Actually, I do not believe that the government can block those communications (prior restraint). What it can do is apply criminal penalties to those who intentionally foment violent activity.
First, who gets to define "terrorist"? One man's freedom figher is another man's terrorist.
Another relativist...
A terrorist is one who engages in terrorism. Terrorism involves the intentional targeting of noncombatants, for the purpose of inciting terror. It doesn't matter what the cause.
Most of the BS rhetoric thrown around in this area is because many movements have terrorists in their fringes, and then one side says
NYA NYA They are terrorists
and the other side says
NYA NYA No they aren't.
It is terrorism when it is policy to engage in it. The Viet Cong in Vietnam engaged in terrorism - killing the village chieftan and his family if he didn't support them. This was policy, so they were terrorists.
Various Palestinian groups are engaged in terrorism. They may *also* be freedom fighters, but that is irrelevant. They are terrorists.
To take the audio output of his player, hook it to the audio input of a good sound card, produce an MP3, and put it on the P2P. For almost everyone, the sound quality would be adequate, and most people would never even know that it went through an analog step along the way.
Typically, the microkernel approach INCREASES the number of context switches. However, a microkernel also normally has very fast context switches.
The context switches are increased because a single operation (say, and I/O read) requires switching into the kernel from the user process, and then out into a device driver. A non-microkernel would have the device driver in the kernel. This is just an example - it may be that the switch is to the file system manager instead, or some other helper process. The point is that the nature of a microkernel is to have lots of helper processes that perform what are normally macro-kernel functions.
Context switches typically are expensive because they involve more than just a switch into kernel mode. They are likely to involve some effort to see if there is other work to do (such as preempt this thread). They may involve some privelege checks, and some statistical gathering.
A microkernel just does less of this stuff.
BTW... the first elegant running micro-kernel I ran into was the original Tandem operating system. The kernel was primarily a messaging system and scheduler (I think scheduling *policy* may have been handled by a task, btw). I/O, file system activity, etc was handled by privileged tasks. It was very elegant, and conveniently fit into their "Non-Stop (TM)" operation.
>i>My highly developed ape remark was meant to echo creationists' view of what evolution implies about people. Very funny NOT!
To someone at Mims' level, a blind spot of that nature is intentional, hence intellectual dishonesty.
As far as I can tell, Mims firmly believes in creation. This does not strike me as dishonesty, which by its very definition means doing or saying something that you do NOT believe in.
Obviously you would fit well at scientific american. Categorizing someone with silly views as "a highly developed ape" is pretty pathetic. Oh, and there is a difference between intellectual dishonesty, and the sort of world view that lends itself to anti-evolution views. I have never seen any reason to consider Mims to be intellectually dishonest. He just has a blind spot.
I would argue that if there is no place for folks whose views on a scientific area are shaped by religion, then there is no place for folks whose views are shaped by politics. And yet scientists frequently make political statements that are just as silly. And Scientific American is among the worst in that regard.
The problem with racial profiling is that it is selfaffirming. You think black people do more crimes? Then you pull over more black people. When you pull over more black people, you catch more black people doing crimes. So you believe even stronger that black people commit more crimes.
This is indeed a problem with racial profiling. But it neither explains the vast disparity in crimes rates between blacks and whites in the US, nor completely invalidates the idea.
That doesn't even deal with the societal implications: young iranians in the U.S. that are treated like terrorists thinking things like "well, if you are going to think I'm a terrorist anyway, I might as well blow some shit up."
I never said that racial profiling is without negative consequences.
o, don't forget about the 20-30 year old white sniper in Virgina that turned out to be black and in his 40s. Or the successful, social Ted Bundy who was overlooked for 3 years in spite of 6 people reporting on him because he didn't fit his own profile. Profiling is bullshit,
Two problems: you are confusing profiling on a specific crime with a more general profiling. They are not the same thing.
Second, profiling is useful - it just isn't the magic that TV makes it out to be. A lot has been learned about serial killers and spree killers, and it is in fact useful in tracking them down. But it isn't perfect. It isn't random, it just isn't perfect.
It is information, and its value should be weighted just like you weigh other information: some is highly specific, some is very suspect, all is useful as long as you weight it.
You bring up Tim McVeigh. If he hadn't been caught so quickly, it would have been obvious to all that there were two primary profiles to look for:
1) Foreign terrorists, most likely Arab, Persian or Pakistani
and
2) Anti-government local terrorists.
This is obvious, it is useful, and it is profiling.
Tim McVeigh actually fits the profile very well, and that profile is not 20-20 hindsight.
It is true that the FBI sometimes gets too hung up on a single investigative direction( ask Richard Jewell). But this is just the nature of large bureaucracies - see http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/Laswburo.htm.
It's a shame you don't have an organization like the ACLU in your country.
I *do* live in the country with the ACLU (I assume you are referring to the *American* Civil Liberties Union).
And I know exactly what they do - which is to selectively protect those rights which are of most value to leftists, while occasionally defending some looney Nazi to allow them to claim they defend everyones' rights.
I'll pay a bit more attention to the ACLU when it defends my right to defend myself with a firearm, and when it defends, even slightly, the right of *any* unborn person.
Our government only becomes a usurper of rights when it becomes corrupted by the cancer of greed that is engendered by overly wealthy business interests
I see. Does this explain the 100,000,000 people of their own citizens that communist regimes murdered???
And while I remember the horror which happened in Germany, I also remember (unlike most of the left) what happened in the USSR (20-40 million dead), China (similar numbers) and many other communist countries.
Government becomes a usurper of rights when it is to the benefit of those in government to do so, and when the citizens do not or can not resist. The single most important weapon against government power is education about the dangerous trends of government whether motivated by capitalist greed, psychopathic rage or utopian ideals. Unfortunately, today that education has been twisted - too many people seem to believe, like you explicitely state, that the only government that is dangerous is one corrupted by the standard bogeyman: "wealthy business interess."
There are two basic fallacies here. First, civil liberties protections are, by definition, law enforcement (they prevent the police from breaking the law). Second, police agencies acting outside the bounds of civil liberties protections tend to exhibit "desires and needs" which have no legitimate relationship to law enforcement (e.g. politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits).
No, civil liberties are NOT law enforcement. Civil liberties are those liberties that man naturally has. Civil liberties don't prevent the police from breaking the law (although the *exercise* of free speech sometimes helps). Police don't violate your civil liberties (in most cases) because there are other systems in society to prevent it (courts, newspapers).
It is rare for civil liberties to impede the police in illegitimate acts. The most common use of civil liberties protections is to make it harder for police (and prosecutors) to catch and convict guilty people. And this is a price we *agree* to pay in order to prevent abuse, but it is also a price we constantly haggle about, as it is naturally a controversial issue.
Politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits are more likely to be the acts of politicans than police, and are most likely to be prevented by the free press or the threat of exposure than by any civil liberties rules.
Actually, I suspect that the main problem was the *public* being on the lookout for white vans.
The police know better. Furthermore, the police had information that at least one suspect was black - a phone call of his was obviously made by a black person, or an EXTREMELY good impersonator. They did NOT give out this information, which may very well have impeded the capture of the sniper. Furthermore, when Chief Moose told the public who he was after - before they were captured, he did NOT mention that they were black even though he knew they were. This was extremely wrong, but the sort of politically correct behavior that the anti-profiling mentality leads to.
Also, keep in mind that this sniping incident was unprecedented. No reasonable profiling could really be done. This is far different from where racial profiling is more useful, which is more ordinary crime. You tend to look at white bigots for hate crimes against black; where I live, murders of store clerks are usually by blacks, even though they represent 1% of the population.
No, a BOLO isn't a racial profile. I bring it up to mention the obvious importance of race as a characteristic of value to law enforcement.
The typical BOLO I hear is "...hispanic male, 16-20 armed with a handgun."
Racial profiling is simply a matter of increasing the odds of detection. It of course depends on other circumstances.
DWB (Driving While Black) is an issue because a relatively high percentage of young black males are criminals in certain areas. This leads to a very natural inclination of police to watch young black males more closely. It isn't fair to the non-criminal young black males, but that says nothing about its effectiveness.
After all, government ONLY works by removing liberties. ... and it made no sense at all to me, on any level. I was going to retort, but then I saw the sig...
Government is the only institution which is granted that right to use deadly force, which ultimately is the only way to deprive someone of their liberties. Government without that capability (or some other effective form of coercion) cannot enforce its mandates, and thus doesn't work. I thought that was obvious!
Now, this doesn't mean that you have more liberties without government, as someone else may come along and use force to take them from you. But government works by the threat of or actual taking of liberties, backed up by its authorization to use deadly force.
Police work needs to be 100% accurate, or as close as humanly possible. Exclusionary rules don't help the situation, and Tim McVeigh is a good example. In the case of the recent sniper shootings, the law enforcement people were looking for a young white guy in his 20s with a crew cut right up until the killer(s) pretty much gave himself away.
Police work is rarely 100% accurate, or even close. What law enforcement needs is as much information as possibly applied to the detection of criminals. Racial profiling provides this information, just like other profiling does. Of course it isn't perfect, as your examples illustrate. But it *does* work. Police work, like most things involving humans, is ultimately proabilistic. Racial profiling works to improve probabilities. That is all it does. And when properly applied, it works. It is no different in that sense than age profiling.
In the case of terrorism, it should be obvious that most muslims are foreigners, and can be visually distinguished that way. Thus it is logical to be *more* suspicious of people with that appearance, even though 99.99 percent of them are not terrorists. It certainly makes more sense than strip searching 85 year old grannies just to be fair!
I never argued that civil liberties should not be allowed to impede law enforcement. As the NSA guy implied with his question, the issue is how much. My post addressed the all too common absolutist view of civil rights.
I still have my subscription, after 40 years of reading the magazine.
But I really don't like the way the magazine is going. It has long had a bit of a political skew (it frequently ran articles on nuclear deterrence, for example, which is hardly a scientific policy).
But it is really sad what is happening now. The percentage of science articles to environmentalist articles is declining. Sure, there are scientific issues with the environment, but it is a small part of overall science. Where are the major physics articles? Why are most biology articles now about species diversity or global warming impact on the biota, or whatever?
The answer is simple: the magazine has become a shill for a particular viewpoint.
If one wants to see how biased it has gotten, and how the editors consider pushing their viewpoint more important than informing the public on science, just look at how they handled the debate over "The Skeptical Environmentalist." They spent 14 pages debunking it, with articles that were more venom and ad-hominem than scientific. They forced the author to take down his point-by-point refutation from his website (copyright violation, they said, even though it was obviously fair use).
Another example is how they treated Forrest Mims on the Amateur Scientist issue. Forrest Mims is an anti-evolutionist, which is unfortunate. But he is also very good at the sort of thing that the Amateur Scientist used to be known for: doing practical science experiments and building interesting scientific gadgets. They hired him for the job, then found out he was anti-evolutionist, and promptly dropped him.
I see no place for anti-evolutionist views in Scientific American, but he had promised not to put those views into his work. It appears that he was sacked just because they couldn't stand to have a person whose *private views* disagreed with them.
The result of the bias and changed focus at SciAm shows. The magazine is shrinking. Obviously they are having financial troubles. I am afraid that this 150 year old American classic is doomed to extinction. Its great tradition is being destroyed by those who want to inject their political views into every aspect of life.
If the Earth spun the other way 'round, meteor showers would always be best just after sunset. But, sadly, I was not consulted during the design phase...
Obviously we need a project to reverse the earth's spin. After all, what decent geek gets up EARLY IN THE MORNING?
Certainly not me, which is why I usually miss these shows.
Why does the NSA have to ask for a line between safety and liberty? Why can't we have both
The NSA isn't asking you to choose one or the other. It is asking how much liberty do you wish to sacrifice in order to gain how much safety.
And contrary to the rest of your post, there is *always* that tradeoff in the real world.
I know that violating people's civil liberties including taking away their right to speech, privacy and due process makes it easier for law enforcement, but aside from being unconstitutional, it's also bad policework.
Wait... it makes it easier to do their job, so it is bad policework? That doesn't follow.
If you racially profile your suspects, then the Timothy McVeighs slip through.
Nonsense. If you racially profile, you enhance your odds of catching criminals. There is a reason that every BOLO I have ever heard (and I have heard a lot of them) list the race of the suspect. And in terms of a more general profile, where you don't exactly know the suspect, it still makes sense. Not racially profiling is like making a spam filter that ignores certain words because it is politically incorrect to do so.
In other words, it is a dumb strategy from a law enforcement viewpoint.
If you tap everyone's phone, then you become bogged down in terabytes of data -- most of which is useless. If you suppress the speech of the hate mongers and racists, then you don't know who is a hate monger or racist.
Civil liberties aren't just respectful of constitutional and human rights, they also help law enforcement do their job right. So don't ask for a line to be drawn. Try playing by the rules instead.
This is utter balderdash. Civil liberties in general impede law inforcement. Otherwise, we wouldn't need to enforce civil liberties against law enforcement, because they would have no desire or need to violate them.
The important issue, which at least the head of the NSA understands (unlike some posters here) is which civil liberties does one reduce (not eliminate) in trade for what sort of protection. This is a valid question. In fact, it is the fundamental question of all government: what freedoms do you take from your citizens in trade for what benefits do you give them?
After all, government ONLY works by removing liberties. This is something that those who favor big government should keep in mind. It isn't only safety that people trade for liberty; they are also all to willing to trade economic freedoms (typically the economic freedoms of others) for their own economic gain (or the economic gain of others).
Government is necessary in the real world. Government only works by removing liberties. The US government is contrained in its removal of liberties by a constitution, although the interpretation of that constitution is a matter of constant controversy.
Therefore the only interesting issue is how much the government can and should infringe on liberties. Anything else ignores reality.
One of the things I found most striking when flying into Vietnam (during the war) was hearing, on the Airport Terminal Information System at Cam Rahn: "Caution: High trajectory artillery fire from " (coordinates).
Of course those silly shells have to go up high, otherwise they wouldn't get very far!
The military has been tracking projectiles for a long time. They had mortar tracking radar during the Vietnam War that could track the shell, predict its impact point, and more importantly, back calculate the launch point.
Tracking a shell can be very easy, depending on the circumstances. They are made out of conductive metal, so a radar can certainly track them.
You detect the firing with a rapid scan radar, then lock onto it with a finer resolution radar. Then you use lidar (Laser radar) for final tracking and range finding.
This really is not much of a trick.
What is impressive is integrating all of that technology with a laser that is powerful enough to damage the projectile while at the same time being able to track it.
Vaporware. Hardly - this system is already being used in Israel and to shoot down Katyusha rockets. In this sort of issue, the main difference between an artiller shell and a rocket is that the rocket is likely to be longer. But an artillery rocket doesn't burn for long, and then it is just another ballistic projectile.
I apologize. I had just finished a post on a more contentious topic. I shouldn't have let that emotion carry over into this one.
The misunderstanding you appear to have is that digital modulation means modulating with raw digital signals. It usually doesn't. Digital modulation really means modulation meant to carry digital information, not modulation directly by the digital signal.
For example, one can convey digital information by converting the baseband square waves into band limited signals by passing them through a low pass filter, and *then* using them to FM or AM or PM modulate a signal. This is a simple, low data rate modulation. Higher data rates use more complex signals - such as a combination of phase and amplitude modulation (PAM) - often with multiple levels of both (nQAM). Even more sophisticated schemes exist.
If you modulate an AM carrier with square waves, you will generate sidebands on odd harmonics of the fundamental square wave frequency. The amplitude of those sidebands will be proportional to the inverse of the modulation sideband number. If you use triangular waves, the amplitude is proportional to the inverse of the square of the sideband number. Even better shaping of the modulating signal produces even greater suppression of sidebands.
When one goes to FM or PM modulation, things get much weirder. Typical FM modulation has an infinite number of sidebands - with their amplitudes determined by bessel functions. Thus any FM signal is essentially infinitely wide. But in a practical sense, the modulation index and the baseband frequencies are chosen to fit the signal (or X% or Y dB of it) into a specified bandwidth.
Note that low pass filtering of digital NRZ signals (rectangular waves) is really no different than what you do with audio - you have to low pass filter that also or you will get overly wide signal bandwidth. If you look at a typical voice, you will see that there are harmonic generation waveforms even worse than square waves - these look like evenly separated spikes. So any modulation system really has the same problem.
The reason that pagers drive you nuts is not that they are using digital modulation, but rather that the transmitters run very high power (thus triggering intermodulation in your receiver), and the modulation has a very unpleasant sound (which is made worse since you are typically listening to the second harmonic of the pager mixed with the fundamental of another nearby signal). That second harmonic has distorted wider-band modulation.
For example, the pager is on frequency X in the VHF band. You are listening to frequency y. There is another transmitter at frequency 2X-y. So when 2X-y mixes with the second harmonic of X (2X), you end up with y (with the modulation of both X and th 2X-y signal).
What kind of freedom fighters kill nuns, priests, children, organizers, electrocute people's genitals, decapitate people and display their heads, oppress women, cut off people's hands for stealing?
The hardly perfect people of Afghanistan, who were being oppressed by an invading army from the USSR. I remember when the left used to be for the oppressed, until they realized that the USSR also oppressed people. Those atrocities they never mentioned.
Oh, and other than the "oppress women and cut off people's hands for stealing" - the rest has been true of most 20th century freedom fighters on ALL sides. BUT, it has been the supported policy of only of the left (Viet Cong) for example and some of the harder to control rebels. Please consider that the acts of the few do not define either the goals or the methods of the many.
Your "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan are basically the Taliban.
No, the Taliban ended up controlling the country. The most extreme of the freedom fighters where of the Taliban ilk.
You're telling me that conservatives didn't support the war against South Vietnam?
No, I'm tellng you that the conservatives didn't send people to fight in Vietnam. But lots of us DID volunteer to do so, including myself.
And if you knew anything about the Vietnam War, you would realize that the bulk of the terrorism was performed at the orders of the North Vietnamese. It was their *policy* to torture and kill any village leaders who did not actively support them. It was because of this sort of behavior that, during the Tet offensive, none of the people that they claimed to be fighting for rose up and joined their cause (which is why they lost that battle so badly). Oh, and those wonderful freedom fighters, when they captured the one major city they did temporarily hold (Hue), massacred 2000 civilians. These were not accidental casualties. They were people who opposed the communists, and they were rounded up and slaughtered.
Did our side do bad things in Vietnam? You bet. But when our soldiers misbehaved and got caught (like Lieutenant Calley and his platoon), we disciplined them. When the VC and NVA engaged in massacres, it was under the orders of their superiors!
I think the people of Nicaragua got the message loud and clear, vote against the wishes of the US, and the terrorist war against them continues. I would have voted as I was told as well. How you can call that election "fair" is beyond me.
You know, the really hilarious thing about this discussion is when you bring up positions like this. If you knew your history, you would know that the American left EXPECTED the Sandinistas to win the election. They didn't think the people were being threatened by contras! Jimmy Carter himself certified the election as fair. Don't you think that if the people voted out of terror, the american left, who hated the Contras and the Reagan policy a who were present THROUGHOUT the war and election period would have expected the people to vote for contras? Huh?
No, it was a fair election.
Oh, and another thing you need to understand about most Latin American battles of the time. The communists were led by the children of the rich! Look at who came to power under the Sandinistas. Oh, and look at their first acts in office: confiscation of the best property of their opponents, followed by giving those luxurious places to their followers.
Furthermore, they betrayed most of those who joined them in the uprising (communist takeover 101). The overthrow of Somoza was a broadly popular uprising. Many of those who fought against Somoza were purged by the Sandinistas, and many of the survivors of those purges joined the Contras!
The only way the Contras look human is by comparing them to the worst of the Sandinistas, who were (obviously) hardly boy scouts.
Demogoguery 101 - deny the humanity of your opponents. Good work. You learned your lession. Here you are nicely admitting that the *worst* of the Sandinistas were a little worse than all of the Contras. But the reality is that the worst of both were very bad. And the best of the Contras were very good. And like most of those situations, lots of folks were inbetween. Stereotyping the contras is no substitute for thinking.
The Reagan and Bush administration's record on supporting terrorists, destabilizing governments, and staging coups against Latin America is well documented, perhaps you should read the declassified documents [gwu.edu] for yourself.
Sorry... but pointing to a gigantic archive doesn't exactly inform. Perhaps you should be more specific.
But... I will accept all but the "supporting terrorist" charges just to clear the air (at least for Reagan - Bush is another matter). Reagan reversed a decades old US policy vs the USSR that had the effect of letting them engage in subversion, and keep their gains, while we were only allowed to oppose the subversion. This, of course, is a losing policy. Reagan's policy was counter-subversion. Where the Russians played the game to our disadvantage (and objectively to the disadvantage of the subjects of the regimes they created and propped up), we responded. We subverted THEIR puppet regimes. And I am glad we did.
Was it fair to the people of these countries that the great powers were fighting over them? Not at all. But we didn't start it - we did, thank goodness, finish it.
BTW... most of your charges are more accurately waged against FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon than Reagan and modern conservatives.
The number of felony conviction against defence contractors for defrauding the Pentagon number in the thousands. Pretending that these corporations don't rip off the Pentagon is ridiculous, the record is clear.
Of course that is true. But I didn't pretend that they didn't. I take, however, take issue with your examples.
The fact that many elected officials support this kind of corporate welfare is obvious, what it has to do with defending the country is less obvious. The B1 is a famous example, the Air Force didn't want it, but the Republicans pushed for it for years, at the bidding of their corporate handlers.
And again, no dispute with all of this except for the implication that only the Republicans pushed for the B-1, and the use of the code word "corporate handlers." So what? I never disputed that politicians, including Republicans, engage in pork barrel. BUT, the fact that they do so does not mean that every action is pork barrel and that every action is selfish. You seem to be engaging again in one sided stereotyping here.
Your "fiat currency" rantings sound like those of a gold bug. Conservatives like a strong currency. Many of us favor a gold standard. So just who are you accusing of what with your wierd terminology, and what does it have to do with your accusations that conservatives don't favor a free market is beyond me.
S&L weren't supposed to pay "competitive rates" - checking accounts weren't supposed to pay interest, remember?
I see. Then please explain to me how S&L's were supposed to acquire and retain depositors? Eh?
Again you assert that Bush has increased taxes. WHICH TAXES? BE SPECIFIC. Bush reduced taxes. And yes, I agree that the silly rebate was a bad idea, and conservatives (those folks you claim to be characterizing) universally opposed the rebate. So I guess I have to ask again... your point?
You assume I'm a liberal? The only critics of conservatives are liberal Democrats, eh? I hardly see the difference between them
Actually, I don't know what you are. I do know that most of your arguments are those normally given by the left and hard left, so is a lot of your so-called evidence, and so is the rhetorical tone. So whatever you call yourself, you sound like a leftist (in most of your arguments - the fiat currency stuff sounds more like the folks that live in compounds in rural Idaho).
I don't assume to know what's in the heart of conservatives, but I do know that they favor killing of all sorts of people, born and unborn, when it's in their interests. How people who are against abortion, yet for capital punishment, and bombing cities full of people, look in the mirror is beyond me. The National Right to Life Committee doesn't even try to pull that nonsense anymore.
Obviously you haven't paid ANY attention to the philosophy of conservativism nor our spokesmen (and do NOT count Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, or some of the loonier TV evangelists in that number). And I also absolutely disagree with the "when it's in their interests" phrase. That is a nasty thing, when you say we favor killing when it is in our (implied selfish) interests.
Yes, we do favor capital punishment (except for many in the Right To Life movement, with which you are obviously only familiar from TV). What it means to "favor killing" however can be better stated in less wildly rhetorical terms as "we believe in the long established concept of a just war, and recognize that in some circumstances it is necessary and morally right to kill" We also believe it is appropriate to do our very best to protect innocent people in those unfortunate eventualities."
Now, you can disagree with that philophy, which if you do allows me to categorize you as a pacifist (except pacifists don't favor killing unborn children). But pacifists, however moral they may be, are also utopian fools.
So why don't you tell me: how DO we deal with mass murders? How do we prevent it? Or is there no circumstance which justifies killing other than the convenience of sexually irresponsible women?
---
Interesting that you lump Rush Limbaugh (who is far from a hate monger) with Anne Coulter (who is refreshing because she gives the left a little bit of what they have been giving the right forever) with O'Reilly (who is NOT a conservative, not very intelligent, and not at all polite). They are very different people.
And of course freerepublic.com is one of the more radical of the conservative sites, and hardly represents mainstream conservative opinion. If you want to know what conservatives really think, read National Review, Daily Standard, Wall Street Journal (editorial page only) - or listen to Limbaugh (ignore anything he says about science) or Michael Medved.
I am fully aware of the difference between the rhetoric of conservatives and libertarians,
(not really - see below)
but the differences between their actions are slight. As far as I can tell, Libertarians just seem to be conservatives who like to smoke pot.
Uh huh. Libertarians are almost (not completely) uniformly pro-choice. Conservatives are almost always not. Most people who call themselves libertarians are actually libertines but don't know the difference (go to a Mensa meeting sometime and you'll see what I mean). The National Review, considered the foremost journal of conservative thought, is in favor of ending the war on drugs, but it is hardly libertarian!
There are lots of differences.
Libertarians sure want a strong government to protect their property and enforce their contracts.
Not the ones I come across or read. Their philosophy tends to be "if you want to avoid being robbed, hire a guard. If you want to avoid having your freedoms taken by an invader, hire your own army."
I always did have trouble understanding the difference between a libertarian company town and dictatorship, aside from the dictator being called "CEO" under the libertarian regime.
Really? That is a pretty amazing admission. Dictatorships operate by suppressing all freedoms. Just ask the Russians or the Vietnamese or the Cubans or the Nicaraguans under either Somoza or the Sandinistas. Libertarians oppose all of that. And CEO's in a libertarian (or conservative for that matter) world are bound by a set of laws that prevent the very depradations that dictators are known for.
As far as your attempt at showing irony... you seem to miss the point. The left can be a force for evil without malice. It is true that I believe there is some malice (which indeed is motivation) behind a lot of the most outrageous slanders. So yes, you can really say nasty mean things and get me to, in a moment of anger, question whether you are really a fine spirited person who just happens to disagree.
What kind of freedom fighters kill nuns, priests, children, organizers, electrocute people's genitals, decapitate people and display their heads, oppress women, cut off people's hands for stealing?
The hardly perfect people of Afghanistan, who were being oppressed by an invading army from the USSR. I remember when the left used to be for the oppressed, until they realized that the USSR also oppressed people. Those atrocities they never mentioned.
Oh, and other than the "oppress women and cut off people's hands for stealing" - the rest has been true of most 20th century freedom fighters on ALL sides. BUT, it has been the supported policy of only of the left (Viet Cong) for example and some of the harder to control rebels. Please consider that the acts of the few do not define either the goals or the methods of the many.
Your "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan are basically the Taliban.
No, the Taliban ended up controlling the country. The most extreme of the freedom fighters where of the Taliban ilk.
You're telling me that conservatives didn't support the war against South Vietnam?
No, I'm tellng you that the conservatives didn't send people to fight in Vietnam. But lots of us DID volunteer to do so, including myself.
And if you knew anything about the Vietnam War, you would realize that the bulk of the terrorism was performed at the orders of the North Vietnamese. It was their *policy* to torture and kill any village leaders who did not actively support them. It was because of this sort of behavior that, during the Tet offensive, none of the people that they claimed to be fighting for rose up and joined their cause (which is why they lost that battle so badly). Oh, and those wonderful freedom fighters, when they captured the one major city they did temporarily hold (Hue), massacred 2000 civilians. These were not accidental casualties. They were people who opposed the communists, and they were rounded up and slaughtered.
Did our side do bad things in Vietnam? You bet. But when our soldiers misbehaved and got caught (like Lieutenant Calley and his platoon), we disciplined them. When the VC and NVA engaged in massacres, it was under the orders of their superiors!
I think the people of Nicaragua got the message loud and clear, vote against the wishes of the US, and the terrorist war against them continues. I would have voted as I was told as well. How you can call that election "fair" is beyond me.
You know, the really hilarious thing about this discussion is when you bring up positions like this. If you knew your history, you would know that the American left EXPECTED the Sandinistas to win the election. They didn't think the people were being threatened by contras! Jimmy Carter himself certified the election as fair. Don't you think that if the people voted out of terror, the american left, who hated the Contras and the Reagan policy a who were present THROUGHOUT the war and election period would have expected the people to vote for contras? Huh?
No, it was a fair election.
Oh, and another thing you need to understand about most Latin American battles of the time. The communists were led by the children of the rich! Look at who came to power under the Sandinistas. Oh, and look at their first acts in office: confiscation of the best property of their opponents, followed by giving those luxurious places to their followers.
Furthermore, they betrayed most of those who joined them in the uprising (communist takeover 101). The overthrow of Somoza was a broadly popular uprising. Many of those who fought against Somoza were purged by the Sandinistas, and many of the survivors of those purges joined the Contras!
The only way the Contras look human is by comparing them to the worst of the Sandinistas, who were (obviously) hardly boy scouts.
Demogoguery 101 - deny the humanity of your opponents. Good work. You learned your lession. Here you are nicely admitting that the *worst* of the Sandinistas were a little worse than all of the Contras. But the reality is that the worst of both were very bad. And the best of the Contras were very good. And like most of those situations, lots of folks were inbetween. Stereotyping the contras is no substitute for thinking.
The Reagan and Bush administration's record on supporting terrorists, destabilizing governments, and staging coups against Latin America is well documented, perhaps you should read the declassified documents [gwu.edu] for yourself. Sorry... but ponting to a gigantic archive doesn't exactly inform. Perhaps you should be more specific.
But... I will accept all but the "supporting terrorist" charges just to clear the air (at least for Reagan - Bush is another matter). Reagan reversed a decades old US policy vs the USSR that had the effect of letting them engage in subversion, and keep their gains, while we were only allowed to oppose the subversion. This, of course, is a losing policy. Reagan's policy was counter-subversion. Where the Russians played the game to our disadvantage (and objectively to the disadvantage of the subjects of the regimes they created and propped up), we responded. We subverted THEIR puppet regimes. And I am glad we did.
Was it fair to the people of these countries that the great powers were fighting over them? Not at all. But we didn't start it - we did, thank goodness, finish it.
BTW... most of your charges are more accurately waged against FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon than Reagan and modern conservatives.
The number of felony conviction against defence contractors for defrauding the Pentagon number in the thousands. Pretending that these corporations don't rip off the Pentagon is ridiculous, the record is clear.
Of course that is true. But I didn't pretend that they didn't. I take, however, take issue with your examples.
The fact that many elected officials support this kind of corporate welfare is obvious, what it has to do with defending the country is less obvious. The B1 is a famous example, the Air Force didn't want it, but the Republicans pushed for it for years, at the bidding of their corporate handlers.
And again, no dispute with all of this except for the implication that only the Republicans pushed for the B-1, and the use of the code word "corporate handlers." So what? I never disputed that politicians, including Republicans, engage in pork barrel. BUT, the fact that they do so does not mean that every action is pork barrel and that every action is selfish. You seem to be engaging again in one sided stereotyping here.
Your "fiat currency" rantings sound like those of a gold bug. Conservatives like a strong currency. Many of us favor a gold standard. So just who are you accusing of what with your wierd terminology, and what does it have to do with your accusations that conservatives don't favor a free market is beyond me.
S&L weren't supposed to pay "competitive rates" - checking accounts weren't supposed to pay interest, remember?
I see. Then please explain to me how S&L's were supposed to acquire and retain depositors? Eh?
Again you assert that Bush has increased taxes. WHICH TAXES? BE SPECIFIC. Bush reduced taxes. And yes, I agree that the silly rebate was a bad idea, and conservatives (those folks you claim to be characterizing) universally opposed the rebate. So I guess I have to ask again... your point?
You assume I'm a liberal? The only critics of conservatives are liberal Democrats, eh? I hardly see the difference between them
Actually, I don't know what you are. I do know that most of your arguments are those normally given by the left and hard left, so is a lot of your so-called evidence, and so is the rhetorical tone. So whatever you call yourself, you sound like a leftist (in most of your arguments - the fiat currency stuff sounds more like the folks that live in compounds in rural Idaho).
I don't assume to know what's in the heart of conservatives, but I do know that they favor killing of all sorts of people, born and unborn, when it's in their interests. How people who are against abortion, yet for capital punishment, and bombing cities full of people, look in the mirror is beyond me. The National Right to Life Committee doesn't even try to pull that nonsense anymore.
Obviously you haven't paid ANY attention to the philosophy of conservativism nor our spokesmen (and do NOT count Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, or some of the loonier TV evangelists in that number). And I also absolutely disagree with the "when it's in their interests" phrase. That is a nasty thing, when you say we favor killing when it is in our (implied selfish) interests. Yes, we do favor capital punishment (except for many in the Right To Life movement, with which you are obviously on familiar from TV). What it means to "favor killing" however can be better stated in less wildly rhetorical terms as "we believe in the long established concept of a just war, and recognize that in some circumstances it is necessary and morally right to kill/" We also believe it is appropriate to do our very best to protect innocent people in those unfortunate eventualities."
Now, you can disagree with that philophy, which if you do allows me to categorize you as a pacifist (except pacifists don't favor killing unborn children). But pacifists, however moral they may be, are also utopian fools.
So why don't you tell me: how DO we deal with mass murders? How do we prevent it? Or is there no circumstance which justifies killing other than the convenience of sexually irresponsible women?
Interesting that you lump Rush Limbaugh (who is far from a hate monger) with Anne Coulter (who is refreshing because she gives the left a little bit of what they have been giving the right forever) with O'Reilly (who is NOT a conservative, not very intelligent, and not at all polite). They are very different people.
And of course freerepublic.com is one of the more radical of the conservative sites, and hardly represents mainstream conservative opinion. If you want to know what conservatives really think, read National Review, Daily Standard, Wall Street Journal (editorial page only) - or listen to Limbaugh (ignore anything he says about science) or Michael Medved.
I am fully aware of the difference between the rhetoric of conservatives and libertarians,
(not really - see below)
but the differences between their actions are slight. As far as I can tell, Libertarians just seem to be conservatives who like to smoke pot.
Uh huh. Libertarians are almost (not completely) uniformly pro-choice. Conservatives are almost always not. Most people who call themselves libertarians are actually libertines but don't know the difference (go to a Mensa meeting sometime and you'll see what I mean). The National Review, considered the foremost journal of conservative thought, is in favor of ending the war on drugs, but it is hardly libertarian!
There are lots of differences.
Libertarians sure want a strong government to protect their property and enforce their contracts.
Not the ones I come across or read. Their philosophy tends to be "if you want to avoid being robbed, hire a guard. If you want to avoid having your freedoms taken by an invader, hire your own army."
I always did have trouble understanding the difference between a libertarian company town and dictatorship, aside from the dictator being called "CEO" under the libertarian regime.
Really? That is a pretty amazing admission. Dictatorships operate by suppressing all freedoms. Just ask the Russians or the Vietnamese or the Cubans or the Nicaraguans under either Somoza or the Sandinistas. Libertarians oppose all of that. And CEO's in a libertarian (or conservative for that matter) world are bound by a set of laws that prevent the very depradations that dictators are known for.
As far as your attempt at showing irony... you seem to miss the point. The left can be a force for evil without malice. It is true that I believe there is some malice (which indeed is motivation) behind a lot of the most outrageous slanders. So yes, you can really say nasty mean things and get me to, in a moment of anger, question whether you are really a fine spirited person who just happens to disagree.
The FCC wants digital TV for spectrum efficiency and modernity reasons. The movie industry wants it for better display, and of course now for DRM reasons. The broadcasters objected to the mandated expense, until things changed to allow them to sell additional services on it in addition to TV, and for them to use it to hold onto additional channels for a while.
The big problem with VHF/UHF broadcast TV in the US is that it is extremely wasteful of very valuable spectrum. There is a limited (by physics) amount of spectrum available for mobile applications, and broadcast TV takes about a third of it!
But... except for a few cases, broadcast TV does not NEED to operate on mobile spectrum. Almost all TV is either multipoint fixed, which can be done at much higher frequencies, or already carried by cable and consumes no air spectrum at all (except for leaks).
A more rational system would eventually phase out high power VHF/UHF TV broadcast - digital and analog, and let it be replaced by satellite and cable. The released spectrum could then be used for high spectral efficiency mobile communications, for which there is a rapidly growing demand.
There is an international organization (ITU) to deal with this, and there are treaties that are *usually* followed in this regard. The US has very long borders with both Canada and Mexico and spectrum management has long been dealt with (not always perfectly).
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Actually, I do not believe that the government can block those communications (prior restraint). What it can do is apply criminal penalties to those who intentionally foment violent activity.
:-)
But then IANAL, thank goodness
Being called a terrorist often has no relationship to whether or not you are a terrorist.
First, who gets to define "terrorist"? One man's freedom figher is another man's terrorist.
Another relativist...
A terrorist is one who engages in terrorism. Terrorism involves the intentional targeting of noncombatants, for the purpose of inciting terror. It doesn't matter what the cause.
Most of the BS rhetoric thrown around in this area is because many movements have terrorists in their fringes, and then one side says
NYA NYA They are terrorists
and the other side says
NYA NYA No they aren't.
It is terrorism when it is policy to engage in it. The Viet Cong in Vietnam engaged in terrorism - killing the village chieftan and his family if he didn't support them. This was policy, so they were terrorists.
Various Palestinian groups are engaged in terrorism. They may *also* be freedom fighters, but that is irrelevant. They are terrorists.
To take the audio output of his player, hook it to the audio input of a good sound card, produce an MP3, and put it on the P2P. For almost everyone, the sound quality would be adequate, and most people would never even know that it went through an analog step along the way.
So much for copy protection.
Typically, the microkernel approach INCREASES the number of context switches. However, a microkernel also normally has very fast context switches.
The context switches are increased because a single operation (say, and I/O read) requires switching into the kernel from the user process, and then out into a device driver. A non-microkernel would have the device driver in the kernel. This is just an example - it may be that the switch is to the file system manager instead, or some other helper process. The point is that the nature of a microkernel is to have lots of helper processes that perform what are normally macro-kernel functions.
Context switches typically are expensive because they involve more than just a switch into kernel mode. They are likely to involve some effort to see if there is other work to do (such as preempt this thread). They may involve some privelege checks, and some statistical gathering.
A microkernel just does less of this stuff.
BTW... the first elegant running micro-kernel I ran into was the original Tandem operating system. The kernel was primarily a messaging system and scheduler (I think scheduling *policy* may have been handled by a task, btw). I/O, file system activity, etc was handled by privileged tasks. It was very elegant, and conveniently fit into their "Non-Stop (TM)" operation.
>i>My highly developed ape remark was meant to echo creationists' view of what evolution implies about people.
Very funny NOT!
To someone at Mims' level, a blind spot of that nature is intentional, hence intellectual dishonesty.
As far as I can tell, Mims firmly believes in creation. This does not strike me as dishonesty, which by its very definition means doing or saying something that you do NOT believe in.
Obviously you would fit well at scientific american. Categorizing someone with silly views as "a highly developed ape" is pretty pathetic. Oh, and there is a difference between intellectual dishonesty, and the sort of world view that lends itself to anti-evolution views. I have never seen any reason to consider Mims to be intellectually dishonest. He just has a blind spot.
I would argue that if there is no place for folks whose views on a scientific area are shaped by religion, then there is no place for folks whose views are shaped by politics. And yet scientists frequently make political statements that are just as silly. And Scientific American is among the worst in that regard.
Yeah.... I got too old for that...
Now 30 years ago... I was up coding at that time!
The problem with racial profiling is that it is selfaffirming. You think black people do more crimes? Then you pull over more black people. When you pull over more black people, you catch more black people doing crimes. So you believe even stronger that black people commit more crimes.
This is indeed a problem with racial profiling. But it neither explains the vast disparity in crimes rates between blacks and whites in the US, nor completely invalidates the idea.
That doesn't even deal with the societal implications: young iranians in the U.S. that are treated like terrorists thinking things like "well, if you are going to think I'm a terrorist anyway, I might as well blow some shit up."
I never said that racial profiling is without negative consequences.
o, don't forget about the 20-30 year old white sniper in Virgina that turned out to be black and in his 40s. Or the successful, social Ted Bundy who was overlooked for 3 years in spite of 6 people reporting on him because he didn't fit his own profile. Profiling is bullshit,
Two problems: you are confusing profiling on a specific crime with a more general profiling. They are not the same thing.
Second, profiling is useful - it just isn't the magic that TV makes it out to be. A lot has been learned about serial killers and spree killers, and it is in fact useful in tracking them down. But it isn't perfect. It isn't random, it just isn't perfect.
It is information, and its value should be weighted just like you weigh other information: some is highly specific, some is very suspect, all is useful as long as you weight it.
You bring up Tim McVeigh. If he hadn't been caught so quickly, it would have been obvious to all that there were two primary profiles to look for:
1) Foreign terrorists, most likely Arab, Persian or Pakistani
and
2) Anti-government local terrorists.
This is obvious, it is useful, and it is profiling.
Tim McVeigh actually fits the profile very well, and that profile is not 20-20 hindsight.
It is true that the FBI sometimes gets too hung up on a single investigative direction( ask Richard Jewell). But this is just the nature of large bureaucracies - see http://www.tinyvital.com/Misc/Laswburo.htm.
It's a shame you don't have an organization like the ACLU in your country.
I *do* live in the country with the ACLU (I assume you are referring to the *American* Civil Liberties Union).
And I know exactly what they do - which is to selectively protect those rights which are of most value to leftists, while occasionally defending some looney Nazi to allow them to claim they defend everyones' rights.
I'll pay a bit more attention to the ACLU when it defends my right to defend myself with a firearm, and when it defends, even slightly, the right of *any* unborn person.
Our government only becomes a usurper of rights when it becomes corrupted by the cancer of greed that is engendered by overly wealthy business interests
I see. Does this explain the 100,000,000 people of their own citizens that communist regimes murdered???
And while I remember the horror which happened in Germany, I also remember (unlike most of the left) what happened in the USSR (20-40 million dead), China (similar numbers) and many other communist countries.
Government becomes a usurper of rights when it is to the benefit of those in government to do so, and when the citizens do not or can not resist. The single most important weapon against government power is education about the dangerous trends of government whether motivated by capitalist greed, psychopathic rage or utopian ideals. Unfortunately, today that education has been twisted - too many people seem to believe, like you explicitely state, that the only government that is dangerous is one corrupted by the standard bogeyman: "wealthy business interess."
There are two basic fallacies here. First, civil liberties protections are, by definition, law enforcement (they prevent the police from breaking the law). Second, police agencies acting outside the bounds of civil liberties protections tend to exhibit "desires and needs" which have no legitimate relationship to law enforcement (e.g. politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits).
No, civil liberties are NOT law enforcement. Civil liberties are those liberties that man naturally has. Civil liberties don't prevent the police from breaking the law (although the *exercise* of free speech sometimes helps). Police don't violate your civil liberties (in most cases) because there are other systems in society to prevent it (courts, newspapers).
It is rare for civil liberties to impede the police in illegitimate acts. The most common use of civil liberties protections is to make it harder for police (and prosecutors) to catch and convict guilty people. And this is a price we *agree* to pay in order to prevent abuse, but it is also a price we constantly haggle about, as it is naturally a controversial issue.
Politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits are more likely to be the acts of politicans than police, and are most likely to be prevented by the free press or the threat of exposure than by any civil liberties rules.
Actually, I suspect that the main problem was the *public* being on the lookout for white vans.
The police know better. Furthermore, the police had information that at least one suspect was black - a phone call of his was obviously made by a black person, or an EXTREMELY good impersonator. They did NOT give out this information, which may very well have impeded the capture of the sniper. Furthermore, when Chief Moose told the public who he was after - before they were captured, he did NOT mention that they were black even though he knew they were. This was extremely wrong, but the sort of politically correct behavior that the anti-profiling mentality leads to.
Also, keep in mind that this sniping incident was unprecedented. No reasonable profiling could really be done. This is far different from where racial profiling is more useful, which is more ordinary crime. You tend to look at white bigots for hate crimes against black; where I live, murders of store clerks are usually by blacks, even though they represent 1% of the population.
No, a BOLO isn't a racial profile. I bring it up to mention the obvious importance of race as a characteristic of value to law enforcement.
The typical BOLO I hear is "...hispanic male, 16-20 armed with a handgun."
Racial profiling is simply a matter of increasing the odds of detection. It of course depends on other circumstances.
DWB (Driving While Black) is an issue because a relatively high percentage of young black males are criminals in certain areas. This leads to a very natural inclination of police to watch young black males more closely. It isn't fair to the non-criminal young black males, but that says nothing about its effectiveness.
After all, government ONLY works by removing liberties. ... and it made no sense at all to me, on any level. I was going to retort, but then I saw the sig...
Government is the only institution which is granted that right to use deadly force, which ultimately is the only way to deprive someone of their liberties. Government without that capability (or some other effective form of coercion) cannot enforce its mandates, and thus doesn't work. I thought that was obvious!
Now, this doesn't mean that you have more liberties without government, as someone else may come along and use force to take them from you. But government works by the threat of or actual taking of liberties, backed up by its authorization to use deadly force.
Police work needs to be 100% accurate, or as close as humanly possible. Exclusionary rules don't help the situation, and Tim McVeigh is a good example. In the case of the recent sniper shootings, the law enforcement people were looking for a young white guy in his 20s with a crew cut right up until the killer(s) pretty much gave himself away.
Police work is rarely 100% accurate, or even close. What law enforcement needs is as much information as possibly applied to the detection of criminals. Racial profiling provides this information, just like other profiling does. Of course it isn't perfect, as your examples illustrate. But it *does* work. Police work, like most things involving humans, is ultimately proabilistic. Racial profiling works to improve probabilities. That is all it does. And when properly applied, it works. It is no different in that sense than age profiling.
In the case of terrorism, it should be obvious that most muslims are foreigners, and can be visually distinguished that way. Thus it is logical to be *more* suspicious of people with that appearance, even though 99.99 percent of them are not terrorists. It certainly makes more sense than strip searching 85 year old grannies just to be fair!
I never argued that civil liberties should not be allowed to impede law enforcement. As the NSA guy implied with his question, the issue is how much.
My post addressed the all too common absolutist view of civil rights.
I still have my subscription, after 40 years of reading the magazine.
But I really don't like the way the magazine is going. It has long had a bit of a political skew (it frequently ran articles on nuclear deterrence, for example, which is hardly a scientific policy).
But it is really sad what is happening now. The percentage of science articles to environmentalist articles is declining. Sure, there are scientific issues with the environment, but it is a small part of overall science. Where are the major physics articles? Why are most biology articles now about species diversity or global warming impact on the biota, or whatever?
The answer is simple: the magazine has become a shill for a particular viewpoint.
If one wants to see how biased it has gotten, and how the editors consider pushing their viewpoint more important than informing the public on science, just look at how they handled the debate over "The Skeptical Environmentalist." They spent 14 pages debunking it, with articles that were more venom and ad-hominem than scientific. They forced the author to take down his point-by-point refutation from his website (copyright violation, they said, even though it was obviously fair use).
Another example is how they treated Forrest Mims on the Amateur Scientist issue. Forrest Mims is an anti-evolutionist, which is unfortunate. But he is also very good at the sort of thing that the Amateur Scientist used to be known for: doing practical science experiments and building interesting scientific gadgets. They hired him for the job, then found out he was anti-evolutionist, and promptly dropped him.
I see no place for anti-evolutionist views in Scientific American, but he had promised not to put those views into his work. It appears that he was sacked just because they couldn't stand to have a person whose *private views* disagreed with them.
The result of the bias and changed focus at SciAm shows. The magazine is shrinking. Obviously they are having financial troubles. I am afraid that this 150 year old American classic is doomed to extinction. Its great tradition is being destroyed by those who want to inject their political views into every aspect of life.
If the Earth spun the other way 'round, meteor showers would always be best just after sunset. But, sadly, I was not consulted during the design phase...
Obviously we need a project to reverse the earth's spin. After all, what decent geek gets up EARLY IN THE MORNING?
Certainly not me, which is why I usually miss these shows.
Why does the NSA have to ask for a line between safety and liberty? Why can't we have both
The NSA isn't asking you to choose one or the other. It is asking how much liberty do you wish to sacrifice in order to gain how much safety.
And contrary to the rest of your post, there is *always* that tradeoff in the real world.
I know that violating people's civil liberties including taking away their right to speech, privacy and due process makes it easier for law enforcement, but aside from being unconstitutional, it's also bad policework.
Wait... it makes it easier to do their job, so it is bad policework? That doesn't follow.
If you racially profile your suspects, then the Timothy McVeighs slip through.
Nonsense. If you racially profile, you enhance your odds of catching criminals. There is a reason that every BOLO I have ever heard (and I have heard a lot of them) list the race of the suspect. And in terms of a more general profile, where you don't exactly know the suspect, it still makes sense. Not racially profiling is like making a spam filter that ignores certain words because it is politically incorrect to do so.
In other words, it is a dumb strategy from a law enforcement viewpoint.
If you tap everyone's phone, then you become bogged down in terabytes of data -- most of which is useless. If you suppress the speech of the hate mongers and racists, then you don't know who is a hate monger or racist.
Civil liberties aren't just respectful of constitutional and human rights, they also help law enforcement do their job right. So don't ask for a line to be drawn. Try playing by the rules instead.
This is utter balderdash. Civil liberties in general impede law inforcement. Otherwise, we wouldn't need to enforce civil liberties against law enforcement, because they would have no desire or need to violate them.
The important issue, which at least the head of the NSA understands (unlike some posters here) is which civil liberties does one reduce (not eliminate) in trade for what sort of protection. This is a valid question. In fact, it is the fundamental question of all government: what freedoms do you take from your citizens in trade for what benefits do you give them?
After all, government ONLY works by removing liberties. This is something that those who favor big government should keep in mind. It isn't only safety that people trade for liberty; they are also all to willing to trade economic freedoms (typically the economic freedoms of others) for their own economic gain (or the economic gain of others).
Government is necessary in the real world. Government only works by removing liberties. The US government is contrained in its removal of liberties by a constitution, although the interpretation of that constitution is a matter of constant controversy.
Therefore the only interesting issue is how much the government can and should infringe on liberties. Anything else ignores reality.
Counting on the government to do anything well is asking a lot.
Expecting the government to attempt to provide for your safety against the depradations of others is correct, however.
The single most important purpose of government is to protect its citizens against crimes local and afar.
One of the things I found most striking when flying into Vietnam (during the war) was hearing, on the Airport Terminal Information System at Cam Rahn: "Caution: High trajectory artillery fire from " (coordinates).
Of course those silly shells have to go up high, otherwise they wouldn't get very far!
The military has been tracking projectiles for a long time. They had mortar tracking radar during the Vietnam War that could track the shell, predict its impact point, and more importantly, back calculate the launch point.
Tracking a shell can be very easy, depending on the circumstances. They are made out of conductive metal, so a radar can certainly track them.
You detect the firing with a rapid scan radar, then lock onto it with a finer resolution radar. Then you use lidar (Laser radar) for final tracking and range finding.
This really is not much of a trick.
What is impressive is integrating all of that technology with a laser that is powerful enough to damage the projectile while at the same time being able to track it.
Vaporware. Hardly - this system is already being used in Israel and to shoot down Katyusha rockets. In this sort of issue, the main difference between an artiller shell and a rocket is that the rocket is likely to be longer. But an artillery rocket doesn't burn for long, and then it is just another ballistic projectile.
I apologize. I had just finished a post on a more contentious topic. I shouldn't have let that emotion carry over into this one.
The misunderstanding you appear to have is that digital modulation means modulating with raw digital signals. It usually doesn't. Digital modulation really means modulation meant to carry digital information, not modulation directly by the digital signal.
For example, one can convey digital information by converting the baseband square waves into band limited signals by passing them through a low pass filter, and *then* using them to FM or AM or PM modulate a signal. This is a simple, low data rate modulation. Higher data rates use more complex signals - such as a combination of phase and amplitude modulation (PAM) - often with multiple levels of both (nQAM). Even more sophisticated schemes exist.
If you modulate an AM carrier with square waves, you will generate sidebands on odd harmonics of the fundamental square wave frequency. The amplitude of those sidebands will be proportional to the inverse of the modulation sideband number. If you use triangular waves, the amplitude is proportional to the inverse of the square of the sideband number. Even better shaping of the modulating signal produces even greater suppression of sidebands.
When one goes to FM or PM modulation, things get much weirder. Typical FM modulation has an infinite number of sidebands - with their amplitudes determined by bessel functions. Thus any FM signal is essentially infinitely wide. But in a practical sense, the modulation index and the baseband frequencies are chosen to fit the signal (or X% or Y dB of it) into a specified bandwidth.
Note that low pass filtering of digital NRZ signals (rectangular waves) is really no different than what you do with audio - you have to low pass filter that also or you will get overly wide signal bandwidth. If you look at a typical voice, you will see that there are harmonic generation waveforms even worse than square waves - these look like evenly separated spikes. So any modulation system really has the same problem.
The reason that pagers drive you nuts is not that they are using digital modulation, but rather that the transmitters run very high power (thus triggering intermodulation in your receiver), and the modulation has a very unpleasant sound (which is made worse since you are typically listening to the second harmonic of the pager mixed with the fundamental of another nearby signal). That second harmonic has distorted wider-band modulation.
For example, the pager is on frequency X in the VHF band. You are listening to frequency y. There is another transmitter at frequency 2X-y. So when 2X-y mixes with the second harmonic of X (2X), you end up with y (with the modulation of both X and th 2X-y signal).
REPOST with hopefully the italics right.
What kind of freedom fighters kill nuns, priests, children, organizers, electrocute people's genitals, decapitate people and display their heads, oppress women, cut off people's hands for stealing?
The hardly perfect people of Afghanistan, who were being oppressed by an invading army from the USSR. I remember when the left used to be for the oppressed, until they realized that the USSR also oppressed people. Those atrocities they never mentioned.
Oh, and other than the "oppress women and cut off people's hands for stealing" - the rest has been true of most 20th century freedom fighters on ALL sides. BUT, it has been the supported policy of only of the left (Viet Cong) for example and some of the harder to control rebels. Please consider that the acts of the few do not define either the goals or the methods of the many.
Your "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan are basically the Taliban.
No, the Taliban ended up controlling the country. The most extreme of the freedom fighters where of the Taliban ilk.
You're telling me that conservatives didn't support the war against South Vietnam?
No, I'm tellng you that the conservatives didn't send people to fight in Vietnam. But lots of us DID volunteer to do so, including myself.
And if you knew anything about the Vietnam War, you would realize that the bulk of the terrorism was performed at the orders of the North Vietnamese. It was their *policy* to torture and kill any village leaders who did not actively support them. It was because of this sort of behavior that, during the Tet offensive, none of the people that they claimed to be fighting for rose up and joined their cause (which is why they lost that battle so badly). Oh, and those wonderful freedom fighters, when they captured the one major city they did temporarily hold (Hue), massacred 2000 civilians. These were not accidental casualties. They were people who opposed the communists, and they were rounded up and slaughtered.
Did our side do bad things in Vietnam? You bet. But when our soldiers misbehaved and got caught (like Lieutenant Calley and his platoon), we disciplined them. When the VC and NVA engaged in massacres, it was under the orders of their superiors!
I think the people of Nicaragua got the message loud and clear, vote against the wishes of the US, and the terrorist war against them continues. I would have voted as I was told as well. How you can call that election "fair" is beyond me.
You know, the really hilarious thing about this discussion is when you bring up positions like this. If you knew your history, you would know that the American left EXPECTED the Sandinistas to win the election. They didn't think the people were being threatened by contras! Jimmy Carter himself certified the election as fair. Don't you think that if the people voted out of terror, the american left, who hated the Contras and the Reagan policy a who were present THROUGHOUT the war and election period would have expected the people to vote for contras? Huh?
No, it was a fair election.
Oh, and another thing you need to understand about most Latin American battles of the time. The communists were led by the children of the rich! Look at who came to power under the Sandinistas. Oh, and look at their first acts in office: confiscation of the best property of their opponents, followed by giving those luxurious places to their followers.
Furthermore, they betrayed most of those who joined them in the uprising (communist takeover 101). The overthrow of Somoza was a broadly popular uprising. Many of those who fought against Somoza were purged by the Sandinistas, and many of the survivors of those purges joined the Contras!
The only way the Contras look human is by comparing them to the worst of the Sandinistas, who were (obviously) hardly boy scouts.
Demogoguery 101 - deny the humanity of your opponents. Good work. You learned your lession. Here you are nicely admitting that the *worst* of the Sandinistas were a little worse than all of the Contras. But the reality is that the worst of both were very bad. And the best of the Contras were very good. And like most of those situations, lots of folks were inbetween. Stereotyping the contras is no substitute for thinking.
The Reagan and Bush administration's record on supporting terrorists, destabilizing governments, and staging coups against Latin America is well documented, perhaps you should read the declassified documents [gwu.edu] for yourself.
Sorry... but pointing to a gigantic archive doesn't exactly inform. Perhaps you should be more specific.
But... I will accept all but the "supporting terrorist" charges just to clear the air (at least for Reagan - Bush is another matter). Reagan reversed a decades old US policy vs the USSR that had the effect of letting them engage in subversion, and keep their gains, while we were only allowed to oppose the subversion. This, of course, is a losing policy. Reagan's policy was counter-subversion. Where the Russians played the game to our disadvantage (and objectively to the disadvantage of the subjects of the regimes they created and propped up), we responded. We subverted THEIR puppet regimes. And I am glad we did.
Was it fair to the people of these countries that the great powers were fighting over them? Not at all. But we didn't start it - we did, thank goodness, finish it.
BTW... most of your charges are more accurately waged against FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon than Reagan and modern conservatives.
The number of felony conviction against defence contractors for defrauding the Pentagon number in the thousands. Pretending that these corporations don't rip off the Pentagon is ridiculous, the record is clear.
Of course that is true. But I didn't pretend that they didn't. I take, however, take issue with your examples.
The fact that many elected officials support this kind of corporate welfare is obvious, what it has to do with defending the country is less obvious. The B1 is a famous example, the Air Force didn't want it, but the Republicans pushed for it for years, at the bidding of their corporate handlers.
And again, no dispute with all of this except for the implication that only the Republicans pushed for the B-1, and the use of the code word "corporate handlers." So what? I never disputed that politicians, including Republicans, engage in pork barrel. BUT, the fact that they do so does not mean that every action is pork barrel and that every action is selfish. You seem to be engaging again in one sided stereotyping here.
Your "fiat currency" rantings sound like those of a gold bug. Conservatives like a strong currency. Many of us favor a gold standard. So just who are you accusing of what with your wierd terminology, and what does it have to do with your accusations that conservatives don't favor a free market is beyond me.
S&L weren't supposed to pay "competitive rates" - checking accounts weren't supposed to pay interest, remember?
I see. Then please explain to me how S&L's were supposed to acquire and retain depositors? Eh?
Again you assert that Bush has increased taxes. WHICH TAXES? BE SPECIFIC. Bush reduced taxes. And yes, I agree that the silly rebate was a bad idea, and conservatives (those folks you claim to be characterizing) universally opposed the rebate.
So I guess I have to ask again... your point?
You assume I'm a liberal? The only critics of conservatives are liberal Democrats, eh? I hardly see the difference between them
Actually, I don't know what you are. I do know that most of your arguments are those normally given by the left and hard left, so is a lot of your so-called evidence, and so is the rhetorical tone. So whatever you call yourself, you sound like a leftist (in most of your arguments - the fiat currency stuff sounds more like the folks that live in compounds in rural Idaho).
I don't assume to know what's in the heart of conservatives, but I do know that they favor killing of all sorts of people, born and unborn, when it's in their interests. How people who are against abortion, yet for capital punishment, and bombing cities full of people, look in the mirror is beyond me. The National Right to Life Committee doesn't even try to pull that nonsense anymore.
Obviously you haven't paid ANY attention to the philosophy of conservativism nor our spokesmen (and do NOT count Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, or some of the loonier TV evangelists in that number). And I also absolutely disagree with the "when it's in their interests" phrase. That is a nasty thing, when you say we favor killing when it is in our (implied selfish) interests.
Yes, we do favor capital punishment (except for many in the Right To Life movement, with which you are obviously only familiar from TV). What it means to "favor killing" however can be better stated in less wildly rhetorical terms as "we believe in the long established concept of a just war, and recognize that in some circumstances it is necessary and morally right to kill" We also believe it is appropriate to do our very best to protect innocent people in those unfortunate eventualities."
Now, you can disagree with that philophy, which if you do allows me to categorize you as a pacifist (except pacifists don't favor killing unborn children). But pacifists, however moral they may be, are also utopian fools.
So why don't you tell me: how DO we deal with mass murders? How do we prevent it? Or is there no circumstance which justifies killing other than the convenience of sexually irresponsible women?
---
Interesting that you lump Rush Limbaugh (who is far from a hate monger) with Anne Coulter (who is refreshing because she gives the left a little bit of what they have been giving the right forever) with O'Reilly (who is NOT a conservative, not very intelligent, and not at all polite). They are very different people.
And of course freerepublic.com is one of the more radical of the conservative sites, and hardly represents mainstream conservative opinion. If you want to know what conservatives really think, read National Review, Daily Standard, Wall Street Journal (editorial page only) - or listen to Limbaugh (ignore anything he says about science) or Michael Medved.
I am fully aware of the difference between the rhetoric of conservatives and libertarians,
(not really - see below)
but the differences between their actions are slight. As far as I can tell, Libertarians just seem to be conservatives who like to smoke pot.
Uh huh. Libertarians are almost (not completely) uniformly pro-choice. Conservatives are almost always not. Most people who call themselves libertarians are actually libertines but don't know the difference (go to a Mensa meeting sometime and you'll see what I mean). The National Review, considered the foremost journal of conservative thought, is in favor of ending the war on drugs, but it is hardly libertarian!
There are lots of differences.
Libertarians sure want a strong government to protect their property and enforce their contracts.
Not the ones I come across or read. Their philosophy tends to be "if you want to avoid being robbed, hire a guard. If you want to avoid having your freedoms taken by an invader, hire your own army."
I always did have trouble understanding the difference between a libertarian company town and dictatorship, aside from the dictator being called "CEO" under the libertarian regime.
Really? That is a pretty amazing admission. Dictatorships operate by suppressing all freedoms. Just ask the Russians or the Vietnamese or the Cubans or the Nicaraguans under either Somoza or the Sandinistas. Libertarians oppose all of that. And CEO's in a libertarian (or conservative for that matter) world are bound by a set of laws that prevent the very depradations that dictators are known for.
As far as your attempt at showing irony... you seem to miss the point. The left can be a force for evil without malice. It is true that I believe there is some malice (which indeed is motivation) behind a lot of the most outrageous slanders. So yes, you can really say nasty mean things and get me to, in a moment of anger, question whether you are really a fine spirited person who just happens to disagree.
What kind of freedom fighters kill nuns, priests, children, organizers, electrocute people's genitals, decapitate people and display their heads, oppress women, cut off people's hands for stealing?
The hardly perfect people of Afghanistan, who were being oppressed by an invading army from the USSR. I remember when the left used to be for the oppressed, until they realized that the USSR also oppressed people. Those atrocities they never mentioned.
Oh, and other than the "oppress women and cut off people's hands for stealing" - the rest has been true of most 20th century freedom fighters on ALL sides. BUT, it has been the supported policy of only of the left (Viet Cong) for example and some of the harder to control rebels. Please consider that the acts of the few do not define either the goals or the methods of the many.
Your "freedom fighters" in Afghanistan are basically the Taliban.
No, the Taliban ended up controlling the country. The most extreme of the freedom fighters where of the Taliban ilk.
You're telling me that conservatives didn't support the war against South Vietnam?
No, I'm tellng you that the conservatives didn't send people to fight in Vietnam. But lots of us DID volunteer to do so, including myself.
And if you knew anything about the Vietnam War, you would realize that the bulk of the terrorism was performed at the orders of the North Vietnamese. It was their *policy* to torture and kill any village leaders who did not actively support them. It was because of this sort of behavior that, during the Tet offensive, none of the people that they claimed to be fighting for rose up and joined their cause (which is why they lost that battle so badly). Oh, and those wonderful freedom fighters, when they captured the one major city they did temporarily hold (Hue), massacred 2000 civilians. These were not accidental casualties. They were people who opposed the communists, and they were rounded up and slaughtered.
Did our side do bad things in Vietnam? You bet. But when our soldiers misbehaved and got caught (like Lieutenant Calley and his platoon), we disciplined them. When the VC and NVA engaged in massacres, it was under the orders of their superiors!
I think the people of Nicaragua got the message loud and clear, vote against the wishes of the US, and the terrorist war against them continues. I would have voted as I was told as well. How you can call that election "fair" is beyond me.
You know, the really hilarious thing about this discussion is when you bring up positions like this. If you knew your history, you would know that the American left EXPECTED the Sandinistas to win the election. They didn't think the people were being threatened by contras! Jimmy Carter himself certified the election as fair. Don't you think that if the people voted out of terror, the american left, who hated the Contras and the Reagan policy a who were present THROUGHOUT the war and election period would have expected the people to vote for contras? Huh?
No, it was a fair election.
Oh, and another thing you need to understand about most Latin American battles of the time. The communists were led by the children of the rich! Look at who came to power under the Sandinistas. Oh, and look at their first acts in office: confiscation of the best property of their opponents, followed by giving those luxurious places to their followers.
Furthermore, they betrayed most of those who joined them in the uprising (communist takeover 101). The overthrow of Somoza was a broadly popular uprising. Many of those who fought against Somoza were purged by the Sandinistas, and many of the survivors of those purges joined the Contras!
The only way the Contras look human is by comparing them to the worst of the Sandinistas, who were (obviously) hardly boy scouts.
Demogoguery 101 - deny the humanity of your opponents. Good work. You learned your lession. Here you are nicely admitting that the *worst* of the Sandinistas were a little worse than all of the Contras. But the reality is that the worst of both were very bad. And the best of the Contras were very good. And like most of those situations, lots of folks were inbetween. Stereotyping the contras is no substitute for thinking.
The Reagan and Bush administration's record on supporting terrorists, destabilizing governments, and staging coups against Latin America is well documented, perhaps you should read the declassified documents [gwu.edu] for yourself.
Sorry... but ponting to a gigantic archive doesn't exactly inform. Perhaps you should be more specific.
But... I will accept all but the "supporting terrorist" charges just to clear the air (at least for Reagan - Bush is another matter). Reagan reversed a decades old US policy vs the USSR that had the effect of letting them engage in subversion, and keep their gains, while we were only allowed to oppose the subversion. This, of course, is a losing policy. Reagan's policy was counter-subversion. Where the Russians played the game to our disadvantage (and objectively to the disadvantage of the subjects of the regimes they created and propped up), we responded. We subverted THEIR puppet regimes. And I am glad we did.
Was it fair to the people of these countries that the great powers were fighting over them? Not at all. But we didn't start it - we did, thank goodness, finish it.
BTW... most of your charges are more accurately waged against FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon than Reagan and modern conservatives.
The number of felony conviction against defence contractors for defrauding the Pentagon number in the thousands. Pretending that these corporations don't rip off the Pentagon is ridiculous, the record is clear.
Of course that is true. But I didn't pretend that they didn't. I take, however, take issue with your examples.
The fact that many elected officials support this kind of corporate welfare is obvious, what it has to do with defending the country is less obvious. The B1 is a famous example, the Air Force didn't want it, but the Republicans pushed for it for years, at the bidding of their corporate handlers.
And again, no dispute with all of this except for the implication that only the Republicans pushed for the B-1, and the use of the code word "corporate handlers." So what? I never disputed that politicians, including Republicans, engage in pork barrel. BUT, the fact that they do so does not mean that every action is pork barrel and that every action is selfish. You seem to be engaging again in one sided stereotyping here.
Your "fiat currency" rantings sound like those of a gold bug. Conservatives like a strong currency. Many of us favor a gold standard. So just who are you accusing of what with your wierd terminology, and what does it have to do with your accusations that conservatives don't favor a free market is beyond me.
S&L weren't supposed to pay "competitive rates" - checking accounts weren't supposed to pay interest, remember?
I see. Then please explain to me how S&L's were supposed to acquire and retain depositors? Eh?
Again you assert that Bush has increased taxes. WHICH TAXES? BE SPECIFIC. Bush reduced taxes. And yes, I agree that the silly rebate was a bad idea, and conservatives (those folks you claim to be characterizing) universally opposed the rebate.
So I guess I have to ask again... your point?
You assume I'm a liberal? The only critics of conservatives are liberal Democrats, eh? I hardly see the difference between them
Actually, I don't know what you are. I do know that most of your arguments are those normally given by the left and hard left, so is a lot of your so-called evidence, and so is the rhetorical tone. So whatever you call yourself, you sound like a leftist (in most of your arguments - the fiat currency stuff sounds more like the folks that live in compounds in rural Idaho).
I don't assume to know what's in the heart of conservatives, but I do know that they favor killing of all sorts of people, born and unborn, when it's in their interests. How people who are against abortion, yet for capital punishment, and bombing cities full of people, look in the mirror is beyond me. The National Right to Life Committee doesn't even try to pull that nonsense anymore.
Obviously you haven't paid ANY attention to the philosophy of conservativism nor our spokesmen (and do NOT count Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, or some of the loonier TV evangelists in that number). And I also absolutely disagree with the "when it's in their interests" phrase. That is a nasty thing, when you say we favor killing when it is in our (implied selfish) interests. Yes, we do favor capital punishment (except for many in the Right To Life movement, with which you are obviously on familiar from TV). What it means to "favor killing" however can be better stated in less wildly rhetorical terms as "we believe in the long established concept of a just war, and recognize that in some circumstances it is necessary and morally right to kill/" We also believe it is appropriate to do our very best to protect innocent people in those unfortunate eventualities."
Now, you can disagree with that philophy, which if you do allows me to categorize you as a pacifist (except pacifists don't favor killing unborn children). But pacifists, however moral they may be, are also utopian fools.
So why don't you tell me: how DO we deal with mass murders? How do we prevent it? Or is there no circumstance which justifies killing other than the convenience of sexually irresponsible women?
Interesting that you lump Rush Limbaugh (who is far from a hate monger) with Anne Coulter (who is refreshing because she gives the left a little bit of what they have been giving the right forever) with O'Reilly (who is NOT a conservative, not very intelligent, and not at all polite). They are very different people.
And of course freerepublic.com is one of the more radical of the conservative sites, and hardly represents mainstream conservative opinion. If you want to know what conservatives really think, read National Review, Daily Standard, Wall Street Journal (editorial page only) - or listen to Limbaugh (ignore anything he says about science) or Michael Medved.
I am fully aware of the difference between the rhetoric of conservatives and libertarians,
(not really - see below)
but the differences between their actions are slight. As far as I can tell, Libertarians just seem to be conservatives who like to smoke pot.
Uh huh. Libertarians are almost (not completely) uniformly pro-choice. Conservatives are almost always not. Most people who call themselves libertarians are actually libertines but don't know the difference (go to a Mensa meeting sometime and you'll see what I mean). The National Review, considered the foremost journal of conservative thought, is in favor of ending the war on drugs, but it is hardly libertarian!
There are lots of differences.
Libertarians sure want a strong government to protect their property and enforce their contracts.
Not the ones I come across or read. Their philosophy tends to be "if you want to avoid being robbed, hire a guard. If you want to avoid having your freedoms taken by an invader, hire your own army."
I always did have trouble understanding the difference between a libertarian company town and dictatorship, aside from the dictator being called "CEO" under the libertarian regime.
Really? That is a pretty amazing admission. Dictatorships operate by suppressing all freedoms. Just ask the Russians or the Vietnamese or the Cubans or the Nicaraguans under either Somoza or the Sandinistas. Libertarians oppose all of that. And CEO's in a libertarian (or conservative for that matter) world are bound by a set of laws that prevent the very depradations that dictators are known for.
As far as your attempt at showing irony... you seem to miss the point. The left can be a force for evil without malice. It is true that I believe there is some malice (which indeed is motivation) behind a lot of the most outrageous slanders. So yes, you can really say nasty mean things and get me to, in a moment of anger, question whether you are really a fine spirited person who just happens to disagree.
The FCC wants digital TV for spectrum efficiency and modernity reasons. The movie industry wants it for better display, and of course now for DRM reasons. The broadcasters objected to the mandated expense, until things changed to allow them to sell additional services on it in addition to TV, and for them to use it to hold onto additional channels for a while.
The big problem with VHF/UHF broadcast TV in the US is that it is extremely wasteful of very valuable spectrum. There is a limited (by physics) amount of spectrum available for mobile applications, and broadcast TV takes about a third of it!
But... except for a few cases, broadcast TV does not NEED to operate on mobile spectrum. Almost all TV is either multipoint fixed, which can be done at much higher frequencies, or already carried by cable and consumes no air spectrum at all (except for leaks).
A more rational system would eventually phase out high power VHF/UHF TV broadcast - digital and analog, and let it be replaced by satellite and cable. The released spectrum could then be used for high spectral efficiency mobile communications, for which there is a rapidly growing demand.
There is an international organization (ITU) to deal with this, and there are treaties that are *usually* followed in this regard. The US has very long borders with both Canada and Mexico and spectrum management has long been dealt with (not always perfectly).