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U.S. IT Infrastructure Highly Vulnerable
An anonymous reader writes "The President's Information Technology Advisory Committee in their February 2005 report to GW writes "...infrastructure of the United States, which is now vital for communication, commerce, and control of our physical infrastructure, is highly vulnerable to terrorist and criminal attacks." It goes on to say that "fundamentally new approaches are
needed to address the more serious structural weaknesses of the IT infrastructure" and finally offers "four key findings and recommendations
on how the Federal government can foster new architectures and technologies to secure the
Nation's IT infrastructure." Here is yet another, not surprising, bleak outlook for cyber security in the United States. The full 72-page report can be found here."
- A video
- A large image collection
- A PDF file
- A "personal" website (possibly hosted on a home DSL/Cable connection
then please consider using Coral.As long as Coral can see the site, it will be in the cache, and as more /.ers hit the Coral Cache, it will be distributed around (kind of like what Akamai does, only without having to set it up in advance)
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The problem is, she isn't brain dead. She's alive, breathing on her own, reacts to people, but can not feed herself. If simply being brain damaged to the point of not being able to perform certain functions was reason enough to kill people, we have hundreds, if not thousands, of them in nursing homes in worse condition than Terry Schiavo. But, they don't have a husband out to kill them, and it currently is considered "controversial" to want to kill them.
This isn't a case of "letting a brain-dead woman finish dying". It's a case of, "I don't want her around anymore, so I want her dead." And the husband claims, with no evidence to support him, that she "wanted to die". How convenient.
You would die if we withheld food from you. Does that mean that if we did it, we would simply be "allowing you to die"? Would you consider that a mercy, or would you complain that we were murdering you? Terry can't complain. She is going to suffer. They won't even offer the kindness of a lethal injection, because that's too much like murder.
Now, whether setting a precident like this is "medical terrorism", I don't know. I do think it is a bad thing to do, making the decision of who should live or die based not on whether or not someone could survive, but on how much it inconveniences the living.
I do think it is a bad thing to do, making the decision of who should live or die based not on whether or not someone could survive, but on how much it inconveniences the living.
It's a bit off topic, but anyway.
You've presented two options for deciding whether someone gets to live:
1. Could they survive?
2. How inconvenient would that be for others?
But as you can see, they are not distinct options, because the answer to 1. is usually "yes" given a high enough value of inconvenience in 2.
What you're really saying is that you don't like the idea of performing a cost-benefit analysis on someone's life. What alternative do you suggest?
How much money should society spend keeping an individual alive if there's no suggestion that they will ever lead a productive life?
Or say our current spending on medical research is x. Suppose we could find a cure for debilitating illness A if we spend 20x right now.
Should we? If only one person has illness A then it might be a stupid waste of money. If hundreds of thousands have A then maybe we should, but unfortunately we've spent 20x on illness B which affects millions.
There's a limited amount of resource to allocate on different projects. You have to use some determining factor to choose worthy projects. Generally that's about cost/benefit, or "inconvenience".
It's not an equal world, and we can't always make it so. And I'm a socialist.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
The animosity between the Arab (and wider Moslem) world and the U.S. has developed gradually. The first seeds of conflict arose over America's one-sided approach to the dispute between Israel and the Arabs (especially the Palestinians). American support for corrupt governments in the region was also resented. However, until Gulf War I, there was no real organised attempt to hit back at the U.S., in spite of Libia's periodic sabre rattling.
The first major increase in tension came with the large American presence in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other M.E. countries starting with GW I. Confronting Saddam Hussein at that time was unavoidable, of course, but the U.S. should have been looking to disengage as soon as possible instead of planning a permanent presence. A gradual escalation in the resentment of the Arab general population started at the time and continues to grow. Even at the time of 9/11, however, the number actually willing to take up arms against the U.S. was still relatively few.
The situation now is different. There are already tens of thousands of Iraqis willing to fight and die to free their land from U.S. occupation. They have the tacit support of a majority of the Iraqi population, and of a few battle hardened foreign fighters. Now the critical factor: the greater the attempted repression of the population by the U.S., the more support for the resistance will grow. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, large groups are committed to attacking U.S. interests. Smaller numbers are active elsewhere.
The longer the U.S. stays in the region, the more resistance to their presence will grow. If the U.S. attempts to spread the war wider, say by an invasion of Syria, the problems will become even greater.
It is tempting to point to the Israeli success in subjugating the Palestinians and to believe the U.S. with its enormous military power would be able to do at least as well. The U.S. attack on Falluja (and similar attacks elsewhere) certainly seem to come from the Israeli playbook. There is a crucial difference. The Israelis are willing to continue their oppression indefinitely. For the U.S., the costs (politically and in terms of military morale) of taking a thousand American dead annually -- year in, year out -- are not supportable in the long term. It sometimes seems that the U.S. learnt nothing from Vietnam: about the resiliance of a domestic resistance and the difficulty of maintaining morale in armed forces who know they are pursuing an unjust war.