The US has a few misguided citizens who provide funding to the IRA through its unfortunately legal arm - Shin Fein (sp?). This hardly represents the policy of the US government or the opinion of the people of the US. 40% of US citizens are of Irish descent (including myself). Only a few are supporters of the IRA terrorists.
But the terrorism facing the US *is* something new. The attack on 9/11 was unprecedented. 19 people were able to kill 3000 people in a very short period of time. Shortly after that, a small amount of anthrax was released (who knows by whom), which illustrates the danger of modern technology in the hands of terrorists.
The IRA, while despicable, has been relatively limited in its destruction in Britain. Most of its victims, ironically, have been Irish Catholics! And it hasn't been able to kill thousands in a single act!
Furthermore, the US does not allege that the new threat of terrorism only affects itself. The US is asserting (correctly so) that modern technologies, combined by the willingness to use them by fanatics, has made terrorism vastly more dangerous than it was in the past.
Consider that most terrorism of the last 50 years was supported but moderated by the USSR and other sponsor states. They used terrorism to further their aims, but limited the damage it caused because of fear of state to state reprisal. Al Queda and other Islamists have changed the rules, and the world will have to adapt to that change. No longer can one assume that terrorists will choose to do limited damage. It has now been adequately demonstrated to even the most dense that they are willing to engage in large scale mass murder and are capable of inflicting it.
Silly. They are not enforcing law and order. Furthermore it is not peace time. A hostile force has declared war on us.
They are assisting legally authorized civilian law enforcement. They are providing information. They are probably doing so while improving the skills of their staff, which is one of their missions, peacetime or other.
Indeed getting the military too much involved would be a mistake.
But... consider that the President does, and always has have the ability to declare martial law in the event of emergencies. Clearly we don't have a situation that justifies this, for which I am deeply glad.
Also, since you cite the brillians of the founders, keep in mind that George Washington himself used the military in 1794 against US citizens on US soil (see http://earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/wh iskey/>.
It is a matter of balance. In this case, the military is providing *technical assistance* to civilian law enforcement. The military is not enforcing nor making the law. It is merely providing constitutionally acceptable information. It as acting within the law (Posse Comitatus act as amended) and within the spirit of the law.
It is hardly something to become worried about in this case.
In general, I agree with this. The military does exist primarily to exert force on external threats (not states - the military has historically been used on stateless pirates also).
The military, however, also exists to suppress rebellions. The last armed rebellion against the United States (The Terijina rebellion, New Mexico, early 1970s) indeed did involve units of the military.
However, the military also exists to fight within the US if *necessary* - but not in law enforcement.
BUT... this is a minor use of the military. There are lots of minor uses of the military outside of its primary purpose. If this was distracting from the military mission, I would agree that it was wrong. I doubt that it is - it is more likely providing useful training time.
If the military were disregarding constitutional rights, again I would agree. But I know of no constitutional right against surveillance of potential suspects in public areas.
FInally, there is some possibility that this is a terrorist action. Even if it is not, it is a possible terrorist MO, and could be used by terrorists in the future. Fighting terrorists exceeds the narrow mandate of "law enforement."
Law enforcement is about apprehending potential criminals and administering justice. Fighting terrorism, as we learned the hard way on 0/11 is about preventing mass murder, among other things. And it is about waging war - against combatants even if they are on our own soil.
Well written, but you make a number of mistakes...
First of all, I don't wish a terrorist attack on Madison. I wish that if there is a terrorist attack, it hits Madison rather than some place which is supporting our very real need to protect ourselves against these terrorists.
Second, the Patriot Act does not remove checks and balances. Checks and balances are in fact the mechanisms built into the constitution to allow the different branches of government to block each other. In the case of the Patriot Act, two branches have come together, with lots of compromising, to produce a set of laws. A third branch is available to strike down any parts of that which are unconstitutional. IOW checks and balances is about structural mechanisms, not the contents of laws. At least use the right terminology.
This discussion is about the Patriot Act. You bring up "the ability to declare war." This has nothing to do with the Patriot Act. Furthermore, given that this is an act of Congress enabling the president to make war, it is pretty clearly exactly what the founders intended. Also, if you would check history, the US has been in many wars, but only a few declared wars. Bush is doing nothing new in that regard.
You next imply that those capable of critical thinking "realize that... the white house hijacked a nations grief... perpetual war."
Wrong! First of all, the white house and congress responded to the peoples' justifiable anger. Second, many with critical thinking skills have analyzed the situation and agree with the president. If you choose to call this "blindy following," perhaps this is because you yourself blindly follow your ideology rather than reason. You may think the American citizenry, who strongly support military action, to be dolts and idiots who can be easily fooled. I have a bit more respect for them, apparently. If you really think we are all that dumb, why don't you support some sore of enlightened dictatorship by those "who have retained critical thinking" capabilities? As far as perpetual war, it is our opponents, the Islamists, who have in fact *declared* perpetual war against us. Did you perhaps not notice this fact during your moment of critical thinking?
Real people always die in war. This is not exactly a revelation! We did not start this war, but we have already lost 3000 civilians. These civilians were targeted. They had families too! It is the duty of the government to try to prevent more of this, and the Patriot Act contains a number of useful measures to help with this. It also contains some silliness, as one would expect of most acts where hundreds of congressmen have to disagreed. Don't be fooled by the name of the act. Congress always uses silly names for legislation.
You believe you retain critical thinking skills. Fine. At least provide them with some useful data to operate on. The sources you cite are hardly the only ways to find out what is going on. NONE of them address the current situation!
Your first two cites are full of lies. For example, Johnson did *not* want a war in Vietnam. Johnson was a fool, but not that kind of fool. Johnson inherited the war, believed that it was wrong to back out of it (he was right about that), and fell into a deep depression because of that war. Your source makes unprovable assertions that Johnson wanted the war for economic benefit. If that is what you consider critical thinking, it is telling!
Clinton did not block humanitarian aid to Iraq... Saddam Hussein instead did and does *hijack* that aid (which is mostly in UN allowed oil sales) to build weapons. But then, since the source was the notorious left wing UK Guardian, I am not surprised that it is full of anti-American nonsense.
Your first and third sources attempt to tell us that dictators use war to distract from problems at home. Duh! Gee, I guess none of us knew that or read Orwell. This is hardly news.
But it is also not evidence Bush's motivations. It applies much better to the Arab nations who have actual dictators, and who use anti-semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism to distract *their* population. It was this behavior by Saudi Arabia that directly contributed to 9/11.
I don't have the historical information to judge your fourth cite (the Lavon affair), but it also doesn't materially affect this discussion, so who cares. I can only assume you put it in there to imply that either Israel or Bush caused 9-11 on purpose. If that slander is what you meant, have the balls to say it directly.
Your fifth cite, which if it is true took place 40 years go, shows a silly plan like you *again* appear to be indirectly accusing the US of now. was shot down as soon as it got near a reasonable official. This shows the strength of our system.
No, the goal of Islamist terrorism is not to turn the US into a police state. It is to demoralize the US by killing its civilians.
So far, I have seen few liberties handed over, willingly or otherwise. The worst recent handing of liberties has not been the Patriot Act, but the McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform", which prohibts citizens from certain kinds of political speech! Interestingly, the very people who seem to have the most extreme views in exerting the First Amendment free speech clause are the same people who support McCain-Feingold. Go figure.
The way our liberties will be lost is by laws passed by reformers, not those out to protect out lives. The first purpose of government is to protect its citizenry. It is the only excuse to allow a lethally armed police force to police the people. But those who object to the Patriot Act are more happy using those police to arrest environmental offenders than to prevent terrorism.
Police helicopters have to operate at relatively low altitude to be effective, which is a problem in congested airspace. Military aircraft can operate at higher altitudes, and typically due because of their operational need to avoid antiaircraft fire.
As far as coordination goes, the military has radios that are very frequency agile. In a case like this, there is an FBI agent *on* the military vehicle to communicate with the command nets. Even if the military vehicles cannot communicate, at that altitude and FBI agent near a window could use a portable radio.
Furthermore, moving air assets from other cities leaves those cities vulnerable to normal crimes. These air assets are expensive and valuable resources that are typically already underavailable. I monitor police frequencies in a large metropolitan area that has a number of police helicopters with advanced FLIR systems. They normally have to triage requests because there are not enough available for all needs. Furthermore, they run into all sorts of problems with air traffic deconfliction, and often lose vehicles they are tracking due to this. Finally, they can track *one* vehicle per helicopter.
A military reconaissance aircraft can, for example, take a high resolution photograph of a large area (photo nuts would Love those huge cameras) every few seconds, which can then be analyzed by computer either in real time or later to track evey object in the field.
The military has a surge capability that typically keeps some units available. Those units typically fly for training time, and these anti-sniper flights are probably substituting for training, not to mention providing training in an interesting scenario.
As far as the blame game, the sniper has been clever enough to involve multiple jurisdictions. This allows any jurisdiction to deflect blame onto another. It allows the locals to deflect blame onto the FBI and vice versa. The military, OTOH, is hardly likely to be a useful scapegoate, since this is not their ordinary duty.
In that case, I hope the next terrorist attack happens in Madison! If it does, your alders will be out of office before sundown! I am sure that if the terrorists read about this, they will consider your find city a good place to set up their bases.
If terrorism succeeds, it will be because democracies are unwilling to protect themselves from it. Too many citizens are too wrapped up in themselves and their petty ideologies to realize that there are really bad people out there who will do really bad things to them, no matter how idealistic they are!
Grow up and get a life, before the terrorists take yours!
I don't know what country you are from, but most countries in Europe, including the UK, have far fewer protections of civil rights than the US.
To combat modern terrorism, with its technologically enabled ability to cause mass casualties, it is necessary to update old laws. A large part of the unfortunately named Patriot Act does just that. Some parts, of course, are dumb, but that is what happens when a democracy makes laws.
Too bad you didn't read the very article you referenced. It directly refutes your argument in this case.
Here is the relevant portion:
Posse Comitatus clarifications emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities, vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g., search, seizure, and arrests).
The military is a sledge hammer by comparison. Or to quote the movie, The Seige: "The United States military is a sword when what you need a scapel". The only thing these orginizations have in common are guns.
This is utter nonsense. The military has all sorts of capabilities beyond the ability to exert large amounts of brute force. Many of these are technical means which are not available to other agencies.
US law enforcement, for example, is unlikely to have aircraft that can track thousands of targets at once (like JSTARS can), but this may be exactly what is needed to sort out a fleeing sniper from the rest of metropolitan traffic.
That is only one example of many capabilities the military has. These have no relationship at all to a "sledge hammer."
As far as slippery slopes go, there are very few areas of human behavior where there are clean boundaries. Almost everything we do involves "slippery slopes" with something innocuous on one end of a continuum and something horrible at the other. Thus the slippery slope argument is a silly way to look at things. It is simply an excuse for extremism - to stay at one extreme end of the continuum - and is often used to substitude for actual reasoning.
Actually, a system like this can track anything that disturbs the transmission of the radio signals. A body does that well. If you don't believe me, turn on an FM radio to a very weak station. Move around the radio. The signal will change.
However, the practical characteristics of the system depend on where the *receivers* are located. If they have a receiver near your house, they can probably see your body (and your cat, and your computer, and your house wiring, etc).
Trees also reflect (the technical term is scatter) radio waves. For example, I recently had to move my DirectTV satellite dish because a tree had grown in front of it and the signal was degraded by scattering and absorption.
You'd need some kind of system which distinguished between a drug company doing their own basic research and simply taking publically funded research though
Most of the expense a drug company goes through is exactly in the areas that publicly funded research doesn't cover: expensive clinical trials; expensive massive searches for natural substances. The more complex one makes the system, the more it advantages the big at the expense of the little; the more it encourages corruption; and for sure, the less effective it will be because it will depend on a government bureaucracy to make it work.
In other words, the drug companies are symbiotic with public research. Sure, they take advantage of it, but they take the results into areas the public arena cannot effectively go, and shouldn't go.
What you actually need here is a business model which ensures that the cost of making the movie is covered. It's quite possible that there are ways to do this without needing something like copyright. Even with file shareing there still appears to be a market for showing movies in a purpose built room as well as selling and renting copies
Yes, it is possible, but as others have pointed out, very unlikely. Of course, one way to do it might be exactly what the RIAA etc are trying to do: instead of relying on copyright law, they plan to cripple the technology industry to prevent copying. Note that the latter is a way of protecting product - with or without copyright law.
Someone on here gave an example of how the world would work if copying were easy *and legal.* The minute a movie is released (or before if someone gets hold of a bootleg like they do now), *legal* third party producers would mass produce the meda (DVD's, videotape, even projection film). It would then be available for almost nothing at your nearest video store (oops... not there - they would be out of business)... at your local drug store or grocery store or Radio Shack or flea market. And it would all be legal. There is no doubt that this would happen. And clearly this would take so much revenue away from the movies that they simply would not be produced! There would still be a market to go to the theater (I like to watch movies there), but the theater owner would buy cheap copies (which with no copyright could be of extremely high quality). So the money going to the movie creators would simply vanish. And so would movies!
I am sure this is true. But one characteristic of capitalism is that businesses tend not to leave money laying around. If antibiotics will make money, which they do, they will develop them also - even if they do cure people.
Most conditions other than bacterial infections cannor currently be killed by drugs.
Actually, you are the one who is confused, probably because of the weird way Slashdot displays threads when you have a threshold set.
Everything quoted in your article is from *my* postings. The bold quote is from an earlier post by me. The italicized quote is from a response I made to someone who responded to that earlier post.
It was *my* duty to serve in Vietnam, and I did so. And as an *informed* citizen who had seen communism first hand, I knew better than the silly elites who believed the pap they were being fed. That the Soviet Union was a deadly menace to mankind, and was fighting through Vietnam as a proxy, was hardly in doubt. Today, at least, most people have finally come to realize how dangerous and evil the USSR was.
And as far as the impact of the draft... keep in mind two things:
1) Until large numbers of Americans were being drafted and sent to Vietnam, there were very few people in the anti-war movement.
2) Once young people no longer had to fear going to Vietnam, the anti-war movement again dropped to almost nothing.
3) The anti-war movement served only to help the communists. It did NOT protest the communist takeover (and subsequent massacre) in Cambodia by Pol Pot. It did not protest the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam. It did not protest the subsequent invasion of Vietnam by China. In fact, it never protested anything except American policy, and it never helped anyone except the Soviets. Furthermore, it was aided and abetted by the KGB, as has been aptly proven by information available since the fall of the USSR. It was what Lenin called "useful fools" - people who believed what the communists fed them.
There is no question in my mind, having lived through the period and known people on all sides of the issue, that a large percentage of the anti-war crowd were protesting because *they didn't want to go, or didn't want their boyfriends to go.*
Vietnam was IMHO a just war. It may not have been a smart one, and it wasn't carried out well, but it was a just war. Furthermore, we won that war with the Christmas Bombing of 1972, and if it had not been for the perfidious actions of the democrat majority in the congress of the US (in embargoing all aid to South Vietnam including previously promised ammunition), South Vietnam would have remained free of totalitarianism, and probably would have gradually become democratic (like South Korea). Instead, it was overwhelmed by a massive armored invasion (the fantasy that indigenous guerillas won that war is just that. The VC were not a factor after the Tet Offensive of 1968).
While I am not surprised that you consider Vietnam to be unjust, after all the dissention about the issue, I am indeed surprised that you found our action in Korea to be unjust. What are you? A Soviet apologist? The Korean war was started by a naked act of aggression, where Kim Il Sung, a KGB asset and dictator of North Korea, sent his armies to invade South Korea. It was a simple attack on a sovereign nation. Pure aggression. The United Nations voted to stop that attack, and the US provided most (but certainly not all) of the troops, and indeed kept the south from being conquered.
Today, South Korea is a prosperous free society. North Korea is a catastrophic failure, with a least a million of its citizens dead just in the last couple of years as a result of a famine caused by its government's corruption and mismanagement. It is a fascist dictatorship and personality cult. And you think we were wrong to resist the spread of that?
You must have some very odd values.
As far as your views on abortion... well... they are your opinion. You want to repeal biology. You want to repeal the most important humanistic value - the respect for life. All in the name of sexual freedom. If a woman doesn't want the burden of a child, she should not conceive the child. Isn't that simple?
Your assertion that single mom, single dad, two gay parents etc are as good as a nuclear family is totally discredited by plenty of statistics. For example, the odds of a male being a criminal rises dramatically if he does not grow up with his natural father. The odds of a step-parent molesting a child are much larger than that of a natural parent doing so. There are many other statistics showing the value of nuclear families. These are facts. You can go look them up. Regardless of how you would *like* the world to work, you are committing the same mistake that progressives have made for the last 200 years: assuming that human nature is what you wish it is rather than what it stubbornly insists on being.
Regarding "desperately clinging to the status quo" - I would turn that around and say that you are desperately seeking to avoid that which thousands of years of human experience has already learned. I can understand - when I was younger, I thought (the hubris of the boomer generation) that we knew more than all those folks in the past; somehow they were just dummies. The brave new world was coming - and we were going to lead the way.
Hogwash! Human nature has not changed in recorded history, and will not (barring genetic engineering, which is a whole different can of worms). What has happened throughout history is that people have put forth utopian ideas that ignore human nature. The modern progressive movement, starting with Rousseau, is the longest lived and most damaging of all of these, with 100,000,000 deaths on its bloody hands just from communist states alone.
You would rather that the drugs not be developed at all?
Or perhaps you would prefer that some government bureaucracy does it - with the usual inefficiencies and stupidities that government bureaucracies are known for.
If developing a lifesaving drug makes a rich person richer, that's fine with me. It should be with you, also! And keep in mind that most drug companies are widely held companies, mostly owned by the public. In fact, if you have a pension fund in the US, the odds are that YOU are one of the person who gets richer!
Those who imagine that corporations operate only for the benefit of a few rich people are people who have a narrow and uninformed view of capitalism. I should also point out, to save a few useless flames, that people who think capitalism is perfect and the solution for every human problem have an equally narrow and uninformed view.
I think a reasonable solution would be to differentiate more finely between types of intellectual property. For example, some inventions (drugs) require vast expenditures of resources over many years, and thus may require patent protection for a long time or the research will be discouraged.
Other inventions (software), if patented at all (which I generally reject) should be given only short protection, as the field is moving so quickly, and capitalizing on the invention is usually inexpensive.
Copyright is yet another issue, and again perhaps should vary depending on what is being copyrighted. I think that copyright is a valid idea and does create incentive. My wife has published novels, and part of the reason the publisher went to the expense of publishing them was the residual market and the international market. OTOH her grandmother wrote many novels and a couple of movies, and the family is still getting residuals 70 years later, which is absurd.
The argument about prohibition creating crime is a good one. It is my main argument against drug prohibition. However, some degree of protection is clearly necessary for movies and other entertainment, because there is a significant investment in most cases (at least for movies). Clearly the DMCA goes too far, and the attempt to hobble technology in order to protect these government granted monopolies is clearly out of line.
In the past, industry dealt with copyright violations by going after those who made wholesale profits from it. I think it was appropriate that they could do so. Technologies like napster may make that impractical. But the solution isn't draconian laws - it is, as many Slashdotters and others have pointed out, a change in business models. And if that doesn't work - well, it's just too bad! The buggy whip manufacturers would love to have strangled the automobile industry. Fortunately they didn't. Today's situation is similar!
I am afraid that your view is more reasonable than the argument in the article. The article argues against the principle of copyright and patent protection.
It doesn't seem to have been mentioned in this thread, but the US Supreme Court heard arguments just this week on the issue of constantly extending copyrights.
There's more than just racial discrimination that was wrong with the old times. There was also discrimination and accepted violence on gays, and yes women.
There was discrimination, but not accepted violence.
Just because your family didn't approve of wife beating doesn't mean your values were the norm.
Wife beating was NOT the norm. Where are *you* getting this stuff?
Birth control was largely unavailable meaning women had to have kids even if they did not want them to.
I suppose you have never heard of the condom, or imagine that it wasn't invented until AIDS came along.
If you mean abortion wasn't freely available to any women and any state of pregnancy, you are right. And I consider that a good thing.
Religious oppression was also rampant as every devout God fearing individual took it upon themselves to "preach" their own particular morals to everyone else.
Oh really? Where do you get that idea? Did you experience it?
That is utter nonsense.
Simply put, if the old days were so great and wonderful they would have never had led to the social revoultions that followed in the 60's and 70's
The primary social revolutions were:
1) Civil rights. Converting racial discrimination into a national desire for fairness, and then perverting that movement into more racial discrimination (quotas). Racial discrimination was a a bad thing - no doubt about it. Blacks in the US got the shaft. "Reverse discrimination" is equally stupid and unjust, if not as damaging in the short run.
2)Womens rights. Ending discrimination against women. Replacing it with easy divorce, which results in, ultimately, great harm to divoced women and especially their children.
Adding a supposed right to abortion at any age, ending the respect for life that our country had cherished.
The combination of "the pill"
3)The "me" generation - the replacement of social responsibility with the idea with selfishness.
4)Mindless opposition to authority - this was a result of a combination of a huge generation that thought it knew better than the billions of people who had come before it, and an unwillingness of the males to serve in the Vietnam War. In addition, the old seductive marxist ideas were in vogue. The combination led to the anti-war movement, much of which morphed into a general attitude of moral superiority and selfishness on the part of those who took part in it.
The old ways weren't perfect. But the old morality, with the exception of discrimination, produced better social results than what we have today!
There were a lot fewer inner city problems than today, in spite of what you have heard.
Beating your wife was most definitely not accepted.
Women could work - my mother worked as an engineer in the 1940's, and then quit to raise her children. When we were old enough, she went back to work as a teacher.
Racial discrimination was more widespread and was not illegal in some states, but it was certainly not accepted by many of us!
My comments on moral guidance stand.
And the '50s were a better time in terms of kust about any social measure you can come up with other than racial discrimination.
Actually, a single tone into an FM transmitter will produce an infinite number of sidebands, with the amplitude determined by Bessel functions. Of course, the higher order sidebands will be significantly attenuated.
Noise is normally not considered a "signal" - one reason we have the term Signal to Noise Ratio.
Spectral efficiency is of course not the *only* interesting parameter in the design of an RF communications system. It is, however, a very important one.
In general, one strives for the greatest spectral efficiency given other requirements (dropped calls, multipath immunity, interference immunity, privacy and security, power budget, equipment cost, equipment size). The reason is that two of the most expensive components of a cellular sort of system are the base stations and the spectrum itself, both of which are directly affected by the spectral efficiency. Furthermore, keep in mind that the primary reason for using cellular technology is to increase spectral efficiency of the system - specifically, in a frequency-oriented system, to allow frequency re-use in more distant cells.
Furthermore, because spectrum is a very finite resource, it has traditionally been controlled by governments. Their policies are focussed on spectral efficiency, as it provides for the greates use of that resource. There are some extreme libertarians who call for total deregulation of spectrum, but we certainly do not yet have the technology yet to do so. Regulation, at least in the US, developed as a direct result of interference and other chaos in the radio broadcast arena.
'No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this.'
The depression generation succeeded like none before it! This is the generation that enjoyed the boom of the '50s!
The baby boom generation (of which I am an early member), OTOH, has been foisted with paying for the Social Security and Medicare of our elders. Contrary to one poster in this thread, SS and Medicare were set up before us boomers were out of college!
The depression generation also had to fight in WW-II, and many boomers (myself included) went to Vietnam. The Gen-X'ers, with very few exceptions, didn't have a war to worry about!
The biggest problem for the Gen-Xers will be paying for the retirement of us boomers. And this will indeed be a problem, since *we* have lots of votes. This is true in all of the first world countries that I am aware of - the government created retirement systems have always been a generational transfer tax (although not sold as such) and a bit of a scam. The ease of abortion, the later age of marriage and the greater percentage of working women have all lead to a dramatic reduction in birth rate, hence they extra load on the Xers.
The worst thing the boomers have done to the Xers is a result of our generation's rejection of traditional morality, causing too many Xers to grow up in dysfunctional divorced families and without moral guidance.
Boomers grew up when there was little crime, almost everyone had their natural fathers (main exception was those who lost their fathers in war), suicide was rare and drug abuse (with the exception of alcohol and tobacco) was unknown.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has a few misguided citizens who provide funding to the IRA through its unfortunately legal arm - Shin Fein (sp?). This hardly represents the policy of the US government or the opinion of the people of the US. 40% of US citizens are of Irish descent (including myself). Only a few are supporters of the IRA terrorists.
But the terrorism facing the US *is* something new. The attack on 9/11 was unprecedented. 19 people were able to kill 3000 people in a very short period of time. Shortly after that, a small amount of anthrax was released (who knows by whom), which illustrates the danger of modern technology in the hands of terrorists.
The IRA, while despicable, has been relatively limited in its destruction in Britain. Most of its victims, ironically, have been Irish Catholics! And it hasn't been able to kill thousands in a single act!
Furthermore, the US does not allege that the new threat of terrorism only affects itself. The US is asserting (correctly so) that modern technologies, combined by the willingness to use them by fanatics, has made terrorism vastly more dangerous than it was in the past.
Consider that most terrorism of the last 50 years was supported but moderated by the USSR and other sponsor states. They used terrorism to further their aims, but limited the damage it caused because of fear of state to state reprisal. Al Queda and other Islamists have changed the rules, and the world will have to adapt to that change. No longer can one assume that terrorists will choose to do limited damage. It has now been adequately demonstrated to even the most dense that they are willing to engage in large scale mass murder and are capable of inflicting it.
Silly. They are not enforcing law and order. Furthermore it is not peace time. A hostile force has declared war on us.
They are assisting legally authorized civilian law enforcement. They are providing information. They are probably doing so while improving the skills of their staff, which is one of their missions, peacetime or other.
Indeed getting the military too much involved would be a mistake.
h iskey/>.
But... consider that the President does, and always has have the ability to declare martial law in the event of emergencies. Clearly we don't have a situation that justifies this, for which I am deeply glad.
Also, since you cite the brillians of the founders, keep in mind that George Washington himself used the military in 1794 against US citizens on US soil (see http://earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/milestones/w
It is a matter of balance. In this case, the military is providing *technical assistance* to civilian law enforcement. The military is not enforcing nor making the law. It is merely providing constitutionally acceptable information. It as acting within the law (Posse Comitatus act as amended) and within the spirit of the law.
It is hardly something to become worried about in this case.
In general, I agree with this. The military does exist primarily to exert force on external threats (not states - the military has historically been used on stateless pirates also).
The military, however, also exists to suppress rebellions. The last armed rebellion against the United States (The Terijina rebellion, New Mexico, early 1970s) indeed did involve units of the military.
However, the military also exists to fight within the US if *necessary* - but not in law enforcement.
BUT... this is a minor use of the military. There are lots of minor uses of the military outside of its primary purpose. If this was distracting from the military mission, I would agree that it was wrong. I doubt that it is - it is more likely providing useful training time.
If the military were disregarding constitutional rights, again I would agree. But I know of no constitutional right against surveillance of potential suspects in public areas.
FInally, there is some possibility that this is a terrorist action. Even if it is not, it is a possible terrorist MO, and could be used by terrorists in the future. Fighting terrorists exceeds the narrow mandate of "law enforement."
Law enforcement is about apprehending potential criminals and administering justice. Fighting terrorism, as we learned the hard way on 0/11 is about preventing mass murder, among other things. And it is about waging war - against combatants even if they are on our own soil.
Well written, but you make a number of mistakes...
First of all, I don't wish a terrorist attack on Madison. I wish that if there is a terrorist attack, it hits Madison rather than some place which is supporting our very real need to protect ourselves against these terrorists.
Second, the Patriot Act does not remove checks and balances. Checks and balances are in fact the mechanisms built into the constitution to allow the different branches of government to block each other. In the case of the Patriot Act, two branches have come together, with lots of compromising, to produce a set of laws. A third branch is available to strike down any parts of that which are unconstitutional. IOW checks and balances is about structural mechanisms, not the contents of laws. At least use the right terminology.
This discussion is about the Patriot Act. You bring up "the ability to declare war." This has nothing to do with the Patriot Act. Furthermore, given that this is an act of Congress enabling the president to make war, it is pretty clearly exactly what the founders intended. Also, if you would check history, the US has been in many wars, but only a few declared wars. Bush is doing nothing new in that regard.
You next imply that those capable of critical thinking "realize that... the white house hijacked a nations grief... perpetual war."
Wrong! First of all, the white house and congress responded to the peoples' justifiable anger. Second, many with critical thinking skills have analyzed the situation and agree with the president. If you choose to call this "blindy following," perhaps this is because you yourself blindly follow your ideology rather than reason. You may think the American citizenry, who strongly support military action, to be dolts and idiots who can be easily fooled. I have a bit more respect for them, apparently. If you really think we are all that dumb, why don't you support some sore of enlightened dictatorship by those "who have retained critical thinking" capabilities? As far as perpetual war, it is our opponents, the Islamists, who have in fact *declared* perpetual war against us. Did you perhaps not notice this fact during your moment of critical thinking?
Real people always die in war. This is not exactly a revelation! We did not start this war, but we have already lost 3000 civilians. These civilians were targeted. They had families too! It is the duty of the government to try to prevent more of this, and the Patriot Act contains a number of useful measures to help with this. It also contains some silliness, as one would expect of most acts where hundreds of congressmen have to disagreed. Don't be fooled by the name of the act. Congress always uses silly names for legislation.
You believe you retain critical thinking skills. Fine. At least provide them with some useful data to operate on. The sources you cite are hardly the only ways to find out what is going on. NONE of them address the current situation!
Your first two cites are full of lies. For example, Johnson did *not* want a war in Vietnam. Johnson was a fool, but not that kind of fool. Johnson inherited the war, believed that it was wrong to back out of it (he was right about that), and fell into a deep depression because of that war. Your source makes unprovable assertions that Johnson wanted the war for economic benefit. If that is what you consider critical thinking, it is telling!
Clinton did not block humanitarian aid to Iraq... Saddam Hussein instead did and does *hijack* that aid (which is mostly in UN allowed oil sales) to build weapons. But then, since the source was the notorious left wing UK Guardian, I am not surprised that it is full of anti-American nonsense.
Your first and third sources attempt to tell us that dictators use war to distract from problems at home. Duh! Gee, I guess none of us knew that or read Orwell. This is hardly news.
But it is also not evidence Bush's motivations. It applies much better to the Arab nations who have actual dictators, and who use anti-semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism to distract *their* population. It was this behavior by Saudi Arabia that directly contributed to 9/11.
I don't have the historical information to judge your fourth cite (the Lavon affair), but it also doesn't materially affect this discussion, so who cares. I can only assume you put it in there to imply that either Israel or Bush caused 9-11 on purpose. If that slander is what you meant, have the balls to say it directly.
Your fifth cite, which if it is true took place 40 years go, shows a silly plan like you *again* appear to be indirectly accusing the US of now. was shot down as soon as it got near a reasonable official. This shows the strength of our system.
No, the goal of Islamist terrorism is not to turn the US into a police state. It is to demoralize the US by killing its civilians.
So far, I have seen few liberties handed over, willingly or otherwise. The worst recent handing of liberties has not been the Patriot Act, but the McCain-Feingold campaign finance "reform", which prohibts citizens from certain kinds of political speech! Interestingly, the very people who seem to have the most extreme views in exerting the First Amendment free speech clause are the same people who support McCain-Feingold. Go figure.
The way our liberties will be lost is by laws passed by reformers, not those out to protect out lives. The first purpose of government is to protect its citizenry. It is the only excuse to allow a lethally armed police force to police the people. But those who object to the Patriot Act are more happy using those police to arrest environmental offenders than to prevent terrorism.
There is some merit to what you say, but...
Police helicopters have to operate at relatively low altitude to be effective, which is a problem in congested airspace. Military aircraft can operate at higher altitudes, and typically due because of their operational need to avoid antiaircraft fire.
As far as coordination goes, the military has radios that are very frequency agile. In a case like this, there is an FBI agent *on* the military vehicle to communicate with the command nets. Even if the military vehicles cannot communicate, at that altitude and FBI agent near a window could use a portable radio.
Furthermore, moving air assets from other cities leaves those cities vulnerable to normal crimes. These air assets are expensive and valuable resources that are typically already underavailable. I monitor police frequencies in a large metropolitan area that has a number of police helicopters with advanced FLIR systems. They normally have to triage requests because there are not enough available for all needs. Furthermore, they run into all sorts of problems with air traffic deconfliction, and often lose vehicles they are tracking due to this. Finally, they can track *one* vehicle per helicopter.
A military reconaissance aircraft can, for example, take a high resolution photograph of a large area (photo nuts would Love those huge cameras) every few seconds, which can then be analyzed by computer either in real time or later to track evey object in the field.
The military has a surge capability that typically keeps some units available. Those units typically fly for training time, and these anti-sniper flights are probably substituting for training, not to mention providing training in an interesting scenario.
As far as the blame game, the sniper has been clever enough to involve multiple jurisdictions. This allows any jurisdiction to deflect blame onto another. It allows the locals to deflect blame onto the FBI and vice versa. The military, OTOH, is hardly likely to be a useful scapegoate, since this is not their ordinary duty.
In that case, I hope the next terrorist attack happens in Madison! If it does, your alders will be out of office before sundown! I am sure that if the terrorists read about this, they will consider your find city a good place to set up their bases.
If terrorism succeeds, it will be because democracies are unwilling to protect themselves from it. Too many citizens are too wrapped up in themselves and their petty ideologies to realize that there are really bad people out there who will do really bad things to them, no matter how idealistic they are!
Grow up and get a life, before the terrorists take yours!
I don't know what country you are from, but most countries in Europe, including the UK, have far fewer protections of civil rights than the US.
To combat modern terrorism, with its technologically enabled ability to cause mass casualties, it is necessary to update old laws. A large part of the unfortunately named Patriot Act does just that. Some parts, of course, are dumb, but that is what happens when a democracy makes laws.
Too bad you didn't read the very article you referenced. It directly refutes your argument in this case.
Here is the relevant portion:
Posse Comitatus clarifications emphasize supportive and technical assistance (e.g., use of facilities, vessels, aircraft, intelligence, tech aid, surveillance, etc.) while generally prohibiting direct participation of DoD personnel in law enforcement (e.g., search, seizure, and arrests).
The military is a sledge hammer by comparison. Or to quote the movie, The Seige: "The United States military is a sword when what you need a scapel". The only thing these orginizations have in common are guns.
This is utter nonsense. The military has all sorts of capabilities beyond the ability to exert large amounts of brute force. Many of these are technical means which are not available to other agencies.
US law enforcement, for example, is unlikely to have aircraft that can track thousands of targets at once (like JSTARS can), but this may be exactly what is needed to sort out a fleeing sniper from the rest of metropolitan traffic.
That is only one example of many capabilities the military has. These have no relationship at all to a "sledge hammer."
As far as slippery slopes go, there are very few areas of human behavior where there are clean boundaries. Almost everything we do involves "slippery slopes" with something innocuous on one end of a continuum and something horrible at the other. Thus the slippery slope argument is a silly way to look at things. It is simply an excuse for extremism - to stay at one extreme end of the continuum - and is often used to substitude for actual reasoning.
Actually, a system like this can track anything that disturbs the transmission of the radio signals. A body does that well. If you don't believe me, turn on an FM radio to a very weak station. Move around the radio. The signal will change.
However, the practical characteristics of the system depend on where the *receivers* are located. If they have a receiver near your house, they can probably see your body (and your cat, and your computer, and your house wiring, etc).
Trees also reflect (the technical term is scatter) radio waves. For example, I recently had to move my DirectTV satellite dish because a tree had grown in front of it and the signal was degraded by scattering and absorption.
You'd need some kind of system which distinguished between a drug company doing their own basic research and simply taking publically funded research though
Most of the expense a drug company goes through is exactly in the areas that publicly funded research doesn't cover: expensive clinical trials; expensive massive searches for natural substances. The more complex one makes the system, the more it advantages the big at the expense of the little; the more it encourages corruption; and for sure, the less effective it will be because it will depend on a government bureaucracy to make it work.
In other words, the drug companies are symbiotic with public research. Sure, they take advantage of it, but they take the results into areas the
public arena cannot effectively go, and shouldn't go.
What you actually need here is a business model which ensures that the cost of making the movie is covered. It's quite possible that there are ways to do this without needing something like copyright. Even with file shareing there still appears to be a market for showing movies in a purpose built room as well as selling and renting copies
Yes, it is possible, but as others have pointed out, very unlikely. Of course, one way to do it might be exactly what the RIAA etc are trying to do: instead of relying on copyright law, they plan to cripple the technology industry to prevent copying. Note that the latter is a way of protecting product - with or without copyright law.
Someone on here gave an example of how the world would work if copying were easy *and legal.* The minute a movie is released (or before if someone gets hold of a bootleg like they do now), *legal* third party producers would mass produce the meda (DVD's, videotape, even projection film). It would then be available for almost nothing at your nearest video store (oops... not there - they would be out of business)... at your local drug store or grocery store or Radio Shack or flea market. And it would all be legal. There is no doubt that this would happen. And clearly this would take so much revenue away from the movies that they simply would not be produced! There would still be a market to go to the theater (I like to watch movies there), but the theater owner would buy cheap copies (which with no copyright could be of extremely high quality). So the money going to the movie creators would simply vanish. And so would movies!
I am sure this is true. But one characteristic of capitalism is that businesses tend not to leave money laying around. If antibiotics will make money, which they do, they will develop them also - even if they do cure people.
Most conditions other than bacterial infections cannor currently be killed by drugs.
Actually, you are the one who is confused, probably because of the weird way Slashdot displays threads when you have a threshold set.
Everything quoted in your article is from *my* postings. The bold quote is from an earlier post by me. The italicized quote is from a response I made to someone who responded to that earlier post.
Well, you certainly had your say!
It was *my* duty to serve in Vietnam, and I did so. And as an *informed* citizen who had seen communism first hand, I knew better than the silly elites who believed the pap they were being
fed. That the Soviet Union was a deadly menace to mankind, and was fighting through Vietnam as a proxy, was hardly in doubt. Today, at least, most people have finally come to realize how dangerous and evil the USSR was.
And as far as the impact of the draft... keep in mind two things:
1) Until large numbers of Americans were being drafted and sent to Vietnam, there were very few people in the anti-war movement.
2) Once young people no longer had to fear going to Vietnam, the anti-war movement again dropped to almost nothing.
3) The anti-war movement served only to help the communists. It did NOT protest the communist takeover (and subsequent massacre) in Cambodia by Pol Pot. It did not protest the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam. It did not protest the subsequent invasion of Vietnam by China. In fact, it never protested anything except American policy, and it never helped anyone except the Soviets. Furthermore, it was aided and abetted by the KGB, as has been aptly proven by information available since the fall of the USSR. It was what Lenin called "useful fools" - people who believed what the communists fed them.
There is no question in my mind, having lived through the period and known people on all sides of the issue, that a large percentage of the anti-war crowd were protesting because *they didn't want to go, or didn't want their boyfriends to go.*
Vietnam was IMHO a just war. It may not have been a smart one, and it wasn't carried out well, but it was a just war. Furthermore, we won that war with the Christmas Bombing of 1972, and if it had not been for the perfidious actions of the democrat majority in the congress of the US (in embargoing all aid to South Vietnam including previously promised ammunition), South Vietnam would have remained free of totalitarianism, and probably would have gradually become democratic (like South Korea). Instead, it was overwhelmed by a massive armored invasion (the fantasy that indigenous guerillas won that war is just that. The VC were not a factor after the Tet Offensive of 1968).
While I am not surprised that you consider Vietnam to be unjust, after all the dissention about the issue, I am indeed surprised that you found our action in Korea to be unjust. What are you? A Soviet apologist? The Korean war was started by a naked act of aggression, where Kim Il Sung, a KGB asset and dictator of North Korea, sent his armies to invade South Korea. It was a simple attack on a sovereign nation. Pure aggression. The United Nations voted to stop that attack, and the US provided most (but certainly not all) of the troops, and indeed kept the south from being conquered.
Today, South Korea is a prosperous free society. North Korea is a catastrophic failure, with a least a million of its citizens dead just in the last couple of years as a result of a famine caused by its government's corruption and mismanagement. It is a fascist dictatorship and personality cult. And you think we were wrong to resist the spread of that?
You must have some very odd values.
As far as your views on abortion... well... they are your opinion. You want to repeal biology. You want to repeal the most important humanistic value - the respect for life. All in the name of sexual freedom. If a woman doesn't want the burden of a child, she should not conceive the child. Isn't that simple?
Your assertion that single mom, single dad, two gay parents etc are as good as a nuclear family is totally discredited by plenty of statistics. For example, the odds of a male being a criminal rises dramatically if he does not grow up with his natural father. The odds of a step-parent molesting a child are much larger than that of a natural parent doing so. There are many other statistics showing the value of nuclear families. These are facts. You can go look them up. Regardless of how you would *like* the world to work, you are committing the same mistake that progressives have made for the last 200 years: assuming that human nature is what you wish it is rather than what it stubbornly insists on being.
Regarding "desperately clinging to the status quo" - I would turn that around and say that you are desperately seeking to avoid that which thousands of years of human experience has already learned. I can understand - when I was younger, I thought (the hubris of the boomer generation) that we knew more than all those folks in the past; somehow they were just dummies. The brave new world was coming - and we were going to lead the way.
Hogwash! Human nature has not changed in recorded history, and will not (barring genetic engineering, which is a whole different can of worms). What has happened throughout history is that people have put forth utopian ideas that ignore human nature. The modern progressive movement, starting with Rousseau, is the longest lived and most damaging of all of these, with 100,000,000 deaths on its bloody hands just from communist states alone.
You would rather that the drugs not be developed at all?
Or perhaps you would prefer that some government bureaucracy does it - with the usual inefficiencies and stupidities that government bureaucracies are known for.
If developing a lifesaving drug makes a rich person richer, that's fine with me. It should be with you, also! And keep in mind that most drug companies are widely held companies, mostly owned by the public. In fact, if you have a pension fund in the US, the odds are that YOU are one of the person who gets richer!
Those who imagine that corporations operate only for the benefit of a few rich people are people who have a narrow and uninformed view of capitalism. I should also point out, to save a few useless flames, that people who think capitalism is perfect and the solution for every human problem have an equally narrow and uninformed view.
I think a reasonable solution would be to differentiate more finely between types of intellectual property. For example, some inventions (drugs) require vast expenditures of resources over many years, and thus may require patent protection for a long time or the research will be discouraged.
Other inventions (software), if patented at all (which I generally reject) should be given only short protection, as the field is moving so quickly, and capitalizing on the invention is usually inexpensive.
Copyright is yet another issue, and again perhaps should vary depending on what is being copyrighted. I think that copyright is a valid idea and does create incentive. My wife has published novels, and part of the reason the publisher went to the expense of publishing them was the residual market and the international market. OTOH her grandmother wrote many novels and a couple of movies, and the family is still getting residuals 70 years later, which is absurd.
The argument about prohibition creating crime is a good one. It is my main argument against drug prohibition. However, some degree of protection is clearly necessary for movies and other entertainment, because there is a significant investment in most cases (at least for movies). Clearly the DMCA goes too far, and the attempt to hobble technology in order to protect these government granted monopolies is clearly out of line.
In the past, industry dealt with copyright violations by going after those who made wholesale profits from it. I think it was appropriate that they could do so. Technologies like napster may make that impractical. But the solution isn't draconian laws - it is, as many Slashdotters and others have pointed out, a change in business models. And if that doesn't work - well, it's just too bad! The buggy whip manufacturers would love to have strangled the automobile industry. Fortunately they didn't. Today's situation is similar!
I am afraid that your view is more reasonable than the argument in the article. The article argues against the principle of copyright and patent protection.
It doesn't seem to have been mentioned in this thread, but the US Supreme Court heard arguments just this week on the issue of constantly extending copyrights.
See this and, of course, Slashdot it.
There's more than just racial discrimination that was wrong with the old times. There was also discrimination and accepted violence on gays, and yes women.
There was discrimination, but not accepted violence.
Just because your family didn't approve of wife beating doesn't mean your values were the norm.
Wife beating was NOT the norm. Where are *you* getting this stuff?
Birth control was largely unavailable meaning women had to have kids even if they did not want them to.
I suppose you have never heard of the condom, or imagine that it wasn't invented until AIDS came along.
If you mean abortion wasn't freely available to any women and any state of pregnancy, you are right. And I consider that a good thing.
Religious oppression was also rampant as every devout God fearing individual took it upon themselves to "preach" their own particular morals to everyone else.
Oh really? Where do you get that idea? Did you experience it?
That is utter nonsense.
Simply put, if the old days were so great and wonderful they would have never had led to the social revoultions that followed in the 60's and 70's
The primary social revolutions were:
1) Civil rights. Converting racial discrimination into a national desire for fairness, and then perverting that movement into more racial discrimination (quotas). Racial discrimination was a a bad thing - no doubt about it. Blacks in the US got the shaft. "Reverse discrimination" is equally stupid and unjust, if not as damaging in the short run.
2)Womens rights. Ending discrimination against women. Replacing it with easy divorce, which results in, ultimately, great harm to divoced women and especially their children.
Adding a supposed right to abortion at any age, ending the respect for life that our country had cherished.
The combination of "the pill"
3)The "me" generation - the replacement of social responsibility with the idea with selfishness.
4)Mindless opposition to authority - this was a result of a combination of a huge generation that thought it knew better than the billions of people who had come before it, and an unwillingness of the males to serve in the Vietnam War. In addition, the old seductive marxist ideas were in vogue. The combination led to the anti-war movement, much of which morphed into a general attitude of moral superiority and selfishness on the part of those who took part in it.
The old ways weren't perfect. But the old morality, with the exception of discrimination, produced better social results than what we have today!
I never said it was perfect.
There were a lot fewer inner city problems than today, in spite of what you have heard.
Beating your wife was most definitely not accepted.
Women could work - my mother worked as an engineer in the 1940's, and then quit to raise her children. When we were old enough, she went back to work as a teacher.
Racial discrimination was more widespread and was not illegal in some states, but it was certainly not accepted by many of us!
My comments on moral guidance stand.
And the '50s were a better time in terms of kust about any social measure you can come up with other than racial discrimination.
Actually, a single tone into an FM transmitter will produce an infinite number of sidebands, with the amplitude determined by Bessel functions. Of course, the higher order sidebands will be significantly attenuated.
Noise is normally not considered a "signal" - one reason we have the term Signal to Noise Ratio.
Spectral efficiency is of course not the *only* interesting parameter in the design of an RF communications system. It is, however, a very important one.
In general, one strives for the greatest spectral efficiency given other requirements (dropped calls, multipath immunity, interference immunity, privacy and security, power budget, equipment cost, equipment size). The reason is that two of the most expensive components of a cellular sort of system are the base stations and the spectrum itself, both of which are directly affected by the spectral efficiency. Furthermore, keep in mind that the primary reason for using cellular technology is to increase spectral efficiency of the system - specifically, in a frequency-oriented system, to allow frequency re-use in more distant cells.
Furthermore, because spectrum is a very finite resource, it has traditionally been controlled by governments. Their policies are focussed on spectral efficiency, as it provides for the greates use of that resource. There are some extreme libertarians who call for total deregulation of spectrum, but we certainly do not yet have the technology yet to do so. Regulation, at least in the US, developed as a direct result of interference and other chaos in the radio broadcast arena.
'No generation since the Depression has been set up for failure like this.'
The depression generation succeeded like none before it! This is the generation that enjoyed the boom of the '50s!
The baby boom generation (of which I am an early member), OTOH, has been foisted with paying for the Social Security and Medicare of our elders. Contrary to one poster in this thread, SS and Medicare were set up before us boomers were out of college!
The depression generation also had to fight in WW-II, and many boomers (myself included) went to Vietnam. The Gen-X'ers, with very few exceptions, didn't have a war to worry about!
The biggest problem for the Gen-Xers will be paying for the retirement of us boomers. And this will indeed be a problem, since *we* have lots of votes. This is true in all of the first world countries that I am aware of - the government created retirement systems have always been a generational transfer tax (although not sold as such) and a bit of a scam. The ease of abortion, the later age of marriage and the greater percentage of working women have all lead to a dramatic reduction in birth rate, hence they extra load on the Xers.
The worst thing the boomers have done to the Xers is a result of our generation's rejection of traditional morality, causing too many Xers to grow up in dysfunctional divorced families and without moral guidance.
Boomers grew up when there was little crime, almost everyone had their natural fathers (main exception was those who lost their fathers in war), suicide was rare and drug abuse (with the exception of alcohol and tobacco) was unknown.