all three nodes that you use in Tor is monitored by the NSA and such they can simply do traffic analysis based on time and size of data packets.
I don't mean using Tor to access an open web site, but to access an onion forum. If that drug site I don't remember the name manages to continue working why wouldn't this?
I feel PJ is making an important statement, more convincing than anything I've seen yet.
I don't find it convincing, particularly this bit: "there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate". Of course there is. Setup a forum on Tor, Freenet or some other darknet and collaborate there, then publish the results on the open web. Groklaw has a very technical demographics, almost anyone interested will know how to participate.
If understanding a law requires 'considerable legal training', then it's a bad law. How can Joe Public know whether they're breaking a law if they can't understand it?
Bad from our perspective, good from theirs. It makes sense for power hungry politicians to have as many ways to persecute enemies, real or imaginary, as possible. A huge set of arbitrary, ambiguous laws which the powers that be can or not apply to individuals is all they want, because with them everyone is guilty of something and then it's just a matter of choosing who to silence and how to best silence them given the set of laws that can be applied to his "case".
I don't know about the US or the UK, but here in Brazil someone once calculated, adding up the federal, state and local levels, that we have about 15 million laws. Some of those have thousands of pages. How many people in a population of 150 million do you want to bet can claim to not be breaking any of them?
That's what politicians like, and thus everyone's a criminal, no exceptions.
Fortunately, the people who believe death is a gift will rapidly die out, and only us aspiring immortals will be left.
"I have lived a hundred and ten years," the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). "I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you do with eternity, Harry?"
Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."
"I did not understand much of that," said Dumbledore. "But I must ask if these are things that you truly desire so desperately, or if you only imagine them so as to imagine not being tired, as you run and run from death."
"Life is not a finite list of things that you check off before you're allowed to die," Harry said firmly. "It's life, you just go on living it. If I'm not doing those things it'll be because I've found something better."
Dumbledore sighed. His fingers drummed on a clock; as they touched it, the numerals changed to an indecipherable script, and the hands briefly appeared in different positions. "In the unlikely event that I am permitted to tarry until a hundred and fifty," said the old wizard, "I do not think I would mind. But two hundred years would be entirely too much of a good thing."
"Yes, well," Harry said, his voice a little dry as he thought of his Mum and Dad and their allotted span if Harry didn't do something about it, "I suspect, Headmaster, that if you came from a culture where people were accustomed to living four hundred years, that dying at two hundred would seem just as tragically premature as dying at, say, eighty."
That's great and nice and works perfectly when the other 99% of voters start acting that way too, WHICH THEY DON'T because they prefer nash equilibrium over superrationality.
Even so, if election after election the alternatives start gaining more votes due basically to people seeing the alternatives gaining more votes, at some point a threshold could be crossed with the effect gaining momentum. It's unlikely, but given that in the end choosing a republicrat over a demoblican or the other way around is basically irrelevant (28 bits of similarity, 1 bit of divergence), what is in it for you to lose? Send the message. Someone might even listen to it.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
Absolutely true, in a mathematical sense even:
There are roughly 300 million people in the United States, of whom only one can be President at any given time.
With 300 million available candidates, many of whom are not nincompoops, why does America keep electing nincompoops to political office?
Sending a message to select 1 out of 300 million possibilities requires 29 bits. So if you vote in only the general election for the Presidency, then some mysterious force narrows the election down to 2 out of 300 million possibilities - exerting 28 bits of decision power - and then you, or rather the entire voting population, exert 1 more bit of decision power. If you vote in a primary election, you may send another 2 or 3 bits worth of message.
Where do the other 25 bits of decision power come from?
(...) Since around half the population is under the age of 35, at least one bit of the missing decision power is exerted by 55 delegates in Philadelphia in 1787. Though the "natural-born citizen" clause comes from a letter sent by John Jay to George Washington, a suggestion that was adopted without debate by the Philadelphia Convention.
(...) Likewise, not everyone would want to be President. (But see the hidden box: In principle the option exists of enforcing Presidential service, like jury duty.) How many people would run for President if they had a serious chance at winning? Let's pretend the number is only 150,000. That accounts for another 10 bits.
Then some combination of the party structure, and the media telling complicit voters who voters are likely to vote for, is exerting on the order of 14-15 bits of power over the Presidency; while the voters only exert 3-4 bits. And actually the situation is worse than this, because the media and party structure get to move first. They can eliminate nearly all the variance along any particular dimension. So that by the time you get to choose one of four "serious" "front-running" candidates, that is, the ones approved by both the party structure and the media, you're choosing between 90.8% nincompoop and 90.6% nincompoop.
I seriously think the best thing you can do about the situation, as a voter, is stop trying to be clever. Don't try to vote for someone you don't really like, because you think your vote is more likely to make a difference that way. Don't fret about "electability". Don't try to predict and outwit other voters. Don't treat it as a horse race. Don't worry about "wasting your vote" - it always sends a message, you may as well make it a true message.
(...) Oh - and if you're going to vote at all, vote in the primary. That's where most of your remaining bits and remaining variance have a chance to be exerted."
You have either not used Safari much, or you haven't looked closely at it.
That's correct. I rarely use it, only when web developing, and I found interesting that it came set to block 3rd party cookies by default, but I haven't tested whether it works or not. It seems then that Firefox will indeed be the first to actually achieve this. Thanks for the correction!
Thereby creating Problem B, and worsening Problem Y, which was being alleviated by Program X.
No, returning to the previous problem, not creating a new one. The corollary to the Chodorov Principle is that:
* To solve problem 'p' program 'X' is instituted, however it has the side effect of causing problem 'A'; * To solve problem 'A' then program 'Y' is instituted, however it has the side effect of causing problem 'B'; * To solve problem 'B' then program 'Z' is instituted, however it has the side effect of causing problem 'C';
Rinse and repeat until the sum of side effect problems 'A'+'B'+'C'+...+'n' becomes greater than the original problem 'p'.
The current situation in US politics is an exact example of this. It's finally reached the point where all the side effects have become a huger mess than the original 'p', and whatever you do you'll only increase the side effects even further.
Mises? Really?
Yes, really. Good theorists over there. A certain level of narrow mindedness, a strong avoidance of rigorous scientific research due to unfortunate ideological rationalizations, but on average, and despite its flaws, quite interesting.
Judging by how every new law seems to have its own set of unintended consequences, I'm skeptical of anybody who would claim to be able to design a system that would be resistant against such biases. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
Cf. the Chodorov Principle: "For every social problem A caused by government program X, problem A can be solved by abolishing program X."
"No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story." -- Jim Butcher
It's not cost effective to send aid workers when they will die and can't deliver the aid.
There are two not mutually exclusive solutions to this: to make deals with the local guerillas and warlords (I fail to see how "terrorists" would form a distinct category from those) and to pay bodyguards subcontracted from them to protect the aid workers, since those are the law over their respective territories. As for places in an active state of war the best approach is to not enter them until said war is over so as to not create terrorists (this time actually so) focused on you rather than on whatever their original enemies are (unless, of course, there are absolutely overwhelming human rights violations such as genocide at play, since those evidently overcome any such consideration).
But I still completely disagree that it should be anybody's goal to ensure that "the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists."
The problem is that someone's an actual terrorist only after actually committing some terrorist activity or at least helping someone who did. Trying to go after people who are "thinking about" committing an act of terrorism is going after someone for a thought crime. No, the appropriate approach is to focus on prevention. You try the best you can, upper bound by an objective cost-benefit analysis, to prevent such acts from being successful. And if it so happens that one such act goes through the prevention efforts and end up happening, then you go after those who *now* have actually become criminals to prosecute and punish them to the full extent of their *actual* crime.
There's no place in a free society for thought crimes. Widespread surveillance is unneeded both in principle and in practice.
remove religion and most 'terrorism' will disappear.
Nope. If you said "remove political ideologies" I'd tend to agree. There is no strong correlation between (ir)religion and terrorism/non-terrorism, but there is such a strong correlation between (a)politics and terrorism/non-terrorism. Both "politics plus religion" and "politics minus religion" can develop into terrorism. Weren't it so and atheist movements such as the French Revolution and Communism would not have developed terrorist activities. On the other hand neither "non-politics plus religion" nor "non-politics minus religion" ever develop into it.
So you basically consider the existence of diarrhea deaths, for any reason, to be a license for mass murder anywhere in the world?
It should mean that fighting diarrhea should be about 700 times more important than fighting terrorism, and funded proportionally. It's basic cost-benefit analysis. What will save more lives per dollar invested? Invest the majority of whatever you have on the first spots and you'll be doing more for the wellbeing of the human species than whatever your ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal instincts tell you the order or priorities *should* be. Human instincts are poor policy planners in any context involving more than about 60 to 150 individuals.
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!
Here's a better alternative: ask yourself what causes someone to become a terrorist; then ask yourself whether you're doing something in that list; then ask yourself whether those things you're doing are necessary and important enough that it's worth it to have terrorists being formed due to you doing them; then, if the answer is "no", stop doing them. That's a good way to not have terrorists appearing, or at least to not have a majority of them appearing, meaning you won't have to worry about catching that which doesn't exist anymore.
An alternative is to do a cost-benefit analysis. In which position, relative to all other troubles are terrorism-caused violence, destruction and death? 1st place, 2nd, 3rd, 100th, 1000th? Adjust your priorities accordingly. If something kills 'n' more people than terrorists, it should be worth 'n' times more of your time than terrorism. Terrorism kills on average what? A few hundred people every year? There's stuff out there that kill a few hundred thousand people every year. Ask yourself: why aren't you worried a thousand times more about those?
Terrorism is a very minor problem. Giving it all this attention is a cognitive failure. There are much more objectively important issues out there.
Insult script kiddies who see themselves as cyber activists, to get them to do their worst
Wait. Do you mean that 'Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years' is an insult?
What is 'best' for a set of people is more complicated than maximum economic output overall.
On a subjective level that might be true, but on an objective one it isn't. Today's poorest have access to technologies a medieval king wouldn't be able to afford, never mind a poor peasant from them. Sure, he might miss having a deeper meaning in his life, miss having more power, miss the comfort of being a relevant part in a small community where everyone has a voice etc., but he's only able to feel this way because he isn't one of the 9 in 10 children who died before 5 years of age back then. And so on and so forth, up to and including food, which in the world of yesteryear consumed up to 90% of one's earnings. These things are all possible only thanks to the absolutely HUGE trade we have nowadays which, thanks to the economies of scale it causes, makes the magic of science and technology accessible to most of humanity.
And who cares about some foreign companies thinking the US is too expensive to operate in. The sooner they leave the sooner the jobs farmed out come back to the US.
Nope, they don't. There is no such thing as unilateral commerce. If you block the exchange of goods and services in one direction, the other direction follows suit. That's the reason that EVERY country that starts implementing trade barriers to "protect the local economy" starts to almost immediately impoverish. Weren't that so and you'd have to ask yourself why to stop at national borders, why not also implement trade barriers between States, and then between towns, and then between neighborhoods. After all, the evil people from next street are stealing the jobs from the good folk of this street here, and IT. MUST. STOP!!!!!!1!!1!!!!!1!!
And from what I hear, the rest of the Muslim world can't stand them.
That's in part because they follow Wahhabism, a (somewhat modern) ultra-fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam which believes all other branches to be idolatrous, all the while "owning" Islam's most sacred sites such as the Kaaba. This means they go around destroying whatever they can find of Islam's history in name of keeping it free from idolatry. For example, a few years ago I remember reading how they had destroyed a house once owned by Muhammad (or someone almost as important, I dunno), building something non-religious over it so that Muslims would stop going there on pilgrimages.
Add to that brand of crazy the well known fact that the US government backs the Saudi government, and you get all kinds of unwanted consequences, such as that the US government not only loves to wage war in the region, but it also (indirectly) supports the destruction of Islamic sites. Definitely doubleplusungood...
I thought old DVD players didn't accept anything but UDF 1.02, the DVD-Video file system, because they don't have USB ports.
Some do. I have an old Samsung model with such an USB port. It supports playing MP3 files, viewing JPEGs and watching video files in a small list of supported formats.
Slashdot Mirror
all three nodes that you use in Tor is monitored by the NSA and such they can simply do traffic analysis based on time and size of data packets.
I don't mean using Tor to access an open web site, but to access an onion forum. If that drug site I don't remember the name manages to continue working why wouldn't this?
I feel PJ is making an important statement, more convincing than anything I've seen yet.
I don't find it convincing, particularly this bit: "there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate". Of course there is. Setup a forum on Tor, Freenet or some other darknet and collaborate there, then publish the results on the open web. Groklaw has a very technical demographics, almost anyone interested will know how to participate.
If understanding a law requires 'considerable legal training', then it's a bad law. How can Joe Public know whether they're breaking a law if they can't understand it?
Bad from our perspective, good from theirs. It makes sense for power hungry politicians to have as many ways to persecute enemies, real or imaginary, as possible. A huge set of arbitrary, ambiguous laws which the powers that be can or not apply to individuals is all they want, because with them everyone is guilty of something and then it's just a matter of choosing who to silence and how to best silence them given the set of laws that can be applied to his "case".
I don't know about the US or the UK, but here in Brazil someone once calculated, adding up the federal, state and local levels, that we have about 15 million laws. Some of those have thousands of pages. How many people in a population of 150 million do you want to bet can claim to not be breaking any of them?
That's what politicians like, and thus everyone's a criminal, no exceptions.
Remember: it's Ya-"let's delete early Internet history because keeping 1TB around is too expensive"-hoo we're talking about.
Never trust Yahoo. Ever.
Fortunately, the people who believe death is a gift will rapidly die out, and only us aspiring immortals will be left.
"I have lived a hundred and ten years," the old wizard said quietly (taking his beard out of the bowl, and jiggling it to shake out the color). "I have seen and done a great many things, too many of which I wish I had never seen or done. And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does! What would you do with eternity, Harry?"
Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."
"I did not understand much of that," said Dumbledore. "But I must ask if these are things that you truly desire so desperately, or if you only imagine them so as to imagine not being tired, as you run and run from death."
"Life is not a finite list of things that you check off before you're allowed to die," Harry said firmly. "It's life, you just go on living it. If I'm not doing those things it'll be because I've found something better."
Dumbledore sighed. His fingers drummed on a clock; as they touched it, the numerals changed to an indecipherable script, and the hands briefly appeared in different positions. "In the unlikely event that I am permitted to tarry until a hundred and fifty," said the old wizard, "I do not think I would mind. But two hundred years would be entirely too much of a good thing."
"Yes, well," Harry said, his voice a little dry as he thought of his Mum and Dad and their allotted span if Harry didn't do something about it, "I suspect, Headmaster, that if you came from a culture where people were accustomed to living four hundred years, that dying at two hundred would seem just as tragically premature as dying at, say, eighty."
From: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 39
It's that the logic is crackpottery. Entropy is not relevancy.
I think you're reading in it more than what was actually stated.
Your bit calculations are cute.
What did the log2 do to you for you to hate it so? ;)
Adding is easier than multiplying. Logs convert multiplications into sums. Leave it at that.
That's great and nice and works perfectly when the other 99% of voters start acting that way too, WHICH THEY DON'T because they prefer nash equilibrium over superrationality.
Even so, if election after election the alternatives start gaining more votes due basically to people seeing the alternatives gaining more votes, at some point a threshold could be crossed with the effect gaining momentum. It's unlikely, but given that in the end choosing a republicrat over a demoblican or the other way around is basically irrelevant (28 bits of similarity, 1 bit of divergence), what is in it for you to lose? Send the message. Someone might even listen to it.
There is never an excuse when you willingly vote for evil. Never.
Absolutely true, in a mathematical sense even:
There are roughly 300 million people in the United States, of whom only one can be President at any given time.
With 300 million available candidates, many of whom are not nincompoops, why does America keep electing nincompoops to political office?
Sending a message to select 1 out of 300 million possibilities requires 29 bits. So if you vote in only the general election for the Presidency, then some mysterious force narrows the election down to 2 out of 300 million possibilities - exerting 28 bits of decision power - and then you, or rather the entire voting population, exert 1 more bit of decision power. If you vote in a primary election, you may send another 2 or 3 bits worth of message.
Where do the other 25 bits of decision power come from?
(...) Since around half the population is under the age of 35, at least one bit of the missing decision power is exerted by 55 delegates in Philadelphia in 1787. Though the "natural-born citizen" clause comes from a letter sent by John Jay to George Washington, a suggestion that was adopted without debate by the Philadelphia Convention.
(...) Likewise, not everyone would want to be President. (But see the hidden box: In principle the option exists of enforcing Presidential service, like jury duty.) How many people would run for President if they had a serious chance at winning? Let's pretend the number is only 150,000. That accounts for another 10 bits.
Then some combination of the party structure, and the media telling complicit voters who voters are likely to vote for, is exerting on the order of 14-15 bits of power over the Presidency; while the voters only exert 3-4 bits. And actually the situation is worse than this, because the media and party structure get to move first. They can eliminate nearly all the variance along any particular dimension. So that by the time you get to choose one of four "serious" "front-running" candidates, that is, the ones approved by both the party structure and the media, you're choosing between 90.8% nincompoop and 90.6% nincompoop.
I seriously think the best thing you can do about the situation, as a voter, is stop trying to be clever. Don't try to vote for someone you don't really like, because you think your vote is more likely to make a difference that way. Don't fret about "electability". Don't try to predict and outwit other voters. Don't treat it as a horse race. Don't worry about "wasting your vote" - it always sends a message, you may as well make it a true message.
(...) Oh - and if you're going to vote at all, vote in the primary. That's where most of your remaining bits and remaining variance have a chance to be exerted."
Source: Stop Voting For Nincompoops.
You have either not used Safari much, or you haven't looked closely at it.
That's correct. I rarely use it, only when web developing, and I found interesting that it came set to block 3rd party cookies by default, but I haven't tested whether it works or not. It seems then that Firefox will indeed be the first to actually achieve this. Thanks for the correction!
Yeah... I think it more likely they will decide to opt out of the browser in favor of one that "just works."
Like Safari, which already does this?
Thereby creating Problem B, and worsening Problem Y, which was being alleviated by Program X.
No, returning to the previous problem, not creating a new one. The corollary to the Chodorov Principle is that:
* To solve problem 'p' program 'X' is instituted, however it has the side effect of causing problem 'A';
* To solve problem 'A' then program 'Y' is instituted, however it has the side effect of causing problem 'B';
* To solve problem 'B' then program 'Z' is instituted, however it has the side effect of causing problem 'C';
Rinse and repeat until the sum of side effect problems 'A'+'B'+'C'+...+'n' becomes greater than the original problem 'p'.
The current situation in US politics is an exact example of this. It's finally reached the point where all the side effects have become a huger mess than the original 'p', and whatever you do you'll only increase the side effects even further.
Mises? Really?
Yes, really. Good theorists over there. A certain level of narrow mindedness, a strong avoidance of rigorous scientific research due to unfortunate ideological rationalizations, but on average, and despite its flaws, quite interesting.
Judging by how every new law seems to have its own set of unintended consequences, I'm skeptical of anybody who would claim to be able to design a system that would be resistant against such biases. Sometimes the only winning move is not to play.
Cf. the Chodorov Principle: "For every social problem A caused by government program X, problem A can be solved by abolishing program X."
The bad guys always think they are the good guys.
"No one is an unjust villain in his own mind. Even - perhaps even especially - those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call 'hard but necessary steps' for the good of their nation. We're all the hero of our own story." -- Jim Butcher
It's not cost effective to send aid workers when they will die and can't deliver the aid.
There are two not mutually exclusive solutions to this: to make deals with the local guerillas and warlords (I fail to see how "terrorists" would form a distinct category from those) and to pay bodyguards subcontracted from them to protect the aid workers, since those are the law over their respective territories. As for places in an active state of war the best approach is to not enter them until said war is over so as to not create terrorists (this time actually so) focused on you rather than on whatever their original enemies are (unless, of course, there are absolutely overwhelming human rights violations such as genocide at play, since those evidently overcome any such consideration).
But I still completely disagree that it should be anybody's goal to ensure that "the authorities have no hope of finding the actual terrorists."
The problem is that someone's an actual terrorist only after actually committing some terrorist activity or at least helping someone who did. Trying to go after people who are "thinking about" committing an act of terrorism is going after someone for a thought crime. No, the appropriate approach is to focus on prevention. You try the best you can, upper bound by an objective cost-benefit analysis, to prevent such acts from being successful. And if it so happens that one such act goes through the prevention efforts and end up happening, then you go after those who *now* have actually become criminals to prosecute and punish them to the full extent of their *actual* crime.
There's no place in a free society for thought crimes. Widespread surveillance is unneeded both in principle and in practice.
remove religion and most 'terrorism' will disappear.
Nope. If you said "remove political ideologies" I'd tend to agree. There is no strong correlation between (ir)religion and terrorism/non-terrorism, but there is such a strong correlation between (a)politics and terrorism/non-terrorism. Both "politics plus religion" and "politics minus religion" can develop into terrorism. Weren't it so and atheist movements such as the French Revolution and Communism would not have developed terrorist activities. On the other hand neither "non-politics plus religion" nor "non-politics minus religion" ever develop into it.
So you basically consider the existence of diarrhea deaths, for any reason, to be a license for mass murder anywhere in the world?
It should mean that fighting diarrhea should be about 700 times more important than fighting terrorism, and funded proportionally. It's basic cost-benefit analysis. What will save more lives per dollar invested? Invest the majority of whatever you have on the first spots and you'll be doing more for the wellbeing of the human species than whatever your ancestral hunter-gatherer tribal instincts tell you the order or priorities *should* be. Human instincts are poor policy planners in any context involving more than about 60 to 150 individuals.
But I definitely DO want them to catch the "actual terrorists" before they can commit their acts of terrorism!
Here's a better alternative: ask yourself what causes someone to become a terrorist; then ask yourself whether you're doing something in that list; then ask yourself whether those things you're doing are necessary and important enough that it's worth it to have terrorists being formed due to you doing them; then, if the answer is "no", stop doing them. That's a good way to not have terrorists appearing, or at least to not have a majority of them appearing, meaning you won't have to worry about catching that which doesn't exist anymore.
An alternative is to do a cost-benefit analysis. In which position, relative to all other troubles are terrorism-caused violence, destruction and death? 1st place, 2nd, 3rd, 100th, 1000th? Adjust your priorities accordingly. If something kills 'n' more people than terrorists, it should be worth 'n' times more of your time than terrorism. Terrorism kills on average what? A few hundred people every year? There's stuff out there that kill a few hundred thousand people every year. Ask yourself: why aren't you worried a thousand times more about those?
Terrorism is a very minor problem. Giving it all this attention is a cognitive failure. There are much more objectively important issues out there.
Insult script kiddies who see themselves as cyber activists, to get them to do their worst
Wait. Do you mean that 'Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven't talked to the opposite sex in five or six years' is an insult?
What is 'best' for a set of people is more complicated than maximum economic output overall.
On a subjective level that might be true, but on an objective one it isn't. Today's poorest have access to technologies a medieval king wouldn't be able to afford, never mind a poor peasant from them. Sure, he might miss having a deeper meaning in his life, miss having more power, miss the comfort of being a relevant part in a small community where everyone has a voice etc., but he's only able to feel this way because he isn't one of the 9 in 10 children who died before 5 years of age back then. And so on and so forth, up to and including food, which in the world of yesteryear consumed up to 90% of one's earnings. These things are all possible only thanks to the absolutely HUGE trade we have nowadays which, thanks to the economies of scale it causes, makes the magic of science and technology accessible to most of humanity.
And who cares about some foreign companies thinking the US is too expensive to operate in. The sooner they leave the sooner the jobs farmed out come back to the US.
Nope, they don't. There is no such thing as unilateral commerce. If you block the exchange of goods and services in one direction, the other direction follows suit. That's the reason that EVERY country that starts implementing trade barriers to "protect the local economy" starts to almost immediately impoverish. Weren't that so and you'd have to ask yourself why to stop at national borders, why not also implement trade barriers between States, and then between towns, and then between neighborhoods. After all, the evil people from next street are stealing the jobs from the good folk of this street here, and IT. MUST. STOP!!!!!!1!!1!!!!!1!!
And from what I hear, the rest of the Muslim world can't stand them.
That's in part because they follow Wahhabism, a (somewhat modern) ultra-fundamentalist branch of Sunni Islam which believes all other branches to be idolatrous, all the while "owning" Islam's most sacred sites such as the Kaaba. This means they go around destroying whatever they can find of Islam's history in name of keeping it free from idolatry. For example, a few years ago I remember reading how they had destroyed a house once owned by Muhammad (or someone almost as important, I dunno), building something non-religious over it so that Muslims would stop going there on pilgrimages.
Add to that brand of crazy the well known fact that the US government backs the Saudi government, and you get all kinds of unwanted consequences, such as that the US government not only loves to wage war in the region, but it also (indirectly) supports the destruction of Islamic sites. Definitely doubleplusungood...
US Const: I.8.8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times (...)
The constitution is about as non-temporary as you can get.
Care to explain in which way "limited Times" would be synonymous to "non-temporary" rather than to "temporary"?
I thought old DVD players didn't accept anything but UDF 1.02, the DVD-Video file system, because they don't have USB ports.
Some do. I have an old Samsung model with such an USB port. It supports playing MP3 files, viewing JPEGs and watching video files in a small list of supported formats.