That "Peal Harbor" comment is meaningless without some context. The section of the document in question is talking about the obvious need to alter the US military's equipment, budget, training, operations... essentially everything. With the Cold War over, and the threat of any other large army marching, literally, upon allied interests (with the possible exception of China), untold billions of defense dollars now need to spent on completely different priorities. This was true back in 2000, and it's even more true now.
The document you're quoting says that this change has to take place in order to allow the US military to retain its role of being superior to any threat it has to contend with. If the military's attitude were any different, you'd have to wonder who was running the show. The document suggests that the "process of transformation" into a more efficient and appropriate form "is going to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."
Nobody can read into this some dark design to cause or embrace such an event. The comment reads like any other written by anyone with any sense of history. Large, exepensive projects run by governments take a long time, unless some sense of urgency changes the priorities. Pearl Harbor was one such. Earthquakes in large west coast cities are another example (causing a huge change in standards, emergency readiness, building codes, etc). Our space program in the 1960's only got the attention and funding it deserved (perhaps even more so) because of the Soviet space program's obvious progress (Sputnik, etc). Saying that an inevitable and appropriate reconfiguration of our military is going to be accelerated if some catastrophic defense-related event takes place is, well, stating the obvious.
A more interesting line of inquiry might involve wondering why such changes weren't accelerated earlier (say, during the Clinton administration) when we had our naval vessel attacked, watched our embassies attacked, saw under-manned special forces in Somalia attacked, and watched entities like the Taliban taking over places like Afghanistan. Obviously, for the congress (which actually controls the purse strings), those incremental things weren't catalytic enough. So, the author of the document you quote was exactly correct: people don't wake up and re-evaluate how they're preparing for some things until they get a scare. Ask anyone in a neighborhood that's just had a house fire how many of them are checking or replacing smoke detectors, or lining up new insurance and household escape plans for their kids. Ask the people in Indonesia or Sri Lanka how many of them have now (post-tsunami) altered their ideas about where it's reasonable to build cities of wooden huts on the beach. It's not like the concept of that risk wasn't there - it was. Just like the risk of large-scale terrorism was plainly obvious before we geared up to do anything about after 9-11.
Anyone with half a clue expected another terrorist attack. Markets may adjust after a period of irrationality- it didn't take that terribly long after 9/11. Since the UK has been used to terrorism, they may get over this even faster.
I agree. It's just that for some people and sectors, this is a corrosive event that will have a ripple effect.
However what are the consequences of Karl's outing of Plame now being public knowledge? How will this affect relations with the intelligence community?
First, the indications are that Rove's interviews with the reporters in question were not when those reporters gathered Plame's identity. She was widely known to work for the CIA, so it's not like this was actually news at the time. More importantly, the intelligence community is hardly a homogenous entity (though it's more more tightly integrated now than it was even a couple of years ago). I know people in this line of work, here in the DC area, and they laugh about the whole Plame affair as being pretty much a tempest in a teapot. They find that her husband's political wranglings were pretty much out of line if he had any interest in keeping her out of the fray, and note that people like her are scarecly covert in the first place. The administration's relationship with the intel people is better than that of the previous administration, mostly because there is now a more clearly defined mission, complete with adequate funding to operate, and a mandate to actually hire and retain good people (rather than purge them and dumb it down, which was happeneing under the last team, and is one of the reasons we've had poor intel for the last 10 years - a situation which is slowly reversing itself).
You do of course realize that the money did not vanish? It simply went to those that were short on the stocks. Money never vanished it only changes hands.
I should have been clearer. The devaluation of stocks is only a part of it. The slowdown in the economy in general, and disruption of even just local businesses and operations in London alone, will have a wide ripple effect. Madrid had the same problem, but London's much more involved in the wider world economy.
Tell you what. Just read some of Al Queda's own press material. They explicitly refer to democracy as "evil," and refer to elections (such as those that most of the people in Iraq vigorously embraced) as contrary to Islam - making anyone who participates in them a heretic and worthy of death, blah blah.
Of course this is not the view of the average person in that part of the world. It's the mantra of the crazies that are working for groups like Al Queda, and it's the rhetoric they use to justify slaughtering civilians. Do you really think that foreigners (from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia) killing young, native Iraqi police recruits or health care workers in Iraq is about what "we" have done to "them" for the last 100 years? They are not preaching self-determination for the people in the Arab world. They are preaching the viritues of a thuggish, mysogonistic theocracy that kills women for sending their daughters school (lest they learn to think on their own). See the policies of those fine fellows and Al Queda supporters, the Taliban, for some details on how they think humanity should carry on, day to day. That philosophy is entirely antithetical to liberty, democracy, and an open culture. Freedom isn't a "gambit," it's the best way for people to live. Slaughtering people that stand up for it requires no further commentary, as it's plain what those thugs want: chaos, and a brutal environment in which their medeival way of life can come back from the grave. What they want are sheep, and sure as hell not people (including women! gasp!) who flock to the polls to elect their own government.
... in fact, the manifesto of the Project for the New American Century... states they would need "a new Pearl Harbour
Well, see, you're going to sound like much less of a kook if you don't just make stuff up. You can go right here and read their 'manifesto' all you want. You'll notice the complete lack of anything even vaguely like what you're talking about, either philosophically, stragecially, or tactically. I find particulary ironic that even as you describe another party as lying "to the people" for their own good, you're the one fabricating things to try to score a rhetorical point, hoping that your audience doesn't know how to use Google. Pretty insulting, and indicative of your condescending posture (which includes willingness to use nearly childish deceit in a transparent attempt to pursuade the intellectually lazy). If you want to talk about who is dependent on who, I'd suggest that we bring up the issue of which parties will seem completely irrelevent unless they can manufacture and nurse along the myth of some evil conspiracy against which they can bravely rebel. Or, we can focus on that actual evil acts of people who blow up civilians on trains, and think about what they represent.
It is indeed. That we haven't had a similar attack in the US yet is part luck, part vigilance, and partly, no doubt, the bad guys biding their time until they can rig up something dramatic enough to really stoke up Al Jazeera when it happens.
I'm certain it's going to happen in the US again, just like it will probably happen in Italy, Denmark, and elsewhere.
As for how (or whether) this distracts from the G8 agenda... remember: it's exactly the G8 agenda that these guys hate. They're not distracting from the agenda, they're showing their disdain for it. They hate the notion of wealthy western countries using their resources to lift poor countries up and back democracy. These punks only thrive where people are miserable and vulnerable to their medieval way of looking at things.
Now, well the terrorists are playing right into the hands of George Bush!
Do you even hear yourself? If this attack, and the ones in Madrid, and Africa, on our naval vessel, and in Bali, and in New York and Washington had never happened, then we wouldn't have any issues in the first place. This only "plays" into "Bush's hands" in the sense that it demonstrates exactly what we're up against, and how important it is that we keep monsters like the people that did this in check. Several analysts are pointing out that London's fate here may in part be because it's now much harder for terrorists to operate in the U.S.
I really feel for the poor bastards directly impacted by this in London, but it's really an attack on everything democratic, civilized, and open. If you can't see that, then you are playing right into Al Queda's hands.
I may be terribly cynical, but the first thing I thought was:
1. This distracts the world from Karl's outing the CIA agent.
If that's the first thing you though, then you're in pretty bad shape. Do you think "the world" gives a rat's ass about Valerie Plame's job at the CIA and which reporter(s) knew about it? It sure as hell isn't the sort of issue that makes it much past the US talking head circles in terms of real import.
Regardless, the first thing I thought was that the local terrorist cell(s) that did this learned a lot from their last attempt in Madrid, and got their timing better. Further, that they've joined philosophical sides with the people who think smashing out the windows at a Starbucks whenever there's a "global" summit in town will somehow make things better for poor people and for bored, anarchist-minded college students without a clue. And whatever people think about this event, where they're really going to feel it is in their wallet. The stock markets across the world just took a huge hit, and that portion of the economy that depends upon a smoothly operating London has ground to a halt. This will cost billions upon billions of dollars, and the people that think that not enough is being done for the poor should understand that a huge amount of resources just evaporated in several clouds of smoke, courtesy of Islamist fundamentalist wack jobs (note that an Al Queda cell is already claiming responsibility for this event).
I mean, I can't personally fly an F-16 or kill aliens, so that's fun to do in 3D on my computer, with or without natural language interfaces (though the more the merrier).
But get tangled up in the verbal sniping between two people in a failing marriage? That's what visiting the in-laws is for. And not only is it in 3D, the personal safety options are turned off, and the frying pans feel completely real.
I use a simple test. Is some man-made artifact meant to provoke emotion in me? If so, it is art.
Hmmm. But what if it doesn't provoke emotion? What if it's meant to appeal to your rationality, but do so in an unexpected way? Or, what if, no matter how it's intended, it simply fails to connect in any way? Or, what if it's not all intended to provoke, but does anyway? My point is, art is entirely on the consumption/audience side. A good artist can improve the odds of that happening by knowing something about the audience and understanding the likely flavor of human psyche to which he/she is speaking... but that's no guarantee that the work will be seen as art. Here's one of my simple tests: if someone has to explain it to you, it's failed as art.
There's just no one big bucket called "programming." To the extent that one's code interacts with, or communicates to a user, there's ample room for an artful implementation. Especially when the code's purpose is, through that interaction, to inform or pursuade. Yes, that's getting into "content" rather that programming, but the line between those is very, very fuzzy, especially in web development.
That being said, I think there's a certain intrinsic beauty to the way that I indent my subroutines.
But the courts, in particular the circuit and supreme courts, are like factories for novel arguments. That's sort of their jobs, really - to confront the awkward stuff, and find a way that the Constitution speaks to (or about) it. Certainly one could say the same thing about Roe v. Wade. That was a ruling that really needed to be made, and the use of the "privacy" angle would certainly be considered novel. I've got no problem with novel arguments as long as they're rational.
don't the different spoilage rates from different systems also violate equal protection
No, because the causes of the spoilage rate aren't found in the actions of the elections officials (in the way that chad-divining were, for example). You're confusing correlation with causation. If 100 voters in one polling place hose up their ballots, there's no equal protection angle on it when 200 voters hose up their ballots in the next zip code. If the procedures in both those places were run by the same authorities, and there was a reasonable understanding that people were, through the actions of the electoral officials, going to all be saved from low-IQ card-handling mistakes, then different results at different polls would be a reasonably challengable issue. But not when we're talking about more voters in one district who half-way punch out three choices for president than do the voters in another district.
spoilage rates are a lot higher for black voters than for white voters. Your 'weather' rains a little harder on people who vote Democrat.
Again, correlation vs. causation. That, or I'm just being polite and not saying that people inclined to vote Democrat are for some reason less able to think through the complexities of using the polling equipment. I mean, I know that Democratic party affiliation tends to hand in hand with wanting government to do things for you, but surely even that stops at having government look over your shoulder while you're voting to make sure you don't make mutually exclusive votes. Or that you can read, for example.
That aspect of the decision has been widely criticized, but you didn't know about it
Actually, I have read the entire decision, and am aware of that statement. That does not stop a future court, confronted with exactly the same circumstances, from considering how this event was handled. But it probably was very important for the court to indicate that they were responding to the specifics of the challenge at hand (the way that the counting was brought up by the Gore camp, and administered, moving-target-style by the local officials, and then subjected to changing rules by the state court).
Of course, you still felt qualified to heap scorn on those who had problems with the decision.
Follow the thread back. The person to whom I first responded set the scorn tone (aimed at O'Conner). I replied mildly in kind to the person who posted the comment, and who seemed quite confused over whether or not somehow O'Conner "helped get Dubya the cool job." That demanded first, a reminder that the votes involved were objectively clear on who won, and that second, if there was a round of judicial politicking, it was to be found in the Florida courts, with the SCOTUS as an appropriate check-and-balance.
But you've never had the right to copyright infringement. And, the typical use of the word "consumer" includes that person's participation in a commercial relationship with the provider of the goods and services in question. Sneaking off with a copy of a movie doesn't make you a consumer. It makes you someone who's too cheap to pay for the movie. Since it's rampant, the only thing dying is the artist's hope of actually seeing a little compensation for your enjoyment of her work. Does your idea of "fair use" include making that artist your personal little entertainment slave?
Imposing a new standard would be "legislating from the bench".
Which is exactly what the Florida supreme court tried to do. Determining voter intent using different mechanisms/standards by different reviewers is absolutely unduly harmful - to the voters, first of all.
How can counting votes do harm to one candidate in an election?
When the "counting" is being done in non-standard ways in very select area chosen specifically because of a more likely outcome, and with every intention of not mining for more mis-counted or undercounted votes in those areas that would likely have eclipsed them. That's how.
How can it be unfair for different counties to have different methods to determine voter intent, but fair for different counties to have different spoilage rates?
The spoilage rate is like the weather - it just happens, but does so because of a lot of variables. It depends on the acts of a large mass of people, and their demographic, experience, intelligence, education, and (it would seem) political orientation seem to have an impact on how capable they are of actually voting. The residents of each county vote into office the people that run their elections. If a county's priorities don't include upgrading their election facilities, that's a local political issue. But different methods of determining voter intent from one county to the next wasn't even the issue. There were different methods of determining voter intent from one counting table to the next in the same county. In most cases, there were no specific guidelines on determining intent, and that was part of the problem. So having the Florida court step in and try to invent some standards after the fact... not reasonable. The state already had a viable way to cast and count ballots, and the losing party didn't like the results. The amiguity in the intent area was simply a loophole through which they tried to drive the election, and that effort failed, as it should have.
If the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore was so great, then why didn't it set precedent?
What do you mean? All judgements set a precedent. It's a question of whether (especially in a very specific case like the one in Florida at that time) there's another similar case that would hinge on that precedent. Nothing like that has come up again since, so it's a non-issue, so far. That's like asking why the recent Connecticut city's taking of private property didn't set a precedent. It hasn't been used as such yet, but you know it will be. The odds of Bush v. Gore being used as precedent are pretty slim, because that exact set of circumstances is very unlikely to occur again, with the same challenges, the same state supreme court action, etc.
But that in no way excuses the Supreme Court from interfering in a decision clearly designated as a matter for the House of Representatives in the Constitution
The SCOTUS didn't interfere with Congressional power in any way. Congress can still act as they see fit once each state's electors say their piece. This was all very upstream from that part of the process.
Bush v. Gore was complete and utter politics
You're right there, but only because that was forced by the Gore team's actions. They made the politcal decision to try selective vote counting, and then they took their issues to a highly politicized state court. The matter was inately political before it ever got that far up the food chain.
It's not about who won - it's about how it happened. Rule of law, and all that
Right you are. And when one side of the equation decided to see just how much wiggle room there was in Florida's half-baked law, it escalated. The Florida court should have stopped that ridiculous selective vote-finding excursion right in its tracks, but they instead made the thing more political by appearing to concoct the very sorts of twists and turns that the Florida legislature should have done. But of course the legislature had no role to play - the election had already taken place.
If it's the Sandra Day O'Connor who would normally advocate restoration of states' rights in the new Federalist manner, but chose to override the Florida State Supreme Court in the matter, then I think it's the same one.
Being an advocate for states' rights doesn't mean she should drop her advocacy for Equal Protection. And when the Florida courts decided to try to change the election law in the middle of the election process, while one candidate was pursuing the very selective recounts of only those areas that might produce him some more votes, and while the panels in those areas were using highly capricious mind-reading-style methods... well, it's a good thing that there is such a thing as the SCOTUS to make sure that crap like that doesn't happen.
Justices have no business interfering with the electoral process
You're referring to the Florida state court, right? They were the ones looking to change the election rules, after the votes were cast, to favor a candidate from their politcal party. That's judges interfering with an election, and the US supreme court did exactly what they should have done: made the process adhere, evenly for all voters, to the existing laws of the state.
it's apalling
If the Florida judges had been allowed to change the rules in the middle of the election, then the thing you say you don't like would have happened. Now that would have been appalling.
in a position of importance such as the one Mrs. Connor holds should expect to resign when facing massive public outcry
So, someone who faces huge public outcry should quit? Like, say, Lincoln, for emancipating the slaves? There was a huge public outcry against that. Or the members of the supreme court that ruled that school segregation was unconstitional? There was a huge public outcry against that, too.
she and the 5 other justices should never EVER have interfered with the electoral process
It's a good thing they didn't then. They prevented other people from interfering with the process, though, and that's a good thing. That's not "partial justice," it's allowing even-handed justice by not allowing a candidate for office to pick and choose arbitrary places and standards by which he thinks he can mine for a few more votes. That's the sort of corruption that should shame someone out of public life. And that's what Gore was trying to do - scrape out a win by trying to twist the local recount in a way that would ignore some votes and count only those that would help him. Truly corrupt, so I'm sure you have a very low opinion of him, right?
And to the moderator who thinks I'm a troll, you're an idiot: you should know the difference between a strong opinion and a troll
Maybe the moderator has found, reasonably, that your "strong opinion" is actually irrational, rudely stated, and thus a troll.
Is that the same Sandra Day O'Connor that stopped the recount and helped Dubya get the cool job in 2000?
Are you really going to pretend that people don't know better than to swallow that line any more? Though the court finally stopped the selective, standards-less, designed-to-help-Gore style of zoned re-counting that was crawling along, it didn't in any way help Bush win. The multiple recounts that continued to go his way did that. And, of course, you're conveniently forgetting the several news organizations that went through every stinking ballot again, finding that, as the original counting indicated, he won.
What the court did was say that picking and choosing a couple of counties that Gore thought, counted in hanging-chad-mind-reading-mode, might get him a few more votes, was not up to equal-protection standards.
O'Conner, just like the others that found the capricious re-count process (not that there was a real process, per se, as it was requested by the losing side or conducted by panels dominated by that party) unacceptable, voted not for a president, but to demand an even-handed method. The result was to fall back on the existing, already applied method, which was the end of the show. The fact that no matter how other parties counted all of the state's votes (even using the Gore camp's most hoped-for looseness of standards, just as another what-if test) still further supported the existing outcome... that doesn't seem to register with certain people, mysteriously enough. Or maybe idealogically enough. Either way, seeing the very politically motivated Florida state court's nonsense rulings overturned was definitely appropriate. Sorry your guy didn't win, if it's really under your skin, but the court didn't change the votes, and didn't make the divining of dents in paper in different counties using different methods and counting of them unfair (quite the opposite). The only thing that would have changed the outcome would have been Gore getting his way, and only manually mind-reading badly handled ballots in a couple of counties - and if that's his idea of a fair way to treat all of the voters in Florida, then I'm quite glad that he didn't win.
Depending on how popular it is, they are then paid $5,00,000,000, or what ever, by a central organisation
Are you even hearing yourself? A central organization (sorry, I'm not a Brit, so I spell it with a "z") with the authority to handle purse strings, and with the authority to collect that money from someplace (taxes? from whom? do all people consume all entertainment in equal measure?) is called The Government. The crazy notion that there is some fixed-size pie out of which all entertainment funds would be paid to creators misses the entire point of creating something new in the first place. Without the prospect of being the person that brings some huge, wildly popular new creation to the audience, all you're talking about is just creating an army of mediocre pie-slice-takers.
Will people be happy being forced to fork out a few grand a year for products? They fork it out already voluntarily
But they fork it out according to their tastes and willingness to spend. "People" do not all spend the same on their entertainment. Not even counting the people who cheat and pay nothing, there are people who will actually go to the theatre and see the same movie more than once, or that actually buy DVDs for their kids... but then there are people who never go to the cinema, and have no kids. The difference in media consumption could vary by thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Do people get a say in what's produced?
They do already. If something is truly terrible, people won't pay for it. If someone has a reputation for continually producing terrible work, no one will risk investment to pay them to produce more. Or, if they do, that's their business.
How do we insure the producer is producing a quality product?
Why do we care? And, "quality" by what standard? That's the whole point. Some parts of population have a completely different sense of what "quality" is. For example, I just don't get Bollywood films. They aren't compelling to me in any way. Likewise, there are people who consider Merchant Ivory films so glacial as to be anesthetic. So, why introduce some ridiculous bureaucracy to weigh in on it? The audiences, critics, reviewers, bloggers, and word-of-mouth friends are vastly more efficient at moderating the quality and helping you decide when to spend money on entertainment.
strict auditing of the producers
Auditing by... the governemt? Auditing by some elitist guild? How about just stick with auditing by the audience? Why make everything more complex, add a compulsary component (essentially, if you don't pay your entertainment taxes, you go to jail?) and an entire additional layer of non-creative people who do not have a personal vested interest in seeing a particular film, for example, make it to the audiences...
but one which does eliminate the problem sellers we are now facing
Problem sellers? The problem is the non-buyers. If the people that claim they respect the artists actually did respect them by doing business with them in the way the artists have asked, we'd have no problem at all. Artists that go through big studios/companies have one approach, artists who use oddball indy-methods have another approach... no, the only problem here is that some people simply don't want to pay for entertainment, and know that, for now, they have a fairly good chance of not getting caught with their ripped copy of some DVD.
Regardless, I'd rather have the dull roar of back-and-forth lawsuits over pirating than have the government collect money from me, on pain of jail time, and then decide by committee which artists should get paid out of that year's creative pie fund. No thank you. I think watching the Cultural Revolution in China handle it that way was enough of a lesson for everyone, don't you?
Shutting down the Internet would have a similar economic impact of a large terrorist attack
Not if the reason it's being walled off is because it is a vector for attack in the first place. Obviously you have to fight some fires with fire. I think it's more likely that the big pipes from certain countries would be pulled, but the real problem would be people gaining control of the zombie armies and using them for worse than spam. Some of that is totally DNS-dependent, so it's worth thinking about.
And, yes, I know I spelled "grammar" "grammer." In a way, that actually makes my point all the more clearly. A typo (or even a habitual spelling mistake) isn't nearly as distracting in the context of an otherwise more careful effort at stringing together a sentence. I never bust on people for getting a word wrong. I bust on them for getting their thoughts wrong, or for thinking they're cool for having to make everyone work harder to read what they're saying. So, sorry for the typo! Carry on.
Slashdot Mirror
That "Peal Harbor" comment is meaningless without some context. The section of the document in question is talking about the obvious need to alter the US military's equipment, budget, training, operations... essentially everything. With the Cold War over, and the threat of any other large army marching, literally, upon allied interests (with the possible exception of China), untold billions of defense dollars now need to spent on completely different priorities. This was true back in 2000, and it's even more true now.
The document you're quoting says that this change has to take place in order to allow the US military to retain its role of being superior to any threat it has to contend with. If the military's attitude were any different, you'd have to wonder who was running the show. The document suggests that the "process of transformation" into a more efficient and appropriate form "is going to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor."
Nobody can read into this some dark design to cause or embrace such an event. The comment reads like any other written by anyone with any sense of history. Large, exepensive projects run by governments take a long time, unless some sense of urgency changes the priorities. Pearl Harbor was one such. Earthquakes in large west coast cities are another example (causing a huge change in standards, emergency readiness, building codes, etc). Our space program in the 1960's only got the attention and funding it deserved (perhaps even more so) because of the Soviet space program's obvious progress (Sputnik, etc). Saying that an inevitable and appropriate reconfiguration of our military is going to be accelerated if some catastrophic defense-related event takes place is, well, stating the obvious.
A more interesting line of inquiry might involve wondering why such changes weren't accelerated earlier (say, during the Clinton administration) when we had our naval vessel attacked, watched our embassies attacked, saw under-manned special forces in Somalia attacked, and watched entities like the Taliban taking over places like Afghanistan. Obviously, for the congress (which actually controls the purse strings), those incremental things weren't catalytic enough. So, the author of the document you quote was exactly correct: people don't wake up and re-evaluate how they're preparing for some things until they get a scare. Ask anyone in a neighborhood that's just had a house fire how many of them are checking or replacing smoke detectors, or lining up new insurance and household escape plans for their kids. Ask the people in Indonesia or Sri Lanka how many of them have now (post-tsunami) altered their ideas about where it's reasonable to build cities of wooden huts on the beach. It's not like the concept of that risk wasn't there - it was. Just like the risk of large-scale terrorism was plainly obvious before we geared up to do anything about after 9-11.
Anyone with half a clue expected another terrorist attack. Markets may adjust after a period of irrationality- it didn't take that terribly long after 9/11. Since the UK has been used to terrorism, they may get over this even faster.
I agree. It's just that for some people and sectors, this is a corrosive event that will have a ripple effect.
However what are the consequences of Karl's outing of Plame now being public knowledge? How will this affect relations with the intelligence community?
First, the indications are that Rove's interviews with the reporters in question were not when those reporters gathered Plame's identity. She was widely known to work for the CIA, so it's not like this was actually news at the time. More importantly, the intelligence community is hardly a homogenous entity (though it's more more tightly integrated now than it was even a couple of years ago). I know people in this line of work, here in the DC area, and they laugh about the whole Plame affair as being pretty much a tempest in a teapot. They find that her husband's political wranglings were pretty much out of line if he had any interest in keeping her out of the fray, and note that people like her are scarecly covert in the first place. The administration's relationship with the intel people is better than that of the previous administration, mostly because there is now a more clearly defined mission, complete with adequate funding to operate, and a mandate to actually hire and retain good people (rather than purge them and dumb it down, which was happeneing under the last team, and is one of the reasons we've had poor intel for the last 10 years - a situation which is slowly reversing itself).
You do of course realize that the money did not vanish? It simply went to those that were short on the stocks. Money never vanished it only changes hands.
I should have been clearer. The devaluation of stocks is only a part of it. The slowdown in the economy in general, and disruption of even just local businesses and operations in London alone, will have a wide ripple effect. Madrid had the same problem, but London's much more involved in the wider world economy.
Tell you what. Just read some of Al Queda's own press material. They explicitly refer to democracy as "evil," and refer to elections (such as those that most of the people in Iraq vigorously embraced) as contrary to Islam - making anyone who participates in them a heretic and worthy of death, blah blah.
Of course this is not the view of the average person in that part of the world. It's the mantra of the crazies that are working for groups like Al Queda, and it's the rhetoric they use to justify slaughtering civilians. Do you really think that foreigners (from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia) killing young, native Iraqi police recruits or health care workers in Iraq is about what "we" have done to "them" for the last 100 years? They are not preaching self-determination for the people in the Arab world. They are preaching the viritues of a thuggish, mysogonistic theocracy that kills women for sending their daughters school (lest they learn to think on their own). See the policies of those fine fellows and Al Queda supporters, the Taliban, for some details on how they think humanity should carry on, day to day. That philosophy is entirely antithetical to liberty, democracy, and an open culture. Freedom isn't a "gambit," it's the best way for people to live. Slaughtering people that stand up for it requires no further commentary, as it's plain what those thugs want: chaos, and a brutal environment in which their medeival way of life can come back from the grave. What they want are sheep, and sure as hell not people (including women! gasp!) who flock to the polls to elect their own government.
... in fact, the manifesto of the Project for the New American Century ... states they would need "a new Pearl Harbour
Well, see, you're going to sound like much less of a kook if you don't just make stuff up. You can go right here and read their 'manifesto' all you want. You'll notice the complete lack of anything even vaguely like what you're talking about, either philosophically, stragecially, or tactically. I find particulary ironic that even as you describe another party as lying "to the people" for their own good, you're the one fabricating things to try to score a rhetorical point, hoping that your audience doesn't know how to use Google. Pretty insulting, and indicative of your condescending posture (which includes willingness to use nearly childish deceit in a transparent attempt to pursuade the intellectually lazy). If you want to talk about who is dependent on who, I'd suggest that we bring up the issue of which parties will seem completely irrelevent unless they can manufacture and nurse along the myth of some evil conspiracy against which they can bravely rebel. Or, we can focus on that actual evil acts of people who blow up civilians on trains, and think about what they represent.
Tough, very tough!
It is indeed. That we haven't had a similar attack in the US yet is part luck, part vigilance, and partly, no doubt, the bad guys biding their time until they can rig up something dramatic enough to really stoke up Al Jazeera when it happens.
I'm certain it's going to happen in the US again, just like it will probably happen in Italy, Denmark, and elsewhere.
As for how (or whether) this distracts from the G8 agenda... remember: it's exactly the G8 agenda that these guys hate. They're not distracting from the agenda, they're showing their disdain for it. They hate the notion of wealthy western countries using their resources to lift poor countries up and back democracy. These punks only thrive where people are miserable and vulnerable to their medieval way of looking at things.
Now, well the terrorists are playing right into the hands of George Bush!
Do you even hear yourself? If this attack, and the ones in Madrid, and Africa, on our naval vessel, and in Bali, and in New York and Washington had never happened, then we wouldn't have any issues in the first place. This only "plays" into "Bush's hands" in the sense that it demonstrates exactly what we're up against, and how important it is that we keep monsters like the people that did this in check. Several analysts are pointing out that London's fate here may in part be because it's now much harder for terrorists to operate in the U.S.
I really feel for the poor bastards directly impacted by this in London, but it's really an attack on everything democratic, civilized, and open. If you can't see that, then you are playing right into Al Queda's hands.
I may be terribly cynical, but the first thing I thought was:
1. This distracts the world from Karl's outing the CIA agent.
If that's the first thing you though, then you're in pretty bad shape. Do you think "the world" gives a rat's ass about Valerie Plame's job at the CIA and which reporter(s) knew about it? It sure as hell isn't the sort of issue that makes it much past the US talking head circles in terms of real import.
Regardless, the first thing I thought was that the local terrorist cell(s) that did this learned a lot from their last attempt in Madrid, and got their timing better. Further, that they've joined philosophical sides with the people who think smashing out the windows at a Starbucks whenever there's a "global" summit in town will somehow make things better for poor people and for bored, anarchist-minded college students without a clue. And whatever people think about this event, where they're really going to feel it is in their wallet. The stock markets across the world just took a huge hit, and that portion of the economy that depends upon a smoothly operating London has ground to a halt. This will cost billions upon billions of dollars, and the people that think that not enough is being done for the poor should understand that a huge amount of resources just evaporated in several clouds of smoke, courtesy of Islamist fundamentalist wack jobs (note that an Al Queda cell is already claiming responsibility for this event).
I mean, I can't personally fly an F-16 or kill aliens, so that's fun to do in 3D on my computer, with or without natural language interfaces (though the more the merrier).
But get tangled up in the verbal sniping between two people in a failing marriage? That's what visiting the in-laws is for. And not only is it in 3D, the personal safety options are turned off, and the frying pans feel completely real.
I use a simple test. Is some man-made artifact meant to provoke emotion in me? If so, it is art.
Hmmm. But what if it doesn't provoke emotion? What if it's meant to appeal to your rationality, but do so in an unexpected way? Or, what if, no matter how it's intended, it simply fails to connect in any way? Or, what if it's not all intended to provoke, but does anyway? My point is, art is entirely on the consumption/audience side. A good artist can improve the odds of that happening by knowing something about the audience and understanding the likely flavor of human psyche to which he/she is speaking... but that's no guarantee that the work will be seen as art. Here's one of my simple tests: if someone has to explain it to you, it's failed as art.
There's just no one big bucket called "programming." To the extent that one's code interacts with, or communicates to a user, there's ample room for an artful implementation. Especially when the code's purpose is, through that interaction, to inform or pursuade. Yes, that's getting into "content" rather that programming, but the line between those is very, very fuzzy, especially in web development.
That being said, I think there's a certain intrinsic beauty to the way that I indent my subroutines.
Yarrr, kamrater. Nu när en av oss går på plankan, går hela besättningen till Davy Jones skåp. Yarrrr."
Well, cool! As a product of suburban America, but built largely of Scandiavian DNA, I'm grateful for a culture injection.
which is a completely novel argument
But the courts, in particular the circuit and supreme courts, are like factories for novel arguments. That's sort of their jobs, really - to confront the awkward stuff, and find a way that the Constitution speaks to (or about) it. Certainly one could say the same thing about Roe v. Wade. That was a ruling that really needed to be made, and the use of the "privacy" angle would certainly be considered novel. I've got no problem with novel arguments as long as they're rational.
don't the different spoilage rates from different systems also violate equal protection
No, because the causes of the spoilage rate aren't found in the actions of the elections officials (in the way that chad-divining were, for example). You're confusing correlation with causation. If 100 voters in one polling place hose up their ballots, there's no equal protection angle on it when 200 voters hose up their ballots in the next zip code. If the procedures in both those places were run by the same authorities, and there was a reasonable understanding that people were, through the actions of the electoral officials, going to all be saved from low-IQ card-handling mistakes, then different results at different polls would be a reasonably challengable issue. But not when we're talking about more voters in one district who half-way punch out three choices for president than do the voters in another district.
spoilage rates are a lot higher for black voters than for white voters. Your 'weather' rains a little harder on people who vote Democrat.
Again, correlation vs. causation. That, or I'm just being polite and not saying that people inclined to vote Democrat are for some reason less able to think through the complexities of using the polling equipment. I mean, I know that Democratic party affiliation tends to hand in hand with wanting government to do things for you, but surely even that stops at having government look over your shoulder while you're voting to make sure you don't make mutually exclusive votes. Or that you can read, for example.
That aspect of the decision has been widely criticized, but you didn't know about it
Actually, I have read the entire decision, and am aware of that statement. That does not stop a future court, confronted with exactly the same circumstances, from considering how this event was handled. But it probably was very important for the court to indicate that they were responding to the specifics of the challenge at hand (the way that the counting was brought up by the Gore camp, and administered, moving-target-style by the local officials, and then subjected to changing rules by the state court).
Of course, you still felt qualified to heap scorn on those who had problems with the decision.
Follow the thread back. The person to whom I first responded set the scorn tone (aimed at O'Conner). I replied mildly in kind to the person who posted the comment, and who seemed quite confused over whether or not somehow O'Conner "helped get Dubya the cool job." That demanded first, a reminder that the votes involved were objectively clear on who won, and that second, if there was a round of judicial politicking, it was to be found in the Florida courts, with the SCOTUS as an appropriate check-and-balance.
Our rights as consumers are dying.
But you've never had the right to copyright infringement. And, the typical use of the word "consumer" includes that person's participation in a commercial relationship with the provider of the goods and services in question. Sneaking off with a copy of a movie doesn't make you a consumer. It makes you someone who's too cheap to pay for the movie. Since it's rampant, the only thing dying is the artist's hope of actually seeing a little compensation for your enjoyment of her work. Does your idea of "fair use" include making that artist your personal little entertainment slave?
Yarrr, maties... now when one of us walks the plank, the whole crew goes to Davy Jones' locker. Yarrrr.
Or, however that would go in Swedish.
I ahem your ahem.
Imposing a new standard would be "legislating from the bench".
Which is exactly what the Florida supreme court tried to do. Determining voter intent using different mechanisms/standards by different reviewers is absolutely unduly harmful - to the voters, first of all.
How can counting votes do harm to one candidate in an election?
When the "counting" is being done in non-standard ways in very select area chosen specifically because of a more likely outcome, and with every intention of not mining for more mis-counted or undercounted votes in those areas that would likely have eclipsed them. That's how.
How can it be unfair for different counties to have different methods to determine voter intent, but fair for different counties to have different spoilage rates?
The spoilage rate is like the weather - it just happens, but does so because of a lot of variables. It depends on the acts of a large mass of people, and their demographic, experience, intelligence, education, and (it would seem) political orientation seem to have an impact on how capable they are of actually voting. The residents of each county vote into office the people that run their elections. If a county's priorities don't include upgrading their election facilities, that's a local political issue. But different methods of determining voter intent from one county to the next wasn't even the issue. There were different methods of determining voter intent from one counting table to the next in the same county. In most cases, there were no specific guidelines on determining intent, and that was part of the problem. So having the Florida court step in and try to invent some standards after the fact... not reasonable. The state already had a viable way to cast and count ballots, and the losing party didn't like the results. The amiguity in the intent area was simply a loophole through which they tried to drive the election, and that effort failed, as it should have.
If the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore was so great, then why didn't it set precedent?
What do you mean? All judgements set a precedent. It's a question of whether (especially in a very specific case like the one in Florida at that time) there's another similar case that would hinge on that precedent. Nothing like that has come up again since, so it's a non-issue, so far. That's like asking why the recent Connecticut city's taking of private property didn't set a precedent. It hasn't been used as such yet, but you know it will be. The odds of Bush v. Gore being used as precedent are pretty slim, because that exact set of circumstances is very unlikely to occur again, with the same challenges, the same state supreme court action, etc.
But that in no way excuses the Supreme Court from interfering in a decision clearly designated as a matter for the House of Representatives in the Constitution
The SCOTUS didn't interfere with Congressional power in any way. Congress can still act as they see fit once each state's electors say their piece. This was all very upstream from that part of the process.
Bush v. Gore was complete and utter politics
You're right there, but only because that was forced by the Gore team's actions. They made the politcal decision to try selective vote counting, and then they took their issues to a highly politicized state court. The matter was inately political before it ever got that far up the food chain.
It's not about who won - it's about how it happened. Rule of law, and all that
Right you are. And when one side of the equation decided to see just how much wiggle room there was in Florida's half-baked law, it escalated. The Florida court should have stopped that ridiculous selective vote-finding excursion right in its tracks, but they instead made the thing more political by appearing to concoct the very sorts of twists and turns that the Florida legislature should have done. But of course the legislature had no role to play - the election had already taken place.
If it's the Sandra Day O'Connor who would normally advocate restoration of states' rights in the new Federalist manner, but chose to override the Florida State Supreme Court in the matter, then I think it's the same one.
Being an advocate for states' rights doesn't mean she should drop her advocacy for Equal Protection. And when the Florida courts decided to try to change the election law in the middle of the election process, while one candidate was pursuing the very selective recounts of only those areas that might produce him some more votes, and while the panels in those areas were using highly capricious mind-reading-style methods... well, it's a good thing that there is such a thing as the SCOTUS to make sure that crap like that doesn't happen.
Justices have no business interfering with the electoral process
You're referring to the Florida state court, right? They were the ones looking to change the election rules, after the votes were cast, to favor a candidate from their politcal party. That's judges interfering with an election, and the US supreme court did exactly what they should have done: made the process adhere, evenly for all voters, to the existing laws of the state.
it's apalling
If the Florida judges had been allowed to change the rules in the middle of the election, then the thing you say you don't like would have happened. Now that would have been appalling.
in a position of importance such as the one Mrs. Connor holds should expect to resign when facing massive public outcry
So, someone who faces huge public outcry should quit? Like, say, Lincoln, for emancipating the slaves? There was a huge public outcry against that. Or the members of the supreme court that ruled that school segregation was unconstitional? There was a huge public outcry against that, too.
she and the 5 other justices should never EVER have interfered with the electoral process
It's a good thing they didn't then. They prevented other people from interfering with the process, though, and that's a good thing. That's not "partial justice," it's allowing even-handed justice by not allowing a candidate for office to pick and choose arbitrary places and standards by which he thinks he can mine for a few more votes. That's the sort of corruption that should shame someone out of public life. And that's what Gore was trying to do - scrape out a win by trying to twist the local recount in a way that would ignore some votes and count only those that would help him. Truly corrupt, so I'm sure you have a very low opinion of him, right?
And to the moderator who thinks I'm a troll, you're an idiot: you should know the difference between a strong opinion and a troll
Maybe the moderator has found, reasonably, that your "strong opinion" is actually irrational, rudely stated, and thus a troll.
Is that the same Sandra Day O'Connor that stopped the recount and helped Dubya get the cool job in 2000?
Are you really going to pretend that people don't know better than to swallow that line any more? Though the court finally stopped the selective, standards-less, designed-to-help-Gore style of zoned re-counting that was crawling along, it didn't in any way help Bush win. The multiple recounts that continued to go his way did that. And, of course, you're conveniently forgetting the several news organizations that went through every stinking ballot again, finding that, as the original counting indicated, he won.
What the court did was say that picking and choosing a couple of counties that Gore thought, counted in hanging-chad-mind-reading-mode, might get him a few more votes, was not up to equal-protection standards.
O'Conner, just like the others that found the capricious re-count process (not that there was a real process, per se, as it was requested by the losing side or conducted by panels dominated by that party) unacceptable, voted not for a president, but to demand an even-handed method. The result was to fall back on the existing, already applied method, which was the end of the show. The fact that no matter how other parties counted all of the state's votes (even using the Gore camp's most hoped-for looseness of standards, just as another what-if test) still further supported the existing outcome... that doesn't seem to register with certain people, mysteriously enough. Or maybe idealogically enough. Either way, seeing the very politically motivated Florida state court's nonsense rulings overturned was definitely appropriate. Sorry your guy didn't win, if it's really under your skin, but the court didn't change the votes, and didn't make the divining of dents in paper in different counties using different methods and counting of them unfair (quite the opposite). The only thing that would have changed the outcome would have been Gore getting his way, and only manually mind-reading badly handled ballots in a couple of counties - and if that's his idea of a fair way to treat all of the voters in Florida, then I'm quite glad that he didn't win.
Depending on how popular it is, they are then paid $5,00,000,000, or what ever, by a central organisation
Are you even hearing yourself? A central organization (sorry, I'm not a Brit, so I spell it with a "z") with the authority to handle purse strings, and with the authority to collect that money from someplace (taxes? from whom? do all people consume all entertainment in equal measure?) is called The Government. The crazy notion that there is some fixed-size pie out of which all entertainment funds would be paid to creators misses the entire point of creating something new in the first place. Without the prospect of being the person that brings some huge, wildly popular new creation to the audience, all you're talking about is just creating an army of mediocre pie-slice-takers.
Will people be happy being forced to fork out a few grand a year for products? They fork it out already voluntarily
But they fork it out according to their tastes and willingness to spend. "People" do not all spend the same on their entertainment. Not even counting the people who cheat and pay nothing, there are people who will actually go to the theatre and see the same movie more than once, or that actually buy DVDs for their kids... but then there are people who never go to the cinema, and have no kids. The difference in media consumption could vary by thousands upon thousands of dollars.
Do people get a say in what's produced?
They do already. If something is truly terrible, people won't pay for it. If someone has a reputation for continually producing terrible work, no one will risk investment to pay them to produce more. Or, if they do, that's their business.
How do we insure the producer is producing a quality product?
Why do we care? And, "quality" by what standard? That's the whole point. Some parts of population have a completely different sense of what "quality" is. For example, I just don't get Bollywood films. They aren't compelling to me in any way. Likewise, there are people who consider Merchant Ivory films so glacial as to be anesthetic. So, why introduce some ridiculous bureaucracy to weigh in on it? The audiences, critics, reviewers, bloggers, and word-of-mouth friends are vastly more efficient at moderating the quality and helping you decide when to spend money on entertainment.
strict auditing of the producers
Auditing by... the governemt? Auditing by some elitist guild? How about just stick with auditing by the audience? Why make everything more complex, add a compulsary component (essentially, if you don't pay your entertainment taxes, you go to jail?) and an entire additional layer of non-creative people who do not have a personal vested interest in seeing a particular film, for example, make it to the audiences...
but one which does eliminate the problem sellers we are now facing
Problem sellers? The problem is the non-buyers. If the people that claim they respect the artists actually did respect them by doing business with them in the way the artists have asked, we'd have no problem at all. Artists that go through big studios/companies have one approach, artists who use oddball indy-methods have another approach... no, the only problem here is that some people simply don't want to pay for entertainment, and know that, for now, they have a fairly good chance of not getting caught with their ripped copy of some DVD.
Regardless, I'd rather have the dull roar of back-and-forth lawsuits over pirating than have the government collect money from me, on pain of jail time, and then decide by committee which artists should get paid out of that year's creative pie fund. No thank you. I think watching the Cultural Revolution in China handle it that way was enough of a lesson for everyone, don't you?
Ok, so my sarcasm is being a little misunderstood, here. I think the GP is correct, and I'm bitching because no one else does. *sigh*
Shutting down the Internet would have a similar economic impact of a large terrorist attack
Not if the reason it's being walled off is because it is a vector for attack in the first place. Obviously you have to fight some fires with fire. I think it's more likely that the big pipes from certain countries would be pulled, but the real problem would be people gaining control of the zombie armies and using them for worse than spam. Some of that is totally DNS-dependent, so it's worth thinking about.
You are correct, correct, correct. Thank you. And just look at all of the supporting mods you're (not) getting. I'm shocked, shocked I tell you!
And, yes, I know I spelled "grammar" "grammer." In a way, that actually makes my point all the more clearly. A typo (or even a habitual spelling mistake) isn't nearly as distracting in the context of an otherwise more careful effort at stringing together a sentence. I never bust on people for getting a word wrong. I bust on them for getting their thoughts wrong, or for thinking they're cool for having to make everyone work harder to read what they're saying. So, sorry for the typo! Carry on.