Not that a power failure should ever happen in a datacentre anyway
Right, it shouldn't. The last (and only) time I've experienced that was at a first-class data center that had multiple feeders coming into the building, double-redundant generators and UPSes... and of course, still one mechanism at the bitter end of the system that actually cut the power over to our racks. There can be only one thing that actually, physically delivers power to a circuit on your rack. Guess what failed? The one thing that, failing, couldn't by definition be redundant.
Yes, you can deal with it at the rack by getting power in from multiple circuits and then with any luck your servers can take in power from those separate circuits... but not ever device is rigged that way. A hub, or a typical router, is only going to be looking for AC from one source... and yes, you can buy your own hardware to put in the rack, and cut back and forth between multiple incoming circuits, but that's what you expect the data center people to do for, and even the big ones sometimes screw up. It happens, and it's happened to me. And it really, really sucked. I didn't mind doing the database recoveries and poking at dozens of servers... but I did mind all of the phone calls and e-mails to irate end users.
Oh - yes, we could have the entire thing mirrored elsewhere, and pay for enormous pipes to keep all that content synched up... but that's just not feasible on some margins/budgets, so you take some chances. I've lost about 6 hours of downtime in 9 years because of that problem, so it's not a bad gamble.
Assuming intelligence is the ability to extrapolate from facts to deduce the future
That's not necessarily a good assumption. But, taking that as a premise: machine intelligence should be able to be intelligent - in that fashion - with much greater speed that you or I. That whole "extrapolate from facts" thing sort of hinges on having the facts, and on being able to correlate the countless fact-ish things that add up to an extrapolatable "fact." How about AI used to manage bridges and traffic in large city? The "facts" of how many cars are on the road, what they're doing, and what the countless other variables are (and how they're trending) would be impossible for person or team of people to digest and act upon in any useful way. I can certainly see machines being able to take in more information, sort for the facts (that matter) and more rapidly arrive at more contextually-useful decisions/work.
If that's your definition of intelligence, then I see the limit being way, way out there... because the facts that can drive decisions come at higher and higher resolutions. And you've also got larger strategic-level decisions that can be made with a much larger instantaneous perception of the facts than a human could manage. More AI horsepower, and that much more can figure into every decision. Given the size of the universe, a near-term cap on how much might be considered by increasingly advanced systems doesn't seem like a real long-term limit, per se.
where one person sees something really interesting and it gets passed on and on
That closed-loop, forward-to-your-friends behavior is already an echo chamber ringing loudly with nonsensical, tin-foil lined inanities (across the idealogical spectrum) and apocryphal pablum. We already see enough "I don't usually forward this sort of thing, but this is really spooky!" crap from people that we still pretend are our friends.
Political-camp-driven psuedo-factoid-chain-letter type behavior is going to continue to amplify the already tunnel-vision madness that typifies the current election cycle for people in both parties. None of it persuades anyone to change their mind about anything because the simple act of receiving it in your inbox subjects it to already well-armored biases (well founded or otherwise) that result in the same instantly applied judgement that's used to throw out V1@gr4 spam. This sort of stuff may help a candidate keep her already-loyal base stoked up, but is there any question about those votes anyway?
The entire notion of a ballot, with a very limited number of people to choose from, was created by nearly ancient corrupt, cheating polititians, who after winning the cheating contest that we call elections, made new laws to ensure that they and their team could stay in office and accept large quantities of money in the form of bribes.
So... you'd rather we didn't have some way of narrowing down national elections, and insteady just had a giant free-for-all where the guy with the most votes wins, but is elected by only a few percent of the voters? It's divisive enough when only something like half of the voters weigh on towards a winning candidate - but when you have a party in power that only got, say, 10% of the vote, they're essentially unable to get anything done.
As for "bribery"... do you have a conteporary example of politician becoming personally wealthy in direct exchange for particular voting in a certain way, etc? I can certainly point to politicians from both main political camps who are in, or are headed to jail for that sort of thing. And people who have spent years as, say, president are pretty much guaranteed to make a killing afterwards as authors, public speakers, and consultants... but I think you're confusing the flow of cash into party campaign coffers with the flow of cash into individuals' pockets. These people live under a microscope that none of us could tolerate. Doesn't mean I like most of them as humans, and I sure wouldn't want to have to live under that scrutiby myself - but frankly, I think you're skewing a little towards the tinfoil, here.
Which means, what to you, exactly, in terms of my response to another person's comment about a founder of Greenpeace lately speaking out in favor of using more nuclear power? I made the factual response that he has been roundly condemned by other Greenpeace members, and I made the thoughtful, considered, and informed observation that many of the no-nukes crowd have more political things in common than they have any sort of shared science-based perspective that actually brings about their positions.
There are many, many problems with nuclear power
Yes, there can be. And there are many, many (and arguably far worse) problems with the unrelenting burning of coal and other fossil fuels. And since the use of wind and solar energy isn't likely to even come close to addressesing the rapidly exanding global energy demand, and fusion-based power is decades away (if ever), that leaves us with the one thing that the person in question has now found himself supporting. And for that, he is villified - and I think, irrationally so. Hence my comment, which is neither "neo-con" nor "hand-waving" in nature.
Nah, now they are forced to suicide like Turkey makes its females that violate honor.
Really? Girls that go to school in Afghanistan are forced to kill themselves? Or the mothers that take them there are? Please kindly supply a link to that effect. Maybe you'll find that sort of information here, or here, or here, or here. That last one documents the yearly doubling of girls attending school there. You can just cut to the chase by linking to an article showing that the rate of those girls' mothers being forced to kill themselves has also doubled. Or you can just STFU and grind your "Afghanistan was better under the Taliban, and Mullah Omar just needed a little more time to really show some progress" axe in some other way.
Oh, that still happens, just not in the major cities. Town/Village centers suffice if there is a lack of a soccer field. Also they don't send out invitations or make public announcements. Smaller crowds but the end result is pretty much the same.
No, it's not the same. Yes, Afghanistan has long been a fractured place with a wide range of local cultural pockets ranging from Cool to Insane. But the Taliban moved in and said, "Now there's a central authority here, and a dominant theocratic culture that we will enforce at the point of a gun, and one feature of that culture, country-wide, is: women who try to get a job (even if we've killed her husband), or who teach daughters to read will be put to death."
Of course it's horrid that there are spots in that country where that same attitude still exists. But the difference is that now there is no longer a "government" that directly embraces and celebrates that medieval nonsense by actually having government employees who run around and do that evil crap. It will be at least a generation before it becomes culturally embarassing, for more like a majority of Afghanis, to have that stuff happening in their more rural areas. But the difference is crucial: before, it was the law of land, and now it's not.
Just like it took a while before some people in the deep south of the US stopped openly lynching blacks (and getting a nudge-nudge-wink-wink from the local law enforcement). Now, such a think is loudly, and instantly condemned from every meaningful corner of the culture, and perpetrators of such crimes get what they deserve. The Taliban was still running the courts and what passes for law enforcement in Afghanistan just five years ago. This stuff takes a little while - but to suggest that there's no difference between the two conditions is absurd. Both in philosophical and practical terms.
I call bullshit. Do you think the situation for women has gotten much better now that Afganistan is free from the Taliban?
If by "better" you mean "women are no longer dragged out into what used to be a soccer field in front of a crowd at lunchtime and shot in the head for daring to teach their daughters to read," then... yes, better.
Nope, the courts could just dismiss any case brought up.
Which is a form of "weighing in" on whatever is presented to them.
The juries could decide "Not guilty".
Not usually an issue in Constitutional matters, and even in civil cases, jury decisions that seem to clearly be an attempt to legislate (rather than to evaluate the issue on the terms the judge instructs them to think about - something sometimes called "jury nullification") can and frequently are appealed to a higher court.
This idea that the judicial branch is not allowed to oversee and check the powers of the legislative and executive branch is at best insane, at worst treasonous.
You can't talk about it terms of the "idea" of it, because that's not specific enough to be useful. The judiciary (not to be confused with the DoJ, which isn't the same thing at all) does not "check the authority of" anyone. They merely compare actions to legislation to see if they line up, or (when asked, of course - not on their own), compare actions/legislation to the Constitution to see where it falls. The Judiciary cannot, for example, decide that a particular president shouldn't have control over the intelligence agencies in the executive branch - since those agencies are part of that branch, and constitutionally, that office is entirely in charge of what those agencies do.
Now, should a president's people be able to request and receive FBI dossiers on hundreds of political opponents, and have them delivered to the White House for review by campaign strategists? Probably not (and, ethically, certainly not), but that didn't stop Clinton's folks from having 800 such files delivered to them. Didn't really hear much screaming about that one, huh? It's not because it wasn't slimy (it was), but because it's actually a little hard to nail down exactly whether or how the CinC should or shouldn't be prevented from reviewing information that's collected by DoJ (like security reviews of Republican political opponents).
The point is that the constitutional role of the judicial branch is to play referee when other parties (the other branches, or citizens, organizations of citizens, etc) seek clarification on the actions of those other branches (or of lower courts) as it relates to the constitution or the constitutionally-reviewed legislation already in place.
If the house and senate, for example, were to pass some bit of nonsense about flag burning being illegal, the courts can't just stand up and "check" that behavior. Someone else has to make the case that it's a first amendment issue, and then the courts can weigh in as to whether or not that's true. In the current topic, we're talking about whether or not the DoD has the reasonable responsibility to look for international phone calls, especially those going to/from known terror finance/management types. Further, does the office that runs the DoD (the CinC) have the obligation and authority to run programs like that without having the operational details compromised by (in this case) lawyers that do not have security clearances looking into one of the most sensitive intelligence gathering operations that the country operates - or, (as is the case), should they simply brief the legislative branches that fund the program? The latter makes sense, and even the president's more rabid political opponents are quick to say that the last thing they want to do is actually end the DoD's program.
The courts are a vital balancing influence - but only if the issues brought before them by other parties pass muster. There are good arguments that too many people (all across the idealogical spectrum, left and right) look for ways to affect what should be legislative policy changes by simply suing each other into oblivion and hoping that somewhere along the line a judge (or even the Supreme Court) rules in a way that has the effect of passing a law for which no one actually voted. There's at least as much mischief in that form as there is in the executive branch.
The truth is in all those stores from the immediate post 9/11 period claiming "in recounts bush won" were misleading.. if you actually read the articles you will pull enough info to realize gore won.. they state it explicitly, buried deep in page 17.
Oh, come on now. If you have a link to a page that actually shows the facts, provide it.
After the recount mess in Florida, a collection of people - mostly reporters assigned to the task by newspapers opposed to Bush - counted and recounted the Florida ballots in every way possible. They did it according the standards that Gore's lawyers first asked for (where he was picking and choosing only those jurisdictions that would help him - how reasonable!), and then they did across-the-board state recounts. They used the most loose and the tightest interpretations of "voter intent" issues (like the ol' hanging chad mind-reading game), and they came up with only one conclusion: Gore lost. Period. Even by the most Gore-friendly counting methods, he lost. You've got all the room in the world to argue about whether or not the country (or just Florida) was or wan't smart about how they cast their votes, but you can't keep using the word "stole" in that context.
If you want to conjure up a villain for yourself, focus on the local (Democrat!) who designed the paper ballots in the districts that arguably might have gone to Gore if the people voting weren't too dumb to actually match up a mark on the paper with the name they actually wanted. Though I think the number of "oops, I voted for Pat Buchannon because I can't read well" voters didn't amount to enough to necessarily make the difference.
You're pretty much correct - these are cultural issues. It's silly to blame either inanimate object (the gun or the iPod) for what people choose to do.
In the US, you used to be able to mail-order a handgun, sending no more than a check in the mail. You could walk into a hardware store and purchase a high-powered, repeating rifle or a handgun just like you would any other tool. But the crime rate (in the classic Hollywood sense of bad guys running around spraying lead) was well lower, per capita and by any other measure. Why? Cultural reasons, mostly having to do with the lessening of accountability across the board (both in terms of needing to work, and in terms of paying the price for being a criminal).
It's become unfashionable to hold people responsible for their actions, and hence we get discussion threads proposing which color iPod earbuds you should go to so as to not provoke criminals. Incredible.
I can't help thinking it may be linked to this massive effort in fighting terrorism. How can you put so many policemen on that and still have enough in the street really protecting the people?
Have there ever been enough police walking around that they could be physically close enough to everyone to stop muggings?
The problem is the lack of consequence when such people are caught. Most violent offenders (especially those that look to make a living by relieving you of your property) are repeat offenders, and only get worse over time. Make that a less wise career choice, and you won't need to have cops standing all over the sidewalk ready to jump in between every pair of people that might be headed towards a problem.
A lot of hunters. AFAIK it's not legal to hunt with a semi-auto, at least in Pennsylvania, which is the only place I've ever seen the rules.
I'm just south of you in the People's Republic of Maryland. But I've traveled to your intermittently charming state to do some bird hunting. And many, many pheasant hunters (and of course waterfowl hunters) will be carrying a semi-auto shotgun. I believe the rule in PA is one in the chamber and two in the magazine... but that third round and the fast repeat of the auto-loading gun has sure come in handy a few times. When you flush a pair of chukar or kick up a big rooster pheasant into a high wind, that quaint (don't get me wrong, I love them!) side-by-side just won't keep your gundogs as busy, or put as much dinner on the table.
Now, if the pro-gun argument is that having guns would somehow allow you to defend yourself and prevent thefts happening - well would you? If you had a gun at the back of your neck, you'd get out your gun and try to shoot first, despite the high probability that you'd end up dead?
In places where the laws have gone from can't-carry to can-carry, there's good evidence to chew on. When, in general, your average willing-to-use-violence street thug type doesn't know if an intended victim may or may not be carrying a deadly weapon, such crimes go down. States like Florida are good examples.
In places where the laws have gone from might-be-carrying to only-criminals-can-be-carrying (or worse, only-criminals-can-even-possess-them-at-all) such crimes go up.
But I agree with the other comments that find it silly to blame the iPods. You have to blame the people willing to steal anything for the act of stealing. Before it was iPods, it was just cash. iPod lust is just another facet of the growing culture of entitlement. Fix that, and you fix, well, a whole lot of things - including much of what fuels many sorts of violence and the need to defend against it.
F--- the F---ing birds that are stupid enough to fly into wind turbines (or into the side of buildings for that matter). True environmentalists don't give a shit about birds when our oceans are turning to acid.
Right! Except that many people that consider themselves "true environmentalists" don't think like that. They also include people like Ted Kennedy, who think that wind power's great, as long as a wind farm doesn't interfere with the view from his particular private compound in New England. I'll hazard a guess that the windfarm NIMBYs are worse than the nuke NIMBYs, if you take into account that you'd need to cover half the country with wind farms to even put a dent in the growth in power demands over the next 50 years.
Some claim petrol-electric hybrids, others hydrogen--be it combustion or via fuel cells...
...The most promising tech for the present is likely the plugable petrol-electric hybrid. It's not the most glamorous but it is far closer to the budget of the average person than any of the others and it's readily available today.
But: you get hydrogen very inefficiently through the use of enormous amounts of electricity, which is currently being produced mostly through burning coal. Start using hydrogen in your car, you'll start burning that much more coal and natural gas at the electric plants. Your plug-in hybrids introduce the same problem.
They only viable solution is more nuclear power plants. A LOT more.
Maybe. And, I believe one of the founders of Greenpeace or Sierra Club has come out in favor of nuclear power, as you suggest.
Yes, he has. And for his trouble, the remaining members of Greenpeace shrilly scream that he's a traitor and shill for the oil industry, etc, blah blah.
The real problem is that the people who oppose nukes are bound together more by their general political loopiness than they are by actual, real, rational environmental/energy issues. So when they see one of their own taking up a different messages, they excommunicate them idealogically - never mind the practical issues at hand.
Corporations, on the other hand, don't have to respect freedom of speech
But you can punish a corporation any time you want: don't give them any money. If their policies or behavior is bad enough, it takes little more than one well-crafted blog to create a firestorm of bad (and profit-sapping) publicity. Things have changed, a lot. That being said: when you cash a check from an employer, you're working within a lot of boundaries that your employment dictates (actually, it's a two-way street). They want what you can do, and you want the paycheck. If the circumstances under which the money is to be earned don't satisfy, move on to somewhere else.
In the US, we're dealing with very, very low unemployment. For the sort of person with skills and the intellect to even think about stuff like this, there are plenty of jobs to be had.
They can afford to criticize because their money makes them immune
Funny! That's usually what people say about Republicans. Never the less, the point is that there isn't some black-helicopter-traveling agency running around silencing people who don't like the current administration. There couldn't be more of such discourse, and that's as it should be (annoying as many voices can be!).
In the sense that we probably both hold very similar ideals, yes. But not to the extent that we'd agree about the whether or not the justice system is entirely broken, or that cops all abuse their authority, or that the black helicopters have telephone-tapping super-spies rapelling down onto the roof of your ISPs offices, no. I'm not suggesting that you're wearing a tinfoil outfit - I'm going back to the original discussion, wherein the arguably nutso legal stuff being talked about in the UK (anti-social behavior blah blah we're taking your computer etc) is the same as in the US. It's not, and that's my point.
Any "sex offender" in the US. (Don't like them, but that isn't the point)
I don't like them either, but find that the high rate of recidivism among the truly creepy ones probably means that some of their sentences either aren't long enough or aren't leveraging technology well enough. The whole punish-them-after-they've-done-their-time thing is a bad movement. Better to say, in advance, that part of the punishment for (pick one: preying on kids, whatever) is life-long tracking or work camp residence or whatever. But that has to be in the statutes up front. I'm all for it, but the decision to do it can't come after a prison term is up, unless more bad acts are committed or the convict actually says they can't control themselves.
Enter a home w/o warrant or probable cause
Such as? Please site one that hasn't passed judicial challenge and review over and over for years. People like crackers operating in the US get busted after warrant-based monitoring. If you're referring to "imminent threat" situations where there's a hostage in a house or someone hears someone beating up his girlfriend, etc., then I'd like to hear your reasoning behind having to wait for a warrant before the cops can act.
Try to make a phone call lately?
Yes, and they all go right through, just fine. And unless I'm making calls to some other country, especially one that tends to be home base for non-stop criminal and terror operations and financing, I've got no concern at all about the call being monitored. Because they're not. Are your calls not going through?
Have you ever been through, or looked at our so called "justice" system?
Yes, because I've had my car broken into, been assaulted, had the family home broken into, had solo and organized criminals steal from the businesses that pay me, and spend a good part of every day dealing with attempts to defraud, crack, and steal from the many systems I have a hand in running. I've been knifed working crowd control in college, had a crazy professional PCP-user threatening my wife and me at 3:00AM... and I've been a witness in multiple criminal investigations (complete with threatening midnight behavior from suspects prior to trial), I've worked with the FBI on an interstate theft case, I've had to testify in an insurance fraud sting against a former customer, and I've had half a dozen county cops and detectives around my dining room table showing me mugshots while trying to wrap up a pair of notorious local B&E and autotheft specialists that I saw in the act (and which were out on bail in two days, and caught doing more of the same a week later). I've spent time on civil and criminal juries.
I have friends in law enforcement who become furious at having to let known criminals walk on technicalities, and know people in the intel and counter-terror community that have to hold their noses while very, very bad people do very, very bad things just out of reach of the boundaries within which they have to operate.
Does any of that count as enough exposure for you?
The biggest shame is the people like you are just along for the ride.
What, by voting? By carefully choosing the people that I think will most constructively deal with incredibly difficult circumstances, or do so with the least waste or least offensive form and degree of nanny-statism?
The best method of control is to give people the illusion that they still have the control. Its much easier that way then it is to use outright force.
OK, so that's a nice ominous-sounding platitude... but how does address my question about actually describing the previous comment's imagined parallel in the US?
Please list some examples of court proceedings in the US that follow the template being described in the UK. Cite examples of US citizens that, only under suspicion of some "cyber" crime, have been subjected to a court order denying them use of their computer as punishment. For that matter, please detail the nature of the courts that are operated by DHS and which have such confiscatory influence over criminal suspects.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a license plate frame encrusted with strong IR-emitting LEDs? Lose the image in the glare.
Not that a power failure should ever happen in a datacentre anyway
Right, it shouldn't. The last (and only) time I've experienced that was at a first-class data center that had multiple feeders coming into the building, double-redundant generators and UPSes... and of course, still one mechanism at the bitter end of the system that actually cut the power over to our racks. There can be only one thing that actually, physically delivers power to a circuit on your rack. Guess what failed? The one thing that, failing, couldn't by definition be redundant.
Yes, you can deal with it at the rack by getting power in from multiple circuits and then with any luck your servers can take in power from those separate circuits... but not ever device is rigged that way. A hub, or a typical router, is only going to be looking for AC from one source... and yes, you can buy your own hardware to put in the rack, and cut back and forth between multiple incoming circuits, but that's what you expect the data center people to do for, and even the big ones sometimes screw up. It happens, and it's happened to me. And it really, really sucked. I didn't mind doing the database recoveries and poking at dozens of servers... but I did mind all of the phone calls and e-mails to irate end users.
Oh - yes, we could have the entire thing mirrored elsewhere, and pay for enormous pipes to keep all that content synched up... but that's just not feasible on some margins/budgets, so you take some chances. I've lost about 6 hours of downtime in 9 years because of that problem, so it's not a bad gamble.
Assuming intelligence is the ability to extrapolate from facts to deduce the future
That's not necessarily a good assumption. But, taking that as a premise: machine intelligence should be able to be intelligent - in that fashion - with much greater speed that you or I. That whole "extrapolate from facts" thing sort of hinges on having the facts, and on being able to correlate the countless fact-ish things that add up to an extrapolatable "fact." How about AI used to manage bridges and traffic in large city? The "facts" of how many cars are on the road, what they're doing, and what the countless other variables are (and how they're trending) would be impossible for person or team of people to digest and act upon in any useful way. I can certainly see machines being able to take in more information, sort for the facts (that matter) and more rapidly arrive at more contextually-useful decisions/work.
If that's your definition of intelligence, then I see the limit being way, way out there... because the facts that can drive decisions come at higher and higher resolutions. And you've also got larger strategic-level decisions that can be made with a much larger instantaneous perception of the facts than a human could manage. More AI horsepower, and that much more can figure into every decision. Given the size of the universe, a near-term cap on how much might be considered by increasingly advanced systems doesn't seem like a real long-term limit, per se.
where one person sees something really interesting and it gets passed on and on
That closed-loop, forward-to-your-friends behavior is already an echo chamber ringing loudly with nonsensical, tin-foil lined inanities (across the idealogical spectrum) and apocryphal pablum. We already see enough "I don't usually forward this sort of thing, but this is really spooky!" crap from people that we still pretend are our friends.
Political-camp-driven psuedo-factoid-chain-letter type behavior is going to continue to amplify the already tunnel-vision madness that typifies the current election cycle for people in both parties. None of it persuades anyone to change their mind about anything because the simple act of receiving it in your inbox subjects it to already well-armored biases (well founded or otherwise) that result in the same instantly applied judgement that's used to throw out V1@gr4 spam. This sort of stuff may help a candidate keep her already-loyal base stoked up, but is there any question about those votes anyway?
The entire notion of a ballot, with a very limited number of people to choose from, was created by nearly ancient corrupt, cheating polititians, who after winning the cheating contest that we call elections, made new laws to ensure that they and their team could stay in office and accept large quantities of money in the form of bribes.
So... you'd rather we didn't have some way of narrowing down national elections, and insteady just had a giant free-for-all where the guy with the most votes wins, but is elected by only a few percent of the voters? It's divisive enough when only something like half of the voters weigh on towards a winning candidate - but when you have a party in power that only got, say, 10% of the vote, they're essentially unable to get anything done.
As for "bribery"... do you have a conteporary example of politician becoming personally wealthy in direct exchange for particular voting in a certain way, etc? I can certainly point to politicians from both main political camps who are in, or are headed to jail for that sort of thing. And people who have spent years as, say, president are pretty much guaranteed to make a killing afterwards as authors, public speakers, and consultants... but I think you're confusing the flow of cash into party campaign coffers with the flow of cash into individuals' pockets. These people live under a microscope that none of us could tolerate. Doesn't mean I like most of them as humans, and I sure wouldn't want to have to live under that scrutiby myself - but frankly, I think you're skewing a little towards the tinfoil, here.
You must be a neo-con
Which means, what to you, exactly, in terms of my response to another person's comment about a founder of Greenpeace lately speaking out in favor of using more nuclear power? I made the factual response that he has been roundly condemned by other Greenpeace members, and I made the thoughtful, considered, and informed observation that many of the no-nukes crowd have more political things in common than they have any sort of shared science-based perspective that actually brings about their positions.
There are many, many problems with nuclear power
Yes, there can be. And there are many, many (and arguably far worse) problems with the unrelenting burning of coal and other fossil fuels. And since the use of wind and solar energy isn't likely to even come close to addressesing the rapidly exanding global energy demand, and fusion-based power is decades away (if ever), that leaves us with the one thing that the person in question has now found himself supporting. And for that, he is villified - and I think, irrationally so. Hence my comment, which is neither "neo-con" nor "hand-waving" in nature.
Nah, now they are forced to suicide like Turkey makes its females that violate honor.
Really? Girls that go to school in Afghanistan are forced to kill themselves? Or the mothers that take them there are? Please kindly supply a link to that effect. Maybe you'll find that sort of information here, or here, or here, or here. That last one documents the yearly doubling of girls attending school there. You can just cut to the chase by linking to an article showing that the rate of those girls' mothers being forced to kill themselves has also doubled. Or you can just STFU and grind your "Afghanistan was better under the Taliban, and Mullah Omar just needed a little more time to really show some progress" axe in some other way.
Oh, that still happens, just not in the major cities. Town/Village centers suffice if there is a lack of a soccer field. Also they don't send out invitations or make public announcements. Smaller crowds but the end result is pretty much the same.
No, it's not the same. Yes, Afghanistan has long been a fractured place with a wide range of local cultural pockets ranging from Cool to Insane. But the Taliban moved in and said, "Now there's a central authority here, and a dominant theocratic culture that we will enforce at the point of a gun, and one feature of that culture, country-wide, is: women who try to get a job (even if we've killed her husband), or who teach daughters to read will be put to death."
Of course it's horrid that there are spots in that country where that same attitude still exists. But the difference is that now there is no longer a "government" that directly embraces and celebrates that medieval nonsense by actually having government employees who run around and do that evil crap. It will be at least a generation before it becomes culturally embarassing, for more like a majority of Afghanis, to have that stuff happening in their more rural areas. But the difference is crucial: before, it was the law of land, and now it's not.
Just like it took a while before some people in the deep south of the US stopped openly lynching blacks (and getting a nudge-nudge-wink-wink from the local law enforcement). Now, such a think is loudly, and instantly condemned from every meaningful corner of the culture, and perpetrators of such crimes get what they deserve. The Taliban was still running the courts and what passes for law enforcement in Afghanistan just five years ago. This stuff takes a little while - but to suggest that there's no difference between the two conditions is absurd. Both in philosophical and practical terms.
I call bullshit. Do you think the situation for women has gotten much better now that Afganistan is free from the Taliban?
If by "better" you mean "women are no longer dragged out into what used to be a soccer field in front of a crowd at lunchtime and shot in the head for daring to teach their daughters to read," then... yes, better.
Nope, the courts could just dismiss any case brought up.
Which is a form of "weighing in" on whatever is presented to them.
The juries could decide "Not guilty".
Not usually an issue in Constitutional matters, and even in civil cases, jury decisions that seem to clearly be an attempt to legislate (rather than to evaluate the issue on the terms the judge instructs them to think about - something sometimes called "jury nullification") can and frequently are appealed to a higher court.
This idea that the judicial branch is not allowed to oversee and check the powers of the legislative and executive branch is at best insane, at worst treasonous.
You can't talk about it terms of the "idea" of it, because that's not specific enough to be useful. The judiciary (not to be confused with the DoJ, which isn't the same thing at all) does not "check the authority of" anyone. They merely compare actions to legislation to see if they line up, or (when asked, of course - not on their own), compare actions/legislation to the Constitution to see where it falls. The Judiciary cannot, for example, decide that a particular president shouldn't have control over the intelligence agencies in the executive branch - since those agencies are part of that branch, and constitutionally, that office is entirely in charge of what those agencies do.
Now, should a president's people be able to request and receive FBI dossiers on hundreds of political opponents, and have them delivered to the White House for review by campaign strategists? Probably not (and, ethically, certainly not), but that didn't stop Clinton's folks from having 800 such files delivered to them. Didn't really hear much screaming about that one, huh? It's not because it wasn't slimy (it was), but because it's actually a little hard to nail down exactly whether or how the CinC should or shouldn't be prevented from reviewing information that's collected by DoJ (like security reviews of Republican political opponents).
The point is that the constitutional role of the judicial branch is to play referee when other parties (the other branches, or citizens, organizations of citizens, etc) seek clarification on the actions of those other branches (or of lower courts) as it relates to the constitution or the constitutionally-reviewed legislation already in place.
If the house and senate, for example, were to pass some bit of nonsense about flag burning being illegal, the courts can't just stand up and "check" that behavior. Someone else has to make the case that it's a first amendment issue, and then the courts can weigh in as to whether or not that's true. In the current topic, we're talking about whether or not the DoD has the reasonable responsibility to look for international phone calls, especially those going to/from known terror finance/management types. Further, does the office that runs the DoD (the CinC) have the obligation and authority to run programs like that without having the operational details compromised by (in this case) lawyers that do not have security clearances looking into one of the most sensitive intelligence gathering operations that the country operates - or, (as is the case), should they simply brief the legislative branches that fund the program? The latter makes sense, and even the president's more rabid political opponents are quick to say that the last thing they want to do is actually end the DoD's program.
The courts are a vital balancing influence - but only if the issues brought before them by other parties pass muster. There are good arguments that too many people (all across the idealogical spectrum, left and right) look for ways to affect what should be legislative policy changes by simply suing each other into oblivion and hoping that somewhere along the line a judge (or even the Supreme Court) rules in a way that has the effect of passing a law for which no one actually voted. There's at least as much mischief in that form as there is in the executive branch.
The truth is in all those stores from the immediate post 9/11 period claiming "in recounts bush won" were misleading.. if you actually read the articles you will pull enough info to realize gore won.. they state it explicitly, buried deep in page 17.
Oh, come on now. If you have a link to a page that actually shows the facts, provide it.
After the recount mess in Florida, a collection of people - mostly reporters assigned to the task by newspapers opposed to Bush - counted and recounted the Florida ballots in every way possible. They did it according the standards that Gore's lawyers first asked for (where he was picking and choosing only those jurisdictions that would help him - how reasonable!), and then they did across-the-board state recounts. They used the most loose and the tightest interpretations of "voter intent" issues (like the ol' hanging chad mind-reading game), and they came up with only one conclusion: Gore lost. Period. Even by the most Gore-friendly counting methods, he lost. You've got all the room in the world to argue about whether or not the country (or just Florida) was or wan't smart about how they cast their votes, but you can't keep using the word "stole" in that context.
If you want to conjure up a villain for yourself, focus on the local (Democrat!) who designed the paper ballots in the districts that arguably might have gone to Gore if the people voting weren't too dumb to actually match up a mark on the paper with the name they actually wanted. Though I think the number of "oops, I voted for Pat Buchannon because I can't read well" voters didn't amount to enough to necessarily make the difference.
You're pretty much correct - these are cultural issues. It's silly to blame either inanimate object (the gun or the iPod) for what people choose to do.
In the US, you used to be able to mail-order a handgun, sending no more than a check in the mail. You could walk into a hardware store and purchase a high-powered, repeating rifle or a handgun just like you would any other tool. But the crime rate (in the classic Hollywood sense of bad guys running around spraying lead) was well lower, per capita and by any other measure. Why? Cultural reasons, mostly having to do with the lessening of accountability across the board (both in terms of needing to work, and in terms of paying the price for being a criminal).
It's become unfashionable to hold people responsible for their actions, and hence we get discussion threads proposing which color iPod earbuds you should go to so as to not provoke criminals. Incredible.
I mean, this is great - but will they get anything done in July or August? And, during those months, will they be supporting open-source Speedos?
I can't help thinking it may be linked to this massive effort in fighting terrorism. How can you put so many policemen on that and still have enough in the street really protecting the people?
Have there ever been enough police walking around that they could be physically close enough to everyone to stop muggings?
The problem is the lack of consequence when such people are caught. Most violent offenders (especially those that look to make a living by relieving you of your property) are repeat offenders, and only get worse over time. Make that a less wise career choice, and you won't need to have cops standing all over the sidewalk ready to jump in between every pair of people that might be headed towards a problem.
A lot of hunters. AFAIK it's not legal to hunt with a semi-auto, at least in Pennsylvania, which is the only place I've ever seen the rules.
I'm just south of you in the People's Republic of Maryland. But I've traveled to your intermittently charming state to do some bird hunting. And many, many pheasant hunters (and of course waterfowl hunters) will be carrying a semi-auto shotgun. I believe the rule in PA is one in the chamber and two in the magazine... but that third round and the fast repeat of the auto-loading gun has sure come in handy a few times. When you flush a pair of chukar or kick up a big rooster pheasant into a high wind, that quaint (don't get me wrong, I love them!) side-by-side just won't keep your gundogs as busy, or put as much dinner on the table.
Now, if the pro-gun argument is that having guns would somehow allow you to defend yourself and prevent thefts happening - well would you? If you had a gun at the back of your neck, you'd get out your gun and try to shoot first, despite the high probability that you'd end up dead?
In places where the laws have gone from can't-carry to can-carry, there's good evidence to chew on. When, in general, your average willing-to-use-violence street thug type doesn't know if an intended victim may or may not be carrying a deadly weapon, such crimes go down. States like Florida are good examples.
In places where the laws have gone from might-be-carrying to only-criminals-can-be-carrying (or worse, only-criminals-can-even-possess-them-at-all) such crimes go up.
But I agree with the other comments that find it silly to blame the iPods. You have to blame the people willing to steal anything for the act of stealing. Before it was iPods, it was just cash. iPod lust is just another facet of the growing culture of entitlement. Fix that, and you fix, well, a whole lot of things - including much of what fuels many sorts of violence and the need to defend against it.
F--- the F---ing birds that are stupid enough to fly into wind turbines (or into the side of buildings for that matter). True environmentalists don't give a shit about birds when our oceans are turning to acid.
Right! Except that many people that consider themselves "true environmentalists" don't think like that. They also include people like Ted Kennedy, who think that wind power's great, as long as a wind farm doesn't interfere with the view from his particular private compound in New England. I'll hazard a guess that the windfarm NIMBYs are worse than the nuke NIMBYs, if you take into account that you'd need to cover half the country with wind farms to even put a dent in the growth in power demands over the next 50 years.
Some claim petrol-electric hybrids, others hydrogen--be it combustion or via fuel cells...
...The most promising tech for the present is likely the plugable petrol-electric hybrid. It's not the most glamorous but it is far closer to the budget of the average person than any of the others and it's readily available today.
But: you get hydrogen very inefficiently through the use of enormous amounts of electricity, which is currently being produced mostly through burning coal. Start using hydrogen in your car, you'll start burning that much more coal and natural gas at the electric plants. Your plug-in hybrids introduce the same problem.
They only viable solution is more nuclear power plants. A LOT more.
Maybe. And, I believe one of the founders of Greenpeace or Sierra Club has come out in favor of nuclear power, as you suggest.
Yes, he has. And for his trouble, the remaining members of Greenpeace shrilly scream that he's a traitor and shill for the oil industry, etc, blah blah.
The real problem is that the people who oppose nukes are bound together more by their general political loopiness than they are by actual, real, rational environmental/energy issues. So when they see one of their own taking up a different messages, they excommunicate them idealogically - never mind the practical issues at hand.
Corporations, on the other hand, don't have to respect freedom of speech
But you can punish a corporation any time you want: don't give them any money. If their policies or behavior is bad enough, it takes little more than one well-crafted blog to create a firestorm of bad (and profit-sapping) publicity. Things have changed, a lot. That being said: when you cash a check from an employer, you're working within a lot of boundaries that your employment dictates (actually, it's a two-way street). They want what you can do, and you want the paycheck. If the circumstances under which the money is to be earned don't satisfy, move on to somewhere else.
In the US, we're dealing with very, very low unemployment. For the sort of person with skills and the intellect to even think about stuff like this, there are plenty of jobs to be had.
They can afford to criticize because their money makes them immune
Funny! That's usually what people say about Republicans. Never the less, the point is that there isn't some black-helicopter-traveling agency running around silencing people who don't like the current administration. There couldn't be more of such discourse, and that's as it should be (annoying as many voices can be!).
Cool, you support my position!
In the sense that we probably both hold very similar ideals, yes. But not to the extent that we'd agree about the whether or not the justice system is entirely broken, or that cops all abuse their authority, or that the black helicopters have telephone-tapping super-spies rapelling down onto the roof of your ISPs offices, no. I'm not suggesting that you're wearing a tinfoil outfit - I'm going back to the original discussion, wherein the arguably nutso legal stuff being talked about in the UK (anti-social behavior blah blah we're taking your computer etc) is the same as in the US. It's not, and that's my point.
Any "sex offender" in the US. (Don't like them, but that isn't the point)
I don't like them either, but find that the high rate of recidivism among the truly creepy ones probably means that some of their sentences either aren't long enough or aren't leveraging technology well enough. The whole punish-them-after-they've-done-their-time thing is a bad movement. Better to say, in advance, that part of the punishment for (pick one: preying on kids, whatever) is life-long tracking or work camp residence or whatever. But that has to be in the statutes up front. I'm all for it, but the decision to do it can't come after a prison term is up, unless more bad acts are committed or the convict actually says they can't control themselves.
Enter a home w/o warrant or probable cause
Such as? Please site one that hasn't passed judicial challenge and review over and over for years. People like crackers operating in the US get busted after warrant-based monitoring. If you're referring to "imminent threat" situations where there's a hostage in a house or someone hears someone beating up his girlfriend, etc., then I'd like to hear your reasoning behind having to wait for a warrant before the cops can act.
Try to make a phone call lately?
Yes, and they all go right through, just fine. And unless I'm making calls to some other country, especially one that tends to be home base for non-stop criminal and terror operations and financing, I've got no concern at all about the call being monitored. Because they're not. Are your calls not going through?
Have you ever been through, or looked at our so called "justice" system?
Yes, because I've had my car broken into, been assaulted, had the family home broken into, had solo and organized criminals steal from the businesses that pay me, and spend a good part of every day dealing with attempts to defraud, crack, and steal from the many systems I have a hand in running. I've been knifed working crowd control in college, had a crazy professional PCP-user threatening my wife and me at 3:00AM... and I've been a witness in multiple criminal investigations (complete with threatening midnight behavior from suspects prior to trial), I've worked with the FBI on an interstate theft case, I've had to testify in an insurance fraud sting against a former customer, and I've had half a dozen county cops and detectives around my dining room table showing me mugshots while trying to wrap up a pair of notorious local B&E and autotheft specialists that I saw in the act (and which were out on bail in two days, and caught doing more of the same a week later). I've spent time on civil and criminal juries.
I have friends in law enforcement who become furious at having to let known criminals walk on technicalities, and know people in the intel and counter-terror community that have to hold their noses while very, very bad people do very, very bad things just out of reach of the boundaries within which they have to operate.
Does any of that count as enough exposure for you?
The biggest shame is the people like you are just along for the ride.
What, by voting? By carefully choosing the people that I think will most constructively deal with incredibly difficult circumstances, or do so with the least waste or least offensive form and degree of nanny-statism?
The best method of control is to give people the illusion that they still have the control. Its much easier that way then it is to use outright force.
OK, so that's a nice ominous-sounding platitude... but how does address my question about actually describing the previous comment's imagined parallel in the US?
They call it "Homeland Security"
Please list some examples of court proceedings in the US that follow the template being described in the UK. Cite examples of US citizens that, only under suspicion of some "cyber" crime, have been subjected to a court order denying them use of their computer as punishment. For that matter, please detail the nature of the courts that are operated by DHS and which have such confiscatory influence over criminal suspects.
*crickets chirping*