The disappearance of wolly mammoths and most other large animals in the northern temperate zones is most likely the result of predation by humans. Those nature loving "Native Americans" in the US killed of the mammoths, the giant sloth, and a number of other ice age critters.
A recent paper theorizes (with some significant evidence) that the buffalo survived because the tribes were so warlike that buffalo had connected, large zones of no hunting - no man's lands where hunters would be killed by rival tribes.
But wooly mammoths are indeed cool. And their meat apparently tastes good. A field biologist acquaintance of mine enjoyed mammoths steaks in Alaska one time when a flood uncovered a frozen mammoth.
This is most interesting, since the global CO2 concentration rise doesn't follow anywhere near such a linear trend. Furthermore, the temperature trend is likewise not linear, and furthermoer doesn't match (or lag) the CO2 concentration rise.
Actually, there is no credible evidence that small amounts (or even large amounts) of PCB are harmful to people. It's another of those favorite environmental causes that is based on fear mongering, not science.
The same also goes for TCE and a number of other compounds that the scarios and their friends in the EPA try to keep at microscopic levels.
ANd I feel free to drive my large (but suprisingly fuel efficient) SUv as much as I want. In fact, it gives me great pleasure to do so, since so many idiots think it is wrong.
The majority of climatologists consider human induced global warming a fact (that's a Saddam Hussein election-like majority, not a more than 50% majority) The amount of increase and influence is debated about.
And for a long time, the majority of geologists considered contental drift to be a crackpot theory. And the majority of physicists considered Newtonian physics to be the final answer.
Science is not a matter of votes. Neither is it well served by naive analyses of short term data in what is a very long term process.
Actually, the majority of climatologists consider global warming a fact. They do not agree on whether it is human induced. They do agree that CO2 has increased, and that the most simplistic physics would predict warming as a result. They have models that predict warming, and yet they have almost no decent models of ocean behavior, which is far more important than the atmosphere in determining climate.
Also keep in mind that the majority of reporters (including the moderators of Slashdot) are predisposed towards stories that favor man-caused global warming. And that the majority of funding in the climatological area goes to those who investigate global warming - with bias towards those whose papers favor the hypothesis. I know researchers in the field who, under the Clinton administration in the US, were afraid to have their actual anti-anthropogenic views attributed to them because they would lose funding!
The earth started warming in the 17th century, long before any significant CO2 increase. The current warming may be anthropogenic. It also may not. It is just as likely that anthropogenic warming is preventing a damaging cooling.
I get really tired of almost every story published about nature mentioning a possible connection to global warming!
Where are the stories about glacial growth? Some glaciers are increasing, not decreasing, but that doesn't seem to ever make the press, or Slashdot.
The physics is NOT the same for radio and sound, although it is similar. But you are still reasoning by analogy.
As for you last paragraph leaving the citizen band problem to the real world, and declaring it isn't your problem. I think that adequately describes your approach to analyzing this problem.
I agree with all of this. I don't think using the military reconnaisance technology to hunt the sniper is going to far or totally disregarding the status quo.
The military commonly helps with civilian activities. For example, it is routine to use them for search and rescue. The Civil Air Patrol (of which I am a member) is an Air Force auxiliary, and is the primary agency in most areas of the US for missing aircraft searches. And yet we sometimes use Air Force active duty assets to provide sensor support.
Likewise, it is not unprecedented to use military data for law enforcement - especially drug law enforcement (sigh).
Hmmm.... I don't know. In a regular glider, you can use spoilers to slow down, and if you really want to slow down, a strong slip (which is a form of uncoordinated flight that causes a lot of drag) will really do the trip.
Where I did my glider training there was almost always a thermal at the approach end of the runway, so I always ended up doing a severe slip to get it down. When I was refreshing my power license some years later, I scared the hell out of my instructor by doing the same thing in a 182 when I was too high on approach. Hey, it worked, but I guess power pilots are not quite used to such things.
I am reasoning based on an understanding of radio technology and signal processing, including spread spectrum (call it wideband if you wish). The 50,000 people talking in a stadium can be quite enough to keep you from hearing a cricket chirping nearby, but if your particular need is to hear that cricket, you are screwed. And they have no incentive to stop talking so you can hear the cricket.
There are always limits in communications. Furthermore, without rules, there are often incentives to keep yelling louder and louder. This is what caused the FCC to be created in the first place. It is also what happened to the Citizen Band frequencies when the FCC decided not to waste resources enforcing the rules.
Not true. The F-117 achieves stealth by causing the radar signal to be reflected away from the originating transmitter. Thus it is susceptible to bistatic radar.
The B-2, OTOH, also uses radar absorbing material to further reduce its radar cross section.
BTW... the problem with lower frequency radars us that they are not as precise. Furthermore the emitters are vulnerable to HARM missiles.
The use of existing transmitters (TV transmitters for example) is sneakier. You don't necessarily know which transmitters to destroy! You have to take them all out.
But then, one can also use the signals from TV satellites. This was first demonstrated at LAX in the late 60s or thereabouts. But they are low power so they require lots of receiving antenna against a low reflectivity aircraft like a B-2.
And then, of course, there are active techniques to hide a stealth aircraft. Jamming the radars is an old and crude one. Deceiving them is also old. Both are no doubt used in a big way today, but with a lot more sophistication. A radar is at a fundamental disadvantage due to the fourth power exponent in the radar range equation. A jammer is only dealing with a 2nd power term (both of these are powers of the distance).
And then there's all the stuff we DON'T know about this stuff. The physics are obvious, but the applications are not and I am sure some clever engineers on both the stealth and the detection side have done things we won't hear about for some time.
I once had a U-2 fly over me at about 30 feet of altitude. It was just about to land at Kirtland Air Force Base and I was at the end of the runway (this was about 1961).
I made no sound at all except for a slight whistling. Of course, the U-2 is one of the world's best gliders.
I wouldn't say he ignores it, but there is one assumption about underlay that is incorrect. The proposed mechanism of underlay is for the the underlay system to detect that it is causing interference and cease to do so within a few milliseconds.
However, the ideas of Open Spectrum, applied carefully and with good engineering understanding, can indeed significantly increase the usage of spectrum. However, unlike many of the subsequent posters on this thread will assume, it will *not* work without appropriate regulation (as the author recognizes). It is a different and superior method of spectrum management, not spectrum anarchy.
The idea of setting aside spectrum "parks" for the unlicensed services, and then applying strict technical regulations to those systems is the most promising. Setting aside channels 60-69 would free up 60 MHz of very useful bandwidth for mobile and portable applications. The appropriate standards would allow proper sharing of the underlying spectrum without licensing individual users or sites.
However, some of the techniques that allow this sort of operation may not be that inexpensive to create. They will require substantial processor power and probably power consumption. This will limit their use in extremely inexpensive uses (such as keychain transmitters for auto alarms). For these kinds of uses, different spectral parks may be required.
In other words, one may need some spectrum for dirt cheap devices (where an additional $.01 is a significant cost increase), and other spectrum for sophisticated devices where the value allows greater costs. Likewise one may want different spectrum and rules for wide area systems than local ones. Furthermore some systems can tolerate significant random interruption (remote meter reading, for example) while others must work well all of the time in real time (police communications, air traffic control, etc). These may again require different parts of the spectrum in order to be protected from inadvertent interference from nearby non-cooperating unlicensed systems.
Furthermore, one needs to make sure that failure modes of these devices don't screw up a whole area!
Hmmm... this starts to sound a lot different from just turning folks loose on unlicensed bands! It illustrates the complexity and the need for sophisticated standards and associated regulation.
Underlay is IMHO much more dubious than the author lets on.
In practice it can be very hard to do well. Existing narrow-band systems use techniques that *cannot be used* in wideband receivers. The techniques (such as very high Q low loss RF filters) allow the narrow band receiver to operate with very weak signals, signals which could not be adequately detected by a wideband underlay system, and which would then be interfered with by that system. These existing systems are engineered, and regulated, to use the minimum power needed - and thus are inherently susceptible to this new interference.
There are a number of physical factors that limit receiver sensitivity. They range from thermal noise in the receiver to exotic topics such as intermodulation, desensitization, and quantization noise. It is not possible to optimize for all of these in a frequency agile receiver to nearly the degree one can in a narrow band receiver.
In addition, some of the techniques are inherently expensive. Moore's law doesn't apply to the fabrication of precision metal resonators, for example.
What this means is that for an underlay service to be truly non-interfering, it requires either a very expensive, big and power consuming receiver, or it needs to be on a portion of the spectrum where these techniques are not applied by existing users of that spectrum.
Other approaches, such as using spread spectrum - or wideband as the autho prefers -(so you don't have to detect systems you are interfering with) have different problems. A wideband system distributes its power across a wide spectrum, but that power is still not zero. This means that if it is too close to a traditional narrow band receiver, or another wideband receiver it will cause damaging interference.
Overall, however, the Open Spectrum initiative is a good thing and can have enormous economic value. But it should not be viewed as a magic solution or one that can rely strictly on anarchy or unregulated cooperative development.
Specifically... as the frequency goes up, the amount of energy captured by an antenna of a given size goes down by the square of the wavelength. The directivity goes up by a complex relationship with the size of the antenna.
Thus at very high frequencies you have to have exponentially more power to transmit the same distance, or you have to have an equivalently more directional antenna.
This fact is one of the reasons that spectrum is so valuable. The higher the frequency, the more costly and less practical it is to use it for non-stationary applications. In addition, as you get to higher frequencies you run into more problems with attenuation due to atmosphere, rain, walls, earth, etc. In addition to that, transmitters are significantly less power efficient at higher frequencies.
Add all that up and you have several exponentials retarding advances into higher frequencies.
Actually a dipole (half wavelength) antenna at 10 kHz (one of the frequencies they use) is 3000 kilometers!
But there is no rule that says antennas have to be any large fraction of a wavelength. A magnetic or electical antenna can be any size and have the same capture area as a dipole. This is because antennae do not have to be resonant to work - and a non-resonant antenna can be just as efficient as a resonant one, if you have a high efficiency circuit to tune out the reactance which results from the lack of resonance. This is one of the things an "antenna tuner" - familiar to ham radio operators does (the other is to transform the real portion of the impedance to a standard 50 ohms). However, it is hard to make efficient very tiny antennas. This is why these ELF systems have to use such high power.
HOWEVER, on a submarine, the resonant wavelength of a trailing wire antenna is *much* lower, because the speed of propagation in the waveguide formed by the antenna, insulation and salt water is much lower than the speed of light. Thus these antennas need only be a few hundred or thousand meters long to be reasonably efficient.
As an aside, my father invented this antenna in his PhD thesis about 50 years ago.
The issue is not the supposed goals of campaign finance reform (which in reality are *always* the protection of incumbents). It is the constitutionality.
By your argument, then, freedom of the press is useless. After all, operating a press requires money.
Is it okay if I spend my $100,000 on starting up a newspaper and distributing it? It will, of course, support my candidates and oppose others.
Please explain to me why I should have this freedom but not the freedom to purchase the print in someone else's press output?
When I was in your situation, I joined the US Navy and became an air crew member. Things were dangerous then too (Vietnam war), but all in all it was a great time in my life and produced more memories/month than any time before or since.
Of course, your mileage may vary, but the military can really be quite a neat adventure, and there are lots of geek opportunities (I flew on one of the highest tech aircraft of the period and worked on the electronics when not using them).
Hiroshima was an act of war with a military/infrastructural target. It was against a country which had started a war with a surprise attack against us, and which had committed uncountable barbarities and war crimes during that war.
Furthermore, Hiroshima saved many more lives than it took.
Finally, why select Hiroshima as your example? How about the firebombing of Dresden?
Exactly. I believe that limiting the rights of organizations is equivalent to the right of free association.
OTOH, corporations are granted special privileges by the government that may make it constitutional to regulate their speech. For example, they normally shield their owners from liability.
So... an unincorporated entity should be able to say anything one of its members are allowed to say.
I agree that we have had a need for a long time. It was made clear by the *first* attack on the world trade center that we had enemies that were willing to murder people on an unprecedented scale for terrorism. The feckless Clinton administration, in spite of this, failed to do anything to improve our abilities to catch terrorists *before* they caused the problem. The Patriot Act contains a number of measures which do in fact help in that regard.
To you it is knee-jerk. I suppose that trite phrase is how you characterize such things. I think it a more accurate description would be "long overdue."
What makes you think we are reducing ourselves to their level? We haven't decided to sneak into THEIR countries and target civilians.
But, in fact, if they are willing to declare war on us by attacking our civilians, they deserve to face dire consequences. If they continue to do so, we may very well have to kill lost of people, including lots of civilians, to protect ourselves.
But it appears that you do not understand the difference between self defense and premeditated mass murder.
Only a fool would believe that we are going to simultaneously declare war on all the countries that Al Queda finds shelter in. So your first paragraph is a total straw-man argument.
The war on terrorism is poorly named. But a war it is. Your second argument is poor semantic one - basically you argue that since this is called a "war on x," that it must be a futile and cynical charade. That is a poor substitute for a real argument.
As far as the causes of terrorism, hopefully we are working to change them. But the "root cause" approach tends to be a failure in many policy arenas, including the one you cite (war on crime). Often the solution to some behavior is to deter and prevent, not "solve the root problems."
As far as the "missing" stuff you mention... you seem to imply that we are somehow at fault because we somehow mislaid this stuff. That is also sheer nonsense. We didn't mislay the 757's and 767's that caused the world trade center. Anthrax is easy to acquire for the determined - it occurs frequently throughout the world including the US. The *responsible* nations have kept smallpox under tight control. If Iraq has it (and they probably do), it is because one of the last outbreaks of smallpox was in Iraq, or because they bought it from the collapse of the USSR (I don't consider the USSR part of "we" in this discussion). Uranium is all over the place... it is hardly misplaced. Plutonium is likewise not likely to be misplaced, although again it may be on the black market from the former USSR.
Do you really believe we don't think twice when WMD's go missing? What planet do you live on?
Slashdot Mirror
The disappearance of wolly mammoths and most other large animals in the northern temperate zones is most likely the result of predation by humans. Those nature loving "Native Americans" in the US killed of the mammoths, the giant sloth, and a number of other ice age critters.
A recent paper theorizes (with some significant evidence) that the buffalo survived because the tribes were so warlike that buffalo had connected, large zones of no hunting - no man's lands where hunters would be killed by rival tribes.
But wooly mammoths are indeed cool. And their meat apparently tastes good. A field biologist acquaintance of mine enjoyed mammoths steaks in Alaska one time when a flood uncovered a frozen mammoth.
This is most interesting, since the global CO2 concentration rise doesn't follow anywhere near such a linear trend. Furthermore, the temperature trend is likewise not linear, and furthermoer doesn't match (or lag) the CO2 concentration rise.
Actually, there is no credible evidence that small amounts (or even large amounts) of PCB are harmful to people. It's another of those favorite environmental causes that is based on fear mongering, not science.
The same also goes for TCE and a number of other compounds that the scarios and their friends in the EPA try to keep at microscopic levels.
ANd I feel free to drive my large (but suprisingly fuel efficient) SUv as much as I want. In fact, it gives me great pleasure to do so, since so many idiots think it is wrong.
The majority of climatologists consider human induced global warming a fact (that's a Saddam Hussein election-like majority, not a more than 50% majority)
The amount of increase and influence is debated about.
And for a long time, the majority of geologists considered contental drift to be a crackpot theory. And the majority of physicists considered Newtonian physics to be the final answer.
Science is not a matter of votes. Neither is it well served by naive analyses of short term data in what is a very long term process.
Actually, the majority of climatologists consider global warming a fact. They do not agree on whether it is human induced. They do agree that CO2 has increased, and that the most simplistic physics would predict warming as a result. They have models that predict warming, and yet they have almost no decent models of ocean behavior, which is far more important than the atmosphere in determining climate.
Also keep in mind that the majority of reporters (including the moderators of Slashdot) are predisposed towards stories that favor man-caused global warming. And that the majority of funding in the climatological area goes to those who investigate global warming - with bias towards those whose papers favor the hypothesis. I know researchers in the field who, under the Clinton administration in the US, were afraid to have their actual anti-anthropogenic views attributed to them because they would lose funding!
The earth started warming in the 17th century, long before any significant CO2 increase. The current warming may be anthropogenic. It also may not. It is just as likely that anthropogenic warming is preventing a damaging cooling.
I get really tired of almost every story published about nature mentioning a possible connection to global warming!
Where are the stories about glacial growth? Some glaciers are increasing, not decreasing, but that doesn't seem to ever make the press, or Slashdot.
It isn't amazing until its also palindromic!
The physics is NOT the same for radio and sound, although it is similar. But you are still reasoning by analogy.
As for you last paragraph leaving the citizen band problem to the real world, and declaring it isn't your problem. I think that adequately describes your approach to analyzing this problem.
I agree with all of this. I don't think using the military reconnaisance technology to hunt the sniper is going to far or totally disregarding the status quo.
The military commonly helps with civilian activities. For example, it is routine to use them for search and rescue. The Civil Air Patrol (of which I am a member) is an Air Force auxiliary, and is the primary agency in most areas of the US for missing aircraft searches. And yet we sometimes use Air Force active duty assets to provide sensor support.
Likewise, it is not unprecedented to use military data for law enforcement - especially drug law enforcement (sigh).
In 1794, that's the only military they had (other than navy)
Hmmm.... I don't know. In a regular glider, you can use spoilers to slow down, and if you really want to slow down, a strong slip (which is a form of uncoordinated flight that causes a lot of drag) will really do the trip.
Where I did my glider training there was almost always a thermal at the approach end of the runway, so I always ended up doing a severe slip to get it down. When I was refreshing my power license some years later, I scared the hell out of my instructor by doing the same thing in a 182 when I was too high on approach. Hey, it worked, but I guess power pilots are not quite used to such things.
No, you are reasoning by analogy.
I am reasoning based on an understanding of radio technology and signal processing, including spread spectrum (call it wideband if you wish). The 50,000 people talking in a stadium can be quite enough to keep you from hearing a cricket chirping nearby, but if your particular need is to hear that cricket, you are screwed. And they have no incentive to stop talking so you can hear the cricket.
There are always limits in communications. Furthermore, without rules, there are often incentives to keep yelling louder and louder. This is what caused the FCC to be created in the first place. It is also what happened to the Citizen Band frequencies when the FCC decided not to waste resources enforcing the rules.
There was also a spy on the planning staff who passed the flight route to either the Russians or the Serbs.
It was caught in a "SAM trap" that was just waiting for it.
Not true. The F-117 achieves stealth by causing the radar signal to be reflected away from the originating transmitter. Thus it is susceptible to bistatic radar.
The B-2, OTOH, also uses radar absorbing material to further reduce its radar cross section.
BTW... the problem with lower frequency radars us that they are not as precise. Furthermore the emitters are vulnerable to HARM missiles.
The use of existing transmitters (TV transmitters for example) is sneakier. You don't necessarily know which transmitters to destroy! You have to take them all out.
But then, one can also use the signals from TV satellites. This was first demonstrated at LAX in the late 60s or thereabouts. But they are low power so they require lots of receiving antenna against a low reflectivity aircraft like a B-2.
And then, of course, there are active techniques to hide a stealth aircraft. Jamming the radars is an old and crude one. Deceiving them is also old. Both are no doubt used in a big way today, but with a lot more sophistication. A radar is at a fundamental disadvantage due to the fourth power exponent in the radar range equation. A jammer is only dealing with a 2nd power term (both of these are powers of the distance).
And then there's all the stuff we DON'T know about this stuff. The physics are obvious, but the applications are not and I am sure some clever engineers on both the stealth and the detection side have done things we won't hear about for some time.
It might have been gliding.
I once had a U-2 fly over me at about 30 feet of altitude. It was just about to land at Kirtland Air Force Base and I was at the end of the runway (this was about 1961).
I made no sound at all except for a slight whistling. Of course, the U-2 is one of the world's best gliders.
It was extremely cool!
I wouldn't say he ignores it, but there is one assumption about underlay that is incorrect. The proposed mechanism of underlay is for the the underlay system to detect that it is causing interference and cease to do so within a few milliseconds.
However, the ideas of Open Spectrum, applied carefully and with good engineering understanding, can indeed significantly increase the usage of spectrum. However, unlike many of the subsequent posters on this thread will assume, it will *not* work without appropriate regulation (as the author recognizes). It is a different and superior method of spectrum management, not spectrum anarchy.
The idea of setting aside spectrum "parks" for the unlicensed services, and then applying strict technical regulations to those systems is the most promising. Setting aside channels 60-69 would free up 60 MHz of very useful bandwidth for mobile and portable applications. The appropriate standards would allow proper sharing of the underlying spectrum without licensing individual users or sites.
However, some of the techniques that allow this sort of operation may not be that inexpensive to create. They will require substantial processor power and probably power consumption. This will limit their use in extremely inexpensive uses (such as keychain transmitters for auto alarms). For these kinds of uses, different spectral parks may be required.
In other words, one may need some spectrum for dirt cheap devices (where an additional $.01 is a significant cost increase), and other spectrum for sophisticated devices where the value allows greater costs. Likewise one may want different spectrum and rules for wide area systems than local ones. Furthermore some systems can tolerate significant random interruption (remote meter reading, for example) while others must work well all of the time in real time (police communications, air traffic control, etc). These may again require different parts of the spectrum in order to be protected from inadvertent interference from nearby non-cooperating unlicensed systems.
Furthermore, one needs to make sure that failure modes of these devices don't screw up a whole area!
Hmmm... this starts to sound a lot different from just turning folks loose on unlicensed bands! It illustrates the complexity and the need for sophisticated standards and associated regulation.
Underlay is IMHO much more dubious than the author lets on.
In practice it can be very hard to do well. Existing narrow-band systems use techniques that *cannot be used* in wideband receivers. The techniques (such as very high Q low loss RF filters) allow the narrow band receiver to operate with very weak signals, signals which could not be adequately detected by a wideband underlay system, and which would then be interfered with by that system. These existing systems are engineered, and regulated, to use the minimum power needed - and thus are inherently susceptible to this new interference.
There are a number of physical factors that limit receiver sensitivity. They range from thermal noise in the receiver to exotic topics such as intermodulation, desensitization, and quantization noise. It is not possible to optimize for all of these in a frequency agile receiver to nearly the degree one can in a narrow band receiver.
In addition, some of the techniques are inherently expensive. Moore's law doesn't apply to the fabrication of precision metal resonators, for example.
What this means is that for an underlay service to be truly non-interfering, it requires either a very expensive, big and power consuming receiver, or it needs to be on a portion of the spectrum where these techniques are not applied by existing users of that spectrum.
Other approaches, such as using spread spectrum - or wideband as the autho prefers -(so you don't have to detect systems you are interfering with) have different problems. A wideband system distributes its power across a wide spectrum, but that power is still not zero. This means that if it is too close to a traditional narrow band receiver, or another wideband receiver it will cause damaging interference.
Overall, however, the Open Spectrum initiative is a good thing and can have enormous economic value. But it should not be viewed as a magic solution or one that can rely strictly on anarchy or unregulated cooperative development.
oops!
Specifically... as the frequency goes up, the amount of energy captured by an antenna of a given size goes down by the square of the wavelength. The directivity goes up by a complex relationship with the size of the antenna.
Thus at very high frequencies you have to have exponentially more power to transmit the same distance, or you have to have an equivalently more directional antenna.
This fact is one of the reasons that spectrum is so valuable. The higher the frequency, the more costly and less practical it is to use it for non-stationary applications. In addition, as you get to higher frequencies you run into more problems with attenuation due to atmosphere, rain, walls, earth, etc. In addition to that, transmitters are significantly less power efficient at higher frequencies.
Add all that up and you have several exponentials retarding advances into higher frequencies.
Actually a dipole (half wavelength) antenna at 10 kHz (one of the frequencies they use) is 3000 kilometers!
But there is no rule that says antennas have to be any large fraction of a wavelength. A magnetic or electical antenna can be any size and have the same capture area as a dipole. This is because antennae do not have to be resonant to work - and a non-resonant antenna can be just as efficient as a resonant one, if you have a high efficiency circuit to tune out the reactance which results from the lack of resonance. This is one of the things an "antenna tuner" - familiar to ham radio operators does (the other is to transform the real portion of the impedance to a standard 50 ohms). However, it is hard to make efficient very tiny antennas. This is why these ELF systems have to use such high power.
HOWEVER, on a submarine, the resonant wavelength of a trailing wire antenna is *much* lower, because the speed of propagation in the waveguide formed by the antenna, insulation and salt water is much lower than the speed of light. Thus these antennas need only be a few hundred or thousand meters long to be reasonably efficient.
As an aside, my father invented this antenna in his PhD thesis about 50 years ago.
I'm a kid? Hey - I like that. I haven't been a kid for over 40 years. I am also a Vietnam Veteran, dude.
So don't give me your trite phrases about war. Some of us have been around enough to know that the world just ain't that simple.
The issue is not the supposed goals of campaign finance reform (which in reality are *always* the protection of incumbents). It is the constitutionality.
By your argument, then, freedom of the press is useless. After all, operating a press requires money.
Is it okay if I spend my $100,000 on starting up a newspaper and distributing it? It will, of course, support my candidates and oppose others.
Please explain to me why I should have this freedom but not the freedom to purchase the print in someone else's press output?
When I was in your situation, I joined the US Navy and became an air crew member. Things were dangerous then too (Vietnam war), but all in all it was a great time in my life and produced more memories/month than any time before or since.
Of course, your mileage may vary, but the military can really be quite a neat adventure, and there are lots of geek opportunities (I flew on one of the highest tech aircraft of the period and worked on the electronics when not using them).
Hiroshima was an act of war with a military/infrastructural target. It was against a country which had started a war with a surprise attack against us, and which had committed uncountable barbarities and war crimes during that war.
Furthermore, Hiroshima saved many more lives than it took.
Finally, why select Hiroshima as your example? How about the firebombing of Dresden?
Exactly. I believe that limiting the rights of organizations is equivalent to the right of free association.
OTOH, corporations are granted special privileges by the government that may make it constitutional to regulate their speech. For example, they normally shield their owners from liability.
So... an unincorporated entity should be able to say anything one of its members are allowed to say.
If it prevents me from buying a $10,000 ad attacking or promoting a candidate (and it does, I believe), it has restricted my right to free speech.
I don't see anywhere in the first amendment where the rights are limited only to grannies.
I agree that we have had a need for a long time. It was made clear by the *first* attack on the world trade center that we had enemies that were willing to murder people on an unprecedented scale for terrorism. The feckless Clinton administration, in spite of this, failed to do anything to improve our abilities to catch terrorists *before* they caused the problem. The Patriot Act contains a number of measures which do in fact help in that regard.
To you it is knee-jerk. I suppose that trite phrase is how you characterize such things. I think it a more accurate description would be "long overdue."
What makes you think we are reducing ourselves to their level? We haven't decided to sneak into THEIR countries and target civilians.
But, in fact, if they are willing to declare war on us by attacking our civilians, they deserve to face dire consequences. If they continue to do so, we may very well have to kill lost of people, including lots of civilians, to protect ourselves.
But it appears that you do not understand the difference between self defense and premeditated mass murder.
Only a fool would believe that we are going to simultaneously declare war on all the countries that Al Queda finds shelter in. So your first paragraph is a total straw-man argument.
The war on terrorism is poorly named. But a war it is. Your second argument is poor semantic one - basically you argue that since this is called a "war on x," that it must be a futile and cynical charade. That is a poor substitute for a real argument.
As far as the causes of terrorism, hopefully we are working to change them. But the "root cause" approach tends to be a failure in many policy arenas, including the one you cite (war on crime). Often the solution to some behavior is to deter and prevent, not "solve the root problems."
As far as the "missing" stuff you mention... you seem to imply that we are somehow at fault because we somehow mislaid this stuff. That is also sheer nonsense. We didn't mislay the 757's and 767's that caused the world trade center. Anthrax is easy to acquire for the determined - it occurs frequently throughout the world including the US. The *responsible* nations have kept smallpox under tight control. If Iraq has it (and they probably do), it is because one of the last outbreaks of smallpox was in Iraq, or because they bought it from the collapse of the USSR (I don't consider the USSR part of "we" in this discussion). Uranium is all over the place... it is hardly misplaced. Plutonium is likewise not likely to be misplaced, although again it may be on the black market from the former USSR.
Do you really believe we don't think twice when WMD's go missing? What planet do you live on?