Pepcon explosion. 4000 Tons of ammonium perchlorate go BOOM. So this is something in the league of what N.K. claims to have achieved - and we suspect they did the same thing as Pepcon: Pile lots of explosives up next to each other.
HCl is very slow at attacking copper metal. It dissolves the oxides, hydroxides, and carbonates that cover it, but leaves gleaming clean metal behind (Try it: You can buy 9M HCl at Home Depot as "muriatic acid" - copper gets very clean but not dissolved). Now, Nitric or Sulfuric acid, OTOH...
You know that secret warrants are incredibly easy to get under FISA. Go ahead, read USC Title 50 Chapter 36 - I. No, really, put "fisa act" into Google and you'll get a link to cornell.edu. I mean, really, them warrants is reaaaaaal easy to get. Hell, getting into Paris Hilton's cooch is harder than getting a FISA warrant.
If you've read the FISA act, then you know that the warrant request may be filed up to 3 days after tapping starts, that the Attorney General may order tapping for up to 15 days without a warrant during a time of war, and that the President may direct the Attorney General to wiretap for up to one year during a time of war provided he swears it won't be abused.
Now ask what more could possibly be needed on the intel front to fight terrorists than the power to wiretap for an entire year.
Given the premises that the program is not to fight terrorists (because any imaginable need is covered by FISA already), yet the Bush administration is adamant that it be allowed to continue, the only logical conclusion is that the actual reason for it's existence falls under the set "Not terrorism." The actual specific purpose that is "Not terrorism" doesn't matter, because the only justification given is the endless drumbeat that the program is needed "to combat terrorists." However, if the justification given is terrorism but the program is not about terrorism, then the only logical conclusion is that the public are being lied to. To what end? There's no point speculating.
Because after all, it's all just a bunch of "mumbo-jumbo." You've convinced yourself that Herr Bush can do no wrong. You're certain that he and his administration can do nothing that isn't in the true and genuine interests of the American people, and close your eyes and yell LALALALALA at any disagreement. You refuse to see logic or the obvious truth, because then your brain wouldn't give that nice rush of dopamine that self-confirming beliefs always do.
The Reichstag Fire was set by Communists, the ongoing emergency in the Rodina necessitates the declaration of Martial Law, we have always been at war with Oceania, Clinton "did not have... sexual relations, with that woman," and Nixon was not a crook! They all said so, anything else is paranoid mumbo-jumbo!
Let me see if I understand this... First you accuse people who distrust no-oversight warrantless surveillance of paranoia. Then someone replies with an irrefutable prior example of what happens when the government decides it can wiretap without warrants or oversight (watergate). Then you reply that it's all paranoia.
So, uh, can we see an example of an argument you have that doesn't involve involve poisoning any well that you don't like by dismissing it as "paranoid?" Perhaps an example of any surveillance of terrorists that doesn't fall under U.S.C. Title 50 Chapter 36? Or are you just trolling?
Oh yeah? I read it was 99.99% in another post. Now I'm all confused.;-) Exactly what kind of evidence do you think is going to get you a FISA warrant??? Evidence that the person on the phone belongs to Al Qaeda? There's no law against belonging to Al Qaeda. Seriously, what sort of evidence are you suggesting that there should be before the court allows a military spy mission to proceed??? And what does that have to do with a warrant???
OK, you're closer than I was on the acceptance rate... 4 denied out of 19000 issued (assume 1000/year for '01-'06) equals 99.979% acceptance.
Onto more important matters, perhaps evidence that the person in question is a terrorist (Paragraph 6)? Under USC Title 50 Chapter 36-I 1805a, the requirement in question is "probable cause" which 1805-b clarifies to include "past activities of the target, as well as facts and circumstances relating to current or future activities of the target."
It does nothing of the sort. It protects the security of people in the persons, their houses, their papers, and their effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and it requires probable cause for a judge to issue a warrant. I don't think it has ever been interpreted by any court in the history of the U.S. to require the affirmation of a judge for any search.
A judge doesn't need to affirm a search warrant before a search? That'd be news to the guys who make Law & Order. The 4th Amendment says that the government and it's agents are not allowed to unreasonably search anyone. A judge must issue a warrant based on probable cause for such a search. Therefore, a judge must issue a warrant with probable cause (indicating that the search is reasonable) before the government is allowed to search. If the government is searching without such a warrant, it is violating the Fourth Amendment.
If a person feels that their possessions have been searched or seized unreasonably, then they have recourse to the courts to bring suit against the Administration for their damages. At that point it becomes incumbent upon the Administration to provide evidence of the reasonability of the searches. It's an absurdity to suggest that they need to broadcast that evidence for every search they conduct, and I can't imagine why anyone would even suggest it, unless they were intentionally hoping to undermine the ability of the country to protect itself.
Under the so-called "patriot" act, the government can forbid you from telling anyone about it's secret searches, thereby denying judicial recourse. And if by chance you do manage to try and force the Administration to provide reasonable evidence, they will say "national security" and make the case disappear as they did in the AT&T data-sharing case.
And I'm not suggesting that the government be required to broadcast it's evidence for every warrant on CNN. Perhaps if there were a secret court created by something called "FISA" which could review such things in secret. But taking the executive (any executive)'s word for it that they aren't abusing such a thing is also an absurdity. (I am not a crook!)
So we agree. The FISA law is illegal and void insofar as it appropriates to the courts powers given in the Constitution to the President.
Eh... I'm a little dubious about FISA, but after reading it I fail to see where exactly it gives the power of the courts to the president. Could you point them out?
Ok, so a lot of the Democrats are fascists who would betray the Constitution too. Not suprising; They and the Republicans are both sides of the same, rotten-to-the-core coin IMO. That doesn't change the fact that no new arguments are being put forward in support of the warrantless surveillance program.
If the people using the cell phones are in other countries, then the CIA is free to tap away, infiltrate, and pattern-recognize to their heart's content. Since the calls are not between American citizens, the Fourth Amendment is not in effect and I never claimed otherwise. But then you go on to claim that the only phones being tapped include those known to have ties to terrorists, and that the FBI goes and gets a warrant within the US. You may recall that no one not in the US spy agencies knows which calls are being tapped, as senior Bush administration officials made quite a show of claiming that such knowledge (or even knowledge that it happens) would endanger national security. And why are you claiming that the FBI goes and gets a warrant, when the article that nucleated this thread is titled "warrantless surveillance?" If the calls in question involve terminals within United States, the call may be tapped at the remote terminus or it may be tapped in the US terminus with a warrant.
But again, this is moot. If FISA doesn't help with shifting networks of one-time phones or other technologies, too bad. Unlike the Soviet Constitution, the US Constitution does not have an article 121, line 15 that lets the President suspend the Constitution "in the interests of defence." Either the government can get a 3/4 majority and revoke the Fourth Amendment (in which case the United States is dead anyway) or accept the rule of law.
Every time a case such as this, or any other criticism of the Bush administration's policies regarding terrorism comes up, we hear all but the exact same thing: We need this [power | program | law] to fight terrorism. [If you disagree, you must support the terrorists.] Why is it that we never get to hear exactly why [power | program | law] is necessary to stop terrorists? I guess they're assuming that if they beat the drum of "We need this!!!1" long and hard enough people will believe it.
But what real use is this warrantless surveillance program to fighting terrorists? If you evidence, get a warrant. If you have a shred of something resembling evidence, go to FISA and you have about a 99.8% chance of getting a warrant. If there's no time to waste, start tapping and you can file for a warrant (which in an emergency case can be approved within an hour) any time in the next 3 days.
To those who support this program: What conceivable set of circumstances would simultaneously require so many resources that there isn't one intern left over to file a request sometime within the next 3 days marked "urgent" with an institution that rubber-stamps nearly every request that crosses it's path, yet also be totally unknown and not under any previous surveillance. Such a set's parameters are absurd: it doesn't exist. Bush's warrantless surveillance program is nonsense in this regard.
But debating the merits and usefulness of any such program is a moot point. The Fourth Amendment forbids any unreasonable search and any search not affirmed by a judge. The Bush administration refuses to provide evidence that the wiretaps are reasonable (instead insisting that we take it's word), and the fact that they are not affirmed by a judge is the whole point of the program. Therefore, this program is inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment and any program or law contravening the Constitution, it's Amendments, or Treaties is illegal. End of debate, national security be damned. This is a nation of law, no matter what might be convenient, useful, or even life-saving. No one with even the foggiest clue what America is about petitions to destroy the 4th Amendment because it would be a great help to other criminal investigations (and hell yes it would be more convenient and efficient to not have to deal with judges and evidence beforehand), yet when "terrorists" come up, certain people who have all rules and regulations disappear. That is wrong, and history provides abundant evidence why.
Not so long as corrupt and evil individuals wish to corrupt the democratic electoral process.
It all boils down to what level of trust you want to have in the system. General purpose computers for voting? They can be programmed to run anything and say anything - that's the entire purpose of a general purpose computer. Open source voting software and open verification? Read about the Thompson Hack. Assembling a limited-purpose expert system? Can't trust that its designers aren't compromised in some way. Creating the system using discrete transistors a la PDP-10? We can fit an entire PDP-10 onto a single one of those discrete transistors these days; It would only take a few such hacked transistors on the data readout pins to say anything their malicious creator wanted. Plan to verify that the transistors are in fact simple transistors? You'll have to use electronic tools to test their responses. Your tools can be replaced with ones programmed to say what the person replacing them wants. Each step more and more difficult, but still possible none the less.
The basic problem is that it's fundamentally impossible for a person to be absolutely 100% certain how an electronic computer will operate if evil and corrupt people have a strong incentive to change it's workings because it's impossible to interact with electronic circuits without technological go-betweens that could also be changed.
The most complex device I would support being used in an election is an electromechanical computer with mechanical memory where every component is encased inside a transparent material. Anyone can examine it's system of mechanical switches, register pins, levers, and rods, and the operation of the motors that turn the crank and the electrical relays connecting it's "vote for this person" buttons on the front to the counter mechanisms, and the wouldn't need anything other than their eyes to inspect that all vote counters start in the 0000-0000-0000-0000 position.
I freely admit, suspecting that someone would try to corrupt an election by replacing hardware components of computers is out there. How do you KNOW that it's not being done though? Given what we know of Diebold, it's almost universally suspected that they replaced softare components to fix the 2004 election. And is anything less than 100% certainty of the basic components acceptable in something as critical as an election?
On one hand, the Brazilian government wants the IPs to go after pedophiles and racist hatemongers. I think we can all get behind throwing such people in very small cells with no windows and melting the key down as they watch.
On the other, this is an American company receiving a demand from Brazil. If they comply with this demand to hand over IPs, who's to say such wonderful democratic places as Saudi Arabia and China won't start demanding information on dissidents and getting it via this precedent (Ok, scratch China... Do No Evil my ass)? If the precedent is very explicitly restricted to pedophiles, then expect find out that everyone the CCP doesn't like are pedophiles.
Unfortunately, such applies to any corrupt authoritarian government. If you have any means of handing them data, they will abuse it to their own ends [Insert standard link to Bush administration here]. So the question becomes, how to hand data over to Brazil to help them hunt down child predators while NOT helping Saudi Arabia jail and murder dissidents.
And overshadowing this is the fact that perverts and hatemongers who are NOT idiots don't talk over plaintext for obvious reasons (like the local government rightfully hunting them down). Given the wide availability of encryption and anonymization tools, it's easily possible to hide from any government you want.
Might I suggest a registry to distinguish between governments that can reasonably be trusted not to misuse requests for identifying information, e.g. Brazil, and corrupt dictatorships like China or Saudi Arabia. Never going to happen because certain dictatorships have America by the economic balls (Thank you, Federal Government, for sending all our industry to China and setting up a $10e11 trade deficit! And for spending $5e11 on Iraq instead of alternate fuels!) and wouldn't take kindly to being disfavored because of their crimes. And if it were created, good like keeping it from being turned into a tool to protect criminals instead (look at the nations that are on the UN Human Rights council). But it's worth dreaming about...
Silly AC, everyone knows that morons are the binding particles exchanged by the neutron, vice-neutrons, and assistant-vice-neutrons in the core of an Administratium atom.
Why people like you terrorize themselves into believing that we need to give up what makes America America escapes me.
You know, it would make us a lot safer if we rounded up all the Muslims (no, better make it everyone who looks remotely middle eastern) and put them in "internment camps." If the TSA started handcuffing everyone who flies to their seat, we wouldn't need to worry about anyone hijacking a plane ever again. I'm sure officials could catch at least a few terrorists if they were allowed to search anyone they found suspicious. There's even a chance that they might be able to beat some names out of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. I'm pretty sure that we'd catch a few more terrorists (or at least people who hate America) if the FBI were to round up everyone who ever entered "al quaeda" into Google. Perhaps the NSA should preemptively wiretap everyone who requests http://www.aljazeera.com? Yet none of these things have been seriously proposed, except the torture one (because torture is no longer a debasement of everything America holds dear if they're terrorists). Care to think why?
You would have hated the Founding Fathers for the laws they wrote. You think they didn't know that the 2nd Amendment would make the police's job harder? You think they didn't know that the 4th would seriously impede legitimate investigations? That the 5th gave conspirators a free hand to stonewall investigations? That the First Amendment, giving anyone the right to say whatever they wanted (except in condition of causing immediate danger), would let all manner of sickos and hatemongers spew their filth without fear of reprisal?
Do you want to know why they would write such laws, which the Bush administration would no doubt (correctly) denounce because they "impede legitimate investigations" if they were proposed today? Exactly BECAUSE the Bush administration, or the Clinton administration, or the Reagan or Carter or Ford or Nixon or Hoover or Grant administrations would denounce such gaurantees in the name of efficiency and convenience. The Founders KNEW that power breeds corruption, and they knew exactly where the powers unequivocally denied to the government in the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights would lead on very, very short order because they'd just overthrown such a government. They intentionally hog-tied the Federal Government because they knew where anything else would lead, and they knew how many people died getting back their rights the first time.
And here you are, cheering the Bush administration as as they try to renounce the very laws that have assured historically unprecedented freedom for hundreds of millions of people for centuries in the name of expediency. In the words of Samuel Adams, "We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
At this point, I finish with a snide comment about the Emergency Clause in the Soviet constitution. You may now proceed to rationalize wholesale attacks on the Bill of Rights in the name of expediency to prevent your worldview from imploding, certain that Stalin will renounce his powers as soon as The Emergency is passed.
1. Solar radiation output is increasing as helium 'ash' accumulates at the sun's core; The change amounts to 33% in 4.6 billion years.
2. Sunspots are dark areas which radiate less energy, not more.
3. Earth's orbital eccentricity is currently.016, a nearly perfect circle.
4. Momentum of orbiting bodies is conserved therefore there is no such thing as gravitational friction.
When the ISPs say "unlimited service", they also have a sort of implicitly-understood agreement with their users.
Remember that guy who took dozens or hundreds of the free (Kinkos I think) boxes and used the to make furniture and got sued? They gave the boxes away, because it's implicitly assumed that you're going to use them to send shit via Kinkos (or whoever).
Likewise, ISPs offer unlimited service with the implicit statement "as long as you don't use every KB of bandwidth every second of every day" because their systems are not built to support such a load from all their users, and never will be as long as the users pay $40/month. I'm an occasional user of Azureus and Gnutella. I use them to download movies and linux distros and occasionally some music. I often leave Azureus on to share until I've uploaded a fair bit more than I downloaded. But I don't download and upload hundreds of gigabytes of crap every month.
In a sense, you can think of current ISP payments as being somewhat socialized: We all pay $40 for a comparable connection, I use probably 5 or 10GB a month, granny uses maybe 25MB for E-Mailing pictures of her grandkids, and others use hundreds of GB sharing their mp3s and warez. What's going on is that ISPs are tiring of the people who use hundreds of dollars of bandwidth and maintenence that the other users have to pay for. As usual, there are a few who just can't play nice and insist on abusing everything until the privilege is taken away from everyone.
Think of it like this: "OK, kids, here's the cookie jar - feel free to take a few cookies." There's nothing to stop any of the kids from taking as many cookies as they can stuff their faces with, but most understand and accept that they should only take a few. There will, of course, be an asshole who will indeed take all he can eat because he isn't explicitly forbidden.
I demand that Google Maps and Google Earth be shut down because terrorists could use them to plan the route of an attack. I demand that a license be required to purchase fertilizer, especially if you own a diesel truck. I demand that all access to computers be government-monitored and that there be a Federal backdoor into every box, because terrorists can use computers to communicate.
It's the same situation. How much information or freedom should be restricted to fight terrorists? It seems that if the Bush administration were to have it's way, we might as well surrender now because America isn't worth fighting for if it isn't free.
How much more information to we classify and how many more freedoms do we restrict in the name of fighting terrorists? Should we shut down the Wikipedia page on acetone peroxide (*cough*put nail polish and store-bought H2O2 together in the fridge*cough*)? Should my post be censored if, hypothetically, I mentioned a 7-step process whereby anyone could make white phosphorus?
To quote Star Trek Insurrection, "When does it become wrong, Admiral? 600? A thousand? Ten thousand, a million!"
It's more like NBC-Cable offers you 1080-P high definition on NBC-affiliated channels and retransmits other channels, like those from competitors ABC or CNN, in analog with drifting color saturation, static, and ghosting because those companies failed to pay the protection money. This comes after everyone has been receiving 1080p on all channels since the beginning of television.
In a just world, NBC would then be swiftly and viciously penalized by both the market and the government for a very long time. Now replace cable TV company names with ISPs and 'channels' with 'websites'.
Re:Astrophysics Psychology Science
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Dark Matter Exists
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Take a gander at the published paper. A large part of the reason that this galaxy cluster in particular was chosen was because it is one of the cases known where we have a clear-cut idea of what's going on.
Their initial assumption (page 1 right column): "During a collision of two clusters, galaxies behave as collisionless particles, while the fluid-like X-ray emitting intracluster plasma experiences ram pressure. Therefore, in the course of a cluster collision, galaxies spatially decouple from the plasma." Since the area occupied by dense matter (stars) is more than 10^11 times smaller than that of the whole cluster, literally one or two stars might impact each other. Meanwhile, the intracluster gas is, however diffuse, GAS - it can't pass through itself, and is observed to contain ~80-90% of a cluster's visible mass.
I don't know the specifics of how this is done, but they used a gradient of the change in a background galaxy's size and related it to the curvature of space (and hence amount of mass). By plotting a lot of background galaxies, they were able to integrate the gradient to find the center of mass (warning: not 100% sure of this explanation) that was causing the lensing (green gradient lines on page 2).
When this is compared with an x-ray image of the gas which is known to comprise most of the visible mass of clusters, the two mismatch by about 6 arc seconds. On page 4, they discuss the probability of other clusters creating the apparent mass (1/10 million chance) or entire filaments of intergalactic mass creating it (1 in 100 million). The only remaining conclusion from this is that something which fits the description of dark matter (in that it has mass but no other measurable property) makes up the great majority of the cluster's mass and the two clouds of it passed through each other like the galaxies.
So, they expected the stars/dark matter and the gas of colliding clusters to separate in a collision, and this is exactly what was observed
Re:I don't see any proof...
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Dark Matter Exists
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· Score: 5, Informative
Show me why dark matter has to exist.
Executive summary of TFPP (The Fucking Physics Paper):
Step 1: Observe galaxy cluster 1E0657-558 through the Magellan optical telescope, note positions of lensed galaxies.
Step 2: Observe galaxy cluster 1E0657-558 through the Chandra X-Ray observatory, note positions of colliding gas.
Step 3: Using statistics and vector calculus, compute where the centers of mass causing the lensing are.
Step 4: Note that the computed center of mass (green contours) doesn't match the position of the gas which composes ~90% of the cluster's visible mass (false-color smear), as shown on page 2.
Conclusion: Something that we can't see comprises ~90% of 1E0657-558's mass. This something emits no EM radiation, no particle radiation, and thus does not interact with the normal matter in the cluster via electromagnetism or the nuclear forces. It's only measurable property is it's mass, hence "Dark Matter".
We've set off fifty megaton nukes for crying out loud without a single sign of anything amiss that would suggest we have a giant hole in physics requiring dark matter. We've done experiments on electromagnetic fundamentals, nuclear forces, and so on and along the way, we didn't hear of a need to invent dark matter.
Why should a divergent nuclear chain reaction reveal or be affected by the presence of something that doesn't interact by the strong, weak, or EM forces? Dark matter doesn't come up when experimenting with forces that don't affect it.
But some people look at the cosmos and decide that despite not truly understanding the whole picture of physics at every scale yet, we can claim that dark matter exists and here's proof. Where in the Nine Hells does this stuff fit with the physics theories they already promulgate as accepted science to be taught in universities?
Physics is nothing more than a way to model the universe and it's contents. Would you have exclaimed suprise at Einstein's use of wave-particle duality to explain the photoelectric effect because we didn't understand phyisics at the atomic scale circa 1900? The photoelectric effect, the quantum theory of the atom, black holes, and now Dark Matter are the things we use to make "known physics" jibe with observed reality. The whole reason Dark Matter is proposed because the current model of gravity acting on visible mass doesn't fit observations.
There's no point trying to tell you how much we do know, Debbie Downer, because you're determined to hate humanity and life and existence because [God says so | I'm emo and I hate myself | My life sucks and I want yours to suck too].
But just to drop a few clue-by-fours: Wrong, (the majority of computers on earth, those used in cars, will run correctly forever except for a hardware fault), wrong (the United States alone grows enough food to feed 2.4 billion people, even after wasting so much on feeding cattle), and irrelevant (the social conditions which create and drive poverty have nothing to do with artificial satellites).
The only reason that "Privacy" isn't explicitly mentioned in the Constitution is because in 1791 the only thing needed to assure privacy was a walk into the middle of a field and a quiet voice.
If the founders had known that someday it would be possible for the government to tap absolutely any phone or verbal conversation (including one behind closed doors and windows) without the subjects knowing (unless they were tipped off), do you think they'd have left it out of the Constitution?
OTOH, it seems there's nothing one can say that's so crazy that there isn't at least one wingnut (left or right) who actually believes it. Plus there'd be flamewars over Parody vs Troll.
The main difference is that screen resolution is easy to specify in Windows and painful in Linux.
O rly?
Suse 10: Yast -> hardware -> monitor -> choose resolution
Windows: Control Panel -> display -> choose resolution
Big difference indeed. Now, what's painful is trying to imagine what the hell they were thinking when they decided to name *every* resolution after VGA. "VGA" stands for "Video Graphics Adaptor"; WTF do UXGA, SXGA, QUXGA, and WXGA stand for? WSXGA+? IMHO the abuse of acronyms indicates that some marketoid needs to STFU and GBTW (or preferably DIAF).
After all, the DRM is a result of those who can't seem to bring themselves to pay for something they want.
Which explains why there was DRM on DVDs when they were introduced in 1996, at a time when most internet connections were sub-28K? DVDs and MP3s are digital information, and one of the basic functions of computers is duplicating digital information. Computers are getting so good at it that the supply of anything digital is approaching infinity, and therefore the free-market price is approaching zero. As usual, corporations like the RIAA believe in the free market until it bites them and DRM is their attempt to prevent the supply from being infinity.
"The more you try and enforce your unjust rules, the more we're going to break them."
How do you propose to know who jacked anything up, seeing as Bush's policy of "I can do anything I want in a war with no oversight" just got validated?
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Pepcon explosion. 4000 Tons of ammonium perchlorate go BOOM. So this is something in the league of what N.K. claims to have achieved - and we suspect they did the same thing as Pepcon: Pile lots of explosives up next to each other.
HCl is very slow at attacking copper metal. It dissolves the oxides, hydroxides, and carbonates that cover it, but leaves gleaming clean metal behind (Try it: You can buy 9M HCl at Home Depot as "muriatic acid" - copper gets very clean but not dissolved). Now, Nitric or Sulfuric acid, OTOH...
Alright, I'll feed the troll one last time...
You know that secret warrants are incredibly easy to get under FISA. Go ahead, read USC Title 50 Chapter 36 - I. No, really, put "fisa act" into Google and you'll get a link to cornell.edu. I mean, really, them warrants is reaaaaaal easy to get. Hell, getting into Paris Hilton's cooch is harder than getting a FISA warrant.
If you've read the FISA act, then you know that the warrant request may be filed up to 3 days after tapping starts, that the Attorney General may order tapping for up to 15 days without a warrant during a time of war, and that the President may direct the Attorney General to wiretap for up to one year during a time of war provided he swears it won't be abused.
Now ask what more could possibly be needed on the intel front to fight terrorists than the power to wiretap for an entire year.
Given the premises that the program is not to fight terrorists (because any imaginable need is covered by FISA already), yet the Bush administration is adamant that it be allowed to continue, the only logical conclusion is that the actual reason for it's existence falls under the set "Not terrorism." The actual specific purpose that is "Not terrorism" doesn't matter, because the only justification given is the endless drumbeat that the program is needed "to combat terrorists." However, if the justification given is terrorism but the program is not about terrorism, then the only logical conclusion is that the public are being lied to. To what end? There's no point speculating.
Because after all, it's all just a bunch of "mumbo-jumbo." You've convinced yourself that Herr Bush can do no wrong. You're certain that he and his administration can do nothing that isn't in the true and genuine interests of the American people, and close your eyes and yell LALALALALA at any disagreement. You refuse to see logic or the obvious truth, because then your brain wouldn't give that nice rush of dopamine that self-confirming beliefs always do.
The Reichstag Fire was set by Communists, the ongoing emergency in the Rodina necessitates the declaration of Martial Law, we have always been at war with Oceania, Clinton "did not have... sexual relations, with that woman," and Nixon was not a crook! They all said so, anything else is paranoid mumbo-jumbo!
Let me see if I understand this... First you accuse people who distrust no-oversight warrantless surveillance of paranoia. Then someone replies with an irrefutable prior example of what happens when the government decides it can wiretap without warrants or oversight (watergate). Then you reply that it's all paranoia.
So, uh, can we see an example of an argument you have that doesn't involve involve poisoning any well that you don't like by dismissing it as "paranoid?" Perhaps an example of any surveillance of terrorists that doesn't fall under U.S.C. Title 50 Chapter 36? Or are you just trolling?
OK, you're closer than I was on the acceptance rate... 4 denied out of 19000 issued (assume 1000/year for '01-'06) equals 99.979% acceptance.
Onto more important matters, perhaps evidence that the person in question is a terrorist (Paragraph 6)? Under USC Title 50 Chapter 36-I 1805a, the requirement in question is "probable cause" which 1805-b clarifies to include "past activities of the target, as well as facts and circumstances relating to current or future activities of the target."
A judge doesn't need to affirm a search warrant before a search? That'd be news to the guys who make Law & Order. The 4th Amendment says that the government and it's agents are not allowed to unreasonably search anyone. A judge must issue a warrant based on probable cause for such a search. Therefore, a judge must issue a warrant with probable cause (indicating that the search is reasonable) before the government is allowed to search. If the government is searching without such a warrant, it is violating the Fourth Amendment.
Under the so-called "patriot" act, the government can forbid you from telling anyone about it's secret searches, thereby denying judicial recourse. And if by chance you do manage to try and force the Administration to provide reasonable evidence, they will say "national security" and make the case disappear as they did in the AT&T data-sharing case.
And I'm not suggesting that the government be required to broadcast it's evidence for every warrant on CNN. Perhaps if there were a secret court created by something called "FISA" which could review such things in secret. But taking the executive (any executive)'s word for it that they aren't abusing such a thing is also an absurdity. (I am not a crook!)
Eh... I'm a little dubious about FISA, but after reading it I fail to see where exactly it gives the power of the courts to the president. Could you point them out?
Ok, so a lot of the Democrats are fascists who would betray the Constitution too. Not suprising; They and the Republicans are both sides of the same, rotten-to-the-core coin IMO. That doesn't change the fact that no new arguments are being put forward in support of the warrantless surveillance program.
If the people using the cell phones are in other countries, then the CIA is free to tap away, infiltrate, and pattern-recognize to their heart's content. Since the calls are not between American citizens, the Fourth Amendment is not in effect and I never claimed otherwise. But then you go on to claim that the only phones being tapped include those known to have ties to terrorists, and that the FBI goes and gets a warrant within the US. You may recall that no one not in the US spy agencies knows which calls are being tapped, as senior Bush administration officials made quite a show of claiming that such knowledge (or even knowledge that it happens) would endanger national security. And why are you claiming that the FBI goes and gets a warrant, when the article that nucleated this thread is titled "warrantless surveillance?" If the calls in question involve terminals within United States, the call may be tapped at the remote terminus or it may be tapped in the US terminus with a warrant.
But again, this is moot. If FISA doesn't help with shifting networks of one-time phones or other technologies, too bad. Unlike the Soviet Constitution, the US Constitution does not have an article 121, line 15 that lets the President suspend the Constitution "in the interests of defence." Either the government can get a 3/4 majority and revoke the Fourth Amendment (in which case the United States is dead anyway) or accept the rule of law.
Every time a case such as this, or any other criticism of the Bush administration's policies regarding terrorism comes up, we hear all but the exact same thing: We need this [power | program | law] to fight terrorism. [If you disagree, you must support the terrorists.] Why is it that we never get to hear exactly why [power | program | law] is necessary to stop terrorists? I guess they're assuming that if they beat the drum of "We need this!!!1" long and hard enough people will believe it.
But what real use is this warrantless surveillance program to fighting terrorists? If you evidence, get a warrant. If you have a shred of something resembling evidence, go to FISA and you have about a 99.8% chance of getting a warrant. If there's no time to waste, start tapping and you can file for a warrant (which in an emergency case can be approved within an hour) any time in the next 3 days. To those who support this program: What conceivable set of circumstances would simultaneously require so many resources that there isn't one intern left over to file a request sometime within the next 3 days marked "urgent" with an institution that rubber-stamps nearly every request that crosses it's path, yet also be totally unknown and not under any previous surveillance. Such a set's parameters are absurd: it doesn't exist. Bush's warrantless surveillance program is nonsense in this regard.
But debating the merits and usefulness of any such program is a moot point. The Fourth Amendment forbids any unreasonable search and any search not affirmed by a judge. The Bush administration refuses to provide evidence that the wiretaps are reasonable (instead insisting that we take it's word), and the fact that they are not affirmed by a judge is the whole point of the program. Therefore, this program is inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment and any program or law contravening the Constitution, it's Amendments, or Treaties is illegal. End of debate, national security be damned. This is a nation of law, no matter what might be convenient, useful, or even life-saving. No one with even the foggiest clue what America is about petitions to destroy the 4th Amendment because it would be a great help to other criminal investigations (and hell yes it would be more convenient and efficient to not have to deal with judges and evidence beforehand), yet when "terrorists" come up, certain people who have all rules and regulations disappear. That is wrong, and history provides abundant evidence why.
Not so long as corrupt and evil individuals wish to corrupt the democratic electoral process.
It all boils down to what level of trust you want to have in the system. General purpose computers for voting? They can be programmed to run anything and say anything - that's the entire purpose of a general purpose computer. Open source voting software and open verification? Read about the Thompson Hack. Assembling a limited-purpose expert system? Can't trust that its designers aren't compromised in some way. Creating the system using discrete transistors a la PDP-10? We can fit an entire PDP-10 onto a single one of those discrete transistors these days; It would only take a few such hacked transistors on the data readout pins to say anything their malicious creator wanted. Plan to verify that the transistors are in fact simple transistors? You'll have to use electronic tools to test their responses. Your tools can be replaced with ones programmed to say what the person replacing them wants. Each step more and more difficult, but still possible none the less.
The basic problem is that it's fundamentally impossible for a person to be absolutely 100% certain how an electronic computer will operate if evil and corrupt people have a strong incentive to change it's workings because it's impossible to interact with electronic circuits without technological go-betweens that could also be changed.
The most complex device I would support being used in an election is an electromechanical computer with mechanical memory where every component is encased inside a transparent material. Anyone can examine it's system of mechanical switches, register pins, levers, and rods, and the operation of the motors that turn the crank and the electrical relays connecting it's "vote for this person" buttons on the front to the counter mechanisms, and the wouldn't need anything other than their eyes to inspect that all vote counters start in the 0000-0000-0000-0000 position.
I freely admit, suspecting that someone would try to corrupt an election by replacing hardware components of computers is out there. How do you KNOW that it's not being done though? Given what we know of Diebold, it's almost universally suspected that they replaced softare components to fix the 2004 election. And is anything less than 100% certainty of the basic components acceptable in something as critical as an election?
On one hand, the Brazilian government wants the IPs to go after pedophiles and racist hatemongers. I think we can all get behind throwing such people in very small cells with no windows and melting the key down as they watch.
On the other, this is an American company receiving a demand from Brazil. If they comply with this demand to hand over IPs, who's to say such wonderful democratic places as Saudi Arabia and China won't start demanding information on dissidents and getting it via this precedent (Ok, scratch China... Do No Evil my ass)? If the precedent is very explicitly restricted to pedophiles, then expect find out that everyone the CCP doesn't like are pedophiles.
Unfortunately, such applies to any corrupt authoritarian government. If you have any means of handing them data, they will abuse it to their own ends [Insert standard link to Bush administration here]. So the question becomes, how to hand data over to Brazil to help them hunt down child predators while NOT helping Saudi Arabia jail and murder dissidents.
And overshadowing this is the fact that perverts and hatemongers who are NOT idiots don't talk over plaintext for obvious reasons (like the local government rightfully hunting them down). Given the wide availability of encryption and anonymization tools, it's easily possible to hide from any government you want.
Might I suggest a registry to distinguish between governments that can reasonably be trusted not to misuse requests for identifying information, e.g. Brazil, and corrupt dictatorships like China or Saudi Arabia. Never going to happen because certain dictatorships have America by the economic balls (Thank you, Federal Government, for sending all our industry to China and setting up a $10e11 trade deficit! And for spending $5e11 on Iraq instead of alternate fuels!) and wouldn't take kindly to being disfavored because of their crimes. And if it were created, good like keeping it from being turned into a tool to protect criminals instead (look at the nations that are on the UN Human Rights council). But it's worth dreaming about...
Silly AC, everyone knows that morons are the binding particles exchanged by the neutron, vice-neutrons, and assistant-vice-neutrons in the core of an Administratium atom.
Why people like you terrorize themselves into believing that we need to give up what makes America America escapes me.
You know, it would make us a lot safer if we rounded up all the Muslims (no, better make it everyone who looks remotely middle eastern) and put them in "internment camps." If the TSA started handcuffing everyone who flies to their seat, we wouldn't need to worry about anyone hijacking a plane ever again. I'm sure officials could catch at least a few terrorists if they were allowed to search anyone they found suspicious. There's even a chance that they might be able to beat some names out of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. I'm pretty sure that we'd catch a few more terrorists (or at least people who hate America) if the FBI were to round up everyone who ever entered "al quaeda" into Google. Perhaps the NSA should preemptively wiretap everyone who requests http://www.aljazeera.com? Yet none of these things have been seriously proposed, except the torture one (because torture is no longer a debasement of everything America holds dear if they're terrorists). Care to think why?
You would have hated the Founding Fathers for the laws they wrote. You think they didn't know that the 2nd Amendment would make the police's job harder? You think they didn't know that the 4th would seriously impede legitimate investigations? That the 5th gave conspirators a free hand to stonewall investigations? That the First Amendment, giving anyone the right to say whatever they wanted (except in condition of causing immediate danger), would let all manner of sickos and hatemongers spew their filth without fear of reprisal?
Do you want to know why they would write such laws, which the Bush administration would no doubt (correctly) denounce because they "impede legitimate investigations" if they were proposed today? Exactly BECAUSE the Bush administration, or the Clinton administration, or the Reagan or Carter or Ford or Nixon or Hoover or Grant administrations would denounce such gaurantees in the name of efficiency and convenience. The Founders KNEW that power breeds corruption, and they knew exactly where the powers unequivocally denied to the government in the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights would lead on very, very short order because they'd just overthrown such a government. They intentionally hog-tied the Federal Government because they knew where anything else would lead, and they knew how many people died getting back their rights the first time.
And here you are, cheering the Bush administration as as they try to renounce the very laws that have assured historically unprecedented freedom for hundreds of millions of people for centuries in the name of expediency. In the words of Samuel Adams, "We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen."
At this point, I finish with a snide comment about the Emergency Clause in the Soviet constitution. You may now proceed to rationalize wholesale attacks on the Bill of Rights in the name of expediency to prevent your worldview from imploding, certain that Stalin will renounce his powers as soon as The Emergency is passed.
1. Solar radiation output is increasing as helium 'ash' accumulates at the sun's core; The change amounts to 33% in 4.6 billion years. .016, a nearly perfect circle.
2. Sunspots are dark areas which radiate less energy, not more.
3. Earth's orbital eccentricity is currently
4. Momentum of orbiting bodies is conserved therefore there is no such thing as gravitational friction.
Score: -1, Factually Incorrect.
When the ISPs say "unlimited service", they also have a sort of implicitly-understood agreement with their users.
Remember that guy who took dozens or hundreds of the free (Kinkos I think) boxes and used the to make furniture and got sued? They gave the boxes away, because it's implicitly assumed that you're going to use them to send shit via Kinkos (or whoever).
Likewise, ISPs offer unlimited service with the implicit statement "as long as you don't use every KB of bandwidth every second of every day" because their systems are not built to support such a load from all their users, and never will be as long as the users pay $40/month. I'm an occasional user of Azureus and Gnutella. I use them to download movies and linux distros and occasionally some music. I often leave Azureus on to share until I've uploaded a fair bit more than I downloaded. But I don't download and upload hundreds of gigabytes of crap every month.
In a sense, you can think of current ISP payments as being somewhat socialized: We all pay $40 for a comparable connection, I use probably 5 or 10GB a month, granny uses maybe 25MB for E-Mailing pictures of her grandkids, and others use hundreds of GB sharing their mp3s and warez. What's going on is that ISPs are tiring of the people who use hundreds of dollars of bandwidth and maintenence that the other users have to pay for. As usual, there are a few who just can't play nice and insist on abusing everything until the privilege is taken away from everyone.
Think of it like this: "OK, kids, here's the cookie jar - feel free to take a few cookies." There's nothing to stop any of the kids from taking as many cookies as they can stuff their faces with, but most understand and accept that they should only take a few. There will, of course, be an asshole who will indeed take all he can eat because he isn't explicitly forbidden.
"They want to stop your computer from doing what you want it to do, and I won't be able to fix it for you."
I demand that Google Maps and Google Earth be shut down because terrorists could use them to plan the route of an attack. I demand that a license be required to purchase fertilizer, especially if you own a diesel truck. I demand that all access to computers be government-monitored and that there be a Federal backdoor into every box, because terrorists can use computers to communicate.
It's the same situation. How much information or freedom should be restricted to fight terrorists? It seems that if the Bush administration were to have it's way, we might as well surrender now because America isn't worth fighting for if it isn't free.
How much more information to we classify and how many more freedoms do we restrict in the name of fighting terrorists? Should we shut down the Wikipedia page on acetone peroxide (*cough*put nail polish and store-bought H2O2 together in the fridge*cough*)? Should my post be censored if, hypothetically, I mentioned a 7-step process whereby anyone could make white phosphorus?
To quote Star Trek Insurrection, "When does it become wrong, Admiral? 600? A thousand? Ten thousand, a million!"
Aluminum Oxynitride.
The internet is not like cable TV actually is.
It's more like NBC-Cable offers you 1080-P high definition on NBC-affiliated channels and retransmits other channels, like those from competitors ABC or CNN, in analog with drifting color saturation, static, and ghosting because those companies failed to pay the protection money. This comes after everyone has been receiving 1080p on all channels since the beginning of television.
In a just world, NBC would then be swiftly and viciously penalized by both the market and the government for a very long time. Now replace cable TV company names with ISPs and 'channels' with 'websites'.
Take a gander at the published paper. A large part of the reason that this galaxy cluster in particular was chosen was because it is one of the cases known where we have a clear-cut idea of what's going on.
Their initial assumption (page 1 right column): "During a collision of two clusters, galaxies behave as collisionless particles, while the fluid-like X-ray emitting intracluster plasma experiences ram pressure. Therefore, in the course of a cluster collision, galaxies spatially decouple from the plasma." Since the area occupied by dense matter (stars) is more than 10^11 times smaller than that of the whole cluster, literally one or two stars might impact each other. Meanwhile, the intracluster gas is, however diffuse, GAS - it can't pass through itself, and is observed to contain ~80-90% of a cluster's visible mass.
I don't know the specifics of how this is done, but they used a gradient of the change in a background galaxy's size and related it to the curvature of space (and hence amount of mass). By plotting a lot of background galaxies, they were able to integrate the gradient to find the center of mass (warning: not 100% sure of this explanation) that was causing the lensing (green gradient lines on page 2).
When this is compared with an x-ray image of the gas which is known to comprise most of the visible mass of clusters, the two mismatch by about 6 arc seconds. On page 4, they discuss the probability of other clusters creating the apparent mass (1/10 million chance) or entire filaments of intergalactic mass creating it (1 in 100 million). The only remaining conclusion from this is that something which fits the description of dark matter (in that it has mass but no other measurable property) makes up the great majority of the cluster's mass and the two clouds of it passed through each other like the galaxies.
So, they expected the stars/dark matter and the gas of colliding clusters to separate in a collision, and this is exactly what was observed
Step 1: Observe galaxy cluster 1E0657-558 through the Magellan optical telescope, note positions of lensed galaxies.
Step 2: Observe galaxy cluster 1E0657-558 through the Chandra X-Ray observatory, note positions of colliding gas.
Step 3: Using statistics and vector calculus, compute where the centers of mass causing the lensing are.
Step 4: Note that the computed center of mass (green contours) doesn't match the position of the gas which composes ~90% of the cluster's visible mass (false-color smear), as shown on page 2.
Conclusion: Something that we can't see comprises ~90% of 1E0657-558's mass. This something emits no EM radiation, no particle radiation, and thus does not interact with the normal matter in the cluster via electromagnetism or the nuclear forces. It's only measurable property is it's mass, hence "Dark Matter".
Why should a divergent nuclear chain reaction reveal or be affected by the presence of something that doesn't interact by the strong, weak, or EM forces? Dark matter doesn't come up when experimenting with forces that don't affect it.
Physics is nothing more than a way to model the universe and it's contents. Would you have exclaimed suprise at Einstein's use of wave-particle duality to explain the photoelectric effect because we didn't understand phyisics at the atomic scale circa 1900? The photoelectric effect, the quantum theory of the atom, black holes, and now Dark Matter are the things we use to make "known physics" jibe with observed reality. The whole reason Dark Matter is proposed because the current model of gravity acting on visible mass doesn't fit observations.
There's no point trying to tell you how much we do know, Debbie Downer, because you're determined to hate humanity and life and existence because [God says so | I'm emo and I hate myself | My life sucks and I want yours to suck too].
But just to drop a few clue-by-fours: Wrong, (the majority of computers on earth, those used in cars, will run correctly forever except for a hardware fault), wrong (the United States alone grows enough food to feed 2.4 billion people, even after wasting so much on feeding cattle), and irrelevant (the social conditions which create and drive poverty have nothing to do with artificial satellites).
The only reason that "Privacy" isn't explicitly mentioned in the Constitution is because in 1791 the only thing needed to assure privacy was a walk into the middle of a field and a quiet voice.
If the founders had known that someday it would be possible for the government to tap absolutely any phone or verbal conversation (including one behind closed doors and windows) without the subjects knowing (unless they were tipped off), do you think they'd have left it out of the Constitution?
We need a new tag: +1, Parody.
OTOH, it seems there's nothing one can say that's so crazy that there isn't at least one wingnut (left or right) who actually believes it. Plus there'd be flamewars over Parody vs Troll.
Suse 10: Yast -> hardware -> monitor -> choose resolution
Windows: Control Panel -> display -> choose resolution
Big difference indeed. Now, what's painful is trying to imagine what the hell they were thinking when they decided to name *every* resolution after VGA. "VGA" stands for "Video Graphics Adaptor"; WTF do UXGA, SXGA, QUXGA, and WXGA stand for? WSXGA+? IMHO the abuse of acronyms indicates that some marketoid needs to STFU and GBTW (or preferably DIAF).
"The more you try and enforce your unjust rules, the more we're going to break them."
How do you propose to know who jacked anything up, seeing as Bush's policy of "I can do anything I want in a war with no oversight" just got validated?