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Should the US Go Offensive In Cyberwarfare?
The NYTimes has a piece analyzing the policy discussions in the US around the question of what should be the proper stance towards offensive cyberwarfare. This is a question that the Bush administration wrestled with, before deciding that the outgoing president didn't have the political capital left to grapple with it. The article notes two instances in which President Bush approved the use of offensive cyberattacks; but these were exceptions, and the formation of a general policy was left to the Obama administration. "Senior Pentagon and military officials also express deep concern that the laws and understanding of armed conflict have not kept current with the challenges of offensive cyberwarfare. Over the decades, a number of limits on action have been accepted — if not always practiced. One is the prohibition against assassinating government leaders. Another is avoiding attacks aimed at civilians. Yet in the cyberworld, where the most vulnerable targets are civilian, there are no such rules or understandings. If a military base is attacked, would it be a proportional, legitimate response to bring down the attacker's power grid if that would also shut down its hospital systems, its air traffic control system, or its banking system?"
Doing such things would be almost as awful as ... putting a caterpiller on someone. How could anyone respect a country that uses such things as caterpillers and worms?
Obama should ban such devices of torture as worms, just like he banned caterpillers.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
WE did nothing of the sort. The giveaway in software technology was on the part of traitorous corporations that decided to outsource, in the name of short-term profit, and without regard to the very economy that made them big in the first place. Don't include me, or most other U.S. citizens, in that "we"!
Further, the U.S. still leads in software technology, even if there has been a drain. And further yet, your information is out of date: students in the U.S. have again started enrolling in Computer Science programs nationwide, bringing the numbers back up.
I would have to agree with you that American systems have been compromised. Blame the big American corporations and multinationals. They are responsible (along with the politicians who made it all possible). However, the idea that money and physical access is the easiest way to compromise a system is nothing new; it has always been that way.
But requiring even basic math standards from little kids is so unfair. After all some never learn them. Your only option is to, at some point, exclude the worse performing students from the "best" education, or at the very least limiting their choices. This not only involves "focring a bad education on them", but also involves telling them they're crap.
Requiring any sort of knowledge for passing school creates, in other words, inequality. Inequality that is, first and foremost, the result of lazyness on the part of the bad students and secondary a result of natural talent (or lack of such). But it's inequality.
Now in reality, obviously people are naturally unequal. Even races have "on average" differences that can present advantages or disadvantages. "Whites" are on average (a lot) taller than both black and yellow races. This creates advantages and disadvantages for both parties. But ... worse than that there are also intellectual differences. On average only 1 in 7 (randomly chosen) whites will outperform a yellow person in an IQ test, and only 1 in 200 randomly chosen blacks will outperform a randomly chosen white person. There are even ideological differences, these are extremely obvious but extremely incendiary. Let's put it this way : your choice, both in religion (or "lack of it"), and even in political matters is a strong indicator of performance in IQ tests and both academic achievement and success later in life. Whoops.
So if you create advanced math classes, you'll see a lot of yellow faces, significantly less white faces, and every 5 years or so a single black face. You can imagine the screams of the politically correct nutcases. You will find in those classes basically no muslims (even in muslim states they would be sorely underrepresented), many christians, and slightly less atheists than christians. There wouldn't be many jews, but something like 80-90% of jewish students would find themselves amongst these "top performers". Imagine how incendiary this is, and then think about the obvious question : "since there is no difference in performance of christian students and kids of ex-muslim christian parents, clearly there is something in the religion that's preventing cognitive development. What ?". Imagine the world's response to obvious questions like that. Replace muslims with blacks, same question, but involving genes. Or find out how this relates to political orientation, and repeat for extra outrage.
Add to that that community organisers really, really dislike inequality. Even when it's so plainly obviously necessary things like excluding everybody except comitted students from higher education. Some even go so far as to make it the "responsability of the state" to change biological facts like the fact that a gay couple can't have natural children (you can laugh, but that's exactly what Europe is trying to do. Needless to say, it will fail, and create heaps of resentment along the way)
A "community organiser" is in charge of America, so I wouldn't expect the dumbing down to end any time soon. But soon a criminal drug addicted thief will no longer have to suffer "the humiliation" of having a lower grade in math than the kid who spends half his free time reading math and physics papers on the web. Prepare for worse, not for better.