I saw the if and I understood it. However, there is no "if." That simply isn't the case, as I was trying to point out. The idea that linux isn't targeted because it isn't as popular is nothing more than a myth, or perhaps wishful thinking.
I don't actually think that's the only reason linux is safer.
Lack of popularity not the "only" reason or even "any" reason. It's a myth. The reason linux is not often a target is because it is a very difficult target. I laid out some of the reasons, others have added others further into the thread, but they all come back to the same thing: linux has been a lot harder to break into than windows has been over a network connection.
The point is that if everyone switches to linux because it is safer, and if the reason it is safer is that it's a smaller target, than the end result will be that the "truth" that linux is safer will end up as a thing of the past.
Your point, however, is wrong. Linux isn't more secure because it is targetted less. It is more secure because it uses a different security model with a whole lot fewer holes in it; *nix in general has been designed to be secure and account for restricting one portion of the system from other portions since very early days. Windows started wide open, and remained wide open for a long time, a lot of system software was written to be wide open, and even more importantly, a lot of system concepts, like activeX, were not designed with security in mind. Consequently, Windows security, such as it is, is an afterthought layer that was added to the original functionality, whereas *nix security, specifically linux security, is built in at the bedrock level.
The fact is, it is a lot more difficult to hack a *nix system by design. Something else to note: A huge proportion of the servers out on the net are linux machines running apache. These machines are powerful (that's why they are servers), the tend to have big pipes (again, they're servers, they need relatively big pipes) they're online all the time (they're servers!) and so they are ideal for a botnet or a spamming system, etc. And so, the majority of spamming systems and botnets are linux machines, right? Because they're common and have the perfect set of capabilities for these tasks? No. Wrong. Most mal-servers are Windows machines. But why? All those many linux machines would be great mal-servers! They are a huge target! Well, the why is simple, and it's just what I said above: It is hard to hack a linux server, even one that isn't that well patched. A linux machine that is properly kept up to date is even harder. Macs are basically the same kind of hard target; they're *nix underneath.
The bottom line is that Windows has the malware because it has been the easy target. Not because it is the common target.
Higher-end products are designed with the sort of considerations you mention, but there isn't generally a consumer market for them, and if it's really that important to you, expect to pay a premium
I wouldn't mind paying a few thousand each for routers that told me what the heck was going on. That's what I was asking; does anyone know of a commercial router that has a decent front panel? I'm particularly interested in an actual measurement of overall throughput upstream, but also link state, rate, and activity on a per line basis. Or once we get anywhere, are we talking about a dedicated computer? I suppose I could drop multiple networking cards into a linux box if I wanted to figure all that out (I don't, really.)
Higher-end products are designed with the sort of considerations you mention, but there isn't generally a consumer market for them, and if it's really that important to you, expect to pay a premium
Are you aware of routers and switches that provide per-line status, transfer rate and speed (10/100/1gb) indications on the front panel? I'd pay quite a bit for devices that provided that level of detail, I think.
I love at-a-glance data. I've got our servers configured so that there is a live graph of network activity with a hard ceiling that matches the line speed for each server. I also have a custom python system that provides text-mode windows that show the most recent web pages hit, obtained by tail from various apache logs. They are blue on white on first hit, then turn to white on black 10 seconds later, then as the hits age, a blue backdrop underneath the white text serves as a bar graph that grows towards the right, one character every ten seconds. It shows page misses as black on red, then red on black...blue. You can look at this and see exactly what is going on at any one time. When a page is hit that is not on the list (usually 3 columns of 23 pagenames) it just replaces the oldest member of the list. The graph, the list and a copy of top running to show only active tasks and refreshing at 1 hz sit on each server; one look, and I can pretty much tell you what's happening. After all, there are essentially 70 graphs on screen, plus the considerable amount of system data top dumps out.
Graphs, lights, lists... the more, the merrier, I say. There's something immensely satisfying in being able to look at a bunch of computers talking to one another and the net, while being able to get a decent handle on how things are going without having to lift a finger.
Biggest problem with computers? NOISE! Until we solve that, forget the stupid blinking lights.
I solved that by switching to Mac minis; snappy little dual core 2 gig ram boxes that don't make a sound. I get to run OSX, linux, and XP all concurrently in any combination (via Parallels), and I don't hear a sound from the system unless I'm playing audio. I've never been as happy with a computer in my entire life, and I've had a lot of computers, starting back with homebuilt systems in the early 1970's. I've got a maxxed out Macbook pro, it's faster and has more ram (3 gigs), but I actually like the minis better. No worries about batteries, hinge wear, or shock damage (because the MBP travels and the minis don't.)
Minis have lots of I/O, a tiny footprint, and a nice balanced set of features like DVD burning, firewire 400 and so forth. At home, I have a mini in my home music studio, one in my HD home entertainment system, one on my sweetheart's desk, and one on my desk. At work, I bought them for everyone; boy that was worth doing... the support load is a fraction of what it used to be. Little suckers just work, and in blessed silence, no one likes noise. They're certainly not for every type of user, some people need more power, and the graphics, while certainly hi-res enough, aren't all that quick. The minis use integrated Intel GMA 950 subsystem, so it's not much of a gaming machine, if that's your interest. Dual displays aren't an option, either. On the other hand, the ability to use multiple desktops makes up for a lot, and you do get a lot of desk back.
Don't buy Apple products and you won't have that problem.
What? None of my Apple stuff has such a problem. Even the minis stack perfectly well, and have accessories like port expanders that stack too. I have an IOGear USB hub and a Belkin USB hub that both do, though.
Lights: Routers don't have enough lights. They need bar graphs that tell me how much of the available bandwidth is being used (and what means that needs to be configurable in the on-board software.) A counter of currently expected reply packets might serve as a metric for "busyness" as well. And we should be able to configure the colors - R, G and B LEDS have been available for some time, lets get to using them.
Industrial design: Too many devices are "designed", looks-wise. What this means is some idiot decided that they should be really small, for starters. What this causes is the device being dragged all over by the cables attached to it, or being unable to sit flat without being glued or rubber-banded to something more substantial. Another "design" goal seems to be to create devices that look like they were squeezed out of an orifice, have only one flat side (the bottom) and as a consequence, won't stack. Another thing is means is that the indicators it does have are on the top or sitting at some weird angle, so you can't read them unless you are hovering over the bloody thing. First, make sure there is a front, and second, put the lights there. Third, make sure there is a back, and fourth, put the connectors there... or make the front double-high and put the connectors on the bottom, and the lights on the top (some devices call for ease of regular access, USB comes to mind here.) But I have routers and switches - for crying out loud - that have the channel status indicators right next to the jacks. You can't see half of them for the forest of cables that comes out of the devices. These would be fine if they were just there to tell you the cable is connected; but they are terrible for looking at the already set-up router and trying to get a sense of which lines are active and/or properly connected, and there are no other indicators to take on that role, so you're forced to dislodge cables to try and read the device status. Just dumb.
Power use: Make the lights switchable, absolutely. That way, you can turn them off, and I can leave them on. I hope to have the whole facility running on solar and wind power by the end of the year, but even if I didn't, those indicators serve a purpose that I am perfectly willing to pay for. An LED indicator isn't a big power user. I'm not going to get too excited about those kinds of drains.
Cable looms: If a device is meant to have a bunch (more than one) of cables plugged into it, it should provide an optional (meaning, you decide to attach and use it or not, but always supplied) cable loom so that you can redirect the cables from the front to the back, or vice-versa, according to your needs. This goes back to the "device is too light" design error; for instance, if you try to re-route 16 or 24 network cables, you're going to drag the device around by the tensions associated with bending all of those cables. If there is a loom, the device itself will keep the tension of the re-route from torquing it around.
More lights. The more something can tell me without requiring me to interact with it, the more time I save. A glance is always faster than calling up a web page and selecting some option.
Wouldn't it have been significantly more civil to either post and respond to said questions, or not post at all?
No.
And to be fair you spent so much time elaborating on unrelated items you masked what the questions even were.
I don't consider them unrelated; consequently, I wouldn't consider such an outlook "fair."
Maybe his tone was rough, but he has valid points.
I'll be happy to respond to any point that is presented in a civil fashion. I won't spend my time encouraging someone to call me names and denigrate my character. As long as the modus operandi is to castigate and invoke ad hominem, I'll choose to spend my time elsewhere.
Right, but the problem is that the NSA didn't realize they needed a warrant until the conversation was intercepted.
I think the core issue here is whether we want the government to obey the constituting authority, or not. If we're going to allow it to disobey, then the life-span and scope of every right, every enumerated power, risks becoming ephemeral as soon as there is a pressure upon the government to accomplish something where those prohibitions and enumerations stand in the way. The motivation for letting the government disobey, no matter how sterling, still forms the basis for a power structure that is governing without hard limits of any kind. Consequently, it is my firm conviction that if an action is forbidden, then that's the end of it — there is no excuse, emergency, or exigency that allows the government to break its own laws. None.
An additional problem is that conversations between overseas enemies and people in the US are potentially more important to intercept, from the NSA's perspective, than a typical conversation between overseas opponents, but that's a different kind of problem.
From my perspective, it doesn't matter how deep the problems pile up, where they come from, or if resolution to them looks like it is a slam-dunk with just a small compromise made with regard to the constitution. In the end, the constitution provides a perfectly effective mechanism for making changes to itself — nearly any change one can imagine — and if there is a problem of sufficient magnitude, then the duty and obligation of the government is to make those needs known, arrange to bring about the appropriate convention, representation and vote-gathering mechanisms, and see if the people also feel that the problem deserves the kind of change the government is advocating. If the people agree, then the change will be made, and the government will no longer be in the position of behaving criminally.
As things stand now, direct and obvious breaches of constitutional prohibitions, usurpation of powers not enumerated, and the making of legislation of explicitly forbidden are all part of day to day government operations. The president himself has been reported to have said of the constitution that it is "just a god-dammed piece of paper", judges even at the supreme court level not only render unconstitutional opinions, they also shirk dealing with constitutional issues using the most transparent excuses imaginable. This is the fruit of making law in any way that seems convenient in order to ameliorate the problems of the day. From where I stand, this fruit is far more bitter than, for instance, having the government say, "we were unable to [fill in the blank] and this has resulted in a poor outcome of [fill in the blank]." Finally, I would like to put forth the idea that just because the government can do something, doesn't mean it should. My parents taught me that when I was very young, and I saw the sense in it more or less immediately (actually, there was a beating involved, but still, timewise, we're not talking about a long sinking-in period; it isn't that difficult a concept.) The US government has yet to learn this lesson. Some might argue that they have, but at some point the lesson was forgotten; I say that regardless, they need to learn or re-learn it now, before things get much further out of hand.
Maybe what's needed is a law that expands the definition of "declaration of war" to include non-state organizations.
Perhaps what is needed is something that can stop the government from declaring war on states that are not actively making war against us or our allies. Terrorists rarely act at the behest of a nation's people or even their governments at large. In this case — the current Iraq invasion — no such link has ever been demonstrated. Again,
The first one is that the rights laid out in amendments 1-10 aren't just rights that have to be respected if you have an American citizen; the sentence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." from the Declaration of Independence is the basis for this position. The key to that kind of thinking is the "among these", implying there are others, and then the follow-up in the constitution that lays out some that seem to be along the same lines. Within this outlook, the bill of rights applies to all people, not to citizens. If that is the case, then you're done - no right to invade anyone's privacy is among the constitutionally enumerated powers, and such action is furthermore forbidden. You need a warrant no matter who is on which end of any such conversation. This seems most honest to me, but I would observe that the DoI does not stand as a constituting authority for the feds or the states, and lacking such standing, I'm afraid this outlook isn't defensible in the legal sense, as much as one might like it to be.
The second argument presumes that the bill of rights (amendments 1-10) applies to US citizens, leaving others either with no rights at all, or at least, not those in the constitution. Nasty, eh? This is the very basis for a government that thinks it can do anything to any foreign national without having to worry about legality. Anyway, in your example, since there is a US citizen on the line in your example, you still need a warrant. If the conversation is between (for example) an Englishman and a Frenchwoman, you would not. This is legally defensible; and it is a very, very ugly way to think.
Are you a politician because you do a good job of not answering any of the questions I actually ask you, or if you do you rephrase them to suit you for some other means. I didn't ask you how you use it, I said DO you use it.
I answered you perfectly plainly. Go back and look at the first word in the post after the quoted question. I said "No."
As for the rest, I decline to tolerate your repeated declarations of disbelief, accusations of lying, and generally abusive tone. Next time, you might try try being civil. Asking simple questions would have gotten you the answers you were seeking. Live and learn. Hopefully.
From the article you quoted,
>>the global cooling hysteria of the 1970s.
This claim is like a Terminator, it just keeps coming back no matter how many times someone posts the bibliography of climate articles from the 1970s.
Here's the root cause of the hysteria, right here. The reason the claim keeps coming back isn't because it was science; it is because of the pot-stirring done by the popular media. Your average person doesn't read scientific journals. They read Newsweek.
Scientists today aren't generally predicting these horrific consequences; they're a lot more likely to snort and laugh and tell you it's entirely overblown. But when you come here, that is, interface with the public, there is post after post explaining how the human race is going to drown, and "we have to do something", and so on and so forth. This is also hysteria, and it is no more scientifically based than the nonsense from the 70's (and yes, absolutely it was nonsense, that's the entire point.) And of course the government uses it as a means to keep the citizens focused on anything but the reaming they're getting from the legislature, along with the other big three scare tactics, terrorism, pedophilia, and immigration. The popular media follows suit, and Joe Average jumps up and down, drools and shakes his fists in response.
As for the rest, I've made several other posts; please see them for more. I'm willing to discuss, but not to discuss the same things in several directions.
Which [mars warming] has diddly squat to do with global warming on Earth
Exactly - it is an isolated system, except it has the sun in common. That's your "diddly." Mars CO2 atmosphere is not a new thing - unlike our current surplus. So you can't attribute the warming to mars CO2 (and of course, that's not what is causing it - the sun is.) Nothing else has changed. That's your "squat." The only varying input is solar energy.
Which [CO2 lead/lag] has diddly squat to do with the fact that CO2 is now forcing the temperature change due, instead of vice versa
It has a great deal to do with it. It means that using historical CO2 increases as flags for impending warming is an intellectually bankrupt technique. The assertion that CO2 is forcing our current very, very minor temperature change may or may not be true to some unknown extent, however, we know that CO2 hasn't done any such thing in the past despite being quite high in post-warming periods, and that, by the way, is one of the factors that implicates the evaporative cycle in ameliorating any effect that CO2 might have.
I have no idea what you are trying to imply by that [evaporative cycle].
I'll outline it for you. The water vapor cycle - rain, evaporation, etc, ad infinitum - works like this. Water at the surface warms. This process creates water vapor. This vapor rises into the upper atmosphere, where it cools, giving up its heat as radiation - whereby a lot of said heat leaves the planet. This water vapor, now considerably cooler, condenses out, falls as rain, and this cycle continues apace. Now - as the surface temperature rises, inevitably, the rate at which the water at the surface warms increases, just as it does when you increase the heat applied to a kettle. This in turn boosts the rate of evaporation, which in turn boosts the rate of cooling, etc. In other words, as the surface warms for any reason, the water vapor cycle increases the amount of cooling. This establishes a negative feedback, countering warming trends.
In point of fact, climate model predictions of things like global temperatures are not at all bad
Those seem like interesting charts. What is the source study? The page doesn't say, and going to the containing directory produces a 404.
My assertion was in predicting climate; not in simply predicting global temperature, by the way. Most climate predictions I have seen have failed miserably at any edge cases, such as in the arctic and with regard to predicting sea level rise, melt in Greenland, and so on.
Correct up until the last sentense(sic). FISA requires a warrant. The oversight process is different and in emergencies, the government can get a warrant in retrospect,
FISA (presently) allows wiretapping first, with up to 48 hours before a warrant has to be applied for. This is ass-backwards. Warrant first, then security violation. That is what the bill of rights allows for. Not the other way around. So the sentence you were concerned with was, and is, 100% correct. FISA is absolutely unconstitutional.
That is bad enough — but they are actually threatening to make it worse.
The Department of Justice's proposed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, section 405, extends the duration of emergency wiretap orders that allow the government to surveil suspects without prior judicial review from 72 hours to one week. Section 410 extends the period of emergency trap and trace orders from 48 hours to one week. The initial position of 48 hours is already completely out of line; broadening it to one week just adds insult (to the constitution and the people) to injury (to the constitution and the people.)
...and if any of the readers of this post think that is bad:
Section 409 of the proposed changes allows the attorney general more leeway to authorize physical searches in the absence of a warrant. It expands the period of time the attorney general has to search a home without judicial approval from three days to a full week. Nice, eh? Search first, warrant later. Un-bloody-constitutional. Period. But wait! There's more! Section 409 allows the attorney general to share information obtained in warrantless searches of your home even when the court later finds that the search was wrongly conducted. How do you like those bananas, folks? Yessir, your government at work, destroying key elements of the bill of rights, and using your tax dollars to do so.
...if the police believe that a crime is imminant(sic), and that getting a warrant may take time that may cost someone his or her life, they can enter premises without such a warrant
And this is also 100% unconstitutional. If (and that is a huge if) such capabilities need be given the constitution can be changed. If our society feels that such changes are worth more than the problems they cause, they will survive as amendments. Otherwise, as now, there is no authority to do any such thing — only power. And I maintain that a serious problem with most US citizens is that they confuse authority with power. The government has very little of the former, and has absconded with far too much of the latter.
The [politically correct] theory is that climate changes on Mars can be explained primarily by small alterations in the planet's orbit and tilt, not by changes in the sun.
Actually, you can read it as specifically saying that without stretching at all. It says, in part:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects
Papers were what they had to communicate with. Mail, diplomatic packets, notes, diaries, etc. Clearly, they were trying to safeguard communications, as well as a person's records, until or unless a warrant was issued for cause. When there is no cause, there will be no search of a person's communications. The mail isn't allowed to be interfered with either, again as a fourth amendment issue, because your papers, in transit, represent your communications and they are still protected. Your words in transit on a wire or a fiber are conceptually the same, and I mean really 1:1, exactly, precisely, 100% the same, as your letter to someone that is sitting in a postal collection box or a carrier's bag. When that letter is at your home it is protected, when it is in transit it is protected, and when it is delivered to the recipient it is protected. Your telephone communications clearly deserve the same protections, and given what the founders knew at the time, there is no question that this is what they were trying to accomplish.
Whether a computer monitoring all phone calls constitutes an illegal search or not is not a given.
Yes. It is. Because the result is the same as the human and machine (tape recorders, etc) acts forbidden in telecommunications law: Your privacy is sundered, your actions in speech that were purportedly private are not, you may very well be held accountable as a direct result of said computer monitoring, and information you did not expect to become public, or intend to become public, or want to become public, or formulate with the notion of public consumption... becomes public. How broadly varies from case to case, but regardless, your privacy is gone. Hyperbole can be interpreted as statements of intent, hypotheticals can become presumed reality, flights of fancy can be perverted into nefarious plans, statements of disgust with public figures can be taken as plots and subversion. It is critical that we know we are speaking for public (or law enforcement, even more so) consumption if that is in fact the case. There are immense consequences that arrive without justification or the knowledge of the persons communicating otherwise.
Now, mind you, I am not saying that the courts - those same courts that think the enumerated and limited power to interfere with interstate commerce means they can interfere with intrastate commerce... those same courts that think the absolute prohibition against ex post facto laws means it is perfectly OK to make ex post facto laws... those same courts that think that the requirement they not infringe upon the right to bear arms means that they can outright forbid you to bear them and that's perfectly OK... those same courts that have trampled the first amendment to the point where people are arrested for "speaking against religion" - would not go right ahead and do this.
However, to any clearheaded human being not a member of the sophist bunch coming out of law school, there is no question that regardless if it is a machine or a person that does the listening and the snitching and the character assassination, your privacy has been violated when said listening is done without the mechanism of a warrant as required by telecommunications law, which, as I mentioned earlier, is based on the fourth amendment and for perfectly obvious reasons. It is still unauthorized, still wrong, and still represents a use of power not enumerated on the one hand, and forbidden on the other.
It is not unreasonable that the courts could say that computerized monitoring of phone calls is not due
Why do you people spread all these misguiding claims about Josephus
I have spread no misguidance whatsoever. Here is the passage in question:
About this time, there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared
The wikipedia article misquotes/mixes languages that line as saying "he was the Christ." You see, Christ, in Hebrew, means "messiah." And you can tell from context this is a title, not a name: It isn't "he was named Christ", it is He was the Messiah. Again, as I pointed out above, Jospehus was a Pharisee, and no Pharisee would have said any such thing, as they held that Emperor Vespasian was the messiah. Now, he might have written, in narrative form, "the Christians considered him the (or their) messiah", but he certainly would not have acclaimed him as the messiah even in speech, and certainly not in writing, as he'd be quite likely to lose his head for so doing.
However... either way, it doesn't affect my conclusions; Jospehus was not a contemporary of Christ, and he cannot serve as contemporaneous evidence of the man's existence. No such records have come to light as yet.
No. It is about a power that was never made available to the federal government in the first place. Warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, period. That includes FISA. FISA represents exactly the same kind of reasoning as the ridiculous topsy-turvey interpretation of the commerce clause. The premise is that wiretapping itself does no harm, completely ignoring the breach of your security. Here is the fourth amendment:
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.
You'll note the order there - it isn't an accident: first they get the warrant, then then they can search, seize and generally violate you security. This is the basis for telecommunications law that outlaws wiretapping in the first place.
FISA is based upon the very peculiar notion that they can first tap, and then ask for a warrant, and if a warrant is not issued, then they just "forget" about the tap and - somehow - everything is just peachy. But clearly, it isn't. Your security and privacy was violated, without a warrant. This of course is entirely aside from the fact that FISA is a rubber-stamp organization; just look at the statistics for warrants granted as opposed to warrants refused. Consider further the fact that I am not allowed to put a tap on your phone line. For any reason. I'm not even allowed to listen to a cell phone conversation you broadcast on an analog mode cell connection or an RF-based portable home phone. This is because it is an invasion of your privacy; and because your security is threatened. It isn't because I didn't get a warrant (I can't, as I am a citizen, not a member of law enforcement) and it isn't because I could get a warrant later, if it seemed like I needed to - I still can't. No, it is simply because your security is guaranteed by the constitution, and it is very clear that such an action would be in violation. But this is exactly what the government does with FISA. They don't bother to get a warrant, they just listen whenever they decide they want to. Clearly, FISA is unconstitutional.
Lastly, all arguments that the constitution is irrelevant here somehow because of "need" are false. If there is a real need, the constitution contains the tools required so that it may be modified such that those needs may be met. No, this is simply an end-run around the intent of the document without having to be inconvenienced by its restrictions. Remember, the constitution is the constituting authority for the federal (and state, with regard to amendments 1-10, as per the 14th) government, and any action that is forbidden on the one hand, or not an enumerated power in the case of the feds, is both unconstitutional and lacking any legitimate authority. Don't confuse power with authority.
People will laugh at this hysteria the same way we laugh at the global cooling hysteria of the 1970s.
You'll note the dead silence at the news that Mars is warming just as fast (or faster), and by just as much, as the Earth is. You'll note that on earth, historically speaking, CO2 rises lag warm periods, not lead them. You'll also note that the evaporative cooling cycle - water vapor, rain, etc . - runs at many times the speed of the CO2 warming cycle and is temperature sensitive so that a warmer environment will make it run even faster. And of course, it is important to observe that the predictions of the climate models have been very, very poor, even completely failing in some regions. And no one can miss the fact that the media pump the idea that GW is anthropocentric without pause.
Here in the USA, it is critically important that the public be kept in the cycle of fuckarosis about terrorists, pedophiles, immgrants, and global warming. It keeps them from realizing their government is 100% in the grip of corporate and wealthy power brokers, that their constitutional rights are being eroded at an ever-faster pace, and that the entire political system is a sham. So don't disturb the rank and file. Shhhh!
We now return you to our normally scheduled, politically correct, hysteria-fest, with special guest, Al Gore.
You mean, found on codex fragments that at the earliest, are from 150 AD (and more likely 250 AD, simply because they are codexes and not scrolls), all part of one book and with no evidence whatsoever that speaks to the origin, or authorship, of those codexes, and further, no evidence of the existence of the central figure in the story, and further, found to contain stories that blithely refer to supernatural events, some of which would have been visible to any writer of the period, such as country-wide darkness during the day, of which there is also no record.
The bible's "reliability" is entirely contained in the concept that the bibles we have today are very, very similar in content to the bible's content at the time it was first constructed. There is no "reliability" in the sense that anything of significance in the stories contained therein has been confirmed by any other source. In fact, the first mention of Christ or Christians occurs well after Christ was supposed to have died, in writings by one Josephus, a Pharisee who wasn't even born until 37 AD. And he is supposed to have said some things that a Pharisee would never have said, to wit, "He [Jesus] was the Messiah." That alone is a huge red flag to indicate that even the Josephus quotes have been tampered with. When we try to find something else as contemporary (if I may misuse the word a bit), we next find Tacitus, born in 55 AD (about 22 years after the crucifixion's purported date), writing in 120 AD, 87 years after the crucifixion, and he basically calls them pests - but his report is also suspected of being tampered with, because there are mistakes that are unreasonable, such as Tacitus referring to Pontius Pilatus as a procurator (unspecified as to what of), when in fact he was a prefect, which is something else entirely.
So that whole "reliability" thing is really just a myth. Not saying there was or wasn't a Jesus; just saying that when people quote either the bible stories or the existence of Jesus himself as a "sure thing", "reliable", or any variation thereof, they're just showing that they are ignorant of the actual situation vis-a-vis actual contemporaneous historical records.
But hey, other than that, yeah, I'm with you 100%. Hubbard was a space opera manufacturer (though to be fair, at the time, so were a lot of other SF authors, including some we hold in high esteem for the very space opera-ness of their output, such as E.E. Doc Smith.) Dianetics, later to deliquesce into Scientology, is an amazing tribute to the vulnerability of the left side of the IQ gaussian on the one hand, and to general gullibility everywhere across the bell on the other.
PT Barnum had part of it right when he said: "You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public"; I like to add, you're not going to go broke overestimating their gullibility, either.
Don't watch it. Read it. Like every movie adaptation that ever came out of hollywood, 99% of the content of the source book was left behind. Never assert a literary opinion based on a movie, because you're not being exposed to the book, you're being exposed to a minor, and probably modified, fraction of it.
Having said that, it's quite a long book, as well written as anything else Hubbard ever did, mildly entertaining in an apocalyptic way, and not so much the basis for scientology as a work that uses scientology as basic principles. Which is about what you'd expect, since scientology came first.
A particular species going extinct is *not* inherently bad. It happens all the time as conditions change across the world. Totally natural. OK, so it is happening a little (ok, a lot) more then usual now. Still isn't inherently bad - even mass extinctions happen on a regular basis, and end up with more highly evolved species in the end.
Ok. So, if your species goes extinct, it's not a bad thing. Right?
Oh, wait... you don't want to die? You want your offspring and family to survive? Well, I have a news-flash for you: The individuals that make up other species that have even moderately similar neural systems want the same things, certainly at the immediate family level. They just can't articulate it. They can, and do, demonstrate it in the care they show for their young. It is a bad thing when a species goes extinct. Start your reasoning with your own family and realize you're just another species, and you'll be able to climb out of that anthropocentric pit you've dug for yourself.
I'm not going to respond when you put words in my mouth.
I didn't put any words in your mouth. Here are your own words:
The goal is to maximize the quality of the life that we have. Expending sensible amounts of effort where it can effectively reduce risks improves our lives. Spending exorbitant amounts of money for small safety gains does not.
That is a statistical argument. Admittedly a very poor one, and one which is ethically bankrupt at every level, but a statistical argument nonetheless. You would hold back spending for N% lives, but spend for N%+X% lives. Your argument directly calls saving tens of thousands of lives a "small gain." There's your N%. You attempted to bring up spending on drinking and driving, with the direct claim that this would save more lives, and there is your N%+X%. Those are your arguments, not mine, so as you manipulate yourself into turning away from an argument you have lost, don't be thinking anyone is fooled into thinking you have a legitimate reason to get all offended. You're simply avoiding your own words, not some manipulative claim of mine.
Outlawing alcohol (and making it stick) would save many more of the ~50,000 lives lost on US highways annually than fences would.
Two things. First, alcohol use combined with driving is already illegal. The penalties, particularly when people are hurt, are severe. It doesn't stop it. Legislation never stops anything, it simply wreaks punishment after the fact. If you want to stop it, you'll need integrated technology that actually prevents drunk driving, and we don't have any such technology. Yet. Secondly, regardless of what legislation w/regard to alcohol would or would not do, this in no way ameliorates the deaths, injuries and losses that are incurred because driving surfaces are not limited access and so represents a strawman argument.
Banning all personally-operated vehicles, and basically applying the same sorts of rules to automobiles and drivers as are applied to commercial airliners and their pilots, complete with detailed accident analyses, black box recorders, etc. would virtually eliminate highway deaths.
Nonsense. It would criminalize a lot of behavior, but as we already know, people will do what they think is most beneficial to them. Laws against murder don't stop murders. Likewise, laws against drinking and driving don't stop that, either. Laws against smoking pot don't stop that. And laws against driving without a license don't stop people from driving without a license. Law is a toothless old dog that arrives after the fact, each and every time. I mug you, then a cop shows up. They didn't stop me. Heck, they probably didn't even catch me. If you want to solve a problem, it requires technology or for the problem to become a non-problem (for instance, drug use and a considerable amount of normal sexual behaviors are entirely artificial problems created by law - if the law goes away, so will the "problems.")
It's not a matter of valuing money over lives, it's a matter of recognizing that there's only so much money available to address safety issues
(cough) Iraq war (cough) trillions of dollars that take lives (cough) drug war (cough) hundreds of billions of dollars that take lives... we can fund highway safety quite well, thank you. The fact that we don't is simply a reflection of society's values, not its resources. You're only fooling yourself if you believe we can't afford to make our roads safe. We can. Easily. We won't do it because the value of abstract lives lost is culturally low as compared to specific lives lost, and that's a fact. Examples? We'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars to save a few astro/cosmo-nauts or a submarine full of trapped sailors, but we won't buy fencing and build pass-throughs to save tens of thousands over time. Don't lecture me about costs. It is cold-hearted cultural short-sightedness we are really talking about here. You want to stop drunk driving? Have the car match the driver using DNA via the steering wheel, and have it test the blood alcohol level against the DNA before it will start, and require the same DNA on the wheel to keep running. If any other non-matching or non-DNA carrying grasp is made of the steering wheel, have the car stop. Pass the cost through to the car owner, or not, as you choose. There - problem actually solved, no law required. And again, the law doesn't solve the problem anyway.
Also, it's instructive to realize that money == lives. I am not saying that money can replace lives, I'm saying that, ultimately, money is just an exchange medium that stands in place of labor, and labor is just a piece of somebody's life.
Sorry, I won't go there. I'm an atheist; this life is all we have, as far as any evidence I have been exposed to can even begin to show. Consequently, losing a life is a tragedy beyond any other. It is the final and irreversible extinguishi
I meant that if the pilots are incapacitated, someone else may need to step in to fly the plane.
Who? The flight crew is all on the control side anyway, door or no door. The stewardess isn't going to fly the plane, neither are most people. In fact, that's what we're trying to prevent. I'm sorry, I just don't buy your argument.
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I saw the if and I understood it. However, there is no "if." That simply isn't the case, as I was trying to point out. The idea that linux isn't targeted because it isn't as popular is nothing more than a myth, or perhaps wishful thinking.
Lack of popularity not the "only" reason or even "any" reason. It's a myth. The reason linux is not often a target is because it is a very difficult target. I laid out some of the reasons, others have added others further into the thread, but they all come back to the same thing: linux has been a lot harder to break into than windows has been over a network connection.
Your point, however, is wrong. Linux isn't more secure because it is targetted less. It is more secure because it uses a different security model with a whole lot fewer holes in it; *nix in general has been designed to be secure and account for restricting one portion of the system from other portions since very early days. Windows started wide open, and remained wide open for a long time, a lot of system software was written to be wide open, and even more importantly, a lot of system concepts, like activeX, were not designed with security in mind. Consequently, Windows security, such as it is, is an afterthought layer that was added to the original functionality, whereas *nix security, specifically linux security, is built in at the bedrock level.
The fact is, it is a lot more difficult to hack a *nix system by design. Something else to note: A huge proportion of the servers out on the net are linux machines running apache. These machines are powerful (that's why they are servers), the tend to have big pipes (again, they're servers, they need relatively big pipes) they're online all the time (they're servers!) and so they are ideal for a botnet or a spamming system, etc. And so, the majority of spamming systems and botnets are linux machines, right? Because they're common and have the perfect set of capabilities for these tasks? No. Wrong. Most mal-servers are Windows machines. But why? All those many linux machines would be great mal-servers! They are a huge target! Well, the why is simple, and it's just what I said above: It is hard to hack a linux server, even one that isn't that well patched. A linux machine that is properly kept up to date is even harder. Macs are basically the same kind of hard target; they're *nix underneath.
The bottom line is that Windows has the malware because it has been the easy target. Not because it is the common target.
I wouldn't mind paying a few thousand each for routers that told me what the heck was going on. That's what I was asking; does anyone know of a commercial router that has a decent front panel? I'm particularly interested in an actual measurement of overall throughput upstream, but also link state, rate, and activity on a per line basis. Or once we get anywhere, are we talking about a dedicated computer? I suppose I could drop multiple networking cards into a linux box if I wanted to figure all that out (I don't, really.)
Are you aware of routers and switches that provide per-line status, transfer rate and speed (10/100/1gb) indications on the front panel? I'd pay quite a bit for devices that provided that level of detail, I think.
I love at-a-glance data. I've got our servers configured so that there is a live graph of network activity with a hard ceiling that matches the line speed for each server. I also have a custom python system that provides text-mode windows that show the most recent web pages hit, obtained by tail from various apache logs. They are blue on white on first hit, then turn to white on black 10 seconds later, then as the hits age, a blue backdrop underneath the white text serves as a bar graph that grows towards the right, one character every ten seconds. It shows page misses as black on red, then red on black...blue. You can look at this and see exactly what is going on at any one time. When a page is hit that is not on the list (usually 3 columns of 23 pagenames) it just replaces the oldest member of the list. The graph, the list and a copy of top running to show only active tasks and refreshing at 1 hz sit on each server; one look, and I can pretty much tell you what's happening. After all, there are essentially 70 graphs on screen, plus the considerable amount of system data top dumps out.
Graphs, lights, lists... the more, the merrier, I say. There's something immensely satisfying in being able to look at a bunch of computers talking to one another and the net, while being able to get a decent handle on how things are going without having to lift a finger.
I solved that by switching to Mac minis; snappy little dual core 2 gig ram boxes that don't make a sound. I get to run OSX, linux, and XP all concurrently in any combination (via Parallels), and I don't hear a sound from the system unless I'm playing audio. I've never been as happy with a computer in my entire life, and I've had a lot of computers, starting back with homebuilt systems in the early 1970's. I've got a maxxed out Macbook pro, it's faster and has more ram (3 gigs), but I actually like the minis better. No worries about batteries, hinge wear, or shock damage (because the MBP travels and the minis don't.)
Minis have lots of I/O, a tiny footprint, and a nice balanced set of features like DVD burning, firewire 400 and so forth. At home, I have a mini in my home music studio, one in my HD home entertainment system, one on my sweetheart's desk, and one on my desk. At work, I bought them for everyone; boy that was worth doing... the support load is a fraction of what it used to be. Little suckers just work, and in blessed silence, no one likes noise. They're certainly not for every type of user, some people need more power, and the graphics, while certainly hi-res enough, aren't all that quick. The minis use integrated Intel GMA 950 subsystem, so it's not much of a gaming machine, if that's your interest. Dual displays aren't an option, either. On the other hand, the ability to use multiple desktops makes up for a lot, and you do get a lot of desk back.
What? None of my Apple stuff has such a problem. Even the minis stack perfectly well, and have accessories like port expanders that stack too. I have an IOGear USB hub and a Belkin USB hub that both do, though.
Lights: Routers don't have enough lights. They need bar graphs that tell me how much of the available bandwidth is being used (and what means that needs to be configurable in the on-board software.) A counter of currently expected reply packets might serve as a metric for "busyness" as well. And we should be able to configure the colors - R, G and B LEDS have been available for some time, lets get to using them.
Industrial design: Too many devices are "designed", looks-wise. What this means is some idiot decided that they should be really small, for starters. What this causes is the device being dragged all over by the cables attached to it, or being unable to sit flat without being glued or rubber-banded to something more substantial. Another "design" goal seems to be to create devices that look like they were squeezed out of an orifice, have only one flat side (the bottom) and as a consequence, won't stack. Another thing is means is that the indicators it does have are on the top or sitting at some weird angle, so you can't read them unless you are hovering over the bloody thing. First, make sure there is a front, and second, put the lights there. Third, make sure there is a back, and fourth, put the connectors there... or make the front double-high and put the connectors on the bottom, and the lights on the top (some devices call for ease of regular access, USB comes to mind here.) But I have routers and switches - for crying out loud - that have the channel status indicators right next to the jacks. You can't see half of them for the forest of cables that comes out of the devices. These would be fine if they were just there to tell you the cable is connected; but they are terrible for looking at the already set-up router and trying to get a sense of which lines are active and/or properly connected, and there are no other indicators to take on that role, so you're forced to dislodge cables to try and read the device status. Just dumb.
Power use: Make the lights switchable, absolutely. That way, you can turn them off, and I can leave them on. I hope to have the whole facility running on solar and wind power by the end of the year, but even if I didn't, those indicators serve a purpose that I am perfectly willing to pay for. An LED indicator isn't a big power user. I'm not going to get too excited about those kinds of drains.
Cable looms: If a device is meant to have a bunch (more than one) of cables plugged into it, it should provide an optional (meaning, you decide to attach and use it or not, but always supplied) cable loom so that you can redirect the cables from the front to the back, or vice-versa, according to your needs. This goes back to the "device is too light" design error; for instance, if you try to re-route 16 or 24 network cables, you're going to drag the device around by the tensions associated with bending all of those cables. If there is a loom, the device itself will keep the tension of the re-route from torquing it around.
More lights. The more something can tell me without requiring me to interact with it, the more time I save. A glance is always faster than calling up a web page and selecting some option.
No.
I don't consider them unrelated; consequently, I wouldn't consider such an outlook "fair."
I'll be happy to respond to any point that is presented in a civil fashion. I won't spend my time encouraging someone to call me names and denigrate my character. As long as the modus operandi is to castigate and invoke ad hominem, I'll choose to spend my time elsewhere.
I think the core issue here is whether we want the government to obey the constituting authority, or not. If we're going to allow it to disobey, then the life-span and scope of every right, every enumerated power, risks becoming ephemeral as soon as there is a pressure upon the government to accomplish something where those prohibitions and enumerations stand in the way. The motivation for letting the government disobey, no matter how sterling, still forms the basis for a power structure that is governing without hard limits of any kind. Consequently, it is my firm conviction that if an action is forbidden, then that's the end of it — there is no excuse, emergency, or exigency that allows the government to break its own laws. None.
From my perspective, it doesn't matter how deep the problems pile up, where they come from, or if resolution to them looks like it is a slam-dunk with just a small compromise made with regard to the constitution. In the end, the constitution provides a perfectly effective mechanism for making changes to itself — nearly any change one can imagine — and if there is a problem of sufficient magnitude, then the duty and obligation of the government is to make those needs known, arrange to bring about the appropriate convention, representation and vote-gathering mechanisms, and see if the people also feel that the problem deserves the kind of change the government is advocating. If the people agree, then the change will be made, and the government will no longer be in the position of behaving criminally.
As things stand now, direct and obvious breaches of constitutional prohibitions, usurpation of powers not enumerated, and the making of legislation of explicitly forbidden are all part of day to day government operations. The president himself has been reported to have said of the constitution that it is "just a god-dammed piece of paper", judges even at the supreme court level not only render unconstitutional opinions, they also shirk dealing with constitutional issues using the most transparent excuses imaginable. This is the fruit of making law in any way that seems convenient in order to ameliorate the problems of the day. From where I stand, this fruit is far more bitter than, for instance, having the government say, "we were unable to [fill in the blank] and this has resulted in a poor outcome of [fill in the blank]." Finally, I would like to put forth the idea that just because the government can do something, doesn't mean it should. My parents taught me that when I was very young, and I saw the sense in it more or less immediately (actually, there was a beating involved, but still, timewise, we're not talking about a long sinking-in period; it isn't that difficult a concept.) The US government has yet to learn this lesson. Some might argue that they have, but at some point the lesson was forgotten; I say that regardless, they need to learn or re-learn it now, before things get much further out of hand.
Perhaps what is needed is something that can stop the government from declaring war on states that are not actively making war against us or our allies. Terrorists rarely act at the behest of a nation's people or even their governments at large. In this case — the current Iraq invasion — no such link has ever been demonstrated. Again,
There are two arguments made for this.
The first one is that the rights laid out in amendments 1-10 aren't just rights that have to be respected if you have an American citizen; the sentence "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." from the Declaration of Independence is the basis for this position. The key to that kind of thinking is the "among these", implying there are others, and then the follow-up in the constitution that lays out some that seem to be along the same lines. Within this outlook, the bill of rights applies to all people, not to citizens. If that is the case, then you're done - no right to invade anyone's privacy is among the constitutionally enumerated powers, and such action is furthermore forbidden. You need a warrant no matter who is on which end of any such conversation. This seems most honest to me, but I would observe that the DoI does not stand as a constituting authority for the feds or the states, and lacking such standing, I'm afraid this outlook isn't defensible in the legal sense, as much as one might like it to be.
The second argument presumes that the bill of rights (amendments 1-10) applies to US citizens, leaving others either with no rights at all, or at least, not those in the constitution. Nasty, eh? This is the very basis for a government that thinks it can do anything to any foreign national without having to worry about legality. Anyway, in your example, since there is a US citizen on the line in your example, you still need a warrant. If the conversation is between (for example) an Englishman and a Frenchwoman, you would not. This is legally defensible; and it is a very, very ugly way to think.
I answered you perfectly plainly. Go back and look at the first word in the post after the quoted question. I said "No."
As for the rest, I decline to tolerate your repeated declarations of disbelief, accusations of lying, and generally abusive tone. Next time, you might try try being civil. Asking simple questions would have gotten you the answers you were seeking. Live and learn. Hopefully.
Here's the root cause of the hysteria, right here. The reason the claim keeps coming back isn't because it was science; it is because of the pot-stirring done by the popular media. Your average person doesn't read scientific journals. They read Newsweek.
Scientists today aren't generally predicting these horrific consequences; they're a lot more likely to snort and laugh and tell you it's entirely overblown. But when you come here, that is, interface with the public, there is post after post explaining how the human race is going to drown, and "we have to do something", and so on and so forth. This is also hysteria, and it is no more scientifically based than the nonsense from the 70's (and yes, absolutely it was nonsense, that's the entire point.) And of course the government uses it as a means to keep the citizens focused on anything but the reaming they're getting from the legislature, along with the other big three scare tactics, terrorism, pedophilia, and immigration. The popular media follows suit, and Joe Average jumps up and down, drools and shakes his fists in response.
As for the rest, I've made several other posts; please see them for more. I'm willing to discuss, but not to discuss the same things in several directions.
Exactly - it is an isolated system, except it has the sun in common. That's your "diddly." Mars CO2 atmosphere is not a new thing - unlike our current surplus. So you can't attribute the warming to mars CO2 (and of course, that's not what is causing it - the sun is.) Nothing else has changed. That's your "squat." The only varying input is solar energy.
It has a great deal to do with it. It means that using historical CO2 increases as flags for impending warming is an intellectually bankrupt technique. The assertion that CO2 is forcing our current very, very minor temperature change may or may not be true to some unknown extent, however, we know that CO2 hasn't done any such thing in the past despite being quite high in post-warming periods, and that, by the way, is one of the factors that implicates the evaporative cycle in ameliorating any effect that CO2 might have.
I'll outline it for you. The water vapor cycle - rain, evaporation, etc, ad infinitum - works like this. Water at the surface warms. This process creates water vapor. This vapor rises into the upper atmosphere, where it cools, giving up its heat as radiation - whereby a lot of said heat leaves the planet. This water vapor, now considerably cooler, condenses out, falls as rain, and this cycle continues apace. Now - as the surface temperature rises, inevitably, the rate at which the water at the surface warms increases, just as it does when you increase the heat applied to a kettle. This in turn boosts the rate of evaporation, which in turn boosts the rate of cooling, etc. In other words, as the surface warms for any reason, the water vapor cycle increases the amount of cooling. This establishes a negative feedback, countering warming trends.
Those seem like interesting charts. What is the source study? The page doesn't say, and going to the containing directory produces a 404.
My assertion was in predicting climate; not in simply predicting global temperature, by the way. Most climate predictions I have seen have failed miserably at any edge cases, such as in the arctic and with regard to predicting sea level rise, melt in Greenland, and so on.
FISA (presently) allows wiretapping first, with up to 48 hours before a warrant has to be applied for. This is ass-backwards. Warrant first, then security violation. That is what the bill of rights allows for. Not the other way around. So the sentence you were concerned with was, and is, 100% correct. FISA is absolutely unconstitutional.
That is bad enough — but they are actually threatening to make it worse.
The Department of Justice's proposed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act amendments, section 405, extends the duration of emergency wiretap orders that allow the government to surveil suspects without prior judicial review from 72 hours to one week. Section 410 extends the period of emergency trap and trace orders from 48 hours to one week. The initial position of 48 hours is already completely out of line; broadening it to one week just adds insult (to the constitution and the people) to injury (to the constitution and the people.)
Section 409 of the proposed changes allows the attorney general more leeway to authorize physical searches in the absence of a warrant. It expands the period of time the attorney general has to search a home without judicial approval from three days to a full week. Nice, eh? Search first, warrant later. Un-bloody-constitutional. Period. But wait! There's more! Section 409 allows the attorney general to share information obtained in warrantless searches of your home even when the court later finds that the search was wrongly conducted. How do you like those bananas, folks? Yessir, your government at work, destroying key elements of the bill of rights, and using your tax dollars to do so.
And this is also 100% unconstitutional. If (and that is a huge if) such capabilities need be given the constitution can be changed. If our society feels that such changes are worth more than the problems they cause, they will survive as amendments. Otherwise, as now, there is no authority to do any such thing — only power. And I maintain that a serious problem with most US citizens is that they confuse authority with power. The government has very little of the former, and has absconded with far too much of the latter.
There. Fixed that for you. No need to thank me.
Actually, you can read it as specifically saying that without stretching at all. It says, in part:
Papers were what they had to communicate with. Mail, diplomatic packets, notes, diaries, etc. Clearly, they were trying to safeguard communications, as well as a person's records, until or unless a warrant was issued for cause. When there is no cause, there will be no search of a person's communications. The mail isn't allowed to be interfered with either, again as a fourth amendment issue, because your papers, in transit, represent your communications and they are still protected. Your words in transit on a wire or a fiber are conceptually the same, and I mean really 1:1, exactly, precisely, 100% the same, as your letter to someone that is sitting in a postal collection box or a carrier's bag. When that letter is at your home it is protected, when it is in transit it is protected, and when it is delivered to the recipient it is protected. Your telephone communications clearly deserve the same protections, and given what the founders knew at the time, there is no question that this is what they were trying to accomplish.
Yes. It is. Because the result is the same as the human and machine (tape recorders, etc) acts forbidden in telecommunications law: Your privacy is sundered, your actions in speech that were purportedly private are not, you may very well be held accountable as a direct result of said computer monitoring, and information you did not expect to become public, or intend to become public, or want to become public, or formulate with the notion of public consumption... becomes public. How broadly varies from case to case, but regardless, your privacy is gone. Hyperbole can be interpreted as statements of intent, hypotheticals can become presumed reality, flights of fancy can be perverted into nefarious plans, statements of disgust with public figures can be taken as plots and subversion. It is critical that we know we are speaking for public (or law enforcement, even more so) consumption if that is in fact the case. There are immense consequences that arrive without justification or the knowledge of the persons communicating otherwise.
Now, mind you, I am not saying that the courts - those same courts that think the enumerated and limited power to interfere with interstate commerce means they can interfere with intrastate commerce... those same courts that think the absolute prohibition against ex post facto laws means it is perfectly OK to make ex post facto laws... those same courts that think that the requirement they not infringe upon the right to bear arms means that they can outright forbid you to bear them and that's perfectly OK... those same courts that have trampled the first amendment to the point where people are arrested for "speaking against religion" - would not go right ahead and do this.
However, to any clearheaded human being not a member of the sophist bunch coming out of law school, there is no question that regardless if it is a machine or a person that does the listening and the snitching and the character assassination, your privacy has been violated when said listening is done without the mechanism of a warrant as required by telecommunications law, which, as I mentioned earlier, is based on the fourth amendment and for perfectly obvious reasons. It is still unauthorized, still wrong, and still represents a use of power not enumerated on the one hand, and forbidden on the other.
I have spread no misguidance whatsoever. Here is the passage in question:
The wikipedia article misquotes/mixes languages that line as saying "he was the Christ." You see, Christ, in Hebrew, means "messiah." And you can tell from context this is a title, not a name: It isn't "he was named Christ", it is He was the Messiah. Again, as I pointed out above, Jospehus was a Pharisee, and no Pharisee would have said any such thing, as they held that Emperor Vespasian was the messiah. Now, he might have written, in narrative form, "the Christians considered him the (or their) messiah", but he certainly would not have acclaimed him as the messiah even in speech, and certainly not in writing, as he'd be quite likely to lose his head for so doing.
However... either way, it doesn't affect my conclusions; Jospehus was not a contemporary of Christ, and he cannot serve as contemporaneous evidence of the man's existence. No such records have come to light as yet.
No. It is about a power that was never made available to the federal government in the first place. Warrantless wiretapping is unconstitutional, period. That includes FISA. FISA represents exactly the same kind of reasoning as the ridiculous topsy-turvey interpretation of the commerce clause. The premise is that wiretapping itself does no harm, completely ignoring the breach of your security. Here is the fourth amendment:
You'll note the order there - it isn't an accident: first they get the warrant, then then they can search, seize and generally violate you security. This is the basis for telecommunications law that outlaws wiretapping in the first place.
FISA is based upon the very peculiar notion that they can first tap, and then ask for a warrant, and if a warrant is not issued, then they just "forget" about the tap and - somehow - everything is just peachy. But clearly, it isn't. Your security and privacy was violated, without a warrant. This of course is entirely aside from the fact that FISA is a rubber-stamp organization; just look at the statistics for warrants granted as opposed to warrants refused. Consider further the fact that I am not allowed to put a tap on your phone line. For any reason. I'm not even allowed to listen to a cell phone conversation you broadcast on an analog mode cell connection or an RF-based portable home phone. This is because it is an invasion of your privacy; and because your security is threatened. It isn't because I didn't get a warrant (I can't, as I am a citizen, not a member of law enforcement) and it isn't because I could get a warrant later, if it seemed like I needed to - I still can't. No, it is simply because your security is guaranteed by the constitution, and it is very clear that such an action would be in violation. But this is exactly what the government does with FISA. They don't bother to get a warrant, they just listen whenever they decide they want to. Clearly, FISA is unconstitutional.
Lastly, all arguments that the constitution is irrelevant here somehow because of "need" are false. If there is a real need, the constitution contains the tools required so that it may be modified such that those needs may be met. No, this is simply an end-run around the intent of the document without having to be inconvenienced by its restrictions. Remember, the constitution is the constituting authority for the federal (and state, with regard to amendments 1-10, as per the 14th) government, and any action that is forbidden on the one hand, or not an enumerated power in the case of the feds, is both unconstitutional and lacking any legitimate authority. Don't confuse power with authority.
You'll note the dead silence at the news that Mars is warming just as fast (or faster), and by just as much, as the Earth is. You'll note that on earth, historically speaking, CO2 rises lag warm periods, not lead them. You'll also note that the evaporative cooling cycle - water vapor, rain, etc . - runs at many times the speed of the CO2 warming cycle and is temperature sensitive so that a warmer environment will make it run even faster. And of course, it is important to observe that the predictions of the climate models have been very, very poor, even completely failing in some regions. And no one can miss the fact that the media pump the idea that GW is anthropocentric without pause.
Here in the USA, it is critically important that the public be kept in the cycle of fuckarosis about terrorists, pedophiles, immgrants, and global warming. It keeps them from realizing their government is 100% in the grip of corporate and wealthy power brokers, that their constitutional rights are being eroded at an ever-faster pace, and that the entire political system is a sham. So don't disturb the rank and file. Shhhh!
We now return you to our normally scheduled, politically correct, hysteria-fest, with special guest, Al Gore.
You mean, found on codex fragments that at the earliest, are from 150 AD (and more likely 250 AD, simply because they are codexes and not scrolls), all part of one book and with no evidence whatsoever that speaks to the origin, or authorship, of those codexes, and further, no evidence of the existence of the central figure in the story, and further, found to contain stories that blithely refer to supernatural events, some of which would have been visible to any writer of the period, such as country-wide darkness during the day, of which there is also no record.
The bible's "reliability" is entirely contained in the concept that the bibles we have today are very, very similar in content to the bible's content at the time it was first constructed. There is no "reliability" in the sense that anything of significance in the stories contained therein has been confirmed by any other source. In fact, the first mention of Christ or Christians occurs well after Christ was supposed to have died, in writings by one Josephus, a Pharisee who wasn't even born until 37 AD. And he is supposed to have said some things that a Pharisee would never have said, to wit, "He [Jesus] was the Messiah." That alone is a huge red flag to indicate that even the Josephus quotes have been tampered with. When we try to find something else as contemporary (if I may misuse the word a bit), we next find Tacitus, born in 55 AD (about 22 years after the crucifixion's purported date), writing in 120 AD, 87 years after the crucifixion, and he basically calls them pests - but his report is also suspected of being tampered with, because there are mistakes that are unreasonable, such as Tacitus referring to Pontius Pilatus as a procurator (unspecified as to what of), when in fact he was a prefect, which is something else entirely.
So that whole "reliability" thing is really just a myth. Not saying there was or wasn't a Jesus; just saying that when people quote either the bible stories or the existence of Jesus himself as a "sure thing", "reliable", or any variation thereof, they're just showing that they are ignorant of the actual situation vis-a-vis actual contemporaneous historical records.
But hey, other than that, yeah, I'm with you 100%. Hubbard was a space opera manufacturer (though to be fair, at the time, so were a lot of other SF authors, including some we hold in high esteem for the very space opera-ness of their output, such as E.E. Doc Smith.) Dianetics, later to deliquesce into Scientology, is an amazing tribute to the vulnerability of the left side of the IQ gaussian on the one hand, and to general gullibility everywhere across the bell on the other.
PT Barnum had part of it right when he said: "You'll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public"; I like to add, you're not going to go broke overestimating their gullibility, either.
Don't watch it. Read it. Like every movie adaptation that ever came out of hollywood, 99% of the content of the source book was left behind. Never assert a literary opinion based on a movie, because you're not being exposed to the book, you're being exposed to a minor, and probably modified, fraction of it.
Having said that, it's quite a long book, as well written as anything else Hubbard ever did, mildly entertaining in an apocalyptic way, and not so much the basis for scientology as a work that uses scientology as basic principles. Which is about what you'd expect, since scientology came first.
Ok. So, if your species goes extinct, it's not a bad thing. Right?
Oh, wait... you don't want to die? You want your offspring and family to survive? Well, I have a news-flash for you: The individuals that make up other species that have even moderately similar neural systems want the same things, certainly at the immediate family level. They just can't articulate it. They can, and do, demonstrate it in the care they show for their young. It is a bad thing when a species goes extinct. Start your reasoning with your own family and realize you're just another species, and you'll be able to climb out of that anthropocentric pit you've dug for yourself.
I didn't put any words in your mouth. Here are your own words:
That is a statistical argument. Admittedly a very poor one, and one which is ethically bankrupt at every level, but a statistical argument nonetheless. You would hold back spending for N% lives, but spend for N%+X% lives. Your argument directly calls saving tens of thousands of lives a "small gain." There's your N%. You attempted to bring up spending on drinking and driving, with the direct claim that this would save more lives, and there is your N%+X%. Those are your arguments, not mine, so as you manipulate yourself into turning away from an argument you have lost, don't be thinking anyone is fooled into thinking you have a legitimate reason to get all offended. You're simply avoiding your own words, not some manipulative claim of mine.
Two things. First, alcohol use combined with driving is already illegal. The penalties, particularly when people are hurt, are severe. It doesn't stop it. Legislation never stops anything, it simply wreaks punishment after the fact. If you want to stop it, you'll need integrated technology that actually prevents drunk driving, and we don't have any such technology. Yet. Secondly, regardless of what legislation w/regard to alcohol would or would not do, this in no way ameliorates the deaths, injuries and losses that are incurred because driving surfaces are not limited access and so represents a strawman argument.
Nonsense. It would criminalize a lot of behavior, but as we already know, people will do what they think is most beneficial to them. Laws against murder don't stop murders. Likewise, laws against drinking and driving don't stop that, either. Laws against smoking pot don't stop that. And laws against driving without a license don't stop people from driving without a license. Law is a toothless old dog that arrives after the fact, each and every time. I mug you, then a cop shows up. They didn't stop me. Heck, they probably didn't even catch me. If you want to solve a problem, it requires technology or for the problem to become a non-problem (for instance, drug use and a considerable amount of normal sexual behaviors are entirely artificial problems created by law - if the law goes away, so will the "problems.")
(cough) Iraq war (cough) trillions of dollars that take lives (cough) drug war (cough) hundreds of billions of dollars that take lives... we can fund highway safety quite well, thank you. The fact that we don't is simply a reflection of society's values, not its resources. You're only fooling yourself if you believe we can't afford to make our roads safe. We can. Easily. We won't do it because the value of abstract lives lost is culturally low as compared to specific lives lost, and that's a fact. Examples? We'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars to save a few astro/cosmo-nauts or a submarine full of trapped sailors, but we won't buy fencing and build pass-throughs to save tens of thousands over time. Don't lecture me about costs. It is cold-hearted cultural short-sightedness we are really talking about here. You want to stop drunk driving? Have the car match the driver using DNA via the steering wheel, and have it test the blood alcohol level against the DNA before it will start, and require the same DNA on the wheel to keep running. If any other non-matching or non-DNA carrying grasp is made of the steering wheel, have the car stop. Pass the cost through to the car owner, or not, as you choose. There - problem actually solved, no law required. And again, the law doesn't solve the problem anyway.
Sorry, I won't go there. I'm an atheist; this life is all we have, as far as any evidence I have been exposed to can even begin to show. Consequently, losing a life is a tragedy beyond any other. It is the final and irreversible extinguishi
Who? The flight crew is all on the control side anyway, door or no door. The stewardess isn't going to fly the plane, neither are most people. In fact, that's what we're trying to prevent. I'm sorry, I just don't buy your argument.