You mean the CIA does stuff abroad in pursuit of the enemies of the US that breaks foreign law?
No, really? Gosh! That's not nice! Do you think they've ever, you know, killed someone?
Apparently you are under the impression that international warfare is fought by the same genteel rules under which one debates who gets the ball next in kindergarten recess. Sorry, no. Hasn't worked that way since...oh, forever. Good grief. Go see a James Bond movie. It's not complete fabrication, you know.
Oh balls. First of all, you should be talking about the legislative system, not the legal system. The people who write the laws, not the people who enforce them.
Secondly, you're wrong. I know of no persuasive evidence that any substantial number of Americans have "no respect" for the legal (or legislative) system. People have bitched about a do-nothing grandstanding Congress and an expensive legal system that is either (1) overly activist or (2) insufficiently moral (take your pick) in every year of my life since I noticed these things, which would be roughly in 1977 or so. And if you read any history, or just Mark Twain ("America has no native criminal class, excepting Congress") you'll realize they've been doing it for centuries.
Nevertheless, we generally obey the law, we generally serve on juries and believe the verdicts we deliver are just and will be implemented fairly, we mostly trust the police, and we generally return incumbents to office. We certainly love grumbling about politicians, like the weather, but our actions say we are not much less trusting than we've ever been.
Finally, a strong and healthy disrespect for legal authority is one of the fine principles on which this country was founded. We have always believed that We the People are the only true ultimate sovereign, and that we dole out bits of our authority to police, congressmen, and other such riff-raff with the same squinty-eyed distrust and caution as we dole out our cash to used-car dealers, ready to snatch it back at the slightest sign of fraud or abuse. That's as it should be. A powerful distrust of authority and power, however sweetly decorated with noble intentions, is one of the foundation stones of liberty.
Well, again it's not Guantanamo, but it's an interesting case.
The guy held dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship. He had been under investigation by the Mounties for years for his friendship with a guy allegedly tight with senior al Qaeda leadership. He want to visit Tunisia, and on the way home stopped over in New York City, where he was detained by the INS on the basis of information supplied by the Canadians. INS questioned him for two weeks, as you say, without providing him with a lawyer. They can do that. Your rights are severely circumscribed every time you cross a border, as has been noted many times in/. discussions (e.g. the famous "Can they really search my laptop without a warrant? Yes they can, Petunia" flamefest).
There are obvious reasons for putting your most serious security (and hence greatest limitations on civil liberties) at the border. That's what saves you from having to do so inside the country. But be that as it may, it's long been an accepted principal of international and US law that if you voluntarily cross international borders, you can expect to be subjected to a degree of intrusive examination that you are normally immune to if you stay at home.
Anyway, after the INS got done grilling him, they decided to deport him. They had a choice about where to send him, because he had dual citizenship. He asked for Canada. They sent him to Syria. That may not have been nice, but, again, they can do that. They're not obliged to send you where you want to go.
In Syria his treatment really went south, as he was physically tortured. Was this something the US expected, the equivalent of the sheriff putting the prisoner he doesn't like into the cell with the violent rapist? Could be. Did they expect the Syrians to screw something out of him they wanted to know? Could be, although it's kind of hard to credit. The Syrians almost never cooperate with the US, and would likely leap at the chance to embarass the US and portray it as a torturer. Why would they (1) follow US directions on this guy, and (2) keep quiet about it afterward? Doesn't seem like them. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a bit out of character.
So does this bug me? It seems a sad story, perhaps, assuming the guy was merely unlucky or unwise in his choice of friends from the old country, and not actually part of the terrorist ring at all. A tribute to human fallibility. Would I support a thorough investigation of those fuckers at the INS, make sure they did what they did for reasons the data really supported, and not just because he was a smart-ass or something? Absolutely. Do I think it doesn't reflect very creditably on the Canadian and US governments? Very possibly.
But...hmmm...as massive national crimes go, it's not the gulag, not Auschwitz or Buchenwald or Tiananman Square or even tossing Nelson Mandela in jail for 20 years. The fact is, if Authority is pissed at you, and thinks you're up to no good, they are going to walk right up to (and if no one is watching a smidge over) any existing line of protection as they try to screw the data out of you they think they need to nail you. The ol' light in the eyes, good cop/bad cop 24 hour no sleep routine is no joke, and plenty of small-time suspects get it every day, in jails all across the country.
That's human nature. Police power is a scary thing, and, like all power, it tends to corrupt. That's why my knee-jerk response is always to take power away from government and return it to individual citizens. That's why it absolutely blows my mind that folks here can wax livid and paranoid over the possibility of a Syrian-born guy with dodgy associations being deported to Syria, poor chap, by a cynical and power-drunk government -- and then turn right around and welcome with open arms the prospect of that same government providing all their health care, and having near 100% charge of their life and death! Holy cats, if you think the government might deport your ass in an
You're venturing into subtleties about British politics that are way above my pay grade. I can barely keep up with what happens on this side of the pond.
But...if I stipulate arguendo that you're right about the clumsiness and pointlessness of the act, then I agree completely with you. Legislating for the sake of "sending signals" or making people feel like "something is being done" is corrosive of liberty and any kind of respect for the law. A law should either be damn necessary, and obviously so, or it should not exist.
And I'm sure it's not like Parlaiment is sitting around twiddling its thumbs, with no more serious business to which they should be attending, huh?
Yup. That's not Guantanamo, of course, but your point is quite relevant.
He was not arrested on foreign soil, but actually at O'Hare airport in Chicago on his return from a trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. I'm guessing that this, among other reasons, e.g. his citizenship, was why eventually he did win the right to a trial in civilian court despite the President's having classified him as an "enemy combatant." He was convicted at trial and sentenced to 17 years in prison. (He's not a nice person, by the way. He was a gang thug in his teens, was arrested five times between the age of 15 and 21. He served three years in juvie for aggravated battery (a kid he kicked in the head died) and armed robbery. He served a further year in a Florida jail for aggravated assault. Pretty substantial rap sheet for a young guy.)
Padilla apparently fell into a "gray area" between someone, say, arrested actually on the battlefield in Afghanistan launching RPGs at a USMC platoon, and someone arrested in a Chicago bus station passing out pro-Taliban literature (but who'd never left the state). That's probably why the Courts and the Administration went back and forth about how to classify him, with some Courts agreeing with the Administration, and some (including eventually the Supreme Court) not. So it goes. This is why we have Courts, to figure out all these gray areas.
One can argue that it's criminally cruel to leave a man hanging for several years while a gray area is cleared up, but that's the fault of Congress, which certainly could have written a clearer statute (the famous AUMF), or even, after the problems with the original became evident, re-written it to make its intention crystal clear. But I think Congress found it more useful to grandstand the issue for political gain and too painful to be forced to make some clear-cut decisions that would have certainly pissed off some people no matter how they decided it. All too typical cowardice.
Cry me a river, man. Let's quote from the Wikipedia article you cite:
U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones asked Hawash during the hearing "You and the others in the group were prepared to take up arms, and die as martyrs if necessary, to defend the Taliban. Is this true?" Hawash replied "Yes, your honor."
He pled guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban, the same motherfuckers who shielded and funded the evil monsters who flew planes into the WTC, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, killing 3000 men, women, and children, some of whom leapt to their deaths from a thousand feet up rather than burn alive. If that isn't aid and comfort to the enemy, I don't know what is. In previous centuries he would have been hanged as a traitor.
Now of course the tone of the article -- and your post -- is that the guy may have lied to the Court about what he was doing and falsely pled guilty to a charge with a seven-year sentence to avoid taking his changes in front of a jury of his peers on more serious charges. Maybe so. But if he did, that's just first-class stupid, not to mention subversive of any hope that he might be trusted in his other statements (about what he was doing trying to go to Afghanistan, for example). If you perjure yourself in Court, on any matter, you can hardly expect to be believed about anything at all.
So am I bugged that either a traitor or a dumfuk liar with complete contempt for the principle of telling the truth under oath was held for five weeks with "limited" access to his attorneys? Not even a smidge.
The bill defines how long you can hold someone without charging him with a crime. That's got nothing to do with how long, after he has been charged, it can take before he is tried.
As I understand it, the current limit is 28 days, so they're just tacking on an extra two weeks, and according to the BBC, they want the right on a "contingency basis" when the crime in question is particularly complicated and time-consuming to unravel, so they can figure out who's who and know whom to charge and whom to let go. An example they give is when there are international complications, e.g. the police need to get info from another country's police, immigration, or security services, which, of course, can take an annoyingly long time, since you have to rely on purely voluntary cooperation (no English judge can compel a French police caption, or a Saudi immigration agency, or the FBI).
In other words, as a general rule, the 28-day limit stays in effect, but in certain unusual circumstances -- e.g. something like the London bombing, evidence that some major operation has taken place, or is about to take place -- then the government can raise the 28-day limit to 42 days temporarily. Even if the limit is raised, a judge needs to sign off on applying it to any particular individual. Parlaiment can step in at any time after the limit is raised and reverse it. And, in any event, the raising expires after 60 days.
I dunno, when you look at the bill in detail, it seems rather, well, moderate. Not quite like the massive Armageddon / burning pile of civil liberties / return of the Gestapo, Inquisition, and the rack that lots of Chicken Littles seem to think it is. *shrug*
They also weren't apprehended on US soil, which is actually the operative difference.
If someone were picked up by the police or FBI in Chicago on a "terror" related charge, then the whole habeas corpus, right to a speedy trial thingy comes into play as usual. The difference with Guantanamo prisoners is they were all picked up on battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, et cetera. Whole 'nother ball game.
time to appreciate the suits a bit more
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The State of X.Org
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You're saying more people would code if coding were easier?
Um, yes. But I think part of the point here is that putting together a functioning software project is not just about coding. A good part of it is good management, organization, documentation, internal conflict management, timely and robust decision-making. These are exactly the things that make that "barrier to entry" lower, and make it possible to just get started programming.
If you're working for Microsoft or Sun, say, you might be able, as a programmer, to concentrate on your coding and let the strange people in suits take care of that angle for you. But there are no suits in an open software project. Usually, the same people who code have to take care of it, too. Which can be a problem, as it's not often their strong point.
Wouldn't be a half-bad thing if this whole discussion led to a new respect among programmers for good managers, which do exist, and which serve, as it turns out, a very necessary function in software development.
I think I'm starting to understand kind of how the 70's computer geeks felt when their friends came over asking for help with their Windows boxes.
Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985, and the first really successful version (Windows 3.0) was released in 1990. Heck, MS-DOS was released in 1981.
In the 1970s everyone mostly worked on mainframes, and the newest thing was the minicomputer, which only took up the space of one tall bookcase, instead of half a room. The cool development in operating systems was the concept of time-sharing, so that multiple users could use the hardware at the same time, mostly from 9600-baud hardwired VT-100 terminals in the "terminal room." We didn't have windows, because they tended to boost the air-conditioning bill when it was sunny out.
Needless to mention that to compile (properly configured) Linux kernel (with subset of drivers and features you really need) only few minutes
This was not true in, say, 1995 when I started using Linux, and when quite a lot of coders were enthused about joining the project. At that time the instructions for compiling the kernel suggested you go get a cup of coffee after you typed "make" and come back in an hour. I recall being very pleased when my spanking new Pentium 133 was able to compile the kernel in 20-30 minutes, if I recall correctly.
Dude...calm down. It's very likely that you and I agree on all the major points. But it's this kind of enraged kind of response to what is, in fact, a fairly reasonable point that helps turn the public discussion ugly. And, if you think about it, you should realize that if the discussion gets ugly and people are pissed off, then it's the side advocating change that's going to lose. People are being asked to change their lives, to sacrifice. If they get pissed off because they're being yelled at and treated like morons, they're just going to say fuck off you arrogant sods, and that will be that. Since we may all lose, it behooves those who are better informed to exercise great patience and courtesy.
First of all, yes, duh, the absorption spectrum of CO2 is the same in vivo and in vitro. Didn't I say that? It's easy to show that adding CO2 to a gas mixture in a flask in the lab increases the greenhouse effect. But that's not the point. The question is what happens out in the real world? Yes, no doubt, more CO2 means more absorption of IR. But then what? As you ought to know, a bazillion other processes then begin, and what the final result is -- warmer or cooler Earth, temporary or permanent, more or less variation with latitude, ocean pH higher or lower, and on and on -- this stuff no one knows for sure.
Second of all, it's illogical to argue that (1) people are reluctant to make the changes necessary to curb CO2 emissions enough to matter, but (2) it would be easy and cheap. Only one of these things can be true. Which is it? Well...you don't need to absorb complex economic arguments to understand that if the world's energy supply almost entirely comes from combustion, which of course it does, and CO2 is an absolutely inevitable result of combustion, which it is, and you want to reduce CO2 emissions in half, say, which is Barack Obama's latest promise, then that's going to be very hard. Just take a look at your own life, and imagine cutting your energy usage in half across the board. Drive half as many miles, use half as much electricity, spend half as much money on food that must be transported from elsewhere. You know that would be a big and painful challenge.
And that leaves out the inevitable fact that economic growth -- on which our future prosperity depends -- inevitable increases energy usage. For the last 250 years CO2 emissions have grown exponentially, along with population and the size of the world economy. If you want to not only stop that growth but reverse it, that's tough. And you don't need a fancy degree to understand that. Which is exactly why people are resistant to the notion, and keep asking How sure are you about this? They deserve better answers than trust me, I'm a scientist.
The question is whether cutting CO2 is more expensive than the alternative (not cutting it and letting global warming happen).
Quite right. But you need to factor in the probability that the models are wrong in various key ways, and global warming won't happen even if nothing at all is done, or it might not be nearly as bad as we think, or it might even be good, on balance.
But you've missed my point. When you factor in the cost of CO2 mitigation, you have to count the opportunity cost, too. You must think about all the things that could have been done with that social energy and money, that won't be. Perhaps, for example, if a certain amount of warming is inevitable from, say, solar forcing, then it might make more sense to accept that anthropogenic CO2 will add another few degrees to that, and spend the resources preparing the world to cope with it. After all, it's exceedingly unlikely life itself is threatened -- life has survive far more traumatic climate events, from Ice Ages to the KT extinction to the postulated snowball Earth events. All that may be threatened is human civilization. But is the right way to save it to adapt to a warmer planet, or try to put the brakes on
Hmm, well...I dunno if the existence of photosynthesizers that do something with the incoming radiation other than simply absorb it, like a rock, matters. Maybe. I suppose one could argue that some small fraction of the incoming radiation is being turned into stored chemical energy instead of re-radiated as heat. Does that matter? Got me. We're talking about incredibly subtle effects.
increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is known to have a warming effect
Wrong. It's known to increase the warming effect in the laboratory. That's easy physics. But in real life? That's harder. We don't know enough about the atmosphere to calculate the effect with enough certainty, and we can't measure the effect because we can't do the control experiment (go back in time 200 years, not start burning fossil fuels, and see what happens).
Even if the effect of the CO2 is smaller than an as yet unproven warming by the sun: We can't change the sun, can we?
You speak as if reducing CO2 emissions is entirely a cost-free enterprise. But it's not. It would have enormous dislocating economic effects. That means it will greatly reduce the size and health of the future world economy, slow down scientific and technological progress (which both depend on a healthy economy to pay for them), and greatly strain social and political agreements that keep world peace.
That's all fine if it's necessary to prevent an Ice Age or runaway warming that will leave Earth like Venus.
But what if it's not? The problem is, we can only make such a staggeringly huge change in our habits perhaps once in a thousand years. By making that change now, in the direction of reducing CO2 emissions, we give up the ability to make any similarly massive change for a long time. Is that a wise bet? Or might there be some other climate effect, driven by the Sun, say, to which we will in the future really wish we had preserved our ability to respond?
If reducing global CO2 emissions is something like buying insurance, we do need to consider the fact that that insurance is very expensive, and, once we buy it, we'll have virtually nothing left in the bank with which to buy anything else we might need in the future. That doesn't say we shouldn't do it. That does say we should as a species approach this giant purchase with extreme caution, the way one might hesitate before committing to buy a very large house in an uncertain real estate market.
give us more time to figure out how to deal with the end of cheap oil.
Alas, human nature being what it is, you know we're not going to use that time, right? We're just going to wait until the last possible moment and pull a planet-wide all-nighter, so to speak.
Well, but on the other hand you could describe the early adopters as "hasty," too. It all depends on what the precise right time to jump on the bandwagon is, isn't it?
I'm OK with a President who is inherently cautious, who doesn't suggest certain threats are "imminent" until they damn well are, and who is more reluctant than recent Presidents to propose radical restrictions on our freedoms to address such "imminent" threats.
I mean, it's not like we need the President on board to be doing something, is it? It's not like the rest of us can't be reducing CO2 emissions all on our own -- driving less, saving energy, turning out the lights and turning up the thermostat -- if we choose to do so.
I imagine one could fit a black-body curve to the solar spectrum, for example. That would probably give a pretty precise answer.
However, the OP has a point, even if it wasn't put all that sophisticatedly. The question of the influence of solar output on the Earth's energy budget is not as settled as you imply. In the first place, he's right, only very subtle changes in the huge amounts of energy flowing in and out of the Earth's ecosystem are required, and these are inherently difficult to measure accurately. Generally speaking, you're subtracting large and nearly equal numbers from each other, which is always tricky.
Secondly, the Sun does more than simply heat the Earth through radiation. It emits ionizing radiation that ionizes the atmosphere (which is what allows over-the-horizon radio communication). It injects charged particles into Earth's magnetic field. It has a magnetic field itself that interacts with that of the Earth, and changes the way charged particles from the Sun and the cosmos hit the Earth. These things may have subtle effects on, for example, cloud formation -- and therefore on the Earth's albedo.
One might well say who cares about all this weird third- and fourth-order stuff if we were talking about big changes in Earth's climate. But we're not. We're not trying to explain an Ice Age, still less a "snowball Earth" event, or the runaway hothouse climate of Venus. We're trying to explain a temperature trend that is so slight that it is not only much smaller than annual and diurnal variations, it is smaller than the unexplained "background noise" variations in the measurement. It's only by averaging over a long time that you can even see any temperature change.
Does that mean the leading explanation of the day for the observed temperature change (anthropogenic CO2 emission) is wrong? Nope. But it very well does suggest a bit of humility about the possibility of other explanations. Mother Nature has a long, long history of confounding "obvious" explanations.
Oh it's far worse than that. These days, big real-estate developers often skimp on paying for a nice sealant topcoat of plastic grass or concrete, which means exposing the public to potential sources of invisibly fine air-borne nanoparticles containing silicates, sulfates and other nonvolatile chemical compounds, particularly if it's windy and the unsealed areas are exposed to radiation in the 400-700 nm range.
I would guess the application of interest is shipping boxes and so forth. If you want things well-protected, increasingly important in a shipping industry that uses more robots and conveyor belts and fewer human hands every day, you need strong boxes. Probably even a modest increase in the strength of cardboard would be quite helpful, as it would reduce the fraction of the weight of a shipment that is boxing.
It all depends, really, on whether the processing needed to create "super" paper doesn't cost more than the savings you might enjoy in lower shipping costs per unit weight of product. The fact mentioned in the summary that the original material (wood) is cheap seems quite unimportant.* Steel come essentially from dirt and rock, which is cheap, too. It's the processing that costs.
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* But would I expect a/. editor to know something about materials science and/or economics? I would not.
I would say a huge difference between the 1960s and today is computational power. In the 1960s there was no ability to simulate what would happen to various rocket designs under various conditions: you had to build one and try it, or, if that was too expensive, just go with a mix of safety factors and prayer. The difference in time, effort and money between sorting through engineering designs in silico and in real life is substantial. There's a good reason why Boeing was an early and enthusiastic purchasers of supercomputers.
Additionally, we've already demonstrated a pretty sophisticated remote-control ability on Mars, which leads to the possibility of reducing both risk and cost by sending the return craft ahead of time to Mars, and having it, if possible, extract its fuel from the Martian soil and atmosphere. That way you don't even launch your crew until you know they have a ride home waiting for them. Furthermore, you save the cost of the fuel it takes to transport your fuel to Mars, which is enormous.
But that's only possible because we have such phenomenally greater capability for building autonomous machines.
(I don't disagree with you that it's difficult, BTW. Just saying that we have some advantages now that one could reasonably say make it no harder, relatively speaking, than going to the Moon in 1969. Also worth bearing in mind is the fact that the US economy is maybe 3 times bigger now than it was then.)
Think about the cost associated with having and maintaining a completely hot-pluggable second control system. How much do you want your power bills to go up to pay for that? And what would be the point?
They have a perfectly adequate safety system that did exactly what it's supposed to do. It read confusing data and decided to shut the reactor down until a human came along and explained things satisfactorily. What's wrong with that? Aside from having the reactor offline for 48 hours, there was no other cost.
When national health care arrives, as it will shortly, if the elections this November turn out the way they look like they will, then the government is going to be your health-care provider. There will be no need for passing actual legislation to force you to conform to any particular medical procedure. That can just be decided by the President, who, as head of the Executive Branch, is in ultimate charge of all national government agencies.
You're thinking that it takes a physician the same time to read through your history and pluck out the important stuff that it would take you, a complete amateur with nearly zero understanding of how medicine works.
That's as logical as thinking that it would take Linus Torvalds as long to understand a kernel patch as J. Random User who's never coded a line in his life. Or that your car mechanic needs to carefully listen to every sound your jalopy makes to know whether it needs a valve job. Or that the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic would have to get out a tuning fork and go carefully around to listen to each of his 150 musicians to know whether the orchestra is playing in tune.
You think? Hmmm. How about someone in government realizes that AIDS costs the public treasury a huge amount of money, so they start penalizing a gay lifestyle? Or being unmarried, which shortens up your life? Or amusing yourself rock-climbing or bicycle racing, which are more dangerous than going to the gym and riding a stationary bicycle to nowhere?
More plausibly, how about someone in government thinks that lifestyle X is bad for you, and starts handing out tax penalties and rebates accordingly -- but he's wrong. Not like we've ever had any health fads that turned out to be nonsense, right? And no government bureaucrat would dream of making decisions when he doesn't really have enough information to make a good one, right?
And all based on essentially two-dimensional observation. It's like having your neck immediately permanently clamped to a chair the moment you're born, and then trying to figure out the three-dimensional size, shape and arrangement of the objects all around you, without ever being able to get up and walk towards them, pick them up, look at them from another angle, and so forth. Very much like Plato's people of the cave, I think, trying to deduce the nature of real objects solely from the shadows they cast on the wall.
I'd still like to know how they get absolute distance measurements from IR observation inside the galaxy. No red shift, no absolute/relative luminosity relationships like you have with stars. How is it done?
Well...as a parent, I confess I do tend to find this more of a feature than a bug. But I probably need to compromise if I want to be allowed to see my grandchildren. Oh well. What a pity we parents don't actually have the God-like absolute power to fashion young lives to our taste that teenagers and twentysomethings imagine we do.
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You mean the CIA does stuff abroad in pursuit of the enemies of the US that breaks foreign law?
No, really? Gosh! That's not nice! Do you think they've ever, you know, killed someone?
Apparently you are under the impression that international warfare is fought by the same genteel rules under which one debates who gets the ball next in kindergarten recess. Sorry, no. Hasn't worked that way since...oh, forever. Good grief. Go see a James Bond movie. It's not complete fabrication, you know.
Oh balls. First of all, you should be talking about the legislative system, not the legal system. The people who write the laws, not the people who enforce them.
Secondly, you're wrong. I know of no persuasive evidence that any substantial number of Americans have "no respect" for the legal (or legislative) system. People have bitched about a do-nothing grandstanding Congress and an expensive legal system that is either (1) overly activist or (2) insufficiently moral (take your pick) in every year of my life since I noticed these things, which would be roughly in 1977 or so. And if you read any history, or just Mark Twain ("America has no native criminal class, excepting Congress") you'll realize they've been doing it for centuries.
Nevertheless, we generally obey the law, we generally serve on juries and believe the verdicts we deliver are just and will be implemented fairly, we mostly trust the police, and we generally return incumbents to office. We certainly love grumbling about politicians, like the weather, but our actions say we are not much less trusting than we've ever been.
Finally, a strong and healthy disrespect for legal authority is one of the fine principles on which this country was founded. We have always believed that We the People are the only true ultimate sovereign, and that we dole out bits of our authority to police, congressmen, and other such riff-raff with the same squinty-eyed distrust and caution as we dole out our cash to used-car dealers, ready to snatch it back at the slightest sign of fraud or abuse. That's as it should be. A powerful distrust of authority and power, however sweetly decorated with noble intentions, is one of the foundation stones of liberty.
Well, again it's not Guantanamo, but it's an interesting case.
/. discussions (e.g. the famous "Can they really search my laptop without a warrant? Yes they can, Petunia" flamefest).
The guy held dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship. He had been under investigation by the Mounties for years for his friendship with a guy allegedly tight with senior al Qaeda leadership. He want to visit Tunisia, and on the way home stopped over in New York City, where he was detained by the INS on the basis of information supplied by the Canadians. INS questioned him for two weeks, as you say, without providing him with a lawyer. They can do that. Your rights are severely circumscribed every time you cross a border, as has been noted many times in
There are obvious reasons for putting your most serious security (and hence greatest limitations on civil liberties) at the border. That's what saves you from having to do so inside the country. But be that as it may, it's long been an accepted principal of international and US law that if you voluntarily cross international borders, you can expect to be subjected to a degree of intrusive examination that you are normally immune to if you stay at home.
Anyway, after the INS got done grilling him, they decided to deport him. They had a choice about where to send him, because he had dual citizenship. He asked for Canada. They sent him to Syria. That may not have been nice, but, again, they can do that. They're not obliged to send you where you want to go.
In Syria his treatment really went south, as he was physically tortured. Was this something the US expected, the equivalent of the sheriff putting the prisoner he doesn't like into the cell with the violent rapist? Could be. Did they expect the Syrians to screw something out of him they wanted to know? Could be, although it's kind of hard to credit. The Syrians almost never cooperate with the US, and would likely leap at the chance to embarass the US and portray it as a torturer. Why would they (1) follow US directions on this guy, and (2) keep quiet about it afterward? Doesn't seem like them. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's a bit out of character.
So does this bug me? It seems a sad story, perhaps, assuming the guy was merely unlucky or unwise in his choice of friends from the old country, and not actually part of the terrorist ring at all. A tribute to human fallibility. Would I support a thorough investigation of those fuckers at the INS, make sure they did what they did for reasons the data really supported, and not just because he was a smart-ass or something? Absolutely. Do I think it doesn't reflect very creditably on the Canadian and US governments? Very possibly.
But...hmmm...as massive national crimes go, it's not the gulag, not Auschwitz or Buchenwald or Tiananman Square or even tossing Nelson Mandela in jail for 20 years. The fact is, if Authority is pissed at you, and thinks you're up to no good, they are going to walk right up to (and if no one is watching a smidge over) any existing line of protection as they try to screw the data out of you they think they need to nail you. The ol' light in the eyes, good cop/bad cop 24 hour no sleep routine is no joke, and plenty of small-time suspects get it every day, in jails all across the country.
That's human nature. Police power is a scary thing, and, like all power, it tends to corrupt. That's why my knee-jerk response is always to take power away from government and return it to individual citizens. That's why it absolutely blows my mind that folks here can wax livid and paranoid over the possibility of a Syrian-born guy with dodgy associations being deported to Syria, poor chap, by a cynical and power-drunk government -- and then turn right around and welcome with open arms the prospect of that same government providing all their health care, and having near 100% charge of their life and death! Holy cats, if you think the government might deport your ass in an
You're venturing into subtleties about British politics that are way above my pay grade. I can barely keep up with what happens on this side of the pond.
But...if I stipulate arguendo that you're right about the clumsiness and pointlessness of the act, then I agree completely with you. Legislating for the sake of "sending signals" or making people feel like "something is being done" is corrosive of liberty and any kind of respect for the law. A law should either be damn necessary, and obviously so, or it should not exist.
And I'm sure it's not like Parlaiment is sitting around twiddling its thumbs, with no more serious business to which they should be attending, huh?
Yup. That's not Guantanamo, of course, but your point is quite relevant.
He was not arrested on foreign soil, but actually at O'Hare airport in Chicago on his return from a trip to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. I'm guessing that this, among other reasons, e.g. his citizenship, was why eventually he did win the right to a trial in civilian court despite the President's having classified him as an "enemy combatant." He was convicted at trial and sentenced to 17 years in prison. (He's not a nice person, by the way. He was a gang thug in his teens, was arrested five times between the age of 15 and 21. He served three years in juvie for aggravated battery (a kid he kicked in the head died) and armed robbery. He served a further year in a Florida jail for aggravated assault. Pretty substantial rap sheet for a young guy.)
Padilla apparently fell into a "gray area" between someone, say, arrested actually on the battlefield in Afghanistan launching RPGs at a USMC platoon, and someone arrested in a Chicago bus station passing out pro-Taliban literature (but who'd never left the state). That's probably why the Courts and the Administration went back and forth about how to classify him, with some Courts agreeing with the Administration, and some (including eventually the Supreme Court) not. So it goes. This is why we have Courts, to figure out all these gray areas.
One can argue that it's criminally cruel to leave a man hanging for several years while a gray area is cleared up, but that's the fault of Congress, which certainly could have written a clearer statute (the famous AUMF), or even, after the problems with the original became evident, re-written it to make its intention crystal clear. But I think Congress found it more useful to grandstand the issue for political gain and too painful to be forced to make some clear-cut decisions that would have certainly pissed off some people no matter how they decided it. All too typical cowardice.
Cry me a river, man. Let's quote from the Wikipedia article you cite:
U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones asked Hawash during the hearing "You and the others in the group were prepared to take up arms, and die as martyrs if necessary, to defend the Taliban. Is this true?" Hawash replied "Yes, your honor."
He pled guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Taliban, the same motherfuckers who shielded and funded the evil monsters who flew planes into the WTC, the Pentagon, and a field in Shanksville, killing 3000 men, women, and children, some of whom leapt to their deaths from a thousand feet up rather than burn alive. If that isn't aid and comfort to the enemy, I don't know what is. In previous centuries he would have been hanged as a traitor.
Now of course the tone of the article -- and your post -- is that the guy may have lied to the Court about what he was doing and falsely pled guilty to a charge with a seven-year sentence to avoid taking his changes in front of a jury of his peers on more serious charges. Maybe so. But if he did, that's just first-class stupid, not to mention subversive of any hope that he might be trusted in his other statements (about what he was doing trying to go to Afghanistan, for example). If you perjure yourself in Court, on any matter, you can hardly expect to be believed about anything at all.
So am I bugged that either a traitor or a dumfuk liar with complete contempt for the principle of telling the truth under oath was held for five weeks with "limited" access to his attorneys? Not even a smidge.
The bill defines how long you can hold someone without charging him with a crime. That's got nothing to do with how long, after he has been charged, it can take before he is tried.
As I understand it, the current limit is 28 days, so they're just tacking on an extra two weeks, and according to the BBC, they want the right on a "contingency basis" when the crime in question is particularly complicated and time-consuming to unravel, so they can figure out who's who and know whom to charge and whom to let go. An example they give is when there are international complications, e.g. the police need to get info from another country's police, immigration, or security services, which, of course, can take an annoyingly long time, since you have to rely on purely voluntary cooperation (no English judge can compel a French police caption, or a Saudi immigration agency, or the FBI).
In other words, as a general rule, the 28-day limit stays in effect, but in certain unusual circumstances -- e.g. something like the London bombing, evidence that some major operation has taken place, or is about to take place -- then the government can raise the 28-day limit to 42 days temporarily. Even if the limit is raised, a judge needs to sign off on applying it to any particular individual. Parlaiment can step in at any time after the limit is raised and reverse it. And, in any event, the raising expires after 60 days.
I dunno, when you look at the bill in detail, it seems rather, well, moderate. Not quite like the massive Armageddon / burning pile of civil liberties / return of the Gestapo, Inquisition, and the rack that lots of Chicken Littles seem to think it is. *shrug*
They also weren't apprehended on US soil, which is actually the operative difference.
If someone were picked up by the police or FBI in Chicago on a "terror" related charge, then the whole habeas corpus, right to a speedy trial thingy comes into play as usual. The difference with Guantanamo prisoners is they were all picked up on battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, et cetera. Whole 'nother ball game.
You're saying more people would code if coding were easier?
Um, yes. But I think part of the point here is that putting together a functioning software project is not just about coding. A good part of it is good management, organization, documentation, internal conflict management, timely and robust decision-making. These are exactly the things that make that "barrier to entry" lower, and make it possible to just get started programming.
If you're working for Microsoft or Sun, say, you might be able, as a programmer, to concentrate on your coding and let the strange people in suits take care of that angle for you. But there are no suits in an open software project. Usually, the same people who code have to take care of it, too. Which can be a problem, as it's not often their strong point.
Wouldn't be a half-bad thing if this whole discussion led to a new respect among programmers for good managers, which do exist, and which serve, as it turns out, a very necessary function in software development.
I think I'm starting to understand kind of how the 70's computer geeks felt when their friends came over asking for help with their Windows boxes.
Windows 1.0 was released in November 1985, and the first really successful version (Windows 3.0) was released in 1990. Heck, MS-DOS was released in 1981.
In the 1970s everyone mostly worked on mainframes, and the newest thing was the minicomputer, which only took up the space of one tall bookcase, instead of half a room. The cool development in operating systems was the concept of time-sharing, so that multiple users could use the hardware at the same time, mostly from 9600-baud hardwired VT-100 terminals in the "terminal room." We didn't have windows, because they tended to boost the air-conditioning bill when it was sunny out.
Needless to mention that to compile (properly configured) Linux kernel (with subset of drivers and features you really need) only few minutes
This was not true in, say, 1995 when I started using Linux, and when quite a lot of coders were enthused about joining the project. At that time the instructions for compiling the kernel suggested you go get a cup of coffee after you typed "make" and come back in an hour. I recall being very pleased when my spanking new Pentium 133 was able to compile the kernel in 20-30 minutes, if I recall correctly.
Dude...calm down. It's very likely that you and I agree on all the major points. But it's this kind of enraged kind of response to what is, in fact, a fairly reasonable point that helps turn the public discussion ugly. And, if you think about it, you should realize that if the discussion gets ugly and people are pissed off, then it's the side advocating change that's going to lose. People are being asked to change their lives, to sacrifice. If they get pissed off because they're being yelled at and treated like morons, they're just going to say fuck off you arrogant sods, and that will be that. Since we may all lose, it behooves those who are better informed to exercise great patience and courtesy.
First of all, yes, duh, the absorption spectrum of CO2 is the same in vivo and in vitro. Didn't I say that? It's easy to show that adding CO2 to a gas mixture in a flask in the lab increases the greenhouse effect. But that's not the point. The question is what happens out in the real world? Yes, no doubt, more CO2 means more absorption of IR. But then what? As you ought to know, a bazillion other processes then begin, and what the final result is -- warmer or cooler Earth, temporary or permanent, more or less variation with latitude, ocean pH higher or lower, and on and on -- this stuff no one knows for sure.
Second of all, it's illogical to argue that (1) people are reluctant to make the changes necessary to curb CO2 emissions enough to matter, but (2) it would be easy and cheap. Only one of these things can be true. Which is it? Well...you don't need to absorb complex economic arguments to understand that if the world's energy supply almost entirely comes from combustion, which of course it does, and CO2 is an absolutely inevitable result of combustion, which it is, and you want to reduce CO2 emissions in half, say, which is Barack Obama's latest promise, then that's going to be very hard. Just take a look at your own life, and imagine cutting your energy usage in half across the board. Drive half as many miles, use half as much electricity, spend half as much money on food that must be transported from elsewhere. You know that would be a big and painful challenge.
And that leaves out the inevitable fact that economic growth -- on which our future prosperity depends -- inevitable increases energy usage. For the last 250 years CO2 emissions have grown exponentially, along with population and the size of the world economy. If you want to not only stop that growth but reverse it, that's tough. And you don't need a fancy degree to understand that. Which is exactly why people are resistant to the notion, and keep asking How sure are you about this? They deserve better answers than trust me, I'm a scientist.
The question is whether cutting CO2 is more expensive than the alternative (not cutting it and letting global warming happen).
Quite right. But you need to factor in the probability that the models are wrong in various key ways, and global warming won't happen even if nothing at all is done, or it might not be nearly as bad as we think, or it might even be good, on balance.
But you've missed my point. When you factor in the cost of CO2 mitigation, you have to count the opportunity cost, too. You must think about all the things that could have been done with that social energy and money, that won't be. Perhaps, for example, if a certain amount of warming is inevitable from, say, solar forcing, then it might make more sense to accept that anthropogenic CO2 will add another few degrees to that, and spend the resources preparing the world to cope with it. After all, it's exceedingly unlikely life itself is threatened -- life has survive far more traumatic climate events, from Ice Ages to the KT extinction to the postulated snowball Earth events. All that may be threatened is human civilization. But is the right way to save it to adapt to a warmer planet, or try to put the brakes on
Hmm, well...I dunno if the existence of photosynthesizers that do something with the incoming radiation other than simply absorb it, like a rock, matters. Maybe. I suppose one could argue that some small fraction of the incoming radiation is being turned into stored chemical energy instead of re-radiated as heat. Does that matter? Got me. We're talking about incredibly subtle effects.
increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is known to have a warming effect
Wrong. It's known to increase the warming effect in the laboratory. That's easy physics. But in real life? That's harder. We don't know enough about the atmosphere to calculate the effect with enough certainty, and we can't measure the effect because we can't do the control experiment (go back in time 200 years, not start burning fossil fuels, and see what happens).
Even if the effect of the CO2 is smaller than an as yet unproven warming by the sun: We can't change the sun, can we?
You speak as if reducing CO2 emissions is entirely a cost-free enterprise. But it's not. It would have enormous dislocating economic effects. That means it will greatly reduce the size and health of the future world economy, slow down scientific and technological progress (which both depend on a healthy economy to pay for them), and greatly strain social and political agreements that keep world peace.
That's all fine if it's necessary to prevent an Ice Age or runaway warming that will leave Earth like Venus.
But what if it's not? The problem is, we can only make such a staggeringly huge change in our habits perhaps once in a thousand years. By making that change now, in the direction of reducing CO2 emissions, we give up the ability to make any similarly massive change for a long time. Is that a wise bet? Or might there be some other climate effect, driven by the Sun, say, to which we will in the future really wish we had preserved our ability to respond?
If reducing global CO2 emissions is something like buying insurance, we do need to consider the fact that that insurance is very expensive, and, once we buy it, we'll have virtually nothing left in the bank with which to buy anything else we might need in the future. That doesn't say we shouldn't do it. That does say we should as a species approach this giant purchase with extreme caution, the way one might hesitate before committing to buy a very large house in an uncertain real estate market.
give us more time to figure out how to deal with the end of cheap oil.
Alas, human nature being what it is, you know we're not going to use that time, right? We're just going to wait until the last possible moment and pull a planet-wide all-nighter, so to speak.
Well, but on the other hand you could describe the early adopters as "hasty," too. It all depends on what the precise right time to jump on the bandwagon is, isn't it?
I'm OK with a President who is inherently cautious, who doesn't suggest certain threats are "imminent" until they damn well are, and who is more reluctant than recent Presidents to propose radical restrictions on our freedoms to address such "imminent" threats.
I mean, it's not like we need the President on board to be doing something, is it? It's not like the rest of us can't be reducing CO2 emissions all on our own -- driving less, saving energy, turning out the lights and turning up the thermostat -- if we choose to do so.
I imagine one could fit a black-body curve to the solar spectrum, for example. That would probably give a pretty precise answer.
However, the OP has a point, even if it wasn't put all that sophisticatedly. The question of the influence of solar output on the Earth's energy budget is not as settled as you imply. In the first place, he's right, only very subtle changes in the huge amounts of energy flowing in and out of the Earth's ecosystem are required, and these are inherently difficult to measure accurately. Generally speaking, you're subtracting large and nearly equal numbers from each other, which is always tricky.
Secondly, the Sun does more than simply heat the Earth through radiation. It emits ionizing radiation that ionizes the atmosphere (which is what allows over-the-horizon radio communication). It injects charged particles into Earth's magnetic field. It has a magnetic field itself that interacts with that of the Earth, and changes the way charged particles from the Sun and the cosmos hit the Earth. These things may have subtle effects on, for example, cloud formation -- and therefore on the Earth's albedo.
One might well say who cares about all this weird third- and fourth-order stuff if we were talking about big changes in Earth's climate. But we're not. We're not trying to explain an Ice Age, still less a "snowball Earth" event, or the runaway hothouse climate of Venus. We're trying to explain a temperature trend that is so slight that it is not only much smaller than annual and diurnal variations, it is smaller than the unexplained "background noise" variations in the measurement. It's only by averaging over a long time that you can even see any temperature change.
Does that mean the leading explanation of the day for the observed temperature change (anthropogenic CO2 emission) is wrong? Nope. But it very well does suggest a bit of humility about the possibility of other explanations. Mother Nature has a long, long history of confounding "obvious" explanations.
Oh it's far worse than that. These days, big real-estate developers often skimp on paying for a nice sealant topcoat of plastic grass or concrete, which means exposing the public to potential sources of invisibly fine air-borne nanoparticles containing silicates, sulfates and other nonvolatile chemical compounds, particularly if it's windy and the unsealed areas are exposed to radiation in the 400-700 nm range.
I would guess the application of interest is shipping boxes and so forth. If you want things well-protected, increasingly important in a shipping industry that uses more robots and conveyor belts and fewer human hands every day, you need strong boxes. Probably even a modest increase in the strength of cardboard would be quite helpful, as it would reduce the fraction of the weight of a shipment that is boxing.
/. editor to know something about materials science and/or economics? I would not.
It all depends, really, on whether the processing needed to create "super" paper doesn't cost more than the savings you might enjoy in lower shipping costs per unit weight of product. The fact mentioned in the summary that the original material (wood) is cheap seems quite unimportant.* Steel come essentially from dirt and rock, which is cheap, too. It's the processing that costs.
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* But would I expect a
I would say a huge difference between the 1960s and today is computational power. In the 1960s there was no ability to simulate what would happen to various rocket designs under various conditions: you had to build one and try it, or, if that was too expensive, just go with a mix of safety factors and prayer. The difference in time, effort and money between sorting through engineering designs in silico and in real life is substantial. There's a good reason why Boeing was an early and enthusiastic purchasers of supercomputers.
Additionally, we've already demonstrated a pretty sophisticated remote-control ability on Mars, which leads to the possibility of reducing both risk and cost by sending the return craft ahead of time to Mars, and having it, if possible, extract its fuel from the Martian soil and atmosphere. That way you don't even launch your crew until you know they have a ride home waiting for them. Furthermore, you save the cost of the fuel it takes to transport your fuel to Mars, which is enormous.
But that's only possible because we have such phenomenally greater capability for building autonomous machines.
(I don't disagree with you that it's difficult, BTW. Just saying that we have some advantages now that one could reasonably say make it no harder, relatively speaking, than going to the Moon in 1969. Also worth bearing in mind is the fact that the US economy is maybe 3 times bigger now than it was then.)
Think about the cost associated with having and maintaining a completely hot-pluggable second control system. How much do you want your power bills to go up to pay for that? And what would be the point?
They have a perfectly adequate safety system that did exactly what it's supposed to do. It read confusing data and decided to shut the reactor down until a human came along and explained things satisfactorily. What's wrong with that? Aside from having the reactor offline for 48 hours, there was no other cost.
When national health care arrives, as it will shortly, if the elections this November turn out the way they look like they will, then the government is going to be your health-care provider. There will be no need for passing actual legislation to force you to conform to any particular medical procedure. That can just be decided by the President, who, as head of the Executive Branch, is in ultimate charge of all national government agencies.
You're thinking that it takes a physician the same time to read through your history and pluck out the important stuff that it would take you, a complete amateur with nearly zero understanding of how medicine works.
That's as logical as thinking that it would take Linus Torvalds as long to understand a kernel patch as J. Random User who's never coded a line in his life. Or that your car mechanic needs to carefully listen to every sound your jalopy makes to know whether it needs a valve job. Or that the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic would have to get out a tuning fork and go carefully around to listen to each of his 150 musicians to know whether the orchestra is playing in tune.
You think? Hmmm. How about someone in government realizes that AIDS costs the public treasury a huge amount of money, so they start penalizing a gay lifestyle? Or being unmarried, which shortens up your life? Or amusing yourself rock-climbing or bicycle racing, which are more dangerous than going to the gym and riding a stationary bicycle to nowhere?
More plausibly, how about someone in government thinks that lifestyle X is bad for you, and starts handing out tax penalties and rebates accordingly -- but he's wrong. Not like we've ever had any health fads that turned out to be nonsense, right? And no government bureaucrat would dream of making decisions when he doesn't really have enough information to make a good one, right?
And all based on essentially two-dimensional observation. It's like having your neck immediately permanently clamped to a chair the moment you're born, and then trying to figure out the three-dimensional size, shape and arrangement of the objects all around you, without ever being able to get up and walk towards them, pick them up, look at them from another angle, and so forth. Very much like Plato's people of the cave, I think, trying to deduce the nature of real objects solely from the shadows they cast on the wall.
I'd still like to know how they get absolute distance measurements from IR observation inside the galaxy. No red shift, no absolute/relative luminosity relationships like you have with stars. How is it done?
Well...as a parent, I confess I do tend to find this more of a feature than a bug. But I probably need to compromise if I want to be allowed to see my grandchildren. Oh well. What a pity we parents don't actually have the God-like absolute power to fashion young lives to our taste that teenagers and twentysomethings imagine we do.