You know that feeling you get, when you start to read a review of something, and then you encounter a statement that is so nonsensical that you read it 3 times, looking for the irony/joke/sarcasm? And it isn't there?
The funny thing is, I thought you were referring to the 'suicide wife' bit. Like maybe you were leading to some form of hidden card-playing humor: "dueces and suicide wives are wild!". Other than that, maybe even a reference to the 'suicide blonde' concept.
Then I see that you're talking about the mention of Ronin... which means nothing to me since I haven't bothered watching it. meh.
Admittedly, it's 7 years old, though it does come in under the "last decade" bar. I'll admit my situation is atypical, but it's not unknown to happen. Well... at least not now.
I can understand after 12 months asking for a card, but why do they need to do it up front when the person has already payed for the service?
Um, identity verification so they can properly ban you should you start causing trouble?
Feel free to also throw around whatever privacy/conspiracy issues you may have... but really I imagine it's about being able to keep track of who their users are in some way. God knows they have enough experience with useless identity verification from Hotmail.
Forrest Gump also never made any money, at least as far as the contract with the writer of the original story was concerned. The problem is that overhead can be allocated however a company wants to.
Say you have a fleet of limos sitting around to drive executives/actors around. Ah, let's put that all on Spiderman... don't want to lose corporate profit by giving out higher royalties than you absolutely need to. Etc...
The incredibly stupid thing here is that Stan Lee has control over a rather large field of 'intellectual property' that said movie studios may want to draw on in the future, not to mention the sequel(s) of current films.
Imagine... Stan Lee's contract terms for Spiderman III: "5% of gross ticket sales and, oh yeah, %5 of gross ticket sales of Spiderman 1&2 you f%&#$!!!"
Sloppiness on the internet? On Slashdot? Surely you're kidding me! Heh.
I think we probably agree on the central point... but in the details...
"Suppose you are checking for counterexamples and you find an action with no equal & opposite reaction (that you can discern)."
If it happens once, you can probably dismiss it as experimental error. If it happens regularly given the same conditions, then the 'theory' in question is in trouble.
For instance, Newtonian mechanics mostly accounts for chunks of matter either running into each other or being in an acceleration field (e.g. gravity). If you have no equal and opposite reaction in the application of a force (you can find no matter that ran into what you're observing and other things indicate the absence of a field), then your theory is not predicting the outcome properly. Then people will laugh at your theory and generally feel better about themselves. Your theory will still be a theory, but it will have about as much acceptance as classical aether theory does today.
"Thats just absence of evidence not evidence of absence.
So you have to look deeper for an equal & opposite reaction for this apparently errant action.
When, exactly, do you stop looking? When you have checked every other action in the universe and determined that not one of them was an equal & opposite reaction to that action (the one you were looking at in the first place)?"
It's completely arbitrary, the matter of when you stop looking. All you're trying to do is convince yourself and others of the validity of your observation.
A theory is simply a relation amongst physical phenomena which is observed with enough regularity to put disbelief on any claims of observations that run contrary to it. Eventually, if we can't find any conditions where the theory fails we just call it a law.
In other words:
Hypothesis = proposed physical axiom or consequence thereof
Theory = Hypothesis + agreement in observation
Law = Theory + more agreement in observation until everyone gets tired and calls it a day.
There isn't (or shouldn't) be any claim that we can create a formal proof of any physical 'law'. Such things are the realm of mathematics only. This is simply because we live by whatever axioms of physical law exist, not with them.
If that's your point, we certainly agree.
"This is an impossible task, but its the only way, short of finding a mechanism to explain the reason for the axiom, but then the 'every action has a blardy bla bla' becomes a data element in a theory, not a theory in its own right."
And, of course, you can't explain the reasoning for an axiom. They just are. That's what an axiom is. (At least in a mathematical sense, which is hopefully what you'd encounter in physics.) Going by the things that you said previous to this, I'm thinking that we disagree slightly on the definitions of axiom and theory.
(Unless you're making a really obscure joke about how inexact the phrase "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction" is...)
for every action a,
there exists an reaction b,
such that b is equal and opposite to a.
You're not actually formulating one of Newton's laws, you're just saying that an equal and opposite reaction exists... not making the implication that the reaction that will be observed will be the equal and opposite one.
What would work:
Let X,Y be actions.
For all X, there exists a (unique) Y such that X is equal and opposite to Y and that X occuring implies that Y will also occur.
I'm going to ignore the "unique existential quantifier" on Y (leave it as an existential) since the only thing it says is that "only one equal and opposite reaction exists".
To negate my proposition (sans uniqueness), we have (using parentheses for grouping): There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))).
So, all you have to do is find one instance where X occurs and Y (the equal and opposite) does not occur, and you're done. You can also find an instance where a reaction occurs, but it is not equal and opposite.
Okay, if you really want the uniqueness: There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))) or (there exists a Z such that (Z is equal and opposite to X) and (Z is not equal to Y))
So therefore, if you can find two reactions that are equal and opposite, but aren't the same, you've also found a counterexample... I'm not counting on that being very useful.
--
Apologies for any errors... I'm easily distracted by shiny objects.
A free DVD case and a free throwing disc? What's not to love about that?!
Now back in the day when they were just sending out the discs*, that was less useful. There's only so much entertainment you can get out of throwing a CD around until it expoldes. However, with the DVD case thrown in, it's well worth the time involved in tearing the plastic off.
* (Yes, that's after the day when they were sending out floppies, I know.)
Marijuana is the main cash crop. That is the baseline source for all the dealers. The other drugs are just upsells. But if you take away that main source of income, the other drugs alone won't yield the same cash. Think how much money a store would not make if they could only sell $100+ items...
How will this change the nature of what is causing the problem in the first place? I think that there would be plenty of money to be made from selling cocaine, crack cocaine, meth, etc for criminal societies to 'get by'. If such a small incentive as 'reduced profitability' were enough to damage such organizations, they would have moved to legitimate business long ago.
How is this any different from having 1/2 the population addicted to cigarettes from the least ethical and most greedy tobacco company available? How about the least ethical beer company?
Though not exactly my point, it does kinda suck, no?:)
By anyway... my side point there was that heavily regulated drug production would likely not be 'mom and pop' in the meth lab, but it would be another corporate machine. My main point was that cheap mass-produced drugs would not necessarilly be a good thing.
I'm not as worried about the mob as I am the street gangs (who derive most of their income from illegal drugs, incdentally).
Yep, they do. However, if the drug money dries up, they'll find something else do do, maybe more risky, but higher profit per time spent. Maybe fewer criminals would be left, but the remaining become more of a threat.
Also, if drugs were legal, prices would drop and the addicts would not need to go to extreme measures to support their habit.
Quite possible. You would also then have the increaced societal costs of having a higher addiction rate in the population.(higher addiction caused by destigmatization + less monetary cost deterrent + confidence in relative safety of the product)
Other than the fact that it keeps the DEA in a job, I just don't see the advantage to spending $800,000 an hour funding this "War on Drugs". It's stupid.
For one, fine items like opium and cocaine will not be legalized in the United States anytime soon. A certain amount of thet money is going to try to help certain countries combat overwhelmingly powerful criminal organizations that fund themselves by selling in the U.S. It is only right and responsible that the U.S. tries to help combat these organizations with funding/equipment/training/etc.
How much of the drug production in Colombia is marijuana?
How much of the "War on Drugs" is being directed toward the operations of criminal organizations (that would still be around after any legalization you could think of)? (I ignore the case where 'criminal' loses its meaning)
Does any go toward border patrol that probably needs to be in place anyway?
So, you're saying that the ONLY reason people don't do drugs is because they're illegal? If heroin were legal tomorrow, I STILL wouldnt touch the crap
Nooope. I don't think that was implied anywhere. While I was actually thinking of it as hyperbole, the number I used (1/4) was actually a feasible limiting user ratio for the plethora of highly addictive drugs that would be freely available.
If the "ONLY" reason people don't do drugs is because they're illegal, then the numbers would be looking more toward the upper range (well above 50%), no? (I'm assuming that mass production would make addiction fairly affordable.)
That anonymity, and so many other things we risk losing, ARE precious. Your response is precisely what the powers that be are banking on. You see, there's a flaw in your logic:
Hmm... let's look at the logic presented here.
Since when is anonymity classed as an "essential liberty" that Franklin would allude to? Anonymity is more or less the removal of responsibility from the exercise of rights. You have a right to do things, but you don't necessarily have a right to do them without anyone knowing about it. Freedom and rights are a power, lack of anonymity is its check.
I guess the signatures of the Declaration of Independence should have looked like this:
JOHN F'ING HANCOCK
AC
AC
AC
AC
AC
AC ...
Where any significant danger is involved, loss of anonymity is a matter of course. If I want to drive a car in public, I can't (legally) do it anonymously. I can't even have an anonymous vehicle on public streets (non-free plates req'd). If I want to buy a firearm, I can certainly do so (last time I checked), but there is no anonymity about it.
But that's beside the point...
If we as American citizens have but a SINGLE less right or freedom than we did on September 10, 2001 then the terrorists won not by blowing up planes and buildings but by forcing us to destroy our OWN way of life.
So, I suppose that I should retain my right to board an aircraft carrying a bladed instrument (along with a group of friends carrying knives).
Small (even large) sacrifices of freedoms are a matter of course in society..., and no, I do not say that lightly. They are more or less the fabric of civilization... 'societal contract' as it were. Go and review the number of things that you aren't allowed to do, simply to ensure the stability of society and the preservation of individual rights.
You may see the spectre of central and necessary liberty being quashed,... I'll wait and fight it when I see it happening. (Indeed, the holding of persons without identification is quite shady, but is this a matter of the government silencing citizens, or allowing them to retain anonymity? I haven't seen that addressed to my satisfaction. I'll have to look into it again.)
Do you really think they intended to strike a horrible physical blow against the United States with those planes? Of course not. That was just a by-product of the real intent: to show the American public that we are not safe.
Other motives:
1 Attacking the United States has been an express goal of al Qaeda. An attack was necessary to continue and bolster fundraising.("Hey, look we're doing what we said we would!")
2 Trying to get the West out of mid-east politics by giving those weak stomached Americans a bloody nose (see Somalia).
3 Advancement of varied political goals in the mid-East.
4 And yes, actual murder of Americans is a goal of the organization.
The end goal is not the disruption of freedoms, etc in the U.S. (though I'm sure they would be entertained). It is either coertion to a political goal (historically shown futile) or for self gain.
For the first time, we were shown that we are no less vulnerable than anyone else on the planet -- that, maybe, our giant cities, seats of government and commerce that could not be easily replaced, might make us even MORE vulnerable than some.
And that's certainly much of the reason that al Qaeda has been so viciously pursued. After the advent of mechanized warfare, "defence" has become equivalent with "the ability to destroy agressors". That's why "forts" are mostly fancy storage facilities/dorms these days. Any walls/fences are to keep out the locals, rather than repel an invasion force.
I guess you're arguing in favor of SDI to provide an active defense against airborne agressors. Whoo.
And that is what scares the average American into blindly accepting whatever "safety regulations" the Powers That Be deem appropriate to protect us from the ubiquitous "them" that we've all feared from childhood, be it the monster in the closet or the terrorist in the desert.
"Them"? I think pretty much everyone recognizes such adjectives in this context to mean 'the al Qaeda organization and affiliates'. And most people are more on the level of "demanding" or "desiring" proper security precautions, rather than "accepting" them. Democracy at work.
Government is, at its heart, simply the sum of its human parts. Humans are, at their hearts, ambitious, maybe even greedy. As such, the general tendency of any government is toward expansion.
So, assuming you're human, what personal ambition are you pursuing in your argument? What power are you trying to gain over other people? Why should I see what you're saying as anything other than self-serving drivel?
Any motive you have can equally be held by a political activist or politician working in Washington (D.C.). In fact, while some politicians are driven by profit or power motive, of the few politically active people I've known, the reason they are involved in what they do is because of their personal convictions far more than for other people, on average. (It's like saying kids only like playing basketball because they expect to grow up and make assloads of money... if you don't want to do it... if you don't have personal convictions you want to follow through on, there are far more profitable and certain paths to take.) That's just my personal experience, though. YMMV.
Take any particular group as a whole... politicians, police, firefighters, geeks... and you're going to get some flaming ass#^!&s. There are also some damn fine people amongst them.
They don't simply throw us into the boiling water, they gradually increase the temperature, allow us to acclimate, turn it up another notch...
Fortunately people are not lobsters. When it starts to get uncomfortable, they start to complain. By virtue of the American political system, any overriding concern that the populace has, the government listens to (or is replaced). You may not enjoy the results, but democracy is designed to address only the most important things first (as determined by the whims of the public). Non-critical issues are often left to languish until something or someone brings them to the fore.
The point being, that while it may be nice to head off every approaching "bad thing", typically things will get straightened out when they start getting "out of hand". Trying to fight an idea or law on what you think it will eventually lead to is going to be hard and possibly even misdirected.
BTW, the concept of "the government" in its current configuration working closely and quietly in concert to advance some secret transition of power structure is less realistic than all of them gathering around a large table, doing tequilla shots, and then stabbing each other in the face.
Whether it was a terrorist act or simply the whim of nature, they are just as dead. But that's a natural disaster, yes? We can't FIGHT that, can we? So it warrants a few minutes on CNN, a spot on the "World" page of the local paper, and maybe a few prayers here and there.
Yeah, people are more concerned about having enemies that are actively trying to directly affect them (or may have already had a direct affect on them) than they are about an effectively random (yet tragic) event on the other side of the world. Go figure.
Except, in many places around the world, under-funded research is being done to be able to predict earthquakes. Where is your support? Where is your rage that the governments of the world haven't united to fund this crucial research? If a way was found to reliably (or even NOT so reliably, any at all is better than none!) predict earthquakes, how many dozens of thousands of future lives might be saved? If it had happened 20 years ago, how many of those Indians, men, women, and children crushed like so much garbage in their own homes, might have been saved by early evacuation?
Riiight. We have one really good predictor of inevitability, so let's start by evacuating every city that lies on or near a known fault line. (Start with L.A. and New York... maybe St. Louis)
Maybe people have been put off by the fact that after hundreds of years of research and massive amounts of technology, the weather can't be predicted worth crap, other than just observing massive self-sustaining weather patterns that have already developed and seeing that the're still coming... depsite the fact that the atmosphere is easily observable. (Curse you Weather Channel! heh) I find it hard to expect that plate-tectonics will be much less chaotic of a dynamic system... just a more slowly evolved one that we can't observe readily because of the miles of dirt in the way.
What you're likely to get from this is that "oh crap, there's going to be a major earthquake in 35 seconds!" (okay, maybe they could get it up to 5 minutes or so)
The only current solution deemed reasonable is in developing buildings that withstand earthquakes better. Perhaps this is under-funded, but then again, everything could use more funds. If 'prediction' were thought feasible, Japan and the U.S. (concerned with the West coast) would be dumping plenty of money into it.
So how many lives would have been saved in India if they had used modern construction? I guess I'm supposed to be outraged that my government isn't tearing down buildings in India and building new ones for them? The Indian people aren't children. They are thusly allowed to make their own decisions and take care of themselves. It's not like the U.S. never tries to help out with natural disasters or anything.
The government is half responsible for raising drug money for terrorists, it helps create the black market by making the drugs illegal. If the drugs were legalized and decently regulated, black market trading would become unprofitable.
So then you mean that we'd have to raise the bar to heroin, opium, or cocaine for our "illegal drug" category? Or would all drugs become legal for all purposes?
I guess that having about 1/4 of the population addicted to crack, heroin, or morphine from the least ethical and most greedy pharmeceutical company available would be "a step in the right direction". Also, those stupid mobsters would never find a new crime to make a bit o' fast cash off of, so they'd be quickly out of business. Excellent.
Slashdot Mirror
When pointing out that it was Kanada, the researcher, and not Canada the country...
Jack Valenti: KA-NA-DA!!!
Kanada: VA-LEN-TI!!!
Valenti: KA-NA-DAAAA!!!!!
Sorry. Apologies to Katsuhiro Otomo.
The funny thing is, I thought you were referring to the 'suicide wife' bit. Like maybe you were leading to some form of hidden card-playing humor: "dueces and suicide wives are wild!". Other than that, maybe even a reference to the 'suicide blonde' concept.
Then I see that you're talking about the mention of Ronin... which means nothing to me since I haven't bothered watching it. meh.
Admittedly, it's 7 years old, though it does come in under the "last decade" bar. I'll admit my situation is atypical, but it's not unknown to happen. Well... at least not now.
My RCA TV doesn't have RCA inputs. How's that for irony?
I do have a DVD player.
Um, identity verification so they can properly ban you should you start causing trouble?
Feel free to also throw around whatever privacy/conspiracy issues you may have... but really I imagine it's about being able to keep track of who their users are in some way. God knows they have enough experience with useless identity verification from Hotmail.
Say you have a fleet of limos sitting around to drive executives/actors around. Ah, let's put that all on Spiderman... don't want to lose corporate profit by giving out higher royalties than you absolutely need to. Etc...
The incredibly stupid thing here is that Stan Lee has control over a rather large field of 'intellectual property' that said movie studios may want to draw on in the future, not to mention the sequel(s) of current films.
Imagine... Stan Lee's contract terms for Spiderman III: "5% of gross ticket sales and, oh yeah, %5 of gross ticket sales of Spiderman 1&2 you f%&#$!!!"
Nah, I just got the impression that MJ just cut'n'pasted directly from HardOCP. Word for word. I kid ye not.
Sloppiness on the internet? On Slashdot? Surely you're kidding me! Heh.
I think we probably agree on the central point... but in the details...
"Suppose you are checking for counterexamples and you find an action with no equal & opposite reaction (that you can discern)."
If it happens once, you can probably dismiss it as experimental error. If it happens regularly given the same conditions, then the 'theory' in question is in trouble.
For instance, Newtonian mechanics mostly accounts for chunks of matter either running into each other or being in an acceleration field (e.g. gravity). If you have no equal and opposite reaction in the application of a force (you can find no matter that ran into what you're observing and other things indicate the absence of a field), then your theory is not predicting the outcome properly. Then people will laugh at your theory and generally feel better about themselves. Your theory will still be a theory, but it will have about as much acceptance as classical aether theory does today.
"Thats just absence of evidence not evidence of absence.
So you have to look deeper for an equal & opposite reaction for this apparently errant action.
When, exactly, do you stop looking? When you have checked every other action in the universe and determined that not one of them was an equal & opposite reaction to that action (the one you were looking at in the first place)?"
It's completely arbitrary, the matter of when you stop looking. All you're trying to do is convince yourself and others of the validity of your observation.
A theory is simply a relation amongst physical phenomena which is observed with enough regularity to put disbelief on any claims of observations that run contrary to it. Eventually, if we can't find any conditions where the theory fails we just call it a law.
In other words:
Hypothesis = proposed physical axiom or consequence thereof
Theory = Hypothesis + agreement in observation
Law = Theory + more agreement in observation until everyone gets tired and calls it a day.
There isn't (or shouldn't) be any claim that we can create a formal proof of any physical 'law'. Such things are the realm of mathematics only. This is simply because we live by whatever axioms of physical law exist, not with them.
If that's your point, we certainly agree.
"This is an impossible task, but its the only way, short of finding a mechanism to explain the reason for the axiom, but then the 'every action has a blardy bla bla' becomes a data element in a theory, not a theory in its own right."
And, of course, you can't explain the reasoning for an axiom. They just are. That's what an axiom is. (At least in a mathematical sense, which is hopefully what you'd encounter in physics.) Going by the things that you said previous to this, I'm thinking that we disagree slightly on the definitions of axiom and theory.
--
Thanks for the info, but my fingers have all the RAM they need.
for every action a,
there exists an reaction b,
such that b is equal and opposite to a.
You're not actually formulating one of Newton's laws, you're just saying that an equal and opposite reaction exists... not making the implication that the reaction that will be observed will be the equal and opposite one.
What would work:
Let X,Y be actions.
For all X, there exists a (unique) Y such that X is equal and opposite to Y and that X occuring implies that Y will also occur.
I'm going to ignore the "unique existential quantifier" on Y (leave it as an existential) since the only thing it says is that "only one equal and opposite reaction exists".
To negate my proposition (sans uniqueness), we have (using parentheses for grouping):
There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))).
So, all you have to do is find one instance where X occurs and Y (the equal and opposite) does not occur, and you're done. You can also find an instance where a reaction occurs, but it is not equal and opposite.
Okay, if you really want the uniqueness:
There exists a X such that for all Y, ((X is not equal and opposite to Y) or ((X occurs) and (Y does not occur))) or (there exists a Z such that (Z is equal and opposite to X) and (Z is not equal to Y))
So therefore, if you can find two reactions that are equal and opposite, but aren't the same, you've also found a counterexample... I'm not counting on that being very useful.
--
Apologies for any errors... I'm easily distracted by shiny objects.
Deru kugi wa utareru.
"The protruding nail gets hammered."
Seems appropriate. (And note, this is 'hammered' in a non-beverage-related manner.)
... but I bet that in a few months, it'll all just turn out to be vaporware.
Now back in the day when they were just sending out the discs*, that was less useful. There's only so much entertainment you can get out of throwing a CD around until it expoldes. However, with the DVD case thrown in, it's well worth the time involved in tearing the plastic off.
* (Yes, that's after the day when they were sending out floppies, I know.)
2. ???
It really doesn't work without that step.
Heh. I think that in this case:
1. Trademark
2. ??? FOR DUMMIES
3. profit!
would also be appropriate.
I guess I'll trademark:
"* [fF][oO][rR] [dD][uU][mM][mM][iI][eE][sS]", excluding the subset that they claim.
Now's where I get the profit, right?
Okay, so I'm tired.
How will this change the nature of what is causing the problem in the first place? I think that there would be plenty of money to be made from selling cocaine, crack cocaine, meth, etc for criminal societies to 'get by'. If such a small incentive as 'reduced profitability' were enough to damage such organizations, they would have moved to legitimate business long ago.
How is this any different from having 1/2 the population addicted to cigarettes from the least ethical and most greedy tobacco company available? How about the least ethical beer company?
Though not exactly my point, it does kinda suck, no? :)
By anyway... my side point there was that heavily regulated drug production would likely not be 'mom and pop' in the meth lab, but it would be another corporate machine. My main point was that cheap mass-produced drugs would not necessarilly be a good thing.
I'm not as worried about the mob as I am the street gangs (who derive most of their income from illegal drugs, incdentally).
Yep, they do. However, if the drug money dries up, they'll find something else do do, maybe more risky, but higher profit per time spent. Maybe fewer criminals would be left, but the remaining become more of a threat.
Also, if drugs were legal, prices would drop and the addicts would not need to go to extreme measures to support their habit.
Quite possible. You would also then have the increaced societal costs of having a higher addiction rate in the population.(higher addiction caused by destigmatization + less monetary cost deterrent + confidence in relative safety of the product)
Other than the fact that it keeps the DEA in a job, I just don't see the advantage to spending $800,000 an hour funding this "War on Drugs". It's stupid.
For one, fine items like opium and cocaine will not be legalized in the United States anytime soon. A certain amount of thet money is going to try to help certain countries combat overwhelmingly powerful criminal organizations that fund themselves by selling in the U.S. It is only right and responsible that the U.S. tries to help combat these organizations with funding/equipment/training/etc.
How much of the drug production in Colombia is marijuana?
How much of the "War on Drugs" is being directed toward the operations of criminal organizations (that would still be around after any legalization you could think of)? (I ignore the case where 'criminal' loses its meaning)
Does any go toward border patrol that probably needs to be in place anyway?
Nooope. I don't think that was implied anywhere. While I was actually thinking of it as hyperbole, the number I used (1/4) was actually a feasible limiting user ratio for the plethora of highly addictive drugs that would be freely available.
If the "ONLY" reason people don't do drugs is because they're illegal, then the numbers would be looking more toward the upper range (well above 50%), no? (I'm assuming that mass production would make addiction fairly affordable.)
That anonymity, and so many other things we risk losing, ARE precious. Your response is precisely what the powers that be are banking on. You see, there's a flaw in your logic:
Hmm... let's look at the logic presented here.
Since when is anonymity classed as an "essential liberty" that Franklin would allude to? Anonymity is more or less the removal of responsibility from the exercise of rights. You have a right to do things, but you don't necessarily have a right to do them without anyone knowing about it. Freedom and rights are a power, lack of anonymity is its check.
I guess the signatures of the Declaration of Independence should have looked like this:
JOHN F'ING HANCOCK
...
AC
AC
AC
AC
AC
AC
Where any significant danger is involved, loss of anonymity is a matter of course. If I want to drive a car in public, I can't (legally) do it anonymously. I can't even have an anonymous vehicle on public streets (non-free plates req'd). If I want to buy a firearm, I can certainly do so (last time I checked), but there is no anonymity about it.
But that's beside the point...
If we as American citizens have but a SINGLE less right or freedom than we did on September 10, 2001 then the terrorists won not by blowing up planes and buildings but by forcing us to destroy our OWN way of life.
So, I suppose that I should retain my right to board an aircraft carrying a bladed instrument (along with a group of friends carrying knives).
Small (even large) sacrifices of freedoms are a matter of course in society..., and no, I do not say that lightly. They are more or less the fabric of civilization... 'societal contract' as it were. Go and review the number of things that you aren't allowed to do, simply to ensure the stability of society and the preservation of individual rights. You may see the spectre of central and necessary liberty being quashed,... I'll wait and fight it when I see it happening. (Indeed, the holding of persons without identification is quite shady, but is this a matter of the government silencing citizens, or allowing them to retain anonymity? I haven't seen that addressed to my satisfaction. I'll have to look into it again.)
Do you really think they intended to strike a horrible physical blow against the United States with those planes? Of course not. That was just a by-product of the real intent: to show the American public that we are not safe.
Other motives:
1 Attacking the United States has been an express goal of al Qaeda. An attack was necessary to continue and bolster fundraising.("Hey, look we're doing what we said we would!")
2 Trying to get the West out of mid-east politics by giving those weak stomached Americans a bloody nose (see Somalia).
3 Advancement of varied political goals in the mid-East.
4 And yes, actual murder of Americans is a goal of the organization.
The end goal is not the disruption of freedoms, etc in the U.S. (though I'm sure they would be entertained). It is either coertion to a political goal (historically shown futile) or for self gain.
For the first time, we were shown that we are no less vulnerable than anyone else on the planet -- that, maybe, our giant cities, seats of government and commerce that could not be easily replaced, might make us even MORE vulnerable than some.
And that's certainly much of the reason that al Qaeda has been so viciously pursued. After the advent of mechanized warfare, "defence" has become equivalent with "the ability to destroy agressors". That's why "forts" are mostly fancy storage facilities/dorms these days. Any walls/fences are to keep out the locals, rather than repel an invasion force.
I guess you're arguing in favor of SDI to provide an active defense against airborne agressors. Whoo.
And that is what scares the average American into blindly accepting whatever "safety regulations" the Powers That Be deem appropriate to protect us from the ubiquitous "them" that we've all feared from childhood, be it the monster in the closet or the terrorist in the desert.
"Them"? I think pretty much everyone recognizes such adjectives in this context to mean 'the al Qaeda organization and affiliates'. And most people are more on the level of "demanding" or "desiring" proper security precautions, rather than "accepting" them. Democracy at work.
Government is, at its heart, simply the sum of its human parts. Humans are, at their hearts, ambitious, maybe even greedy. As such, the general tendency of any government is toward expansion.
So, assuming you're human, what personal ambition are you pursuing in your argument? What power are you trying to gain over other people? Why should I see what you're saying as anything other than self-serving drivel?
Any motive you have can equally be held by a political activist or politician working in Washington (D.C.). In fact, while some politicians are driven by profit or power motive, of the few politically active people I've known, the reason they are involved in what they do is because of their personal convictions far more than for other people, on average. (It's like saying kids only like playing basketball because they expect to grow up and make assloads of money... if you don't want to do it... if you don't have personal convictions you want to follow through on, there are far more profitable and certain paths to take.) That's just my personal experience, though. YMMV.
Take any particular group as a whole... politicians, police, firefighters, geeks... and you're going to get some flaming ass#^!&s. There are also some damn fine people amongst them.
They don't simply throw us into the boiling water, they gradually increase the temperature, allow us to acclimate, turn it up another notch...
Fortunately people are not lobsters. When it starts to get uncomfortable, they start to complain. By virtue of the American political system, any overriding concern that the populace has, the government listens to (or is replaced). You may not enjoy the results, but democracy is designed to address only the most important things first (as determined by the whims of the public). Non-critical issues are often left to languish until something or someone brings them to the fore.
The point being, that while it may be nice to head off every approaching "bad thing", typically things will get straightened out when they start getting "out of hand". Trying to fight an idea or law on what you think it will eventually lead to is going to be hard and possibly even misdirected.
BTW, the concept of "the government" in its current configuration working closely and quietly in concert to advance some secret transition of power structure is less realistic than all of them gathering around a large table, doing tequilla shots, and then stabbing each other in the face.
Whether it was a terrorist act or simply the whim of nature, they are just as dead. But that's a natural disaster, yes? We can't FIGHT that, can we? So it warrants a few minutes on CNN, a spot on the "World" page of the local paper, and maybe a few prayers here and there.
Yeah, people are more concerned about having enemies that are actively trying to directly affect them (or may have already had a direct affect on them) than they are about an effectively random (yet tragic) event on the other side of the world. Go figure.
Except, in many places around the world, under-funded research is being done to be able to predict earthquakes. Where is your support? Where is your rage that the governments of the world haven't united to fund this crucial research? If a way was found to reliably (or even NOT so reliably, any at all is better than none!) predict earthquakes, how many dozens of thousands of future lives might be saved? If it had happened 20 years ago, how many of those Indians, men, women, and children crushed like so much garbage in their own homes, might have been saved by early evacuation?
Riiight. We have one really good predictor of inevitability, so let's start by evacuating every city that lies on or near a known fault line. (Start with L.A. and New York... maybe St. Louis)
Maybe people have been put off by the fact that after hundreds of years of research and massive amounts of technology, the weather can't be predicted worth crap, other than just observing massive self-sustaining weather patterns that have already developed and seeing that the're still coming... depsite the fact that the atmosphere is easily observable. (Curse you Weather Channel! heh) I find it hard to expect that plate-tectonics will be much less chaotic of a dynamic system... just a more slowly evolved one that we can't observe readily because of the miles of dirt in the way.
What you're likely to get from this is that "oh crap, there's going to be a major earthquake in 35 seconds!" (okay, maybe they could get it up to 5 minutes or so)
The only current solution deemed reasonable is in developing buildings that withstand earthquakes better. Perhaps this is under-funded, but then again, everything could use more funds. If 'prediction' were thought feasible, Japan and the U.S. (concerned with the West coast) would be dumping plenty of money into it.
So how many lives would have been saved in India if they had used modern construction? I guess I'm supposed to be outraged that my government isn't tearing down buildings in India and building new ones for them? The Indian people aren't children. They are thusly allowed to make their own decisions and take care of themselves. It's not like the U.S. never tries to help out with natural disasters or anything.
To summarize: Blah. Sleep.
So then you mean that we'd have to raise the bar to heroin, opium, or cocaine for our "illegal drug" category? Or would all drugs become legal for all purposes?
I guess that having about 1/4 of the population addicted to crack, heroin, or morphine from the least ethical and most greedy pharmeceutical company available would be "a step in the right direction". Also, those stupid mobsters would never find a new crime to make a bit o' fast cash off of, so they'd be quickly out of business. Excellent.