That's what religion is for. Didn't you read my post?
The universe _is_. It always has been.
Not according to modern scientific belief. See "Big Bang Theory". That is when the universe began. Even Einstein had to admit that the Universe is neither static or eternal.
Not according to religious thought. See Genesis. That is when it all began.
The core of religious belief is that God created the heavens and the Earth.
The core of science is to figure out how.
I've come across countless people who will say things like "Science can't explain X, but religion can: God did it!" Perhaps this is just a minority - what do the majority believe then, if they don't believe in a God that created the Universe?
From HERE:
Ten years later, Alexander Friedmann, a Russian cosmologist and mathematician, derived the Friedmann equations from Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity, showing that the universe might be expanding in contrast to the static universe model advocated by Einstein.[3] In 1924, Edwin Hubble's measurement of the great distance to the nearest spiral nebulae showed that these systems were indeed other galaxies. Independently deriving Friedmann's equations in 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, predicted that the recession of the nebulae was due to the expansion of the universe.[4] In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the universe began as a simple "primeval atom", perhaps echoing previous speculations about the cosmic egg origin of the universe. So it was a Catholic Priest that came up with the "Big Bang Theory". Don't say that science and religion are mutually exclusive. Scientists ask how. Religion asks why.
There's a lot of evidence that drug abusers will simply switch drugs when their drug of choice becomes unavailable.
Really? Link please. According to the second TFA listed, that has not been the case:
One of the concerns with a cocaine vaccine is that once inoculated against a cocaine high, determined users will seek other drugs. But Haney's subjects did not do that.
"On the outside, they were using less cocaine. They just stopped. None of them switched to another drug of abuse."
I have no issue with both sides being taught in schools, as long as we make sure that only the one that conforms to the scientific method gets called science. Intelligent design can go in a religion or philosophy class.
I don't know if I would even go that far. All most Christians want is that the theory of evolution be taught as a theory. As a Christian student, evolution fascinated me. I always felt that a slow evolution of species was much more a miracle than God simply saying "let there be X... and there was". I always wanted to know what happened when (and before... God is timeless after all) God said what he said, and evolution provided that to me. But too many science teachers wannabe scientists (like here on/.) use evolutional theory as proof that God doesn't exist. I see it as proof that God DOES exist as the odds of each evolutionary step happening as it does are so slim to be qualified as a miracle, IMHO.
So I have nothing against the theory of evolution being taught as long as it's taught as a theory. My reasoning for that is nothing religious, but because sometimes, science is wrong. Even Einstein rejected the idea of the "Big Bang" as he rejected the idea of an expanding universe. He told Georges Lemaître (a Catholic Priest, btw) "Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.". Einstein, of course, had to revise his theories once Hubble proved that the Universe was expanding.
My point is that science evolves just like anything else. What is "fact" today is backward-thinking-junk-science tomorrow. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. Evolution has about as much to do with disproving religion as the Big Bang, and I don't want it being taught as such. Teaching Darwin is fine. Teaching Darwin as a counter to religion is just wrong.
Sheesh, if that's the case it's not surprising there's a Republican presidential candidate who doesn't accept the idea of Evolution. It wasn't a jibe at Republicans. Uh, yeah it was. Otherwise, you wouldn't have said, Republicans. Let's see what Bush has to say about whether evolution should be taught in schools:
"Both sides ought to be properly taught . . . so people can understand what the debate is about," he said, according to an official transcript of the session. Bush added: "Part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought. . . . You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes." I guess if people want to see a view other than your own, then they must be wrong.
The best health care system in the world is worthless if no one can afford to get treated.
No one in the US goes without treatment. Hell, even illegal aliens get treated. It may bankrupt you, but if you are in need of treatment in the US, you will get treated.
The video then shows iTunes digital album gift cards and a cell phone, for which you can buy Christmas-themed ring tones. God bless us, every one. If someone buys me friggin ringtones for Christmas, I'm gonna be PISSED! Save your money and make me card made from macaroni!
Wow an expensive sports car. What will they think of next.
I see it as an expensive electric car. At least that's how GM is marketing it. "See, we're green. We are releasing an electric car and it's cool!" It's going to be (one of) the first one(s) out, and it's priced out of reach for 99.99% of the population.
GM sux! Want to make a difference? How about releasing an electric car that normal people can afford, you douchebags!
Uhm, you contradicted yourself. If you sold back the energy to the Grid because that was the most effecient and then used the Grid during the day to charge your car then the net effect your car would have on CO2 emmisions when you factor in the Solar panels would ne None, Zero, Zip, Zilch.
I'm not thinking CO2. I'm thinking cash. If you can sell energy back all day (assuming your panels can power your AC, computers, TV so the wife can watch soaps and so and still have energy to spare), you will make more than what it will cost to buy it back in the evening. Buy low, sell high! Batteries are horrible for the environment (again, not talking CO2, but dumping battery acid into a landfill or expending more energy to somehow recapture it) expensive to buy, and dispose of, and inefficient.
As for CO2, you're driving an electric car... you're good. I'm also assuming that by the time these things become available, we'll be powered by nuclear or some other non-CO2 producing form of generation. Personally, I don't really care about C02 and don't buy into the whole man-made global warming scare. That's a different discussion, however. I'm in it because I like the idea of no longer paying terrorist supporting and anti-American countries huge amounts of money so they can repress their populations and finance their little campaigns against us. So I share the same goals as GW alarmists, but for different reasons.
However, you do have a point. If large numbers of people buy electric cars, large numbers of people are going to be charging them at night. This means that demand will be higher for night, making electricity more expensive. This will negate my whole dollars and sense thing (misspelling intentional). I still don't know if the differential will be enough to cover the cost of batteries, however. Hopefully, by the time electric cars become a reality, there will be a much better infrastructure to support them, such as plug-in parking at work, power-parking meter style charging stations (put in a dollar worth of quarters and plug your car in while you park it there), battery exchange stations and maybe even putting solar panels on your car to charge it up while you are at work, parked in the sun.
I think this is a case of "buy it, and they will build it!
From that post:
Obviously, the energy needs to be stored in batteries in your garage so it can be available for when you need it at night. I figured you could figure this out for yourself though.
Another way to store the energy is to convert it to Hydrogen. It is less effecient but Hydrogen cars can get better range. If you have enough excess energy during the day to store it, when demand is high and it cost the most, wouldn't it be better to sell that back to the grid at the higher price and then buy it back during the non-peak hours of the evening when electricity is cheapest? Also, how much energy is lost by storing it in batteries? How long do these batteries last and what is the replacement cost? What is the environmental impact from disposing all these batteries from all these homes? How safe are these batteries (in the past 12 years, I've seen UPS's blow up three times in server rooms, filling the entire building with toxic fumes)? Even hydrogen is not a good idea as hydrogen is explosive, very inefficient to produce, nearly impossible to store and the fuel cell equipment needed to convert it back to electricity is prohibitively expensive.
install solar panels on your roof of your garage and use that juice to charge the car overnight.
Uh, Solar panels, by design, don't work at night. Maybe you should invent the Lunar panel, but even that will only work at maximum efficiency for a few nights per month.
Hey dingo brain... The point is that regardless of performance, if you are going 300 miles and you only use one gallon of gas, then you're doing much better than a conventional gas powered automobile Even if you want to be a total bean counter and factor in the cost of the electricity used to charge the batteries enough to make that 300 mile trip (which is stupid in my opinion) the fact is you will pollute less and use far fewer resources. Quit being such an arse ya bugger.
Does this mean I can put ten gallons in the tank and drive from Miami to LA without refueling? No? Then the 300 MPG figure is misleading to the point of being fraudulent. I don't care if it gets a "true" 250 MPG, saying it gets 300 is a lie if you can't go 3000 miles on 10 gallons.
You sound like the classic case of a proletariat. Just do what everyone tells you, even if it is stupid, and you know it's wrong.
First, welcome to the real world.
Second, let's turn your statement around: Just do whatever you think is best, regardless of what the rules are, because you know what is right and everyone else that disagrees with you is stupid.
Is that the attitude you take at work, on the highways and in your home? We have rules for a reason. Your thinking that they are stupid does not mean it's OK to disobey them. I think it's stupid that I have to wait a red light when there is no traffic coming. Does that mean I should be free to run it? If you have a problem with a rule, challenge the rule, not the person whose job it is to enforce those rules.
In this case, the student should have stopped using Firefox, started using the tools that he was supposed to be using, and then went to the principal or whoever and challenged the use of IE over Firefox.
Its too bad that we don't have information as to whether or not the student actually installed firefox, or if they just ran something that was already installed. All we know is that it was running on a windows system (based on it having a ".exe" extension). I'd like to be able to assume that the IT person at said school was smart enough to set up the windows boxes to keep people from being able to just install any application willy-nilly, but of course we cannot make that assumption.
So really, due to the lack of good information in this case, the answers to your questions don't really apply. We could of course make some fun assumptions about how their IT is run at that school, and decide based on that, but that wouldn't likely help in this case.
True, if the student was caught installing FireFox and stopped when told. Unfortunately, we don't know if the student installed it or not. Either way, when the teacher said, "don't use that" the student should have stopped. I guess it would have been OK for the student to say, "Well, OK, but this is better, but if you want us using IE, I'll use IE." What is really the point here is that the teacher said, "don't use that" and the student said, "I think this is better, so I'm going to keep using it, regardless of what you say."
As to the machine not being sufficiently locked down to prevent unauthorized apps from being installed, well that's a problem between the teacher and the IT dept. No matter how locked down something is, there are ways around it. At some point we have to say that the rules must be followed, regardless if it is possible to do something or not. Securing the PC just makes the teacher's job easier, but it's not the responsibility of the IT department to run the class.
You're right. The child should have been allowed to install whatever he wanted on his... I mean, the school's computer. The teacher, acting as a representative of the school district has no right telling students what they can and can't do to school property. If this kid wanted to install the Adult-porn-finder search bar, that should have been allowed. If the student wanted to format the drive and leave it at a blinking "Press F1 to continue", that's his right. These student's should be allowed to jump around and fling shit all over their monitors if that is what they desire. Teacher's have no business running the classrooms! What was I thinking?!!? That's what the Nazi's did!
In the military, A commanding officer can order you to drop your pants and shoot yourself in the left testicle too but you have the right to disobey. Especially if the order is stupid, immoral, without merit or could get you into trouble. On always has the right to disobey when the authority figure is a moron.. such is the case here.
Blowing off a testicle would be considered an unlawful order. Only using the approved browser is quite allowed by the rules. What if the kid wanted to user Opera? How about if the kid wanted to use IE, but with that nifty share ware search toolbar he got for free when he installed Kazaa, which also has a browser of sorts. Where do we draw the line. Are you implying that the students should be allowed to install whatever they want, provided that they think it is better than what is on there?
his is an apology for authoritarianism - assuming innocence on the part of authority, and granting benefits of doubt to their actions while also itemising possible hypothitical infractions by the accused.
Uh, no. I expect Authority to be... well, in charge. Imagine that. Should the students be allowed to install and run anything they want on school computers? Can you do that at YOUR job?
That is how fascism is apologised.
Blow it out your ass. Just because someone is in charge, in this case a teacher in charge of the classroom, doesn't mean that the school is fascist.
First, the teacher was wrong for not knowing what FireFox (FoxFire) is. Any teacher with a computer in the classroom should have AT LEAST that level of knowledge.
Second, the teacher was right in assigning detention. The teacher is in charge and has the right to tell the students what they can and can't run on school computers. If a student is running an application and the teacher tells the student to close it, the student needs to close it, period, end of story. It's no different in the real world. If an IT director tells you shut down Cain&Able, you can get fired if you don't. It doesn't matter that the IT director doesn't know what Cain&Able is.
But (as a AC posted in response to a sibling of your comment), the police can't just ask a private citizen (or even a P.I.) to illegally wiretap a phone just because they couldn't get a warrant. The person who placed said wiretap could(should) still face charges, and by all decent standards the "evidence" should be tossed as well (IANAL, YMMV)
Sorry, AC's are below my threshold.
Charges? For what? Is there a law that says that telco's can't tap a line. For that matter what is the penalty for illegally obtaining evidence? IANAL either, but from what I gather, the penalty is that the evidence can't be used in a criminal case. Since the government's goal is espionage, not conviction, I don't see what the cost is.
simply stated if you care about any of your rights it's important. Fourth Amendment:...
While the executive branch is more at fault for strong arming the telecos I don't think the public is well served by granting amnesty for ignoring the law.
That would be an excellent point if the Bill of Rights dealt with what companies can and can not do. Unfortunately, it only deals with government. Citizens and corporations are not bound by the BoR.
So, sorry to say it, but if telco's freely give information they own to the feds without a warrant, then no law has been broken.
"Urban operations?" Are they planning to use a 12000lb chemical laser for crowd control? Shit, I guess they're expecting a lot of people to start misbehaving soon.
Crowd control? No.
The AC130 has several weapons ranging from a 105mm canon down to a M240 machine gun. However, none of these weapons are very good in urban environments as they tend to break not just the target, but everything around it. This weapon is much better for urban warfare as it only destroys the target (and maybe that on the ground about a meter behind the target) only. There is no "splash damage" to the surrounding buildings, vehicles or people.
So, if anything this is the exact opposite of crowd control as it would do little good against a large area target, such as a crowd.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Why should there be any need for a creation?
That's what religion is for. Didn't you read my post?
The universe _is_. It always has been.
Not according to modern scientific belief. See "Big Bang Theory". That is when the universe began. Even Einstein had to admit that the Universe is neither static or eternal.
Not according to religious thought. See Genesis. That is when it all began.
The core of religious belief is that God created the heavens and the Earth.
The core of science is to figure out how.
I've come across countless people who will say things like "Science can't explain X, but religion can: God did it!" Perhaps this is just a minority - what do the majority believe then, if they don't believe in a God that created the Universe?
From HERE: Ten years later, Alexander Friedmann, a Russian cosmologist and mathematician, derived the Friedmann equations from Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity, showing that the universe might be expanding in contrast to the static universe model advocated by Einstein.[3] In 1924, Edwin Hubble's measurement of the great distance to the nearest spiral nebulae showed that these systems were indeed other galaxies. Independently deriving Friedmann's equations in 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, predicted that the recession of the nebulae was due to the expansion of the universe.[4] In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the universe began as a simple "primeval atom", perhaps echoing previous speculations about the cosmic egg origin of the universe. So it was a Catholic Priest that came up with the "Big Bang Theory". Don't say that science and religion are mutually exclusive. Scientists ask how. Religion asks why.
Really? Link please. According to the second TFA listed, that has not been the case: One of the concerns with a cocaine vaccine is that once inoculated against a cocaine high, determined users will seek other drugs. But Haney's subjects did not do that.
"On the outside, they were using less cocaine. They just stopped. None of them switched to another drug of abuse."
I have no issue with both sides being taught in schools, as long as we make sure that only the one that conforms to the scientific method gets called science. Intelligent design can go in a religion or philosophy class.
/.) use evolutional theory as proof that God doesn't exist. I see it as proof that God DOES exist as the odds of each evolutionary step happening as it does are so slim to be qualified as a miracle, IMHO.
I don't know if I would even go that far. All most Christians want is that the theory of evolution be taught as a theory. As a Christian student, evolution fascinated me. I always felt that a slow evolution of species was much more a miracle than God simply saying "let there be X... and there was". I always wanted to know what happened when (and before... God is timeless after all) God said what he said, and evolution provided that to me. But too many science teachers wannabe scientists (like here on
So I have nothing against the theory of evolution being taught as long as it's taught as a theory. My reasoning for that is nothing religious, but because sometimes, science is wrong. Even Einstein rejected the idea of the "Big Bang" as he rejected the idea of an expanding universe. He told Georges Lemaître (a Catholic Priest, btw) "Your calculations are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.". Einstein, of course, had to revise his theories once Hubble proved that the Universe was expanding.
My point is that science evolves just like anything else. What is "fact" today is backward-thinking-junk-science tomorrow. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive. Evolution has about as much to do with disproving religion as the Big Bang, and I don't want it being taught as such. Teaching Darwin is fine. Teaching Darwin as a counter to religion is just wrong.
The best health care system in the world is worthless if no one can afford to get treated.
No one in the US goes without treatment. Hell, even illegal aliens get treated. It may bankrupt you, but if you are in need of treatment in the US, you will get treated.
Ummm... Since when did GM have anything to do with Tesla Motors?
Damn. The AC is right. I was thinking of the Volt. My mistake.
OK, then GM and Tesla are both douchebags (as am I for getting the two confused)!
Wow an expensive sports car. What will they think of next.
I see it as an expensive electric car. At least that's how GM is marketing it. "See, we're green. We are releasing an electric car and it's cool!" It's going to be (one of) the first one(s) out, and it's priced out of reach for 99.99% of the population.
GM sux! Want to make a difference? How about releasing an electric car that normal people can afford, you douchebags!
Bless his noodly appendage...
Sauce be upon him.
Uhm, you contradicted yourself. If you sold back the energy to the Grid because that was the most effecient and then used the Grid during the day to charge your car then the net effect your car would have on CO2 emmisions when you factor in the Solar panels would ne None, Zero, Zip, Zilch.
I'm not thinking CO2. I'm thinking cash. If you can sell energy back all day (assuming your panels can power your AC, computers, TV so the wife can watch soaps and so and still have energy to spare), you will make more than what it will cost to buy it back in the evening. Buy low, sell high! Batteries are horrible for the environment (again, not talking CO2, but dumping battery acid into a landfill or expending more energy to somehow recapture it) expensive to buy, and dispose of, and inefficient.
As for CO2, you're driving an electric car... you're good. I'm also assuming that by the time these things become available, we'll be powered by nuclear or some other non-CO2 producing form of generation. Personally, I don't really care about C02 and don't buy into the whole man-made global warming scare. That's a different discussion, however. I'm in it because I like the idea of no longer paying terrorist supporting and anti-American countries huge amounts of money so they can repress their populations and finance their little campaigns against us. So I share the same goals as GW alarmists, but for different reasons.
However, you do have a point. If large numbers of people buy electric cars, large numbers of people are going to be charging them at night. This means that demand will be higher for night, making electricity more expensive. This will negate my whole dollars and sense thing (misspelling intentional). I still don't know if the differential will be enough to cover the cost of batteries, however. Hopefully, by the time electric cars become a reality, there will be a much better infrastructure to support them, such as plug-in parking at work, power-parking meter style charging stations (put in a dollar worth of quarters and plug your car in while you park it there), battery exchange stations and maybe even putting solar panels on your car to charge it up while you are at work, parked in the sun.
I think this is a case of "buy it, and they will build it!
Another way to store the energy is to convert it to Hydrogen. It is less effecient but Hydrogen cars can get better range. If you have enough excess energy during the day to store it, when demand is high and it cost the most, wouldn't it be better to sell that back to the grid at the higher price and then buy it back during the non-peak hours of the evening when electricity is cheapest?
Also, how much energy is lost by storing it in batteries? How long do these batteries last and what is the replacement cost? What is the environmental impact from disposing all these batteries from all these homes? How safe are these batteries (in the past 12 years, I've seen UPS's blow up three times in server rooms, filling the entire building with toxic fumes)? Even hydrogen is not a good idea as hydrogen is explosive, very inefficient to produce, nearly impossible to store and the fuel cell equipment needed to convert it back to electricity is prohibitively expensive.
Yeah, it's still a stupid idea.
install solar panels on your roof of your garage and use that juice to charge the car overnight.
Uh, Solar panels, by design, don't work at night. Maybe you should invent the Lunar panel, but even that will only work at maximum efficiency for a few nights per month.
This one pretty enough for ya? :-D
base price: $98,000
Not any more.
Hey dingo brain... The point is that regardless of performance, if you are going 300 miles and you only use one gallon of gas, then you're doing much better than a conventional gas powered automobile Even if you want to be a total bean counter and factor in the cost of the electricity used to charge the batteries enough to make that 300 mile trip (which is stupid in my opinion) the fact is you will pollute less and use far fewer resources. Quit being such an arse ya bugger.
Does this mean I can put ten gallons in the tank and drive from Miami to LA without refueling? No? Then the 300 MPG figure is misleading to the point of being fraudulent. I don't care if it gets a "true" 250 MPG, saying it gets 300 is a lie if you can't go 3000 miles on 10 gallons.
You sound like the classic case of a proletariat. Just do what everyone tells you, even if it is stupid, and you know it's wrong.
First, welcome to the real world.
Second, let's turn your statement around:
Just do whatever you think is best, regardless of what the rules are, because you know what is right and everyone else that disagrees with you is stupid.
Is that the attitude you take at work, on the highways and in your home? We have rules for a reason. Your thinking that they are stupid does not mean it's OK to disobey them. I think it's stupid that I have to wait a red light when there is no traffic coming. Does that mean I should be free to run it? If you have a problem with a rule, challenge the rule, not the person whose job it is to enforce those rules.
In this case, the student should have stopped using Firefox, started using the tools that he was supposed to be using, and then went to the principal or whoever and challenged the use of IE over Firefox.
Its too bad that we don't have information as to whether or not the student actually installed firefox, or if they just ran something that was already installed. All we know is that it was running on a windows system (based on it having a ".exe" extension). I'd like to be able to assume that the IT person at said school was smart enough to set up the windows boxes to keep people from being able to just install any application willy-nilly, but of course we cannot make that assumption.
So really, due to the lack of good information in this case, the answers to your questions don't really apply. We could of course make some fun assumptions about how their IT is run at that school, and decide based on that, but that wouldn't likely help in this case.
True, if the student was caught installing FireFox and stopped when told. Unfortunately, we don't know if the student installed it or not. Either way, when the teacher said, "don't use that" the student should have stopped. I guess it would have been OK for the student to say, "Well, OK, but this is better, but if you want us using IE, I'll use IE." What is really the point here is that the teacher said, "don't use that" and the student said, "I think this is better, so I'm going to keep using it, regardless of what you say."
As to the machine not being sufficiently locked down to prevent unauthorized apps from being installed, well that's a problem between the teacher and the IT dept. No matter how locked down something is, there are ways around it. At some point we have to say that the rules must be followed, regardless if it is possible to do something or not. Securing the PC just makes the teacher's job easier, but it's not the responsibility of the IT department to run the class.
You're right. The child should have been allowed to install whatever he wanted on his ... I mean, the school's computer. The teacher, acting as a representative of the school district has no right telling students what they can and can't do to school property. If this kid wanted to install the Adult-porn-finder search bar, that should have been allowed. If the student wanted to format the drive and leave it at a blinking "Press F1 to continue", that's his right. These student's should be allowed to jump around and fling shit all over their monitors if that is what they desire. Teacher's have no business running the classrooms! What was I thinking?!!? That's what the Nazi's did!
(is that better?)
In the military, A commanding officer can order you to drop your pants and shoot yourself in the left testicle too but you have the right to disobey. Especially if the order is stupid, immoral, without merit or could get you into trouble. On always has the right to disobey when the authority figure is a moron.. such is the case here.
Blowing off a testicle would be considered an unlawful order. Only using the approved browser is quite allowed by the rules. What if the kid wanted to user Opera? How about if the kid wanted to use IE, but with that nifty share ware search toolbar he got for free when he installed Kazaa, which also has a browser of sorts. Where do we draw the line. Are you implying that the students should be allowed to install whatever they want, provided that they think it is better than what is on there?
If you are not totally subservient to a teacher, you get detention.
Is it not the job of schools to prepare kids for the real world?
I ask because last time I checked:
If you do not obey the rules of your employer, you get fired.
There, I fixed this for you.
his is an apology for authoritarianism - assuming innocence on the part of authority, and granting benefits of doubt to their actions while also itemising possible hypothitical infractions by the accused.
Uh, no. I expect Authority to be... well, in charge. Imagine that. Should the students be allowed to install and run anything they want on school computers? Can you do that at YOUR job?
That is how fascism is apologised.
Blow it out your ass. Just because someone is in charge, in this case a teacher in charge of the classroom, doesn't mean that the school is fascist.
The teacher was right.
Well, the teacher was right... and wrong.
First, the teacher was wrong for not knowing what FireFox (FoxFire) is. Any teacher with a computer in the classroom should have AT LEAST that level of knowledge.
Second, the teacher was right in assigning detention. The teacher is in charge and has the right to tell the students what they can and can't run on school computers. If a student is running an application and the teacher tells the student to close it, the student needs to close it, period, end of story. It's no different in the real world. If an IT director tells you shut down Cain&Able, you can get fired if you don't. It doesn't matter that the IT director doesn't know what Cain&Able is.
But (as a AC posted in response to a sibling of your comment), the police can't just ask a private citizen (or even a P.I.) to illegally wiretap a phone just because they couldn't get a warrant. The person who placed said wiretap could(should) still face charges, and by all decent standards the "evidence" should be tossed as well (IANAL, YMMV)
Sorry, AC's are below my threshold.
Charges? For what? Is there a law that says that telco's can't tap a line. For that matter what is the penalty for illegally obtaining evidence? IANAL either, but from what I gather, the penalty is that the evidence can't be used in a criminal case. Since the government's goal is espionage, not conviction, I don't see what the cost is.
simply stated if you care about any of your rights it's important. ...
Fourth Amendment:
While the executive branch is more at fault for strong arming the telecos I don't think the public is well served by granting amnesty for ignoring the law.
That would be an excellent point if the Bill of Rights dealt with what companies can and can not do. Unfortunately, it only deals with government. Citizens and corporations are not bound by the BoR.
So, sorry to say it, but if telco's freely give information they own to the feds without a warrant, then no law has been broken.
"Urban operations?" Are they planning to use a 12000lb chemical laser for crowd control? Shit, I guess they're expecting a lot of people to start misbehaving soon.
Crowd control? No.
The AC130 has several weapons ranging from a 105mm canon down to a M240 machine gun. However, none of these weapons are very good in urban environments as they tend to break not just the target, but everything around it. This weapon is much better for urban warfare as it only destroys the target (and maybe that on the ground about a meter behind the target) only. There is no "splash damage" to the surrounding buildings, vehicles or people.
So, if anything this is the exact opposite of crowd control as it would do little good against a large area target, such as a crowd.