I don't see how you could call it a scare tactic. We all knew it already, and it's a simple statement. They're just reminding you of one of the risks when you do the whole risk/reward weighing in your head.
In fact the entire bit you quote says nothing about speech. It says nothing about you not being allowed to be eavesdropped on.
Yes, this is true. There's no mention about an exclusion from eavesdropping, but remember when the ammendment was written. Without electronic communication, you had 2 ways of communicating with someone: direct or via some sort of letter courrier.
In the case of direct communication, you do not have an expectation of privacy in a public space. But, you do within the home (mostly because eavesdropping would require one to illegally enter ('search') your premises).
In the case of courrier mail, you have an expectation of privacy because the letter is seen as private property belonging to you until its delivered to the intended recipient. Seizing and reading said letter without probable cause would be an unreasonable seizure.
Courts have ruled that direct person-to-person calls do indeed have a reasonable expectation of privacy, akin to the expectation of privacy involved in sending mail or communicating directly within the home. With a warrant and probable cause, you can be eavesdropped on, but otherwise you have a right to privacy.
The fact that the Bill of Rights makes no mention of electronic communication does not mean that the government has the right to eavesdrop on electronic communiques.
Well, whether they would've received unencrypted data and then encrypted it, or received pre-encrypted data from the phone company would probably end up being an implementation decision, and they never got to that stage. So who knows on that one. I hope they would've done it right, but something inside tells me they wouldn't have.
And I agree with you wholeheartedly that the people involved in the current NSA wiretapping scandal should be indicted, and the first piece of evidence should be this abandoned program because it demonstrates that they consciously decided to abandon even the most cursory efforts to safeguard privacy in favor of an illegal activity.
I call BS. If it doesn't give them much to work from then why do they want to do it? Obviously some valuable information can be found out this way, or they wouldn't be doing it at all.
Stop drinking the koolaid.
I didn't drink the koolaid, and you obviously didn't read the article. They aren't gathering valuable information this way. It was a proposed program that never went into effect. It was shelved in favor of the current NSA wiretapping fiasco because it wouldn't have given them the "valuable" (illegal) information they wanted.
Okay..... you need to understand that this program never happened, it was proposed. Its legality/illegality are moot as a lot of that would've hinged upon the implementation, and that was never decided. As proposed:
(a) they would be looking at calling records, not the calls themselves.
(b) they would not know whose encrypted number belongs to who.
(c) in order to find out, they would have to get a search warrant from a judge (probably in the FISA court) and then ask the phone company to decrypt it for them. They would not be allowed to decrypt the numbers themselves.
Would it have worked without infringing on people's privacy? I really don't know. Without details of implementation (which don't exist since the project was scrapped) we'll never know.
The latest Justifications I have heard for the NSA wire taping are indicative of the problem... saying "we havent had a terrorist atack because of this program" is like saying "the wolly mammoth repelant is working" unless you can show proof that attacks have been thwarted.
I hate it when people justify using the calls intercepted on Sept. 10 but not translated until Sept. 12 that say stuff like "the match is tomorrow" or whatever and say "See! That's why we need wiretapping!"
No,... we got those from legal wiretaps with warrants. If anything, it shows that the legal method worked. What we need is translators.
At the time the proposed program was written, there was no "enemy combatant" statute and Guantanamo wasn't used nearly as often nor for the same reasons. Today, however, yes... the illegality of evidence gained might not be as strong a deterrent with that "out."
But the "right to privacy" in the sense of a right not to have unwarranted searches and seizures definitely extends into the realm of wiretapping and phone records. The government wants these records specifically to see if you're doing anything illegal, not for a benign purpose. In that respect it should fall under the fourth ammendment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Obviously at the time of writing, phone lines didn't exist, but it's reasonable to see that as an "effect" belonging to an individual.
Part of the proposed program would make it illegal to do so without a court order. And therefore, any evidence gained from a surreptitiously decrypted number would be inadmissible in court (and very embarrassing for the NSA).
See, technically the only thing that stops the police from tapping every phone (other than respect for the community) is that it's illegal to do so and any evidence gathered is wholly worthless.
I think you're misunderstanding. The proposed program would look at phone call records only, not actual phone calls. (basically, it would know who's calling who and when, but not why or what they talked about... and even then it would only know that anonymous sudonym A was contacting anonymous sudonym B, not who you actually are) If they see some alarming pattern (i.e. one person calling another right before a terrorist attack, but never any other time) they could get a court order to expose who those encrypted phone numbers belong to.
Realistically, that doesn't really give them much information to work from, but if they were able to get some more narrowing information that's not an identifier (i.e. what country/state/province/city the numbers correlate to), they could actually search for some real patterns without knowing whose numbers they're looking at until there's probable cause for a warrant.
Halo's main multiplayer matchmaking pits groups of people against semi-randomly chosen opponents within a "playlist" - a set of maps and gametypes chosen by Bungie.
Maybe I'm not getting the description right, but this sounds a lot like DDR Ultramix's matching style on XBL. You can select some parameters and it'll look for someone who's got similar parameters, but you don't have to pick specific options or songs.
By the time you add a game to the PS3 you're looking at $660.
Also, they've announced that the Nunchuck atachment will be included in the console.
If it launches at $250, then for the price of the high-end PS3 and one game, I could get a Wii with 8 games. I really don't see how this should take more than a second to decide.
Sony's launch lineup is utter garbage so far. Wait until games like MGS4 and FFXIII come out, and maybe by then there'll be a price break. But right now, I can't understand anybody who'd buy a $500-$600 PS3 over a $300-$400 X-Box 360 or a $200 Wii.
(a) That was the estimated cost of the system. Merril Lynch doesn't seem to understand fully that Sony sells their consoles at massive losses at first.
(b) That estimate was based on the cost of those components at "launch," but was written back when Sony still insisted that March 2006 would be the launch month. Were it actually made in March 2006, it would have cost $900 to build.
(c) The component list was based off Sony's 2005 E3 specs for the PS3, which differ slightly from the 2006 E3 specs. Some features have been removed.
No, if for no other reason than that Nintendo is talking about the cheap price as one of its most positive features. Pricing their console equivalent to an X-Box 360 Core Package would be contrary to their marketing thus far. I'm expecting $200-$250, but even $150-$200 is still up for grabs.
And yet, given how violently anti-piracy Sony is, I'm shocked they'd use a burned disc. Why not just use the retail version? In that sense, this gives me a chuckle.
Yeah, that's great that it's cheap after adjusting for inflation. But why should I adjust it for inflation when our salaries haven't been. If we're all making the same (roughly) in real dollars now as I did then, why is $600 now supposed to be cheaper than $600 then?
The analog stick placement always annoyed me on the PS2 controller. The last time I griped about it, someone told me I was holding the controller wrong, and that I should hold it so that my fingers just barely reach the shoulder buttons. My question... then how do I reach the face buttons? That was met with dead silence.
According to some left handed reporters at E3, the Wii controller can be used somewhat ambidexterously. (boy, I bet I really murdered the spelling there)
Considering that Peter Moore (MS) has said that he's impressed with the Wii and that everybody will probably buy it as a 2nd console right after they buy a 360... and then Phil Harrison (Sony) said that Peter Moore was right, everywone will buy one right after they buy a PS3....
Hey, wait a sec, that's not what he said....
At any rate, even Sony and Microsoft seem to think that the Wii will do very well and operate largely independent of their battle of the (schoolyard) titans.
No, none of them require HDTV. I think what the author is trying to say is that this new generation's "hook" is HD gaming, and you'll need an HDTV in order for that hook to get you to buy the system.
While I know he thinks that Nintendo is gonna fail with older gamers because older gamers don't have money to spend on their own games due to their kids... when they go to buy a console for their kids, I think the price will have an effect. Not a "Nintendo wins the console war" effect, but a "the Wii sells better than the Gamecube" effect.
The pricing for the PS3 really is crazy. I know people will still get it, and they'll be lined up on day one (because if you can afford $500 for a console, you can probably afford it on day one), but I see the X-Box 360 picking up a good ammount of market share in the US and Europe and the Wii picking up a good ammount of market share in Japan -- if for no other reason than some people can't afford a $500 console.
I use OSX mostly every day. I don't care that the icon changes to an "eject" icon, if I never thought to drag it to the trash in the first place (which I never would've had I not been told) the icon would've never changed. It doesn't get easier than it does on a PC. When I need to eject a disk, I press "eject" on the disk drive.
Also, what about going into "Get Info" and changing settings sounds "easy" or "intuitive" to you?
Look, I'm not out here to say that OSX doesn't work. Lord knows that's retarded. What I'm saying is that I'm sick of people bashing Windows because they like OSX better. OSX has just as many shortcomings, especially in the supposed "ease of use" department. It's "easy," as long as you've always used macs or you have some mac users to turn to for support... just like Windows or Linux.
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I don't see how you could call it a scare tactic. We all knew it already, and it's a simple statement. They're just reminding you of one of the risks when you do the whole risk/reward weighing in your head.
In the case of direct communication, you do not have an expectation of privacy in a public space. But, you do within the home (mostly because eavesdropping would require one to illegally enter ('search') your premises).
In the case of courrier mail, you have an expectation of privacy because the letter is seen as private property belonging to you until its delivered to the intended recipient. Seizing and reading said letter without probable cause would be an unreasonable seizure.
Courts have ruled that direct person-to-person calls do indeed have a reasonable expectation of privacy, akin to the expectation of privacy involved in sending mail or communicating directly within the home. With a warrant and probable cause, you can be eavesdropped on, but otherwise you have a right to privacy.
The fact that the Bill of Rights makes no mention of electronic communication does not mean that the government has the right to eavesdrop on electronic communiques.
Well, whether they would've received unencrypted data and then encrypted it, or received pre-encrypted data from the phone company would probably end up being an implementation decision, and they never got to that stage. So who knows on that one. I hope they would've done it right, but something inside tells me they wouldn't have.
And I agree with you wholeheartedly that the people involved in the current NSA wiretapping scandal should be indicted, and the first piece of evidence should be this abandoned program because it demonstrates that they consciously decided to abandon even the most cursory efforts to safeguard privacy in favor of an illegal activity.
Okay..... you need to understand that this program never happened, it was proposed. Its legality/illegality are moot as a lot of that would've hinged upon the implementation, and that was never decided. As proposed:
(a) they would be looking at calling records, not the calls themselves.
(b) they would not know whose encrypted number belongs to who.
(c) in order to find out, they would have to get a search warrant from a judge (probably in the FISA court) and then ask the phone company to decrypt it for them. They would not be allowed to decrypt the numbers themselves.
Would it have worked without infringing on people's privacy? I really don't know. Without details of implementation (which don't exist since the project was scrapped) we'll never know.
No,
At the time the proposed program was written, there was no "enemy combatant" statute and Guantanamo wasn't used nearly as often nor for the same reasons. Today, however, yes ... the illegality of evidence gained might not be as strong a deterrent with that "out."
Part of the proposed program would make it illegal to do so without a court order. And therefore, any evidence gained from a surreptitiously decrypted number would be inadmissible in court (and very embarrassing for the NSA).
See, technically the only thing that stops the police from tapping every phone (other than respect for the community) is that it's illegal to do so and any evidence gathered is wholly worthless.
I think you're misunderstanding. The proposed program would look at phone call records only, not actual phone calls. (basically, it would know who's calling who and when, but not why or what they talked about... and even then it would only know that anonymous sudonym A was contacting anonymous sudonym B, not who you actually are) If they see some alarming pattern (i.e. one person calling another right before a terrorist attack, but never any other time) they could get a court order to expose who those encrypted phone numbers belong to.
Realistically, that doesn't really give them much information to work from, but if they were able to get some more narrowing information that's not an identifier (i.e. what country/state/province/city the numbers correlate to), they could actually search for some real patterns without knowing whose numbers they're looking at until there's probable cause for a warrant.
Pong's actual honor is that of being the first coin-operated video game.
It's dead Jim! ... Maybe I'll check back again later, but it sounds like a cool project.
Boy, I hope they put Halo in there for dual weilding!*
*sarcasm
By the time you add a game to the PS3 you're looking at $660.
Also, they've announced that the Nunchuck atachment will be included in the console.
If it launches at $250, then for the price of the high-end PS3 and one game, I could get a Wii with 8 games. I really don't see how this should take more than a second to decide.
Sony's launch lineup is utter garbage so far. Wait until games like MGS4 and FFXIII come out, and maybe by then there'll be a price break. But right now, I can't understand anybody who'd buy a $500-$600 PS3 over a $300-$400 X-Box 360 or a $200 Wii.
No, if for no other reason than that Nintendo is talking about the cheap price as one of its most positive features. Pricing their console equivalent to an X-Box 360 Core Package would be contrary to their marketing thus far. I'm expecting $200-$250, but even $150-$200 is still up for grabs.
And yet, given how violently anti-piracy Sony is, I'm shocked they'd use a burned disc. Why not just use the retail version? In that sense, this gives me a chuckle.
Yeah, that's great that it's cheap after adjusting for inflation. But why should I adjust it for inflation when our salaries haven't been. If we're all making the same (roughly) in real dollars now as I did then, why is $600 now supposed to be cheaper than $600 then?
The analog stick placement always annoyed me on the PS2 controller. The last time I griped about it, someone told me I was holding the controller wrong, and that I should hold it so that my fingers just barely reach the shoulder buttons. My question ... then how do I reach the face buttons? That was met with dead silence.
According to some left handed reporters at E3, the Wii controller can be used somewhat ambidexterously. (boy, I bet I really murdered the spelling there)
Considering that Peter Moore (MS) has said that he's impressed with the Wii and that everybody will probably buy it as a 2nd console right after they buy a 360... and then Phil Harrison (Sony) said that Peter Moore was right, everywone will buy one right after they buy a PS3 ....
Hey, wait a sec, that's not what he said....
At any rate, even Sony and Microsoft seem to think that the Wii will do very well and operate largely independent of their battle of the (schoolyard) titans.
That's why it's not patented. I think the point was that when the tech is new, that's why you patent it. As in, in the hypothetical situation.
No, none of them require HDTV. I think what the author is trying to say is that this new generation's "hook" is HD gaming, and you'll need an HDTV in order for that hook to get you to buy the system.
While I know he thinks that Nintendo is gonna fail with older gamers because older gamers don't have money to spend on their own games due to their kids... when they go to buy a console for their kids, I think the price will have an effect. Not a "Nintendo wins the console war" effect, but a "the Wii sells better than the Gamecube" effect.
The pricing for the PS3 really is crazy. I know people will still get it, and they'll be lined up on day one (because if you can afford $500 for a console, you can probably afford it on day one), but I see the X-Box 360 picking up a good ammount of market share in the US and Europe and the Wii picking up a good ammount of market share in Japan -- if for no other reason than some people can't afford a $500 console.
I use OSX mostly every day. I don't care that the icon changes to an "eject" icon, if I never thought to drag it to the trash in the first place (which I never would've had I not been told) the icon would've never changed. It doesn't get easier than it does on a PC. When I need to eject a disk, I press "eject" on the disk drive.
... just like Windows or Linux.
Also, what about going into "Get Info" and changing settings sounds "easy" or "intuitive" to you?
Look, I'm not out here to say that OSX doesn't work. Lord knows that's retarded. What I'm saying is that I'm sick of people bashing Windows because they like OSX better. OSX has just as many shortcomings, especially in the supposed "ease of use" department. It's "easy," as long as you've always used macs or you have some mac users to turn to for support