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July 4 protests target NSA surveillance as Fourth Amendment
<html>The activists are targeting governmentsurveillance programs,Baltimore Ravens t shirts, in particular PRISM, a project of the recently revealed by a former contractor, ,Here's Why It Takes So Long to Move From Concept to Com, now on the run.It gives the government broad access to Internet traffic and other electronic communications, including records of phone calls made and received by millions of Americans. “The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights clearly protects all citizens’ assets, both digital and physical, against searches and seizures without warrant,”the groups say on the website restorethefourth.net, addiing that they aim to assert those rights.
RECOMMENDED: Among their demands,Seattle Seahawks t shirts, that “the proper channels of government work to ensure that all policy complies with the supreme laws of the in their entirety.”
Groupsranging from the electronic Frontier Foundation to Reddit and the Internet Defense League are calling for websites to post the full text of the amendment on the holiday. They areurging citizens to call their representatives in Congress, and are providing contact information. And they are also pushing forphysical protests, listing more than 100 cities and towns from Birmingham, Ala., to , Calif., where groups are gathering on Thursday for protest rallies. Asked to comment on the planned protests, an NSA spokeswoman says via e-mail that “the Fourth of July reminds us as Americans of the freedoms and rights all citizens of our country are guaranteed by our Constitution. Among those is freedom of speech.” Further, she says, “the NSA and its employees work diligently and lawfully every day, around the clock, to protect the nation and its people.”
Protests against the surveillance programs notwithstanding, it is unclear whether the American people fully comprehend the amount of intelligence gatheringcurrently going on, says Mark Tatge,journalism professor at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind.
“It has been happening for more than a decade, a development that was spurred by the 9/11 attacks and changes in law making it easier to lawfully gather information on Americans and their everyday activities,” he says via e-mail, adding that he does not believe the protests will have a meaningful effect.</html>
The inventor of the mouse has died. Here’s why his inv
<html>That might seem like a long time, but as computer scientist Bill Buxton has , thirty years is actually a typical amount of time for a breakthrough computing invention to go from the first laboratory prototype to commercial ubiquity.
The first packet-switched network, the ARPANET, was launched in 1969. It took about 30 years,What Is An Entrepreneur- 2, until the turn of the millenium, for Internet access to be widely adopted by American consumers.
As Buxton , the story is similar for multitouch computing. The first multi-touch computing display was introduced in 1984,2013 New NFL T Shirts, but it took 23 years for the first high-profile multitouch product, the iPhone, to reach the market in 2007. And it took a few more years,new nfl t shirts, with the introduction of Android in 2008 and the iPad in 2010, for multi-touch computing to become a ubiquitous standard for mobile computing.
Why does it take so long? In all of these cases, it took a decade or longer for the new techniques to spread and mature inside the research community. Engelbart s demos were inspiring, but the full potential of mouse-based computing wasn t made clear until 1973, when researchers at the Xerox PARC laboratory developed the , which pioneered many of the graphical user interface concepts we now take for granted. Similarly, academics loved the early Internet, but it took Tim Berners-Lee s invention of the World Wide Web in 1991 to make the Internet accessible to ordinary consumers.
Once a computing concept has been refined in the laboratory, it can take another decade to turn it into a viable commercial product. Xerox didn t realize the commercial potential of the Alto during the 1970s. Apple incorporated many of the ideas behind the Alto into the Lisa, a Macintosh forerunner introduced in 1983. But its astronomical $9,995 price tag (about $23,000 in 2013 dollars) made the device a flop. It took another year of effort for Apple to hit paydirt with the Macintosh in 1984. And it took almost another decade for Apple s competitors to catch up.
This 30-year rule of thumb can help to form an educated guess about when future innovations will reach the mass market. For example, the first car capable of driving itself long distances was , and the technology has been maturing in academica and corporate labs over the last eight years. If self-driving technology follows the same trajectory as previous computing innovations, commercial self-driving cars will be introduced sometime in the 2020s, and the technology will become widely adopted in the 2030s.</html>
Inhospitable Earth
<html>It's difficult to imagine a more absurd overstatement. I'm not referring to the exaggerated claim the Arctic has melted. And the acidification of the oceans is a real concern (though there's reason to believe it's not as bad as some say). But even Chicken Little wouldn't call it proof the world is already over. What's truly ludicrous is McKibben's use of the word inhospitable. For something like 99 percent of human history, the world was really inhospitable. Strangers everywhere were greeted with bloodshed and attacked with cruelty. Dying from premature violence was more commonplace than dying from heart disease or cancer is today. In his classic, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Lawrence Keeley provides mountains of data documenting that modern humans live on a mountain of murder. In prehistoric societies, up to half of the population died from homicide, though 10 percent to 20 percent was closer to the norm. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker shows that the world has become immeasurably more hospitable since the Industrial Revolution. Even World War II was an improvement. If the death toll had been equal to that of tribal societies, 2 billion lives would have been lost instead of a mere 60 million to 100 million. In the United States, violent crime is the lowest it's been in nearly half a century. Of course, McKibben is speaking of the physical environment. But by any conceivable measure -- save, arguably, outdoor temperatures -- the Earth is a vastly more hospitable place for humanity thanks to the hard work of humanity. When Pilgrims came to North America,cheap nfl tshirts, it was often described as an inhospitable wilderness. Malaria, smallpox and yellow fever decimated immigrants (not to mention untold millions of Native Americans). Backbreaking labor was the only means of subsistence for millions of Americans for generations. Drudgery and toil -- have you ever tried to churn butter? -- were necessary for even the simplest pleasures. And does anyone dispute the improved lot of blacks and women? Ironically,Orland Park pool earns five, as global warming fears have risen, America and the Earth have gotten more, not less, hospitable. Since 1990, global poverty has been cut in half, and since 1970, extreme poverty has dropped 80 percent. Rich and poor alike are eating better, despite global population growth. According to UNICEF, more than 2 billion people gained access to improved water sources between 1990 and 2010. In the developing world, meat consumption has more than doubled since the 1990s (after having doubled already since the 1960s). That's because new technologies allow us to grow more with less. From 1940 to 2010, U.S. corn production quintupled while the land used for the crop shrunk.
Globally, writes Matt Ridley, the production of a given crop requires 65 percent less land than it did in 1961. And, he notes, the acreage required for all crops is falling 2 percent a year.
OK, things have gotten a wee bit warmer outside. But economic growth and innovation have made the world vastly more hospitable. We live longer, eat better, have more leisure time and have fewer deadly occupations. The environment in the developed world has gotten vastly cleaner, healthier and more enjoyable since the 1970s because rich countries can afford to make things more hospitable. We can only hope poor countries get similarly wealthy as quickly as possible. Well, most of us can hope for such things. Others seem to think such gains come at too high a price. (Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clich s, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him in care of this newspaper or by e-mail at ,Los Angeles Lakers t shirts, or via Twitter @JonahNRO.)</html>