and it is an ideology that many people are embracing, and many countries and agencies are implementing, completely ignorant of the long term consequences. While loosening the constitutional grip on law enforcement might be fine and dandy for preventing terrorists, I doubt many people would be happy with the potential civil consequences in other areas.
Having a rule that says "murder is illegal" is fine and dandy, but when the enforcement path includes cameras in everyones house, then there is a problem.
Maybe in Pluto there is a colony of intelligent robots (which communicate through gravity waves, i.e. civilizations withouth a theory of quantum gravity wouldn't detect their communications) and they are waiting for our civilization to build enough autonomous electronic components, so that at a given point they will send a signal/virus, take control of all our electronic infracstructure and take on planet's control. The threats of civilization always come from possibilities that we weren't able to imagine.
Actually the only life on Pluto is a lonely ship full of intelligent crab/lobster people, and they are more frightened of us, than we of them.
As I said, I only think this in my most optimistic moments. Currently, with less than a sip of coffee in my gut, I think the developed countries are going to decline, and the developing world will swallow us all up, until, of course, their standard of living increases, then they too will dwindle.
Though, I prefer to think that their is a level where everything evens out. If a population drops to much, they will find it hard to achieve a desirable standard of living, and will have to live with a very real and immediate risk of their culture dying off, this precipice might prove the impetuous for breeding more. Either that (as often seen in threatened minorities), ennui, xenophobia, and movements towards cultural purity.
Though one foil is the fact that most of these countries with a declining birth rate rely on their poor neighbors to keep up their accustomed life-style. Here in America, we don't need children to replenish the labor pool, when we have millions of neighbors down south who are begging for out metaphorical scraps, willing to do all of our dirty work.
I don't think this is a unique time in human events. Most large empires grow fat and lazy on the backs of poor neighbors who do all the dirty work. And pretty much every historical empire is long dead thanks to this situation.
Growing up as "gen-x" made me somewhat jaded to the institution. Of all the people I know in my rough age-group, perhaps 10% came from a happily married family, the rest were children of divorce or single parenthood. It makes it hard to even see marriage as a commitment, when over 50% of them end in divorce, making it nothing more than a social agreement with a horde of lawyers attached.
I'm not disparaging people choosing to get married though, since the institution is only as strong as the amount of faith the participants wish to put into it.
As the first reply to your comment says; geeks are not a genetic population. it is entirely possible for non-geeks to have geeky offspring (my parents are not geeks by any stretch, yet here I am), and it is also possible that two geeky parents will not have geeky offspring.
Geekiness is a factor of culture, mostly. Yes, intelligence is a prerequisite, but not even this is a purely genetic attribute.
Also, the pool of geeks replenishes mostly by non-sexual means. If no geek ever breed, there still would be geeks.
Right now the US is barely breaking even and that's due to immigration. Other westernized countries are already in decline. The numbers are out there, and it's enough to make you think intelligence is an evolutionary dead end.
I don't see the logical connection between "we're breeding less than replacement rate", and "we're doomed". My preferred theory is that our overall population will decline, then stabilize at some less-populous point. Eventually removing around 10% of the population would be advantageous to the human race, removing 50% would be very good. I can see, in my most optimistic moments, the total human population declining over time to a sustainable population, where civilization goes back to being based around small communities, and not giant monolithic, inhuman cities. Cities served a purpose, and now this purpose has been pretty much made obsolete by technology. Humans are naturally adapted to small family-tribal sized units, not gigantic, faceless, aggregates.
In another couple thousand years we'll be living in a Clifford Simak novel.
More of the "geek" stereotype. I'd say around half the geeks I know, who are in or above their 30's, have children and are happily married. The other half have a long term girlfriend and haven't had children due to economic factors. When I was a young geek, in my 20's, I had several girlfriends, and could have spawned at any time, but chose not to.
Sure, I didn't have as many girlfriends, or acquired them with the ease of some non-geek types, but there still was a largish pool to choose from. Currently I have been dating the same woman for around 7 years (with neither of us desiring the purely legalistic construct called "marriage"), and we have put off starting a family until we are financially stable, and willing to accept the life-style changes that having a family entails.
Smart people breed later, and breed less, it has nothing to do with geeks, but with having the mental resources to plan ahead, and wait for the optimal time to have offspring. Dumb people breed early, and breed often, completely oblivious to the consequences for both themselves and their offspring.
On a rational level, your assessment is absolutely correct, but that wasn't my point. Most people are not rational, and most people assess current risks at a higher level than distant risks. Points are a distant risk, where a cash fine is far more immediate.
Calculating points is a far more abstract thing than thinking "crap, I'm going to lose money for this".
But then again none of this matters given the pretty much uniformly lax enforcement of most "minor" traffic violations. Where I live you might have a 1 in 1000 chance of getting stopped for driving like a moron, so there really isn't much of a threat, no matter what the punishment.
Points are psychologically abstract, while the threat of loss of money is more real feeling.
Weigh these two phrases; A) "You will loose 3 points, which, if enough are accrued, will lead to the loss of your license, and possible higher insurance rates."; or, B) "You will be fined $400.". Which is more likely to make you, the common slob, shape up?
I support all measures to curb cell-phone use while driving (all use, but mostly non-handsfree and texting), but all laws are only as good as their enforcement. And enforcement is only as good as police presence, and in many states this is almost non-existent. Here in AZ, I haven't actually seen cop on the road in weeks, which pretty much means I can do what I wish with very slim chances of getting caught. Meaning there is almost no consequences for my own actions.
Your dream is still in alpha status, therefore I will not roll it into my currently stable worldview. I will wait for release status before accepting it.
The "beta" label has pretty much died. In Google-ese "beta" means a normal release, and when they hit the "1.0" and finally take of the beta tag, it pretty much means nothing.
Have you been able to tell the difference between the beta of Gmail, and the full on release? I haven't.
Now if you said this about the "dev channel", or Chromium daily, you would have a point. Though even being at "full-on release" status doesn't mean much, how often does Firefox update, and push bug patches, even at release status? The Mozilla team are tinkering with release versions about as much as Google is tinkering with their betas.
If we're talking about stability, this isn't really an argument either. Chrome is about as stable as Firefox is currently. Both have nagging issues that don't seem to ever be fixed, though I haven't had Chrome or Chromium full-on crash yet, and I pretty much ditched Firefox's last full release because it didn't play well on either Win7 or Karmic (a crash a day is unacceptable).
Also, you're talking about personal computing right, as opposed to business? And you're also talking about something as banal and inconsequential as a web browser, right? What's the worst that can happen (on a well protected OS), you loose your cookies or saved form data? We're not talking about running a server, or business app here, where you can loose data that actually matters, or worse, money.
No, it's called "Ease of Use". Not everyone even knows what an IP address is, and expecting every single person on the planet to understand the concept is ludicrous.
And some of us who know what an IP address is don't want to waste time mucking with system files when there is a far more elegant solution.
Some of us are not 14 anymore, and don't think that taking the hard route makes one "hardcore".
So you have a bit of sympathy for the McVeigh's cause, but not that of the various other groups, so, therefore, McVeigh is not the same type of beast as the other groups who are willing to slaughter innocents for some idiotic ideology?
And even accepting your "overthrowing our government is not terrorism" argument, then we must say that ELF, the Weather Undergound, and other left wing groups from the 60's are also not terrorists, but just "misguided revolutionaries".
This would also remove a large group of Palestinian terrorists from the running, since they just want to remove the Israeli government. What about international groups who attack the US, using terror tactics, to depose our government because of its perceived influence on their region? Wouldn't they just be revolutionaries too?
The label "terrorism" is about tactics, not motive. Using tactics that cause terror or panic, usually by lashing out at civilians, are terrorism, no matter the ends your using them for.
How many people have died in Muslim terrorist attacks?How many in attacks by Christian militia groups in Michigan?
Not many in the grand scheme of things. Getting struck by lightening more than once is probably a greater threat than being killed by Christian extremists (statistically).
Though if you collate all of the Christian, apocalyptic, extremist groups, there is a small, but decent body count as well.
In both cases though, there is a clear threat, and means to prevent that threat from actualizing. We avoid lightening strikes by avoiding going out in thunderstorms and standing under trees, so we shouldn't we act to prevent extremist groups (of all ideologies) to the extent possible without violating the rights of the masses?
Wait, so terrorists are generally only short, fat, people?
I would say physical characteristic would be the worst set of flags there could be, outside of the politically incorrect skin tone which is marginally useful (at best). I'm sure if we mapped all of the terrorists who ever attempted to do their thing, we'd find a pretty dramatic spread of physical characteristics.
Unless terrorism is truly the disenfranchised vertically challenged trying to overthrow the oppression of their tall masters, ala Napoleon.
Also, by "Oklahoma bomber" I assume you mean Timothy McVeigh, who was not a terrorist. He was a badly misguided revolutionary.
Is there a difference?
McVeigh and the Terrorists used the same actions to the same ends. Even if the reasons differed, the ends were the same. Therefore: If it quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.
Take two rings (2D). Raise one in the third dimension. Flip it 90 degrees. Can you link them without having to break one of the rings? No.
Your thinking of the second dimension as pieces of paper, not as proper 2d solids. You can't overlap in 2D, so putting one ring on top of the other would result in one object. Another problem is that you can't link two objects in 2D like in the video. In 2D you would end up with one ring, and then a dot (cross section of a 2D ring rotated in 3D) outside, and a dot inside the 2D ring.
It would be impossible to link the rings from a 2D perspective, though, since there is no way they could overlap. You wouldn't have 2 rings, you would only have a ring and two dots (or rather 1D lines).
It is called the "God Particle" because some pop science writer decided that it would sell more books than calling it the "Higgs Boson". In short, a feeble attempt to get the unwashed, and largely uncaring, masses to give a rat's ass about particle physics. It worked, but only to the extent that people are confusing a mythical deity with a theoretical quantum particle, with all the associated baggage.
I think said pop science author also had to conflate the Higgs with mythical powers to fill his 300 pages, because in reality not many people want to read 300 pages basically saying "It is the quanta of gravitational force, silly!". All of the implications of finding the Higgs are rather obtuse to laypeople, no matter how exciting they are to physicists and geeks.
Maybe the same people who claimed to believe in the Jedi religion on the national census (Google it if you don't believe) will vote for them?
If there was such an entity as the Pirate Party, and it was possible for them to actually be represented, in the U.S., I would vote for them, even if they are a one cause "gimmick" party.
Why? Because they at least would represent one area of the things I care about. Yes, members of both current parties generally have one area (at least) I agree with too, but generally they offset this by having a giant stock of ideas I find repugnant.
With a one trick pony, I avoid this. With enough of them, you might get a whole horse.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. It might even work better now that its discovered, since it leads to far more media coverage.
Yes, I like hyperbole.
What good are rules without enforcement?
Not much. All rules should have a clear and obvious enforcement path. The failure of many traffic laws (blinkers, or driving obnoxiously) is linked to the lack of enforcement.
That said, there are some paths that make sense, and some that are draconian. Just because something can veer to the latter does not invalidate the rules, but it should spawn a decent amount of vigilance.
ALL of our rights? Is the freedom of the press or freedom of religion not allowed on planes? How about the right to remain silent? People check you and your luggage to confirm that you don't have any weapons. This is not a suspension of ALL of your rights.
Yes, I like hyperbole. Safety, though, should not suspend any of our big (constitutional) rights, and tread very very lightly on our smaller rights. Our current security regime threatens to tread on the whole "unreasonable search and seizure" thing. I also think that secret lists, lacking in oversight, made by dubious profiling tread rather heavy on our rights.
Plus the idea of treating everyone like a potential criminal goes against the very spirit of our nation. The more we move into this ground, the harsher the future consequences will be. Like hyperbole, I am also a fan of the slippery slope.
ANY cost? No. But, of course, there will be some cost. Do you not put new brake pads on your car? That's at a cost, is it not?
I feel that "Absolute freedom, regardless of the risk to me or others" is equally as heinous.
Some people ascribe to this philosophy. Some people are willing to sell their soul, and live in a police state just so the "bad guys don't win". See London and Chicago for example. See the support in some circles for Bush Jr.'s warrantless wiretapping. See the huge amount of support for the completely unread, and constitution stomping PATRIOT act after 9/11. This is why we need a degree of vigilance and vocal outrage.
Sure, there are some people that think that anyone should be able to go to their local 7-11 and purchase an AK-47 complete with scope an ammo like they are buying a pack of smokes, but they are wrong.
I agree. But if these background checks started relying on secretly compiled lists, profiling, and involved searching your possessions for compromising material, then I would say they overstep. Background checks are (forthe most part) sound, but they can reach a level of absurdity too, if we allow them to.
I'm not saying I am against most of our current air-port security, I'm just saying that it teaters on dangerous territory, and thus requires a heaping dose of vigilance and skepticism. We should be willing to fight against those who are "security nuts".
I would rather risk terrorism than have our own government overstep their bounds, or trample on any single right of us, the innocent citizens.
Here is an idea; why doesn't Google start automatically encrypting messages sent between Gmail accounts? This would pretty much close off a small, but decent, percentage of traffic from quasi-lawful snooping? Being that Google is the big player, it would provide impetuous for other email service providers to follow suit, or form agreements to cross encrypt with each other (all main from gmail to gmail will be encrypted, as will all main from gmail to yahoo, or yahoo to yahoo). It would be nice for marketing too.
I fully admit my idea is probably highly naive, and wildly unrealistic.
Having rules that are enforced like "no bombs on planes (REALLY)" is not usurping your civil rights.
I don't think its the rules that bother people, its the enforcement. I doubt you'd find many people who take issues with a "no bombs" policy, the real problem is that we're willing to give up basically all of our rights to enforce it. Worse, we give up all our rights for pretty much negligible results.
The problem is that at some point the cure becomes worse than the disease. Some argue (and I agree) that this point has been passed. "Safety at any cost" is a pretty heinous ideology, and it is an ideology that many people are embracing, and many countries and agencies are implementing, completely ignorant of the long term consequences. While loosening the constitutional grip on law enforcement might be fine and dandy for preventing terrorists, I doubt many people would be happy with the potential civil consequences in other areas.
Having a rule that says "murder is illegal" is fine and dandy, but when the enforcement path includes cameras in everyones house, then there is a problem.
Maybe in Pluto there is a colony of intelligent robots (which communicate through gravity waves, i.e. civilizations withouth a theory of quantum gravity wouldn't detect their communications) and they are waiting for our civilization to build enough autonomous electronic components, so that at a given point they will send a signal/virus, take control of all our electronic infracstructure and take on planet's control. The threats of civilization always come from possibilities that we weren't able to imagine.
Actually the only life on Pluto is a lonely ship full of intelligent crab/lobster people, and they are more frightened of us, than we of them.
As I said, I only think this in my most optimistic moments. Currently, with less than a sip of coffee in my gut, I think the developed countries are going to decline, and the developing world will swallow us all up, until, of course, their standard of living increases, then they too will dwindle.
Though, I prefer to think that their is a level where everything evens out. If a population drops to much, they will find it hard to achieve a desirable standard of living, and will have to live with a very real and immediate risk of their culture dying off, this precipice might prove the impetuous for breeding more. Either that (as often seen in threatened minorities), ennui, xenophobia, and movements towards cultural purity.
Though one foil is the fact that most of these countries with a declining birth rate rely on their poor neighbors to keep up their accustomed life-style. Here in America, we don't need children to replenish the labor pool, when we have millions of neighbors down south who are begging for out metaphorical scraps, willing to do all of our dirty work.
I don't think this is a unique time in human events. Most large empires grow fat and lazy on the backs of poor neighbors who do all the dirty work. And pretty much every historical empire is long dead thanks to this situation.
Growing up as "gen-x" made me somewhat jaded to the institution. Of all the people I know in my rough age-group, perhaps 10% came from a happily married family, the rest were children of divorce or single parenthood. It makes it hard to even see marriage as a commitment, when over 50% of them end in divorce, making it nothing more than a social agreement with a horde of lawyers attached.
I'm not disparaging people choosing to get married though, since the institution is only as strong as the amount of faith the participants wish to put into it.
As the first reply to your comment says; geeks are not a genetic population. it is entirely possible for non-geeks to have geeky offspring (my parents are not geeks by any stretch, yet here I am), and it is also possible that two geeky parents will not have geeky offspring.
Geekiness is a factor of culture, mostly. Yes, intelligence is a prerequisite, but not even this is a purely genetic attribute.
Also, the pool of geeks replenishes mostly by non-sexual means. If no geek ever breed, there still would be geeks.
Right now the US is barely breaking even and that's due to immigration. Other westernized countries are already in decline. The numbers are out there, and it's enough to make you think intelligence is an evolutionary dead end.
I don't see the logical connection between "we're breeding less than replacement rate", and "we're doomed". My preferred theory is that our overall population will decline, then stabilize at some less-populous point. Eventually removing around 10% of the population would be advantageous to the human race, removing 50% would be very good. I can see, in my most optimistic moments, the total human population declining over time to a sustainable population, where civilization goes back to being based around small communities, and not giant monolithic, inhuman cities. Cities served a purpose, and now this purpose has been pretty much made obsolete by technology. Humans are naturally adapted to small family-tribal sized units, not gigantic, faceless, aggregates.
In another couple thousand years we'll be living in a Clifford Simak novel.
More of the "geek" stereotype. I'd say around half the geeks I know, who are in or above their 30's, have children and are happily married. The other half have a long term girlfriend and haven't had children due to economic factors. When I was a young geek, in my 20's, I had several girlfriends, and could have spawned at any time, but chose not to.
Sure, I didn't have as many girlfriends, or acquired them with the ease of some non-geek types, but there still was a largish pool to choose from. Currently I have been dating the same woman for around 7 years (with neither of us desiring the purely legalistic construct called "marriage"), and we have put off starting a family until we are financially stable, and willing to accept the life-style changes that having a family entails.
Smart people breed later, and breed less, it has nothing to do with geeks, but with having the mental resources to plan ahead, and wait for the optimal time to have offspring. Dumb people breed early, and breed often, completely oblivious to the consequences for both themselves and their offspring.
On a rational level, your assessment is absolutely correct, but that wasn't my point. Most people are not rational, and most people assess current risks at a higher level than distant risks. Points are a distant risk, where a cash fine is far more immediate.
Calculating points is a far more abstract thing than thinking "crap, I'm going to lose money for this".
But then again none of this matters given the pretty much uniformly lax enforcement of most "minor" traffic violations. Where I live you might have a 1 in 1000 chance of getting stopped for driving like a moron, so there really isn't much of a threat, no matter what the punishment.
Points are psychologically abstract, while the threat of loss of money is more real feeling.
Weigh these two phrases; A) "You will loose 3 points, which, if enough are accrued, will lead to the loss of your license, and possible higher insurance rates."; or, B) "You will be fined $400.". Which is more likely to make you, the common slob, shape up?
I support all measures to curb cell-phone use while driving (all use, but mostly non-handsfree and texting), but all laws are only as good as their enforcement. And enforcement is only as good as police presence, and in many states this is almost non-existent. Here in AZ, I haven't actually seen cop on the road in weeks, which pretty much means I can do what I wish with very slim chances of getting caught. Meaning there is almost no consequences for my own actions.
Your dream is still in alpha status, therefore I will not roll it into my currently stable worldview. I will wait for release status before accepting it.
The "beta" label has pretty much died. In Google-ese "beta" means a normal release, and when they hit the "1.0" and finally take of the beta tag, it pretty much means nothing.
Have you been able to tell the difference between the beta of Gmail, and the full on release? I haven't.
Now if you said this about the "dev channel", or Chromium daily, you would have a point. Though even being at "full-on release" status doesn't mean much, how often does Firefox update, and push bug patches, even at release status? The Mozilla team are tinkering with release versions about as much as Google is tinkering with their betas.
If we're talking about stability, this isn't really an argument either. Chrome is about as stable as Firefox is currently. Both have nagging issues that don't seem to ever be fixed, though I haven't had Chrome or Chromium full-on crash yet, and I pretty much ditched Firefox's last full release because it didn't play well on either Win7 or Karmic (a crash a day is unacceptable).
Also, you're talking about personal computing right, as opposed to business? And you're also talking about something as banal and inconsequential as a web browser, right? What's the worst that can happen (on a well protected OS), you loose your cookies or saved form data? We're not talking about running a server, or business app here, where you can loose data that actually matters, or worse, money.
I believe a lack of protein can stunt development of the brain.
And I believe that eating meat is the only way to keep the Tooth Fairy from embarking on a terrible rampage that would kill all of man-kind.
No, it's called "Ease of Use". Not everyone even knows what an IP address is, and expecting every single person on the planet to understand the concept is ludicrous.
And some of us who know what an IP address is don't want to waste time mucking with system files when there is a far more elegant solution.
Some of us are not 14 anymore, and don't think that taking the hard route makes one "hardcore".
You're the expert, you should know.
So you have a bit of sympathy for the McVeigh's cause, but not that of the various other groups, so, therefore, McVeigh is not the same type of beast as the other groups who are willing to slaughter innocents for some idiotic ideology?
And even accepting your "overthrowing our government is not terrorism" argument, then we must say that ELF, the Weather Undergound, and other left wing groups from the 60's are also not terrorists, but just "misguided revolutionaries".
This would also remove a large group of Palestinian terrorists from the running, since they just want to remove the Israeli government. What about international groups who attack the US, using terror tactics, to depose our government because of its perceived influence on their region? Wouldn't they just be revolutionaries too?
The label "terrorism" is about tactics, not motive. Using tactics that cause terror or panic, usually by lashing out at civilians, are terrorism, no matter the ends your using them for.
Very small it seems.
How many people have died in Muslim terrorist attacks?How many in attacks by Christian militia groups in Michigan?
Not many in the grand scheme of things. Getting struck by lightening more than once is probably a greater threat than being killed by Christian extremists (statistically).
Though if you collate all of the Christian, apocalyptic, extremist groups, there is a small, but decent body count as well.
In both cases though, there is a clear threat, and means to prevent that threat from actualizing. We avoid lightening strikes by avoiding going out in thunderstorms and standing under trees, so we shouldn't we act to prevent extremist groups (of all ideologies) to the extent possible without violating the rights of the masses?
(travel history, height/weight specs, etc)
Wait, so terrorists are generally only short, fat, people?
I would say physical characteristic would be the worst set of flags there could be, outside of the politically incorrect skin tone which is marginally useful (at best). I'm sure if we mapped all of the terrorists who ever attempted to do their thing, we'd find a pretty dramatic spread of physical characteristics.
Unless terrorism is truly the disenfranchised vertically challenged trying to overthrow the oppression of their tall masters, ala Napoleon.
Also, by "Oklahoma bomber" I assume you mean Timothy McVeigh, who was not a terrorist. He was a badly misguided revolutionary.
Is there a difference?
McVeigh and the Terrorists used the same actions to the same ends. Even if the reasons differed, the ends were the same. Therefore: If it quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.
Take two rings (2D). Raise one in the third dimension. Flip it 90 degrees. Can you link them without having to break one of the rings? No.
Your thinking of the second dimension as pieces of paper, not as proper 2d solids. You can't overlap in 2D, so putting one ring on top of the other would result in one object. Another problem is that you can't link two objects in 2D like in the video. In 2D you would end up with one ring, and then a dot (cross section of a 2D ring rotated in 3D) outside, and a dot inside the 2D ring.
It would be impossible to link the rings from a 2D perspective, though, since there is no way they could overlap. You wouldn't have 2 rings, you would only have a ring and two dots (or rather 1D lines).
/raises hand
It is called the "God Particle" because some pop science writer decided that it would sell more books than calling it the "Higgs Boson". In short, a feeble attempt to get the unwashed, and largely uncaring, masses to give a rat's ass about particle physics. It worked, but only to the extent that people are confusing a mythical deity with a theoretical quantum particle, with all the associated baggage.
I think said pop science author also had to conflate the Higgs with mythical powers to fill his 300 pages, because in reality not many people want to read 300 pages basically saying "It is the quanta of gravitational force, silly!". All of the implications of finding the Higgs are rather obtuse to laypeople, no matter how exciting they are to physicists and geeks.
Maybe the same people who claimed to believe in the Jedi religion on the national census (Google it if you don't believe) will vote for them?
If there was such an entity as the Pirate Party, and it was possible for them to actually be represented, in the U.S., I would vote for them, even if they are a one cause "gimmick" party.
Why? Because they at least would represent one area of the things I care about. Yes, members of both current parties generally have one area (at least) I agree with too, but generally they offset this by having a giant stock of ideas I find repugnant.
With a one trick pony, I avoid this. With enough of them, you might get a whole horse.