Please provide some evidence that probability of rape/stalking/abuse are related to attractiveness. From my experience, the relationship just is not there.
But whatever the costs, the presence of a huge plastic surgery industry suggests that the cost is outweighed by the benefit.
"You may be interested in reading about the "evolutionarily deceptive" teenage years, where soon-to-be-ugly people appear attractive to seduce a mate, and soon-to-be-beautiful people repel mates so as to avoid the wrong one."
Do you have any literature for that? I don't see how that is an evolutionary stable strategy. S
"But they do not have some privacy right to extend this practice unethically to foreigners."
Do we have the right to unethically extend freedom of speech to foreigners? The right to banking privacy is considered a defense against government tyranny, just as Free Speech.
While I personally think that the cost's of banking privacy do not justify the benefits, that is a discussion for the Swiss. But while they hold these values, they have just as much right to hold the rest of the world to their values as we do to ours.
"Instead of using market forces, Apple seems to prefer not to have such an application in its store in the first place. I, for one, can't blame them."
Personaly, I want my iphone to recieve IM's when I am doing other tasks. If Apple had actualy equiped the phone with the features that are common place with it's competitors, then iphone unlocking would be about as obscure as placing linux on an Ipod. But since Apple steadfastly refuses to implement basic features the phone is capable of, they have a responcibility to atleast allow others to implement it themselves on the phone that they bought.
Apple has over 500 patents on the iphone. They include the multitouch interface, several components of the iphone UI, the radio transmitter, some miniturization tech, etc.
Consumers are smart enough to know that "more programs"=="Slower". Apple's demographic has changed, they now cater toward extremely tech-savy affluent teenagers and young people, as well as first adopters who run through multiple gadgets per year. If Apple treats them like their previous elementary school teacher demographic, they will suffer in the long term.
Dude, my jailbroken iphone runs background processes on third party software right now. I can run a good number of programs before the thing slows down. Programmers are pretty good at satisfying space constraints.
I understand the need for some sort of approval process for code, though I personally disagree with it's effectiveness. But what argument do you have against letting consumers choose to download apps with background processes?
That is nothing but a transparent block toward the network specific apps, like IM and VOIP, that Apple either does not want to exist, or wants to monopolize for itself. Remember how much trouble Microsoft got in when they gave their programs special treatment over competitors?
The whole "let the market decide" isn't really so trivial when it comes to consumer electronics. Apple was granted a legal monopoly over several components of the iphone, which prevent competitors from creating a device with it's best features. There is nothing free-market about government granted monopolies.
Because of this, if Apple abuses customers by crippling it's device, it is acting against the public interest for it's own gain. I don't blame them for this, their shareholders would be pissed otherwise, but the point of government is to make sure that the selfish interest of individuals does not clash with the collective good of society.
I would prefer marijuana to be legal, but I realize that is impossible for political reasons. But the effect of designating Marijuana as a schedule 2 drug would do a great deal to create a viable coalition of supporters that could legalize it in the future.
meanwhile, it would do a lot to end the organized drug trade, as well as reducing the number of tragic arrests. Idealism isnt always responcible.
"I say cheaper, since it seems classifying drugs as pharmaceuticals would raise the price, just look at the average cost of American prescriptions."
Once a drug is approved for one use (Say... lymphoma or thyroid cancer), loopholes allow for the drug to be prescribed for "off-label" uses. Such prescriptions become legal, but there can be liability issues if something happens to the patient (And these are mostly skirted if there are any studies to back it up).
For example, anti-depressants are often prescribed to treat ADD, even though they were never (to my knowledge) approved for such. In the same vein, there is no reason to assume that Marijuana would be prescribed for back pain, stress, depression, etcs.
Doctors most likely go along with such requests, happy to receive the office pay premium from insurance companies, and secure in the knowledge that Marijuana's non-toxicity mostly protects them from lawsuits. (If this doesn't seem plausible, see how freely amphetamines and pain killers are prescribed, despite far higher risks)
Obviously, people are not going to all go to their doctor to get some weed. But the number of legal semi-legitimate Marijuana users will drastically increase. Once this hits a critical mass, the means of obtaining Weed for illicit purposes changes drastically. Teenagers will begin to steal from their parent's weed stash, instead of buying from dealers. College students and adults will probably start sharing weed with their friends.
With that, the demand for illegal marijuana production most likely will not be enough to cover fixed costs.
"Why, also, do the police need drones? I can see in combat situations where they exist to keep the pilots out of danger (dead technology is worth less than dead people), but I don't see this true in metropolitan areas. I don't think Floridian cities are so crime ridden as to the point where the criminals have an ample supply of shoulder-fired missiles. How many police helicopters have been shot down in Miami in the last ten years?"
And as a Miami resident, I'll say that Miami has somewhat corrupt local government and a large inflow of Federal Homeland security funds. This leads to a lot of wasteful projects.
More seriously, Miami has a serious problem with urban balkanization, where most of the police belong to extremely small cities (Mine has 300 residents) that exist for tax purposes. The unified Miami-Dade police force has a very hard time projecting its force throughout the country for this reason. So it's not hard to imagine that this is meant to counter that.
And in my experience, you mainly see that America-only stuff in the public sector(and even then, not too often). The business world tends to know better.
How do we define the most pressing issues of the day? We have a finite number of bright minds, how do we best allocate them to the various things we need researched?
For short/intermediate term research on things that are easily patentable, that is an easy question. The most valuable research is almost always that which makes the most money to the firm that "owns" the discovery, and rational scientists will work toward discovering the most valuable things that they can(Public heath and environmental technology are notable exceptions, at least without regulations and/or taxes). A more rigorous proof could be derived from Coase's Theorem and the General Welfare Theorem.
But patents hold a cost to society too, both in the transaction costs they create, and in that people who hold them work less because they can coast off of previous earnings. Because of this, we cannot extend this toward longer term research.
Worse, we don't really know what fields are valuable, so it's impossible to set effective prices for a lot of this stuff.
But altogether, we do a pretty good job of allocation, there are no large numbers of idle scientists, and our economy has tended to grow consistently over the last 50 years.
My concern, is that large government prizes will distort the economy, by pushing scientists and VC funding into "sexy" research that ultimately produces little(Lunar landers for example), at the expense of mundane yet important stuff(Capital market prediction, material science, etc).
And because the incentive effects of prizes are still not very well understood, I'm afraid of corporations doing the same thing.
Perhaps it's not efficient, from a societal point of view, to have thousands of the most brilliant people in the world doing duplicate work? Consider how much better society would be if they were each individually working on something different.
Not only that, but keep in mind that these bright people were going to do something else before they decided to take up the prize. Is the US economy better off because a genius physicist came up with a lunar robot, when he would have discovered a new type of nuclear fusion had he not worked on the prize?
I don't want to spend billions of dollars in order to be inspired, it would be cheaper to send acid tablets to every person in the country.
If I put money in the space program, I want it to be for research that will boost our economy, but is sufficiently long-term such that the market would not develop it.
Sending little probes to other planets meet this criteria, a space station arguably meets this criteria. Bold attention grabbing measures usually don't.
"Implicit in the protection of its citizenry is using the mechanics of defense and intelligence, including foreign intelligence collection unfettered by unnecessary restrictions -- for example, court oversight. I do not believe that foreign intelligence collection on non-US Persons outside of the US should require a warrant. For those not following along, this type of collection has NEVER required a warrant. I believe collection should not be arbitrary, and that it should be justifiable by some measure, but oversight and proceduralization of this sort can and does happen via other channels than a court and a judge. In fact, it is necessary to ensure that US Persons -- either inside or outside of the United States -- are not inappropriately surveilled in such collection."
Explain to me why court oversight is an "unnecessary restriction" for foreign intelligence gathering, but not for domestic intelligence gathering. After all, 7/21 showed that domestic terrorism is just as dangerous as foreign terrorism.
"It's not a case of whether a "law" allowing this is Constitutional. Such collection has always been intrinsically and explicitly allowed, because such persons do not have Constitutional protections with respect to activities such as surveillance."
Executive agencies and their role usualy need to be specified by congress to achieve funding. There are ways around this by using the President's executive authority, but those legal theories are very controversial.
"Such collection has always been intrinsically and explicitly allowed, because such persons do not have Constitutional protections with respect to activities such as surveillance."
No, such collection has been allowed because the Supreme Court has avoided the issue like the plague, possibly out of fear of judicial non-acquiescence.
"Additionally, in order to be on an even playing field with other nations -- if you believe that using one's capacity to maintain a defense and collect intelligence is valuable to the preservation of security of a nation -- foreign intelligence collection that is not burdened with the same requirements for protection of our own citizens is simply one of those realities."
You assume it is one of those realities, but you never state any evidence that it is so.
"Being a retired Marine it was a gaff to post the street view of the military bases... "
Why exactly? You might be right, I'm not a military man, but I'm not sure why. The only organizations capable of launching attacks against domestic army bases have most likely infiltrated our military by now.
Meanwhile, I'd imagine that it might be useful for people who live on base. As you certainly know, bases sometimes contain non-military installations like stores or day care centers. I can imagine a soldier asking his wife to pick up the kids, and using the service to give her directions.
"The arguments that the US "should" treat all persons on earth with the same protections of the Constitution is a very different discussion from what is or isn't legally allowable from a foreign intelligence perspective"
Yes, most people believe that a law allowing foreign surveillance would most likely be constitutional(Though the UN charter of human rights was ratified by the US, so that's a bit debatable)
But that defeats the purpose. If the US wanted to enslave everyone in Puerto Rico and force them to farm sugar all day, that most likely would also be constitutional(See the Insular cases of 1898).
The question is: Should congress pass a law requiring foreign surveillance to be illegal without a warrant? Hiding behind the constitution will not help you here, unless you want to support enslaving Puerto Rico.
So please, justify why you believe that invading the privacy of foreigners should not require a warrant.
"gathering foreign intelligence outside of the United States on non-US Persons has ALWAYS been allowable without any form of court oversight or warrants. As it should be."
This argument only makes sense in a strict legal sense. But just like the right to free speech, the freedom from unwarranted surveillance by the powerful is a fundamental right of man. If Americans should have this right, yet foreigners should not, then it becomes implicitly clear that foreigners are sub-human.
"You then seem to make the logical leap that any use of secrecy in the last 7 years has been to cover up corruption (and this has never happened at any other time in US history...?)."
It has, and that is the problem. Secrecy has been used as a cover for incompetence and power grabs for years. The fact that such a record is non-partisan, only bolsters the gp's argument.
"Some exclusively foreign traffic between foreign individuals can now travel through equipment located physically in the United States. Why should that be off limits?"
Your absolute refusal to admit that foreigners have a right to privacy disturbs me.
Suppose a politician is about to be elected in oil rich Nigeria, and he promises to nationalize American oil company assets in the country. The NSA then proceeds to monitor his communications, and discovers that he is homosexual. The US government then proceeds to leak the information to deeply conservative Nigeria, and a pro-American canidate is elected.
You want to give the government a blank check to do things like that? If the intelligence agencies think that the information is vital for our national security, they should be able get it passed a judge.
"Again, since warrants protect individuals, why shouldn't telecommunications operators be allowed to voluntary assist in the interception of such traffic via much, much easier means?"
Because this foreign person on the other end is a human being, with just as strong a right to privacy as the American.
"Foreign intelligence is a necessity, even for free nations. It always has been. Any denial of this is the denial of reality. "
That is rather debatable. You might be right, but considering the massive failures of intelligence over the last 50 years, the burden of proof is on you here.
"he Constitution only applies to US citizens or persons with a legal status within the United States. It does NOT apply to foreign persons outside of the US; any argument that it does flies in the face of the very notion of nation-states, borders, and international relationships."
Your argument flies in the face of the very notions of universal rights and freedom that our nation was founded on.
"This is precisely why the surveillance of such persons does not require a warrant. In the past, there was no earthly reason to conduct any such surveillance within the United States. Now there is."
Why do these people provide any more threat than people inside the United States? Why is it acceptable to force agents to get warrants when dealing with US citizens, if the threat to our security is so dire?
In the absence of the constitution, would you support requiring warrants for domestic surveillance?
Is that age dependent? I have a lot of teenage friends in Germany, and they seem to use MSN exclusively.
In general, MSN seems dominant in Latin America(Except Brazil, I see a lot of G-talk there), Western Europe(At least England, Germany, Italy, and France), and the Middle East. Can anyone vouch for East Asia and Eastern Europe? [Or, God forbid, know any real statistics?]
There was a significant amount of iphones smuggled into other countries. From what I've read, that might have been the fate of a third of the iphones sold.
So it's more of an Apple to Apple comparison then you think.
Slashdot Mirror
But whatever the costs, the presence of a huge plastic surgery industry suggests that the cost is outweighed by the benefit.
"You may be interested in reading about the "evolutionarily deceptive" teenage years, where soon-to-be-ugly people appear attractive to seduce a mate, and soon-to-be-beautiful people repel mates so as to avoid the wrong one."
Do you have any literature for that? I don't see how that is an evolutionary stable strategy. S
Do we have the right to unethically extend freedom of speech to foreigners? The right to banking privacy is considered a defense against government tyranny, just as Free Speech.
While I personally think that the cost's of banking privacy do not justify the benefits, that is a discussion for the Swiss. But while they hold these values, they have just as much right to hold the rest of the world to their values as we do to ours.
Personaly, I want my iphone to recieve IM's when I am doing other tasks. If Apple had actualy equiped the phone with the features that are common place with it's competitors, then iphone unlocking would be about as obscure as placing linux on an Ipod. But since Apple steadfastly refuses to implement basic features the phone is capable of, they have a responcibility to atleast allow others to implement it themselves on the phone that they bought.
Apple has over 500 patents on the iphone. They include the multitouch interface, several components of the iphone UI, the radio transmitter, some miniturization tech, etc.
Consumers are smart enough to know that "more programs"=="Slower". Apple's demographic has changed, they now cater toward extremely tech-savy affluent teenagers and young people, as well as first adopters who run through multiple gadgets per year. If Apple treats them like their previous elementary school teacher demographic, they will suffer in the long term.
Dude, my jailbroken iphone runs background processes on third party software right now. I can run a good number of programs before the thing slows down. Programmers are pretty good at satisfying space constraints.
That is nothing but a transparent block toward the network specific apps, like IM and VOIP, that Apple either does not want to exist, or wants to monopolize for itself. Remember how much trouble Microsoft got in when they gave their programs special treatment over competitors?
Because of this, if Apple abuses customers by crippling it's device, it is acting against the public interest for it's own gain. I don't blame them for this, their shareholders would be pissed otherwise, but the point of government is to make sure that the selfish interest of individuals does not clash with the collective good of society.
Our regulators should do something about this.
meanwhile, it would do a lot to end the organized drug trade, as well as reducing the number of tragic arrests. Idealism isnt always responcible.
Once a drug is approved for one use (Say... lymphoma or thyroid cancer), loopholes allow for the drug to be prescribed for "off-label" uses. Such prescriptions become legal, but there can be liability issues if something happens to the patient (And these are mostly skirted if there are any studies to back it up).
For example, anti-depressants are often prescribed to treat ADD, even though they were never (to my knowledge) approved for such. In the same vein, there is no reason to assume that Marijuana would be prescribed for back pain, stress, depression, etcs.
Doctors most likely go along with such requests, happy to receive the office pay premium from insurance companies, and secure in the knowledge that Marijuana's non-toxicity mostly protects them from lawsuits. (If this doesn't seem plausible, see how freely amphetamines and pain killers are prescribed, despite far higher risks)
Obviously, people are not going to all go to their doctor to get some weed. But the number of legal semi-legitimate Marijuana users will drastically increase. Once this hits a critical mass, the means of obtaining Weed for illicit purposes changes drastically. Teenagers will begin to steal from their parent's weed stash, instead of buying from dealers. College students and adults will probably start sharing weed with their friends.
With that, the demand for illegal marijuana production most likely will not be enough to cover fixed costs.
"Why, also, do the police need drones? I can see in combat situations where they exist to keep the pilots out of danger (dead technology is worth less than dead people), but I don't see this true in metropolitan areas. I don't think Floridian cities are so crime ridden as to the point where the criminals have an ample supply of shoulder-fired missiles. How many police helicopters have been shot down in Miami in the last ten years?"
And as a Miami resident, I'll say that Miami has somewhat corrupt local government and a large inflow of Federal Homeland security funds. This leads to a lot of wasteful projects.
More seriously, Miami has a serious problem with urban balkanization, where most of the police belong to extremely small cities (Mine has 300 residents) that exist for tax purposes. The unified Miami-Dade police force has a very hard time projecting its force throughout the country for this reason. So it's not hard to imagine that this is meant to counter that.
And in my experience, you mainly see that America-only stuff in the public sector(and even then, not too often). The business world tends to know better.
Regarding point 1, please look at what the FBI did to MLK.
Because code verification to that level is expensive as hell?
For short/intermediate term research on things that are easily patentable, that is an easy question. The most valuable research is almost always that which makes the most money to the firm that "owns" the discovery, and rational scientists will work toward discovering the most valuable things that they can(Public heath and environmental technology are notable exceptions, at least without regulations and/or taxes). A more rigorous proof could be derived from Coase's Theorem and the General Welfare Theorem.
But patents hold a cost to society too, both in the transaction costs they create, and in that people who hold them work less because they can coast off of previous earnings. Because of this, we cannot extend this toward longer term research.
Worse, we don't really know what fields are valuable, so it's impossible to set effective prices for a lot of this stuff.
But altogether, we do a pretty good job of allocation, there are no large numbers of idle scientists, and our economy has tended to grow consistently over the last 50 years.
My concern, is that large government prizes will distort the economy, by pushing scientists and VC funding into "sexy" research that ultimately produces little(Lunar landers for example), at the expense of mundane yet important stuff(Capital market prediction, material science, etc).
And because the incentive effects of prizes are still not very well understood, I'm afraid of corporations doing the same thing.
Not only that, but keep in mind that these bright people were going to do something else before they decided to take up the prize. Is the US economy better off because a genius physicist came up with a lunar robot, when he would have discovered a new type of nuclear fusion had he not worked on the prize?
If I put money in the space program, I want it to be for research that will boost our economy, but is sufficiently long-term such that the market would not develop it.
Sending little probes to other planets meet this criteria, a space station arguably meets this criteria. Bold attention grabbing measures usually don't.
Ok, that's pretty reasonable. Thanks.
Explain to me why court oversight is an "unnecessary restriction" for foreign intelligence gathering, but not for domestic intelligence gathering. After all, 7/21 showed that domestic terrorism is just as dangerous as foreign terrorism.
"It's not a case of whether a "law" allowing this is Constitutional. Such collection has always been intrinsically and explicitly allowed, because such persons do not have Constitutional protections with respect to activities such as surveillance."
Executive agencies and their role usualy need to be specified by congress to achieve funding. There are ways around this by using the President's executive authority, but those legal theories are very controversial.
"Such collection has always been intrinsically and explicitly allowed, because such persons do not have Constitutional protections with respect to activities such as surveillance."
No, such collection has been allowed because the Supreme Court has avoided the issue like the plague, possibly out of fear of judicial non-acquiescence.
"Additionally, in order to be on an even playing field with other nations -- if you believe that using one's capacity to maintain a defense and collect intelligence is valuable to the preservation of security of a nation -- foreign intelligence collection that is not burdened with the same requirements for protection of our own citizens is simply one of those realities."
You assume it is one of those realities, but you never state any evidence that it is so.
My understanding was that security by obscurity has been mostly discredited. The best security systems are transparently impermeable.
Why exactly? You might be right, I'm not a military man, but I'm not sure why. The only organizations capable of launching attacks against domestic army bases have most likely infiltrated our military by now.
Meanwhile, I'd imagine that it might be useful for people who live on base. As you certainly know, bases sometimes contain non-military installations like stores or day care centers. I can imagine a soldier asking his wife to pick up the kids, and using the service to give her directions.
Yes, most people believe that a law allowing foreign surveillance would most likely be constitutional(Though the UN charter of human rights was ratified by the US, so that's a bit debatable)
But that defeats the purpose. If the US wanted to enslave everyone in Puerto Rico and force them to farm sugar all day, that most likely would also be constitutional(See the Insular cases of 1898).
The question is: Should congress pass a law requiring foreign surveillance to be illegal without a warrant? Hiding behind the constitution will not help you here, unless you want to support enslaving Puerto Rico.
So please, justify why you believe that invading the privacy of foreigners should not require a warrant.
This argument only makes sense in a strict legal sense. But just like the right to free speech, the freedom from unwarranted surveillance by the powerful is a fundamental right of man. If Americans should have this right, yet foreigners should not, then it becomes implicitly clear that foreigners are sub-human.
"You then seem to make the logical leap that any use of secrecy in the last 7 years has been to cover up corruption (and this has never happened at any other time in US history...?)."
It has, and that is the problem. Secrecy has been used as a cover for incompetence and power grabs for years. The fact that such a record is non-partisan, only bolsters the gp's argument.
"Some exclusively foreign traffic between foreign individuals can now travel through equipment located physically in the United States. Why should that be off limits?"
Your absolute refusal to admit that foreigners have a right to privacy disturbs me.
Suppose a politician is about to be elected in oil rich Nigeria, and he promises to nationalize American oil company assets in the country. The NSA then proceeds to monitor his communications, and discovers that he is homosexual. The US government then proceeds to leak the information to deeply conservative Nigeria, and a pro-American canidate is elected.
You want to give the government a blank check to do things like that? If the intelligence agencies think that the information is vital for our national security, they should be able get it passed a judge.
"Again, since warrants protect individuals, why shouldn't telecommunications operators be allowed to voluntary assist in the interception of such traffic via much, much easier means?"
Because this foreign person on the other end is a human being, with just as strong a right to privacy as the American.
"Foreign intelligence is a necessity, even for free nations. It always has been. Any denial of this is the denial of reality. "
That is rather debatable. You might be right, but considering the massive failures of intelligence over the last 50 years, the burden of proof is on you here.
"he Constitution only applies to US citizens or persons with a legal status within the United States. It does NOT apply to foreign persons outside of the US; any argument that it does flies in the face of the very notion of nation-states, borders, and international relationships."
Your argument flies in the face of the very notions of universal rights and freedom that our nation was founded on.
"This is precisely why the surveillance of such persons does not require a warrant. In the past, there was no earthly reason to conduct any such surveillance within the United States. Now there is."
Why do these people provide any more threat than people inside the United States? Why is it acceptable to force agents to get warrants when dealing with US citizens, if the threat to our security is so dire?
In the absence of the constitution, would you support requiring warrants for domestic surveillance?
In general, MSN seems dominant in Latin America(Except Brazil, I see a lot of G-talk there), Western Europe(At least England, Germany, Italy, and France), and the Middle East. Can anyone vouch for East Asia and Eastern Europe? [Or, God forbid, know any real statistics?]
Bullshit, nearly every hardware company posts firmware upgrades.
So it's more of an Apple to Apple comparison then you think.