"What's wrong with the local authorities, the people closest to the 'action' calling the shots? "
there are probably untrained to assertain a priority to recovery.
This training only exists at a Federal level?
You need experts. You also need the local politicians to scream, yell, point, and gather attention of the media and point out every single problem you run into to focus responisbility on FEMA.
These experts only exist on a Federal level? And aren't a lot of our problems due to the tendency of everybody passing the buck up to the next level? If the local politicians are only there to scream, yell, point, and gather attention of the media and point out every single problem you run into to focus responisbility on FEMA, what are they in place for? Where does their responsibility end. Hell, where does their responsibility START??? Local problems need local solutions. What is so inherently difficult in understanding this? Whatever happened to the old fashioned American attitude of self-reliance?
In New Orleans there wan't anyone on the ground capable to call the shots.
In New Orleans, there wasn't anybody on the ground allowed to take responsibility and/or call the shots until FEMA showed up. Biggest problem is, what happens if your Federal visiting fireman who ride in from the sunset don't know their ass from a hole in the ground?
you forgot 'Needs more funding for conclusive results'. Go bureaucracy!
Nonononononono. You got it a bit off here.
What you really meant was, 'Needs 30 times more funding, taken from useless social programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Workman's Compensation for better results, and to be put under the Department of Defense for maximum effect'.
Actually, I think there's a lot of merit to the philosophy of "ineffective government". And it's definitely the case that the system of government we signed up for was designed to be as ineffective as possible without being completely useless.
I wholeheartedly agree. The Founders knew what they were talking about when they insisted on keeping the Federal government relatively weak and ineffective. They had a severe distrust of centralised power, and with good reason. They'd just won a revolution from a strong centralised government that ran roughshod over their rights. They believed the best solution to any problem was a local solution. FWIW, I tend to agree with them. The best information is on the spot, not X thousand miles away.
However, in so far as we have government at all, I would prefer that it was able to act effectively in times of crisis.
I mean, think how much better off we'd be if FEMA, the State of Louisiana, and the City of New Orleans had thought to work out trust relationships and clear contingency plans and handoff of responsibilities, prior to the arrival of a giant fucking hurricane, yeah?
What's wrong with the local authorities, the people closest to the 'action' calling the shots? IMNSFBHO, when FEMA showed up, it should have been to check out the site, figure out the damage, and cut the check.
Also, the article isn't about the "secret police", but about the woefully feeble capabilities of government infrastructure agencies in general, to survive and recover from "cyber" attacks. You might want to save your "secret police" objections for an article about actual "secret police".
So the answer to a weak central facility is more centralisation? To me, this is a firm argument for decentralisation. Spread the pieces around and some of them will survive a hit. It makes the so-called 'Bad Guys' work harder for the same effect. And I'm all for making the 'Bad Guys' work for a living. Why centralise things and make it easier on them by giving them one big juicy target to hit?
Nope. It was concieved as a component for massively parallel processing, but using it in the playstation was the only way to get the volume production that I need to get the kind of reliability I want for my nuclear simulations.
OK, lemme see if I get this right...
I buy a PS3. Hook it to the net. Leave it on 24/7. Your nuke simulating supercomputer comes over the net & scams spare cycles off of me a la SETI@Home.
Wasn't part of the reason we took Saddam Hussein out of power because he was using weapons on his citizens? I know this is different as these are 'non-lethal' but with out proper testing there's no way to tell if they are truely 'non-lethal' so who knows? They may turn out to me worse than the biological ones Hussein was using.
Yup. Of course, the inconvenient fact that those weapons were used in 1988 (two years before the first Gulf War) is of little consequence. What's a 15 year delay in responding to the attacks between friends?
What I do find interesting is, what with all the satellite surveilance of Iraq since 1990, by the US, the Russians, and anybody else that could lob a satellite, and with almost daily spy plane flights over the No-Fly Zone, and over 1000 UN weapons inspectors on the ground under those same watchful eyes, how could the weapons be 'shuffled around' without anybody catching them? These are the satellites reputed able to detect when you move a rock from one side of your yard to another. And if the resolution is truly only '1 meter', they'll still pick up anything bigger than a briefcase.
I find it curious as hell that Iraq was invaded only after taking delivery of aluminum tubes that were totally useless for doing uranium separation, but were perfect for use as the fuselage of the latest SCUD variant, the one that, if you shot it off just inside the western border of Iraq and it caught a good tailwind, could deliver its payload into Israel. Curious, indeed...
IMHO, the whole deal falls back to people in "power" not fully understanding how things work, thusly fearing them. First VOIP. They feared is, as they did not understand it, and did not know how they would "control" it. They initially thought every kid who could run a linux box at their house would end up being their own telecom. (Not too far from the truth, but hey). Now VOIP has matured, and they're regulated (for the most part).
Dood, they understand it alright. What they understand best, though, is that they don't control it. What they want is more control, and they're willing to do the hot button topic of the day for quoteable soundbites on the 11 o'clock news to show that they're 'doing something' about the percieved 'problem'. What they want is control. They get this by playing to their campaign contributors. It wins them elections. Notice how VOIP was suddenly made available as soon as a megacorp figured out a way to make a buck off it and control it?
Think of it. An Internet free of non-government approved 'content', with the 'approved' content neatly packaged in DRM to protect the rights of the media corporations that own the eternal copyright to it, in formats that require you to shell out even more money when the formats change for no good technological reason.
What a great day that will be, eh?
A free press kept the US free. Open access to fax machines helped bring down the Soviet Union. Now our 'leaders' want to turn back the clock as well as crib from the Soviet's playbook.
And evidently, USAmericans are afraid of terrorists, because they're putting up with all these ridiculously invasive new initiatives with nary a whimper. Sure, there are some isolated objectors (labeled by the media as "unpatriotic crackpots") who see what the administration is really doing, but on the whole, people are quite comfortable to let Bush and Cheney Inc. do what needs to be done, so they can feel safer.
We're not afraid of terrorists. When the government's spin doctors equate resistance to those ridiculously invasive new initiatives to unAmerican thinking and the people speaking out against them as 'aiding and abetting terrorists', what's a mutha to do?
"I think so, Brain, but where are we going to find a herd of yaks, a box of latex gloves, and a swimming pool filled with vaseline at this time of night?"
And militarily, we were winning the Vietnam War, but the politicians made us give it all back.
Yes, we could have kept a large force there there for many more years, at the cost of another 30,000+ lives or more, and possibly have stabilized the country and made them our friends. But we chose to leave instead, and they became stable and our friends anyway. A lot more lives could have been saved if we'd never gotten involved in the first place, with the exact same outcome.
I was talking with a Buddhist monk in '77, '78, and he made the observation that we were dropping the wrong stuff on Hanoi. He said we could have won it if we'd dropped Army PX'es, Coca-Cola & Levis on Hanoi instead of bombs. Looking back at it, I think he had something there...
The problem isn't that it's electronic, the problem is it's not being held to any sort of secure criteria. Just compare Nevada slot machines to a Diebold device. Hell, compare Diebold ATMs to Diebold voting machines. It's a world of difference.
So the solution is an electronic voting machine that pays off if you get lucky? Cool...
A main problem is that there are only two sides, the election structure we currently have forces us to choose between the lesser of two evils -- there is no opportunity for wholesale regime change.
No, the problem is, the lesser of two evils is STILL evil. This needs to be fixed. How? I haven't a clue, but I'm willing to listen & brainstorm on any possible fixes...
Politics of Division & Hatred. Its far easier to convince someone you are right if you don't bother with reasonable arguements. Ann Coulter makes a living claiming people who disagree with her nutjob point of view are commiting treason, today I read a forwarded email from a very intelligent person that claimed everyone not current or ex-military.police/fire/etc was a sheep with their head in the sand. My grandmother oalmost was ill because I'd rather have an ex-marine and Vietnam vet who protested the war he just returned from (I know we could have one that one if it weren't for all those damned hippies 6,000 miles away) than a party-boy failed businessman who froze for 7 minutes in a classroom when our country was attacked (seriously, he put our counry at risk because he didn't want to scare a classroom full of kids by excusing himself from the room? How do people justify this foolishness?).
Kerry was Navy, not Marine. And militarily, we were winning the Vietnam War, but the politicians made us give it all back.
Sounds like what'll happen to you in Colorado if you sport a Red Wings bumper sticker. 4 flat tires in half an hour was no fun, particularly after the Wings clobbered the Avs in the 7th game.
After the '04 election, I was in my local 'supermarket' & one of the neighborhood's more notorious idiots was crowing about how 'we sure showed those Commie bastards, didn't we??' I looked at him and said, "You just don't get it, do you?' & walked away.
Make no mistake about it, her family would have sued him even if he was convicted in the criminal case. The civil suit was revenge, pure and simple. They were going for the money. They had it in their heads that he was guilty no matter what any criminal case jury said.
The sad thing about the whole case was, we may NEVER find out who REALLY did it thanks to the way the LAPD botched the case from Day One of the investigation. Maybe it really was OJ, and he got off due to manufactured evidence. Maybe it wasn't, and the LAPD was so intent on convicting OJ that the real killer got away in the witch hunt's confusion. As far as I know, the LAPD considers this case still open, but again, as far as I know, they're not retracing any of their leads or trying to develope new ones. This case is a cold case, it'll never be resolved.
Personally, I think the judge should have declared a mistrial when he found out about the fabricated evidence, and demanded the LAPD do their jobs according to the rules for once, and let them come back with a new case and real evidence. The LAPD and the LA County DA were just too damned eager to bury OJ because it was such a high profile case that their procedures got sloppy. NOT the kind of thing you want to have happen in a capital murder case.
Good point. The Civil War was when State's Rights started taking it in the ass. Before, a state could legally seceed and go its own way. Mr Lincoln made sure this would never happen.
BZZZZZZZZZZT. Incorrect, but thank you for playing our game!
If the statute of limitations has run out, no civil or criminal charges can be brought. What this law is saying is, 'Somebody accused you of a sex crime, but we can't try and convict you due to the legal system the way it is, so we'll put you on this list and make a REAL criminal out of you if you fail to comply with our extortion'.
I didn't say it was double jeopardy, I said it was abuse of the system.
Hell, by living in the same neighborhood where meth labs proliferate, one could try to make the case that I'm partially responsible for them being there because I voted against our sheriff. There wouldn't be enough evidence to convict in criminal court, but there would be enough to haul me into civil court. This is the United States. Anybody can sue anybody any time, as long as they do it within the statute of limitations of the incident.
Hell, I could sue YOU because it's Monday. All I gotta do is cough up a l*wy*r that can show how it being Monday hurts me, and they'll show WHY it's YOUR fault in court.
Problem is, this registry is bypassing a trial. No trial, no right to face your accuser in court, no public defender if he can't affor d a l*wy*r, the whole enchilada.
Look at what they're classifying as 'sex crimes' these days.
Indecent exposure (includes walking around without a shirt as well as streaking and getting caught in the back seat naked)
Public urination (like, when you've had a few beers, it's 3 AM, & you're too far from home and need to 'find a tree')
The catch-all is 'gross sexual imposition', which can mean anything from kissing a girl against her wishes to commenting about her attire ('Gee, you look HAWT in that string mesh bikini...'), to some kid still making out with their girlfriend/boyfriend AFTER they turn 18 to full blown violent rape (only in the violent rape cases, they plea bargain it down because their case is weak).
Hell, up in Nevada, they had some parents of a 6 year old girl try to sue the district for allowing a 'sexual assault' because a 6 year old boy kissed her on the playground. Shall we put that 6 year old kid on the list too?
I can see where this law could be useful in cases where we know someone has committed a heinous act but the state can't punish him. Maybe the key evidence linking him is inadmissible in court (but still reliable). Maybe the statue of limitations has expired or there are jurisdictional problems. Maybe the victim is unwilling to press charges or has fled. Maybe what the person did is despicable but not criminal, e.g. someone with HIV who knowingly refuses to use protection or inform his/her partners. A criminal conviction is a very high bar. We can't always establish criminal conduct beyond a reasonable doubt even though we know for certain the person has done very bad things. Not saying I think this is the right approach, but it's not as harebrained as many here have suggested.
Strange... I was always taught when I was a kid back in the Stone Age (the 60's, so maybe that shoud be the STONED Age) that the law was set up to protect the innocent, and it's better that 1000 guilty go free than 1 innocent be convicted.
The person who is required to register as a sex offender has NOT been convicted of a crime. However, failure to keep registered will be a crime. People who have NOT been convicted of crimes are NOT criminals. What part of this are you having problems understanding? By being placed on this registry, the person BECOMES a sex criminal, whether they were before the registry or not.
The divorce was in '83. IIRC, statute of limitations in Ohio is 2 years from 'date of discovery'. Which means, basically, I'm SOL on this, and the Bradley Amendment means they can keep coming and coming and coming forever at me.
Slashdot Mirror
Eventually. But I have my doubts if they'll find one denser than a neocon politician...
This training only exists at a Federal level?
These experts only exist on a Federal level? And aren't a lot of our problems due to the tendency of everybody passing the buck up to the next level? If the local politicians are only there to scream, yell, point, and gather attention of the media and point out every single problem you run into to focus responisbility on FEMA, what are they in place for? Where does their responsibility end. Hell, where does their responsibility START??? Local problems need local solutions. What is so inherently difficult in understanding this? Whatever happened to the old fashioned American attitude of self-reliance?
In New Orleans, there wasn't anybody on the ground allowed to take responsibility and/or call the shots until FEMA showed up. Biggest problem is, what happens if your Federal visiting fireman who ride in from the sunset don't know their ass from a hole in the ground?
Nonononononono. You got it a bit off here.
What you really meant was, 'Needs 30 times more funding, taken from useless social programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and Workman's Compensation for better results, and to be put under the Department of Defense for maximum effect'.
I wholeheartedly agree. The Founders knew what they were talking about when they insisted on keeping the Federal government relatively weak and ineffective. They had a severe distrust of centralised power, and with good reason. They'd just won a revolution from a strong centralised government that ran roughshod over their rights. They believed the best solution to any problem was a local solution. FWIW, I tend to agree with them. The best information is on the spot, not X thousand miles away.
What's wrong with the local authorities, the people closest to the 'action' calling the shots? IMNSFBHO, when FEMA showed up, it should have been to check out the site, figure out the damage, and cut the check.
So the answer to a weak central facility is more centralisation? To me, this is a firm argument for decentralisation. Spread the pieces around and some of them will survive a hit. It makes the so-called 'Bad Guys' work harder for the same effect. And I'm all for making the 'Bad Guys' work for a living. Why centralise things and make it easier on them by giving them one big juicy target to hit?
OK, lemme see if I get this right...
I buy a PS3. Hook it to the net. Leave it on 24/7. Your nuke simulating supercomputer comes over the net & scams spare cycles off of me a la SETI@Home.
Did I miss anything?
Yup. Of course, the inconvenient fact that those weapons were used in 1988 (two years before the first Gulf War) is of little consequence. What's a 15 year delay in responding to the attacks between friends?
What I do find interesting is, what with all the satellite surveilance of Iraq since 1990, by the US, the Russians, and anybody else that could lob a satellite, and with almost daily spy plane flights over the No-Fly Zone, and over 1000 UN weapons inspectors on the ground under those same watchful eyes, how could the weapons be 'shuffled around' without anybody catching them? These are the satellites reputed able to detect when you move a rock from one side of your yard to another. And if the resolution is truly only '1 meter', they'll still pick up anything bigger than a briefcase.
I find it curious as hell that Iraq was invaded only after taking delivery of aluminum tubes that were totally useless for doing uranium separation, but were perfect for use as the fuselage of the latest SCUD variant, the one that, if you shot it off just inside the western border of Iraq and it caught a good tailwind, could deliver its payload into Israel. Curious, indeed...
Dood, they understand it alright. What they understand best, though, is that they don't control it. What they want is more control, and they're willing to do the hot button topic of the day for quoteable soundbites on the 11 o'clock news to show that they're 'doing something' about the percieved 'problem'. What they want is control. They get this by playing to their campaign contributors. It wins them elections. Notice how VOIP was suddenly made available as soon as a megacorp figured out a way to make a buck off it and control it?
Think of it. An Internet free of non-government approved 'content', with the 'approved' content neatly packaged in DRM to protect the rights of the media corporations that own the eternal copyright to it, in formats that require you to shell out even more money when the formats change for no good technological reason.
What a great day that will be, eh?
A free press kept the US free. Open access to fax machines helped bring down the Soviet Union. Now our 'leaders' want to turn back the clock as well as crib from the Soviet's playbook.
We're not afraid of terrorists. When the government's spin doctors equate resistance to those ridiculously invasive new initiatives to unAmerican thinking and the people speaking out against them as 'aiding and abetting terrorists', what's a mutha to do?
"I think so, Brain, but where are we going to find a herd of yaks, a box of latex gloves, and a swimming pool filled with vaseline at this time of night?"
I was talking with a Buddhist monk in '77, '78, and he made the observation that we were dropping the wrong stuff on Hanoi. He said we could have won it if we'd dropped Army PX'es, Coca-Cola & Levis on Hanoi instead of bombs. Looking back at it, I think he had something there...
So the solution is an electronic voting machine that pays off if you get lucky? Cool...
No, the problem is, the lesser of two evils is STILL evil. This needs to be fixed. How? I haven't a clue, but I'm willing to listen & brainstorm on any possible fixes...
I actually LIKE the old fashioned paper ballots, btw.
Kerry was Navy, not Marine. And militarily, we were winning the Vietnam War, but the politicians made us give it all back.
After the '04 election, I was in my local 'supermarket' & one of the neighborhood's more notorious idiots was crowing about how 'we sure showed those Commie bastards, didn't we??' I looked at him and said, "You just don't get it, do you?' & walked away.
The sad thing about the whole case was, we may NEVER find out who REALLY did it thanks to the way the LAPD botched the case from Day One of the investigation. Maybe it really was OJ, and he got off due to manufactured evidence. Maybe it wasn't, and the LAPD was so intent on convicting OJ that the real killer got away in the witch hunt's confusion. As far as I know, the LAPD considers this case still open, but again, as far as I know, they're not retracing any of their leads or trying to develope new ones. This case is a cold case, it'll never be resolved.
Personally, I think the judge should have declared a mistrial when he found out about the fabricated evidence, and demanded the LAPD do their jobs according to the rules for once, and let them come back with a new case and real evidence. The LAPD and the LA County DA were just too damned eager to bury OJ because it was such a high profile case that their procedures got sloppy. NOT the kind of thing you want to have happen in a capital murder case.
Good point. The Civil War was when State's Rights started taking it in the ass. Before, a state could legally seceed and go its own way. Mr Lincoln made sure this would never happen.
If the statute of limitations has run out, no civil or criminal charges can be brought. What this law is saying is, 'Somebody accused you of a sex crime, but we can't try and convict you due to the legal system the way it is, so we'll put you on this list and make a REAL criminal out of you if you fail to comply with our extortion'.
Hell, by living in the same neighborhood where meth labs proliferate, one could try to make the case that I'm partially responsible for them being there because I voted against our sheriff. There wouldn't be enough evidence to convict in criminal court, but there would be enough to haul me into civil court. This is the United States. Anybody can sue anybody any time, as long as they do it within the statute of limitations of the incident.
Hell, I could sue YOU because it's Monday. All I gotta do is cough up a l*wy*r that can show how it being Monday hurts me, and they'll show WHY it's YOUR fault in court.
Problem is, this registry is bypassing a trial. No trial, no right to face your accuser in court, no public defender if he can't affor d a l*wy*r, the whole enchilada.
Indecent exposure (includes walking around without a shirt as well as streaking and getting caught in the back seat naked)
Public urination (like, when you've had a few beers, it's 3 AM, & you're too far from home and need to 'find a tree')
The catch-all is 'gross sexual imposition', which can mean anything from kissing a girl against her wishes to commenting about her attire ('Gee, you look HAWT in that string mesh bikini...'), to some kid still making out with their girlfriend/boyfriend AFTER they turn 18 to full blown violent rape (only in the violent rape cases, they plea bargain it down because their case is weak).
Hell, up in Nevada, they had some parents of a 6 year old girl try to sue the district for allowing a 'sexual assault' because a 6 year old boy kissed her on the playground. Shall we put that 6 year old kid on the list too?
Strange... I was always taught when I was a kid back in the Stone Age (the 60's, so maybe that shoud be the STONED Age) that the law was set up to protect the innocent, and it's better that 1000 guilty go free than 1 innocent be convicted.
The person who is required to register as a sex offender has NOT been convicted of a crime. However, failure to keep registered will be a crime. People who have NOT been convicted of crimes are NOT criminals. What part of this are you having problems understanding? By being placed on this registry, the person BECOMES a sex criminal, whether they were before the registry or not.
The divorce was in '83. IIRC, statute of limitations in Ohio is 2 years from 'date of discovery'. Which means, basically, I'm SOL on this, and the Bradley Amendment means they can keep coming and coming and coming forever at me.
Damn!!!!!!!! Looks like I'll have to call the l*wy*rs to get my mufukkin movie check...