I'm a pro-life libertarian non-isolationist, which has meant that I've mostly been a Bush supporter. The basic problem was a peacetime President elected in reaction to Bill Clinton's style and errors, forced to deal with a world gone mad.
Because of Bill Clinton's slick style and personal morality issues, people didn't want someone with a slick style and morality issues. So here was GWB, with the image of a twelve step graduate and simple speaker. He got elected.
Then comes 9/11, and he's totally unprepared, I think. We all were. Like most people, I thought he did very well right after 9/11, with his doctrine that harboring a terrorist is being a terrorist.
But Iraq was really iffy. Was Saddam really the one to attack next? His relationship to 9/11 was tenuous at best, even though he clearly supported and encouraged terrorism and anti-Americanism generally. And everybody thought he had WMD. I was uneasy, but in the year and a half between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, it became more and more reasonable to think he was hiding something. I wondered why we were waiting, giving him time to plan his defenses.
I turned out that his defenses, if he had prepared them, were pretty ineffectual.
But while you can topple a government with air power and 100,000 troops, you can't hold a hostile area the size of California with that. And once we went in, we could not afford to leave without nation-building. The key error of the Iraq war is the repeated mistake of Viet Nam: failure to go all in. I blame Rumsfeld, and Bush's inexperience and penchant for stubborn loyalty.
I'll vote for John McCain, even though I don't like a lot of what he's done, because I don't like anything about Barack Obama except that he's black. But on the Iraq war, John McCain was right all along. He'd been arguing that more troops were needed right from the start, and was one of the early voices for getting rid of Rumsfeld. In retrospect, we'd have been a lot better off with him the last eight years.
(d) Defense.-- A good faith reliance on-- (1) a court warrant or order, a grand jury subpoena, a legislative authorization, or a statutory authorization; (2) a request of an investigative or law enforcement officer under section 2518 (7) of this title; or (3) a good faith determination that section 2511 (3) or 2511 (2)(i) of this title permitted the conduct complained of; is a complete defense against any civil or criminal action brought under this chapter or any other law.
Wow. I don't understand what the fuss is all about. I suspect that people are playing politics and only pretending not to know what's what, demagoguing, in other words.
They want immunity from civil litigation. That's different from criminal prosecution. They don't want to get sued for doing what they think is the right thing.
The other options are for the telecoms never to divulge any information, or only when they think it's justified, or when they think its not an undue burden. Would you like to be in the terrorist protection business? They aren't equipped to judge whether it's justified or not -- that's what the cop/intel/court system is for.
That makes no sense at all, and is contrary to the discussion. The question is whether the companies can be sued. They already have immunity from criminal prosecution, the same as you do when you comply with a police investigation. They cannot be compelled to cooperate; the proposal is that they be held harmless from civil litigation if they do cooperate.
If you cooperate with a police investigation and someone sues you because of it, do you want to pay a lawyer to defend you?
Bandwith is worthless if it can't be used the way you want.
But I have that. I don't use P2P. When I want something, I download it.
The P2P model presupposes an Internet the way it should be: everyone should have multiple bandwidth providers/partners. In fact, almost everyone is a leaf node, and P2P sucks leaf bandwidth dry. Add the mathematics of fan-in, and no sane ISP would allow unfiltered P2P.
A vote in OK carries (marginally) more weight than one in CA, but not that much more. You get more say in which candidate wins Oklahoma, but Oklahoma has less say in who gets to be President by almost the same proportion.
As far as the independent thing goes, you're really in the same boat as the rest of us, pally. We don't like our candidates much either.
First, every state gets at least three votes, even Alaska and Wyoming which have the same populations as some cities.
Second, a bare 50.00001% majority in a State throws all of that State's support to one candidate. Yes, States can choose proportionality, but that would just serve to dilute their importance as a State. So even with only two candidates, in States of about the same size, taking one with 90% can be offset by losing the other by 50.0x%. So taking California by 90% helps you no more than taking it by 51%.
It forces candidates to have geographically diverse support.
You are correct that the Electoral College and not the People elect the President, but your supposition of a conspiratorial safety valve there is exaggerated.
The Electoral College is not a static group of Illuminati holding secret rites in the basement of the Lincoln Memorial. It's just an artifact of the fact that the States elect the President. Each State gets a certain number of Electors, equal to the number of its representation in Congress (House + Senate). As mentioned upthread, States are not required to have a popular vote to decide their Electors; they could decide it in the State Legislature, let the Governor pick, or even draw straws. Now that would be fun.
The system was designed to keep one massively overpopulated region of the country from ruling over the rest. Today it has the effect of keeping the cities from dominating the rural areas.
It's possible, in an asteroid-hits-Earth kind of way, that something substantial could happen in the few days between the general election and the assembly of the Electoral College to make them change their votes. Even then, an immediate impeachment would be more likely than an Electoral College rebellion. It's also within the Constitutional rules for the Electors as a group to abstain from voting or to try their best and fail to elect a President, putting the election in the hands of the House of Representatives.
In a democracy, everything paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open
While I agree with that statement, it implies that in non-democracies things should be something other than open.
But your last paragraph is really bad logic. You say that every scandal in the last 7 years of exposure to incompetence, corruption, or illegality has been decried as giving aid and comfort, which is largely true. That's because exposure of bad things does give aid and comfort to our enemies. The argument for exposing them anyway is that it's worth the price. It is incorrect and self-deluding to claim that there is no price to be paid.
But it is not "obvious" that covering for the people who made the mistakes is the real desire for secrecy, since that lumps all three of your categories together. The real desire for secrecy is in fact to hide our inner workings from our foes. Hiding them from ourselves is just a bad side effect that secrecy proponents are willing to accept, while you are not. And it's not the case that all revelations are met with equal cries of disdain from the Right nor glee from the Left. Lumping them all together is useful for creation of a bogeyman, but it's not an accurate picture.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they don't filter it. They just swish the charcoal around in the bottom of the pot for a while and BAM: "coffee".
But I wonder who did the A/B comparison.
Maybe they just taste-tested the coffee against a cup from Starbucks.
I'm a pro-life libertarian non-isolationist, which has meant that I've mostly been a Bush supporter. The basic problem was a peacetime President elected in reaction to Bill Clinton's style and errors, forced to deal with a world gone mad.
Because of Bill Clinton's slick style and personal morality issues, people didn't want someone with a slick style and morality issues. So here was GWB, with the image of a twelve step graduate and simple speaker. He got elected.
Then comes 9/11, and he's totally unprepared, I think. We all were. Like most people, I thought he did very well right after 9/11, with his doctrine that harboring a terrorist is being a terrorist.
But Iraq was really iffy. Was Saddam really the one to attack next? His relationship to 9/11 was tenuous at best, even though he clearly supported and encouraged terrorism and anti-Americanism generally. And everybody thought he had WMD. I was uneasy, but in the year and a half between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion, it became more and more reasonable to think he was hiding something. I wondered why we were waiting, giving him time to plan his defenses.
I turned out that his defenses, if he had prepared them, were pretty ineffectual.
But while you can topple a government with air power and 100,000 troops, you can't hold a hostile area the size of California with that. And once we went in, we could not afford to leave without nation-building. The key error of the Iraq war is the repeated mistake of Viet Nam: failure to go all in. I blame Rumsfeld, and Bush's inexperience and penchant for stubborn loyalty.
I'll vote for John McCain, even though I don't like a lot of what he's done, because I don't like anything about Barack Obama except that he's black. But on the Iraq war, John McCain was right all along. He'd been arguing that more troops were needed right from the start, and was one of the early voices for getting rid of Rumsfeld. In retrospect, we'd have been a lot better off with him the last eight years.
As this one is still going on and not yet accepted on /. as a hoax, I'll be modded down and pilloried for this.
Just saying.
Aargh, my heart! Pepper, quick: take your clothes off to get my heart going again!
I cry foul on the question, anyway. Isn't all code patched in binary after it's running anyway? I know that's how we do things here at NIST.
To a zombie: Eat Me!
To a loan shark: I'm a little short right now...
To a woman: Yeah, they do make you look a little heavy, why do you ask?
To a lawyer: We have evidence....
All of these have ... consequences.
Don't they have the Internet in Bosnia?
Wow. I don't understand what the fuss is all about. I suspect that people are playing politics and only pretending not to know what's what, demagoguing, in other words.
That, or it's as you say.
They want immunity from civil litigation. That's different from criminal prosecution. They don't want to get sued for doing what they think is the right thing.
The other options are for the telecoms never to divulge any information, or only when they think it's justified, or when they think its not an undue burden. Would you like to be in the terrorist protection business? They aren't equipped to judge whether it's justified or not -- that's what the cop/intel/court system is for.
That's Begging the Question. It's illegal because it's illegal.
Isn't the debate about changing the law? Arguing against making something legal solely because it's illegal seems to me to lack much force.
That makes no sense at all, and is contrary to the discussion. The question is whether the companies can be sued. They already have immunity from criminal prosecution, the same as you do when you comply with a police investigation. They cannot be compelled to cooperate; the proposal is that they be held harmless from civil litigation if they do cooperate. If you cooperate with a police investigation and someone sues you because of it, do you want to pay a lawyer to defend you?
Why is immunity for complying with government requests bad? What possible harm could it do?
Bandwith is worthless if it can't be used the way you want.
But I have that. I don't use P2P. When I want something, I download it.
The P2P model presupposes an Internet the way it should be: everyone should have multiple bandwidth providers/partners. In fact, almost everyone is a leaf node, and P2P sucks leaf bandwidth dry. Add the mathematics of fan-in, and no sane ISP would allow unfiltered P2P.
So they're lowering P2P traffic bandwidth. GOOD. P2P is a cancer.
Show me the locality where that is happening.
Show me the trend to decreased bandwidth.
It looks to me that the trend everywhere, under light regulation, is toward increased bandwidth.
But if you can show me, I'll be happily disabused of that.
Your vote is not useless.
If you and I disagree about something, and we talk and you make your points, then you may not change my mind but you will have been heard.
Voting works that way, too and lets everyone else know that someone thinks the way you do.
A vote in OK carries (marginally) more weight than one in CA, but not that much more. You get more say in which candidate wins Oklahoma, but Oklahoma has less say in who gets to be President by almost the same proportion.
As far as the independent thing goes, you're really in the same boat as the rest of us, pally. We don't like our candidates much either.
Do candidates focus their campaigns on States with lots of votes, making big States matter more, or do small States matter more?
[how does this work]
There are two subtleties you are missing.
First, every state gets at least three votes, even Alaska and Wyoming which have the same populations as some cities.
Second, a bare 50.00001% majority in a State throws all of that State's support to one candidate. Yes, States can choose proportionality, but that would just serve to dilute their importance as a State. So even with only two candidates, in States of about the same size, taking one with 90% can be offset by losing the other by 50.0x%. So taking California by 90% helps you no more than taking it by 51%.
It forces candidates to have geographically diverse support.
You are correct that the Electoral College and not the People elect the President, but your supposition of a conspiratorial safety valve there is exaggerated.
The Electoral College is not a static group of Illuminati holding secret rites in the basement of the Lincoln Memorial. It's just an artifact of the fact that the States elect the President. Each State gets a certain number of Electors, equal to the number of its representation in Congress (House + Senate). As mentioned upthread, States are not required to have a popular vote to decide their Electors; they could decide it in the State Legislature, let the Governor pick, or even draw straws. Now that would be fun.
The system was designed to keep one massively overpopulated region of the country from ruling over the rest. Today it has the effect of keeping the cities from dominating the rural areas.
It's possible, in an asteroid-hits-Earth kind of way, that something substantial could happen in the few days between the general election and the assembly of the Electoral College to make them change their votes. Even then, an immediate impeachment would be more likely than an Electoral College rebellion. It's also within the Constitutional rules for the Electors as a group to abstain from voting or to try their best and fail to elect a President, putting the election in the hands of the House of Representatives.
She might be 13 billion, but she has the body of a 16 billion year old.
Yes, I know. It was lazy use of the word "implies". I should have said "suggests" or something.
But what about government activity (your social security info, criminal history, tax records, etc) which concerns individuals?
In a democracy, everything paid for by taxpayer dollars should be open
While I agree with that statement, it implies that in non-democracies things should be something other than open.
But your last paragraph is really bad logic. You say that every scandal in the last 7 years of exposure to incompetence, corruption, or illegality has been decried as giving aid and comfort, which is largely true. That's because exposure of bad things does give aid and comfort to our enemies. The argument for exposing them anyway is that it's worth the price. It is incorrect and self-deluding to claim that there is no price to be paid.
But it is not "obvious" that covering for the people who made the mistakes is the real desire for secrecy, since that lumps all three of your categories together. The real desire for secrecy is in fact to hide our inner workings from our foes. Hiding them from ourselves is just a bad side effect that secrecy proponents are willing to accept, while you are not. And it's not the case that all revelations are met with equal cries of disdain from the Right nor glee from the Left. Lumping them all together is useful for creation of a bogeyman, but it's not an accurate picture.