For instance, Iran has been training and supplying people to fight in Iraq against US troops.
Not really. Most of the people fighting US troops in Iraq were Sunni (Saddam, his Ba'ath Party and his military were mostly Sunni). The present governments of Iraq and Iran are both Shia and are closely allied (no doubt to the annoyance of the US)... removing the Ba'ath Party from power and installing a Shia government was a great move for Iran. There are even allegations that it was Iranian intelligence that tricked the U.S. into invading Iraq through the use of double agents and false intel: US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war:
Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq... "It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi.".... "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."
"The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator.
Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces."
The U2 flies very high. Russia persevered and got a bit lucky; there were many fly overs where they tried to intercept the U2, but their planes couldn't fly high enough. Their SAMs couldn't fly high enough either. But they persevered, and eventually invented a SAM that could fly high enough. Powers wasn't meant to survive, he was supposed to swallow his suicide pill, or eject at an altitude that would kill him (supposedly, the U2 pilots were not told that ejection at the altitude they were flying at would kill them). Unfortunately for the CIA, Powers was smart and didn't want to die - he didn't take his pill, and he stayed in his wrecked plane in uncontrolled descent until he was at a safe altitude before ejecting.
But yeah, it is hard to shoot down something that is very high, and even if you could, there are spy satellites that are even higher. Best to just hide whatever it is you're doing underground.
I assumed the OP was alluding to the past, since he used that "history" word. But if you want to talk about now, please do so.... how exactly has Iran tried to "expand its borders" in the last couple of years? I really would like to know. As far as I can see (and contrary to the images portrayed by some Western media) the Iranian government hasn't invaded anyone, hasn't "settled" or captured any land, and has in fact been praised by the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq for being a good and helpful neighbor.
The government of Iran were also a major regional enemy of the Taliban - after declaring opium unlawful, the Iranian government eradicated the domestic trade in 18 months, and started fighting the Taliban smugglers who use Iran as a transit route to Europe. Three Iranian security agents are killed every day in this "war"; the total killed numbers in the thousands, and they almost went to war with the Taliban when they governed Afghanistan. This is something that our media forget to mention when they try to to convince us that Iran is the bad guy allied with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
I am no apologist for the Iranian government. From our liberal west point of view, we may not like the religious society that they want to create, but compared to ourselves their territorial ambitions seem to have been remarkably limited. Are they the ones that have invaded our neighbors? Are they the ones with soldiers deployed along our borders? Are they the ones constantly meddling in the politics of north America or Europe? Did they ever overthrow a western government and install a dictator? No. And yet, we have done all of these things to them. No wonder they dislike us.
Disagreeing with a government is not a reason to go to war:
"Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems."
"War is the most striking instance of the failure of intelligence to master the problem of human relationships."
Yes, because the best time to discover a radar site is when you are flying over it... seriously, you don't think there might be some advantage in knowing the location of a radar site *before* it turns on and lights up your aircraft? And, you know, possibly taking it out with cruise missile instead of risking planes and pilots?
Yes, fortunately for us on our moral high-ground, Iran and North Korea are the only nations that have a history of territorial ambitions. The United States would never do somethinglike that. Neither would Britain.
The drawback for me is that I'm finding it harder to continue to get energized to learn new technologies. I can still do it, but it's becoming more of a hassle. Not so much the languages, but the specifics of frameworks and technology domains (i.e. web vs. traditional client-server vs. realtime). Probably more a personal limitation, I'm not the smartest guy in the world.
There are incredibly smart guys who don't learn many new technologies. I have no doubt that the old school guys like Linus or K&R are very smart, but I'd also guess they are pretty unfamiliar with modern web and application development (AJAX, Rails, PHP). They probably wouldn't be considered experts in Java,.NET, or any of the other modern frameworks that recruiters want. They probably don't know that much about Android applications and the Dalvik API, or about developing iPhone apps. Of course, they could learn, and possibly faster than others, but they would lack specific experience. From a recruiter's perspective, their CV would be thrown in the bin ("No 10 years X experience?! Out.") To me, this is a flaw in modern IT recruitment, but to others, it makes sense.
There are various reasons as to why older people tend not to learn newer technologies. Free time has a lot to do with it. As you get older, it seems as though, no matter how smart you are, the amount of time you can dedicate to learning new things decreases. The motivation also decreases. Once you can program in five difference languages, there is not as much reason to learn the sixth. Your knowledge is already sufficient to carry out the tasks you want to, and much of the difference is inconsequential - all of the APIs are slightly different, but you gain little from memorising them all. There is also a mental barrier - the "Why should I struggle to write this in a language/framework I don't know when I could write it in my old, familiar language in a fraction of the time?" feeling.
Another important reason is that the software world is a lot bigger now. Once upon a time it sufficed to know C and Pascal. Now it seems like we need to know C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, Bash, PHP, HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. And for each of those, there are multiple frameworks in use. How many different ORMs are there just for Java, Python and PHP? There has been a framework explosion over the last 15 years, and this makes it difficult for a person to keep up. The world was a lot simpler when 90% of development only required knowledge of C and the standard libraries.
Your obligations make you less open to relocation, the technologies on your resume seem less-current
How is this age discrimination? If you are in this situation, then you are less likely to get hired, regardless of age. If you assume that older people are in this situation, and reject them based on their age, then that is age discrimination. But if someone actually is less open to relocation, and hasn't managed to keep up with newer technologies, and you reject them for those reasons, then it isn't age discrimination.
Just like if you reject someone because they lack skills, and they happen to be from a minority ethnic group, then it isn't racial discrimination, but if you reject them because they are from a minority ethnic group and you assume that means they lack skills, then it is racial discrimination.
I also would actually challenge the assumption that older people are less willing to relocate. I have known many young people who don't want to leave their families, the areas that they grew up in, their friends etc. It is a too big step for many. There are regions with chronic youth unemployment problems, where young people will complain that they are simply unable to find a job, and yet if you ask them why they don't relocate to an area which doesn't have these problems, they will claim that it is simply not possible. Ask them how it is possible that immigrants relocate hundreds, or even thousands of miles crossing international boundaries in search of work, and yet they are unwilling to relocate within even their own country, and they will justify their position with a sequences of excuses that apply just as readily to the immigrants. "I have family" - immigrants don't have family? "I was born and grew up here" - immigrants weren't born and grew up somewhere? "I have friends" - immigrants don't have friends?
That word does not mean what you think it does. Money laundering: the process of disguising illegal sources of money so that it looks like it came from legal sources.
What Google, and Facebook, and Microsoft, etc. do is called tax avoidance, and (like it or not) it is completely legal.
Anti-AGW believers are still banging on about Climategate? Every scientific journal that has commented has backed the researchers. Six independent investigations all found no evidence of fraud or misconduct (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Science Assessment Panel, Pennsylvania State University, Independent Climate Change Email Review, United States Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation). And yet you *still* believe that these scientists are frauds, and that there is a grand conspiracy that is being covered up by the scientists, others who have reviewed their work, the editors and scientists who work for all of the journals, and all of the official investigative committees?
Notice the fact that China and India have 58% of emissions. That is not because of their large economies, but lack of controls.
What? China has a massive economy. Economy of the People's Republic of China: "The People's Republic of China (PRC) ranks since 2010 as the world's second largest economy after the United States. It has been the world's fastest-growing major economy, with consistent growth rates of around 10% over the past 30 years. China is also the largest exporter and second largest importer of goods in the world."
China and India also have a combined population that is eight times bigger than the U.S. population.
Also, check out this graph of global emissions per capita. China has emissions several times less than western nations, and, in fact, lower than the world average. And India's emissions are even lower than that. And if you are going to argue that per capita emissions aren't important, then you will need to argue from the moral perspective that you have the right to pollute more than a person in a third world country. You need to answer the question: what gives you that right?
It is difficult to construct a coherent moral argument, that given a limited resource, I, as a westerner, should be entitled to several times more of that resource than people living in other parts of the world.
China may have lots of dirty industry, but it's per capita emissions are several times less than those of the U.S., Australia, Canada and Western Europe. In fact, China's emissions per capita are below the world average, and it has stated that it won't follow the U.S. path of increasing emissions, they acknowledged to let emissions rise that high would be a "disaster for the world". Hopefully they will be able to do this.
We also need to be honest here: the problem of increased atmospheric CO2 is mostly our fault, especially when you consider the cumulative emissions we made over the last century, which dwarf those of China.
This graph show current emissions per capita. The author insightfully points out: "So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse
gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system
of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are
two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example."
The next page has a graph for historical cumulative emissions of CO2. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 50 to 100 years. Guess who is responsible for putting most of the extra CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere there? Not China.
The alternative 'just use less' philosophy is based upon some crazy idea that 7 billion people can just live in yurts.
Not true. Energy costs are rising. People are using less. We aren't all living in yurts. Ultimately, it is not sustainable (barring some amazing scientific advance) to have 7 billion people living the current lifestyle of the average westerner. It isn't even sustainable for us westerners. I would encourage you to read the book I linked to (there are PDF, epub etc. versions). You'd be surprised how much energy we use. The author is pro-nuclear, but even there his sums show we will have to build new nuclear plants at a rate faster than ever before to match the decline in fossil fuel supplies, and rely on technology that doesn't exist yet (industrial processes for seawater extraction) if we are to maintain our current western energy usage.
Problem is, America and the world is filled with too many folks with superstitious beliefs regarding nuclear power.
The problem is not superstitious beliefs. The problem is one of governance and management - we have not yet figured out a way to have either government run, or privately run, nuclear power programs with effective safety protocols. On the one hand we have government run programs with their inherent problems, and on the other, for-profit corporations reducing safety to maximise profits. Here's a recent example from a supporter of nuclear power:
The safety of nuclear operations in Britain remains a concern. The THORP
reprocessing facility at Sellafield, built in 1994 at a cost of £1.8 billion, had
a growing leak from a broken pipe from August 2004 to April 2005. Over
eight months, the leak let 85 000 litres of uranium-rich fluid flow into a
sump which was equipped with safety systems that were designed to detect
immediately any leak of as little as 15 litres. But the leak went undetected
because the operators hadn’t completed the checks that ensured
the safety systems were working; and the operators were in the habit of
ignoring safety alarms anyway.
The safety system came with belt and braces. Independent of the failed
safety alarms, routine safety-measurements of fluids in the sump should
have detected the abnormal presence of uranium within one month of the
start of the leak; but the operators often didn’t bother taking these routine
measurements, because they felt too busy; and when they did take measurements that detected the abnormal presence of uranium in the sump
(on 28 August 2004, 26 November 2004, and 24 February 2005), no action
was taken.
By April 2005, 22 tons of uranium had leaked, but still none of the
leak-detection systems detected the leak. The leak was finally detected by
accountancy, when the bean-counters noticed that they were getting 10%
less uranium out than their clients claimed they’d put in! Thank goodness
this private company had a profit motive, hey? The criticism from the Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations was withering: “The Plant was
operated in a culture that seemed to allow instruments to operate in alarm
mode rather than questioning the alarm and rectifying the relevant fault.”
If we let private companies build new reactors, how can we ensure that
higher safety standards are adhered to? I don’t know.
The catastrophic effects of WWII (and, prior to that, centuries of warring) eventually spurred the creation of the European Union. The aim was to create an integrated union of nations, bonded by common ideals and free trade, so that the citizens of those nations would have no desire to go to war with their neighbours ever again. To a large extent this has succeeded - a war between the nations of Europe, something that actually happened only 70 years ago, is now unthinkable (or, at least as unthinkable as a war between any of the neighbouring U.S. states).
As far as the generalisations you allude to go, they are crude, but there is also some truth there. The nations of Europe were completely destroyed by WWII. Tens of millions of civilians were killed. Whole cities were flattened by nightly bombing. This experience had a huge effect on the culture of Europe, which over the following decades led directly to the development of a pervasive anti-war culture. In contrast, the U.S. has never experienced anything similar. U.S. cities were not bombed during WWII, there was no invasion, and U.S. civilians were not slaughtered in the millions. Consider the cultural reaction of to the World Trade Center attacks - attacks that killed a few thousand people. People were willing to give up their freedoms, back new draconian laws, invade foreign nations, and massively increase spending on the military industrial homeland security complex, because life for many became dominated by the fear of terrorism. And that was a cultural reaction to the killing of only a few thousand. Now imagine the number killed were in the region of ten thousand times that amount. Imagine 9/11 happening five times a day, every day, for six whole years. Of course it creates a profound social impact.
That's an interesting scheme but it's not very specific. If they stop updating the page, all you know is that they got a request. You have no idea if it was for your data or someone elses.
The British government has an advice page for companies that want to export data: Sending personal data outside the European Economic Area (Principle 8). It is okay to send personal data to the U.S. as long as the U.S. company agrees to a contract protecting the data. They even provide model contracts.
Although the United States of America (US) is not included in the European Commission list, the Commission considers that personal data sent to the US under the “Safe Harbor” scheme is adequately protected. When a US company signs up to the Safe Harbor arrangement, they agree to:
follow seven principles of information handling; and
be held responsible for keeping to those principles by the Federal Trade Commission or other oversight schemes.
Certain types of companies cannot sign up to Safe Harbor. View a list of the companies signed up to the Safe Harbor arrangement on the US Department of Commerce website.
In July 2007, the EU and the US signed an agreement to legitimise and regulate the transfer of passenger name record information (PNR) from EU airlines to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This agreement is regarded as providing adequate protection for the personal data in question.
Wholly-owned international subsidiaries are separate legal entities under the control of the parent company. They are obliged to follow the laws of the country that they are based in, but under no obligation to obey the law of a foreign land (such as the U.S.), as they are outside of that legal jurisdiction. However, the parent company is under such an obligation, and since it controls the subsidiary, under the Patriot Act it has a legal obligation to compel the subsidiary to comply. But if, in complying, the subsidiary may break local laws, then there are problems. Basically, the company has to decide whether to violate U.S. law or local law.
To whom do these laws apply?
All U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens, entities and organizations located in or out of the United States (including any subsidiary or foreign offices overseas) must comply with the USA PATRIOT Act, Executive Order 13224, and Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations. Further, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373 and other resolutions have the force of international law binding on all member states.
Whether the Patriot Act could be used to compel a U.S. parent to disclose records held by a Canadian subsidiary remains a matter of debate. The B.C. Commissioner Report found that it is a “reasonable possibility” that the FISA Court would order production of documents that are within the custody or control of a U.S. company, such as a U.S. parent with access to records held by a Canadian subsidiary.[14] If a U.S.-linked company makes a disclosure to U.S. authorities without the consent of the Canadian individuals named, this could result in the Canadian organization that transferred the information breaching Canadian privacy legislation unless the disclosure meets an exception in the applicable Canadian privacy legislation. http://library.findlaw.com/2005/May/10/245866.html
Any company that is wholly-owned by a U.S.-based corporation cannot guarantee that the data will not leave its customer-designated datacenters or servers. Google would not budge from its first and final response, and Microsoft could not offer guarantees to not move data outside the EU under any circumstances.
These subsidiary companies and their U.S.-parent corporations cannot provide the assurances that data is safe in the UK or the EEA, because the USA PATRIOT Act not only affects the U.S.-based corporations but also their worldwide wholly-owned subsidiary companies based within and outside the European Union.
Great Android selling phones do about 10% of a single iPhone model.
Not true. Samsung Galaxy S Sales Hit 30 Million. The last HTC Wildfire sales figure I saw was 21.3 million. By your logic, that means Apple must have shipped in the range of 200-300 million of each iPhone model, right? But total sales of every iPhone model sold from 2007-2010 is only 73 million. Even Total sales figures per fiscal year is clearly nowhere near that level. (I couldn't find iPhone sales figures broken down by model, but total sales of every iPhone from 2007-2010 is only sold 73 million, so clearly not outselling popular Android phones by 1000%).
the (free, open) Android version is more akin to a rootkit
Carrier IQ is not free or open. The post you responded to was arguing that closed source is more difficult to analyse, which is clearly true. If Carrier IQ were open source, we would have known about it years ago, and we wouldn't need to reverse engineer it to figure out what, when and how it's doing what it does, and under what conditions the logs get transferred to remote servers, etc.
I would also argue that, as much as we dislike Carrier IQ, it isn't really a rootkit - the software itself makes no effort to hide its presence, which is one of the defining characteristics of a rootkit. Also, you say that the Android version has a "backdoor" - could you provide a reference for this? As far as I can see, this is not actually true, as it doesn't enable any secret authentication-bypassing remote access (which would be the very definition of a backdoor).
There is a big difference: Google does not provide this software as part of their Android distribution, and Google has not installed it on any of the Nexus phones that they sell. For Android, Carrier IQ is third party software that has been installed by some carriers. That makes the carriers responsible, not Google. It is not even clear that Google knew what third-party software carriers ship on their phones. The carriers have no legal responsibility to impart this information to Google, just like if you sell a pre-installed Ubuntu system you don't have to contact Ubuntu and let them know what you installed.
In contrast, Apple appears to have shipped this software as part of iOS, and secretly installed it on millions of iPhones without telling anyone. For a long time Apple fanboys have argued that because Apple is in control of the iPhone, and not the carriers, then it is impossible for this kind of crap to happen. It seems the impossible just became reality.
It's worth noting that whilst Carrier IQ is running for all iOS versions, uploading the logs appears to be turned off by default on iOS3/4, but it is not known how or when it gets turned on. On iOS 5, Carrier IQ log uploads are controlled by the “Submit Logs to Apple” option on iOS setup. Most users would probably trust Apple with their logs, right? So most iOS 5 users probably have Carrier IQ uploading their logs right now.
1) Apple gathers "crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data". To do this, your iPhone sends your location along with your Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data (SSIDs, signal strength) to Apple. They do say that the request is anonymised so they have no way of figuring out who you are based on the request, but clearly they could just correlate the geo-tagged request with non-geo requests coming from your phone and figure out who you are.
2) Apple has an advertising system (iAds) that uses your location to send you targetted ads. Obviously this involves Apple knowing what your location is.
3) Apple provides application crash logs to third party developers. They say the logs are anonymous, but an app developer could easily include enough information to identify you (a username, IP address etc.).
4) Apple tracks you when you travel. They say it is anonymous, but again they could clearly figure out who you if they wanted to. ("Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database.")
Apple's profit motive is not in the collecting of user information like Google's is, it's in the selling of devices.
iAds: "The iAd mobile advertising network is a significant revenue stream for developers and a powerful way for brands to reach millions of iOS users." This is different to Google how?
Interesting. It was my understanding that the USPTO granted software patents if the algorithm produced a "useful, concrete and tangible result", and that test was so wide that it effectively allowed all software patents. i.e.:
Finally, in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group,[12] the CAFC ruled that a numerical calculation that produces a "useful, concrete and tangible result", such as a price, is patent-eligible.[13]....
In 1995, the USPTO established some broad guidelines for examining and issuing software patents. The USPTO interpreted the courts as requiring the USPTO to grant software patents in a broad variety of circumstances. Although the U.S. Congress has never legislated specifically that software is patentable, the broad description of patentable subject in the Patent Act of 1952 and the failure of Congress to change the law after the CAFC decisions allowing software patents, was interpreted as an indication of Congressional intent. Wikipedia:
However, it seems that this has now been supplanted by Bilski and the need for the software to "transform any article to a different state or thing", and where the data structures being transformed need to be "representative of physical objects or substances." So, if I am interpreting this correctly, in the U.S. you can patent a method consisting of a pure software algorithm as long as it involves some kind of processing and transformation of data structures that represent physical objects or signals? And in the E.U. it appears you can patent software as long as it has a "technical effect" such as reducing access time to physical memory or device. It is even possible to patent the software for "decoding a radio signal" (as suggested in the Wikipedia article), which I would have thought would class as a mathematical algorithm. How depressing.
No it doesn't. You are comparing two different systems and claiming that they are the same; one system where software can be patented, and another where hardware can be patented, but the hardware can contain firmware. Those are two different things. In the E.U. you can't patent pure software, or to use your terminology "software not tied to a machine". This is not the same as the U.S. - in the U.S. software is patentable. You don't have to put it inside a machine and patent that - you can literally patent pure software. Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure says:
"Europe already has uniform rules about what is patentable and what not. They are laid down in the European Patent Convention of 1973. In Article 52, the Convention states that mathematical methods, intellectual methods, business methods, computer programs, presentation of information etc are not inventions in the sense of patent law."
Bolded for emphasis. That is not the same as the U.S. system. The EPO did grant some software patents in anticipation of new legislation, but introduction of the legislation failed:
"The EPO has meanwhile granted more than 30,000 pure software patents in anticipation of the new legislation, and the number has recently been rising at a rate of 3,000 per year... the European Patent Organisation, i.e. the intergovernmental organisation that runs the European Patent Office, attempted to delete all the exclusions listed under Art 52 of the European Patent Convention. Due to public resistance which they apparently did not anticipate, this effort failed."
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, Iran has been training and supplying people to fight in Iraq against US troops.
Not really. Most of the people fighting US troops in Iraq were Sunni (Saddam, his Ba'ath Party and his military were mostly Sunni). The present governments of Iraq and Iran are both Shia and are closely allied (no doubt to the annoyance of the US)... removing the Ba'ath Party from power and installing a Shia government was a great move for Iran. There are even allegations that it was Iranian intelligence that tricked the U.S. into invading Iraq through the use of double agents and false intel: US intelligence fears Iran duped hawks into Iraq war:
Some intelligence officials now believe that Iran used the hawks in the Pentagon and the White House to get rid of a hostile neighbour, and pave the way for a Shia-ruled Iraq... "It's pretty clear that Iranians had us for breakfast, lunch and dinner," said an intelligence source in Washington yesterday. "Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the US for several years through Chalabi." .... "When the story ultimately comes out we'll see that Iran has run one of the most masterful intelligence operations in history. They persuaded the US and Britain to dispose of its greatest enemy."
Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?
"The revelation raises questions about whether Iran may have used a small cabal of officials in the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office to feed bogus intelligence on Iraq and Iran to senior policymakers in the Bush administration who were eager to oust the Iraqi dictator. Iran, which was a mortal enemy of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and fought a bloody eight-year war with Iraq during his reign, has been the primary beneficiary of U.S. policy in Iraq, where Iranian-backed groups now run much of the government and the security forces."
The U2 flies very high. Russia persevered and got a bit lucky; there were many fly overs where they tried to intercept the U2, but their planes couldn't fly high enough. Their SAMs couldn't fly high enough either. But they persevered, and eventually invented a SAM that could fly high enough. Powers wasn't meant to survive, he was supposed to swallow his suicide pill, or eject at an altitude that would kill him (supposedly, the U2 pilots were not told that ejection at the altitude they were flying at would kill them). Unfortunately for the CIA, Powers was smart and didn't want to die - he didn't take his pill, and he stayed in his wrecked plane in uncontrolled descent until he was at a safe altitude before ejecting.
But yeah, it is hard to shoot down something that is very high, and even if you could, there are spy satellites that are even higher. Best to just hide whatever it is you're doing underground.
I assumed the OP was alluding to the past, since he used that "history" word. But if you want to talk about now, please do so.... how exactly has Iran tried to "expand its borders" in the last couple of years? I really would like to know. As far as I can see (and contrary to the images portrayed by some Western media) the Iranian government hasn't invaded anyone, hasn't "settled" or captured any land, and has in fact been praised by the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq for being a good and helpful neighbor.
The government of Iran were also a major regional enemy of the Taliban - after declaring opium unlawful, the Iranian government eradicated the domestic trade in 18 months, and started fighting the Taliban smugglers who use Iran as a transit route to Europe. Three Iranian security agents are killed every day in this "war"; the total killed numbers in the thousands, and they almost went to war with the Taliban when they governed Afghanistan. This is something that our media forget to mention when they try to to convince us that Iran is the bad guy allied with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
I am no apologist for the Iranian government. From our liberal west point of view, we may not like the religious society that they want to create, but compared to ourselves their territorial ambitions seem to have been remarkably limited. Are they the ones that have invaded our neighbors? Are they the ones with soldiers deployed along our borders? Are they the ones constantly meddling in the politics of north America or Europe? Did they ever overthrow a western government and install a dictator? No. And yet, we have done all of these things to them. No wonder they dislike us.
Disagreeing with a government is not a reason to go to war:
"Old men declare war because they have failed to solve complex political and economic problems."
"War is the most striking instance of the failure of intelligence to master the problem of human relationships."
Pre Iraq, the Muslim world was united, Muslims would never attach Muslims
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but just in case it isn't... Iran-Iraq war, Invasion of Kuwait, Afghan civil war (plus pt2), ...
Yes, because the best time to discover a radar site is when you are flying over it... seriously, you don't think there might be some advantage in knowing the location of a radar site *before* it turns on and lights up your aircraft? And, you know, possibly taking it out with cruise missile instead of risking planes and pilots?
Yes, fortunately for us on our moral high-ground, Iran and North Korea are the only nations that have a history of territorial ambitions. The United States would never do something like that. Neither would Britain.
According to some, the covert war has already started:
* $400 million funding for CIA Iran covert ops program
* Assassinations of Iranian scientists (the ones we know about: Majid Shahriari, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, Majid Shahriari, Fereidoun Abbasi-Davani (survived), Darioush Rezaeinejad)
* Cyber attacks (Stuxnet etc.)
* Sabotage of military/industrial sites (bombing of Isfahan uranium plant)
* Assassinations of military personnel (the head of the Revolutionary Guards missile program)
* And now: 12 CIA operatives arrested in Iran
It's almost as if someone is trying to provoke a full on war...
The drawback for me is that I'm finding it harder to continue to get energized to learn new technologies. I can still do it, but it's becoming more of a hassle. Not so much the languages, but the specifics of frameworks and technology domains (i.e. web vs. traditional client-server vs. realtime). Probably more a personal limitation, I'm not the smartest guy in the world.
There are incredibly smart guys who don't learn many new technologies. I have no doubt that the old school guys like Linus or K&R are very smart, but I'd also guess they are pretty unfamiliar with modern web and application development (AJAX, Rails, PHP). They probably wouldn't be considered experts in Java, .NET, or any of the other modern frameworks that recruiters want. They probably don't know that much about Android applications and the Dalvik API, or about developing iPhone apps. Of course, they could learn, and possibly faster than others, but they would lack specific experience. From a recruiter's perspective, their CV would be thrown in the bin ("No 10 years X experience?! Out.") To me, this is a flaw in modern IT recruitment, but to others, it makes sense.
There are various reasons as to why older people tend not to learn newer technologies. Free time has a lot to do with it. As you get older, it seems as though, no matter how smart you are, the amount of time you can dedicate to learning new things decreases. The motivation also decreases. Once you can program in five difference languages, there is not as much reason to learn the sixth. Your knowledge is already sufficient to carry out the tasks you want to, and much of the difference is inconsequential - all of the APIs are slightly different, but you gain little from memorising them all. There is also a mental barrier - the "Why should I struggle to write this in a language/framework I don't know when I could write it in my old, familiar language in a fraction of the time?" feeling.
Another important reason is that the software world is a lot bigger now. Once upon a time it sufficed to know C and Pascal. Now it seems like we need to know C, C++, Java, C#, Perl, Python, Ruby, Bash, PHP, HTML, Javascript, CSS etc. And for each of those, there are multiple frameworks in use. How many different ORMs are there just for Java, Python and PHP? There has been a framework explosion over the last 15 years, and this makes it difficult for a person to keep up. The world was a lot simpler when 90% of development only required knowledge of C and the standard libraries.
Your obligations make you less open to relocation, the technologies on your resume seem less-current
How is this age discrimination? If you are in this situation, then you are less likely to get hired, regardless of age. If you assume that older people are in this situation, and reject them based on their age, then that is age discrimination. But if someone actually is less open to relocation, and hasn't managed to keep up with newer technologies, and you reject them for those reasons, then it isn't age discrimination.
Just like if you reject someone because they lack skills, and they happen to be from a minority ethnic group, then it isn't racial discrimination, but if you reject them because they are from a minority ethnic group and you assume that means they lack skills, then it is racial discrimination.
I also would actually challenge the assumption that older people are less willing to relocate. I have known many young people who don't want to leave their families, the areas that they grew up in, their friends etc. It is a too big step for many. There are regions with chronic youth unemployment problems, where young people will complain that they are simply unable to find a job, and yet if you ask them why they don't relocate to an area which doesn't have these problems, they will claim that it is simply not possible. Ask them how it is possible that immigrants relocate hundreds, or even thousands of miles crossing international boundaries in search of work, and yet they are unwilling to relocate within even their own country, and they will justify their position with a sequences of excuses that apply just as readily to the immigrants. "I have family" - immigrants don't have family? "I was born and grew up here" - immigrants weren't born and grew up somewhere? "I have friends" - immigrants don't have friends?
That word does not mean what you think it does. Money laundering: the process of disguising illegal sources of money so that it looks like it came from legal sources.
What Google, and Facebook, and Microsoft, etc. do is called tax avoidance, and (like it or not) it is completely legal.
Anti-AGW believers are still banging on about Climategate? Every scientific journal that has commented has backed the researchers. Six independent investigations all found no evidence of fraud or misconduct (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, Science Assessment Panel, Pennsylvania State University, Independent Climate Change Email Review, United States Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation). And yet you *still* believe that these scientists are frauds, and that there is a grand conspiracy that is being covered up by the scientists, others who have reviewed their work, the editors and scientists who work for all of the journals, and all of the official investigative committees?
Notice the fact that China and India have 58% of emissions. That is not because of their large economies, but lack of controls.
What? China has a massive economy. Economy of the People's Republic of China: "The People's Republic of China (PRC) ranks since 2010 as the world's second largest economy after the United States. It has been the world's fastest-growing major economy, with consistent growth rates of around 10% over the past 30 years. China is also the largest exporter and second largest importer of goods in the world."
China and India also have a combined population that is eight times bigger than the U.S. population.
Also, check out this graph of global emissions per capita. China has emissions several times less than western nations, and, in fact, lower than the world average. And India's emissions are even lower than that. And if you are going to argue that per capita emissions aren't important, then you will need to argue from the moral perspective that you have the right to pollute more than a person in a third world country. You need to answer the question: what gives you that right?
It is difficult to construct a coherent moral argument, that given a limited resource, I, as a westerner, should be entitled to several times more of that resource than people living in other parts of the world.
China may have lots of dirty industry, but it's per capita emissions are several times less than those of the U.S., Australia, Canada and Western Europe. In fact, China's emissions per capita are below the world average, and it has stated that it won't follow the U.S. path of increasing emissions, they acknowledged to let emissions rise that high would be a "disaster for the world". Hopefully they will be able to do this.
We also need to be honest here: the problem of increased atmospheric CO2 is mostly our fault, especially when you consider the cumulative emissions we made over the last century, which dwarf those of China.
This graph show current emissions per capita. The author insightfully points out: "So, assuming that “something needs to be done” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, who has a special responsibility to do something? As I said, that’s an ethical question. But I find it hard to imagine any system of ethics that denies that the responsibility falls especially on the countries to the left hand side of this diagram – the countries whose emissions are two, three, or four times the world average. Countries that are most able to pay. Countries like Britain and the USA, for example."
The next page has a graph for historical cumulative emissions of CO2. CO2 stays in the atmosphere for 50 to 100 years. Guess who is responsible for putting most of the extra CO2 that is currently in the atmosphere there? Not China.
The alternative 'just use less' philosophy is based upon some crazy idea that 7 billion people can just live in yurts.
Not true. Energy costs are rising. People are using less. We aren't all living in yurts. Ultimately, it is not sustainable (barring some amazing scientific advance) to have 7 billion people living the current lifestyle of the average westerner. It isn't even sustainable for us westerners. I would encourage you to read the book I linked to (there are PDF, epub etc. versions). You'd be surprised how much energy we use. The author is pro-nuclear, but even there his sums show we will have to build new nuclear plants at a rate faster than ever before to match the decline in fossil fuel supplies, and rely on technology that doesn't exist yet (industrial processes for seawater extraction) if we are to maintain our current western energy usage.
Problem is, America and the world is filled with too many folks with superstitious beliefs regarding nuclear power.
The problem is not superstitious beliefs. The problem is one of governance and management - we have not yet figured out a way to have either government run, or privately run, nuclear power programs with effective safety protocols. On the one hand we have government run programs with their inherent problems, and on the other, for-profit corporations reducing safety to maximise profits. Here's a recent example from a supporter of nuclear power:
The safety of nuclear operations in Britain remains a concern. The THORP reprocessing facility at Sellafield, built in 1994 at a cost of £1.8 billion, had a growing leak from a broken pipe from August 2004 to April 2005. Over eight months, the leak let 85 000 litres of uranium-rich fluid flow into a sump which was equipped with safety systems that were designed to detect immediately any leak of as little as 15 litres. But the leak went undetected because the operators hadn’t completed the checks that ensured the safety systems were working; and the operators were in the habit of ignoring safety alarms anyway.
The safety system came with belt and braces. Independent of the failed safety alarms, routine safety-measurements of fluids in the sump should have detected the abnormal presence of uranium within one month of the start of the leak; but the operators often didn’t bother taking these routine measurements, because they felt too busy; and when they did take measurements that detected the abnormal presence of uranium in the sump (on 28 August 2004, 26 November 2004, and 24 February 2005), no action was taken.
By April 2005, 22 tons of uranium had leaked, but still none of the leak-detection systems detected the leak. The leak was finally detected by accountancy, when the bean-counters noticed that they were getting 10% less uranium out than their clients claimed they’d put in! Thank goodness this private company had a profit motive, hey? The criticism from the Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations was withering: “The Plant was operated in a culture that seemed to allow instruments to operate in alarm mode rather than questioning the alarm and rectifying the relevant fault.”
If we let private companies build new reactors, how can we ensure that higher safety standards are adhered to? I don’t know.
The catastrophic effects of WWII (and, prior to that, centuries of warring) eventually spurred the creation of the European Union. The aim was to create an integrated union of nations, bonded by common ideals and free trade, so that the citizens of those nations would have no desire to go to war with their neighbours ever again. To a large extent this has succeeded - a war between the nations of Europe, something that actually happened only 70 years ago, is now unthinkable (or, at least as unthinkable as a war between any of the neighbouring U.S. states).
As far as the generalisations you allude to go, they are crude, but there is also some truth there. The nations of Europe were completely destroyed by WWII. Tens of millions of civilians were killed. Whole cities were flattened by nightly bombing. This experience had a huge effect on the culture of Europe, which over the following decades led directly to the development of a pervasive anti-war culture. In contrast, the U.S. has never experienced anything similar. U.S. cities were not bombed during WWII, there was no invasion, and U.S. civilians were not slaughtered in the millions. Consider the cultural reaction of to the World Trade Center attacks - attacks that killed a few thousand people. People were willing to give up their freedoms, back new draconian laws, invade foreign nations, and massively increase spending on the military industrial homeland security complex, because life for many became dominated by the fear of terrorism. And that was a cultural reaction to the killing of only a few thousand. Now imagine the number killed were in the region of ten thousand times that amount. Imagine 9/11 happening five times a day, every day, for six whole years. Of course it creates a profound social impact.
That's an interesting scheme but it's not very specific. If they stop updating the page, all you know is that they got a request. You have no idea if it was for your data or someone elses.
Although the United States of America (US) is not included in the European Commission list, the Commission considers that personal data sent to the US under the “Safe Harbor” scheme is adequately protected. When a US company signs up to the Safe Harbor arrangement, they agree to: follow seven principles of information handling; and be held responsible for keeping to those principles by the Federal Trade Commission or other oversight schemes. Certain types of companies cannot sign up to Safe Harbor. View a list of the companies signed up to the Safe Harbor arrangement on the US Department of Commerce website. In July 2007, the EU and the US signed an agreement to legitimise and regulate the transfer of passenger name record information (PNR) from EU airlines to the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This agreement is regarded as providing adequate protection for the personal data in question.
To whom do these laws apply? All U.S. citizens and permanent resident aliens, entities and organizations located in or out of the United States (including any subsidiary or foreign offices overseas) must comply with the USA PATRIOT Act, Executive Order 13224, and Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations. Further, U.N. Security Council Resolution 1373 and other resolutions have the force of international law binding on all member states.
http://www.mott.org/resources/patriotact/faqs.aspx#q6
Whether the Patriot Act could be used to compel a U.S. parent to disclose records held by a Canadian subsidiary remains a matter of debate. The B.C. Commissioner Report found that it is a “reasonable possibility” that the FISA Court would order production of documents that are within the custody or control of a U.S. company, such as a U.S. parent with access to records held by a Canadian subsidiary.[14] If a U.S.-linked company makes a disclosure to U.S. authorities without the consent of the Canadian individuals named, this could result in the Canadian organization that transferred the information breaching Canadian privacy legislation unless the disclosure meets an exception in the applicable Canadian privacy legislation. http://library.findlaw.com/2005/May/10/245866.html
Any company that is wholly-owned by a U.S.-based corporation cannot guarantee that the data will not leave its customer-designated datacenters or servers. Google would not budge from its first and final response, and Microsoft could not offer guarantees to not move data outside the EU under any circumstances. These subsidiary companies and their U.S.-parent corporations cannot provide the assurances that data is safe in the UK or the EEA, because the USA PATRIOT Act not only affects the U.S.-based corporations but also their worldwide wholly-owned subsidiary companies based within and outside the European Union.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/igeneration/case-study-how-the-usa-patriot-act-can-be-used-to-access-eu-data/8805?pg=4&tag=content;siu-container
Great Android selling phones do about 10% of a single iPhone model.
Not true. Samsung Galaxy S Sales Hit 30 Million. The last HTC Wildfire sales figure I saw was 21.3 million. By your logic, that means Apple must have shipped in the range of 200-300 million of each iPhone model, right? But total sales of every iPhone model sold from 2007-2010 is only 73 million. Even Total sales figures per fiscal year is clearly nowhere near that level. (I couldn't find iPhone sales figures broken down by model, but total sales of every iPhone from 2007-2010 is only sold 73 million, so clearly not outselling popular Android phones by 1000%).
the (free, open) Android version is more akin to a rootkit
Carrier IQ is not free or open. The post you responded to was arguing that closed source is more difficult to analyse, which is clearly true. If Carrier IQ were open source, we would have known about it years ago, and we wouldn't need to reverse engineer it to figure out what, when and how it's doing what it does, and under what conditions the logs get transferred to remote servers, etc.
I would also argue that, as much as we dislike Carrier IQ, it isn't really a rootkit - the software itself makes no effort to hide its presence, which is one of the defining characteristics of a rootkit. Also, you say that the Android version has a "backdoor" - could you provide a reference for this? As far as I can see, this is not actually true, as it doesn't enable any secret authentication-bypassing remote access (which would be the very definition of a backdoor).
There is a big difference: Google does not provide this software as part of their Android distribution, and Google has not installed it on any of the Nexus phones that they sell. For Android, Carrier IQ is third party software that has been installed by some carriers. That makes the carriers responsible, not Google. It is not even clear that Google knew what third-party software carriers ship on their phones. The carriers have no legal responsibility to impart this information to Google, just like if you sell a pre-installed Ubuntu system you don't have to contact Ubuntu and let them know what you installed.
In contrast, Apple appears to have shipped this software as part of iOS, and secretly installed it on millions of iPhones without telling anyone. For a long time Apple fanboys have argued that because Apple is in control of the iPhone, and not the carriers, then it is impossible for this kind of crap to happen. It seems the impossible just became reality.
It's worth noting that whilst Carrier IQ is running for all iOS versions, uploading the logs appears to be turned off by default on iOS3/4, but it is not known how or when it gets turned on. On iOS 5, Carrier IQ log uploads are controlled by the “Submit Logs to Apple” option on iOS setup. Most users would probably trust Apple with their logs, right? So most iOS 5 users probably have Carrier IQ uploading their logs right now.
Bye bye lots of commercial use of Android handsets, especially Blackberry.
Which Blackberry devices run Android?
Can you point out exactly what you think Google does that Apple does not? From Apple's Q&A on Location Data.
1) Apple gathers "crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data". To do this, your iPhone sends your location along with your Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data (SSIDs, signal strength) to Apple. They do say that the request is anonymised so they have no way of figuring out who you are based on the request, but clearly they could just correlate the geo-tagged request with non-geo requests coming from your phone and figure out who you are.
2) Apple has an advertising system (iAds) that uses your location to send you targetted ads. Obviously this involves Apple knowing what your location is.
3) Apple provides application crash logs to third party developers. They say the logs are anonymous, but an app developer could easily include enough information to identify you (a username, IP address etc.).
4) Apple tracks you when you travel. They say it is anonymous, but again they could clearly figure out who you if they wanted to. ("Apple is now collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced traffic database.")
Apple's profit motive is not in the collecting of user information like Google's is, it's in the selling of devices.
iAds: "The iAd mobile advertising network is a significant revenue stream for developers and a powerful way for brands to reach millions of iOS users." This is different to Google how?
Interesting. It was my understanding that the USPTO granted software patents if the algorithm produced a "useful, concrete and tangible result", and that test was so wide that it effectively allowed all software patents. i.e.:
Finally, in State Street Bank v. Signature Financial Group,[12] the CAFC ruled that a numerical calculation that produces a "useful, concrete and tangible result", such as a price, is patent-eligible.[13] ....
In 1995, the USPTO established some broad guidelines for examining and issuing software patents. The USPTO interpreted the courts as requiring the USPTO to grant software patents in a broad variety of circumstances. Although the U.S. Congress has never legislated specifically that software is patentable, the broad description of patentable subject in the Patent Act of 1952 and the failure of Congress to change the law after the CAFC decisions allowing software patents, was interpreted as an indication of Congressional intent. Wikipedia:
However, it seems that this has now been supplanted by Bilski and the need for the software to "transform any article to a different state or thing", and where the data structures being transformed need to be "representative of physical objects or substances." So, if I am interpreting this correctly, in the U.S. you can patent a method consisting of a pure software algorithm as long as it involves some kind of processing and transformation of data structures that represent physical objects or signals? And in the E.U. it appears you can patent software as long as it has a "technical effect" such as reducing access time to physical memory or device. It is even possible to patent the software for "decoding a radio signal" (as suggested in the Wikipedia article), which I would have thought would class as a mathematical algorithm. How depressing.
What was the E.U. case parallel to Bilski that you mentioned? It seems last year the EPO refused to clarify the situation of software patents.
No it doesn't. You are comparing two different systems and claiming that they are the same; one system where software can be patented, and another where hardware can be patented, but the hardware can contain firmware. Those are two different things. In the E.U. you can't patent pure software, or to use your terminology "software not tied to a machine". This is not the same as the U.S. - in the U.S. software is patentable. You don't have to put it inside a machine and patent that - you can literally patent pure software. Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure says:
"Europe already has uniform rules about what is patentable and what not. They are laid down in the European Patent Convention of 1973. In Article 52, the Convention states that mathematical methods, intellectual methods, business methods, computer programs, presentation of information etc are not inventions in the sense of patent law."
Bolded for emphasis. That is not the same as the U.S. system. The EPO did grant some software patents in anticipation of new legislation, but introduction of the legislation failed:
"The EPO has meanwhile granted more than 30,000 pure software patents in anticipation of the new legislation, and the number has recently been rising at a rate of 3,000 per year... the European Patent Organisation, i.e. the intergovernmental organisation that runs the European Patent Office, attempted to delete all the exclusions listed under Art 52 of the European Patent Convention. Due to public resistance which they apparently did not anticipate, this effort failed."