It still doesn't matter, the goal of the moderation is censorship, plain and simple.
No, the goal of moderation is to indicate your opinion of what someone else said. YOU have exactly the same horsepower, in that regard, as every other one of your peers. Don't have mod points? Then be more persuasive in your rhetoric or more illuminating with your facts. For example, you might start using the word "censorship" in keeping with its actual meaning. Once people see that you understand the definition, and may have some credibility, you have a better shot at the primary use of moderation, which is the amplification of what you say.
For example: there are plenty of people who absolutely get hives over some of my opinions, here. I get all sorts of arguments. But I'm almost never modded down, despite certainly going against the grain of most users on this site. When I make a more lucid or useful observation, I frequently get modded up. My take on this is that when someone comes across as specifically whiny, can't seem to grasp what favorite words like "fascist" or "corporation" or "censorship" etc mean, that's when they tend to get modded down. Essentially, people are frequently given the thumbs-down for being poor communicators and/or showing poor critical thinking skills. As it should be.
That's not censorship, it's your peers pointing out where you need some work on your debating skills or an expansion of your perception/perspective. Crying censorship out of context, as you're doing, simply robs meaning from the word, and makes it harder to talk about it when it's really being practiced... say, in China or Iran.
apparently being gay is such a horrible thing to most Slashdotters that accusations of it amount to libel. Sad, really.
Actually, this is more like someone putting up a fake profile for 'freeweed' that says "Hi, my name is Freeweed, and I'm a big fan of Windows ME. Yessir, Win32 is really what does it for me, and I use it all the time. Near children. On weekends, I boot up MS Bob. Will you be my MS Bob?"
interesting how those guys manage to actually create all that IP in the first place, that people enjoy so much they want to add it as a soundtrack. You know, what with them sitting on their ass all day.
Well, technically, someone who manipulates wireframe models at Weta all day is probably, actually, sitting on their ass all day. In front of a very expensive piece of equipment, running fantastically complex and expensive software, on a huge and complex network. And making things... not passing off cut/paste jobs as art. The cut/paste people don't have to persuade investors to feed them and hundreds of other people for a few years while they work on their project, either. Honestly, I think some people are so desparate to make sure that they can avoid subscribing to HBO that they'll feign being total idiots. There's no other explanation for the GP's "thought" process.
What I find even more annoying than my exercising the choice to sell a company the exclusive right to content I create, is the desire of some people to jump in and save me from myself by taking that content and redistributing it as they see fit.
The US imports half of all the oil it uses. Therefore its not a net exporter. Therefore its not in an article about the future of net exports - only those countries with oil to spare are. If they aren't there to export it, you can't buy it.
You're missing the point. The conversation and spin surrounding the graphic, as shown and discussed here, equates it with a supply forecast. It's not.
we'll never get as much oil out of that as you've heard, my friend
I have no specific expectations about that... but I do know that the US sells oil into the wider market (or even, essentially, to itself). That the US production (in dollars) isn't part of the chart is just one of the reasons it comes across as rather pointless.
Oh, I don't know... maybe a different chart that actually shows Iraq's operations back in place sometime between now and 2020, since it's NOT ON THE CHART AT ALL. Or, perhaps something that takes into account the big new puddle they just found in the Gulf of Mexico? Prop. O. Ganda.
Does having a really heavy rack in my datacenter mean that I'm slightly bending light, and thus modifying the "goods" in question? Does that mean that I'm also subject to a value-added tax of some sort? And if I look at my data through rose-colored glasses, then what... do some of the "goods" never get delivered? This is a lot to take in... but server virtualization is looking better every minute: fewer places for that light to actually go. Whew!
So now even the exploration of space has been redefined as a national security issue.
What do you mean "redefined?" It always has been. Did you think that Kennedy's boosting of the program was all about the pure science for the sake of science? That was politics and defense first, scientific frosting on the cake second.
"Exploration" of space may not be a security thing, but use of space sure as hell will continue to be, just as it has been for decades.
I love how this news post is cleverly filed under the "hardware" category =)
Hey, I submitted the article. There wasn't much to it at the time I did (it had just hit the cable news channels), so I found a couple of links, and type up a couple of words... and then I sat their and stared at the list of categories trying to find something suitable. I opted, at the time, for "Security" since it seemed appropriate. Zonk, though, thought "Hardware" was more fun, I guess. I mean, it was a hardware test, I suppose... but only in the context that "having a tantrum" tests the hardware holding together the stroller in which a two year old is having a hissy fit.
Is it just me, or does Taco really need to add some fresh categories? I suppose that would be giving into the reality that many things here are only peripherally nerdly, and we can't have that!
Can a fellow geek do some napkin math on this? I'd sure like to know the kiloton yeild on that puppy!
Listening to some topical experts that appear to have been dragged out of their homes and into the cable news studios on a Sunday night, there appears to be discussion about how NK was hoping to produce a "400 kiloton" yield... which is about 20x Hiroshima, or 10klc (ten thousand libraries of congress).
A White House source is being quoted as saying they think NK got much less of a yield than they were looking for, but that's sounding a little more like spin than truly knowable (and unclassified) fact at this stage.
USGS and other international players are now reporting 4.2 magnitude (Richter scale) tremor at the indicated time of the test. China says they got a 20-minute warning, which they passed along to the US and other western governments.
Looks like it will be a busy day in diplo-land, and a noisy day in pundit-land.
Its not about whether the chinese or japanese did it. Its about whether the commerce dept knows enough to protect itself or not.
It's not really an either/or thing. Yes, that bureau at Commerce needs to get its act together, of course. But it's actually very helpful to understand which spots around the world seem to be the largest sources of invasive nastiness, especially as it relates to economic/industry targets. Totally unscientific: of the many machines and networks I see administratively, the number that seem to be getting extra special Chinese h@x0r attention these days has gone way, way up. And it's getting a lot more sophisticated than it used to be.
Such as the 72-hour retroactive window FISA gives law enforcement to apply for a warrant after the tapping, you mean?
No. As in, you find out from the laptop you got from the guy you caught at 3:00AM that there's something being planned for a ship coming in closer to sunrise. Most intel of that sort, and the trail it provides to the live use of things like disposable Trac phones, is stale later the same day you get it. Less so, of course, if you've got a nice rich database to immediately show the network of recent international calls one corner of which you've just uncovered. But that means pre-fetching and thoroughly indexing that data before you're suddenly worried about which speedboat in a harbor's facilities, fueled up with whose stolen credit card, tied to which student at a school in Munich with a frequently called "uncle" who lives in Baltimore, is the one with the suicide bombers waiting for the tanker. 72 hours is your clean-up time, not your prevention time.
I suspect you don't really know what you're talking about and are just repeating what you think and what you've heard.
You suspect incorrectly.
The most recent "liquid explosives on a plane" threat was halted through good old fashioned British Police work.
Yes. That, and overseas eavesdropping and counter-terrorism intel from people in several other countries, backed up by more communcations monitoring. The arrests, involving UK nationals on their soil, absolutely were best handled in a law enforcement framework... but the people on the other end of the money and explosives training trail, overseas, do not have some nightstick-and-a-whistle Bobby on their tails. Not hardly.
which was that the Law Enforcement approach does a better job of preparing you for the aftermath of stopping a terrorist attack
Even if that were true (which probably depends on a lot of circumstances), that doesn't make it the only thing to do. The aftermath of the death of thousands of people still involves the deaths of thousands of people and a huge economic hit. Prepare for the aftermath, but stop it from happening in the first place, too. You can't stop everything, but the more sophisticated plots, or those that are aimed at, say, damaging a large port facility or releasing some bio-nastiness or radiological stain in a big urban center cannot be about after-the-fact prosecution. In any way that matters, that's always too late.
Don't worry though, in the 1900's, Americans felt the same way about Jews, Poles, Russians, Irish, etc and Americans (for the most part) got over it.
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, we weren't a giant entitlement-system economy. Immigrants came to the U.S. specifically to work their asses off in an environment where that could be very rewarding, or at least for more rewarding than the environment in the Old World. But we didn't have a lot of Poles, or Russians (to use your examples) pushing to have US schools start teaching in Russian or Polish. Or using well-paid activists to lobby for producing government documents in Hebrew or Italian.
This isn't 1900. The landscape isn't still wide open with empty, up-for-grabs farmland or mining opportunities. But, unlike then, climbing over border illegally and giving birth gets your new kid immediate and free health care and education in the U.S. (oh, citizenship, as if that was it was really all about). Comparing the huge movement of people from Central America to the emmigration from Ireland is not really reasonable - in terms of scale or circumstance.
Which ultimately leads us to the problem with Bush's War on Terror: If you don't treat terrorism as a Law Enforcement Problem, you will never be able to convict anyone in a civilian court of law.
Who cares? The whole point of most counter-terrorism efforts is to stop the events from happening in the first place. Law enforcement can never do that (it's called "prior restraint") unless they've got plain-as-day evidence of conspiracy, preparation, etc. Most law enforcement is still aimed at catch-the-perp-afterwards type investigations, with the possible side benefit of catching other associates that may or may not be working on something similar.
But when you're dealing with someone that's planning on driving a handful of truck bombs up to a refinery or shipping port, you have to act. Usually on very, very short notice. Especially when that's happening overseas, the traditional law enforcement channels are completely toothless, or just unworkably slow. Someone willing to do a Cole-style attack on a LNG tanker near a US port isn't a law enforcement problem, they're a military problem. And to the extent that they're coordinating with someone in the US on logistics, cash, or personnel, dealing with them really is a defense issue, just not in the up-against-a-standing-army old-timey sense of it.
Why should there be? The circumstances are the same as they were when the need for it (and capacity to do it) became obvious in the first place. Are you making new arguments against actual search and seizure? Why not? Possibly because your argument doesn't need to change? Unchanging merits don't make something less important over time. Stop signs and traffic lights, despite their interference with my liberty to travel, don't require fresh analysis and debate every day, either.
Bush administration's policies regarding terrorism comes up, we hear all but the exact same thing: We need this
Funny how you're leaving out the fact that the leading figures in the party that bitterly dislikes him also say we need this. At least be honest - it gives you a better shot at being credible.
But what real use is this warrantless surveillance program to fighting terrorists? If you evidence, get a warrant. If you have a shred of something resembling evidence, go to FISA and you have about a 99.8% chance of getting a warrant.
You can't get evidence of what a loose group of people in several countries using a trunk full of disposable cell phones are working on until you assemble data about the network of calls. You get the evidence of these overseas communications by looking for patterns. When you get on-the-ground type intel from other sources, that can sometimes expose a cell phone number (or a collection of them) that in turn provide an anchor to more pattern matching. The only internation calls that are "tapped" are those that actually include such contacts (those, in other countries, known to have such ties). FISA doesn't help you at all when you're dealing with a shifting network of multiple, one-time-use trash phones, VoIP, etc.
If that network of international calls does point to someone here in the US as part of the picture, then the FBI does go and get one of those pretty-easy-to-get warrants, and there you go.
So why don't they just get a warrant under the FISA provision? It's exactly what FISA is supposed to be for, why don't they just use it? Cause they don't want to?
Because the program as currently being worked is designed to take into account the fact that a standard wire tap has about ZERO chance of truly getting a grip on the communications between people using tangled webs of multiple disposable Trac phones, etc. You have to rack up patterns of calls, and then when you get intel (from any number of sources) that suggests that one of the overseas participants in these calls is a bad guy (financier, logistics operator, would-be train/plane bomber, whatever), then you've got the records and the ability to piece some of the communications together. FISA doesn't come close to addressing the fluid nature of the international communications mechanisms that are used to stitch these groups together.
it is also impossible to expect immigrants to throw away their entire identity just for the privilege of living here
You're positing a false dichotemy, there. There's a lot of room in between "coming to America and leaving your entire identity and culture behind" and "coming to America and doing your best to make the local courts practice Sharia law" (as an example... a more mild example might be to change the centuries-long practice of presenting certain government documents and services in a single language and start adjusting the prevailing society around the immigrants, rather than asking the immigrants to adjust (not abandon) their ways around the prevailing society.
One wag mentioned this, in regards to France, these days: it's not that Moroccans want to move to France, it's that they want to move Morrocco to France.
Liberty and Freedom are not for everyone, in that view.
True, they aren't for everyone. They're for the people willing to pay the price of liberty and freedom, and those willing to take the responsibilities (like, say, taxes) that are part of that framework. For example, people who break the law, rather than taking their turn to immigrate, aren't exactly committing themselves to the responsibility side of the equation.
I see that sort of veiled racism all the time
You're confusing frustration over what people do (or don't) with what color they are.
My preference is to eliminate the risk by making sure the artist already has a paying audience when he starts working - just like a barber already has a paying customer when he starts cutting hair.
Let's cut to the chase, here. This is where your vision completely falls apart. How will an artist with a brilliant (but as yet unrealized) creative idea line up paying customers in advance? If he knows he's got something that a wide audience will (when they can actually see it) appreciate enough to buy, how much time would you have her spend not creating the work to run around... what, securing grants? getting politicians to approve some sort of tax-subsidy-for-only-good-artists? You can talk all you want about buying "book futures," but in practical terms, it's uttern nonsense. Commissioned work is for the small (perhaps singular) audience that commissions it.
An author (to stick with our example) is exactly like an entrepeneur spending six months building a new storefront or preparing (and pumping money and time into) some new service or product that will later serve its market. Someone who invests a million dollars in dreaming up, designing, writing, producing, staging, and promoting a stage musical does so knowing that the only way to recoup those costs is to sell at least a million dollars worth of tickets or related stuff (like recordings). You can't get a million dollars worth of revenue out of your opening night, so the gamble is that your reviews will be good enough to ensure a lasting popularity that will drive revenue to the point of earning back the investment. But if the work sucks, then too bad. He loses the investment. The thing is, your model doesn't take into account the front-loading of the work. Yes, the performers are getting paid a salary for that day's performance. But the creator of the work is (or is not) making that money back over time. Maybe he shouldn't! Why are you looking for a way to pay him for something that might not be worth it? If he's willing to take the chance, you should be happy that no one (other than him) had to part with any cash until they find it's worth it. Same with a book or a film.
So, you want to eliminate risk and pay creative people before they create - a perfect recipe for mediocrity, at best. Would you have any provision for taking back the money from a person who, essentially, lied about the quality of what they were going to produce? No? Then that means that whoever, in your model, is paying in advance is risking their investment. So, now the artist isn't risking anything, but the financial backers are. You've just moved the risk away from the artist and off to someone else... but you're also removing the incentive to produce something that may be so good that it exceeds the expectations and rewards the artist enough to give them the ability to work on much better, more complex projects going forward... on their own investment.
What I care about is when someone tells me I can't share or copy certain information because his business model requires that he's the only person who can do that.
But it's so simple! Don't do business with that person. If you're right, and the world really wants patron-powered, or taxpayer-funded, or commissioned-only work from artists that then have no control over how their work is used, then you shouldn't have any problem finding them or the people to pay them. But you also should have no problem walking away from the creative works of people who choose a business model you don't like... since they obviously see the world differently (in a way very opposed to yours: they want influence over the use of their work), you surely wouldn't want to prop up them and their ill-conceived world view by supporting them or their work anyway, right? Why would you want to celebrate (by reading words, or listening to music, or watching images) an artist that you think is acting contrary to your
Let them get paid for their labor at the time they perform it, just like everyone else, and if they want to get paid some more, let them work some more.
So, someone should be paying an author as he types things? Or just when the chapter is finished? Or just when the manuscript is complete? Who will pay that, before anyone has bought a copy, yet? Now, it's a week later, and he hasn't "worked" for days. Just absurd for him to receive money next month as people start to discover and choose to buy his work, right?
How about the family businesses guy, or farmer, that works for months or years to build up something that won't really show its value or its returns until some future (and recurring) date? Would you be happy if all million people that will ever buy an artist's work all bought it, together, the same instant he stopped typing it? Would that suit your authors-are-the-same-as-burger-flippers model? If you're OK with that, then why do you care if the same million people make those purchases over the course of a week? Or a month? Or 25 years? It's his work. He invested the time and effort, and it may or may not pay off. His risk. Most will fail, some will succeed. Your preference is to make the risk (taken by the artist) always a surely losing effort. Nice empty world you're proposing, there.
Just because you aren't creative enough to build something that has lasting appeal and don't understand that symphonies, novels, films and the like can't be cashed in at the end of the day like punching a clock at McDonalds doesn't mean you can't grasp that you're missing something. Because you really, really are.
Slashdot Mirror
It still doesn't matter, the goal of the moderation is censorship, plain and simple.
No, the goal of moderation is to indicate your opinion of what someone else said. YOU have exactly the same horsepower, in that regard, as every other one of your peers. Don't have mod points? Then be more persuasive in your rhetoric or more illuminating with your facts. For example, you might start using the word "censorship" in keeping with its actual meaning. Once people see that you understand the definition, and may have some credibility, you have a better shot at the primary use of moderation, which is the amplification of what you say.
For example: there are plenty of people who absolutely get hives over some of my opinions, here. I get all sorts of arguments. But I'm almost never modded down, despite certainly going against the grain of most users on this site. When I make a more lucid or useful observation, I frequently get modded up. My take on this is that when someone comes across as specifically whiny, can't seem to grasp what favorite words like "fascist" or "corporation" or "censorship" etc mean, that's when they tend to get modded down. Essentially, people are frequently given the thumbs-down for being poor communicators and/or showing poor critical thinking skills. As it should be.
That's not censorship, it's your peers pointing out where you need some work on your debating skills or an expansion of your perception/perspective. Crying censorship out of context, as you're doing, simply robs meaning from the word, and makes it harder to talk about it when it's really being practiced... say, in China or Iran.
apparently being gay is such a horrible thing to most Slashdotters that accusations of it amount to libel. Sad, really.
Actually, this is more like someone putting up a fake profile for 'freeweed' that says "Hi, my name is Freeweed, and I'm a big fan of Windows ME. Yessir, Win32 is really what does it for me, and I use it all the time. Near children. On weekends, I boot up MS Bob. Will you be my MS Bob?"
interesting how those guys manage to actually create all that IP in the first place, that people enjoy so much they want to add it as a soundtrack. You know, what with them sitting on their ass all day.
Well, technically, someone who manipulates wireframe models at Weta all day is probably, actually, sitting on their ass all day. In front of a very expensive piece of equipment, running fantastically complex and expensive software, on a huge and complex network. And making things... not passing off cut/paste jobs as art. The cut/paste people don't have to persuade investors to feed them and hundreds of other people for a few years while they work on their project, either. Honestly, I think some people are so desparate to make sure that they can avoid subscribing to HBO that they'll feign being total idiots. There's no other explanation for the GP's "thought" process.
What I find even more annoying than my exercising the choice to sell a company the exclusive right to content I create, is the desire of some people to jump in and save me from myself by taking that content and redistributing it as they see fit.
Yes.
The US imports half of all the oil it uses. Therefore its not a net exporter. Therefore its not in an article about the future of net exports - only those countries with oil to spare are. If they aren't there to export it, you can't buy it.
You're missing the point. The conversation and spin surrounding the graphic, as shown and discussed here, equates it with a supply forecast. It's not.
we'll never get as much oil out of that as you've heard, my friend
I have no specific expectations about that... but I do know that the US sells oil into the wider market (or even, essentially, to itself). That the US production (in dollars) isn't part of the chart is just one of the reasons it comes across as rather pointless.
What could possibly be more credible than that?
Oh, I don't know... maybe a different chart that actually shows Iraq's operations back in place sometime between now and 2020, since it's NOT ON THE CHART AT ALL. Or, perhaps something that takes into account the big new puddle they just found in the Gulf of Mexico? Prop. O. Ganda.
I'm sorry, what did you say? I started daydreaming after you said "really heavy rack."
Like I said, "value added." But, no extra charge, today.
Does having a really heavy rack in my datacenter mean that I'm slightly bending light, and thus modifying the "goods" in question? Does that mean that I'm also subject to a value-added tax of some sort? And if I look at my data through rose-colored glasses, then what... do some of the "goods" never get delivered? This is a lot to take in... but server virtualization is looking better every minute: fewer places for that light to actually go. Whew!
So now even the exploration of space has been redefined as a national security issue.
What do you mean "redefined?" It always has been. Did you think that Kennedy's boosting of the program was all about the pure science for the sake of science? That was politics and defense first, scientific frosting on the cake second.
"Exploration" of space may not be a security thing, but use of space sure as hell will continue to be, just as it has been for decades.
I love how this news post is cleverly filed under the "hardware" category =)
Hey, I submitted the article. There wasn't much to it at the time I did (it had just hit the cable news channels), so I found a couple of links, and type up a couple of words... and then I sat their and stared at the list of categories trying to find something suitable. I opted, at the time, for "Security" since it seemed appropriate. Zonk, though, thought "Hardware" was more fun, I guess. I mean, it was a hardware test, I suppose... but only in the context that "having a tantrum" tests the hardware holding together the stroller in which a two year old is having a hissy fit.
Is it just me, or does Taco really need to add some fresh categories? I suppose that would be giving into the reality that many things here are only peripherally nerdly, and we can't have that!
Can a fellow geek do some napkin math on this? I'd sure like to know the kiloton yeild on that puppy!
Listening to some topical experts that appear to have been dragged out of their homes and into the cable news studios on a Sunday night, there appears to be discussion about how NK was hoping to produce a "400 kiloton" yield... which is about 20x Hiroshima, or 10klc (ten thousand libraries of congress).
A White House source is being quoted as saying they think NK got much less of a yield than they were looking for, but that's sounding a little more like spin than truly knowable (and unclassified) fact at this stage.
USGS and other international players are now reporting 4.2 magnitude (Richter scale) tremor at the indicated time of the test. China says they got a 20-minute warning, which they passed along to the US and other western governments.
Looks like it will be a busy day in diplo-land, and a noisy day in pundit-land.
Its not about whether the chinese or japanese did it. Its about whether the commerce dept knows enough to protect itself or not.
It's not really an either/or thing. Yes, that bureau at Commerce needs to get its act together, of course. But it's actually very helpful to understand which spots around the world seem to be the largest sources of invasive nastiness, especially as it relates to economic/industry targets. Totally unscientific: of the many machines and networks I see administratively, the number that seem to be getting extra special Chinese h@x0r attention these days has gone way, way up. And it's getting a lot more sophisticated than it used to be.
Such as the 72-hour retroactive window FISA gives law enforcement to apply for a warrant after the tapping, you mean?
No. As in, you find out from the laptop you got from the guy you caught at 3:00AM that there's something being planned for a ship coming in closer to sunrise. Most intel of that sort, and the trail it provides to the live use of things like disposable Trac phones, is stale later the same day you get it. Less so, of course, if you've got a nice rich database to immediately show the network of recent international calls one corner of which you've just uncovered. But that means pre-fetching and thoroughly indexing that data before you're suddenly worried about which speedboat in a harbor's facilities, fueled up with whose stolen credit card, tied to which student at a school in Munich with a frequently called "uncle" who lives in Baltimore, is the one with the suicide bombers waiting for the tanker. 72 hours is your clean-up time, not your prevention time.
I suspect you don't really know what you're talking about and are just repeating what you think and what you've heard.
You suspect incorrectly.
The most recent "liquid explosives on a plane" threat was halted through good old fashioned British Police work.
Yes. That, and overseas eavesdropping and counter-terrorism intel from people in several other countries, backed up by more communcations monitoring. The arrests, involving UK nationals on their soil, absolutely were best handled in a law enforcement framework... but the people on the other end of the money and explosives training trail, overseas, do not have some nightstick-and-a-whistle Bobby on their tails. Not hardly.
which was that the Law Enforcement approach does a better job of preparing you for the aftermath of stopping a terrorist attack
Even if that were true (which probably depends on a lot of circumstances), that doesn't make it the only thing to do. The aftermath of the death of thousands of people still involves the deaths of thousands of people and a huge economic hit. Prepare for the aftermath, but stop it from happening in the first place, too. You can't stop everything, but the more sophisticated plots, or those that are aimed at, say, damaging a large port facility or releasing some bio-nastiness or radiological stain in a big urban center cannot be about after-the-fact prosecution. In any way that matters, that's always too late.
Don't worry though, in the 1900's, Americans felt the same way about Jews, Poles, Russians, Irish, etc and Americans (for the most part) got over it.
In the late 1800's and early 1900's, we weren't a giant entitlement-system economy. Immigrants came to the U.S. specifically to work their asses off in an environment where that could be very rewarding, or at least for more rewarding than the environment in the Old World. But we didn't have a lot of Poles, or Russians (to use your examples) pushing to have US schools start teaching in Russian or Polish. Or using well-paid activists to lobby for producing government documents in Hebrew or Italian.
This isn't 1900. The landscape isn't still wide open with empty, up-for-grabs farmland or mining opportunities. But, unlike then, climbing over border illegally and giving birth gets your new kid immediate and free health care and education in the U.S. (oh, citizenship, as if that was it was really all about). Comparing the huge movement of people from Central America to the emmigration from Ireland is not really reasonable - in terms of scale or circumstance.
Which ultimately leads us to the problem with Bush's War on Terror: If you don't treat terrorism as a Law Enforcement Problem, you will never be able to convict anyone in a civilian court of law.
Who cares? The whole point of most counter-terrorism efforts is to stop the events from happening in the first place. Law enforcement can never do that (it's called "prior restraint") unless they've got plain-as-day evidence of conspiracy, preparation, etc. Most law enforcement is still aimed at catch-the-perp-afterwards type investigations, with the possible side benefit of catching other associates that may or may not be working on something similar.
But when you're dealing with someone that's planning on driving a handful of truck bombs up to a refinery or shipping port, you have to act. Usually on very, very short notice. Especially when that's happening overseas, the traditional law enforcement channels are completely toothless, or just unworkably slow. Someone willing to do a Cole-style attack on a LNG tanker near a US port isn't a law enforcement problem, they're a military problem. And to the extent that they're coordinating with someone in the US on logistics, cash, or personnel, dealing with them really is a defense issue, just not in the up-against-a-standing-army old-timey sense of it.
no new arguments are being put forward
Why should there be? The circumstances are the same as they were when the need for it (and capacity to do it) became obvious in the first place. Are you making new arguments against actual search and seizure? Why not? Possibly because your argument doesn't need to change? Unchanging merits don't make something less important over time. Stop signs and traffic lights, despite their interference with my liberty to travel, don't require fresh analysis and debate every day, either.
Bush administration's policies regarding terrorism comes up, we hear all but the exact same thing: We need this
Funny how you're leaving out the fact that the leading figures in the party that bitterly dislikes him also say we need this. At least be honest - it gives you a better shot at being credible.
But what real use is this warrantless surveillance program to fighting terrorists? If you evidence, get a warrant. If you have a shred of something resembling evidence, go to FISA and you have about a 99.8% chance of getting a warrant.
You can't get evidence of what a loose group of people in several countries using a trunk full of disposable cell phones are working on until you assemble data about the network of calls. You get the evidence of these overseas communications by looking for patterns. When you get on-the-ground type intel from other sources, that can sometimes expose a cell phone number (or a collection of them) that in turn provide an anchor to more pattern matching. The only internation calls that are "tapped" are those that actually include such contacts (those, in other countries, known to have such ties). FISA doesn't help you at all when you're dealing with a shifting network of multiple, one-time-use trash phones, VoIP, etc.
If that network of international calls does point to someone here in the US as part of the picture, then the FBI does go and get one of those pretty-easy-to-get warrants, and there you go.
So why don't they just get a warrant under the FISA provision? It's exactly what FISA is supposed to be for, why don't they just use it? Cause they don't want to?
Because the program as currently being worked is designed to take into account the fact that a standard wire tap has about ZERO chance of truly getting a grip on the communications between people using tangled webs of multiple disposable Trac phones, etc. You have to rack up patterns of calls, and then when you get intel (from any number of sources) that suggests that one of the overseas participants in these calls is a bad guy (financier, logistics operator, would-be train/plane bomber, whatever), then you've got the records and the ability to piece some of the communications together. FISA doesn't come close to addressing the fluid nature of the international communications mechanisms that are used to stitch these groups together.
it is also impossible to expect immigrants to throw away their entire identity just for the privilege of living here
You're positing a false dichotemy, there. There's a lot of room in between "coming to America and leaving your entire identity and culture behind" and "coming to America and doing your best to make the local courts practice Sharia law" (as an example... a more mild example might be to change the centuries-long practice of presenting certain government documents and services in a single language and start adjusting the prevailing society around the immigrants, rather than asking the immigrants to adjust (not abandon) their ways around the prevailing society.
One wag mentioned this, in regards to France, these days: it's not that Moroccans want to move to France, it's that they want to move Morrocco to France.
Liberty and Freedom are not for everyone, in that view.
True, they aren't for everyone. They're for the people willing to pay the price of liberty and freedom, and those willing to take the responsibilities (like, say, taxes) that are part of that framework. For example, people who break the law, rather than taking their turn to immigrate, aren't exactly committing themselves to the responsibility side of the equation.
I see that sort of veiled racism all the time
You're confusing frustration over what people do (or don't) with what color they are.
My preference is to eliminate the risk by making sure the artist already has a paying audience when he starts working - just like a barber already has a paying customer when he starts cutting hair.
... what, securing grants? getting politicians to approve some sort of tax-subsidy-for-only-good-artists? You can talk all you want about buying "book futures," but in practical terms, it's uttern nonsense. Commissioned work is for the small (perhaps singular) audience that commissions it.
Let's cut to the chase, here. This is where your vision completely falls apart. How will an artist with a brilliant (but as yet unrealized) creative idea line up paying customers in advance? If he knows he's got something that a wide audience will (when they can actually see it) appreciate enough to buy, how much time would you have her spend not creating the work to run around
An author (to stick with our example) is exactly like an entrepeneur spending six months building a new storefront or preparing (and pumping money and time into) some new service or product that will later serve its market. Someone who invests a million dollars in dreaming up, designing, writing, producing, staging, and promoting a stage musical does so knowing that the only way to recoup those costs is to sell at least a million dollars worth of tickets or related stuff (like recordings). You can't get a million dollars worth of revenue out of your opening night, so the gamble is that your reviews will be good enough to ensure a lasting popularity that will drive revenue to the point of earning back the investment. But if the work sucks, then too bad. He loses the investment. The thing is, your model doesn't take into account the front-loading of the work. Yes, the performers are getting paid a salary for that day's performance. But the creator of the work is (or is not) making that money back over time. Maybe he shouldn't! Why are you looking for a way to pay him for something that might not be worth it? If he's willing to take the chance, you should be happy that no one (other than him) had to part with any cash until they find it's worth it. Same with a book or a film.
So, you want to eliminate risk and pay creative people before they create - a perfect recipe for mediocrity, at best. Would you have any provision for taking back the money from a person who, essentially, lied about the quality of what they were going to produce? No? Then that means that whoever, in your model, is paying in advance is risking their investment. So, now the artist isn't risking anything, but the financial backers are. You've just moved the risk away from the artist and off to someone else... but you're also removing the incentive to produce something that may be so good that it exceeds the expectations and rewards the artist enough to give them the ability to work on much better, more complex projects going forward... on their own investment.
What I care about is when someone tells me I can't share or copy certain information because his business model requires that he's the only person who can do that.
But it's so simple! Don't do business with that person. If you're right, and the world really wants patron-powered, or taxpayer-funded, or commissioned-only work from artists that then have no control over how their work is used, then you shouldn't have any problem finding them or the people to pay them. But you also should have no problem walking away from the creative works of people who choose a business model you don't like... since they obviously see the world differently (in a way very opposed to yours: they want influence over the use of their work), you surely wouldn't want to prop up them and their ill-conceived world view by supporting them or their work anyway, right? Why would you want to celebrate (by reading words, or listening to music, or watching images) an artist that you think is acting contrary to your
Let them get paid for their labor at the time they perform it, just like everyone else, and if they want to get paid some more, let them work some more.
So, someone should be paying an author as he types things? Or just when the chapter is finished? Or just when the manuscript is complete? Who will pay that, before anyone has bought a copy, yet? Now, it's a week later, and he hasn't "worked" for days. Just absurd for him to receive money next month as people start to discover and choose to buy his work, right?
How about the family businesses guy, or farmer, that works for months or years to build up something that won't really show its value or its returns until some future (and recurring) date? Would you be happy if all million people that will ever buy an artist's work all bought it, together, the same instant he stopped typing it? Would that suit your authors-are-the-same-as-burger-flippers model? If you're OK with that, then why do you care if the same million people make those purchases over the course of a week? Or a month? Or 25 years? It's his work. He invested the time and effort, and it may or may not pay off. His risk. Most will fail, some will succeed. Your preference is to make the risk (taken by the artist) always a surely losing effort. Nice empty world you're proposing, there.
Just because you aren't creative enough to build something that has lasting appeal and don't understand that symphonies, novels, films and the like can't be cashed in at the end of the day like punching a clock at McDonalds doesn't mean you can't grasp that you're missing something. Because you really, really are.
Wow. You're like the Valkyrie o' Reason or something. That was fun (and, of course, dead on).