Domain: usma.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to usma.edu.
Comments · 21
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Re:Here's why
> (ISIS don't care if recruits are very religious with many recruits just joining for money, important when there is no work)
That's true for local recruits, people need jobs.
But for disaffected europeans its another story. As you noted, they were street hoods. More and more that's a common factor among europeans who are recruited. They aren't particularly religious, but they are violent. ISIS's ideology gives them an excuse to be violent. As one european terrorism expert put it last year:
Previously we were mostly dealing with "radical Islamists"--individuals radicalized toward violence by an extremist interpretation of Islam--but now we're increasingly dealing with what are best described as "Islamized radicals." The young Muslims from "inner-city" areas of Belgium, France, and other European countries joining up with the Islamic State were radical before they were religious. Their revolt from society manifested itself through petty crime and delinquency. Many are essentially part of street gangs. What the Islamic State brought in its wake was a new strain of Islam which legitimized their radical approach. These youngsters are getting quickly and completely sucked in. The next thing they know they're in Syria and in a real video game. The environment they find themselves in over there is attractive to them. Just like in gangs in Europe, respect is equated with fear. They feel like somebody when they're over in Syria. If someone crosses you there, you put a bullet in his head. The Islamic State has legitimized their violent street credo.
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Re: What's next?
Hell, almost every story I've heard about people joining IS is virtually the same: they met with a person at their mosque who saw them as an impressionable target and convinced them over a long period of time that they are being oppressed by the west and need to fight back.
If that is all you've heard then it would appear you've never bothered to actually try to find out what is really going on, and don't pay attention to the news. To miss the internet as a recruiting tool in the age of the internet is stunning, almost unbelievable.
Internet making it easier to become a terrorist
"The new militancy is driven by the Web," agreed Fawaz A. Gerges, a terrorism expert at the London School of Economics. "The terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan are being replaced by virtual camps on the Web."
From their side, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are scrambling to monitor the Internet and penetrate radical websites to track suspects, set up sting operations or unravel plots before they are carried out.
The FBI arrested LaRose in October after she had spent months using e-mail, YouTube, MySpace and electronic message boards to recruit radicals in Europe and South Asia to "wage violent jihad," according to a federal indictment unsealed this week.
That put the strawberry-haired Pennsylvania resident in league with many of the 12 domestic terrorism cases involving Muslims that the FBI disclosed last year, the most in any year since 2001. The Internet was cited as a recruiting or radicalizing tool in nearly every case.
"Basically, Al Qaeda isn't coming to them," Gerges said. "They are using the Web to go to Al Qaeda."
In December, for example, five young men from northern Virginia were arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of seeking to join anti-American militants in Afghanistan.
A Taliban recruiter made contact with the group after one of the five, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, posted comments on YouTube praising videos of attacks on U.S. troops, officials said. To avoid detection, they communicated by leaving draft e-mail messages at a shared Yahoo e-mail address.
The Internet and its Role in Terrorist Recruitment and Operational Planning
Al-Shabab Recruits in the United States and the Pakistan-Virginia Case
In November 2009, federal authorities unsealed terrorism-related charges against men they say were key actors in a recruitment drive that led young Somali-Americans to join al-Shabab, a Somali insurgent group and an al-Qa`ida affiliate. In total, authorities have implicated 14 people in the case. Perhaps the most notorious is Zakaria Maruf, an American-Somali who had left Minnesota for southern Somalia to link up with al-Shabab and subsequently recruited men from the United States through a variety of means, including the internet.[33]
This was the case of Mohamoud Hassan, a student at the Carlson School of Management, whose path toward extremism began through the internet with searches for jihadist videos and jihadist chat rooms. Like the Toronto 18, Hassan listened to the audio lectures of Anwar al-Awlaki.[34] Hassan then began to communicate frequently with Maruf who established contact through listservs, an antiquated form of sending e-mails, and conference calls arranged by an associate who distributed several hundred numbers and passwords so people could establish contact securely.[35]
In November 2008, Hassan turned his back on a university education and with two other students left for Somalia to join an al-Shabab training camp where he linked up with his internet recruiter Maruf.[36] In September 2009, Hassan’s grandmother received news from Somalia that her grandson was killed. It is unlikely that he will be the last S
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Re:Require .gov TLD ?
and
.edu, I'd guess.Those are almost all state, local, or private. But there are a few run by the feds, such as www.usma.edu and www.usna.edu, which default to vanilla http.
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Re:alpha test?
How about we respect the constitution, and use NO scanners? I prefer that, but I guess that's just me.
Just you (and me too), apparently.
The government says that only racist, right-wing, small-government, libertarian terrorists cite the constitution.
It's only Patriotic(TM) to call for more government, not less. Otherwise, you get put on one of Big Sis's lists.
The CTC at West Point is already preparing our soldiers to deal with those dangerous "freedom-terrorists". Freedom is slavery, and allows the Bad Guys(TM) to win.
I'd like to know if this guy sees any threat from groups on the left, like the Weather Underground, the NBPP, STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement--based in Oakland, CA from 1994-2002. Organized by like-minded communist/socialist revolutionaries such as Van Jones), ALF, etc etc.
Strat
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DARPA-funded? Really?
If, like me, you found it unlikely that DARPA would fund something like this and let you talk about it (or at least, suspected this might be a case of hacker braggadocio), check this out:
http://www.cft.usma.edu/currentProjects.htm
The Power Strip Auditor
Pwnie Express
February 2012 -
Re:A very sad day
Where did you read that? Read it more carefully. "Citizens" can be almost anybody. Ghadaffi is also a citizen, and so are the people who are supporting him.
This article argues that the rebels are supporters of Al Qaeda. http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony/pdf/CTCForeignFighter.19.Dec07.pdf Is that true?
Are we just setting up al Quaeda in Libya, just as we set up the Taliban in Afghanistan?
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Re:iirc
I was basing that on what my calculus teacher told me; that Newton called it "Leibniz' Rule" as a sort of mocking joke.
However, it would appear Leibniz did correct his mistake, after ten days. He did make the mistake at first but maybe it was just one of carelessness (see these websites and their citations if needed: http://www.math.tamu.edu/~dallen/history/calc1/calc1.html; http://www.math.usma.edu/people/rickey/hm/CalcNotes/ProductRule.pdf).
At any rate, I maintain that it's definitely possible to be able to compute integrals and not understand the concepts; as it is possible to understand the concepts and not be able to compute (difficult) integrals. After all, no practitioner living today computes integrals the same way as Newton did, except perhaps as an esoteric exercise. Computation is a skill which is partially orthogonal to understanding.
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Re:I got $5 on fail, anyone want some?
I have the facts to back it up.
1) The Duelfer Report, clearly stating that there was no connection between the Baathist movement and al Qaeda, and just the dysfunctional remainings of a weapons program.
2) An interview with the Number Two of al Qaeda, al Zawahiri.
3) The history of the Baath Party as a secular, socialist and nationalist Arab movement.
4) The biography of the Number Two of Iraq, Tariq Aziz, who is no muslim at all, but a Chaldean Catholic. So whatever Iraq was, it was surely not ruled by islamistic jihadists.
5) All the alleged evidence brought before the war being debunked, from the Yellow Cake Story to the British dossier on Iraq's WMD program being just a rip of of Ibrahim al-Marashi's doctoral thesis.
6) The fact that Donald Rumsfeld even created his own intelligence unit because the CIA was still unable to uncover anything supporting, what the administration was believing to be true.
7) The fact that Colin Powell's address at the U.N. didn't convince neither Hans Blix, head of the U.N.'s inspectors of Iraq's WMD program nor the "old Europeans", with Germany's Minister for Foreign Affairs, J.Fischer, publicly stating his doubts. -
Re:Oh, my Ego!
How does this turn into "dumb roughneck hicks with guns"?
I'm talking about strategy at a level conducted by four star generals, each with 25-40 years of experience, who have college degrees in the art of war. By the time they make Colonel, they have the equivalent of a master's degree. By the time they make General, they have the equivalent of a doctorate.
Yes, I DO believe that the generals, on average, know far more about running a war than politicians. Politicians know more about politics(though by necessity generals are up there as well).
As for Vietnam, if we'd fought it smarter, fought it to win, our soldiers wouldn't have been stuck in the muck for so long, they wouldn't have been quite so inclined to commit atrocities(which were still fairly rare). -
Re:Better yet
I live in NY and we have history all over the area i live. Granted its not 800 years old its still amazing.
within a 20 mile radius around my house I can go to Brotherhood Winery, the oldest Winery in america.
My good friend lives in a house older than our country (1765)
I can go to the home where Franklin D. Rosevelt grew up
I can go to many different battlegrounds from the American Revolution I can go to Washington's Headquartersin Newburgh on the hudson.
i got the Hudson River, and West Point.
And I work at a National Historic Hotel The Mohonk Mountian House which has ALOT of history for such a place
You see where I am going. I may not have the history of Europe, (Dont get me wrong i would LOVE to go out there, Amsterdam is nice this time of year) But there are so many things here and this is only in a 20 mile radius around my house in a small town. -
Re:A crutch
I've seen and actually used this, some of the developers are profs. (I'm at USMA), and there isn't any "crashing around" while wearing the system. Running is achieved by jogging in place. Sound unrealistic? Yes, it is. But it's better than any video game I've played, and I've played most everything out there. The point is not necessarily to make training more realistic, either; it's to facilitate a training environment where soldiers can practice basic battle drills during a single day and not have to spend hours breaking down and cleaning every weapon fired and re-shining every boot. It adds valuable time to the training that soldiers recieve.
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Re:Slashdot anti-intellectualism
Maybe you should have gone to a school where cheating isn't tolerated and whose students actually have the guts to kick out those who do.
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Packet Captures and More Information...
If you want more information, take a look at West Point's Cyber Defense Exercise webpage...
http://www.itoc.usma.edu/cdx/
They also have a number of publications here...
http://www.itoc.usma.edu/cdx/publication.htm
~rumint
www.rumint.com -
Packet Captures and More Information...
If you want more information, take a look at West Point's Cyber Defense Exercise webpage...
http://www.itoc.usma.edu/cdx/
They also have a number of publications here...
http://www.itoc.usma.edu/cdx/publication.htm
~rumint
www.rumint.com -
When I was teaching...Sim Farm was a dandy one that they loved.
West Point Bridge Design had them gleefully ripping out their own hair trying to match the posted records.
Life & Death II: The Brain has medically-sanctioned violence.
SHAMELESS PLUG: My personal favorite is WordWars, a nice vocabulary-building game with mild cartoonish violence, if the administration can handle that. It's my favorite, naturally, as I wrote it.
:D -
When I was teaching...Sim Farm was a dandy one that they loved.
West Point Bridge Design had them gleefully ripping out their own hair trying to match the posted records.
Life & Death II: The Brain has medically-sanctioned violence.
SHAMELESS PLUG: My personal favorite is WordWars, a nice vocabulary-building game with mild cartoonish violence, if the administration can handle that. It's my favorite, naturally, as I wrote it.
:D -
Took Okasaki's data structures courseHere's a reason to get a Computer Science degree at a good school: you can take a course on data structures taught by Chris Okasaki, the book's author. I took Advanced Data Structures from him at Columbia in 1999. Now he's at West Point.
The course was pretty mind-blowing. He knows his stuff. It was a bit freaky to watch him grading programming assignments by just reading them, not running them, and yet never missing a mistake.
I would recommend the book not just as an introduction to advanced data structures in functional languages, but as a guide to some of the more interesting data structures of the last fifteen years, regardless of implementation language.
-- Phil Gross -
The nation's first engineering school
United States Military Academy at West Point
How can you miss a place that has been producing engineers for two centuries? Plus you get great scenery, lots of history, interesting architecture, and if you time it right, you might be able to catch a show at Ike Hall.
Some other places to consider would be the Johnson Space Center, the Boston Museum of Science, the Las Vegas strip, and, to see what our lives will be like in the future (minus a few decades...), Epcot Center. Those are just a few places I can think of that I've been to that would be of interest (other than what has already been mentioned several times).
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West Point does this
The U.S. Military Academy (West Point) already does this to a large extent. The engineering and science majors have to take a reasonable dose of humanities (Psych, Eng Lit/Comp, Int'l Relations, Poli Sci, foriegn language, all kinds of history) over the 4 years, and, perhaps more importantly, the liberal arts-type majors are mandated to take a minor in an engineering field. It makes for much more well-rounded thinkers... it's not the engineering they take, but the engineering thought process associated with it that is important.
It's also full tuition (and room/board/food).
Of course, definitely not for everyone, but a really good education for those who do go. -
Re:BZZZT... wrongA great school attracts great students, great teachers [I am using the word 'teacher' because what matters is the ability to convey the material, which is teaching; professing is to "declare or claim"
:)], and great supporters (businesses, professionals, retirees).But "Ivy League schools" are not the best option for everyone. And I'm not refering to those who couldn't get in anyway, I'm refering to the high schooler who is trying to decide between engineering at Berkeley, Cal Tech, MIT, and Stanford. (Yes, I'm from California. Bit of a bias, but I am also looking at the U.S. News ranking of the best undergraduate engineering schools with Ph.D. programs. Sometimes 'best' needs to be defined in terms of what you want. If you want an education which emphasizes practical, hands-on, do it yourself, go out to the shop and weld yourself a bike, you might not get as much as you want at an Ivy League school as you would at others.
I know, I go to a great school. Cal Poly was ranked 4th in the nation for the best undergraduate engineering schools without Ph.D. programs, ie. we concentrate on teaching undergraduate engineering. To compare, the US service academies (West Point, Annapolis, and US Air Force Academy) all rank below us, and they are considered world-class. Our graduates are known for being good engineers the first week on the job, quality contributors, intelligent people.
Basically, you don't need Ivy to be great.
Louis WuThinking is one of hardest types of work.
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CryptolgiaCryptologia is a journal that is a wonderful source on the history of codes and ciphers. There have been four books edited by Cipher A. Deavours (and others) and published by Artech House of selected papers from Cryptologia:
Machine Cryptography and Modern Cryptanalysis, 1985, Out of Print
Cryptology: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, 1987, Out of Print
Cryptology: Machines, History and Methods, 1989, Out of Print
Selections from Cryptologia: History, People and Technology, 1998
You might be able to find them in a good university library.
Aegean Park Press is another good source of historical material on cryptography.