No, Rehnquist was just doing his job. Rehnquist was a fantastic judge, you'll notice Reagan and Bush appointed well balanced judges, Clinton is the one who appointed extremist judges to the federal bench, like the femenist Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, both femenists. Look, guy; you can't know everything by reading a wikipedia document, and you make yourself look like a moron when you think you know everything after a few minutes of scanning.
By the way, that quote you cite is not by Ben Franklin. Let me guess, you live in San Francisco and you see the bumper stickers everywhere. Just keep floating down this river of propoganda, don't ever even try to think for yourself. God damn you self-obsessed liberals.
Yes, you take 3 people for example, they are all involved in a top secret spying program. One of them says to the others "Hey, we should use this for our own financial gain!". What do you think the odds are that one of the other two goes to the authorities? Accounting is one profession that has been good at keeping people honest (maybe not perfect). Accountants have access to information that could make them rich, and the feds have ways of identifying insider trading by harvesting information. Some people may be profiting, feds or sneaky accountants, but it's a necessary component of society. Some company explodes and the feds dig into people making huge trades before and after the event. How is that any different than investigators who identify a strange unique word people are using to trade child pornography on the internet, and they dig into everyone who's searched on that word? Is that something you or I should fear? The precedent is already there, forget about precedent for a moment. Possible alternatives, and their effectiveness?
Besides, that is what GWB says all the time, that the middle-eastern people should suffer to get freedom.
What's more, it should be forced upon them, if for nobody elses benefit than our own. Whoever said the middle east wasn't "ready" for democracy was an idiot.
Oh I understand your post quite well. You're afraid of the Orwellian nightmare. Stalinism, fascism. Stuff like that.
The problem is your opposition is ideological in nature. It is meant to provide balance, not to be adhered to literally. When I ask you a direct question, and you can't answer it because of ho-hum philosophical reason, it makes you look bad, like you're not even thinking. You're entrenched in this ideology. When you try and blend an argument about privacy in with an argument for freedom, with no clear distinction between the two, you are making some sort of fallacy, you tell me. You may as well start preaching about any doomsday scenario, overpopulation, global warming, the likelihood of an asteroid impact. On the other hand, it's only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of certain "freedoms" to trade child porn, or commit mass murder. When the government; the only people TO be trusted with all the information, try to do anything about these crimes, you scream some irrational horror story. I always feel like I have to remind you guys that the government is people like you and me. In this country, anybody can be part of the government, and behold the responsibility. My wife works for the government, she adheres to privacy laws. My best friend does surveillance for the Air Force, NSA, he can't even tell me what his job entails, or he goes to jail!
I'll tell you, this from my own head. Capitalism and fascism don't mix. One eventually takes over the other. People aren't productive when they're living in a vice. We proved that during the cold war, it's been proven time and time again throughout history, the Renaissance for example. Morality is subservient to the bottom line in this day and age, and there is a parallell between capitalism/freedom and anti-capitalism/fascism/totalitarianism. Capitalist society is not the likely breeding ground for this sort of thing.
My little brother killed himself driving in the rain when he was 16. An accident like his may be totally unpredictable, but it is predictable that your kids will want to see how fast they can go, or they think they can drive like in action movies. I did. Melted the engine on my first car going 110mph down PCH (the oil line burst). I never managed to kill myself, but I was damn stupid. So it may not all be about how you learn to drive, what kind of driver you grow up to be, but whether you grow up at all.
I'd prefer a device that had a remote shutdown feature, for when I have kids. It's all fine and good that your kids WANT to go fast, I think it's in a boys nature, so you really just have to disallow it completely.
In fact, they aught to put speed governors on cars, mandatory, like they do airbags. That would save lots of teenagers. Why haven't they done that? Is there some practical reason?
You don't understand the difference between freedom and privacy. They aren't interchangable. Are you trying to say people have a right to look at child porn? Or even that people have a right to allow minors access to porn? Saying "I am over the age of 18" never worked when you were 14 and wanted a porno mag from 7-eleven, why should it work on the internet? These questions haven't been addressed yet.
Personally I don't think naked women should pop up on my screen without credit card information first. That's what's been happening lately, too. I visit a site looking for cheap computer hardware, and I see porno banners. Free porn shouldn't be a click away for any minor, like it is right now. There are a lot of you on Slashdot who think the internet is better as total anarchy, for ideological reasons, but you're not thinking of OTHER PEOPLE, let alone "the children". What does privacy really get you, anyways? Denial of service attacks, child porn, spam.... haven't you thought this through?
Your inspirational quotes on "freedom" really have nothing to do with this. Wouldn't you still consider yourself a free man if you had to jump through hoops in order to look at porn?
That's ridiculous, on both counts. That's like saying nobody has heard the "he lied about WMD" propoganda. It's been plastered all over the news for months. You'll just have to face the facts that not everybody is paranoid and delusional.
And it appears you're convinced we'd have been better off if the manhattan project never existed. Is that correct?
Ever hear of the tyranny of the minority? Me neither! Go to the U.S. Senate and see it for yourself.
Many terrorists believe in killing Jews. Many terrorists, like Yasser Arafat, have direct links to the Nazi's. Can you imagine if one of our ex-presidents said "Yeah I served under a Nazi in WW2". Link
It's a shame your liberal arguments are the only one's people see. If you would take 2 seconds to google it, you would find the polls. I'm sure others have already posted links to them.
I agree with you on the "trust" question. It's a stupid question to be polling, and it is meant to deceive people, like many polls are. The question "do you support warrantless wiretaps" is a valid question though, and that's what the polls were asking, but a poll can be easily tarnished with this question, referenced:
57 percent said that in light of the NSA data-mining news and other executive actions, the Bush-Cheney Administration has "gone too far in expanding presidential power."
This type of polling doesn't need to be accurate either, because a final conclusion will not be made, as in a presidential election poll. They could be way off and nobody would ever know, and few would even care.
Word it a little differently and this is what you get:
A Rasmussen poll found that 64% of Americans support warrantless wiretapping of international calls made to or from suspected terrorists in the US
What the hell? This isn't insightful. And look, I've been squelched. Typical.
Slavery was only popular amongs rich land owners in the south. Most people in the north, and, unless you count slaves as 3/5ths of a human being, most people in the south didn't support slavery. If your saying at SOME POINT most people supported slavery, well, where are the polls to back that claim up?
The president's duty encompasses the WHOLE of the constitution, not just the parts you want to identify (and then one that isn't even in the constitution, the "right" to privacy). Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Do I have to repeat that over and over? He's protecting lives here. How do you think they caught these British terrorists, luck? They were spying on them! They had infiltrated their "secret" organization!
Insightful, pfffffft. We're done here. Your liberal friends want to silence me. Bye.
It's no surprise when you consider the links the entire region has to hitler and the nazis. Why he gives a damn about the palestinian cause? Yasser Arafat served under a nazi commander, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. Arafat was a nazi, Ahmadinejad is a nazi. We never hunted down the nazi's over there in the middle east, we left them to brew trouble. Had we exterminated the nazis across the globe like we were supposed to, we might not be dealing with this today. The fucked up thing is that hitler was just using the arabs, the arabs were next on his hit list after the jews. So what the hell? What the hell....
Something deep down in me says the entire middle-east is going to be 10 million degrees before this is over.
I read someplace else that the company has already filed for bankruptcy in anticipation of the lawsuits, and the certain loss of their reputation (would you ever buy a drug from this company?)
From a lawyers perspective, if you pay them compensation outside of court, you will be sued anyways, so it makes more sense to just settle in court.
I always hear people complain about drug companies, they test all sorts of things on people not just drugs. This is bound to happen sooner or later, even if you take all necessary precautions. What're you going to do? Stop developing new drugs?
2,000 pounds is a pretty tempting offer. If they were testing something a little more common, like arthritis medicine, I think I'd take it. But if someone offered me 10,000 to test new Erectile Dysfunction medication I think I'd pass. As a matter of fact, they do pain medicine trials here at the University of Utah all the time, I did it when I was younger, they want to test paid medicine on people who are scheduled to have their wisdom teeth out. They've never had any problems.
DO you know me? I think not, you know next to nothing about me.
It may have been a bit brazen of me. I apologize.
I think we made some mistakes in the past. Proxy wars are destructive and have proven to be unsuccessful in almost every case. I think the U.S. military needs to play a more active role these days, do our own dirty work, so to speak. Which is the case in Iraq. We created a monster. I don't think the middle east could have turned out much worse. I think Russia needs to clean up a lot of it's messes also. Who will be the last people on earth to be free? North Korea?
Also keep in mind that the constitution expresses the freedoms of American citizens from its government. All the NSA tapping was foreign communications, AFAIK. The call records have always been there for sifting, and if you're associating with known terrorists or their associates, hell yes you should be tapped. The people he is held accountable to have spoken, they want this.
Oh but we have a good example right now, the Bush admin. They feel as though they can spy on anyone and everyone, and they hold people in indefinite custidy without charging them with anything. While some speak out not many do, some even call those who do speak out traiters.
Yes it is a perfect example, because people generally agree that we should be tracking these phone calls and taking extra security measures. Thus, these initiatives are accepted. You act like he is not accountable to anybody, but he is. You don't put a president in office and let him do whatever he wants. Congress tried to impeach Clinton over a damn BJ.
This is exactly what Bush and the neocons in his admin has done. I'm still waiting to see all of those WMDs Saddam had.
That silly quote has nothing to do with what we're talking about, an all volunteer army. Everyone I know who was in the military before the war started joined because they wanted to see something like this. Everyone I know who joined after did it because they solemnly supported the cause. You can't argue on behalf of the veterans, since you aren't one. I've heard reports of more than 500 chemical munitions. Isn't that enough? Terrorists in Iraq have been using them, not quite as effective as the big explosions. Saddam is gone and now Iraq is turning into a democracy. You're so quick to jump on the liar bandwagon, but so hesitant to believe for a second that anything we're doing is actually working.
No you misunderstood me. I'm comparing now to then. Iran is at the same level as Germany, trying to develop nuclear weapons and what not. The advanced education system is critical to preventing oppression. One of the primary reasons Hitler could do what he did is because of the authoritative educational systems they inherited from the Prussians, a lot like current muslim-state education.
Although I disagree with you if you are trying to say that the US is susceptible to that sort of thing. Like I said, we're too advanced, people wouldn't accept oppressive rule. You can make laws but it doesn't mean everyone will follow them.
I disagree. I think you guys are getting way, way ahead of yourselves. In order for the police state to exist, there has to be a "New World Order". The United States is in competition for the best, brightest individuals. They come here for economic freedom and what not. If the trade-off was that you had to have a probe stuck up your butt when you crossed inter-state boundaries, I for one would move to Australia. I don't see the New World Order thing happening. Too expensive for the USA to conquer the world.
I also think the Orwellian nightmare is fundamentally flawed. Imagine if someone invents a nuclear reactor type device that sits on your kitchen counter, like the food-maker on star trek, and you can jimmy-rig the thing to manufacture plutonium. Do you want to live in a world where people are given all the freedom they need to commit mass murder? Imagine if instead of cars, we ride around in aircraft at mach 0.95. Do you police DUI the same way, considering a drunk driver is capable of destroying 5 city blocks? Do you even allow people to drive without computer restrictions? Do you allow people to buy caustic chemicals in the grocery store? (it used to be commonplace) These sorts of questions are completely new and you can't apply the same reasoning to them based on your ideology. The governments whole purpose is to enforce order in society. If you want to build bombs you can: move out to the middle of nowhere, start digging until you find useful metals and stuff, build a chemical factory............. you can't have any help from society because society doesn't want to help you with that sort of thing.
The world gets better and better. If you think the world was a better place when kings ruled and you could ride around on a horse chopping peoples heads off for sport, you are sorely mistaken. The smarter and more advanced we all get as a whole, the harder it is to implement oppressive institutions.
such as ceding control of.com/.net to Verisign, which have led to unnecessary monopoly situations, and resulting inflated prices.
What!? I remember paying $200 for my first domain to Internic (now Network Solutions). A few years back I bought a bunch of.com's from godaddy for $5 each. Inflated prices? Monopolies? What're you smoking?
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No, Rehnquist was just doing his job. Rehnquist was a fantastic judge, you'll notice Reagan and Bush appointed well balanced judges, Clinton is the one who appointed extremist judges to the federal bench, like the femenist Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, both femenists. Look, guy; you can't know everything by reading a wikipedia document, and you make yourself look like a moron when you think you know everything after a few minutes of scanning.
By the way, that quote you cite is not by Ben Franklin. Let me guess, you live in San Francisco and you see the bumper stickers everywhere. Just keep floating down this river of propoganda, don't ever even try to think for yourself. God damn you self-obsessed liberals.
http://www.futureofthebook.com/stories/storyReadeYes, you take 3 people for example, they are all involved in a top secret spying program. One of them says to the others "Hey, we should use this for our own financial gain!". What do you think the odds are that one of the other two goes to the authorities? Accounting is one profession that has been good at keeping people honest (maybe not perfect). Accountants have access to information that could make them rich, and the feds have ways of identifying insider trading by harvesting information. Some people may be profiting, feds or sneaky accountants, but it's a necessary component of society. Some company explodes and the feds dig into people making huge trades before and after the event. How is that any different than investigators who identify a strange unique word people are using to trade child pornography on the internet, and they dig into everyone who's searched on that word? Is that something you or I should fear? The precedent is already there, forget about precedent for a moment. Possible alternatives, and their effectiveness?
What's more, it should be forced upon them, if for nobody elses benefit than our own. Whoever said the middle east wasn't "ready" for democracy was an idiot.
Oh I understand your post quite well. You're afraid of the Orwellian nightmare. Stalinism, fascism. Stuff like that.
The problem is your opposition is ideological in nature. It is meant to provide balance, not to be adhered to literally. When I ask you a direct question, and you can't answer it because of ho-hum philosophical reason, it makes you look bad, like you're not even thinking. You're entrenched in this ideology. When you try and blend an argument about privacy in with an argument for freedom, with no clear distinction between the two, you are making some sort of fallacy, you tell me. You may as well start preaching about any doomsday scenario, overpopulation, global warming, the likelihood of an asteroid impact. On the other hand, it's only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of certain "freedoms" to trade child porn, or commit mass murder. When the government; the only people TO be trusted with all the information, try to do anything about these crimes, you scream some irrational horror story. I always feel like I have to remind you guys that the government is people like you and me. In this country, anybody can be part of the government, and behold the responsibility. My wife works for the government, she adheres to privacy laws. My best friend does surveillance for the Air Force, NSA, he can't even tell me what his job entails, or he goes to jail!
I'll tell you, this from my own head. Capitalism and fascism don't mix. One eventually takes over the other. People aren't productive when they're living in a vice. We proved that during the cold war, it's been proven time and time again throughout history, the Renaissance for example. Morality is subservient to the bottom line in this day and age, and there is a parallell between capitalism/freedom and anti-capitalism/fascism/totalitarianism. Capitalist society is not the likely breeding ground for this sort of thing.
My little brother killed himself driving in the rain when he was 16. An accident like his may be totally unpredictable, but it is predictable that your kids will want to see how fast they can go, or they think they can drive like in action movies. I did. Melted the engine on my first car going 110mph down PCH (the oil line burst). I never managed to kill myself, but I was damn stupid. So it may not all be about how you learn to drive, what kind of driver you grow up to be, but whether you grow up at all.
I'd prefer a device that had a remote shutdown feature, for when I have kids. It's all fine and good that your kids WANT to go fast, I think it's in a boys nature, so you really just have to disallow it completely.
In fact, they aught to put speed governors on cars, mandatory, like they do airbags. That would save lots of teenagers. Why haven't they done that? Is there some practical reason?
You don't understand the difference between freedom and privacy. They aren't interchangable. Are you trying to say people have a right to look at child porn? Or even that people have a right to allow minors access to porn? Saying "I am over the age of 18" never worked when you were 14 and wanted a porno mag from 7-eleven, why should it work on the internet? These questions haven't been addressed yet.
Personally I don't think naked women should pop up on my screen without credit card information first. That's what's been happening lately, too. I visit a site looking for cheap computer hardware, and I see porno banners. Free porn shouldn't be a click away for any minor, like it is right now. There are a lot of you on Slashdot who think the internet is better as total anarchy, for ideological reasons, but you're not thinking of OTHER PEOPLE, let alone "the children". What does privacy really get you, anyways? Denial of service attacks, child porn, spam.... haven't you thought this through?
Your inspirational quotes on "freedom" really have nothing to do with this. Wouldn't you still consider yourself a free man if you had to jump through hoops in order to look at porn?
That's ridiculous, on both counts. That's like saying nobody has heard the "he lied about WMD" propoganda. It's been plastered all over the news for months. You'll just have to face the facts that not everybody is paranoid and delusional.
And it appears you're convinced we'd have been better off if the manhattan project never existed. Is that correct?
Ever hear of the tyranny of the minority? Me neither! Go to the U.S. Senate and see it for yourself.
Many terrorists believe in killing Jews. Many terrorists, like Yasser Arafat, have direct links to the Nazi's. Can you imagine if one of our ex-presidents said "Yeah I served under a Nazi in WW2". Link
Are we still talking about warrantless wiretaps?
http://www.mediaresearch.org/press/2006/press200 60623.asp
Oh wait, I know what you're going to say. 500, big deal! Well then, how many WMD's is enough? Give me a number.
On second thought, don't bother.
It's a shame your liberal arguments are the only one's people see. If you would take 2 seconds to google it, you would find the polls. I'm sure others have already posted links to them.
I agree with you on the "trust" question. It's a stupid question to be polling, and it is meant to deceive people, like many polls are. The question "do you support warrantless wiretaps" is a valid question though, and that's what the polls were asking, but a poll can be easily tarnished with this question, referenced:
This type of polling doesn't need to be accurate either, because a final conclusion will not be made, as in a presidential election poll. They could be way off and nobody would ever know, and few would even care.
Word it a little differently and this is what you get:
What the hell? This isn't insightful. And look, I've been squelched. Typical.
Slavery was only popular amongs rich land owners in the south. Most people in the north, and, unless you count slaves as 3/5ths of a human being, most people in the south didn't support slavery. If your saying at SOME POINT most people supported slavery, well, where are the polls to back that claim up?
The president's duty encompasses the WHOLE of the constitution, not just the parts you want to identify (and then one that isn't even in the constitution, the "right" to privacy). Life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Do I have to repeat that over and over? He's protecting lives here. How do you think they caught these British terrorists, luck? They were spying on them! They had infiltrated their "secret" organization!
Insightful, pfffffft. We're done here. Your liberal friends want to silence me. Bye.
This is not true. Where do you pull a figure like that from? Your ass?
Most people in the United States support the wiretapping program.
Oh well. The cat's out of the bag. Another peaceful attempt at security blown to smitherines.
It's no surprise when you consider the links the entire region has to hitler and the nazis. Why he gives a damn about the palestinian cause? Yasser Arafat served under a nazi commander, Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini. Arafat was a nazi, Ahmadinejad is a nazi. We never hunted down the nazi's over there in the middle east, we left them to brew trouble. Had we exterminated the nazis across the globe like we were supposed to, we might not be dealing with this today. The fucked up thing is that hitler was just using the arabs, the arabs were next on his hit list after the jews. So what the hell? What the hell.... Something deep down in me says the entire middle-east is going to be 10 million degrees before this is over.
The Colbert Report, news for stupid people, stuff that's entertaining!!!
I've got the razr + bluetooth headset, all this thing needs is a little phased array radar and it's a tricorder. That would be so cool!
From a lawyers perspective, if you pay them compensation outside of court, you will be sued anyways, so it makes more sense to just settle in court.
I always hear people complain about drug companies, they test all sorts of things on people not just drugs. This is bound to happen sooner or later, even if you take all necessary precautions. What're you going to do? Stop developing new drugs?
2,000 pounds is a pretty tempting offer. If they were testing something a little more common, like arthritis medicine, I think I'd take it. But if someone offered me 10,000 to test new Erectile Dysfunction medication I think I'd pass. As a matter of fact, they do pain medicine trials here at the University of Utah all the time, I did it when I was younger, they want to test paid medicine on people who are scheduled to have their wisdom teeth out. They've never had any problems.
It may have been a bit brazen of me. I apologize.
I think we made some mistakes in the past. Proxy wars are destructive and have proven to be unsuccessful in almost every case. I think the U.S. military needs to play a more active role these days, do our own dirty work, so to speak. Which is the case in Iraq. We created a monster. I don't think the middle east could have turned out much worse. I think Russia needs to clean up a lot of it's messes also. Who will be the last people on earth to be free? North Korea?
Also keep in mind that the constitution expresses the freedoms of American citizens from its government. All the NSA tapping was foreign communications, AFAIK. The call records have always been there for sifting, and if you're associating with known terrorists or their associates, hell yes you should be tapped. The people he is held accountable to have spoken, they want this.
Yes it is a perfect example, because people generally agree that we should be tracking these phone calls and taking extra security measures. Thus, these initiatives are accepted. You act like he is not accountable to anybody, but he is. You don't put a president in office and let him do whatever he wants. Congress tried to impeach Clinton over a damn BJ.
That silly quote has nothing to do with what we're talking about, an all volunteer army. Everyone I know who was in the military before the war started joined because they wanted to see something like this. Everyone I know who joined after did it because they solemnly supported the cause. You can't argue on behalf of the veterans, since you aren't one. I've heard reports of more than 500 chemical munitions. Isn't that enough? Terrorists in Iraq have been using them, not quite as effective as the big explosions. Saddam is gone and now Iraq is turning into a democracy. You're so quick to jump on the liar bandwagon, but so hesitant to believe for a second that anything we're doing is actually working.
Although I disagree with you if you are trying to say that the US is susceptible to that sort of thing. Like I said, we're too advanced, people wouldn't accept oppressive rule. You can make laws but it doesn't mean everyone will follow them.
I also think the Orwellian nightmare is fundamentally flawed. Imagine if someone invents a nuclear reactor type device that sits on your kitchen counter, like the food-maker on star trek, and you can jimmy-rig the thing to manufacture plutonium. Do you want to live in a world where people are given all the freedom they need to commit mass murder? Imagine if instead of cars, we ride around in aircraft at mach 0.95. Do you police DUI the same way, considering a drunk driver is capable of destroying 5 city blocks? Do you even allow people to drive without computer restrictions? Do you allow people to buy caustic chemicals in the grocery store? (it used to be commonplace) These sorts of questions are completely new and you can't apply the same reasoning to them based on your ideology. The governments whole purpose is to enforce order in society. If you want to build bombs you can: move out to the middle of nowhere, start digging until you find useful metals and stuff, build a chemical factory............. you can't have any help from society because society doesn't want to help you with that sort of thing.
The world gets better and better. If you think the world was a better place when kings ruled and you could ride around on a horse chopping peoples heads off for sport, you are sorely mistaken. The smarter and more advanced we all get as a whole, the harder it is to implement oppressive institutions.
We could really use talented people like him over in the RUBY community :) Ruby just keeps getting better and better.
What!? I remember paying $200 for my first domain to Internic (now Network Solutions). A few years back I bought a bunch of .com's from godaddy for $5 each. Inflated prices? Monopolies? What're you smoking?
The USA: just stay away from Vermont