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The Radicalization of Diasporas and Terrorism

Over the past two years, certain Diaspora communities, frustrated with a perceived war against the Muslim world, have turned against their adopted homelands, targeting the government and its people by supporting terrorist attacks against Western countries through recruitment, fundraising, and training. Critical issues include incidents that prove these communities will indeed attack their adopted homelands; that recruits come from converts to Islam, first-generation migrants disaffected with their new society, and second-generation failed assimilations; that Diasporas create financial lifelines to propagandize, recruit, raise funds, procure weapons, and that they lobby their adopted governments to pressure the government of their country of origin. Second- and third-generation immigrants who oppose their home governments represent adversaries almost impossible to profile. Many share a growing sense of aggrievement and frustration with a perceived war against the Muslim world by the West, fueled by events in Iraq, Palestine, and the Balkans. The challenge is to identify emerging threats in Diaspora communities, but to avoid alienating these groups and becoming forced to follow only reactive policies with regard to this growing threat.
   

In the 1970s, RAND built models they thought could predict fire patterns in New York, and then used them to justify closing fire stations in NYC's poorest sections in the name of efficiency, a decision that would ultimately displace 600,000 people as their neighborhoods burned.

So the source is a wikipedia page, which cites this book, which is a dead end for now.

Are the authors talking about this study?

If anyone's got a source that actually backs up the notion that RAND explicitly recommended closing down fire stations in poor areas, or the actual claims that "they're just committing arson anyway", I'm very curious, as that's a pretty wild claim. I've emailed them for comment.

And you still don't seem to understand what "monopoly" means. Here's a hint: there's a reason it starts with "mono".

there is no difference in between oligopoly or monopoly from citizens' side.

I agree with you in general about the limits of simulations and even intelligence itself.

Still, simulations can be used to:
* predict (you are right, they often fail for reasons of chaos theory and limited accuracy or missing aspects);
* understand (where you play what ifs to see the consequences of your assumptions);
* to gain insight (something other than understanding of details, where you gain a sense of the gestalt, a feeling, or some new summarizing key idea, like I say with my sig about the irony of the tools of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity -- maybe we need a simulation about creating simulations to have scientists gain the insight about simulations you suggest many lack? :-);
* assess risk (to some extend, by Monte Carlo methods for well understood processes)
* to consolidate knowledge in an organized explicit way (you can't hand wave as much when you have to implement ideas in code);
* educate intellectually (as fun toys to play with and learn from);
* educate practically (to learn skills by trial and error, basically failing faster and safer like in a flight simulator or nuclear power plant simulator or surgical simulator);
* educate emotionally (to see consequences and possibilities and related narrative, often as games);
* entertain (relates to the above, but is a different focus);
* to serve as a focus for political policy debates about future scenarios (including as different simulators with different assumptions describe different implications of policy -- note weather forecasters use multiple weather models plus their intuition and experience to make forecasts);
* as a form of self-justifying artwork;
* as a way to create entirely new worlds to explore inspired by nature but (as you suggest) often very different;
* probably many more -- in the sense of, what good is a blank sheet of paper?

I learned some of this from thinking about what people like Steven C Bankes at RAND had to say in the 1980s and 1990s:
http://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/bankes_steven_c.html
As well as people like Seymour Papert (of Microworlds educational software fame).
http://www.papert.org/
Or Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others with Smalltalk as a simulation environment. As well as what futurists (WFS) and risk modellers (RAMAS) have to say. And from making a simulation about gardening in the 1990s (with my wife, as a more than six person-year labor of love released with source under the GPL):
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/

One concern I have about simulations of living creatures (especially intelligent or self-aware ones that can feel some kind of virtual pleasure or virtual pain, like in agent-based simulations) is, what are the ethics? As in, do not do unto others that which you do not want done unto yourself (unless they like that kind of stuff)...
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/LegalRightsOfRobots.htm

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation

RAND planned to use LSD to stop antiwar protestors
In the early 1960s, we did examine the short- and long-term effect of LSD on personality change. Volunteers from RAND's research and support staff enjoyed their "trips" in a controlled environment at UCLA.

Long-Lasting Effects of LSD on Certain Attitudes in Normals: An Experimental Proposal — 1962
William Hersche McGlothlin

Short-Term Effects of LSD on Anxiety, Attitudes, and Performance — 1963
William H. McGlothlin, Sidney Cohen, Marcella S. McGlothlin

http://www.rand.org/about/faq.html

I was googling for Baez's crackpot scale and I found a fascinating paper by Greunberger at the Rand corporation based on a discussion he had with Nobel Laureate Richard Hamming on crackpots. It's a more serious crackpot detection paper and it's excellent reading. http://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/2006/P2678.pdf If schools taught the contents of this paper, critical thinking skills would be improved.

Strikes me as ironic that the people of the United States of America have a significant amount of money invested in ongoing research and development in Texas (Texas ranked 5th among the 50 states, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico in terms of the amount of federal R&D dollars received annually in 2000).

Ironic, because as the Texas Board of Education makes obvious, many of the people of Texas are hellbent on returning to the Dark Ages...to those benighted and dangerous times when you could burn people who didn't have the "right" religious beliefs at the stake. (I do hope that people understand that the terms "religious" and "political" become interchangeable once the situation has deteriorated far enough...far enough, say, that the use of propaganda as a weapon becomes overt.)

I feel for the children of Texas...but they can - for the time being - find and learn the truth on the internet if they are so motivated. I do hope, however, that Texas' unabashed and expanding use of political indoctrination isn't catching...I really don't want to be forced to spend what little free time I have ensuring that the politicians of my state avoid the temptation to grant themselves the power of Kings - the power to rewrite history as they would have it.

We cannot tolerate government by an aristocratic elite convinced of their right to dictate what children shall believe. There is no avoiding it: To attempt to polish and spin the mistakes of history is to teach that those mistakes should be repeated .

I find it difficult to believe that the Texas Board of Education - and the Texas GOP - are unaware of what they are setting into motion.

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB47/index1.html

Talks about how long an ICBM takes to get to a target based on origin and trajectory.

"RAND analyzed the performance potential of the Minuteman missile defense system against six potential scenarios: China launching against Hawaii and Los Angeles; North Korea against Hawaii and Alaska; and Libya against Washington, D.C., and Miami. Flight times vary from about 23 minutes for the North Korean threat against Alaska to 35 minutes for the Chinese threat against Los Angeles."

ind any government agency that's tried to do exceptionally well and you'll find that the smaller the scope of their responsibility the better they did. Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Postal Service, any regulatory agency - you get the picture. The federal government simply doesn't have a good resume; you can't blame the unbiased peoples for not loving the idea of the government running yet another program.

Simply not true. The Defense Department, for example, is probably the most enormous government agency in the world, and by all accounts it does a fine job in providing defense services. And more to the point: which provider of health services gets the highest marks for patient outcomes and patient satisfaction? That would be the VA. Which insurer has the lowest costs and highest customer satisfaction? That would be Medicare.

The meme of the federal goverment being ineffective is popular, but it has no basis in reality.

I don't think that joining RAND is going to help Apple get competitive prices. (Hint: RAND stands for Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory.) Maybe they should join the GSM Association, instead.

RAND is actually rather non-partisan, and does serious work on climate change policy, e.g. here, here, here, here.

RAND is actually rather non-partisan, and does serious work on climate change policy, e.g. here, here, here, here.

RAND is actually rather non-partisan, and does serious work on climate change policy, e.g. here, here, here, here.

RAND is actually rather non-partisan, and does serious work on climate change policy, e.g. here, here, here, here.

Looking at this guy's website the first thing that seems not quite kosher is that he works for RAND corporation

I think this explains all, it seems very natural that the same "think-tank" that once proposed that a nuclear war can have a winner will also state so categorically that global warming is harmless.

That's the same organization that gets so much funding from the oil industry they opened a branch in the Persian gulf.

"how come the government is allowed to dump its old stuff in the sea and the rest of us have to pay for disposal?"

The U.S. government pays dearly for disposal, it's just that reefing old ships after many millions of dollars in preparation is more cost effective than scrapping under the current U.S. government environmental rules. Read this if you want to know more: http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB391/

It's good that we are finally getting some attention paid to corporate tax abuse. Hopefully Linus's Law kicks in and rules get reinforced and streamlined.

The problem was widespread even pre-2004.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/tax/view/
(Please excuse the smaller video quality, PBS has improved but older material is reminiscent of when it was put online, and they rarely re-update.)

And here's a RAND article about the mess from 2008:
http://rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/summer2008/horizon02.html

On a slightly different note:
The check system is in need of an overhaul too. It may not be as bad as the "Catch Me if You Can" days, but it's a shame when people are afraid to write checks.

It is also non-funding for the productions the p2p audience wants to see.

Film piracy can be even more profitable than drug trafficking or other enterprises commonly linked to organized crime. In one example cited in the report, a pirated DVD made in Malaysia for 70 cents was marked up more than 1,000 percent and sold on the street in London for about $9. The profit margin was more than three times higher than the markup for Iranian heroin and higher than the profit for Columbian cocaine.

Worldwide, the criminal penalties for counterfeiting are relatively light and prosecution is sparse, researchers say. In France, for example, selling counterfeit products is punishable by a two-year prison term and a $190,000 fine, while selling drugs is punishable by a 10-year prison term and a $9.5 million fine. Meanwhile, just 134 people were sentenced in U.S. federal courts for intellectual property crimes during 2002, contrasted to more than 1.5 million arrests for drug offenses nationally in 2003. Organized Crime Is Increasingly Active in Film Piracy [News Release]

Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism [Free Video and Full-Length Documents, in PDF Format]

It is also non-funding for the productions the p2p audience wants to see.

Film piracy can be even more profitable than drug trafficking or other enterprises commonly linked to organized crime. In one example cited in the report, a pirated DVD made in Malaysia for 70 cents was marked up more than 1,000 percent and sold on the street in London for about $9. The profit margin was more than three times higher than the markup for Iranian heroin and higher than the profit for Columbian cocaine.

Worldwide, the criminal penalties for counterfeiting are relatively light and prosecution is sparse, researchers say. In France, for example, selling counterfeit products is punishable by a two-year prison term and a $190,000 fine, while selling drugs is punishable by a 10-year prison term and a $9.5 million fine. Meanwhile, just 134 people were sentenced in U.S. federal courts for intellectual property crimes during 2002, contrasted to more than 1.5 million arrests for drug offenses nationally in 2003. Organized Crime Is Increasingly Active in Film Piracy [News Release]

Film Piracy, Organized Crime, and Terrorism [Free Video and Full-Length Documents, in PDF Format]

RAND has also published results most Slashdotters would find agreeable. They've said that fundamental science research is carried out better by academia than by private industry, that global warming is real and that racial profiling doesn't work at all (because it's trivial to counter). All of their research is published in full on the RAND site, and the news snippet concerning the article in question actually reads, "Film piracy is growing venture for organized crime, profits occasionally support terrorism." Organized crime has many ventures, so that's reasonable enough to believe. That profits from organized crime might also end up with terrorists also isn't a stretch. It's not hard for money to travel far and wide today. I do think that RAND's conclusions aren't as remarkable as the Slashdot summary makes them off to be.

The geek in full flight.

For a look at the full spectrum of RAND research: Browse by Category

Free downloads - PDF or HTML.

Here is the briefest of samplings from the RAND Classics:

Williams "The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy" 1954
Dresher "Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications" 1961
Dole and Asimov "Planets For Man"
Baran, ed. "On Distributed Communications" 1961-62
"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" 2001
Shapiro and Anderson "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail"

I'll save everyone time and give you the link:

Kahn "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence" 1960

The geek in full flight.

For a look at the full spectrum of RAND research: Browse by Category

Free downloads - PDF or HTML.

Here is the briefest of samplings from the RAND Classics:

Williams "The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy" 1954
Dresher "Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications" 1961
Dole and Asimov "Planets For Man"
Baran, ed. "On Distributed Communications" 1961-62
"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" 2001
Shapiro and Anderson "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail"

I'll save everyone time and give you the link:

Kahn "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence" 1960

The geek in full flight.

For a look at the full spectrum of RAND research: Browse by Category

Free downloads - PDF or HTML.

Here is the briefest of samplings from the RAND Classics:

Williams "The Compleat Strategyst: Being a Primer on the Theory of Games of Strategy" 1954
Dresher "Games of Strategy: Theory and Applications" 1961
Dole and Asimov "Planets For Man"
Baran, ed. "On Distributed Communications" 1961-62
"A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates" 2001
Shapiro and Anderson "Toward an Ethics and Etiquette for Electronic Mail"

I'll save everyone time and give you the link:

Kahn "The Nature and Feasibility of War and Deterrence" 1960

Geee... A corporation with it's HQ in Santa Monica/West LA taking a position that is pro-copyright/MPAA. I'm just shocked.

http://www.rand.org/about/locations/

For the rest of us, this is more in a long line of public information that we'll never read - more (potentially interesting but lost among the rest) documents are published by the military, various departments, etc, than we could shake a stick at,

Think tanks, research groups, journalists, students, historians and a whole passle of other professions will find this stuff invaluable.

They have always provided a filter between raw material and the general public. I guarantee that these reports will immediately start getting cited in journals and newspaper articles. Best of all, we can read the primary source without having to pay the RAND Corporation or some other think tank $XYZ to get our hands on the document.

Most of the RAND studies commissioned by the government which are not classified are available free from their wesbite. Just search around or browse to the topic area that interests you.

Thanks for the rest of the analysis, but:

to supply 100% of that with wind and batteries would cost roughly $6.2 trillion dollars

USA spent over a trillion dollars on non-renewable energy a year (DOE reports), much of that goes to clueless klepto/auto/theo-cracies overseas and bastard oil companies. So, spending $600 billion a year to reduce that seems a pretty good deal on economics without even considering the pollution and employment stimulus benefits. Of course that trillion+ is more than just electricity, USA "only" spent 368 billion for electricity in 2006 (RAND report). But a smart grid powered by renewables goes hand-in-hand with switching transportation from fossil fuels to recharging battery and hybrid vehicles.

This is a good summary of China's lines of thinking:

Hypothetical attack on U.S. outlined by China, Air Force Times, January 28, 2008

The democratic Republic of China, commonly called Taiwan -- which America backs and the communist People's Republic of China considers part of its territory -- frequently irritates Chinese leaders with calls for greater independence from the mainland. But while the American military mulls its options, Chinese missiles hit runways, fuel lines, barracks and supply depots at U.S. Air Force bases in Japan and South Korea. Long-range warheads destroy American satellites, crippling Air Force surveillance and communication networks. A nuclear fireball erupts high above the Pacific Ocean, ionizing the atmosphere and scrambling radars and radio feeds.

This is China's anti-U.S. sucker punch strategy.

It's designed to strike America's military suddenly, stunning and stalling the Air Force more than any other service. In a script written by Chinese military officers and defense analysts, a bruised U.S. military, beholden to a sheepish American public, puts up a small fight before slinking off to avoid full-on war.

[...]

Because the American public is "abnormally sensitive" about military casualties, according to an article in China's Liberation Army Daily, killing U.S. airmen or other personnel would spark a "domestic anti-war cry" on the home front and possibly force early withdrawal of U.S. forces.

[...]

The PLA also would likely use less conventional attacks on the American military's vital communications network. The goal, as one Chinese expert put it: leaving U.S. combat capabilities "blind," "deaf" and "paralyzed." Losing early-warning systems designed to detect incoming missiles would be, for the Air Force, the most devastating setback -- one that could force the service to exit the region altogether, according to Rand.

The report that is the subject of this article also discusses options for hardening US military targets and infrastructure. But ultimately, even dedicated military networks have some of the same vulnerabilities as the commodity internet. They are just as sensitive to EM disruption, and some common modes of attack. The other piece you're missing is the more subtle psychological manipulation, which can occur over a much longer term.

This isn't just about DoSing web sites. The attacks that can occur in the information realm span many more areas, and may not even be interpreted or recognized as an attack until it's too late. It pays to be aware of this landscape in a changing world:

A global multipolar system is emerging with the rise of China, India, and others. The relative power of nonstate actors -- businesses, tribes, religious organizations, and even criminal networks -- also will increase.

By 2025 a single "international community" composed of nation-states will no longer exist. Power will be more dispersed with the newer players bringing new rules of the game while risks will increase that the traditional Western alliances will weaken. Rather than emulating Western models of political and economic development, more countries may be attracted to China's alternative development model.

If we place any importance on the positive aspects of Western systems of values and influence (something which moral relativists may find extremely difficult to do), over, say, government and social models in China or Russia, then there should be an awareness about threats against those systems.

See also: Entering the Dragon's Lair: Chinese Antiaccess Strategies and Their Implications for the United States. This entire book is available free and is a great read for those interested in Chinese military strategy.

I won't comment on whether or not this was fair or not... The whole thing seems fishy, but the teacher herself plead guilty to the misdemeanor for whatever reason.. Anyway, my comment is more in response to whether or not kids are harmed by sexual content.. Your argument is basically that since the median age for first intercourse in the US is 17, claims of harm caused by sexual content must be exaggerated if not false. My response, however, would be that environmental influence - specifically media influence - results in the median age of first intercourse being what it is: http://www.rand.org/news/press/2008/11/03/. If this is the case, then the question is whether there is anything wrong w/ the median age being what it is - 17. The argument here turns on your view on sex. Is sex something to be valued, or is it simply to be used for pleasure between any number of persons and any number of times? For me, sex is something to be enjoyed only in marriage. When sex is permitted outside marriage, there is really nothing more to it than the act itself. You have people taking advantage of each other for a period of time for the sake of pleasure and nothing else. It does nothing to develop the relationship between two people. This is why I would posit that sex at 17 is harmful. Kids are getting involved in things that they don't understand will affect them the rest of their lives. Do you think that when one person has sex and then almost flippantly moves on to the next, the first partner doesn't get hurt in the process? Do you think the act of sex does not lead to any emotional bonds?

Actually, there's a RAND study on this. Here's the summary:

Does free medical care lead to better health than insurance plans that require the patient to shoulder part of the cost? In an effort to answer this question, the authors studied 3,958 people between the ages of 14 and 61 who were free of disability that precluded work and had been randomly assigned to a set of insurance plans for three or five years. One plan provided free care; the others required enrollees to pay a share of their medical bills. As reported in R-2847-HHS, patients in the latter group made approximately one-third fewer visits to a physician and were hospitalized about one-third less often. For persons with poor vision and for low-income persons with high blood pressure, free care brought an improvement (vision better by 0.2 Snellen lines, diastolic blood pressure lower by 3 mm Hg); better control of blood pressure reduced the calculated risk of early death among those at high risk. For the average participant, as well as for subgroups differing in income and initial health status, no significant effects were detected on eight other measures of health status and health habits. Confidence intervals for these eight measures were sufficiently narrow to rule out all but a minimal influence, favorable or adverse, of free care for the average participant. For some measures of health in subgroups of the population, however, the broader confidence intervals make this conclusion less certain.

source

TL;DR -- When people had to share in the costs of health care, they used less of it without a significant negative impact to health outcomes. See also: Moral Hazard

The clearest account of the WTO demonstrations in Seattle is probably the study by the RAND corporation, they are not a hippy-dippy group. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/MR1382.ch7.pdf They found that clearly, the police started assaulting non-violent crowds before any windows were broken. The crowds were sitting down blocking access to the convention center, and the Seattle PD and co started gassing, pepper-spraying, and beating them at about 9 AM. The window-smashing started later. There was a small group (maybe a hundred out of 30,000 demonstrators) who did plan to spray-paint and break windows. I think that was dumb myself, it obviously muddied the violence the police were engaging in. The police lost all tactical control the didn't have a plan by then (they never confronted the window-smashers at all). And later they chased a bunch of people into Capitol Hill, panicked when locals were angry at them, and tear-gassed a residential neighborhood. Since then we've seen several things: 1. cops try to preemptively intimidate and arrest people (months or years later, these are thrown out of court.) 2. They usually are more agressive at the beginning of an event (like the RNC), and then they get milder, like they've "learned from their mistakes." This might take the sting off, but it seems to be a pattern, so I wonder if it is a planned tactic. Also, at the RNC in Philadelphia in 2000, the city took out insurance to pay for possible constitutional rights violations. I call that premeditation, and the city and the insurer should be liable. Blah, blah, rant rant. The Rand Corp. document really is an interesting play by play. I think the people giving orders should go to jail.

WE'RE AT WAR AGAINST A TACTIC, you know.

It looks like this idiocy might finally be coming to an end. A recent RAND Corporation report recommends that "U.S. policymakers should end the use of the phrase "war on terrorism" since there is no battlefield solution to defeating al Qa'ida."

uh, why would this be better?

assuming you want to limit yourself to line of site RF
(for a bunch of reasons) then what's wrong with ground based
towers?

Depending on wind/weather issues, I would think you could
even build structures out of wood.

Guyed towers can reduce the steel requirements a lot though,
with sections being able to be carried by humans or animals.
100 ft guyed towers are pretty cheap to erect. Probably less
than $5000. Don't need much concrete either.

Or take advantage of topography (hills)

Here's an analysis of height requirements vs distance
(frenel distance issues etc)
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3762/RM3762.chap5.html

100 ft tower can probably get you a 20 mile link at 5Ghz no problem.
10 of them to go 200 miles. ..plus you can mount all
your local repeaters.

I've heard about math and science shortages for almost two decades now,

A myth perpetuated by biz lobbyists trying to generate an excuse to offshore or hire more visa workers. There was a Rand Corporation (a research institute) study that said there is no general sci-math "shortage".

I don't recall the IEEE saying anything about the "shortage" of computer specialists. Maybe I missed it, maybe the other posters are mistaking the IEEE with the Rand Corporation.

I think you should read the paper RAND wrote. It describes exactly what everyone is talking about in this thread.

Now, I'm not Chinese and have no special affiliation with them, but according to this inconvenient report http://rand.org/publications/MG/MG260/index.html by RAND Corporation (Wikipedia says this: The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces)

As for: They are modernizing their military far beyond what's necessary to attack any other nation. I'd add - "just like the US are...."

And lastly: "The premier of China has threatened to nuke Los Angeles" - it was the 2nd in command of the army who said it in response to a declassified US army report that named China as one of six possible nations that could face nuclear strikes from America.

Remind us when was the last time China went to war? And when was the last time the US did?

What say you now, Sir?

Even nukes can't stop it! Or at least they shouldn't, since the internet was originally designed to run as a communications network in the event of a nuclear attack.

We were just discussing this paper at a meeting yesterday (I'm one of the co-authors). Looks like we need to start sending out copies again... Protecting Commercial Aviation Against the Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2005/RA ND_OP106.pdf A summary, if you're lazy: http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2005/RA ND_OP106.sum.pdf

We were just discussing this paper at a meeting yesterday (I'm one of the co-authors). Looks like we need to start sending out copies again... Protecting Commercial Aviation Against the Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2005/RA ND_OP106.pdf A summary, if you're lazy: http://www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2005/RA ND_OP106.sum.pdf

Long before Bill Joy, UNIX had a good full-screen editor - the RAND editor. The RAND editor dated from the early 1970s. I used it at Ford Aerospace, and it was much nicer than "vi". But it wasn't free. You had to pay RAND for each copy.

The RAND editor was much closer to "what you see is what you get" than "vi". It was a full-screen editor with all the commands on function keys. All the keys like "insert", "delete", etc. did what you'd expect. Labels were provided to show what each function key did. So it was far more user-friendly than "vi".

The RAND editor was modestly portable from terminal to terminal. It worked best on HP terminals of the period, and was table driven so that it could support different devices. But you had to change the tables in C and rebuild to add support for a new device.

The RAND editor had fewer "mode" issues than "vi". What you typed went in at the cursor position. For a few special commands, like "find", a special line at the bottom of the screen was used. But you could always see visually what was going on. Much better look and feel than "vi".

Those of us who had both available used the RAND editor.

Some of what Joy is credited for in the early days of UNIX reflects the fact that he worked for a tax-funded organization working under a contract that allowed them to give software away.

How about instead of H1-Bs, we fast-track green cards for people with needed skills, or is that not enough like indentured servitude?

I've seen H-1B abuse with my own eyes at a very large telecom. They want people they can manipulate, not full-blown citizens with real choices. There is no "shortage", just lobbyists looking for an angle. See about this Rand study:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB1505/in dex1.html

The way that Iraq has been handled has turned it into a disastrous failure, with no apparent path out. Two years into the occupation of Germany, German police had taken over general policing and border control duties. The occupying force in Germany was under 20,000 men within two years of V-E, while three and a half years into Iraq the 140,000+ American troops in Iraq continue to be pulled back into fortified megabases as the rest of the country slips toward anarchy.

Total postwar combat casualties in the American occupations of Germany, Japan, Haiti, former Yugoslavia: Zero

On the domestic side, I continue to be shocked by the inaction of our elected officials as major elements of the Federal Government continue to do everything they can to remove transparency and accountability from the political process. I was brought up to believe that Republicans supported limited government, but I haven't seen much evidence of that since before 1996. Secret laws, intimidation of critics, ballooning federal deficits, blinding and willful incompetence at all levels of the governent... it's like a nightmare. All of the people who stand to benefit from a corrupt government are silent-- media, government contractors, officials, large corporations. The people who are afraid to lose their reputation and livelihood are silent. The media are fractured, manipulated, and have their own concepts of fairness and balance used against them to weaken their message. ...and the people who refuse to see what is being done in their names continue to raise a hue and cry about issues that don't matter while corrupt men continue to pervert the ideals that America stands for.

The Bush Administration has been a disastrous failure for America, and for the world we should be an example to. I wish I could trust that the Democratic victories in this election will produce a change, but I don't have a lot of hope for improvement in the near future unless we all work together to demand it.

From the site:"The purpose of this web page is to serve as a focal point for investigations of the parallels between perhaps the two greatest qualitative jumps in communications capabilities of the last millennium - printing and internetted computers"

Further the same site has referenced a number of relevant papers:
" There is a wealth of information available on and off the Web that talks about printing and/or the Internet and/or their social and cultural implications. Since the interest of this web site is in the parallels between printing and the Internet and what they might tell us about policy about the Internet, only a small subset of such papers will be relevant to that understanding. Though even the concept of what is relevant will evolve, there are at least two general topics that should remain relevant:

understanding the parallels and divergences between printing and the Internet

understanding the history and impact of printing"

From the site:"The purpose of this web page is to serve as a focal point for investigations of the parallels between perhaps the two greatest qualitative jumps in communications capabilities of the last millennium - printing and internetted computers"

Further the same site has referenced a number of relevant papers:
" There is a wealth of information available on and off the Web that talks about printing and/or the Internet and/or their social and cultural implications. Since the interest of this web site is in the parallels between printing and the Internet and what they might tell us about policy about the Internet, only a small subset of such papers will be relevant to that understanding. Though even the concept of what is relevant will evolve, there are at least two general topics that should remain relevant:

understanding the parallels and divergences between printing and the Internet

understanding the history and impact of printing"

Take this RAND publication from 1996, for example:

http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR661/

Citizens of western countries like ours should be very familiar with Information Warfare, our states have been practicing it upon us for years.

Everything you could ever want to know:
From the Rand Corp.

They're 'non-partisan', so they are at least making an effort at actually being "Fair and Balanced". And they've been writing papers about Information Warfare since the mid-90s

No, that was just more spin from Condi Rice.

According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins, who had a lead role in the Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo reconstruction efforts, and a team of RAND Corporation researchers, the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany--and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases--was zero.
Slate

And one "moron" like reporter (666905) raising interesting questions is worth a thousand anonymous cowards regurgitating the government party line.

The crude that comes out of this source is actually easier to refine.

Which source? The product of oil sands is solid at room temperature, and requires both cracking and desulfurization IIRC.

In at least two of the processes natural gas is a suprluss [sic] product.

I think you have not learned the distinction between natural gas, cracker off-gas and synthesis gas. They are not interchangeable.

Water usage isn't the issue for this source, power is. Hence part of the political roadblock. Indeed, if used intelligently, this process can be used to produce surpluss *clean* water, as well as power for the electrical grid.

Production of oil from tar sands requires 2 barrels of water per barrel of oil. The situation with Fischer-Tropsch (the governor of Montana wants to use coal-to-liquids to prop up his economy) is roughly the same.

You don't get a free ride if you use in-situ retorting. Here's what The Rand Corporation has to say about it:

All high-grade western oil shale resources lie in the Colorado River drainage basin. For mining and surface retorting, the major water quality issue is the leaching of salts and toxics from spent shale. A number of approaches are available for preventing surface water contamination from waste piles, but it is not clear whether these methods represent a permanent solution that will be effective after the site is closed and abandoned. For in-situ retorting, inadequate information is available on the fate, once extraction operations cease, of salts and other minerals that are commingled with oil shale.

There's no proof that freeze-walls will work on such a large scale, that the boreholes will remain open as the shale is retorted (it expands, which would tend to occlude the bores), or several of the other things that would have to work to get the oil out. We can be pretty certain that production cannot be ramped up fast enough to compensate for declining production elsewhere. We can be pretty much assured that the groundwater in the area will be a toxic mess for millennia, though.

E85 provides a transition to ethanol driven fuel cells. Ethanol driven fuel cells are showing the best potential as far as infrastructure requirements.

Hogwash. The US burns about 140 billion gallons of gasoline every year, and another 63 billion gallons of distillate (diesel). You're not going to replace that with ethanol (especially not from corn!), and you've still got the remaining 1/3 of US demand that goes to non-transportation uses. US production of ethanol is due to get up to around 5 billion gallons/year. Uh, w00t?

The best replacement for petroleum transportation fuel isn't alternative petroleum, it's electricity. The grid is here, and its spare capacity in off-peak hours is enough to move several times as much energy as our vehicles need (total generation capacity almost 1 TW, average is ~450 GW; do the math). We've got several suitable varieties of Li-ion batteries on the market already, a carbon-backed lead-acid technology (which radically reduces weight and increases lifespan) coming, and several different supercapacitor technologies either on the market or under development (EEStor). To keep electricity from becoming the transport energy source of choice, ALL of them will have to fail. Electricity has further advantages:

• Stationary plants can sacrifice lightness and form factor for high efficiency and cleanliness.
• Stationary plants can use energy sources which cannot be packaged for a vehicle.
• Stationary plants can co-generate with fuel being used for heat.

Even the BBC article is wrong in military parlance. It states "When it describes plans for electronic warfare, or EW, the document takes on an extraordinary tone. It seems to see the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system." Electronic warfare is a mode of warfare in the electromagnetic spectrum not the Internet. And even when it states "The slogan "fight the net" appears several times throughout the roadmap." probably refers to the military concept of netwar. Which is a mode of warfare where social and ideological networks attack other social/ideological networks, military technology plays only a minor part.

I remember reading the RAND policies way before everyone was suddenly discovering Laden Networks & cie.

It's called InfoPolitik (was RealPolitik b4) or Netwar...
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1382/ index.html

Still... You can use some of these strategies for good reasons. (NGOs operations)
Look at the Zapatista in Mexico. They were eye-openner before this 2001 event.