Slashdot Mirror
Technology Leveling The Playing Field In Modern War
The IEEE spectrum site has up an article written by the author Robert N. Charette describing the 'empowerment of the individual to conduct war' through technology. In the piece, entitled Open-Source Warfare, Charette describes the cheap, inexpensive, but clever ways that militants are adapting to modern warfare. "As events are making painfully clear, [counterterrorism expert John Robb] says, warfare is being transformed from a closed, state-sponsored affair to one where the means and the know-how to do battle are readily found on the Internet and at your local RadioShack. This open global access to increasingly powerful technological tools, he says, is in effect allowing 'small groups to...declare war on nations.' Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3."
the germans did pretty good with old technology, and I think that even today they'd make most smaller countries think twice about attacking them if they 'only' had wwII era weaponry.
In fact all that tech is quickly becoming a weakness.
Think about South Korea, more afraid of North Koreas conventional weaponry and artillery then of their nuke (assuming they really do have one).
http://rndpic.com/
MP3 Search Engine
I can see Microsoft's new marketing campaign now. "PS3's are for terrorists"
Seriously, WTF? How does a Playstation have any benefits over other smaller, cheaper, lighter computer hardware for guiding missiles? How does cheap computer hardware have any benefits at all when you don't have the software to run on it? How would hardware and software have any benefits at all when you don't have any guided missiles in the first place, and if some rogue state (or the CIA, depending on whose side you're on) wanted to supply you with them, they could just supply you with guidance systems at the same time?!
I'd thought guerrilla wasn't exactly a new concept...
/* BTW inexpensive == cheap */
Ignore this signature. By order.
The real problem with expending your military might in an endless fight is the same as abusing antibiotics. You train your enemy how to adapt to your attacks and how to generate new ones against you. This is one reason why we had the Powell Doctrine. You attack with a clear goal, a clear exit strategy, and overwhelming force. This is what we learned in Vietnam. Powell & Armitage were the only members of the Bush administration who were in the army and we told to shut up by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cheney. Now we have trained a new generation of Mugahadin on two fronts how to bleed the US Army. In fact this was Bin laden's stated policy. He said he could run a $100,000 opperation against us and in turn we would spend billioins to fight him. At the time of this post "The War in Iraq Costs $471,396,995,064. Wow Bush et. all could not have done a worse job of responding to asymmetrical warfare. This is how Afghanistan defeated the U.S.S.R. and in some ways Afghanistan was the straw that broke the camel's back. Now we as a country have run up or credit cards only to run up or mortgages on s speculative bubble only to run up of national debt to what end. The dollar plunges, the rate of abortions goes up, and the federal government expands its powers. For what?
I dunno, maybe you could make it run on DC...Prolly could get away with a power inverter. Still though, would you don't really want moving parts and it's a lame way to do it.
http://www.u-nav.com/picopilot/picopilotn.html
$500 gets you a solid state autopilot programmable with GPS waypoints. It also already has a interface to servo's.
Just because you could build a guidance system from a game system, doesn't mean it's really going to have any advantage in the real world.
Sure, technology helps. But what you really need is to find some way to inspire men to kill. As present experience shows us, as long as you have that ideology that inspires men to plant a bomb in a market packed with people, that's all that matters. Dynamite is a 19th century invention. As is throwing bombs into crowds.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
on the subject.. remember Bruce Simpson and his DIY cruise missile that various governments stamped on?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3302763.stm
http://www.interestingprojects.com/cruisemissile/
He's talented and not afraid of controversy and his part in the infamous "jet carts" episode from Scrapheap Challenge is excellent. I always thought he had a point about this one.
btw. I always though IE D from the article was a very misleading term - many of these devices are NOT improvised the insurgents pack them out on a factory line and some of them are relatively advanced in the design and detonation system - as far as I can tell from the news reports.
If I recall correctly, the first computers more than half a decade ago were built to guide missiles, even my pocket calculator could do that.
In the piece, entitled Open-Source Warfare, Charette describes the cheap, inexpensive, but clever ways that militants are adapting to modern warfare.
Such as? I couldn't find much at all in the article except for some vague references to IEDs and cell phones, terrorist manuals found on the internet (most of which, according to TFA are terribly inaccurate) and ridiculous comments such as the one about PS2 being used as a missile guidance system. Sounds like someone came up with a new buzzword "open source warfare" and thought it was so cool that it warranted a 5 page article. People have used guerrilla tactics forever and I don't see anything terribly new here except perhaps detonating bombs remotely using a cellphone.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Cheap terrorism becomes "global warfare".
Calling the World Trade Center attacks an "Attack on America" just upgraded a couple of lunatic terrorists to warfaring guys that can attack a nation.
What a bunch of bullcrap. But good for the security industry. They can sell a bunch of crap on that. The Iraqis are now used to live with a big one every week. America turned into a bunch of pussies because of one lousy (OK, it was pretty good, but it was still just one) attack. I am from Germany and we went through this before. The RAF formed in the 70s and the whole nation went ape shit crazy. Anti-Terrorism-legislation went unanimously through parliament that was against basic rights and the constitution on many accounts.
I think this makes terror work in the first place. If we don't pass legislation. If we don't go ape shit. Then we win against them. The loosing starts by calling them terrorists. They are a bunch of lunatics that badly need to be put behind bars. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Modern warfare"? This article marks just another loss.
To summarize the article:
Despite America's best efforts to bomb the guerilla fighters into the stone age, they are still managing to get hold of cell phones and laptops. In theory, we blame thier new fangled abilities to communicate on a broad scale for America's inability to adjust to asymetrical warfare waged by non nation states. We threw in the bit about using PS2s to fly cruise missles to mislead you, its worked before. Consumer electronis are the new weapons of mass destruction. So are you afraid yet? Vote Republican or the terrorists win.
never mind the gadgets, consider more the blood, guts & dead people, as well as innocent children being blown to pieces. takes some of the excitement of techno babble out of it. yOUR 'mainstream' media has failed us whoreabully in this aspect.
the lights are coming up all over now. pay attention. it's cost effective, & could help make the future brighter for all of us. don't forget to get a little more oxygen on yOUR brain, so you'll be alert when witnessing the big flash.
there's lots to be done. the planet/population remains in crisis mode.
we're intending (do not underestimate intentions) for the philistine nazi execrable to give up/fail even further, in attempting to control the 'weather', as well as a # of other things.
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=video+cloud+spraying
micro management has never worked. it's an illness. tie that with life0cidal aggression & gangster style bullying, & what do we have? a greed/fear/ego based recipe for disaster.
the creators will prevail. as it has always been.
corepirate nazi execrable costs outweigh benefits
(Score:-)mynuts won, the king is a fink)
by ourselves on everyday 24/7
as there are no benefits, just more&more death/debt & disruption.
fortunately there's an 'army' of 'angels'(light bringers, for those who are afraid of/confused by heavenly stuff), coming yOUR way
do not be dismayed, it is the way it was meant to be.
the little ones/innocents must/will be protected.
after the big flash, ALL of yOUR imaginary 'borders' may blur a bit?
for each of the creators' innocents harmed (in any way), there is a debt that must/will be repaid by you/us, as the perpetrators/minions of unprecedented evile, will not be available after the big flash occurs.
beware the illusionary smoke&mirrors.con
all is not lost or forgotten.
no need to fret (unless you're associated/joined at the hype with, unprecedented evile), it's all just a part of the creators' wwwildly popular, newclear powered, planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.
or, it could be (literally) ground hog day, again? many of US are obviously not interested in how we appear (which is whoreabull) from the other side of the 'lens', or even from across the oceans.
vote with (what's left in) yOUR wallet. help bring an end to unprecedented evile's manifestation through yOUR owned felonious corepirate nazi glowbull warmongering execrable.
we still haven't read (here) about the 2/3'rds of you kids who are investigating/pursuing a spiritual/conscience/concious re-awakening, in amongst the 'stuff that matters'? another big surprise?
some of US should consider ourselves very fortunate to be among those scheduled to survive after the big flash/implementation of the creators' wwwildly popular planet/population rescue initiative/mandate.
it's right in the manual, 'world without end', etc....
as we all ?know?, change is inevitable, & denying/ignoring gravity, logic, morality, etc..., is only possible, on a temporary basis.
concern about the course of events that will occur should the life0cidal execrable fail to be intervened upon is in order.
'do not be dismayed' (also from the manual). however, it's ok/recommended, to not attempt to live under/accept, fauxking nazi felon greed/fear/ego based pr ?firm? scriptdead mindphuking hypenosys.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators. providing more than enough of everything for everyone (without any distracting/spiritdead personal gain motives), whilst badtolling unprecedented evile, using an unlimited supply of newclear power, since/until forever. see you there?
"If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land."
"Open Source" is so 1995. Good lord, he even makes reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar." Could this article be more hackneyed? Time to update the buzzwords at least. This is Warfare 3.0! (Or is that too 2002?)
The insurgency has an advantage in that all they really need to do to win is continue to create a lot of chaos. That's a somewhat more modest objective than invading and occupying another country on the other side of the globe, which no number of PS3s and radio shack components will enable any guerilla army to do any time soon. They aren't particularly high tech, unless you were naive enough to think Iraqis didn't have cell phones and the Internet prior to the war. So technology isn't really leveling the playing field at all; it's just the nature of counter insurgency warfare.
It's a shame we lost a $100,000 robot to disarm a much less expensive IED, but that's why we built the robots. Ideally they'd come back from every mission, but if they don't it's quite an improvement over losing a solider, as we might have done in Vietnam.
Terrorism is like advertising, if you ignore it, pretty soon it will go away.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Just don't look.
How we know is more important than what we know.
We can think of terrorists much in the way we think of "trolls" on an Internet forum. Essentially, they both perform acts intended to annoy other people, to the point that the targets end up overreacting in such a way that hurts themselves. In the Internet world, comparing the evolution of Slashdot versus GameFAQs shows the right way and the wrong way of handing such folks.
Take Slashdot. Support for community-wide discussion was enabled, and soon enough, there were "trolls". After some experimentation, a community-based moderation system was set up. So nowadays the "trolls" can post all they want, but the community will ensure that such comments are moderated down. So in general, the "trolls" are ignored, and even marginalized, without compromising the ability of Slashdot users to freely discuss a very wide variety of issues. Best of all, those who want to read what the "trolls" write are free to do so, if they browse at -1.
Take a site like GameFAQs. Early on, they added discussion forums to their site. Soon enough, they got "trolls" posting there. But instead of taking a sensible approach like Slashdot, where a large swathe of the community is involved in the moderation process, GameFAQs appointed a small, select number of moderators. Most of these moderators were immature, anti-social, 15-year-old unemployed kids who had hours upon hours each day to do nothing but delete the posts of others. In their quest to eradicate "trolls", they essentially destroyed the ability for the legitimate GameFAQs forum users to have any meaningful discussion. They overreacted, and took out not only the trolls, but everyone there who had something interesting to say.
That isn't exactly correct, and, more importantly, war doesn't boil down to just having the best tanks. What's more important is how you use them.
1. German tanks _were_ weaker. Yes, everyone knows about Tigers and Panthers later, but in 39 we entered the war with Pz-I and Pz-II. That was the bulk of the German army. The I series was little more than an armoured car with two _medium_ machineguns in a turret. They were intended to be training tanks, but got pressed into the war because of lack of anything better.
Plus a couple of better ones, half of them captured from the Czechs, but they were anything but the bulk of the army.
Most German soldiers were equipped with a bolt action rifle until the end of the war.
Where Germany excelled were the doctrines. I.e., how you use that equipment.
E.g., tanks were weaker, but that was ok, because they were only supposed to punch through or bypass, take some important position, then let the enemy attack you to take it back. And then you could use the 88mm FLAK gun to kill any better tanks the enemy might have had. That was Blitzkrieg.
E.g., the soldiers may have had bolt action rifles, but that was ok because the German infantry doctrine had the squad machinegun as the central piece, and the rest of the squad was mostly support for it. (By comparison, the Americans saw it the other way around, so they were saddled with the shitty BAR as a piss-poor substitute for a squad MG.)
2. The Soviet union was more technologically advanced than you seem to think, grasshopper.
The T34 was years ahead of anything anyone else had. The 76mm gun could break through any other nation's tanks' armour even with the high explosive round. And the front armour was just short of invulnerable to anything Germany had on a tank.
The T34 was one of the reasons why Germany rushed to attack the USSR early. Hitler couldn't risk waiting until it's produced in large numbers.
You know the (in)famous German Panther? Well, that was a shameless copy of the Soviet T34. Really. The initial proposal was to just start manufacturing T34s, but it was seen as a matter of national pride to not be that obvious about it. So they changed the gun on it and a few other details, but otherwise it was still just a modded T34.
The KV-1 and KV-2 were a nightmare for the German army too. It took quite literally hundreds of hits to disable one. That was _years_ before the Tigers.
Add other advances, like rocket artillery, early semi-automatic rifles (and mass use of SMGs, far ahead of the numbers the Germans had), etc, and the Russians weren't technologically handicapped at all.
Heck, even their AT guns, Germany used any they could lay their hands on. There were whole series of vehicles built with captured soviet AT guns. That says something, doesn't it? They wouldn't have used something that's two generations behind.
3. Don't get me wrong, the USSR did have its own problems and handicaps. But it wasn't as handicapped as most people seem to assume anyway.
The biggest and foremost problem the USSR had wasn't technological at all. Their army had just gone through Stalin's purges, and was (A) lacking competent officers, (B) paralized with fear of being the next scapegoat if they show any initiative, and (C) put under the control of comissars who were there just for political reasons, not for any military competence. The USSR, including the army, also had a _massive_ morale problem. At least half the people (and almost all the minorities and non-Russian Soviet republics) would have been happier to fight against Stalin than for him.
_That_ is the main factor that almost doomed the USSR in the early days of Operation Barbarossa.
A second problem -- again, mostly because of doctrine and political idiocy, rather than technology -- was that the Russians didn't believe in using radios on their tanks. They had them in homeopathic quantities, if at all. So once they were buttoned up in combat, each tank was almost on its own and had
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I resent the association between war and Open Source. It's bullshit.
yeah, especially seeing as it has been a success beyond even their most wildest fantasies. A better description would be "super fantastic."
How we know is more important than what we know.
I guess the "fanatical mindset" refers to the 1930s and 1940s.
There is a huge difference. The difference I was pointing out in my article. Back then we had a war machine that took down Europe and was set to conquer Asia. But America stood up to that. Now it is a bunch of guys with box cutters. Less than a tiny fraction of people with no weapons other than box cutters.
But still they managed to destroy 4 airliners, 2 buildings and damage a fourth one. That is very impressive, don't you think? To prevent that any sane person would lock the cockpit doors of airliners so they can't open during midflight. I am sorry to call you pussy. I was just trying to point something out.
Guerrilla warfare is never waged without the support of the people. Now that guerrillas have gotten so effective we should not fear any invasion, as it will be sent home with its tail between its legs in short order.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
If you need a PS2 or PS3 to run guidance algorithms, you don't know how to write guided missile control software. A 68000 is more than most missiles have.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
...were open source.
People do things for reasons.
bear with me, I'll make the point clear.
9/11 was a response to the Trillion Dollar bet
It was no coincidence our defense system was in such a state as to not really respond.
Nor was it coincidence that building 7 was intentionally taken down though it contained documents regarding matters of the
trillion dollar bet that were under investigation by the SEC. Enron, Worldcom were a couple of the losers in the bet.
The dot com boom was a result of some winners needing to put their money somewhere.
And there is a lot more to this that is and has been "open source" publicly available.
However, the Anthrax threat against the News Media by our own government and the set up of the "Clear Channel" news network resulted in hiding the truth.
Social Security ain't gonna be there for me, as I get annual reports as to what decreasing percentage of what is to be own me, will be paid me. Why is it decreasing? Because the US government keeps taking our money away from us to use it on so called wars to protect our freedom. I'm going to be real free when I don't have a place to live because the government stole from me.
I suspect the idea is that in time people will forget the wrongs done them, as they die off.
But check this out: What the World Wants
It exposes the lies of teh self supported dependencies of war mongers and warfare.
The point is:
Its not religion, thats just philosophy that is wrapped around the real, and the real is all about money and trade value.
We the world have such a massive amount of money, we have the manpower and the knowledge, far more than we need to fix real world problems. And doing so would also remove real and many imaginary reasons supported by the real for warfare/terrorism, that warfare/terrorism would be clearly shown for what it really is. A self destructive, value draining illusion that we the world can do better by leaps and bound far beyond the constraints if this war illusion that not anyone having to do with commanding war is going to look good when this is put into practice.
Open Source, information made available, is what is exposing the fraud of war mongers and warfare.
And that is a SERIOUS Threat, a TERRORISM against the war mongers.
It's not talking about open source software, it's open source as a methodology. The author is using the term open source in terms of how knowledge of improvised weapons and tactics are being spread. That technically sophisticated terrorists have managed to shorten the learning curve. It's open source intelligence and the premise is not flawed. They're using the open source model very effectively. It's not that the pitchforks are all that much more advanced, it's the learning environment that's advanced. And it that regard the insurgents are running rings around the Pentagon. Although one could argue that's a pretty low bar.
But the real boon for terrorists is having a practical lab located conveniently in their own back yard.
The reason Iraq has proven to be such a rich learning environment for insurgents has more to do with practical, on-the-ground opportunities for learning that the fighting provides."
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I seriously doubt we will see many cobbled-together anti-aircraft missiles with Linux guidance programs in the near future. The testing phase alone (to make sure it wouldn't lock onto something else, like a tree) would carry too much of a risk of discovery. It is far more effective for them to load a truck full of fertilizer, propane, or fuel, and drive it into a building. Oh, and even if they do pick a government building as a target, it's doubtful to be a military building. Those are too much of a hard target. They would go after an office building full of civilian government employees.
Look at that. Doesn't sound like warfare, does it? Sounds more like run-of-the-mill terrorism and defending against that is incredibly difficult without adversely affecting Liberty itself. The price of not living in a police state is that, sometimes, bad people will manage to do bad things. Horrible cost, but that's life. Anybody who tells you differently is selling something.
Maybe our children's children will finally find a solution. It is not going to be our generation; so do your best to teach the children the value of life and freedom. At the very least, they can push forward some more and will not spend their time trying to build missiles out of their PS2.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Speaking of bad taste, check this out: http://rants-raves.net/2007/09/james-brolin-happy-911-wtf.html
What an idiot!
-Ben
...and the know-how to do battle are readily found on the Internet and at your local RadioShack. Dear God, if they can wage battle with RadioShack, please keep them from knowing about Digi-key http://dkc1.digikey.com/us/en/pdf/Current.htmlGiven that they did successfully "attack a nation" (eg, cause nation-wide disruption, tens of billions in damage, etc), I don't see the point of your remark. I agree with the remarks about passing legislation and such. Last I checked, the US government had enough information to investigate and stop the 9/11 attacl. Maybe the terrorists would have adapted and found some other 9/11-like attack that would succeed. But it still remains that the attacks happened on schedule due to US incompetence. You can't legislate incompetence.
I see two things that you need to consider. First, there was a need to prevent future terrorist attacks. My take is that the Bush administration has been successful in preventing future terrorist attacks because there haven't been future attacks. Six years is IMHO well in excess of the time between big Al Qaeda ops. My take is that given that there have been attacks on Spain, UK, and elsewhere, but no similar attacks in the US, then that means the US has done something better.
Second, given that everyone goes apeshit over this stuff, then that means you have to do a certain amount of apeshit activity to keep society from doing something far worse. One useful approach is to prevent futher attacks, something with which the US has been success so far.
Technology is increasing the ability of terrorists. Modern armies aren't very good at fighting terrorists whether or not they have technology. We had the same problem in Viet Nam. The Viet Cong did a pretty good job with shit covered sticks in pits.
... I wonder if it's too early for a double scotch.)
Giving away our freedoms and destroying our economy so we can fight terrorists means the terrorists have won. You are also right that the rest of the world had been dealing with this crap for years before 911.
In light of every other major cause of death, the destruction of 911 was relatively minor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_Traffic_Safety_Administration Annually, 40,000 people die on the highways. That's about twenty times the 911 toll. The billions we have wasted on the war on terror and in Iraq make our spending on highway safety seem pitiful by comparison.
Fighting terrorists is as much a battle for hearts and minds as anything else. We could win the war in Afghanistan because the people remember and fear the Taliban. We are screwing that one up because we diverted the resources we need to Iraq. We are also losing support because we insist on fighting the war on drugs and bombing the snot out of the Afghan farmers. Can't we do anything right. (Smoke now pours from my ears
Of course, Slashdot trolls don't kill people. Terrorists do. Now you might say "just ignore the killing, and it won't bother you", but I don't consider that a good attitude. Moreover, you can quite effectively protect you from inadvertently reading troll posts by just setting the score threshold high enough. There's no corresponding "death threshold" to set in order to protect yourself from being inadvertently killed by terrorists.
Yes, it is important not to over-react to terrorists. But just ignoring them isn't the right answer either.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Just FYI, they did not use box cutters.
There were no box cutters found in the wreckage of the planes, and no one calling from any of the planes mentioned box cutters.
However, there were reports from the planes of stabbing and the use of a chemical spray.
The reason the box cutter myth was created is because otherwise it would mean the terrorists were allowed to take real weapons through customs. This puts the blame and liability onto the airlines, and also means that the existing security measures should have been adequate to stop the hijackers.
At first glance, spending $100k to take out a cheap IED doesn't sound that useful, but there are two really important things to remember. First, that the insurgencies need to pay people $500 to $1000 (roughly) to plant those bombs. There's also risk that either someone gets caught or an innocent party gets killed (both which can cause serious problems for the insurgency). And second, the insurgencies have far less resources than the US government does. Two orders of magnitude spending difference may be sufficient for the US to beat these insurgencies.
And so, here are a few of my favorite quotes from the article. . .
To understand open-source warfare, it's instructive to revisit Eric S. Raymond's 1997 manifesto, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in which he describes how a large community of open-source software hackers created the operating system Linux. "Linux is subversive," Raymond wrote.
Wow. So there it is. Writing software in your spare time for the fun of it is now 'hacking', 'subversive' and linked to terrorism. They've been trying like crazy to connect those synapses for years now, but this is the first time I've read an article which says it with such bald-faced impunity.
In studying the behaviors of insurgencies in Iraq and elsewhere, as well as organized-crime syndicates and other groups, Robb noticed the many parallels to the open-source model in software. [. .
Well, thank-you Robb! You just described everybody living in an industrialized nation with an internet connection. He's not describing the community living in a bombed out Iraq or Afghanistan, where they can't even get running water with any reliability, let alone electricity and an internet service provider. Nope. He's describing you and me.
But this article isn't just about trying to make every day activities seem suspicious. The whole thing is a giant sell-job. It just takes for granted that terrorists are real, that brown people defending their country against invaders are our natural enemy and that defeating them is merely a technical problem requiring trillions of dollars. Little robots for detecting road-side mines which cost $100,000 each? Jeezuz. Give me a $100,000 and I'll build you a fleet of frickin' radio-controlled Tonka dune buggies with mini-Canada Arms. Those $100,000 robots are the best indication of exactly what this war is really all about. Money. Hoovering up as much cash from the over-taxed citizens as is possible. Money. You are a terrorist if you write your own software instead of buying Microsoft. (--Money, and that loony little Christian-cult-of-apocalypse-Christ-Rising-In-Babylon(Iraq) thing.) But we know all of this! I'm just repeating what has been said a few thousand times already. And guess what? I'll keep on repeating it whenever I see evil sell-jobs like this dumb article.
Here's a new term: How about, "Closed-Source Propaganda"?
Somebody is paying this 'counterterrorism expert', John Robb's bills. Now who in the great Homeland could that be?
Money from the top. He's not writing this shit in his spare time while panning for donations. He's a soldier for the Neocon Pathocracy. Those secretive bastards are as closed-source as you can get.
-FL
Nah, most of their tanks came from Tankograd, a city they built pretty much from scratch around some enormous tank factories.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
When you buy that PS2 don't forget to pick up the "missile tracking" module as well, or it won't do you much good.
BTW: where can I find a Radio Shack in the vicinity of Iraq or Libya?
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
Wow. This post is incredible.
In summary, I think that your points are that Sept 11 was an inside job - a cover up to hide the fact that the government bailed out the rich invested in a hedge fund, and an excuse to cow the masses into believing that threats by outsiders to US national security are real so that the military industrial complex can make more money by waging a war which is actually no threat to our security.
I can't even begin to address how ridiculous these ideas are.
Building 7 was not intentionally taken down.
Implosion specialist's analysis, based on facts and scientific analysis
With respect to the "Trillion Dollar Bet" - it makes sense to me that if US investors have an enormous number of dollars invested in risky investments overseas when the overseas markets tank, the loss of those holdings could affect the market as a whole, and that could cause significant problems for joe sixpack.
Take a look at what is happening now due to the subprime mortgages issued to people who could not afford them. Our economy is on the edge of slowdown as a whole because of the significant decrease of transactions in the housing market. The fed needed to take action to protect the public, and it did.
Ideologues around the world have stated that they want to kill us. According to your view, how should we respond? Let them attack our ships, our embassies, our large cities, while we ignore them because the battle is economically disproportionate?
Wow.
*POO* IHBT!
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I think it's Ozzy's fault!
He talks about Improvised Explosive Devices and that they account for half the US casualties. Right, eh so? These things are new? Pretty sure my field manual mentioned them, not just how to spot them and deal with them but including suggestions on how to make your own should the need arise. That was over 2 decades ago.
The vietnamese used a lot of IED's and even non-explosive traps. So did the Israeli's in their war against Britian (well would be Israeli's) the various occupied nations during WW2 became experts in it.
In the days of Sword and Bow&Arrow a flail was a dangerous weapon found on any farm. You would need to be very good with your sword to go up against a farmer with a scythe and ask yourselve, who has had the most training with their weapon.
The LIE is that somehow modern tech has changed this. It hasn't. So they use mobile phones now as remote detonators, is that really that different then a radio or IR detonator, how about a simple wire? A fuse? They all been used and plenty of others.
He then goes on to claim that you could use a PS3 as a missle guidance system. You probably could. Except missle guidance systems existed long before you had the PS3, so why do you need anything that powerfull?
It also doesn't explain where you get the rest of the tech, you know like the missle or the detection system. No, the IR sensor is NOT good enough to track a plane. Not by a long shot. What about the software?
It becomes even more silly when you then ask where these PS3 guided missles ARE? All the incidents involving missles involve regular missles bought on the blackmarket. I seen no story claiming that these SAM's were handmade.
If this stuff was so advanced you would think that by now Hezbollah could hit a target with it rather then having to fire at civilian centers because they are the only target big enough to have a change of causing damage.
If you want to see real modern tech you got to look at the propaganda war, every incident, there is a camera right there, recording it and its data gets out to the rest of the world with amazing speed. But the tech used is all of the shelf stuff. Nothing home grown or opensource.
No, this guy is just trying to use a buzzword to scaremonger. Iraq is nothing new, what is frightening is that the US was incapable avoiding it. That we still don't have any better way to deal with this. No I don't have the answer, except that perhaps they should have done another Gulf War 1, bomb the place back to the stoneage every couple of years but stay the fuck out of it. Really, hasn't history shown us that modern occupations rarely work well?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Indeed. Machiavelli laid this out in The Prince centuries ago. It's a very readable book, I recommend it.
That's why it's kind of mind-boggling to see the US fail so miserably in its imperialist occupation in Iraq. The part where they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of giving them at least tokens of power is especially laughable in this respect; it shows that Bush, along with his merry band of war criminals, is most certainly as stupid and ignorant as he looks.
For all the people making fun of how technology levels the playing field, all you need to do is look at how the Iraqis use cell phones to remotely detonate IEDs. Apparently other technologies are being adapted and used as well.
Think you need an actual rocket for a guided missile? How about a big model airplane and a GPS? Did you know that one group of hobbyists a couple of years ago built a model airplane that flew autonomously across the Atlantic ocean? It used a GPS, gyros, and had a satellite radio uplink to report its location http://tam.plannet21.com/.
How about model airplanes that give you the view from the cockpit for remote piloting to the intended target? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2237947353453839215
All the little gadgets and gizmos that are out there give the creative terrorist a lot of possibilities. Think this article is sensationalistic and stupid? Think again. This stuff isn't hard to do any more.
Much like the Soviet at a later time, the US believed its own anticommunist propaganda so much that it felt kicked in the nut when the Soviets built a nuke just a few years after them, then beat them decisively on the delivery and communication part. Sputnik wasn't just a great scientific and technological advance, it also said, clearly, "we can bomb you from space and you can't deny it because everyone can hear sputnik."
Sure, the US beat them back, but you have to ask yourself, what did it take? Well it took a JFK to launch a massive state-run endeavour, the Apollo program, among others.
Yet you still buy the anticommunist propaganda that the state is only good at wasting taxpayer money. Well, apparently, it's particularly apt at it with a republican president using it to attack third world nations.
What, like with the USS Cole? The Embassy bombings in Africa? Fat lot of good that did.
No, what needs to happen is 1) we need to let democracy run it's course in the middle east, even though it will likely lead to an Islamo-fascist regime, and 2) We need to get our government back from the military-industrial-energy complex. (2a: stop messing around in other countries' internal affairs without permission).
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Targeting/hiding behind women and children is not a level military playing field, its terrorism. The only reason these technologies are effective against modern warriors is because they are used against a country that has some sort of conscience. You can debate how strong that conscience is but the fact is the playing field is only leveled because one side can hide behind women and children and the other side has qualms about simply annihilating who ever stands in the way.
The reason the playing field is leveled is because of tactics, not technology.
Why have 1 person driving a backhoe when you could employ 20 with shovels?
There was a military guy who gave a similar presentation (I didn't read TFA) about terrorism and Iraq and open-source warfare. That is, how terrorists are sharing tactics with each other and therefore adapting and evolving their tactics very quickly and effectively.
I'm thinking more along the lines of tasers and mace. Hi tech is cool an' all, but far too sensitive(a nice, strong EMP will take care of that), and good old "lo tech" chemistry and electricity come in pretty handy, and these kind of weapons are easy for anyone to produce out of their home. An army of ants can bring down an elephant.
What?
Ignoring them as terrorists is the right answer.
They should be treated and convicted like any other criminals without acknowledging them as something special. As soon as you label them "terrorists", you give them the credit they want.
During the Nurenberg trial, the chief American prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, stated:
I'm not aware of this interpretation being seriously disputed.
While it is true that Machiavelli is, along with Hobbes, one of the founding authors of what is known as the "realist" school of thought in international relations as a study, his thought processes are largely obsolete.
No shit. That's my fucking point, they don't even grasp 500 year old international relations theory.
Hindsight is always 20/20 from our comfortable arm chairs.
Not just about this army thing, but about the Iraq invasion in general, just go back to what Villepin and Chirac said in 2002-2003 as to what was going to happen. It's not hindsight, it's "I TOLD YOU SO" in big fat red capitals. And not (just) from your fringe leftist nutbags.
So it should be illegal to give them the free plastic enclosing that cellphone ??
Did you know that russians flew a dog into space (pretty big size, a sputnik
Damn those iraqis and so on for shopping at RadioShack, Amazon, and countless other places where they buy so much harmful substances (have you even begun to think about the KNIVES shops) !!
Then, one has to THANK $DEITY that assault weapons and explosives are only sold after having checked either your driving licence in the US OR your military status in pretty much ANY other country !!!
Then, one may argue that, in order to use those cool Vista licences & other gadgets for harmful purposes, one has to have some education
Of course modern weapons can level the playing field. Modern weapons can level pretty much anything!
I hate imperialists!
All open source information.
The trillion dollar bet happened. read the transcript to really understand it and how the formula used was weakened or dis-empowered by being made open source, publicly available.
9/11 was not the first attempt on the WTC. check time lines of trillion dollar bet against the first attempt. It wasn't like South east Asia wasn't trying to be heard, but more like it was being intentionally ignored. Ted Turner, after 9/11 stated 9/11 was and act of desperation and he said this based upon his own newsmedia CNN research and reporting of the financial damage happening in Indonesia and that teh people knew it was the US but did not know how teh US was doing it. Later Ted Turner apologized, probably after he received and anthrax letter.
The so called gamble (how can something like this be a gamble when it is really an intentional drain - money doesn't grow on trees in south east asia and its no wonder it tanked - or more correctly became empty due the theft), it financially drained south east Asia, of which Indonesia was included and hit hard. CIA reports that Indonesia is 88% Islamic.
The US via the world stock market stole from them a great deal.
It had and still has repercussions around the world.
Exception proves the rule. China was not affected as they didn't play in world stock markets however they did get Hong Kong Back and got a front row seat to the event and saw how the stock market can be manipulated and controlled. But now that they are in it, notice how we seem to be getting a lot of bad product from China? Money being put into china companies without really knowing their quality and knowledge standards of manufacturing. Maybe they need more open source knowledge so they we don't suffer their bad manufacturing.
World Bank run by the US offered to make loans to Indonesia, for an interest rate. It did not go over well at all, a matter of intentional usury and entrapment (remember the movie Entrapment.) But we saw how credit card rates dropped later to 0%. A matter of saying sorry?
Violence broke out in Indonesia after 9/11. But no where near as much as the violence we created in iraq.
WTC came down, other buildings damaged worse than building 7. but building 7 came down without anyone being hurt. Interesting in what it contained.
Interesting how the stock market gamble was not publicly tied to Worldcom or Enron or other losers, as the evidence was destroyed in building 7.
I believe there is also something regarding California's power station brown outs due not having the money.... they lost in the bet?
The ownership change of the WTC and problems of the building in asbestos health risks and decreasing tenants count along with an insurance policy that paid off 8 billion for a far lower investment....because the new owner insisted on the details of the terrorism clause in the policy. The payoff was much larger than the structure value lost. Inside job? There could have been some explosives planted to help insure and control the fall and reduce surrounding damage (hmmm, for insisting on details of a terrorist attack - was their effort taken to reduce surrounding damage should such an attack happen?) . Of course the option is to not believe anything more than a jet liner could take a building down that was supposedly designed to withstand a plane crash. But they did come down quite fast for such a supposed design. Perhaps faster than such design should allow? Faster newer jets not accounted for when the WTC was designed?
Anthrax from a US based Military base. The guy they tried blaming won in court more than Richard Jewel got for being blamed for the 1996 Olympic park bombing, but you didn't hear wide spread media coverage of the matter. No conspiracy, as a conspiracy takes more than one high enough ranking military official with enough clearance to access the store and know how to handle it. Only a fool would not see how easy and certain it would be that the government would fall all over it to terrorise the media i
Again, your post is irrational, and your main points simply don't stand up to comparison with facts. You can believe what you want, but understand that it's unrelated to facts.
FWIW, Bush didn't put religion over science, he put moral restraint on amoral science. Look at what happened as a result - this week the man who made the initial breakthroughs on embryonic stem cell research made a new breakthrough with adult stem cells, eliminating the moral problems with killling embryos for the benefit of adults.
Whew. What color is the sky in your world?
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
Example: the last page in the latest MAKE magazine was an article about how a guy had put a LEGO Mindstorms in an R/C plane, and wrote some software, and now he could get it to fly to waypoints. My first thought, when I saw this, was "dude, cheap homebuilt cruise missile! Rock on! This'll piss off LOTS of people!" Guy down in New Zealand has a great set of webpages about building your own pulsejets, used to have one about how to add an autopilot onto one but had to take it down following government pressure -- but the knowledge is there.
You might ask why I'm enthusiastic about this. One: I love DIY and geek hardware. Two: I think the point of the Second Amendment was to keep the government afraid of the people, because an armed populace could overthrow a hostile, intrusive government. Well, these days, that's clearly not going to happen -- people are outclassed by orders of magnitude, and the idea of a popular insurrection is pretty much hopeless. However, maybe technology will fill in the gap. It's already happened with cryptography. Individuals can implement privacy measures that the government can't break by force. Maybe another 20 years, even if we can't stand up for ourselves, we can at least keep the government scared enough to listen.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
In 1992, the United States Secretary of Defense during the war, Dick Cheney, made the same point:
"I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.
And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties, and while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.
And the question in my mind is, how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is, not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."[31]
"Cheney changed his view on Iraq", by Charles Pope, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 29, 2004. Retrieved on January 7, 2005.
I don't buy this entirely. You can test with ordinary hobbyist RC aircraft and connect it to a ground guidance system by radio. When you get them crashing into the things you want to crash them into, you install the guidance system into two or three full scale mockups and test them out the middle of nowhere. There's plenty of places you could test them without drawing undue attention.
It would also be a mistake to assume pure terrorism is the only use of a cheap guided weapon. I can think of a few military applications.
How does one judge the power of technology in warfare? Since the 'product' of war is killing, we can keep score by looking at kill ratios. Look at the numbers. If we examine historical conflicts and compare them with the effectiveness of the coalition invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, I think we'll quickly see how lopsided the use of superior technology and training have made things. Iraq had the third-largest standing army in the world, yet the coalition was able to defeat this army in two weeks using a small fraction of the manpower they had. Coalition forces regularly manage 100:1 kill ratios. The notion that availability of off-the-shelf technology makes things more level is unbelievably naïve.
Repeat after me: more people die in police custody than at the hands of terrorists.
all we need to do is get rid of all the radio shacks and internets in Iraq. Great somebody tell George Bush! He'll be happy to kill teh Google. On a side note DUH! The internet exists for no other reason than to disperse information. Does it surprise anyone that the information dispersed might relate to DIY weapons? Not me. I hear there is this other medium that allows for information regarding bomb making to be passed from person to person...it's called paper. Maybe we should regulate paper AND the intarweb.
What's that? Is it kinda like underwater basket weaving...with a computer? Definitely sounds like you made a good choice there.
...which got sidetracked due to 'personal circumstances' as it is euphemistically called...
:)
You got drafted?
What?
It would also be a mistake to assume pure terrorism is the only use of a cheap guided weapon. I can think of a few military applications. The story blurb specifically mentions missiles, which is why I addressed that: "Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3."
RC planes have a limited payload for loading them down to blow up a building, and it would be difficult to take out an airliner with one. Actually, there is a low-budget film called "City Limits" that has James Earl Jones flying bomb-laden RC planes to destroy the watchtowers being used by a bunch of after-the-apocalypse capitalist Nazis. It would be difficult to put enough explosives in one to do a large amount of damage. A car or truck bomb is a better vehicle for that purpose.
Replacing the guidance system for something with the guts of a PS2 is just silly. If a rogue nation wants to build cheap anti-ship missiles, I think they would just purchase a batch of compact chipsets and such to make them. Converting a gaming system is amusing, not practical.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Typical right wing radio show, too stupid to understand irony.
- an insurgent-resilient model of acquisition
- to protect and serve the expensive equipment."We have to look outside the normal bureaucratic way of doing things" U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates
Yee-haa !!
Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3.
Yeah right. All you need to do is connect your missile's engine to the PlayStation Missile Guidance Port, right? </sarc>
Puhlease. Asymmetric warfare might be becoming more widespread, but it's not because of videogames. It's because it's cheap when you can rely on a bottomless supply of expandable human detonators, better known as suicide bombers. Who needs a sophisticated warhead delivery vehicle when you can load a dozen 155-mm rounds on a truck and give the driver a dead man switch for him to release when he crashes on the target?
Very few IED attacks or terrorist bombings use clever hacks and brilliant designs. Those don't reliably work, can't be duplicated by untrained workers, and don't scale. Remember, warfare is a number game. You need do perform your attacks cheaply and often.
This is true for clandestine organizations, but also for established governments. Look at the Germans during WWII. The sophisticated MG42 machine gun was the ancestor of today's assault rifles, but it cost a fortune because it was overengineered. Look at the Me262, the mot brilliant piece of engineering ever flown at the time, yet too hard to build and not widespread enough to make a difference. Compare and contrast with the crude but reliable American standard equipment, mass produced in huge quantities.
Cheap production and good logistics beat clever engineering most of the time. Of course, politics is subject to different rules, and it has a greater influence on warfare than all weaponry.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
...terrorists kill dozens by dropping container loads of unsold Zunes on a local village.
Have gnu, will travel.
...and genetically engineered cyber goats. You just have to pacth your kernel and configure. It's so easy! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LsxmQV8AXk
Colonialism was a crime, and De Gaulle got France out of Algeria. He wasn't in power during Indochina. But anyway, he's long dead, in case you haven't noticed. How about we do something about crimes happening right now? Could save a few (million) lives.
What the hack does software hackers have to do with Insurgent groups, answer .. nothing. Why is it when you set off an IED, you're a terrorist, while if you drop white phosphorus on a civilian area, your a war hero.
.. bears a strong resemblance to the open-source movement in software development'
.. is simply not designed to operate on such a fleeting timescale"
...
"During the past four and a half years, the United States and its allies in Iraq have fielded the most advanced and complex weaponry ever developed. But they are still not winning the war"
Haven't the US learned anything since the Vietnam war, a low tech highly motivated guerilla army can defeat a so called hi-tech modern army.
"What we are seeing is the empowerment of the individual to conduct war,"
No what you are seeing is a highly pissed off populations defending their own country against an illegal and immoral occupation.
'Robb calls this new type of conflict "open-source warfare," because the manner in which insurgent groups are organizing themselves
What a complete load of tripe, have you noticed that anywhere there is 'terrorost' activity, it usually follows a period of oppression by some government. Are we supposed to forget why the Islamists are so pissed off at the US, it's to do with the Palestinian issue, the second and third generation refugees being a prime source for next years 'terrorists'.
"The resurrection of al-Qaeda is a good example"
There IS no al-Qaeda, just a bunch of severely pissed off ethnic Islamists. Like you drive a tank down my street and then have me ejected and forced to live in some refugee camp, that's gonna make one pissed off Arab.
"Given the structural changes that were required of al-Qaeda to adapt to its loss of Afghanistan as a safe haven,"
Bin Laden was sent into Afghanistan by the US to create an insurgent group that later on become known as al-Qaeda to fight the Russions. The one thing the Taliban did was reduce Opium production to zero, it is now back at its highest level ever. The implication that Afghanistan is now somehow not safe for 'al-Qaeda' is totally bogus. The coalition forces have no control there. As well as large areas of north Packistan are virtually no-go-areas for the Packistan government. Is this Rand fella living on the same planet as the rest of us.
"Unfortunately, the traditional weapons acquisition process
No, it's because you can't put enough troops on the ground to effectivly engage the enemy. In vietnam all it took was a bunch of barefoot gooks, a kalashnikov and a bag of rice to defeat the most powerfull and technologically advanced nation on the planet. You see they were prepared to sacrifice a hundred as against your one. Robots aren't much good in a war, as they don't hate people enough to travel half way round the world to kill people they have never met.
Who's gonna defend us against you
davecb5620@gmail.com
The IRA did a little Surface to Air Missile R&D in USA in the 80s, but they were caught.
In the end heavy duty machine guns were used to take down a few helicopters.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
You cannot call it "I told you so" because European opposition was in itself a power play.
...) our governments did what 90% of their population ask them to do, through MASSIVE demonstrations of 1 million+, including myself. Democracy, ever heard about it?
The ONLY power play is that in OLD EUROPE (France, Germany
I don't care if Chirac did what the people who elected him wanted him to do because his palm reader told him to or because he didn't like Chimpy's face, the fact is that democracy was respected in OLD EUROPE, whereas Blair the war criminal and Aznar the francisto-fascist went against 90% of their electorate and backed a WAR CRIME.
This is not a joke, hundreds of thousands of people have died, millions have lost their homes, their jobs.
Firstly, the author was not saying that open source is a form of terrorism. What he was saying is that the rapid and open communication model used by open source is much more efficient than the closed encrypted compartmented model used by the U.S. Military Industrial Complex: Terrorists communicate on open websites in near realtime while the military communicates through channels with huge delays. A single terrorist can read the terrorist literature from anywhere and change tactics appropriately. A single U.S. soldier neither has access to the up-to-the-second information on new tactics nor the authority to act upon it.
In terms of acquisition, a terrorist can cobble together any sort of armament with any materials available and if it doesn't work, they try again very rapidly. A single U.S. soldier must generally wait for new specially designed equipment to come from the U.S. to combat a given problem. This can take months when lucky and years when not lucky. While the new special equipment likely works very well, the need may have gone away by the time it is delivered. It's not the danger of consumer devices the author was pointing out; it the fact that the enemy has simple cheap and brutally effective weapons based on consumer devices where we have nothing that is either that cheap or nearly as cost effective for the battle at hand. The point about the PS3 was not that the bad guys have PS3 based missiles it's the fact that say a blackberry's processor is just as capable of running a cruise missile as a 1 million dollar circuit card on a cruise missile. That's not to say that the terrorists have the software, it only points up the fact that we ought to question why it takes the U.S. a million dollar control board to do the same thing you could do with a PS3.
What I think the author was trying to say is that we should have the Industrial portion of the Military Industrial Complex cranking out cheap equipment from off the shelf parts designed to meet the need at hand rather than designing multi-million, multi-billion, or multi-trillion dollar systems that take months, years, or decades to field. Why send in a $100,000 packbot to look for explosives if you can send in a $1000 wheeled vehicle made from R/C car parts. With the availablity of cheap explosives on the part of our adversaries, there is no way we can hope to solve the problem with money when there is a 1:100,000 disparity in the cost to us to take out insurgent weapons.
I work for a company that develops quick off the shelf systems for the U.S. military. One system I worked on along these lines ran linux and consisted of lightly modified PC's combined with other special gear. I think we spent 6 months just performing the environment tests to show that the equipment would survive multiple trips to 40 below zero, explosive decompression of an aircraft around it, salt spray etc. It took over a year to get this expedited product out the door.
While the testing was was justified in the case I worked on, I don't see a reason to worry about antarctic applications of tiny cheap and disposable robots for use in the desert. Even if the lifetimes of a lot of this special purpose equipment are short, I think it would be better to put out more cheap equipment faster. A crate of mostly working robots for examining IED's designed as the 90% solution,ON THE GROUND TODAY (with the soldiers), is worth a lot more that a perfectly tested triple checked crate of indestructible robots delivered after the squad they were supposed to protect has perished.
chemical spray? ohhh, pepper spray, got it.
What has changed is the ability of an individual or small groups to have access to information and communication methods more so than in the past. That is true for EVERYONE. Additionally, "offensive" actions without responsibility to protect a geography are always and have always been far "easier" and far less expensive than defensive or state-protective actions. The premise of the article is nothing new. The same applied to the crossbow which the Pope declared would be so horrible a weapon that wars would cease, or metal projectiles or machine guns or trains or ... you name it. The more technology is available, of any type, the more technology can be used for "warfare". You can make poison gas in large quantities from items bought at any grocery store. BFD. The only people who would be stunned by the "revelation" of this article are the people who still think human wave assaults are used or that drug-addicted illiterates are tricked into military service. In the 1960s there were lenty of methods for distributing information (mimeograph machines, etc.) and lots of improvised munitions used for terrorist activities. The same was true in ... every war which proceeded all current wars ... and various civil situations. WTF, don't schools even mention the haymarket riots or assassinations any more? This article is as precient as those warnings on citrus-based cleaners not to drink them.
As I mentioned in another post, PS2 is just a red herring. An off the shelf PC is much more configurable and programmable with less effort. If you had read what I was saying more carefully, the small RC craft were only to be used to test the guidance system: "When you get them crashing into the things you want to crash them into, you install the guidance system into two or three full scale mockups and test them out the middle of nowhere." A general enough control system can control a small plane over radio just as well as it can control a large one it has been directly wired into. No one will notice or care that you are crashing a lot of little RC planes so you use them to get the bulk of your development and testing done.
Incidentally, a small RC craft may not take out a building but it could carry a grenade just fine. No fancy guidance system is required for this. Fly it from a hidden location and detonate it near the personnel you are attacking. Even the military is now using small RC craft for surveillance.
News Flash: It's easier for America to run a war without killing many Americans nowadays. We have technology, NOT leadership, to thank for this. I don't give a fuck if 0 americans were killed -- it's a shitty war nonetheless. And you're a tool, too. And probably a douchebag. But I digress.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
The 'empowerment of like minded individuals joined together to conduct war' through technology is a fact.
... can win in technology warfare" without the full support of like minded and skilled individuals globally to conduct the technology cyber-war. In such a war, I suspect, Human Ideals will kick the ass of feeble fractious feudal greed/myth.
... and Christianity, Islam ... delusionist could not win. If pushed to war by US, EU, China ... Maybe M$, Halliburton-Blackwater, Walmart ... and ... could win, but far more likely is that humanity science and technology warriors/SF would eventually force the unconditional capitulation of all corporations, religions, governments, plutocrats ... to avoid our species extinction.
..., warfare ain't what it was during the present and recent feudal times. Advanced armor, weapons, countermeasures ... are far more expensive and capable, but the on-delivery-target-kill capability is far more impersonal and less precise (a house/car is never the "target"). Inability to confirm "target availability and kill" is a big failure for the highly structured military and surgical strikes. Advanced armor, weapons, countermeasures ... can be effect-marginalized, obtained and used, or neutralized at tactical levels by SciEng-technology specialized enemy forces.
....
...) are about some nebulous pragmatic dogma/mythology.
... are great for recruiting, and can (for all involved) be equally valuable for losers and winners.
...), (2) personally seek-&-destroy (the nations, individuals, ideologies and ...), (3) end it (forever with no restitution/revenge for anyone).
... and other faux-democratic, pseudo-representative, and propaganda-populist governments proved to be consistent competent failures for the last few centuries. Christianity, Islam ... other idol-dogmas (economic, political, cultural ...), after a few draconian millennium, are becoming recognized as evil-agents/agencies that blame others, take wealth and lives, then provide nothing of value to humanity.
"No one nation, individual, ideology
US, EU, China, Russia plutocrats
I think the point is maybe
The asymmetric para-military is still focused on personally seek-&-kill the target (not strength in SciEng-technology). These targets are not (strong in SciEng-technology) shrouded in political-agenda, value, intrigue, doubts, questions
War is about the practical and achievable. Conflicts (political, religious, dogma
Focus on one (War or Conflict), you will lose both. Focus on both, then maybe you will win, but always at a terrible cost to all.
Presently, the USA is involved in a conflict with megalomaniacs who have an asymmetric para-military, and use religious radical ideology (not patriotism) for global recruiting and technology GIG organization. The megalomaniacs are fighting a war with practical and achievable goals. The USA is (as in Vietnam) concerned with the "Domino Theory" of world domination, by other then Christian Crusaders. Religions can cause conflicts, but religions/politics only win conflicts with sever attrition and genocide. Victory in War always depends on the practical and achievable. Patriotism, political, religious, dogma, ideology, mythology, god, money
Iraq is an ideology conflict (like Vietnam and Crusades), started by BinLadin-&-Bush. The Iraq conflict is not a war with practical and achievable objectives of (1) unconditional surrender (of nations, individuals, ideologies and
US, EU, China, Russia, France
The few exceptional leaders in history are not the rule, and their great-image is always exploited by those that seek to rule humanity.
I see little difference in character or value to humanity among historical creeps
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
There's also video of this or a similar statement on YouTube if you want to hear it straight from the horse's mouth. http://youtube.com/watch?v=nEgDIylwPlM and more.
Captcha for this post is "crises".
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Controlling/guiding a RC plane and a small single-engine aircraft is a huge difference. It is an order of magnitude more complex.
Again, going back to the simple stuff. If you want to kill one person, or just terrorize a few, using a high-power rifle with a scope or a homemade mortar is a better choice than creating computer-guided RC planes with grenades on them. Iraqi insurgents using cellphones, garage door openers, etc. to detonate IEDs works, because it is simple. All they want is a way to detonate the artillery shells they buried under the road when a truck is passing over them.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought the RAF was formed by the British in the First World War, and gave Germany a bit of trouble in the Second World War. English is probably not your first language, you meant 'losing' not 'loosing', although the USA have 'set loose' a bunch of terrorists.
Open source, the scapegoat of Capitalism (free market).
.... focus in 2 things, one is the possibility of "everyone" (read programmers/wannabe), to improve/audit the code. That way, we know there isn't such a trojan inside the OS (ala windows) or software (er... spyware).
... crimes against humanity... (sigh).
In the beginning, the goal of the free software, was provide "people" with the ability to "create", (art, technology, etc), to manipulate their own reality and create art (well that is one definition of art).
It was the program (im thinking for example "the gimp" there), and its interface/ability to interact with the user which was important.
Latter, and somehow, the economic model, resented this "intellectuals" giving the whole world the ability to express, and thus (dont ask me how) open source was born.
Open source, mainly
But the second implicit/tacit reason, is to "give the code for free" to the free market world. Yep, the programmer, was forced by the evil forces to give its code for free. Not only the great program/ideas behind it.
That way, and as a sort of payment to capitalism, the programmer (activist), was allowed to continue further his heretic crusade against payed software (the empire of money).
Now, and as usual, as an endemic lack of real responsible/guilty people that shall pay for their mistakes, the model backstabs (using this maybe forethought argument of open source/terrorism) the free software world (once again) with bullshit.
Its all in the line of repression against "free thinkers/activist", and using those who want to give their work for "free" (read no sponsors/capitalist part), as scapegoats of the big goats who shall be judged responsible for their
SO, we have.
need of freedom/creation > idea > free contribution > software development > capitalism intervention (repression) > open source > Open source war on America (open source/free software used as scapegoat).
Very personally, the important goal, of the hole business, was to give the creative minds (artist) tools(programs) to develop in a free environment. Thus, the important subject is the artist, and the way of channel/develop its creativity.
The rest is mainly crap. created interests/repression.
This is simply marketing. There isn't much in it. Create a marketing catchphrase, quote ESR, say something provocative like "a PS3 could stop a missile" and he is well on his way to Faux News.
I guess I am glad to have let my IEEE dues lapse. Spectrum used to be much better.
I think the appropriate response would be to supply our troops with portable fabs which would let them build their own weapons and give them greater autonomy to determine their own tactics. Of course, the overall strategy would have to be better defined, but that's true in conventional warfare as well. I'm sure we could provide them with more and better raw building materials than what the jihadists have access too, and they aren't any dumber!
You think that terrorists choose to strike randomly and are merely thwarted?
The USA is still going bankrupt as fast as it can, so why would the terrorists waste their time? They'll let the Aqua Teen Hunger Force terrorize us instead.
Whatever the truth is about the ideologies that caused the terrorists to attack, the truth is going bankrupt turning into a fascism is a victory for them. Anything that weakens the USA as an economic power reduces the USA's ability to fight a foreign war and that's what they want - USA out, them in.
They mostly aren't freedom fighters, just another round of slavers looking to own the people, but either way they're simply trying to tire you out. When you try to rest, that's when they'll kick you again.
The tech is not needed.
Illegal according to WHO?
False premises according to WHO?
I see you believe everything the media tells you.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Isn't this what the unibomber was complaining about? Advances in technology would enable a single terrorist to destroy civilization?
For starters, Al Qaeda groups aren't that rational. A common thread I see when I read about Al Qaeda members and how they plan things, is that they think too big. They're looking for the big statements like coordinated bombings. Second, they need terrorist attacks for recruiting. I see the dearth of activity in the US hindering their recruitment efforts in the US. When someone asks, "What are you doing for me?", all they can say is that they're killing a few infidels and a lot of Muslims in Iraq. Further, while those efforts have injured the US, they've been pretty damaging to Al Qaeda as well. Al Qaeda is far from dead (Pakistan looks promising for them), but it's pointless to attribute the flaws of the US as an indication of the brilliance of Al Qaeda.
Anyway, one thing to consider here is that the US is slogging along in a fight with someone who could be more effective, if they tried. Things could be worse.
The more complex the technology of warfare becomes, the more Achilles heels accumulate in the designs. The fact technical items at some point become so complex that one cannot possibly test all possible failure or vulnerability scenarios against it, even with advanced computer modeling and such. If we can build cheap, disposable robots to replace human troops in one-on-one gunbattle in the streets of Western al-Bumfuck, Iraq that would be a major advancement though.
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
And you get this insight into the motivations of terrorists from the news?
What more could they do? Boston couldn't be more whipped, New Orleans sunk. The USA is falling apart because of the 2001 attacks, they don't need to do anything else.
Had the country responded rationally to anything they'd have been ripe for another attack. Instead there's been so much internal fighting that another terrorist attack would have pulled everyone together.
They'll wait until it'll do the most damage. Just a while after the USA declares the world safe from terrorism.
There's nothing terrorists want more than George Bush. He's their ultimate supporter. In their wet dreams he declares martial law and sticks around.