Finally someone that gets it. It's pretty sad that people in China probably have a better understanding of market economics than people in the US. Basic economics should be one of the most important subjects we teach in school. The problem is that I suspect that politicians would *hate* it if people had a better understanding of economics.
The thing runs MacOSX. Has anyone seen the specs for the CPU inside the phone? Just kinda curious. Many phones are ARM based, is it also the case with the iPhone?
The problem with Bush's wiretapping program is that he never got warrants, and never had probable cause to get a search. His agents never went to the FISA court that was specifically designed for these cases and rarely ever rejects a warrant request. Because, like I said, warrants can be granted retroactively there is no argument based on urgency against getting a warrant, and it is important to be aware of this when defenders of this policy bring up emergency situations. The only reason not to get a warrant from FISA is because there was no Probable Cause basis for the search, FISA would therefore not have granted a warrant, and the search was unreasonable and hence un-Constitutional.
Actually, Bush did get warrants because of the wiretapping program. Remember the primary target is known enemies of the US making calls with people inside the US. Once the FBI wants to make the person inside the US a primary wiretap target, they must get a warrant. Note that FISA judges stated outright they would not grant FISA warrants to the FBI based solely on NSA leads:
"The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen."
It seems to me that this is a minor point. All the judges are saying is that the FBI must get some sort of evidence of suspicious activity beyond a NSA lead before they go after a FISA warrant. It seems to me that if the NSA catches enough phone activity to a primary tap target outside the US to get flagged, that would be enough to follow up.
Remember even with a normal wiretap, your call can be monitored if you call a target of a wiretap. This would not cause the police to also ask for a tap on your phone, unless they found that you were being complicit in a crime. At that point they would have to go back and get yet another warrant for you. This apparently is exactly how the NSA wiretaps work. The NSA does not need warrants for battlefield taps. Civil courts have no jurisdiction over anything that happens in the battlefield. This is what the WaPo article was about. It was showing that judges are granting warrants based on NSA taps and not the NSA taps themselves. The judges were speaking out and saying they would not grant the warrant solely on NSA intel alone.
For some of the rooms I use CFB I get more than enough light. I don't worry about what is equivalent, I just worry about what gives out the right amount of light for the room. In some cases I put in lower wattage CFB's for the room than what I was using. In other cases, I put in higher wattage ones.
For one big room I replaced a halogen torch lamp (300 watts) with a 68-watt metal halide from a company called Microsun (http://wwww.microsun.com). The are some disadvantages. For example, you can't turn it off and on right away. But for this room I usually have a light on for the entire evening. The 68-watt bulb is slightly brighter than the halogen and produces very nice light.
All SprintPCS phones all use the same connector. I bought a Sprint Treo phone that didn't have the right connector built-in, but a cable was included in the box to adapt it to the Sprint style power connector.
All this rule change did is allow Tech/Tech-Plus phone/data privledges on 10-meters. Novice/Tech/Tech-Plus do not get phone/data privledges on any bandplan below 10-meter. What does this mean? It means that to anything other than CW, all Novice/Tech/Tech-Plus people must upgrade to General licences. Once a person has at least General privledges they can use almost all the available bands.
The NSA is part of the NSA. The military does not go to civilian courts for monitoring communication on battlefields. Once the NSA discovered that a known enemy (the wiretap target) has contacted someone within the US, they pass this information to the FBI. The FBI at this point needs to go to the FISA court to make the person within the US a target of a wiretap. Note that it has be reported that FISA judges will not grant a warrant purely on information from the NSA. The FBI must find some other information to support their request for a wiretap.
This is similar to any other wiretap in that the warrant. The warrant does not cover the people that call or receive calls from the target. Police can use information collected from monitoring the target to get wiretaps on others.
How is this illegal? The NSA is doing their job with the primary target. It is completely legal to generate leads off of the primary target. Further investigation on the people that contact the primary will require further warrants. This is the acceptable way of doing things and has been for quite some time.
It is tradition that the company looses money on each console sold (at least initially). Maybe Sony should sell their console through futures market. Traders bid based on stated supply and estimated demand. Stores sell based on the futures pricing. People that really want the system pay the premium to get it early. As supply goes up the futures pricing goes down.
This could also have the effect for people that really, really want the console can get one with less chance of it being out of stock. They simply have to pay the price for the privilege. With the price sufficiently high, they would never run out of product.
Simple supply and demand. Good stuff.
Re:Fedora's pace is just right for me
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
Boy, are you retarded?
Ummm. Not that I know of.
Calling Debian's release cycle slow down right stupid. You know very well that's because everyone who doesn't use Debian, never looks past stable. And you know what, stable is stable.
What is the point of having a stable release if no one uses it? Cutting stable release a bit more often is very useful. It appears that is what more than a few people want. It seems to be the main thing that is fueling the success of Ubuntu at the cost of creating incompatible repositories.
Fedora's pace is just right for me
on
Fedora Linux
·
· Score: 1
The pace of Fedora is just right for me. For servers I can still use EL or Centos, but I like to keep up with what's happening out there on my notebook. Fedora provides that environment. Not too slow (Debian) and not too fast (gentoo or Rawhide). If you look at RedHat linux releases previous to Fedora, the pace was about the same. It seems to me that RedHat decided they needed to slow down the cycle without loosing momentum. The way they did this is Fedora.
Their point is valid. There recently was a huge find of oil in Utah. It was previously overlooked because our understanding of where to find oil was wrong. We have better tools now. We can drill deeper.
Also, remember when the price of oil is sufficiently high that other types of oil that are not as pure are viable for processing.
Even if we run out of the liquid stuff, we could turn to coal liquification. North America has huge reserves of coal. We could become the Middle East of coal liquification. We have enough to last quite a while. By this time I could hope that technology would advance enough to make alternative way to propel a car compelling and cheep.
We also need to understand where oil comes from. We have never been able to reproduce oil in a lab under the circumstances that we understand to be natural. Maybe our whole assumption on oil is wrong (see Abiogenic petroleum origin.
According to the Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group at the University of Colorado has stated that CO2 forcings contribute a maximum of 28% of global warming. He also pointed to a paper on his site that stated:
"We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45-50% of the 1900-2000 global warming, and 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted."
Further: "For all of the human-caused warming radiative forcings, which includes the 0.5 Watts per meter squared value for the shortwave albedo change, and estimating tropospheric ozone as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the aerosol black carbon direct effect as 0.2 Watts per meter squared, the black carbon on snow and ice as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the semidirect indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared, and the glaciation indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared (with the latter two forcings using a nominal value, since these forcings are very poorly known), the contribution due to CO2 will fall to about 28%."
Get with the lingo buddy. We have Dem's in control of the US Congress now... it's called corporate welfare and I think we're supposed to hate that companies get to keep more of their money because, like, they oppress the workers of the world or something. Yeah, that's the ticket. Did I get that right?
Oh, and rich people, them too. They should not be able to keep their own money either.
I thought that I read that the Duelfer Report also talked about how, although the weapons programs were not up and running, Saddam was hoping to use the oil for food program to wiggle his way out of inspections and international pressure? Saddam was hoping that once that happened he could resume the research and development of WMD. We now know that the oil for food payoffs were working. Thankfully we will never know when the next step would have been.
I installed the filters and it does indeed now load up jpeg's. It's kinda lame for it to ask me what filter to apply when loading the jpg. Shouldn't it just know the file type?
I must be a complete idiot when it comes to KDE apps. I normally use Gnome, but I thought I'd try Krita out. I did a 'yum install koffice-krita' and it installed normally. I tried to load up a photograph in Krita, but I could not figure out how to do it. I tried 'krita somepic.jpg' and that didn't work. I tried a File->Open and that didn't work. Can someone that is a KDE expert tell me how to use a KDE app?
By "free range" do you mean that the chickens can walk around and pick up all sorts of contaminates in the area including migratory bird droppings? Chickens raised in enclosed structures are less likely to be exposed to migratory bird contamination. It seems to me that is a much safer way to go.
And just how does the military (NSA) bring a warrant request to a civilian court? This is why the NSA monitors known terrorist numbers (the target) and reports them to the FBI when there is a possible connection to a US Person/Citizen (not the target of monitoring). The FBI then has to get a FISA warrant. It has been reported in the Washington Post that FISA judges will not issue a warrant to the FBI solely based on a NSA lead. The FBI must first provide some further reason/evidence for a warrant.
This is similar to a situation where you called a known criminal that had their number tapped. You are not the target of the tap, but they will listen in on your call to/from the target of the warrant.
The change that happened after 9/11 was that the Bush administration felt that the NSA should pass intelligence data to the FBI legally. Nothing has changed as far as what calls were monitored by the NSA. What changed is that they could tell someone about it.
Part of the big American myth system everyone's indoctrinated into is that poor people are poor because they deserve it, and that anyone can be successful and get ahead if they try. Accepting food from a charity is seen as personal failure.
One does not exclude the other. Help the person with charity. At the same time, you can help give them opportunities to be successful. It is not a myth that people in the US have many, many times come from nothing and be something. It happens all the time. Those examples should be pointed how and used to encourage people. Sometimes poverty is a circumstance, sometimes it is a mindset. There must be something to the mindset considering how many self-help books there are out there (do they work?).
From what a friend of mine tells me, in China the problem is how you describe. The rich do fully blame the poor for their own problems. It is very harsh compared to the US. The US is comparatively very charitable.
Another problem, shown on the PBS documentary People Like Us about the US class system, is that the food given to charities is often not the food poor people want. They had an example of a food co-op that tried to give away bread that was hitting its freshness date--but the poor people wouldn't take it, because it was wholegrain focaccia and the like rather than the bleached white loaf they were used to.
Well, I grew up on wholegrain bread and my family is not rich. My mom just believed it was better for us.
This lead on to a whole added level of unwillingness to take charity, because many of them felt they were being patronized by the latte-sipping Prius-driving Birkenstock-wearing college-educated yuppies that they've been trained to hate.
That attitude has been around for a long, long time. It would take a lot to replace the pride with dignity (on both sides). We all have problems with pride.
I have not heard of this, and I am extremely skeptical this is true. There are a few secret special judges who do nothing but FISA. No one below a certain security clearance even knows who they are, much less why and what they ruled for any case.
The NSA is doing it's job. The NSA (DoD) has no standing to get warrants in a civilian court. So what should they do with information about a person that is in contact with a known bad guy? Under this administration and from recommendations from the 9/11 commission, the information is passed to the FBI. They used to just site on the information because the "wall" prevented them from notifying law enforcement. If the FBI can not follow up with this lead by going to get a warrant from the FISA court (oversight), what should they do?
This is the logic I just do not get. The relation to Watergate is apples to oranges. There are plenty of controls on domestic spying and there continues to be controls on domestic spying. What the NSA is doing is what it has always been doing. For years and years. Remember Echelon? There is nothing new here. The difference is the NSA (DoD) can now pass leads to law enforcement (Justice Department). This is what people were saying the government wasn't doing before 9/11 and they were upset about it.
People are so hopeful about impeaching Bush that when something is solidified in law (what they are asking for), they get upset because now the administration is following a written delineation of law. I can only conclude that people are so blinded by their hate of Bush they cannot think logically about things anymore.
If a US Person/Citizen is caught by the NSA talking to a terrorist, they should be checked up on. This follows a clearly defined procedure. The FBI is notified. The FBI can get a FISA warrant. If nothing is there, nothing is there. How is this any different from a person unknownly calling a mobster or a drug dealer?
From what I have been reading, technically the NSA does not have standing to get a warrant from a civilian court since they are military. The NSA is restricted to foreign surveillance. Like getting a tap on some criminal, anyone calling that criminal will have their communication listened in on. This is natural and acceptable police work. This is the same with the NSA. If you call a number that is being tapped by the NSA, your communications will be captured. With the PATRIOT ACT they can pass leads to the FBI, but for the FBI to get a warrant, they would need to go through normal channels.
Slashdot Mirror
Economics is not physics.
Finally someone that gets it. It's pretty sad that people in China probably have a better understanding of market economics than people in the US. Basic economics should be one of the most important subjects we teach in school. The problem is that I suspect that politicians would *hate* it if people had a better understanding of economics.
The thing runs MacOSX. Has anyone seen the specs for the CPU inside the phone? Just kinda curious. Many phones are ARM based, is it also the case with the iPhone?
The problem with Bush's wiretapping program is that he never got warrants, and never had probable cause to get a search. His agents never went to the FISA court that was specifically designed for these cases and rarely ever rejects a warrant request. Because, like I said, warrants can be granted retroactively there is no argument based on urgency against getting a warrant, and it is important to be aware of this when defenders of this policy bring up emergency situations. The only reason not to get a warrant from FISA is because there was no Probable Cause basis for the search, FISA would therefore not have granted a warrant, and the search was unreasonable and hence un-Constitutional.
c le/2006/02/08/AR2006020802511.html
Actually, Bush did get warrants because of the wiretapping program. Remember the primary target is known enemies of the US making calls with people inside the US. Once the FBI wants to make the person inside the US a primary wiretap target, they must get a warrant. Note that FISA judges stated outright they would not grant FISA warrants to the FBI based solely on NSA leads:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
"The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen."
It seems to me that this is a minor point. All the judges are saying is that the FBI must get some sort of evidence of suspicious activity beyond a NSA lead before they go after a FISA warrant. It seems to me that if the NSA catches enough phone activity to a primary tap target outside the US to get flagged, that would be enough to follow up.
Remember even with a normal wiretap, your call can be monitored if you call a target of a wiretap. This would not cause the police to also ask for a tap on your phone, unless they found that you were being complicit in a crime. At that point they would have to go back and get yet another warrant for you. This apparently is exactly how the NSA wiretaps work. The NSA does not need warrants for battlefield taps. Civil courts have no jurisdiction over anything that happens in the battlefield. This is what the WaPo article was about. It was showing that judges are granting warrants based on NSA taps and not the NSA taps themselves. The judges were speaking out and saying they would not grant the warrant solely on NSA intel alone.
For some of the rooms I use CFB I get more than enough light. I don't worry about what is equivalent, I just worry about what gives out the right amount of light for the room. In some cases I put in lower wattage CFB's for the room than what I was using. In other cases, I put in higher wattage ones.
For one big room I replaced a halogen torch lamp (300 watts) with a 68-watt metal halide from a company called Microsun (http://wwww.microsun.com). The are some disadvantages. For example, you can't turn it off and on right away. But for this room I usually have a light on for the entire evening. The 68-watt bulb is slightly brighter than the halogen and produces very nice light.
All SprintPCS phones all use the same connector. I bought a Sprint Treo phone that didn't have the right connector built-in, but a cable was included in the box to adapt it to the Sprint style power connector.
All this rule change did is allow Tech/Tech-Plus phone/data privledges on 10-meters. Novice/Tech/Tech-Plus do not get phone/data privledges on any bandplan below 10-meter. What does this mean? It means that to anything other than CW, all Novice/Tech/Tech-Plus people must upgrade to General licences. Once a person has at least General privledges they can use almost all the available bands.
The NSA is part of the NSA. The military does not go to civilian courts for monitoring communication on battlefields. Once the NSA discovered that a known enemy (the wiretap target) has contacted someone within the US, they pass this information to the FBI. The FBI at this point needs to go to the FISA court to make the person within the US a target of a wiretap. Note that it has be reported that FISA judges will not grant a warrant purely on information from the NSA. The FBI must find some other information to support their request for a wiretap.
This is similar to any other wiretap in that the warrant. The warrant does not cover the people that call or receive calls from the target. Police can use information collected from monitoring the target to get wiretaps on others.
How is this illegal? The NSA is doing their job with the primary target. It is completely legal to generate leads off of the primary target. Further investigation on the people that contact the primary will require further warrants. This is the acceptable way of doing things and has been for quite some time.
It is tradition that the company looses money on each console sold (at least initially). Maybe Sony should sell their console through futures market. Traders bid based on stated supply and estimated demand. Stores sell based on the futures pricing. People that really want the system pay the premium to get it early. As supply goes up the futures pricing goes down.
This could also have the effect for people that really, really want the console can get one with less chance of it being out of stock. They simply have to pay the price for the privilege. With the price sufficiently high, they would never run out of product.
Simple supply and demand. Good stuff.
Boy, are you retarded?
Ummm. Not that I know of.
Calling Debian's release cycle slow down right stupid. You know very well that's because everyone who doesn't use Debian, never looks past stable. And you know what, stable is stable.
What is the point of having a stable release if no one uses it? Cutting stable release a bit more often is very useful. It appears that is what more than a few people want. It seems to be the main thing that is fueling the success of Ubuntu at the cost of creating incompatible repositories.
The pace of Fedora is just right for me. For servers I can still use EL or Centos, but I like to keep up with what's happening out there on my notebook. Fedora provides that environment. Not too slow (Debian) and not too fast (gentoo or Rawhide). If you look at RedHat linux releases previous to Fedora, the pace was about the same. It seems to me that RedHat decided they needed to slow down the cycle without loosing momentum. The way they did this is Fedora.
Their point is valid. There recently was a huge find of oil in Utah. It was previously overlooked because our understanding of where to find oil was wrong. We have better tools now. We can drill deeper.
Also, remember when the price of oil is sufficiently high that other types of oil that are not as pure are viable for processing.
Even if we run out of the liquid stuff, we could turn to coal liquification. North America has huge reserves of coal. We could become the Middle East of coal liquification. We have enough to last quite a while. By this time I could hope that technology would advance enough to make alternative way to propel a car compelling and cheep.
We also need to understand where oil comes from. We have never been able to reproduce oil in a lab under the circumstances that we understand to be natural. Maybe our whole assumption on oil is wrong (see Abiogenic petroleum origin.
According to the Roger Pielke Sr. Research Group at the University of Colorado has stated that CO2 forcings contribute a maximum of 28% of global warming. He also pointed to a paper on his site that stated:
"We estimate that the sun contributed as much as 45-50% of the 1900-2000 global warming, and 25-35% of the 1980-2000 global warming. These results, while confirming that anthropogenic-added climate forcing might have progressively played a dominant role in climate change during the last century, also suggest that the solar impact on climate change during the same period is significantly stronger than what some theoretical models have predicted."
Further:
"For all of the human-caused warming radiative forcings, which includes the 0.5 Watts per meter squared value for the shortwave albedo change, and estimating tropospheric ozone as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the aerosol black carbon direct effect as 0.2 Watts per meter squared, the black carbon on snow and ice as 0.3 Watts per meter squared, the semidirect indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared, and the glaciation indirect effect as 0.1 Watt per meter squared (with the latter two forcings using a nominal value, since these forcings are very poorly known), the contribution due to CO2 will fall to about 28%."
Intel wants more GPU power in their CPU's. NVidia is using features of their GPU to do problem solving. Which one will win out?
Get with the lingo buddy. We have Dem's in control of the US Congress now... it's called corporate welfare and I think we're supposed to hate that companies get to keep more of their money because, like, they oppress the workers of the world or something. Yeah, that's the ticket. Did I get that right?
Oh, and rich people, them too. They should not be able to keep their own money either.
Yeah, it just goes to show you that you should say home. Do not vote.
I thought that I read that the Duelfer Report also talked about how, although the weapons programs were not up and running, Saddam was hoping to use the oil for food program to wiggle his way out of inspections and international pressure? Saddam was hoping that once that happened he could resume the research and development of WMD. We now know that the oil for food payoffs were working. Thankfully we will never know when the next step would have been.
I installed the filters and it does indeed now load up jpeg's. It's kinda lame for it to ask me what filter to apply when loading the jpg. Shouldn't it just know the file type?
I must be a complete idiot when it comes to KDE apps. I normally use Gnome, but I thought I'd try Krita out. I did a 'yum install koffice-krita' and it installed normally. I tried to load up a photograph in Krita, but I could not figure out how to do it. I tried 'krita somepic.jpg' and that didn't work. I tried a File->Open and that didn't work. Can someone that is a KDE expert tell me how to use a KDE app?
By "free range" do you mean that the chickens can walk around and pick up all sorts of contaminates in the area including migratory bird droppings? Chickens raised in enclosed structures are less likely to be exposed to migratory bird contamination. It seems to me that is a much safer way to go.
And just how does the military (NSA) bring a warrant request to a civilian court? This is why the NSA monitors known terrorist numbers (the target) and reports them to the FBI when there is a possible connection to a US Person/Citizen (not the target of monitoring). The FBI then has to get a FISA warrant. It has been reported in the Washington Post that FISA judges will not issue a warrant to the FBI solely based on a NSA lead. The FBI must first provide some further reason/evidence for a warrant.
This is similar to a situation where you called a known criminal that had their number tapped. You are not the target of the tap, but they will listen in on your call to/from the target of the warrant.
The change that happened after 9/11 was that the Bush administration felt that the NSA should pass intelligence data to the FBI legally. Nothing has changed as far as what calls were monitored by the NSA. What changed is that they could tell someone about it.
Part of the big American myth system everyone's indoctrinated into is that poor people are poor because they deserve it, and that anyone can be successful and get ahead if they try. Accepting food from a charity is seen as personal failure.
One does not exclude the other. Help the person with charity. At the same time, you can help give them opportunities to be successful. It is not a myth that people in the US have many, many times come from nothing and be something. It happens all the time. Those examples should be pointed how and used to encourage people. Sometimes poverty is a circumstance, sometimes it is a mindset. There must be something to the mindset considering how many self-help books there are out there (do they work?).
From what a friend of mine tells me, in China the problem is how you describe. The rich do fully blame the poor for their own problems. It is very harsh compared to the US. The US is comparatively very charitable.
Another problem, shown on the PBS documentary People Like Us about the US class system, is that the food given to charities is often not the food poor people want. They had an example of a food co-op that tried to give away bread that was hitting its freshness date--but the poor people wouldn't take it, because it was wholegrain focaccia and the like rather than the bleached white loaf they were used to.
Well, I grew up on wholegrain bread and my family is not rich. My mom just believed it was better for us.
This lead on to a whole added level of unwillingness to take charity, because many of them felt they were being patronized by the latte-sipping Prius-driving Birkenstock-wearing college-educated yuppies that they've been trained to hate.
That attitude has been around for a long, long time. It would take a lot to replace the pride with dignity (on both sides). We all have problems with pride.
I have not heard of this, and I am extremely skeptical this is true. There are a few secret special judges who do nothing but FISA. No one below a certain security clearance even knows who they are, much less why and what they ruled for any case.
c le/2006/02/08/AR2006020802511.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
The NSA is doing it's job. The NSA (DoD) has no standing to get warrants in a civilian court. So what should they do with information about a person that is in contact with a known bad guy? Under this administration and from recommendations from the 9/11 commission, the information is passed to the FBI. They used to just site on the information because the "wall" prevented them from notifying law enforcement. If the FBI can not follow up with this lead by going to get a warrant from the FISA court (oversight), what should they do?
This is the logic I just do not get. The relation to Watergate is apples to oranges. There are plenty of controls on domestic spying and there continues to be controls on domestic spying. What the NSA is doing is what it has always been doing. For years and years. Remember Echelon? There is nothing new here. The difference is the NSA (DoD) can now pass leads to law enforcement (Justice Department). This is what people were saying the government wasn't doing before 9/11 and they were upset about it.
People are so hopeful about impeaching Bush that when something is solidified in law (what they are asking for), they get upset because now the administration is following a written delineation of law. I can only conclude that people are so blinded by their hate of Bush they cannot think logically about things anymore.
If a US Person/Citizen is caught by the NSA talking to a terrorist, they should be checked up on. This follows a clearly defined procedure. The FBI is notified. The FBI can get a FISA warrant. If nothing is there, nothing is there. How is this any different from a person unknownly calling a mobster or a drug dealer?
From what I have been reading, technically the NSA does not have standing to get a warrant from a civilian court since they are military. The NSA is restricted to foreign surveillance. Like getting a tap on some criminal, anyone calling that criminal will have their communication listened in on. This is natural and acceptable police work. This is the same with the NSA. If you call a number that is being tapped by the NSA, your communications will be captured. With the PATRIOT ACT they can pass leads to the FBI, but for the FBI to get a warrant, they would need to go through normal channels.