You should have also noted that alcohol was highly prevalent in the speeding accidents
As the article observes: "Speeding reduces a driver's ability to steer safely around curves or objects in the roadway, extends the distance necessary to stop a vehicle, and increases the distance a vehicle travels while the driver reacts to a dangerous situation." The description of the effects of speeding resembles the effects of alcohol in reducing a driver's ability to respond.
However, the safest speed is zero. Every speed limit represents a tradeoff between the need to get somewhere fast and the likelihood of an accident preventing getting there at all. For all I know you may be a safer driver at high speeds than most people are at the speed limit.
I just wanted to point out that not all the fatalaties were caused by speeding alone, which is what your post implied.
I was pointing out that more was at stake than a speeding ticket.
Only in the case of opinions, expert and otherwise, where you must rely not on the argument or evidence being presented but on the judgment of someone else, may personal or background information be used to evaluate the ideas expressed.
The sole evidence for your rhetorical flourish was an unsupported prediction of the future: "and rates won't go down one cent."
You will also notice that I went beyond the ad hominem attack to point out the absurdity of you position, which you have ceased to defend.
There is an unsubstanciated assumption in your comment that driving safely is contingent on driving legally.
I believe the connection between breaking driving laws and accidents is well substantiated. After all, the only purpose of enforcing the laws is to reduce accidents. It would be quite a stretch to argue that breaking the laws is generally safer than obeying them.
I'll drive my late 1990s car until it literally falls apart if the alternative is being tracked like a tagged doe by insurace companies or armed forces of the state (aka police).
You again. You are the dingbat who was arguing that committing suicide is crafty. Here you are boasting that you'll drive a car until it is "literally" falling apart. Despite my doubts, it sound like you really believe that blatantly self-destructive behavior is crafty.
What are you going to do when your car literally falls apart on the highway at 90 miles an hour, oh Crafty One? Call your insurance company?
They should learn to respect someone who wants to drive faster than them, not get aggravated at them. Chances are I'll be the one with the expensive ticket, not them.
In 1996, speeding was a contributing factor in 30 percent of all fatal crashes, and 12,998 lives were lost in speeding-related crashes.
Chances are you'll be the one who kills an innocent person, not them.
If they eliminate all insurance liability for driving mistakes that lead to accidents, what's the point in insurance in the first place?
Under the present system people who are at fault in an accident are still covered by their policy. However, their rates go up after the accident. Presumably, under a black box system, unsafe drivers would still be covered. They would just pay higher premiums. In effect, the penalty for unsafe driving would be paid before the accident, rather than afterwards.
Such a system might actually encourage safer driving. Drivers would receive a financial benefit for obeying the law even when they mistakenly think the risk of an accident is low.
Re:Thoreau on Activism vs. Civil Disobedience
on
On Hacktivism
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
refusing to obey government censorship (in places like China) by hacking through their censors is, in my mind, is a very noble thing.
To be consistent with Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience, the hacker would be have to announce his actions to the authorities and be prepared to go to jail.
As political tactics, Thoreau's ideas may not be so effective in China. Considering the treatment of the Falun Gong and other religious groups, appeals to the conscience of the Chinese authorities are likely to be in vain. They don't have any.
After Tianamen Square no one needs to lecture the Chinese on civil disobedience or the consequences thereof.
They can go to prison for 2 years if they fail on request by the police to decrypt it.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is a bit more complicated than this statement suggests. For instance, the explanatory notes say the act creates civil liability for unlawful interception on a private telecommunications network and defines who may bring an action, namely the sender, recipient or intended recipient. For example, where an employee believes that their employer has unlawfully intercepted a telephone conversation with a third party, either the employee or the third party may sue the employer.
Interception normally requires a warrant from the Secretary of State. It would not be sufficient for him to consider that a warrant might be useful in supplementing other material, or that the information that it could produce could be interesting. The word 'necessary' means 'necessary in a democratic society'.
The act provides for a tribunal as a means of redress for those who wish to complain about the use of the powers.
The provision that forces disclosure of the decryption key assumes that the investigator has authority to read the email in the first place.
The suggestion that the British practice resembles a dictatorship is preposterous.
Actions speak louder than words
on
On Hacktivism
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Our definition of hacktivism is, "using technology to advance human rights through electronic media."
You might not know it from reading the manifesto, but cDc and Hactivismo have actually been working on a product called Peekabooty that allows users to sneak through the firewalls that oppressive regimes set up to restrict access to the Internet.
Hacktivism chooses open code, mostly.
Peekabooty is open source under the GPL but the FAQ advises people who would like to do testing: "You should have enough equipment to run at least three nodes, which means three MS Windows machines (we are in the process of porting it to Linux). You should also be skilled with tracing through code using Visual C++ or your own favorite debugger."
the main challenge for hackers is to keep focused on the goal of liberating the Internet.
There seems to have been some kind of falling out between cDc and Hactivismo over Peekabooty. The lead developer Paul Baranowski (aka Drunken Master) said he has "decided to sever ties with the Hacktivismo group but he will continue to develop the Peekabooty app. Occasionally developers can't find the environment they need to do their best work and now is one such time."
All polite so there wasn't enough evidence to do anything...
You are thinking of Warren vs. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department. The police certainly could have entered the house without a warrant, under exigent circumstances, namely, "Those circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to believe that entry (or other relevant prompt action) was necessary to prevent physical harm to the officers or other persons, the destruction of relevant evidence, the escape of a suspect, or some other consequence improperly frustrating legitimate law enforcement efforts." (United States v. McConney, 1984).
However in Warren, the issues were completely different. Here the victims sued the police because the police had failed to protect them. The court ruled that when "a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community". This decision would appear to confirm the responsibility of the police to conduct investigations (as a duty to the public at large) even if they cannot be held liable for failing to protect every individual.
In a similar manner, despite the original poster's comment, the police aren't necessarily obligated to catch perpetrators. California Government Code says the police may not be sued "for failure to provide adequate police protection or service, failure to prevent the commission of crimes and failure to apprehend criminals."
Nevertheless, catching perpetrators is what police do as well as investigating, patroling and otherwise preventing crimes as best they can.
Law enforcement agents have to do ONE thing and ONE thing only.
One need only look at the FBI's mandate to know that this statement is untrue:
The FBI's investigative functions fall into the categories of applicant matters; civil rights; counterterrorism; foreign counterintelligence; organized crime/drugs; violent crimes and major offenders; and financial crime.
The police have an investigative role to determine if a crime has been committed as well as responsibility to catch the perps. This role also involves patroling to look for signs of a crime being committed.
Part of the purpose of patroling is to prevent or discourage crime by raising the chance that criminals will be caught in the act.
No police force simply sits in the precinct station by the phone waiting for citizens to report a crime, although no doubt the criminals wish they would.
We live in an era of unprecedented governmental respect for civil liberties.
One can see this respect even in the USA PATRIOT Act that uses tortuous language to try and make the act consistent with the Constitution and various court rulings. The British, with a more flexible notion of a constitution and a different role for the judiciary, simply hand government new powers to fight terrorism without such concern for precedent.
A good deal of the USAPA consists of minor, even miniscule, changes to earlier acts, like:
(ii) in subparagraph (B), by striking the period and inserting `; or';
This highly legalistic approach to extending government powers shows that the government is mindful of what it is taking away and wishes to precisely delineate its new powers. It provides conventional recourse to the courts if the powers are exceeded or abused.
FYI, when you paraphrase someone you restate a passage giving the meaning in another form. You must not change the meaning substantially as you have done here.
It would be more accurate to say: "To distort Benjamin Franklin..." or "What Benjamin Franklin would have said if he were as smart as me..."
The rabid 'safety before all else' folks have fundamentally failed to prove that any of the legislation passed or considered will do anything to stem terrorism
A common bit of confusion here. Whether the measures are effective and whether they are a reasonable tradeoff are two separate issues. If the measures are not effective, then they should not be used regardless of their limits on freedom. It's given that the measures by themselves will reduce freedom. The question of whether it's worth it begins only after the effectiveness of the measures in fighting terrorism is agreed on.
If you pose the question of how effective Ashcroft's methods are in fighting terrorism, one can take either side without being unpatriotic.
And then we could go further to ask why we're a target in the first place and if there's anything we could do to not make ourselves a target in the future.
Let the terrorists ask themselves the same question. I'd like to think bin Laden is asking himself that question right now.
there are some things more important than the war against terrorism
Like being coherent. The National Guard is in the airport to protect citizens, not threaten them. But you knew that.
Holding people without charges is unpatriotic. Even with the best intentions.
FYI, you can't be unpatriotic with the best of intentions. It's a contradiction in terms. It's saying someone hates his country with the best of intentions. Can't be done. I think you mean their patriotism is misguided.
Re:Sauce for the goose...
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
There are some that will say "evolution is flat wrong" without pushing creation.
This site (Science against evolution official homepage) contains nothing that resembles science as it is normally practiced. It's typical of creationists who try to claim they're only having a scientific discussion as a way of getting around the separation of church and state problem.
There is a scientific case to made against natural selection as the basis of evolution but this site, predictably, doesn't understand evolution well enough to tell the difference.
Questioning the patriotism of people you disagree with pretty much ends discussion on any topic. Someone could argue with equal logic that the people who oppose Ashcroft the most are the terrorists. Therefore, people like yourself who oppose Ashcroft support the terrorists.
Insofar as the threat of terrorism is real, it poses a real limitation on our freedom. The question is: do the measures proposed by Ashcroft reduce the threat of terrorism enough to compensate for the loss of freedom that fighting terrorism entails? When the question is framed this way, the debate is over what approach leads to the minimum loss of freedom.
One can take either side in this debate without being a traitor.
your average American is much more liberty minded than your average comfort/security mided city dwelling French person.
Not judged by voter turnout at elections. The U.S. has the lowest turnout of any of the Western democracies. I don't know where your liberty-minded Americans are but they tend to stay home on election day.
Say whay you want about Americans, but very few of us would trade our liberty for the temporary safty of surrendering to an army of evil.
The U.S. sat safely behind its ocean stronghold for 2 full years while the "army of evil" overran everything it its path. In fact the U.S. pre-war policy was exactly one of trading national security for temporary safety as long as it could.
In any case, the French defeat had to do with mistaken reliance on the Maginot Line and outdated military strategy, not a deficiency of personal responsibility and accountability, your two great lessons in liberty. When you compare the crime rate in France vs. the U.S., I have no idea why you think the French deficient in personal responsibility.
Would the rest of world be so liberty minded.
A neat and typically American dichotomy here: the U.S.A. and the Rest Of The World. I'm not sure what you mean by "liberty minded" but you appear to think America has some kind of monopoly on it. FYI, it doesn't.
certainly someone who's going to kill himself anyway is craftier if he takes some of his enemies with him...
Most of the victims weren't even enemies of the murderers. Some, probably all, of the perps were mentally disturbed to begin with. Their actions were crude, ineffective and wasteful, the antithesis of crafty.
For future reference: intentionally killing yourself rates zero on the craftiness scale no matter how many other people you make miserable.
Slashdot Mirror
My words were unwarranted and disrespectful. Won't happen again.
I'll let you have the last word...
You could have withdrawn the insulting accusation of excessive naiveté and I would have apologized for the use of "dingbat".
You should have also noted that alcohol was highly prevalent in the speeding accidents
As the article observes: "Speeding reduces a driver's ability to steer safely around curves or objects in the roadway, extends the distance necessary to stop a vehicle, and increases the distance a vehicle travels while the driver reacts to a dangerous situation." The description of the effects of speeding resembles the effects of alcohol in reducing a driver's ability to respond.
However, the safest speed is zero. Every speed limit represents a tradeoff between the need to get somewhere fast and the likelihood of an accident preventing getting there at all. For all I know you may be a safer driver at high speeds than most people are at the speed limit.
I just wanted to point out that not all the fatalaties were caused by speeding alone, which is what your post implied.
I was pointing out that more was at stake than a speeding ticket.
reveals you as a blatant troll.
And yet you feel obliged to respond to my argument. Perhaps it has a modicum of truth after all.
Perhaps you would do well to educate yourself on the difference between satire and namecalling.
And perhaps you need to learn the difference between satire and sarcasm. Also consider why ad hominem might be an appropriate response to sarcasm.
From this discussion on ad hominem agruments:
Only in the case of opinions, expert and otherwise, where you must rely not on the argument or evidence being presented but on the judgment of someone else, may personal or background information be used to evaluate the ideas expressed.
The sole evidence for your rhetorical flourish was an unsupported prediction of the future: "and rates won't go down one cent."
You will also notice that I went beyond the ad hominem attack to point out the absurdity of you position, which you have ceased to defend.
he resorts to namecalling
From the previous post:
Maybe troll would have been more appropriate.
when doing 120mph, you should have a healthy respect for the stupidity, lack of skill, and inattention of other drivers.
Especially those doing 120 mph.
There is an unsubstanciated assumption in your comment that driving safely is contingent on driving legally.
I believe the connection between breaking driving laws and accidents is well substantiated. After all, the only purpose of enforcing the laws is to reduce accidents. It would be quite a stretch to argue that breaking the laws is generally safer than obeying them.
I'll drive my late 1990s car until it literally falls apart if the alternative is being tracked like a tagged doe by insurace companies or armed forces of the state (aka police).
You again. You are the dingbat who was arguing that committing suicide is crafty. Here you are boasting that you'll drive a car until it is "literally" falling apart. Despite my doubts, it sound like you really believe that blatantly self-destructive behavior is crafty.
What are you going to do when your car literally falls apart on the highway at 90 miles an hour, oh Crafty One? Call your insurance company?
They should learn to respect someone who wants to drive faster than them, not get aggravated at them. Chances are I'll be the one with the expensive ticket, not them.
In 1996, speeding was a contributing factor in 30 percent of all fatal crashes, and 12,998 lives were lost in speeding-related crashes.
Chances are you'll be the one who kills an innocent person, not them.
If they eliminate all insurance liability for driving mistakes that lead to accidents, what's the point in insurance in the first place?
Under the present system people who are at fault in an accident are still covered by their policy. However, their rates go up after the accident. Presumably, under a black box system, unsafe drivers would still be covered. They would just pay higher premiums. In effect, the penalty for unsafe driving would be paid before the accident, rather than afterwards.
Such a system might actually encourage safer driving. Drivers would receive a financial benefit for obeying the law even when they mistakenly think the risk of an accident is low.
refusing to obey government censorship (in places like China) by hacking through their censors is, in my mind, is a very noble thing.
To be consistent with Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience, the hacker would be have to announce his actions to the authorities and be prepared to go to jail.
As political tactics, Thoreau's ideas may not be so effective in China. Considering the treatment of the Falun Gong and other religious groups, appeals to the conscience of the Chinese authorities are likely to be in vain. They don't have any.
After Tianamen Square no one needs to lecture the Chinese on civil disobedience or the consequences thereof.
They can go to prison for 2 years if they fail on request by the police to decrypt it.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 is a bit more complicated than this statement suggests. For instance, the explanatory notes say the act creates civil liability for unlawful interception on a private telecommunications network and defines who may bring an action, namely the sender, recipient or intended recipient. For example, where an employee believes that their employer has unlawfully intercepted a telephone conversation with a third party, either the employee or the third party may sue the employer.
Interception normally requires a warrant from the Secretary of State. It would not be sufficient for him to consider that a warrant might be useful in supplementing other material, or that the information that it could produce could be interesting. The word 'necessary' means 'necessary in a democratic society'.
The act provides for a tribunal as a means of redress for those who wish to complain about the use of the powers.
The provision that forces disclosure of the decryption key assumes that the investigator has authority to read the email in the first place.
The suggestion that the British practice resembles a dictatorship is preposterous.
Our definition of hacktivism is, "using technology to advance human rights through electronic media."
You might not know it from reading the manifesto, but cDc and Hactivismo have actually been working on a product called Peekabooty that allows users to sneak through the firewalls that oppressive regimes set up to restrict access to the Internet.
Hacktivism chooses open code, mostly.
Peekabooty is open source under the GPL but the FAQ advises people who would like to do testing: "You should have enough equipment to run at least three nodes, which means three MS Windows machines (we are in the process of porting it to Linux). You should also be skilled with tracing through code using Visual C++ or your own favorite debugger."
the main challenge for hackers is to keep focused on the goal of liberating the Internet.
There seems to have been some kind of falling out between cDc and Hactivismo over Peekabooty. The lead developer Paul Baranowski (aka Drunken Master) said he has "decided to sever ties with the Hacktivismo group but he will continue to develop the Peekabooty app. Occasionally developers can't find the environment they need to do their best work and now is one such time."
All polite so there wasn't enough evidence to do anything...
You are thinking of Warren vs. District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department. The police certainly could have entered the house without a warrant, under exigent circumstances, namely, "Those circumstances that would cause a reasonable person to believe that entry (or other relevant prompt action) was necessary to prevent physical harm to the officers or other persons, the destruction of relevant evidence, the escape of a suspect, or some other consequence improperly frustrating legitimate law enforcement efforts." (United States v. McConney, 1984).
However in Warren, the issues were completely different. Here the victims sued the police because the police had failed to protect them. The court ruled that when "a municipality or other governmental entity undertakes to furnish police services, it assumes a duty only to the public at large and not to individual members of the community". This decision would appear to confirm the responsibility of the police to conduct investigations (as a duty to the public at large) even if they cannot be held liable for failing to protect every individual.
In a similar manner, despite the original poster's comment, the police aren't necessarily obligated to catch perpetrators. California Government Code says the police may not be sued "for failure to provide adequate police protection or service, failure to prevent the commission of crimes and failure to apprehend criminals."
Nevertheless, catching perpetrators is what police do as well as investigating, patroling and otherwise preventing crimes as best they can.
Law enforcement agents have to do ONE thing and ONE thing only.
One need only look at the FBI's mandate to know that this statement is untrue:
The police have an investigative role to determine if a crime has been committed as well as responsibility to catch the perps. This role also involves patroling to look for signs of a crime being committed.
Part of the purpose of patroling is to prevent or discourage crime by raising the chance that criminals will be caught in the act.
No police force simply sits in the precinct station by the phone waiting for citizens to report a crime, although no doubt the criminals wish they would.
We live in an era of unprecedented governmental respect for civil liberties.
One can see this respect even in the USA PATRIOT Act that uses tortuous language to try and make the act consistent with the Constitution and various court rulings. The British, with a more flexible notion of a constitution and a different role for the judiciary, simply hand government new powers to fight terrorism without such concern for precedent.
A good deal of the USAPA consists of minor, even miniscule, changes to earlier acts, like:
This highly legalistic approach to extending government powers shows that the government is mindful of what it is taking away and wishes to precisely delineate its new powers. It provides conventional recourse to the courts if the powers are exceeded or abused.
To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin...
FYI, when you paraphrase someone you restate a passage giving the meaning in another form. You must not change the meaning substantially as you have done here.
It would be more accurate to say: "To distort Benjamin Franklin..." or "What Benjamin Franklin would have said if he were as smart as me..."
The rabid 'safety before all else' folks have fundamentally failed to prove that any of the legislation passed or considered will do anything to stem terrorism
A common bit of confusion here. Whether the measures are effective and whether they are a reasonable tradeoff are two separate issues. If the measures are not effective, then they should not be used regardless of their limits on freedom. It's given that the measures by themselves will reduce freedom. The question of whether it's worth it begins only after the effectiveness of the measures in fighting terrorism is agreed on.
If you pose the question of how effective Ashcroft's methods are in fighting terrorism, one can take either side without being unpatriotic.
And then we could go further to ask why we're a target in the first place and if there's anything we could do to not make ourselves a target in the future.
Let the terrorists ask themselves the same question. I'd like to think bin Laden is asking himself that question right now.
there are some things more important than the war against terrorism
Like being coherent. The National Guard is in the airport to protect citizens, not threaten them. But you knew that.
Holding people without charges is unpatriotic. Even with the best intentions.
FYI, you can't be unpatriotic with the best of intentions. It's a contradiction in terms. It's saying someone hates his country with the best of intentions. Can't be done. I think you mean their patriotism is misguided.
Questioning someone's patriotism has a long and ignoble history. It's a form of demogoguery. People can be wrong and still be patriots and patriots have no monopoly on the truth. But you knew that.
There are some that will say "evolution is flat wrong" without pushing creation.
This site (Science against evolution official homepage) contains nothing that resembles science as it is normally practiced. It's typical of creationists who try to claim they're only having a scientific discussion as a way of getting around the separation of church and state problem.
There is a scientific case to made against natural selection as the basis of evolution but this site, predictably, doesn't understand evolution well enough to tell the difference.
which is the most unpatriotic thing one could do.
Questioning the patriotism of people you disagree with pretty much ends discussion on any topic. Someone could argue with equal logic that the people who oppose Ashcroft the most are the terrorists. Therefore, people like yourself who oppose Ashcroft support the terrorists.
Insofar as the threat of terrorism is real, it poses a real limitation on our freedom. The question is: do the measures proposed by Ashcroft reduce the threat of terrorism enough to compensate for the loss of freedom that fighting terrorism entails? When the question is framed this way, the debate is over what approach leads to the minimum loss of freedom.
One can take either side in this debate without being a traitor.
just another euro-troll
From your original post:
You seem to have the same problem yourself.
your average American is much more liberty minded than your average comfort/security mided city dwelling French person.
Not judged by voter turnout at elections. The U.S. has the lowest turnout of any of the Western democracies. I don't know where your liberty-minded Americans are but they tend to stay home on election day.
Say whay you want about Americans, but very few of us would trade our liberty for the temporary safty of surrendering to an army of evil.
The U.S. sat safely behind its ocean stronghold for 2 full years while the "army of evil" overran everything it its path. In fact the U.S. pre-war policy was exactly one of trading national security for temporary safety as long as it could.
In any case, the French defeat had to do with mistaken reliance on the Maginot Line and outdated military strategy, not a deficiency of personal responsibility and accountability, your two great lessons in liberty. When you compare the crime rate in France vs. the U.S., I have no idea why you think the French deficient in personal responsibility.
Would the rest of world be so liberty minded.
A neat and typically American dichotomy here: the U.S.A. and the Rest Of The World. I'm not sure what you mean by "liberty minded" but you appear to think America has some kind of monopoly on it. FYI, it doesn't.
certainly someone who's going to kill himself anyway is craftier if he takes some of his enemies with him...
Most of the victims weren't even enemies of the murderers. Some, probably all, of the perps were mentally disturbed to begin with. Their actions were crude, ineffective and wasteful, the antithesis of crafty.
For future reference: intentionally killing yourself rates zero on the craftiness scale no matter how many other people you make miserable.