I agree. I was summarizing what was said in the article. I also like the fact that if I save a document, I can share it with anyone, regardless of whether or not they've paid M$ for the rights to the latest Office document format. Open formats do mean a lot to me. Do they mean that much to the average user? Maybe not so much.
The dual x1900 setup will increase performance in gaming, help with hardware accelerated desktops, and tackle physics.
The PhysX card however can actually lower framerates in games. So far the PPU hasn't shown much benefit if any. And the money you drop on it does nothing when it isn't computing physics. The GPU will benefit you in any game, as well as the hardware accelerated desktop.
Really? Then perhaps you can explain the actual real-world benchmarks in how gaming with the PhysX PPU actually lowers scores and framerates in many games, and at best offers no improvement in performance?
Physics currently run on the CPU primarily, and do so relatively well. That is what this article is about however, that the major physics middleware software provider is working with ATI so that the GPU is designed to take on this load, and do so well.
Wouldn't a delegation system be similiar to what we have currently?
I consider myself politically savvy. I have an IT job where I get paid to surf the web all day, so I take advantage of that. I read far more sites than I should. Still I'm not sure I'm even educated or aware enough to vote for all the people I have to. If I had to vote on issues, would it be feasible for me to make good decisions, or will I just go for the best marketed spin on what my opinion should be?
I imagine that many Americans would just delegate their vote to someone else. On one hand, it gives power to those who decide to exercise their voting rights. That option is pretty nice. On the other hand, it might encourage a greater percentage to proxy allowing lobbyists and parties to further bury the individuals who would try to cast an educated vote.
This seemed to be a fairly objective view on the project. However there didn't seem to be much worthwhile meat.
Summary: StarOffice allows for bundling of non-opensource pieces, and allows for paid support. OpenOffice gets more community support. Both have areas they can improve in, and are working on that. The best statement was that users who have MS Office and are happy with it probably don't have a good reason to switch.
My qualm is that he made no effort to really sell his point while making what I believe to be a rather inflammatory statement.
I still hold that if a recent study showed the LAMP stack to be supposedly the most bug-free OSS project in existence, then you need to somehow back up claims that two of the major components need to be dismissed out of hand for being buggy.
The population is skyrocketing. The total number of votes should go up.
And 1992 had 55.1% compared to the recent 55.3%
Technically your statement is true. It was the highest percentage since 1968. However, really it wasn't any higher than 1992, yet there was far more press coverage and supposed interest. Everyone talked about the election. Everyone bitched about the election. They still do. Every day. Yet people couldn't be bothered to show up and vote.
Meanwhile for Iraq's first election, despite bombings and death threats, over 80% showed up to vote.
They could have died, but they still beat us by 25%.
Tell me that voter apathy doesn't exist in this country.
I'm not intentionally being obtuse, but I'm no expert in the field. Given that SQL is powering rather large enterprise-level apps on a daily basis, why are these features so valuable considering that SQL doesn't have them?
And honestly, this is more my opinion, but the LAMP stack is probably underutilized by most people. They're happy to get PHPNuke or PHPBB up and running for their site. If it fits the bill for 90% of the users, and power users have alternatives that they're happier with (be it Perl and PostgreSQL) then does LAMP really need to change?
I still feel that calling LAMP the equivalent of BASIC and insinuating that it ruins would be developers is an asinine statement.
AMD is in talks to buy out ATI supposedly, and yet ATI is optimizing the line of GPU's specifically for Intel. Is ATI fighting to remain independent?
I'm an NVidia guy myself, but I figure if AMD buys out ATI atleast we'd see Linux support from them.
More to the point, this has been rumored for a while. I feel sorry for those who invested heavily in a PPU. In the end, I'm pretty sure most end users are content to allow physics to be split between GPU and CPU, especially when CPU and GPU makers are happy to try and upsell you on their products to carry the load.
What's the difference between spending a little extra on the CPU/GPU side versus spending extra for the PPU? The CPU/GPU money will benefit you more often. With hardware accelerated desktops in the near future, your GPU will be even more valuable. The PPU will only be useful some of the time. Furthermore, venturing into the unknown territory of the PPU means that you can get dropped like any other fad, just as fast as UMD.
Remember when UMD was the hot thing for all of two months?
The government is already horribly inefficient. A pure democracy just doesn't seem feasible from a pure overhead standpoint. Coupled with the existing apathy, I don't think the country cares enough to want or use a pure democracy. In reality, certain strong lobby groups would continue to spam votes.
Step away from politics for a second. In MLB, the fans vote for who gets in. Never once do we see a fair ballot of worthy All-Stars. This year, like most, 8 out of the 9 position players are either on the Red Sox or Yankees. Why? Because the fans can spam the vote and no one else cares to try and counteract that.
I think with a pure democracy there is a possibility for even more shenanigans. Except I think it would fall more to corporate control (via advertising) than party lines with our existing system.
I think the title is a bit melodramatic. There are tons of truly wretched bills that get passed every day. As it stands, downloading music that you didn't pay for is considered illegal in this country anyway. This new bill only clarifies the existing position by making you have licenses for every version of a song you have. I think it is silly. I don't think it is the worst thing Congress has done.
Open source software has fought a long battle to get where it is today, and at least 3/4 of the so-called LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack are under vigorous attack by many, myself included. Why? --
I can't speak for everyone, or for that matter, anyone but myself, but I'm good at doing that so here goes.
I'm quite opposed to using MySQL and PHP, and I'm none too fond of Apache. Anyone who knows me or happens into a conversation with me about development quickly learns of my distaste for these particular projects. To be fair, Apache is the least problematic of the three and if there were no alternatives, I'd use it without a lot of complaint.
MySQL and PHP, on the other hand, really raise my ire. Both of them have two major problems:
1. Bug ridden (by this I am including both misfeatures as well as actual bugs).
2. They encourage bad habits.
I'll start with MySQL. I learned databases on MySQL and used it for several years. Then I discovered PostgreSQL and realized that in fact, I'd learned nothing of databases. For years the MySQL developers were quite vocal that things like referential integrity, transactions, subselects, etc were little more than baggage that could be done better another way. They were after speed, pure and simple. Fair enough, in some respect, since the job MySQL was originally developed for didn't require any of those things. The problem is that a whole generation of database programmers believed them, despite the fact that their applications *did* require those things. Someone in authority told them they didn't and they bought it (and still buy it). Let me clue you in: you need these things or you need to let someone else handle your database work for you.
Another nit I have with MySQL is the ever-changing ways you must interact with it. Some versions have certain command-line flags, and later versions will ignore those flags (or fail if you pass them),
IMO, MySQL once filled a niche (cheap data store) that today is better filled by SQLite but has moved out of it into a area where it doesn't compete nearly as well (that of an enterprise database) and no longer fits in either. If you need a dumb data store, use SQLite. If you need a FOSS database, use PostgreSQL. They cost the same as MySQL (free) and each does a better job of doing what it was designed for than MySQL.
PHP is another sore spot for me. I've gotten to the point that not only will I not write PHP code, I won't even run applications written in PHP (my long search for decent blogging software was due to the restriction that it not be written in PHP). At some level PHP is a great language because the entry cost is so low. Not so much because the language is so particularly friendly, but because it was designed to work in an extremely simple environment (the web) and because it's quite possible to learn PHP incrementally by intermixing it with HTML. So what's the problem? Well, first of all, as anyone who's done much web programming will tell you, mixing code with markup is *not* a good thing if you care about maintenance or extensibility. The very thing that makes PHP a great language for beginners is the very thing that makes it a bad language for beginners. At some point they will have to unlearn those habits, except that usually they don't. Also, because it's so easy to whip out a quick PHP webapp, many, if not most, PHP programmers fail to delve very deep into the realm of programming, preferring to sit at the edge and reap the benefits without the work (I'm not talking about coding work, rather the work of understanding your field). PHP programmers practically popularized the most common attack in the world, the SQL-injection attack. Not only is it the most common, it's the most easily avoided. That's how shallow most PHP-programmer's knowledge is. "Professional" programmers are still assembling SQL queries by concatenating strings.
PHP and MySQL are this generation's BASIC, the language that was described thusly by t
Really? People in Congress are supposedly educated, and they can't write decent legislation. Do you trust the American public to really make smart decisions? Furthermore, if anything the last Presidential election showed the American public is to apathetic to vote. I don't mind the concept of a Republic. In theory it is more efficient than polling the known universe on everything. However, what we need are better leaders in Congress. They have proven time and time again they don't know what the hell they are doing.
Occasionally a third-party candidate with a brain comes along, and the two major parties make sure they never see the light of day. Partisan politics make sure that no one cares about actual issues. The only thing that matters in DC is making the other party look bad, and swearing blind allegiances to party lines, even if you don't know what the line is, or why the line was formed the way it was.
I'd bet money that Google, BBC and Slashdot all have vastly superior hardware to Wikipedia.
I've heard many a DBA-type praise PostgreSQL up and down. However, for most end users, they aren't going to run something that requires the load of Slashdot or Google. SQL scales well, is easy to install/administer, and learning MySQL is fairly interoperable with learning MSSQL. I use MySQL on all my webpages, because I have to use MSSQL at work. I'm not database guru, but I tell you I've never had any complaints with SQL.
If you can point me to actual real-world comparisons of the same content running through the two databases, and why PostgreSQL is better, I'd find that info useful. However, simply stating that Slashdot doesn't use SQL doesn't really explain why SQL is bad.
Odd that he finds PHP and SQL bug-ridden, but Linux isn't.
I'm a fan of Linux (both the kernel and the OS built upon it) but I would never call Linux on the whole stable. The kernel is getting progressively less stable these days, and many distros are pushing for bleeding edge over stability. The Linux scene is not the bastion of stability it once was. And considering how stable PHP and SQL are in reality, Linux is less stable in comparison.
Are you more concerned about the methodology of your webserver, or rock solid stability?
Apache is portable, scalable and stable. When BASIC came about, much better programming languages existed. BASIC was in fact the wrong approach in many ways. It ruined the way programmers thought. It was weak and cumbersome. It was also painfully straightforward and not in the least bit modular (not until QBasic at the very least).
However, Apache is currently the best product on the market. If you don't like the methodology, then write something better. Until then, I'm quite happy with LAMP.
I don't know for a fact that you can commit to purchase a stock before the IPO. That is the entire point of an IPO, is that it is the fist time it is available for purchase. You can't purchase it any earlier. And before the IPO, you don't know the price.
Breaking a verbal contract is shitty. However, are the people legally obligated? I don't know.
I'm no expert, but when a company goes public, they have an IPO, or Initial Public Offering. There is a period of a few months when planning the IPO that the stock isn't actually being traded, while it is common knowledge however that an IPO is being planned.
People may have promised to jump on the initial bandwagon for the IPO, however, no one knows what price the stock will open at. Google is the only company that effectively wrestled the market and determined their own opening stock price, which the SEC wasn't too happy about.
My guess is that the IPO price was higher than people expected, so they didn't buy the stock like they intended to, and then the stock plummeted quickly there after.
Let's piss off investors and potential shareholders. Better yet, while we're at it, can we get some bad press and announce to the rest of the world that everyone wants to back away from our stock?
People love investing a pariah stock that reeks of desperation.
So anyone who breaks a law has committed treason? I don't think you understand the word.
Do we hold ever member of Congress in contempt for treason and execute every one of them? They've approved the NSA taps. They've passed unconstitutional laws.
I remember 1995, Congress passed the Telecommuncations Decency Act of 1995. Newt Gingrinch was currently Speaker of the House. A reported asked if he felt it violated our first ammendment rights, to which Mr. Gingrich said it did. The reporter then asked by Newt voted for it if it was unconstitutional. He said, "it isn't my job to decide what is constitutional. I just give the American public what they want."
Scary attitude, huh?
I'm with you. I don't wish this was the case.
As far as wire taps, from what I read, the NSA has been monitoring encrypted lines, and they stay encrypted the whole time. They're not exactly listening in to our phone conversations. I'm more worried that companies like AT&T volunteered private data.
Gitmo Bay is a tough situation. Is it any different from any other war in history? Prisoners of war are often held the entire duration of a war without seeing a lawyer. Hell, we atleast let the Red Cross make sure the living conditions are humane. I don't necessarily believe the situation is right, but are we supposed to just let everyone go? What are we supposed to do?
And in case you missed it, both Congress and the UN officially sanctioned the war.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I was summarizing what was said in the article. I also like the fact that if I save a document, I can share it with anyone, regardless of whether or not they've paid M$ for the rights to the latest Office document format. Open formats do mean a lot to me. Do they mean that much to the average user? Maybe not so much.
The dual x1900 setup will increase performance in gaming, help with hardware accelerated desktops, and tackle physics.
The PhysX card however can actually lower framerates in games. So far the PPU hasn't shown much benefit if any. And the money you drop on it does nothing when it isn't computing physics. The GPU will benefit you in any game, as well as the hardware accelerated desktop.
Really? Then perhaps you can explain the actual real-world benchmarks in how gaming with the PhysX PPU actually lowers scores and framerates in many games, and at best offers no improvement in performance?
9 &p=2
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=275
Physics currently run on the CPU primarily, and do so relatively well. That is what this article is about however, that the major physics middleware software provider is working with ATI so that the GPU is designed to take on this load, and do so well.
Wouldn't a delegation system be similiar to what we have currently?
I consider myself politically savvy. I have an IT job where I get paid to surf the web all day, so I take advantage of that. I read far more sites than I should. Still I'm not sure I'm even educated or aware enough to vote for all the people I have to. If I had to vote on issues, would it be feasible for me to make good decisions, or will I just go for the best marketed spin on what my opinion should be?
I imagine that many Americans would just delegate their vote to someone else. On one hand, it gives power to those who decide to exercise their voting rights. That option is pretty nice. On the other hand, it might encourage a greater percentage to proxy allowing lobbyists and parties to further bury the individuals who would try to cast an educated vote.
This seemed to be a fairly objective view on the project. However there didn't seem to be much worthwhile meat.
Summary: StarOffice allows for bundling of non-opensource pieces, and allows for paid support. OpenOffice gets more community support. Both have areas they can improve in, and are working on that. The best statement was that users who have MS Office and are happy with it probably don't have a good reason to switch.
You are correct that I should have said MySQL instead of SQL. However, he does make it clear that he believes MySQL to be bug-ridden.
"MySQL and PHP, on the other hand, really raise my ire. Both of them have two major problems:
1. Bug ridden (by this I am including both misfeatures as well as actual bugs)."
His evidence is that sites are exploited. Could it be that many of these sites aren't properly configured, and also have old versions?
Seems to make sense to me. The PPU sounded really good to me until I thought about it.
Make sure to submit it to Digg and/or Slashdot.
My qualm is that he made no effort to really sell his point while making what I believe to be a rather inflammatory statement.
I still hold that if a recent study showed the LAMP stack to be supposedly the most bug-free OSS project in existence, then you need to somehow back up claims that two of the major components need to be dismissed out of hand for being buggy.
The population is skyrocketing. The total number of votes should go up.
And 1992 had 55.1% compared to the recent 55.3%
Technically your statement is true. It was the highest percentage since 1968. However, really it wasn't any higher than 1992, yet there was far more press coverage and supposed interest. Everyone talked about the election. Everyone bitched about the election. They still do. Every day. Yet people couldn't be bothered to show up and vote.
Meanwhile for Iraq's first election, despite bombings and death threats, over 80% showed up to vote.
They could have died, but they still beat us by 25%.
Tell me that voter apathy doesn't exist in this country.
I'm not intentionally being obtuse, but I'm no expert in the field. Given that SQL is powering rather large enterprise-level apps on a daily basis, why are these features so valuable considering that SQL doesn't have them?
And honestly, this is more my opinion, but the LAMP stack is probably underutilized by most people. They're happy to get PHPNuke or PHPBB up and running for their site. If it fits the bill for 90% of the users, and power users have alternatives that they're happier with (be it Perl and PostgreSQL) then does LAMP really need to change?
I still feel that calling LAMP the equivalent of BASIC and insinuating that it ruins would be developers is an asinine statement.
AMD is in talks to buy out ATI supposedly, and yet ATI is optimizing the line of GPU's specifically for Intel. Is ATI fighting to remain independent?
I'm an NVidia guy myself, but I figure if AMD buys out ATI atleast we'd see Linux support from them.
More to the point, this has been rumored for a while. I feel sorry for those who invested heavily in a PPU. In the end, I'm pretty sure most end users are content to allow physics to be split between GPU and CPU, especially when CPU and GPU makers are happy to try and upsell you on their products to carry the load.
What's the difference between spending a little extra on the CPU/GPU side versus spending extra for the PPU? The CPU/GPU money will benefit you more often. With hardware accelerated desktops in the near future, your GPU will be even more valuable. The PPU will only be useful some of the time. Furthermore, venturing into the unknown territory of the PPU means that you can get dropped like any other fad, just as fast as UMD.
Remember when UMD was the hot thing for all of two months?
Thanks. What I'll likely do is a bit of reading up on PostgreSQL on my own. Most people I ask are likely to be biased anyway.
The government is already horribly inefficient. A pure democracy just doesn't seem feasible from a pure overhead standpoint. Coupled with the existing apathy, I don't think the country cares enough to want or use a pure democracy. In reality, certain strong lobby groups would continue to spam votes.
Step away from politics for a second. In MLB, the fans vote for who gets in. Never once do we see a fair ballot of worthy All-Stars. This year, like most, 8 out of the 9 position players are either on the Red Sox or Yankees. Why? Because the fans can spam the vote and no one else cares to try and counteract that.
I think with a pure democracy there is a possibility for even more shenanigans. Except I think it would fall more to corporate control (via advertising) than party lines with our existing system.
Actually I repeatedly said MySQL. I only use MSSQL at work. You can use MySQL in a commercial/enterprise environment. I understand the difference.
Worse than http://www.fcc.gov/telecom.html
Worse than http://akaka.senate.gov/akakabill-b.html
I think the title is a bit melodramatic. There are tons of truly wretched bills that get passed every day. As it stands, downloading music that you didn't pay for is considered illegal in this country anyway. This new bill only clarifies the existing position by making you have licenses for every version of a song you have. I think it is silly. I don't think it is the worst thing Congress has done.
Open source software has fought a long battle to get where it is today, and at least 3/4 of the so-called LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack are under vigorous attack by many, myself included. Why?
--
I can't speak for everyone, or for that matter, anyone but myself, but I'm good at doing that so here goes.
I'm quite opposed to using MySQL and PHP, and I'm none too fond of Apache. Anyone who knows me or happens into a conversation with me about development quickly learns of my distaste for these particular projects. To be fair, Apache is the least problematic of the three and if there were no alternatives, I'd use it without a lot of complaint.
MySQL and PHP, on the other hand, really raise my ire. Both of them have two major problems:
1. Bug ridden (by this I am including both misfeatures as well as actual bugs).
2. They encourage bad habits.
I'll start with MySQL. I learned databases on MySQL and used it for several years. Then I discovered PostgreSQL and realized that in fact, I'd learned nothing of databases. For years the MySQL developers were quite vocal that things like referential integrity, transactions, subselects, etc were little more than baggage that could be done better another way. They were after speed, pure and simple. Fair enough, in some respect, since the job MySQL was originally developed for didn't require any of those things. The problem is that a whole generation of database programmers believed them, despite the fact that their applications *did* require those things. Someone in authority told them they didn't and they bought it (and still buy it). Let me clue you in: you need these things or you need to let someone else handle your database work for you.
Another nit I have with MySQL is the ever-changing ways you must interact with it. Some versions have certain command-line flags, and later versions will ignore those flags (or fail if you pass them),
IMO, MySQL once filled a niche (cheap data store) that today is better filled by SQLite but has moved out of it into a area where it doesn't compete nearly as well (that of an enterprise database) and no longer fits in either. If you need a dumb data store, use SQLite. If you need a FOSS database, use PostgreSQL. They cost the same as MySQL (free) and each does a better job of doing what it was designed for than MySQL.
PHP is another sore spot for me. I've gotten to the point that not only will I not write PHP code, I won't even run applications written in PHP (my long search for decent blogging software was due to the restriction that it not be written in PHP). At some level PHP is a great language because the entry cost is so low. Not so much because the language is so particularly friendly, but because it was designed to work in an extremely simple environment (the web) and because it's quite possible to learn PHP incrementally by intermixing it with HTML. So what's the problem? Well, first of all, as anyone who's done much web programming will tell you, mixing code with markup is *not* a good thing if you care about maintenance or extensibility. The very thing that makes PHP a great language for beginners is the very thing that makes it a bad language for beginners. At some point they will have to unlearn those habits, except that usually they don't. Also, because it's so easy to whip out a quick PHP webapp, many, if not most, PHP programmers fail to delve very deep into the realm of programming, preferring to sit at the edge and reap the benefits without the work (I'm not talking about coding work, rather the work of understanding your field). PHP programmers practically popularized the most common attack in the world, the SQL-injection attack. Not only is it the most common, it's the most easily avoided. That's how shallow most PHP-programmer's knowledge is. "Professional" programmers are still assembling SQL queries by concatenating strings.
PHP and MySQL are this generation's BASIC, the language that was described thusly by t
Really? People in Congress are supposedly educated, and they can't write decent legislation. Do you trust the American public to really make smart decisions? Furthermore, if anything the last Presidential election showed the American public is to apathetic to vote. I don't mind the concept of a Republic. In theory it is more efficient than polling the known universe on everything. However, what we need are better leaders in Congress. They have proven time and time again they don't know what the hell they are doing.
Occasionally a third-party candidate with a brain comes along, and the two major parties make sure they never see the light of day. Partisan politics make sure that no one cares about actual issues. The only thing that matters in DC is making the other party look bad, and swearing blind allegiances to party lines, even if you don't know what the line is, or why the line was formed the way it was.
I'd bet money that Google, BBC and Slashdot all have vastly superior hardware to Wikipedia.
I've heard many a DBA-type praise PostgreSQL up and down. However, for most end users, they aren't going to run something that requires the load of Slashdot or Google. SQL scales well, is easy to install/administer, and learning MySQL is fairly interoperable with learning MSSQL. I use MySQL on all my webpages, because I have to use MSSQL at work. I'm not database guru, but I tell you I've never had any complaints with SQL.
If you can point me to actual real-world comparisons of the same content running through the two databases, and why PostgreSQL is better, I'd find that info useful. However, simply stating that Slashdot doesn't use SQL doesn't really explain why SQL is bad.
Odd that he finds PHP and SQL bug-ridden, but Linux isn't.
I'm a fan of Linux (both the kernel and the OS built upon it) but I would never call Linux on the whole stable. The kernel is getting progressively less stable these days, and many distros are pushing for bleeding edge over stability. The Linux scene is not the bastion of stability it once was. And considering how stable PHP and SQL are in reality, Linux is less stable in comparison.
Anyone recall this?
3 8223&from=rss
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/07/13
Are you more concerned about the methodology of your webserver, or rock solid stability?
Apache is portable, scalable and stable. When BASIC came about, much better programming languages existed. BASIC was in fact the wrong approach in many ways. It ruined the way programmers thought. It was weak and cumbersome. It was also painfully straightforward and not in the least bit modular (not until QBasic at the very least).
However, Apache is currently the best product on the market. If you don't like the methodology, then write something better. Until then, I'm quite happy with LAMP.
I don't know for a fact that you can commit to purchase a stock before the IPO. That is the entire point of an IPO, is that it is the fist time it is available for purchase. You can't purchase it any earlier. And before the IPO, you don't know the price.
Breaking a verbal contract is shitty. However, are the people legally obligated? I don't know.
I'm no expert, but when a company goes public, they have an IPO, or Initial Public Offering. There is a period of a few months when planning the IPO that the stock isn't actually being traded, while it is common knowledge however that an IPO is being planned.
People may have promised to jump on the initial bandwagon for the IPO, however, no one knows what price the stock will open at. Google is the only company that effectively wrestled the market and determined their own opening stock price, which the SEC wasn't too happy about.
My guess is that the IPO price was higher than people expected, so they didn't buy the stock like they intended to, and then the stock plummeted quickly there after.
Let's piss off investors and potential shareholders. Better yet, while we're at it, can we get some bad press and announce to the rest of the world that everyone wants to back away from our stock?
People love investing a pariah stock that reeks of desperation.
So anyone who breaks a law has committed treason? I don't think you understand the word.
Do we hold ever member of Congress in contempt for treason and execute every one of them? They've approved the NSA taps. They've passed unconstitutional laws.
I remember 1995, Congress passed the Telecommuncations Decency Act of 1995. Newt Gingrinch was currently Speaker of the House. A reported asked if he felt it violated our first ammendment rights, to which Mr. Gingrich said it did. The reporter then asked by Newt voted for it if it was unconstitutional. He said, "it isn't my job to decide what is constitutional. I just give the American public what they want."
Scary attitude, huh?
I'm with you. I don't wish this was the case.
As far as wire taps, from what I read, the NSA has been monitoring encrypted lines, and they stay encrypted the whole time. They're not exactly listening in to our phone conversations. I'm more worried that companies like AT&T volunteered private data.
Gitmo Bay is a tough situation. Is it any different from any other war in history? Prisoners of war are often held the entire duration of a war without seeing a lawyer. Hell, we atleast let the Red Cross make sure the living conditions are humane. I don't necessarily believe the situation is right, but are we supposed to just let everyone go? What are we supposed to do?
And in case you missed it, both Congress and the UN officially sanctioned the war.