Don't be absurd. You speak as if prosecutors and judges are robots running Perl scripts. This case has zero "wide implications that will affect other cases," because in all cases the prosecutor has extremely wide latitude about what to charge people with, if anything, and what to prosecute, and what kinds of deals to offer, or not offer. And then even if one is convicted, the Court itself has equally wide latitude in what kind of punishment it can impose. The decisions of prosecutors and judges in one jurisdiction have zero legal force, and in such an unusual case, just about zero persuasive force, on cases in other jurisdictions.
It's ludicrous to imagine that just because the prosecutor decides to hammer Lori Drew -- because the community is demanding that something be done to her -- some other prosecutor is going to be forced to robotically equivalently hammer some poor doofus who signs up with AOL with a fake name in order to write nasty spam e-mail to his ex-wife. Unlike programming, the successful operation of the law does not require logical consistency. To the contrary, in each individual case the prosecutor will exercise his judgment, decide who really needs taking down and who doesn't. That's the way the law works. That's why people who commit exactly the same crime, technically speaking, often suffer widely varying punishments.
Yes it is, and the/. summary is about the slimiest piece of disgusting moral dishonesty I've seen in a while, since it leaves out this hugely relevant fact, and manages to imply this is part of a Giant Fascist Plot to undermine anonymity on the Internet. Here's a clue: the government doesn't give a fuck about J. Random Anonymous Coward posting inflammatory anti-government screeds on slashdot. But they do care -- because the community cares -- about a sick 40-year-old woman deliberately and sneakily psychologically abusing a 13-year-old girl to the point where the latter hangs herself in despair.
Lori Drew is Grade A evil, the worst sort of scum, and she is being prosecuted for this apparently silly crime specifically because of what she did. They're simply trying to nail her for something, because through flaws in the law at the time they can't nail her for what she actually did. It's much like the fact that the Feds put Al Capone away in the 1920s for tax evasion, not for all the murders he ordered in Chicago, because that was the only case they could prove in court, and justice -- the actual immortal principle, not the stale idiot's imitation that equates to a mere rigid technical adherence to the written law -- demanded that something be done about his crimes. What's going on here is the same thing. They are tying anything they can around her neck.
I'm cool with that. I haven't the least objection to Lori Drew being prosecuted for anything under the Sun, for the tiniest infraction imaginable. I'd like to see cops tail her day and night for the rest of her life, to nail her for jaywalking, going 0.5 MPH over the speed limit, and littering if she so much as spits in the street.
I would say the obvious solution to jamming is to have secret signals from the satellites. If you use spread-spectrum techniques your signals become more resistant to jamming. It's possible you might even make your signal nearly undetectable, so that your enemies don't even know it exists.
This being a well-known technique in military radio communications, I would be a little surprised if (1) there weren't already "black" SS signals available to the military, or (2) there will be soon enough.
They may not be especially worried about this. It's not like it's hard to detect someone jamming you, and if you're in a war situation a HARM missile can take care of them for you. Generally a big radio signal is a bit of a liability in a war zone. Makes you stand out, more or less like an electromagnetic bull's-eye painted on your chest.
Here's an amusing site y'all can slashdot, comparing flying the 1960s to the present. A few points the guy makes:
Flying was expensive. For example: A round trip ticket between Cleveland and Washington D.C. was about $75. This doesn't sound like a bad deal, until you adjust the fare for inflation: That's over $400 in today's dollars! By contrast, I recently paid less than $100 for a round trip between Cleveland and Washington on one of today's low-cost deregulated carriers.
There was no point in shopping around for the best deal, because all airfares were controlled by regulation. If a roundtrip ticket between Cleveland and Washington was $75 on one airline, it was $75 on all the airlines.
The vast majority of the passengers were businessmen. White male businessmen. Occasional families. Very few minorities, and virtually no women travelling independently.
Food and drinks were almost always served, no matter how short the flight. Because there was no price competition, the airlines had to compete based on service. It was amazing to watch the stewardesses hustle to serve everyone on a quick trip, while constantly tugging at their skirts to retain some modesty.
Sure, that sounds high-class, I guess, if you were a member of the flying aristocracy.
"Only" a General? That makes you "only" smarter and more disciplined than about 98% of humanity. Stand tall.
And, yep, you make a good point, that radio has significant international repercussions that if nothing else would demand the involvement of the Federal government. Even Thomas Jeffersion, that inveterate hater of Federal power, would have to agree.
Go for the upgrade! See you on the bottom 25 kHz one of these days, huh?
Don't get me started. I'm saying the virgin Commerce Clause, before she was gang-raped by a concupiscent Congress at the shameful invitation of her nine pimps on the Supreme Court, could accomodate the FCC's purview comfortably.
Mike, I would be nuts to post my call on a forum accessible by any present or future flake, Google and its eternal cache being what it is, not to mention the existence of the FCC ULS site to which you refer, or qrz.com, et cetera, where such flakes can look up my home address. I don't mind giving it out to fellow hams, because they are a fairly trustworthy crowd, thanks (ahem) to the FCC hoops they have to jump through to get licensed, which helps to keep out riff-raff not truly interested in being part of the community. If I hear you on 20 meters when the sunspots come back, I'll be happy to exchange calls and QTHs. (Not especially likely, as I live in 6 land and only operate 2m/440 as part of a RACES team and backpack QRP with one of those tiny Yaesu 817s and a wire up a tree.) But I don't think the Internet in general is any longer the kind of place where you leave the private identity doors unlocked, so to speak.
I'm not even sure why you think verifying that the call exists would serve as some kind of verification that me, the person posting, actually owns it. You'd be better off posting 5 random questions from the Extra question pool and seeing if I could answer them.
But to return to your point, by "AM" I meant what most people would understand it to mean, shorthand for "commercial broadcast AM," the stuff between 500 and 1500 kHz. I didn't mean everything from A1 to J3, you know?
I think the Commerce Clause doesn't have to stretch very far to cover radio communication that can go worldwide; that is, radio communication clearly influences interstate commerce, so I think the Constitution grants Congress the power to make law about it fair and square.
I think you're wrong on the facts as well as the law. The only reason to let each state make its own regulations (assuming its not required by the Constitution, vide supra) is if they are going to regulate differently, because, e.g., the citizens of state X have different needs than citizens of state Y, or because X believes it has a better idea than Y and we want to let them all try their individual plans out, to see which is best (the "50 laboratories of democracy" concept).
But even if that could be argued to make some kind of sense for VHF and UHF, it makes no sense at all for HF and AM, where signals easily cross many states. The states could not, in practise, make different regulations for those parts of the spectrum without chaos resulting. So if the state must, as a practical matter, all regulate in the same way, what's the point? Why not just have the Feds do it? Why have 50 wasteful duplicative efforts that must reach the same result?
(And since we're signing our bona fides here, I have an Extra ticket, too.)
You imply that the jobs that are "coming back" to the US are going to go to people who are presently unemployed.
Nope. They're going to go to people who are presently working in higher paying jobs that used to similarly benefit from cheap shipping costs to other countries. Those nice jobs are going to go away, with the price of international transporation skyrocketing, and be replaced by the less-nice, lower-paying jobs that are "coming back." The net result will be little change in employment -- just a replacement of certain jobs with other, lower-paying jobs.
Next up, the/. community discovers that notions like copyright, meaning the right of a work's creator to control how it's copied and distributed, is not such a bad idea after all.
So...if I buy a certain type of digital TV, it turns out it might not record Firefly reruns if the broadcaster signals that he doesn't want it to, for whatever evil nefarious reason.
And this infringes what "right," exactly? My right to have products available that do exactly what I want, at exactly the price I want to pay? Sounds like my "right" to a free lunch.
If you don't like the way Toshiba makes digital TVs, and feel they have sold out to the Devil by following "broadcast flags" sent down the pipe by the provider of content, you have a straightforward solution: get off the damn couch, rustle up some capital, hire some engineers and build your own digital TV. If the great mass of people agree that indeed the broadcast flag is evil, your marvelous new TV will sell like hotcakes and you'll (A) get your TV shows free of restrictions, (B) get rich, and (C) drive Toshiba out of business. A threefer!
No, this isn't particularly easy, certainly not for the average TV watcher. But on the other hand, it's not rocket science either. We're talking about building TVs, not curing cancer or traveling to Mars and back safely. I don't doubt if there were piles of money to be made making digital TVs that ignore broadcasts flags then some bright entrepreneur and a VC group looking for a 500% rate of return would jump on it. And since there's nothing legally standing in their way, there are no "rights" being threatened here, aside from some whiner "right" to get what you want without working for it.
If you're a scientist, it's either a science with very sloppy discipline, or some fuzzy subject where even pandering fools can succeed.
I guess you lose. My PhD is from Berkeley in chemical physics, and I did a post-doc at the University of Illinois in the Department of Materials Science, and another at the University of Chicago. I won a half million dollar Presidential Young Investigator award in my first few years as a professor. You could find me in the archives of Physical Review if you knew my real name.
So I expect I've forgotten more math than you even know exists, unless you're a general relativity theorist or something.
Sure, but lacking caffeine you'll lack the energy to do anything about it. You'll be assimilated without resistance.
So unless a patch is found, you'll need to set up dedicated hosts ready to launch a devastating counter-strike on their coffee machines within the first microsecond of detecting incoming ICDMs (Internet Coffee Datagrams, Malevolent), and trust to an uneasy policy of Mutually Assured Decaffeination to keep the peace.
Cool link. I am reminded of those halcyon hacker days of yore, when everyone was smarter and +5 Funny, and winter exited March the second on the dot. I recall my college housemates trying to hack our PBX phone system so that you could call the washer and dryer and find out if your clothes were done, instead of having to walk down 3 flights to look. (It couldn't be done using a personal computer because no one owned such an expensive toy.)
Speaking as one whose taught for years, your comment is insightful:
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure
Part of the problem may have been that the folks running the show often were "educators" (professors and such), but not of their target audience. Teaching at the K-12 level is not at all the same as teaching undergraduates and graduates at MIT. They certainly should have brought in experienced actual teachers from the K-12 (or K-6) level they wanted to reach.
But this comment from the summary is appallingly clueless or mendacious:
Among the reasons [for failure]:...uncertain pedagogical theories...and no input from education professionals in designing the software.
Anyone who has actually taught knows that "pedagogical theories" and "education professionals" (e.g. those who graduate with PhDs in education, as opposed to PhDs in the subject they teach) are worse than useless, that such things are responsible for half the time-wasting if not counter-productive garbage that clogs the educational system, total sidewalk-supervising theoretician castles-in-the-air bullshit.
Indeed, I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!"). The problems the OLPC people are having ironically self-illustrate the uselessness of "pedagogical theories" constructed in the absence of pedagogical experience.
Mine is that a month is long enough to work out if a crime has been committed,
How the hell would you know? Work for the CID, do you? Twenty years experience in criminal investigation? I think you're just pulling a figure out of your ass. You might as well assert that four weeks is long enough to fix bug X in the Linux kernel, without having read a line of code. The people whose job it is to know these things -- who do it for a living -- have asserted that it's not enough time. Unless you've got some actual, you know, evidence to contradict them, I'd say they ought to get the benefit of a presumption of being right about how fast they can do their job.
That's not to say that some other concern (civil liberties) might trump the question of enough time to work out whether so-and-so was involved with crime such-and-such. Maybe there are other such concerns. But your flat assertion that the police damn well ought to be able to figure this out inside of four weeks is not an argument one can accept without better evidence (not including theories that boil down to "it seems reasonable to me...").
We shouldn't worry about anything while we're not as bad as North Korea?
Nope. Try again, with more subtlety. The assertion is that you should rank the threats to your liberty in order of size and nearness, and allocate your limited resources accordingly. How do you think the North Koreans got where they are? By being distracted by bogus threats ("The eeeeeevil capitalist running dogs are going to get you!") and not catching a clue about the real threats ("Here, let's just have Dear Leader decide where you work...where you live...where you travel...what you eat...how much you eat....whether you eat...")
I'm OK with getting thrashed about possible detention limits going from 28 to 42 days...provided that you have already taken care of, say, all those surveillance cameras, the "no-go" zones in Islamic neighborhoods, your inability to defend yourself inside your own house with deadly force against burglars, the surrender of much of your sovereignty to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, the fact that the government tells you how and when and what kind of health care you're going to get, and your only recourse if you don't like it is to write a stiff letter to the Times.
It's a nice quote from Niemoller, but what you'll notice is that it does not begin with the following stanzas:
When they came for the murderers I was silent. I wasn't a murderer.
When they came for those who rape children I was silent. I did not rape children.
And so forth. Niemoller's prose assumes that all the categories of persons in it are innocent. That is not a reasonable basis for criminal justice or national security, because not all persons are, in fact, innocent. Some of the people picked up by the police and held for questioning are very nasty people who really do want to set off a bomb next to your cafe chair filled with nails, so that the shrapnel takes the top of your head off and your mother will have to identify your body by your school ring, because most of your face is missing.
The question is, then, how do we distinguish between the innocent and guilty? Between those who really deserve Niemoller's gentle empathy and those vicious animals that must be locked in cages if we are to spare your (or my) mother endless grief? That's where the discussion must start.
Er...no, it's not. Foreign intelligence services really have, and do, commit all kinds of acts on foreign soil that are illegal by the foreign laws, right up to and including killing people. This is really news to you??
you get the government you deserve...
I voted for the present government, twice. So not only do I agree I've got the government I deserve, it's also the government I want. It's what might happen this fall that has me concerned, actually. I hate to imagine what I might have done to deserve Barack Obama. Run over a cute bunny rabbit and laughed heartlessly, maybe. Damn. But I think even Mr. Obama will man up in office and act less like a pansy. He actually seems to have toughened up a bit lately. Gives me hope.
Can't say I'm surprised. I know a few Englishmen, although to be fair they're all emigrants, so they may not regard the mother country with perfectly fond memory. Maybe you folks need a strong written Constitution with separation of powers, a reservation to the people of powers not explicitly granted to the state, and a stout Bill of Rights. We've got one you could borrow to study.
As for councils...Brr. We've got a similar vicious weed over here called a Homeowner's Association. Why free men would ever tolerate such an offense against liberty is unknown to me. I comfort myself by cherishing the thought that when the 8.0 earthquake comes and civil society is in ruins, these pasty-faced mealy-mouthed purely parasitical goons will be the first to have their clean water ration reduced, so as to keep an ample supply for the women, children, and more useful animals.
I'm cool with that. We can re-open the question when someone gets a bigger sword than the USMC.
then you want to bleat like a stuck pig when someone you know is executed/blown up/killed by bad dark men with beards?
Not I, friend. I'm aware some of my countrymen are pussies that way, but I'm not interested in bleating, nor in the world's sympathy. As you might have guessed from my post above, my preferred response to having someone I know executed/blow up/killed by bad dark men with beards is to send the Marines to hunt the sorry little rabbits down and snuff them. They're pretty good at that, you know.
I figure that will be sufficiently dissuading to any future bad dark men with beards. And, so far, it's working pretty well. I've got no complaints. So far, it's the dark men with beards who are wetting themselves with fear and strenuously arguing that they're not bad men, really, no, not at all. I'm OK with that, although, as I said, I have enough of a conscience that I would very much prefer my country do its best to avoid unnecessarily hassling the innocent.
Of course government chips away at civil liberties. It's government, right? It's as natural as breathing. You can no more expect government not to chip away at civil liberties than you can expect your employer not try to pay you as little as possible, or expect a shopkeeper not to try to charge you as much as possible, or expect your teenage son not to try to get away with as few household chores as possible. Hello, self interest!
So yeah it's the job of citizens to push back. But here's a strange fact: the blokes in government are not stupid, and they know very well that a powerful weapon on their side is the distractability of the citizenry. Get the herd in a froth about some minor issue -- changing a detention limit from 28 to 42 days -- and they won't even notice some much more serious abridgment of their liberty.
You need to watch out for that, and prioritize. Focus your rage on the biggest offenses. Otherwise, you know, it just degenerates into a state-sponsored Two Minute Hate, where you froth against some paper tiger, and meanwhile give over every important liberty you have to the State. The Stalinists who thrive in state bureaucracies are absolute masters of that kind of mental shell game.
Reckon you'd come out after six weeks the same person?
Fuck yeah. Why not? You talk like people never survived in the gulag for 10 years, or came through the camps, or coped with a hideous car accident that left them quadriplegic, or had the wife and kids smashed to a pulp before their very eyes when the Winnebago rolled over, or is living with Stage IV cancer with metasteses to the brain and liver.
I don't doubt that it would suck spending 6 weeks having assholes yell at you night and day, maybe giving you a slap upside the head, some light beating about, the kind of stuff that won't leave bruises that can't be explained plausibly to the magistrate (He's very clumsy, m'lud. Always falling into things.). I'd do quite a lot to avoid it. But would the prospect make me shit my pants and cry for mommy? No. I dunno about you but I haven't reached middle age without having to learn how to deal with various amounts of physical and mental pain that approach these levels, and some of it goes on for years (or forever), not a mere 6 weeks.
Anyway, its hardly the point, is it? Whatever they can do to you inside the 42-day limit, they can jolly well do to you inside the existing 28-day limit -- or for that matter, if they only have you in their slimy claws for a day.
Maybe you'd just like to not have them have the ability to get ahold of you at all? Well then, take back your security into your own hands. Stop asking government to protect you and yours. Liberalize your weapons laws and arm yourself. Change the rules of the game -- enact 'stand your ground' laws and the right to use deadly force to defend -- so that you can take care of shitheads who break into your flat, or house, or who try to mess with your person while you're in public, and potential shitheads know this and fear you the pissed-off righteous citizen more than they fear the police. Then you can start circumscribing the powers of the police, put them more at arm's length.
The fact of the matter is, this state of affairs hasn't come about because Great Britain is under some kind of alien occupation. Your fellow citizens voted in this government, and it is doing their bidding. If you (plural) don't want the government prying into your life and exerting all that criminal prosecution power to keep the peace, you need to do it yourself.
If there is enough evidence to convince a judge to "sign off" on keeping the (un)accused locked up, surely there must be enough evidence to charge him with some offence
Not a lawyer, huh? Well, ask yourself this: why isn't the same level of evidence sufficient to convict him? Why do we need a trial at all? The answer is that at different stages in the process, as your liberty gets put into deeper and deeper jeopardy, the level of proof needed rises. What's needed to detain you is less than what is needed to charge you is less than what is needed to convict you.
Four weeks locked up with no charge already seems a brutal denial of justice to me.
This is a total lack of perspective. Join Amnesty International sometime and writer letters for prisoners of conscience, as I did for many years, to learn what a brutal denial of justicereally means.
No, it does not mean four weeks in the pokey wondering what the hell is happening, even if it does cause you to miss a final exam and fail a course. Try being imprisoned for 20 years without being charged. Or being beaten every day, having your bones broken. Being snatched in secret in the middle of the night, "disappeared," so no one knows where you are or who took you. Or how about just being killed on trumped-up charges? Whenever, say, a foreigner is willing to pay for a black-market kidney transplant -- and you're going to be the donor. Being forced to participate in a show-trial and denouncing yourself, and maybe some others, so that you can get a nice bullet to the back of the head instead of being, say, decapitated with a dull knife? Or how about being decapitated with a dull knife as a sick initiation ritual for a quasi-military pseudo-political group, while your death is videotaped, so that a political point of some weird kind can be made when it's posted to YouTube?
All this stuff happens out there, and not by random gangs of criminals, but by governments, and those who claim ruling status. If you think spending four weeks in a nice warm jail with three square a day is 9 out of 10 on the injustice scale, you may need to get out and circulate a bit more.
What's more, the problem with this kind of crying wolf / Chicken Littleism is that when the real threats to liberty come along, no one is going to pay you any heed, because you've described all this small stuff as The Ultimate Threat. Save it for when it matters, 'kay? For when the sky really is falling. Husband your outrage. You may really need it someday, God forbid.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't be absurd. You speak as if prosecutors and judges are robots running Perl scripts. This case has zero "wide implications that will affect other cases," because in all cases the prosecutor has extremely wide latitude about what to charge people with, if anything, and what to prosecute, and what kinds of deals to offer, or not offer. And then even if one is convicted, the Court itself has equally wide latitude in what kind of punishment it can impose. The decisions of prosecutors and judges in one jurisdiction have zero legal force, and in such an unusual case, just about zero persuasive force, on cases in other jurisdictions.
It's ludicrous to imagine that just because the prosecutor decides to hammer Lori Drew -- because the community is demanding that something be done to her -- some other prosecutor is going to be forced to robotically equivalently hammer some poor doofus who signs up with AOL with a fake name in order to write nasty spam e-mail to his ex-wife. Unlike programming, the successful operation of the law does not require logical consistency. To the contrary, in each individual case the prosecutor will exercise his judgment, decide who really needs taking down and who doesn't. That's the way the law works. That's why people who commit exactly the same crime, technically speaking, often suffer widely varying punishments.
Yes it is, and the /. summary is about the slimiest piece of disgusting moral dishonesty I've seen in a while, since it leaves out this hugely relevant fact, and manages to imply this is part of a Giant Fascist Plot to undermine anonymity on the Internet. Here's a clue: the government doesn't give a fuck about J. Random Anonymous Coward posting inflammatory anti-government screeds on slashdot. But they do care -- because the community cares -- about a sick 40-year-old woman deliberately and sneakily psychologically abusing a 13-year-old girl to the point where the latter hangs herself in despair.
Lori Drew is Grade A evil, the worst sort of scum, and she is being prosecuted for this apparently silly crime specifically because of what she did. They're simply trying to nail her for something, because through flaws in the law at the time they can't nail her for what she actually did. It's much like the fact that the Feds put Al Capone away in the 1920s for tax evasion, not for all the murders he ordered in Chicago, because that was the only case they could prove in court, and justice -- the actual immortal principle, not the stale idiot's imitation that equates to a mere rigid technical adherence to the written law -- demanded that something be done about his crimes. What's going on here is the same thing. They are tying anything they can around her neck.
I'm cool with that. I haven't the least objection to Lori Drew being prosecuted for anything under the Sun, for the tiniest infraction imaginable. I'd like to see cops tail her day and night for the rest of her life, to nail her for jaywalking, going 0.5 MPH over the speed limit, and littering if she so much as spits in the street.
I would say the obvious solution to jamming is to have secret signals from the satellites. If you use spread-spectrum techniques your signals become more resistant to jamming. It's possible you might even make your signal nearly undetectable, so that your enemies don't even know it exists.
This being a well-known technique in military radio communications, I would be a little surprised if (1) there weren't already "black" SS signals available to the military, or (2) there will be soon enough.
They may not be especially worried about this. It's not like it's hard to detect someone jamming you, and if you're in a war situation a HARM missile can take care of them for you. Generally a big radio signal is a bit of a liability in a war zone. Makes you stand out, more or less like an electromagnetic bull's-eye painted on your chest.
Here's an amusing site y'all can slashdot, comparing flying the 1960s to the present. A few points the guy makes:
Flying was expensive. For example: A round trip ticket between Cleveland and Washington D.C. was about $75. This doesn't sound like a bad deal, until you adjust the fare for inflation: That's over $400 in today's dollars! By contrast, I recently paid less than $100 for a round trip between Cleveland and Washington on one of today's low-cost deregulated carriers.
There was no point in shopping around for the best deal, because all airfares were controlled by regulation. If a roundtrip ticket between Cleveland and Washington was $75 on one airline, it was $75 on all the airlines.
The vast majority of the passengers were businessmen. White male businessmen. Occasional families. Very few minorities, and virtually no women travelling independently.
Food and drinks were almost always served, no matter how short the flight. Because there was no price competition, the airlines had to compete based on service. It was amazing to watch the stewardesses hustle to serve everyone on a quick trip, while constantly tugging at their skirts to retain some modesty.
Sure, that sounds high-class, I guess, if you were a member of the flying aristocracy.
"Only" a General? That makes you "only" smarter and more disciplined than about 98% of humanity. Stand tall.
And, yep, you make a good point, that radio has significant international repercussions that if nothing else would demand the involvement of the Federal government. Even Thomas Jeffersion, that inveterate hater of Federal power, would have to agree.
Go for the upgrade! See you on the bottom 25 kHz one of these days, huh?
Don't get me started. I'm saying the virgin Commerce Clause, before she was gang-raped by a concupiscent Congress at the shameful invitation of her nine pimps on the Supreme Court, could accomodate the FCC's purview comfortably.
Mike, I would be nuts to post my call on a forum accessible by any present or future flake, Google and its eternal cache being what it is, not to mention the existence of the FCC ULS site to which you refer, or qrz.com, et cetera, where such flakes can look up my home address. I don't mind giving it out to fellow hams, because they are a fairly trustworthy crowd, thanks (ahem) to the FCC hoops they have to jump through to get licensed, which helps to keep out riff-raff not truly interested in being part of the community. If I hear you on 20 meters when the sunspots come back, I'll be happy to exchange calls and QTHs. (Not especially likely, as I live in 6 land and only operate 2m/440 as part of a RACES team and backpack QRP with one of those tiny Yaesu 817s and a wire up a tree.) But I don't think the Internet in general is any longer the kind of place where you leave the private identity doors unlocked, so to speak.
I'm not even sure why you think verifying that the call exists would serve as some kind of verification that me, the person posting, actually owns it. You'd be better off posting 5 random questions from the Extra question pool and seeing if I could answer them.
But to return to your point, by "AM" I meant what most people would understand it to mean, shorthand for "commercial broadcast AM," the stuff between 500 and 1500 kHz. I didn't mean everything from A1 to J3, you know?
I think the Commerce Clause doesn't have to stretch very far to cover radio communication that can go worldwide; that is, radio communication clearly influences interstate commerce, so I think the Constitution grants Congress the power to make law about it fair and square.
I think you're wrong on the facts as well as the law. The only reason to let each state make its own regulations (assuming its not required by the Constitution, vide supra) is if they are going to regulate differently, because, e.g., the citizens of state X have different needs than citizens of state Y, or because X believes it has a better idea than Y and we want to let them all try their individual plans out, to see which is best (the "50 laboratories of democracy" concept).
But even if that could be argued to make some kind of sense for VHF and UHF, it makes no sense at all for HF and AM, where signals easily cross many states. The states could not, in practise, make different regulations for those parts of the spectrum without chaos resulting. So if the state must, as a practical matter, all regulate in the same way, what's the point? Why not just have the Feds do it? Why have 50 wasteful duplicative efforts that must reach the same result?
(And since we're signing our bona fides here, I have an Extra ticket, too.)
You imply that the jobs that are "coming back" to the US are going to go to people who are presently unemployed.
Nope. They're going to go to people who are presently working in higher paying jobs that used to similarly benefit from cheap shipping costs to other countries. Those nice jobs are going to go away, with the price of international transporation skyrocketing, and be replaced by the less-nice, lower-paying jobs that are "coming back." The net result will be little change in employment -- just a replacement of certain jobs with other, lower-paying jobs.
Does that change your calculus?
Next up, the /. community discovers that notions like copyright, meaning the right of a work's creator to control how it's copied and distributed, is not such a bad idea after all.
Maybe your dad is better at social engineering. He may not need to hack your computer to hack your head.
So...if I buy a certain type of digital TV, it turns out it might not record Firefly reruns if the broadcaster signals that he doesn't want it to, for whatever evil nefarious reason.
And this infringes what "right," exactly? My right to have products available that do exactly what I want, at exactly the price I want to pay? Sounds like my "right" to a free lunch.
If you don't like the way Toshiba makes digital TVs, and feel they have sold out to the Devil by following "broadcast flags" sent down the pipe by the provider of content, you have a straightforward solution: get off the damn couch, rustle up some capital, hire some engineers and build your own digital TV. If the great mass of people agree that indeed the broadcast flag is evil, your marvelous new TV will sell like hotcakes and you'll (A) get your TV shows free of restrictions, (B) get rich, and (C) drive Toshiba out of business. A threefer!
No, this isn't particularly easy, certainly not for the average TV watcher. But on the other hand, it's not rocket science either. We're talking about building TVs, not curing cancer or traveling to Mars and back safely. I don't doubt if there were piles of money to be made making digital TVs that ignore broadcasts flags then some bright entrepreneur and a VC group looking for a 500% rate of return would jump on it. And since there's nothing legally standing in their way, there are no "rights" being threatened here, aside from some whiner "right" to get what you want without working for it.
If you're a scientist, it's either a science with very sloppy discipline, or some fuzzy subject where even pandering fools can succeed.
I guess you lose. My PhD is from Berkeley in chemical physics, and I did a post-doc at the University of Illinois in the Department of Materials Science, and another at the University of Chicago. I won a half million dollar Presidential Young Investigator award in my first few years as a professor. You could find me in the archives of Physical Review if you knew my real name.
So I expect I've forgotten more math than you even know exists, unless you're a general relativity theorist or something.
I'm pretty much a liberal
But of course.
Sure, but lacking caffeine you'll lack the energy to do anything about it. You'll be assimilated without resistance.
So unless a patch is found, you'll need to set up dedicated hosts ready to launch a devastating counter-strike on their coffee machines within the first microsecond of detecting incoming ICDMs (Internet Coffee Datagrams, Malevolent), and trust to an uneasy policy of Mutually Assured Decaffeination to keep the peace.
Doesn't Linus run on coffee while hacking? I'm confused. Which came first, the kernel or the caffeine?
Cool link. I am reminded of those halcyon hacker days of yore, when everyone was smarter and +5 Funny, and winter exited March the second on the dot. I recall my college housemates trying to hack our PBX phone system so that you could call the washer and dryer and find out if your clothes were done, instead of having to walk down 3 flights to look. (It couldn't be done using a personal computer because no one owned such an expensive toy.)
Speaking as one whose taught for years, your comment is insightful:
To not involve educators in the requirements building phase of this was doomed to the same failure
Part of the problem may have been that the folks running the show often were "educators" (professors and such), but not of their target audience. Teaching at the K-12 level is not at all the same as teaching undergraduates and graduates at MIT. They certainly should have brought in experienced actual teachers from the K-12 (or K-6) level they wanted to reach.
But this comment from the summary is appallingly clueless or mendacious:
Among the reasons [for failure]:...uncertain pedagogical theories...and no input from education professionals in designing the software.
Anyone who has actually taught knows that "pedagogical theories" and "education professionals" (e.g. those who graduate with PhDs in education, as opposed to PhDs in the subject they teach) are worse than useless, that such things are responsible for half the time-wasting if not counter-productive garbage that clogs the educational system, total sidewalk-supervising theoretician castles-in-the-air bullshit.
Indeed, I bet the OLPC people had some nifty "pedagogical theories" -- you might say the whole concept of the OLPC is a major pedagogical theory itself ("give them computers and they will learn!"). The problems the OLPC people are having ironically self-illustrate the uselessness of "pedagogical theories" constructed in the absence of pedagogical experience.
Eh...sometimes I think you're right. But I hope you're not.
Here, have a drink.
[ passes the Kentucky bourbon and a clean glass ]
Mine is that a month is long enough to work out if a crime has been committed,
How the hell would you know? Work for the CID, do you? Twenty years experience in criminal investigation? I think you're just pulling a figure out of your ass. You might as well assert that four weeks is long enough to fix bug X in the Linux kernel, without having read a line of code. The people whose job it is to know these things -- who do it for a living -- have asserted that it's not enough time. Unless you've got some actual, you know, evidence to contradict them, I'd say they ought to get the benefit of a presumption of being right about how fast they can do their job.
That's not to say that some other concern (civil liberties) might trump the question of enough time to work out whether so-and-so was involved with crime such-and-such. Maybe there are other such concerns. But your flat assertion that the police damn well ought to be able to figure this out inside of four weeks is not an argument one can accept without better evidence (not including theories that boil down to "it seems reasonable to me...").
We shouldn't worry about anything while we're not as bad as North Korea?
Nope. Try again, with more subtlety. The assertion is that you should rank the threats to your liberty in order of size and nearness, and allocate your limited resources accordingly. How do you think the North Koreans got where they are? By being distracted by bogus threats ("The eeeeeevil capitalist running dogs are going to get you!") and not catching a clue about the real threats ("Here, let's just have Dear Leader decide where you work...where you live...where you travel...what you eat...how much you eat....whether you eat...")
I'm OK with getting thrashed about possible detention limits going from 28 to 42 days...provided that you have already taken care of, say, all those surveillance cameras, the "no-go" zones in Islamic neighborhoods, your inability to defend yourself inside your own house with deadly force against burglars, the surrender of much of your sovereignty to unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, the fact that the government tells you how and when and what kind of health care you're going to get, and your only recourse if you don't like it is to write a stiff letter to the Times.
It's a nice quote from Niemoller, but what you'll notice is that it does not begin with the following stanzas:
When they came for the murderers
I was silent.
I wasn't a murderer.
When they came for those who rape children
I was silent.
I did not rape children.
And so forth. Niemoller's prose assumes that all the categories of persons in it are innocent. That is not a reasonable basis for criminal justice or national security, because not all persons are, in fact, innocent. Some of the people picked up by the police and held for questioning are very nasty people who really do want to set off a bomb next to your cafe chair filled with nails, so that the shrapnel takes the top of your head off and your mother will have to identify your body by your school ring, because most of your face is missing.
The question is, then, how do we distinguish between the innocent and guilty? Between those who really deserve Niemoller's gentle empathy and those vicious animals that must be locked in cages if we are to spare your (or my) mother endless grief? That's where the discussion must start.
Umm... Yes, it is.
Er...no, it's not. Foreign intelligence services really have, and do, commit all kinds of acts on foreign soil that are illegal by the foreign laws, right up to and including killing people. This is really news to you??
you get the government you deserve...
I voted for the present government, twice. So not only do I agree I've got the government I deserve, it's also the government I want. It's what might happen this fall that has me concerned, actually. I hate to imagine what I might have done to deserve Barack Obama. Run over a cute bunny rabbit and laughed heartlessly, maybe. Damn. But I think even Mr. Obama will man up in office and act less like a pansy. He actually seems to have toughened up a bit lately. Gives me hope.
Can't say I'm surprised. I know a few Englishmen, although to be fair they're all emigrants, so they may not regard the mother country with perfectly fond memory. Maybe you folks need a strong written Constitution with separation of powers, a reservation to the people of powers not explicitly granted to the state, and a stout Bill of Rights. We've got one you could borrow to study.
As for councils...Brr. We've got a similar vicious weed over here called a Homeowner's Association. Why free men would ever tolerate such an offense against liberty is unknown to me. I comfort myself by cherishing the thought that when the 8.0 earthquake comes and civil society is in ruins, these pasty-faced mealy-mouthed purely parasitical goons will be the first to have their clean water ration reduced, so as to keep an ample supply for the women, children, and more useful animals.
Live by the sword die by the sword.
I'm cool with that. We can re-open the question when someone gets a bigger sword than the USMC.
then you want to bleat like a stuck pig when someone you know is executed/blown up/killed by bad dark men with beards?
Not I, friend. I'm aware some of my countrymen are pussies that way, but I'm not interested in bleating, nor in the world's sympathy. As you might have guessed from my post above, my preferred response to having someone I know executed/blow up/killed by bad dark men with beards is to send the Marines to hunt the sorry little rabbits down and snuff them. They're pretty good at that, you know.
I figure that will be sufficiently dissuading to any future bad dark men with beards. And, so far, it's working pretty well. I've got no complaints. So far, it's the dark men with beards who are wetting themselves with fear and strenuously arguing that they're not bad men, really, no, not at all. I'm OK with that, although, as I said, I have enough of a conscience that I would very much prefer my country do its best to avoid unnecessarily hassling the innocent.
Of course government chips away at civil liberties. It's government, right? It's as natural as breathing. You can no more expect government not to chip away at civil liberties than you can expect your employer not try to pay you as little as possible, or expect a shopkeeper not to try to charge you as much as possible, or expect your teenage son not to try to get away with as few household chores as possible. Hello, self interest!
So yeah it's the job of citizens to push back. But here's a strange fact: the blokes in government are not stupid, and they know very well that a powerful weapon on their side is the distractability of the citizenry. Get the herd in a froth about some minor issue -- changing a detention limit from 28 to 42 days -- and they won't even notice some much more serious abridgment of their liberty.
You need to watch out for that, and prioritize. Focus your rage on the biggest offenses. Otherwise, you know, it just degenerates into a state-sponsored Two Minute Hate, where you froth against some paper tiger, and meanwhile give over every important liberty you have to the State. The Stalinists who thrive in state bureaucracies are absolute masters of that kind of mental shell game.
Reckon you'd come out after six weeks the same person?
Fuck yeah. Why not? You talk like people never survived in the gulag for 10 years, or came through the camps, or coped with a hideous car accident that left them quadriplegic, or had the wife and kids smashed to a pulp before their very eyes when the Winnebago rolled over, or is living with Stage IV cancer with metasteses to the brain and liver.
I don't doubt that it would suck spending 6 weeks having assholes yell at you night and day, maybe giving you a slap upside the head, some light beating about, the kind of stuff that won't leave bruises that can't be explained plausibly to the magistrate (He's very clumsy, m'lud. Always falling into things.). I'd do quite a lot to avoid it. But would the prospect make me shit my pants and cry for mommy? No. I dunno about you but I haven't reached middle age without having to learn how to deal with various amounts of physical and mental pain that approach these levels, and some of it goes on for years (or forever), not a mere 6 weeks.
Anyway, its hardly the point, is it? Whatever they can do to you inside the 42-day limit, they can jolly well do to you inside the existing 28-day limit -- or for that matter, if they only have you in their slimy claws for a day.
Maybe you'd just like to not have them have the ability to get ahold of you at all? Well then, take back your security into your own hands. Stop asking government to protect you and yours. Liberalize your weapons laws and arm yourself. Change the rules of the game -- enact 'stand your ground' laws and the right to use deadly force to defend -- so that you can take care of shitheads who break into your flat, or house, or who try to mess with your person while you're in public, and potential shitheads know this and fear you the pissed-off righteous citizen more than they fear the police. Then you can start circumscribing the powers of the police, put them more at arm's length.
The fact of the matter is, this state of affairs hasn't come about because Great Britain is under some kind of alien occupation. Your fellow citizens voted in this government, and it is doing their bidding. If you (plural) don't want the government prying into your life and exerting all that criminal prosecution power to keep the peace, you need to do it yourself.
If there is enough evidence to convince a judge to "sign off" on keeping the (un)accused locked up, surely there must be enough evidence to charge him with some offence
Not a lawyer, huh? Well, ask yourself this: why isn't the same level of evidence sufficient to convict him? Why do we need a trial at all? The answer is that at different stages in the process, as your liberty gets put into deeper and deeper jeopardy, the level of proof needed rises. What's needed to detain you is less than what is needed to charge you is less than what is needed to convict you.
Four weeks locked up with no charge already seems a brutal denial of justice to me.
This is a total lack of perspective. Join Amnesty International sometime and writer letters for prisoners of conscience, as I did for many years, to learn what a brutal denial of justice really means.
No, it does not mean four weeks in the pokey wondering what the hell is happening, even if it does cause you to miss a final exam and fail a course. Try being imprisoned for 20 years without being charged. Or being beaten every day, having your bones broken. Being snatched in secret in the middle of the night, "disappeared," so no one knows where you are or who took you. Or how about just being killed on trumped-up charges? Whenever, say, a foreigner is willing to pay for a black-market kidney transplant -- and you're going to be the donor. Being forced to participate in a show-trial and denouncing yourself, and maybe some others, so that you can get a nice bullet to the back of the head instead of being, say, decapitated with a dull knife? Or how about being decapitated with a dull knife as a sick initiation ritual for a quasi-military pseudo-political group, while your death is videotaped, so that a political point of some weird kind can be made when it's posted to YouTube?
All this stuff happens out there, and not by random gangs of criminals, but by governments, and those who claim ruling status. If you think spending four weeks in a nice warm jail with three square a day is 9 out of 10 on the injustice scale, you may need to get out and circulate a bit more.
What's more, the problem with this kind of crying wolf / Chicken Littleism is that when the real threats to liberty come along, no one is going to pay you any heed, because you've described all this small stuff as The Ultimate Threat. Save it for when it matters, 'kay? For when the sky really is falling. Husband your outrage. You may really need it someday, God forbid.