I don't know what bracket you're in, but last year I paid just shy of 20% in taxes. That includes federal income tax, state & local sales tax, gas tax, property tax, and social security tax. The only tax I could think of that I didn't include was airport taxes, but most of those were going to foreign governments anyway. I think my tax freedom day was back in mid-March.
Yet another data point is that Fry's will sell you a whole desktop computer with hard drive, CD drive, keyboard/mouse, all the standard stuff for $149 retail. The parts cost has got to be less than $100. The OLPC trades out the hard drive, CD drive, modem, 10/100 ethernet, 250W power supply, and adds in a display, wireless hardware, and AC adapter. Again, if the display really is $35, the stated cost is easy to believe.
Well, their web site tells us that the display would normally cost $150, but they've engineered it down to $35. This is the biggest cost of a laptop if it doesn't have a hard disk. Think of the parts inventory: display, case, keyboard, touchpad, RAM, flash RAM, circuit board, CPU, speakers, output jacks, power connections. The display, CPU, and circuit board are the only things likely to cost more than $10 to manufacture. Given that the software is free, I can easily believe a $100 manufacturing cost. In fact, provided with only the $35 display and a mainboard, I'll bet a lot of slashdotters could put together a single unit for $200 or so buying the keyboard, RAM, etc. at retail prices. Those two things are where the meat of this project is.
Another way of thinking about is that a 1GB MP3 player has RAM, flash RAM, CPU, circuit board, and external jacks, and can be had for under $100 retail, with a tidy profit for the manufacturer. Adding a keyboard and a touchpad would be only a few dollars; a wireless chip is a few dollars; add a $35 display and a plastic case and again, you're there under $200, retail. So I think this is believable. I've gone over it a number of times in my head, and I'm convinced the reason we don't all have one is that the manufacturers know the vast majority of current customers spending $1000 on a laptop wouldn't bother if they had one of these. And THAT is the reason, I believe, why Negroponte keeps telling us that we won't be able to buy one. It isn't because it wouldn't be profitable, it isn't because the factory couldn't build out enough capacity (are you kidding?). It's because it would be like GE selling light bulbs that last 100 years, or Gillette selling razors that never get dull. "Killing the goose that laid the golden egg", as they say. For this project to succeed, the only real hurdle is convincing the developed world that they have to (or at least should) keep paying high prices for consumer electronics while the developing world gets the same thing for cheap (well, better, really -- who wouldn't want a laptop that doesn't break when you drop it and doesn't run out of power on the plane?)
> AIDS -can't- be controlled on a personal level by personal behavioral factors -- one's environment and society is always a risk.
Your personal behavior has a huge effect on your risk of getting AIDS. The other risks are infinitesmal in comparison. Sure, you can contract it through lots of different vectors, but if you and your partner are monogamous and you don't use intravenous needles, the chances of being infected with HIV are vanishingly small. I think that's the point he was trying to make -- AIDS is easily controlled through behavior, if people knew the facts and behaved appropriately.
As for spreading the flu (your example), we have manners (cover your mouth when you sneeze, wash your hands often, use your sick days when you know you're contagious) that have developed over many decades to help control its spread. These are very effective practices, and we need similarly effective practices based in FACT to be adopted by people worldwide to control the spread of AIDS. Instead, we have people like Jacob Zuma doing all the wrong things. He's not the only one, by far.
It is a fact that if all people everywhere practiced monogamous sex and did not share needles, AIDS would not be a big problem in this world. It would devastate the lives of a very few people affected by it, like SARS, but the vast majority of the world would only read about it in newspapers. Even if we started now, we could almost completely eradicate it within a few generations, without any dollar cost. That won't happen, I know. People enjoy their sexual practices too much, and don't think about the future. But if ten thousand African males could read the news about Zuma, learn how HIV infection works, and make better choices, that would have a real effect. It's ALL about behavior, and behavior can be influenced by education.
This is true, but doesn't state the whole case. Reduce the number of carriers now, and you increase the number of cases of shingles in people who have previously had chicken pox; but all those kids who never get chicken pox will never get shingles. Over a century, the number of cases of shingles should go up and then way down.
I had chicken pox as a kid; and my kids are getting vaccinated. Statistically, it's bad for me but good for them...and given such a choice, I don't need to think about it much to get my answer.
OK, I don't see any serious comments here. Hasn't anyone here ever dreamed of using your tongue as an I/O device for computing?
The article is all about it being a device-to-brain interface, but I think there's a lot going for it as a brain-to-device interface as well.
If you could image the real-time position of a person's lips and tongue, I'll be the data rate would be higher than a keyboard, and it would be hands-free and silent as well.
Like a good speech interface but without interference problems and without having everyone blabbing out loud all the time. And many handicapped people could use it as well.
Joke all you want, but until direct brainwave interfaces are perfected, I think this kind of research is the most promising area of human-computer interface design going. I just wish they'd emphasize the opposite direction.
It's not that the IRS would want you to pay state sales taxes.
They want to know about income. There are a huge number of private individuals and small business owners
who make heaps of profit via eBay, and if they can track those sales, they will gain leverage.
If they aren't doing it now, it's only a matter of time.
Exactly. The GP asked, "How close are we to breaking even on money spent on Iraq?"
The answer is that neither America nor Iraq as a whole will ever break even, but the group of people who started the war and stand to benefit from it have already profited wildly. They spend money and lives that do not belong to them, then reap the proceeds into their own accounts.
Deaths of children, that's what. When they start arming the drones, and one of them mistakenly shoots a group of young people, then people will cry out.
The deaths at Kent State changed a lot in regards to the Vietnam War. Not all by itself, but it cause a lot of people to wake up and realize their government doesn't have their best interests in mind.
Actually, the more rapidly they bring this stuff on (wiretaps, drones, armed garrisons, voting machines) the better our chances, because people might wake up in time to do something. The longer it goes on, and the more gradually totalitarianism takes hold, the harder it is to get rid of it. I put our current chances at less than 50% to avoid an actual revolution within the next 50 years.
What people don't realize is that if millions take to the streets, they actually can change things. It's been that way for a long time, but the state is getting better at mezmerizing its populace in industrialized nations.
Also consider that the attacker could be an employee who has made a copy of all entries in the system before running the decryption logic on their own machine...in which case the "three strikes and you're out" mechanism won't apply. And there's the denial-of-service attack where the purpose of the attack is to cause a bunch of records to be purged... in any security scenario, you have to consider all angles. Leave one hole open, and you still lose.
If you read the link, they ARE linked to the Christian Science movement -- specifically, one of its churches.
As a devout fundamentalist Christian, I ignored this source of news for many years but have, over time, found it to be one of the best sources when it covers a topic I want to know about. They are generally non-partisan and they don't rely on newsbites: the articles are written in such a way that they assume you're going to read the whole thing, and have a few minutes to do so.
Articles definitely have a point of view, which is inevitable; but to the extent anyone could be called un-biased, the Monitor is. Or perhaps, it's just that they give you enough information to see the issue in-depth, so the biases are more apparent when they're there. You actually learn what is going on, and get an idea of what it means without diatribes or myopia. They don't snap up every wire story and spit it back out, the way cnn.com and so many other "news" sites do.
But you have to do it artificially. If you let the market do it, then self-interest will dominate -- while the solution requires an other-centered decision.
The best way is to raise US gas taxes, until the majority of the cost of gasoline is tax and all that money is going into research and infrastructure improvements that reduce our use of gasoline.
This requires self-sacrificing politicians, though, and I don't think there are any of those. Maybe there never were. Or, it would take grass-roots demand -- can you imagine people walking the streets, waving placards with slogans like "Increase the Gas Tax NOW!"
I can't. I support the basic idea but if I went outside with a sign like that they'd lock me up in a psychiatric hospital.
Wow, that's pretty heady stuff. So it's not just a crime to be laundering money, it's a crime to LOOK like you're laundering money?
In effect, if you don't want the government to observe you, and you act accordingly, that in itself will get you reported and can lead to you being charged with a crime. Thoughtcrime, indeed.
1. "especially the maps and blueprints, are fragile". If you scan them, they are no longer fragile. If you had a 600dpi scan of every page of every book on your shelf, you'd lose very little information. And once you do that, you can keep multiple copies distributed in remote locations. MUCH safer than your paper books, which burn easily. It doesn't matter how long the reader lasts.
2. "being able to spread a whole bunch of sources... out on a large table". If the readers were A4 sized and you had, say, six of them, would that be enough? It would for me. Once the patents run out, I'm betting the actual devices will be cheap. Besides, you can always print pages...unless printing were disabled. Again, technology encumbered by IP.
But if the device had a large, mostly static display coupled with
a small (say, 4 lines by 60 characters) LCD display, you'd get the ability to type in text or monitor fast-changing state in something like a stock ticker or IM application. It would never sell, because it would look too much like the command-line interfaces and line editors of old, but I'd sure buy one. With no big, bright color display it could be solar powered or have battery life measured in days instead of hours. That would be far more valuable to me than an extra Ghz of clock speed. If small areas of the screen could be updated in, say, less than.25 seconds then a reasonable UI could easily be developed.
That's what I want: a solar-powered laptop with a 300dpi screen, a 500Mhz CPU, 4GB of Flash RAM, a 4-line LCD display for text buffering. About 5 colored LED's for attention getting ('you have new mail'), and burst-mode wireless communications to conserve power. Someday I'll be able to build it for $100 from leftover components from other things, but unfortunately I do not expect anyone to ever market such a thing. It wouldn't ever need new batteries, or have a disk crash, to allow the manufacturer to extort more money from the end user.
Maybe they won't want to be MBA's, that's up to them. What's up to me is giving them the awareness of what their options are, and ensuring they have the resources to realize their dreams instead of getting stuck in the grind like 95% of the masses. And I think this is the OP's point.
This means, for me, making sure that my son speaks, reads, and writes both Russian (his mother's native language) and English (his father's), even if he doesn't want to, so that when he's 18 he can CHOOSE to discard one or the other and live in whichever culture he wants to, rather than finding himself pinned down because I couldn't be bothered to motivate him out of his early-childhood laziness. Or, hopefully, he'll embrace both.
Similarly, I will do all that is possible to make sure he goes to college, because I see how it paid off in my life as a result of my parents' expectations.
I already know my son won't fulfill my dreams for myself; I wanted to be an EE but was too dumb, so I went into software. It's been good, but it's unlikely to work for him. He has an entirely different mind. My bet, given what I can see of his natural abilities, is he'll be a lawyer, even though I dislike lawyers in general. But I WILL NOT give up the idea that I can make him understand, by the time he's 16, why I'm still going to work every day and that he doesn't have to do that. Only he can choose, and only he can summon motivation within himself to act, but I WILL NOT have him wake up at 30 and wonder how and why his destiny has been decided by others.
Work can be the way one engages the world, or it can be a ball and chain that pays the bills. An MBA is a great way of having it be the former. It's not the only such tool, but it's one I'll definitely push. Along with going to college, study abroad, school sports, what have you. I can't force any one of these onto my son, but he is going to have to push back on all of them, and push hard, if he thinks they're not for him. I'm not going to just send him off to school, hiding my secret hopes, and see what happens 15 years later.
The more I think about this, the more strongly I agree with Ben.
Why the words ESSENTIAL and TEMPORARY? I think he had learned, through long observation as I have,
that when you give power to a government it NEVER gives it up again. Governments are groups of people and people are greedy that way -- I think that's why we name so many things after George Washington, because his willingness to surrender power was so rare (has anyone after him ever left the presidency willingly? I'm not sure.)
When we give up a freedom, it is ALWAYS PERMANENT, so to get only temporary security in return is a poor bargain.
The other constant is that those in power do USE their power. If you give them the power to spy on you without accountability, they will certainly use it. And sooner or later, some "public servant" will USE IT AGAINST YOU. That's why some liberties are essential. Without them, the people governed are not safe from their own leaders. It isn't just that people who are willing to give up liberty don't deserve it; it's that those who are willing to give it up will live to see it taken from them, or from their children.
The accuracy of your quote is to be admired -- we should always strive for correctness. But the logic of your argument is flawed. The sound bite is just as clear-cut as it always was, and its meaning is exactly what the OP said.
The liberty that is being given up is privacy: our expectation that the government will not send out agents to watch us without oversight. In the Constitution it's worded thusly:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and
no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized."
The temporary security to be obtained is the ability to detect more communications between criminals. The reason it's temporary is that the law-breakers are at least as creative as law enforcement agents, so as they learn how to circumvent wiretaps, the effectiveness of the enforcement will wane. Like how most high-ranking terrorists learned to stop using cell-phones when they realized it gave targeting information to their enemies.
You're not scared by the word "infinite"? I sure am.
The unrestrained growth in energy use will be the worst effect. If energy were "free", we would use more: to be precise, we would DISSIPATE more, into our planet's climate system. And we will do so, until we heat up our rivers and atmosphere like a toaster oven.
If we can switch from fossil fuel to fusion energy, we will immediately see a benefit in reduced pollution and whatnot. But in a few short decades, we will be using vastly more energy than we can imagine using now. What happens to it? The light and heat will not escape to space at the higher rate we produce it. we've demonstrated that even when a resource is depleted, we continue using it faster instead of conserving it. When electrical power is "free", the scarce resource will be the ability to absorb the free energy we pump into the system. And humans will continue to put off dealing with the problem, just as we're doing now.
Imagine that you could make a portable device that could convert warm water into an electrical current, and produce cold water, with no other changes. How soon do you think we would freeze all our oceans? Everyone who had one of the devices would be saying "let other people conserve while I sit comfortably and watch my DVD collection." It would be just like Ice-9. It would be INEVITABLE. Not that it'll be worse than choking on fumes as we're doing now, but it won't be paradise. Just a different kind of destruction in the end.
You are incorrect. I have an '88 CRX HF and I'm 195cm tall, and although it looks funny to people when I'm standing next to the car, I have to say I have far more legroom than practically any other car I've been in.
That includes a large Mercedes, Ford SUV's, a Cadillac, and certainly any midsize coupe or sedan. In no other car have I been able to stretch my legs out straight with my knees locked. And headroom is just fine, too.
I also find that the hatchback accepts many objects (like, say, my kayak) that wouldn't fit in any sedan. The only thing I've ever been wholly stymied by was a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
The only things wrong about the CRX are (a) the headlights stay on when you take the key out of the ignition and drain the battery, and (b) it isn't manufactured any more. It has no other flaws.
You are describing a state of nirvana that will never happen.
First, because different operating systems have different user interface conventions, and although the differences have narrowed considerably since the major players began plagiarizing each other, they are still far from agreement.
Second, because as long as software product teams are under time pressure to get things to market, they will continue trading your CPU cycles against their delivery schedule. If the hardware runs 10 times as fast, they'll pay still less attention to using good algorithms.
If we could achieve industry-wide software behavior standards and halt software bloat, nirvana would already be here. But it isn't. I think it will elude us for a very long time to come.
And if you read the actual text of the warrant and affidavit, you'll probably come to agree that the language WAS intended to include searches of whoever happened to be around:
"The search should also include all occupants of the residence as the information developed shows that [Doe] has frequent visitors that purchase methamphetamine."
We can debate all day about whether the police are allowed to strip-search children (they are) or whether meth should be illegal (it is), but the language in here is crystal clear. The only people who can't see it are those who don't like Alito and want to smear him, and make it appear as though he condones of strip searches (he doesn't, at least not from any reading of his written opinion on the matter).
Politics in this country would be so much easier if the press would just give web links to the full text of whatever they blather about. Then we could all read it and ignore 95% of what the windbags say.
> Every culture used to do some weird/nasty/mean things at some point.
"Used to?"
Take just about any weird/nasty/mean practice that we discover our ancestors did, and you find out modern, "civilized" people have been doing similar stuff within recent memory. How about genocide in Rwanda, or massacres in China during WWII? Napalming populated jungle areas? Or body-piercing? Jonestown? At least every 10 years right up to the present day, there's documented evidence that humans are absolutely barbaric, always have been, and look to continue being so. We need to get past the idea that we've somehow outgrown the barbarism of our ancestors. Civilization is a thin veneer that only takes a few weeks to strip away when conditions deteriorate.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know what bracket you're in, but last year I paid just shy of 20% in taxes.
That includes federal income tax, state & local sales tax, gas tax, property tax, and social security tax. The only tax I could think of that I didn't include was airport taxes, but most of those were going to foreign governments anyway. I think my tax freedom day was back in mid-March.
Yet another data point is that Fry's will sell you a whole desktop computer with hard drive, CD drive, keyboard/mouse, all the standard stuff for $149 retail. The parts cost has got to be less than $100.
The OLPC trades out the hard drive, CD drive, modem, 10/100 ethernet, 250W power supply, and adds in a display, wireless hardware, and AC adapter. Again, if the display really is $35, the stated cost is easy to believe.
Think of the parts inventory: display, case, keyboard, touchpad, RAM, flash RAM, circuit board, CPU, speakers, output jacks, power connections. The display, CPU, and circuit board are the only things likely to cost more than $10 to manufacture.
Given that the software is free, I can easily believe a $100 manufacturing cost. In fact, provided with only the $35 display and a mainboard, I'll bet a lot of slashdotters could put together a single unit for $200 or so buying the keyboard, RAM, etc. at retail prices. Those two things are where the meat of this project is.
Another way of thinking about is that a 1GB MP3 player has RAM, flash RAM, CPU, circuit board, and external jacks, and can be had for under $100 retail, with a tidy profit for the manufacturer. Adding a keyboard and a touchpad would be only a few dollars; a wireless chip is a few dollars; add a $35 display and a plastic case and again, you're there under $200, retail. So I think this is believable. I've gone over it a number of times in my head, and I'm convinced the reason we don't all have one is that the manufacturers know the vast majority of current customers spending $1000 on a laptop wouldn't bother if they had one of these. And THAT is the reason, I believe, why Negroponte keeps telling us that we won't be able to buy one. It isn't because it wouldn't be profitable, it isn't because the factory couldn't build out enough capacity (are you kidding?). It's because it would be like GE selling light bulbs that last 100 years, or Gillette selling razors that never get dull.
"Killing the goose that laid the golden egg", as they say. For this project to succeed, the only real hurdle is convincing the developed world that they have to (or at least should) keep paying high prices for consumer electronics while the developing world gets the same thing for cheap (well, better, really -- who wouldn't want a laptop that doesn't break when you drop it and doesn't run out of power on the plane?)
Your personal behavior has a huge effect on your risk of getting AIDS. The other risks are infinitesmal in comparison. Sure, you can contract it through lots of different vectors, but if you and your partner are monogamous and you don't use intravenous needles, the chances of being infected with HIV are vanishingly small. I think that's the point he was trying to make -- AIDS is easily controlled through behavior, if people knew the facts and behaved appropriately.
As for spreading the flu (your example), we have manners (cover your mouth when you sneeze, wash your hands often, use your sick days when you know you're contagious) that have developed over many decades to help control its spread. These are very effective practices, and we need similarly effective practices based in FACT to be adopted by people worldwide to control the spread of AIDS. Instead, we have people like Jacob Zuma doing all the wrong things. He's not the only one, by far.
It is a fact that if all people everywhere practiced monogamous sex and did not share needles, AIDS would not be a big problem in this world. It would devastate the lives of a very few people affected by it, like SARS, but the vast majority of the world would only read about it in newspapers. Even if we started now, we could almost completely eradicate it within a few generations, without any dollar cost. That won't happen, I know. People enjoy their sexual practices too much, and don't think about the future. But if ten thousand African males could read the news about Zuma, learn how HIV infection works, and make better choices, that would have a real effect. It's ALL about behavior, and behavior can be influenced by education.
I had chicken pox as a kid; and my kids are getting vaccinated. Statistically, it's bad for me but good for them...and given such a choice, I don't need to think about it much to get my answer.
Joke all you want, but until direct brainwave interfaces are perfected, I think this kind of research is the most promising area of human-computer interface design going. I just wish they'd emphasize the opposite direction.
If they aren't doing it now, it's only a matter of time.
Exactly. The GP asked, "How close are we to breaking even on money spent on Iraq?"
The answer is that neither America nor Iraq as a whole will ever break even, but the group of people who started the war and stand to benefit from it have already profited wildly. They spend money and lives that do not belong to them, then reap the proceeds into their own accounts.
Actually, the more rapidly they bring this stuff on (wiretaps, drones, armed garrisons, voting machines) the better our chances, because people might wake up in time to do something. The longer it goes on, and the more gradually totalitarianism takes hold, the harder it is to get rid of it. I put our current chances at less than 50% to avoid an actual revolution within the next 50 years.
What people don't realize is that if millions take to the streets, they actually can change things. It's been that way for a long time, but the state is getting better at mezmerizing its populace in industrialized nations.
Also consider that the attacker could be an employee who has made a copy of all entries in the system before running the decryption logic on their own machine...in which case the "three strikes and you're out" mechanism won't apply. ... in any security scenario, you have to consider all angles. Leave one hole open, and you still lose.
And there's the denial-of-service attack where the purpose of the attack is to cause a bunch of records to be purged
As a devout fundamentalist Christian, I ignored this source of news for many years but have, over time, found it to be one of the best sources when it covers a topic I want to know about. They are generally non-partisan and they don't rely on newsbites: the articles are written in such a way that they assume you're going to read the whole thing, and have a few minutes to do so.
Articles definitely have a point of view, which is inevitable; but to the extent anyone could be called un-biased, the Monitor is. Or perhaps, it's just that they give you enough information to see the issue in-depth, so the biases are more apparent when they're there. You actually learn what is going on, and get an idea of what it means without diatribes or myopia. They don't snap up every wire story and spit it back out, the way cnn.com and so many other "news" sites do.
This requires self-sacrificing politicians, though, and I don't think there are any of those. Maybe there never were. Or, it would take grass-roots demand -- can you imagine people walking the streets, waving placards with slogans like "Increase the Gas Tax NOW!" I can't. I support the basic idea but if I went outside with a sign like that they'd lock me up in a psychiatric hospital.
In effect, if you don't want the government to observe you, and you act accordingly, that in itself will get you reported and can lead to you being charged with a crime. Thoughtcrime, indeed.
Or not. Some cops go a step further.
That's called barter. It evades taxes, so we can expect that such activity will be outlawed.
The government demands its cut of every transaction!
2. "being able to spread a whole bunch of sources ... out on a large table". If the readers were A4 sized and you had, say, six of them, would that be enough? It would for me. Once the patents run out, I'm betting the actual devices will be cheap. Besides, you can always print pages...unless printing were disabled. Again, technology encumbered by IP.
That's what I want: a solar-powered laptop with a 300dpi screen, a 500Mhz CPU, 4GB of Flash RAM, a 4-line LCD display for text buffering. About 5 colored LED's for attention getting ('you have new mail'), and burst-mode wireless communications to conserve power. Someday I'll be able to build it for $100 from leftover components from other things, but unfortunately I do not expect anyone to ever market such a thing. It wouldn't ever need new batteries, or have a disk crash, to allow the manufacturer to extort more money from the end user.
This means, for me, making sure that my son speaks, reads, and writes both Russian (his mother's native language) and English (his father's), even if he doesn't want to, so that when he's 18 he can CHOOSE to discard one or the other and live in whichever culture he wants to, rather than finding himself pinned down because I couldn't be bothered to motivate him out of his early-childhood laziness. Or, hopefully, he'll embrace both.
Similarly, I will do all that is possible to make sure he goes to college, because I see how it paid off in my life as a result of my parents' expectations.
I already know my son won't fulfill my dreams for myself; I wanted to be an EE but was too dumb, so I went into software. It's been good, but it's unlikely to work for him. He has an entirely different mind. My bet, given what I can see of his natural abilities, is he'll be a lawyer, even though I dislike lawyers in general. But I WILL NOT give up the idea that I can make him understand, by the time he's 16, why I'm still going to work every day and that he doesn't have to do that. Only he can choose, and only he can summon motivation within himself to act, but I WILL NOT have him wake up at 30 and wonder how and why his destiny has been decided by others.
Work can be the way one engages the world, or it can be a ball and chain that pays the bills. An MBA is a great way of having it be the former. It's not the only such tool, but it's one I'll definitely push. Along with going to college, study abroad, school sports, what have you. I can't force any one of these onto my son, but he is going to have to push back on all of them, and push hard, if he thinks they're not for him. I'm not going to just send him off to school, hiding my secret hopes, and see what happens 15 years later.
The other constant is that those in power do USE their power. If you give them the power to spy on you without accountability, they will certainly use it. And sooner or later, some "public servant" will USE IT AGAINST YOU. That's why some liberties are essential. Without them, the people governed are not safe from their own leaders. It isn't just that people who are willing to give up liberty don't deserve it; it's that those who are willing to give it up will live to see it taken from them, or from their children.
The liberty that is being given up is privacy: our expectation that the government will not send out agents to watch us without oversight. In the Constitution it's worded thusly:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The temporary security to be obtained is the ability to detect more communications between criminals. The reason it's temporary is that the law-breakers are at least as creative as law enforcement agents, so as they learn how to circumvent wiretaps, the effectiveness of the enforcement will wane. Like how most high-ranking terrorists learned to stop using cell-phones when they realized it gave targeting information to their enemies.
The unrestrained growth in energy use will be the worst effect. If energy were "free", we would use more: to be precise, we would DISSIPATE more, into our planet's climate system. And we will do so, until we heat up our rivers and atmosphere like a toaster oven.
If we can switch from fossil fuel to fusion energy, we will immediately see a benefit in reduced pollution and whatnot. But in a few short decades, we will be using vastly more energy than we can imagine using now. What happens to it? The light and heat will not escape to space at the higher rate we produce it. we've demonstrated that even when a resource is depleted, we continue using it faster instead of conserving it. When electrical power is "free", the scarce resource will be the ability to absorb the free energy we pump into the system. And humans will continue to put off dealing with the problem, just as we're doing now.
Imagine that you could make a portable device that could convert warm water into an electrical current, and produce cold water, with no other changes. How soon do you think we would freeze all our oceans? Everyone who had one of the devices would be saying "let other people conserve while I sit comfortably and watch my DVD collection." It would be just like Ice-9. It would be INEVITABLE. Not that it'll be worse than choking on fumes as we're doing now, but it won't be paradise. Just a different kind of destruction in the end.
I also find that the hatchback accepts many objects (like, say, my kayak) that wouldn't fit in any sedan. The only thing I've ever been wholly stymied by was a 4x8 sheet of plywood.
The only things wrong about the CRX are (a) the headlights stay on when you take the key out of the ignition and drain the battery, and (b) it isn't manufactured any more. It has no other flaws.
First, because different operating systems have different user interface conventions, and although the differences have narrowed considerably since the major players began plagiarizing each other, they are still far from agreement.
Second, because as long as software product teams are under time pressure to get things to market, they will continue trading your CPU cycles against their delivery schedule. If the hardware runs 10 times as fast, they'll pay still less attention to using good algorithms.
If we could achieve industry-wide software behavior standards and halt software bloat, nirvana would already be here. But it isn't. I think it will elude us for a very long time to come.
"The search should also include all occupants of the residence as the information developed shows that [Doe] has frequent visitors that purchase methamphetamine."
We can debate all day about whether the police are allowed to strip-search children (they are) or whether meth should be illegal (it is), but the language in here is crystal clear. The only people who can't see it are those who don't like Alito and want to smear him, and make it appear as though he condones of strip searches (he doesn't, at least not from any reading of his written opinion on the matter).
Politics in this country would be so much easier if the press would just give web links to the full text of whatever they blather about. Then we could all read it and ignore 95% of what the windbags say.
"Used to?"
Take just about any weird/nasty/mean practice that we discover our ancestors did, and you find out modern, "civilized" people have been doing similar stuff within recent memory. How about genocide in Rwanda, or massacres in China during WWII? Napalming populated jungle areas? Or body-piercing? Jonestown? At least every 10 years right up to the present day, there's documented evidence that humans are absolutely barbaric, always have been, and look to continue being so. We need to get past the idea that we've somehow outgrown the barbarism of our ancestors. Civilization is a thin veneer that only takes a few weeks to strip away when conditions deteriorate.