>Then perhaps we can get on with arguing >about whether it's worth spending money to prevent >socio-political problems that will affect our >kids, and, with luck, their kids...
You mean the SEVERE socio-political problems that are a dead certainty if the Western nations reduce their energy consumption by any significant degree?
Funny how the envirowhackos never stop to think about all the people who would starve to death if it weren't for mechanized agriculture in the U.S. and Canada.
Oh, wait. They're just people. Dead people don't count. Only dead seals or snail darters.
Yes, fuckwit, human impacts are exactly what I'm talking about. Where exactly do I say anything about "dead seals or snail darters"? You must be american, only Merkins come out with such cretinous shite. Why don't you pull your head out of your arse for a second? You might learn something.
Nuke plants are pretty expensive to operate. You have to be extremely careful, which costs money. The cost of fuel is quite low - nearly insignificant, like $10/megawatt hour.
There is a hidden cost, and I'm not sure that it has been paid yet. Once the fuel is consumed, it must be disposed of. At the moment, we're storing the spent fuel at the Nuke plant.
Yeah - I grew up within 20 miles of the biggest concentration of nuclear power plants in western Europe (Oldbury, Berkeley and Hinkley Point PWR.) Berkeley and Oldbury are sleepy villages on the south bank of the River Severn ( roughly in the middle of this map) in western England. With two reactors each, of the earliest production models built in the UK, in the late 50s. They had an original design life of 21 years. They extended this several times until finally closing them in the mid 90s. Now they're the testbed: they're the first reactors in the world to be decommissioned, so they're trying out all sorts of approaches. It turns out that the cost of decommissioning is gigantic, and open-ended. The current plan is complete in another 120 years, when only the reactor cores will remain onsite, incased in 200ft square concrete cubes. The artists impressions show cows grazing in peaceful fields next to them. Yes, the civil engineering work will last for AT LEAST a century.
Question for all the SF fans out there. What are the odds that there'll be some sort of natural, cyclical downturn in the level of human civilisation within the next thousand years? Without speculating on scenarios, it's obvious that even on a regional scale, civilisations rise and fall with monotonous regularity. So, sooner or later there'll be non-industrial primitive types dancing round these things, waving spears, and saluting the Great Square Temple left behind by the Gods of the Elder Days...
Now think of the several thousand other reactors scattered around the world. Remember that these century-long civil engineering projects are needed for all these, too.
Oh, and guess what happens to the radioactive dust, rubble and steel that IS removed from the site? NO-ONE KNOWS . No nation, anywhere in the world, is doing long term disposal of nuclear waste. (We've worked out that dumping it in drums of concrete in a couple of hundred feet of water isn't such a great idea.) And let's not forget the radioactive fish and beaches all along the east coast of Ireland - from Windscale, aka Sellafield.
Hi, it's the story author/submitter here again. OK, I admit it, the Greenpeace reference was perhaps a little... reckless, dare I say trollish. Neverthless, I continue to find the general attitude of scorn and derision, backed up with half-baked, long-discredited pseudo science, misunderstandings of half-remembered TV documentaries and ads paid for by the oil industry, profoundly depressing. Speaking as a goddam limey, it's seems to be that this attitude is far more prevalent amongst Americans that others. And that's just skimming at +4! Gawd knows what it's like at -1... *wince* Depressing to see such (accidental, presumably) misinformation and just plain wrong "facts" being moderated up as "informative".
There are so many myths and straw men arguments... I'm going to go through all the comments, isolate each duff point made and refute it. (Mail me if you'd like to know when it's done. I mis-munged my email address in the submission: it's cally, at zpok, dot demon, dot co, dot uk . I'll try to draw attention to any genuine areas of disagreement, or doubt, or even where there are some real science people who disagree on an area.
To everyone who pointed out that the sun has or is getting hotter or colder: yes, of course the sun's output has fluctuated over time. How do you know that? And don't you think that the climate modelling people might have thought of that, too, and ALLOWED for it in their calculations? Well, of course they have, and yes they have.
Lots of straw-man arguments about what "environmentalists" think. The IPCC, the Hadley Centre, and all the other groups around the world working on the fantastically complex area of (a) working out what the climate was like in the past, (2) modelling it well enough to predict the present from the past, and (3) make assessments about the probability of various outcomes - that is, to "make predictions" - are NOT "environmentalists". They are reputable scientists. They study data, test hypothesis, publish in peer reviewed journals, argue with each other, test models, criticise other models, and all the rest of the "scientific method" as practiced today, with all the crap that goes along with it. This is the BEST WE HAVE. If it's good enough to make engrave computers on slivers of rock so small that quantum effects start to make themselves felt - and make the planes fly and drugs work and all the rest of it - then the overall consensus is probably a pretty damn good guess. It's the best we are going to get, for now anyway.
Whatever. I'm knackered (I have a 4.5 hour commute, gotta get up again in 7 hrs), and no-one will read or moderate up this comment, coming so late, but I AM going to write that page listing the myths and broken arguments that keep getting trotted out here. Then perhaps we can get on with arguing about whether it's worth spending money to prevent socio-political problems that will affect our kids, and, with luck, their kids...
Sigh. Go read the "Global Climate Change 101" at eg New Scientist.com. CFCs are greenhouse gases, true, but they were a problem cos they destroyed the ozone layer. CO2 and methane are the two biggest problem greenhouse gases. Ozone destruction appears to be under control, thanks to prompt global action (the Montreal Protocol): the Antarctic ozone hole seems to have stabilised in the last few years and even to be shrinking over the last 2 years.
...and by the way the quotes are from the British Antarctic Survey who, as I said in the story, are respected around the world - what with having been there since 1912, and all. THEY are not sandal-wearing hippie museli munchers: they'r PhDs, grad students, professors etc who spend 6 months a year living on the ice.
The earth will change if we do anything or not. In fact what most enviromentalists want is for it to stay exactly the same and never change, or so it seems. They don't want species to die, yet they do on their own even when we leave them totally alone, the want the climate to stay the same, yet that changes to if we were using our cars and factories or no
FUD, nonsense, guff, bullshit. Any idea what a 10m sealevel rise would do to the world econom? C'mon bunky, you can work it out...
It bothers me that people think they can make assumptions about the Earth's weather patterns based on roughly 100 years (NASA: Surface Temperature Analysis [nasa.gov]) of temperature data.
We don't. We use proxy measurements such as bubbles of air trapped in ice core samples, sediments from lake beds, tree rings, etc etc etc. using many different measurements, which often overlap (and hence correlate each other) we have a fairly good idea of the paleoclimate back to several billion years ago.
Re:The Earth's temperature has ALWAYS fluctuated.
on
Larsen Ice Shelf Collapses
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
but in reality it's probably nothing more than the sun outputting a little more energy than normal.
And your evidence for disagreeing with almost every reputable scientist who's worked in the field?
You know it's amazing how, with our hacker hats on, we laugh our asses off when a PHB tries to tell us how to program, or what software to run. But when it comes to telling climate modellers what their work REALLY means, why! we can sort thsat stuff out over lunch!
At the end of the day, the only people qualified to describe what's happening and where it's going over the next few decades have spent many, many years in the field. (I'm an interested lay observer, with a reasonable science educational background, & been following the debate, new findeings etc., for the last 10 - 15 years.) I'm sure the majority of the posts here (apart from the trolls and the jokes) are going to be arguing the case one way or the other. Well frankly I think none of us (those of us who aren't in the field) are qualified to say "this study's right, that model's wrong"; thus we can only make a judgement about the credibility of the people advanccing the various cases. And the the IPCC have the most credible findings - if anything, they err on the conservative side so as not to freak out certain wobbly 'Western' nations with shakey commitment to doing anything. (The IPCC was set up to establish the global consensus amongst eveyone working in the field.)
Who are you going to believe - fat cats with strong financial interest in doing nothing to halt CO2 production, or imkpartial scientists whose career and reputation rests on the validity of their findings, models, and predictions?
OK, I'm British and I'm not really familiar with the US legal system; BUT...:
The plaintiffs are not here to punish Microsoft," Sullivan said. "The plaintiffs' goals are to make Microsoft behave properly."
No punishment? Is he just saying the STATES aren't there to do the punishing, that's the judge's job? You do have a system of punitive damages, right? And if your conduct is especially insidious, and you're a large, well-known organisation which is looked up to by many, and treated as a role model by other companies, you impose - I can't recall the legal jargon, help me out someone - 'exemplary" damages, right? That is, Microsoft should receive a far HARSHER penalty than some small firm that tried the same things, because Microsoft have more public visibility? That's (roughly) the way it works over here (well, in the UK anyway: dunno about the EU systems, which, yes, we are part of...)
Anyway I sure as hell want to see punitive damages imposed on Microsoft. Whether or not that happens in the US, I'm pretty sure the EU is going to fine them several billion dollars. And not a penny too much. They should be fined the equivalent of the profits they made from their illegal activities over the last decade.
[Macs are ] Immune to the overwhelming majority of virii
Myth I'm afraid. Obviously wintel viruses won't run on MacOS but there are plenty of Mac viruses out there... someone who works here (anonymous a/v co) is about to buy their n-th Ferrari from the proceeds of Mac a/v software.
At work we have somewhat of an answer to viruses. 20 file extensions including exe, pif, scr, com, bat, vbs, vbe, and others are filtered at the server into a "Quarantine" folder
Disclaimer - I work for A.N. well-known a/v company.
How do you handle worms in Javascript? Do you quarantine HTML email too? (Not that this would be a bad idea, IMHO - but I'd never get another mail from the PHBs again...)
What the hell good is SSH on a windows box? Ooh, I can run "cmd.exe".
Cygwin comes with ports of tons of the GNU tools including bash, grep, ls, blah blah hundreds more. It's the first thing I install when I start somewhere new (like I did last week) and the PHB's force me to use Windows for work.
I'm appalled and amazed by this. Can Microsoft really get away with a licence that forbids you from using your computer in a particular way? Do they really think they can forbid people from running an entire CLASS of programs??? It really beggars belief. How have these bastards got away with this crap for so long?!
Some other fits-onna-floppy distros; many of these are security-focused, firewall-appliance type efforts. Disclaimer, this list is of stuff I/want; to check out when I get the time: I'vfe no idea how good or bad they are, beyond Theo's famous comment about entrusting the most important piece of one's network to the most unreliable piece of hardware in modern computers (approximately). Some of them may actually NOT be floppy-distros, I need to clean up these bookmarks... jesus where did the time go... *sigh*
/cygdrive/[...]/WINNT/system32 $ strings *.EXE --print-file-name | grep -i regent FINGER.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1980 The Regents of the University of California. FTP.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. RCP.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California. RSH.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Evidence uncovered last summer points to the Windows operating system borrowing some networking utilities and possibly parts of the TCP/IP stack, the core software that allows networking and Internet connectivity, from the open-source Unix variant FreeBSD.
Theo de Raadt, a founder and project leader for another open-source Unix variant, OpenBSD, stressed that no conclusive proof exists, however. "I have asked repeatedly and never gotten proof," he said.
Well it's easy to show that they use/some/ BSD code, at least. This is Cygwin / bash on NT4:
Unless you run AV software like that produced by my current employer (who shall remain nameless: if you're shopping for a/v software it's not hard to find. And of course STD disclaimer applies - I speak for myself only, etc etc) which checks NTFS alternate streams as well as the main fs.
> Im a sysadmin for a major university, and I can >tell you first hand that even pinging will get you a >letter from the agency you pinged.
I can assure you that this is NOT the case for us outside the US. I've been known to use www.af.mil as a test of connectivity / UDP / ICMP, and I've not seen a letter, an email or indeed any MIB.
>I wouldn't say that they mapped the CIA's network. >Sure, they found some machine names that route mail. >Big deal.
Ah, you've never done any pen-testing I see... the first stage of which is always information gathering. It's not unknown to be able to pick out the most vulnerable point of entry without a single packet passing from between yourself and the target.
Even if we do solve these problems in the best case we should expect the population to top in one or two generations at 15 to 20 billion people, due to the age distribition of the world population, and cultural resistance to change.
Well, I'm sorry, but you're completely wrong with your population growth forecasts, so I shan't bother to address your other points. Especially as you insulted me;p it's called/IRONY/ dude...
> In short, there are huge advantages to a nuclear > rocket over a chemical rocket.
Yeah, and one fsckin massive DISadvantage: it'll never happen, buddy, and you're dreaming if you think different. (for a given value of "never" meaning "not in the lifetime of anyone alive today.")
Slashdot Mirror
Just tell us who the mystery psycho-PHBs are, that we may boycott their products and/or services.
>Then perhaps we can get on with arguing
>about whether it's worth spending money to prevent >socio-political problems that will affect our >kids, and, with luck, their kids...
You mean the SEVERE socio-political problems that are a dead certainty if the Western nations reduce their energy consumption by any significant degree?
Funny how the envirowhackos never stop to think about all the people who would starve to death if it weren't for mechanized agriculture in the U.S. and Canada.
Oh, wait. They're just people. Dead people don't count. Only dead seals or snail darters.
Yes, fuckwit, human impacts are exactly what I'm talking about. Where exactly do I say anything about "dead seals or snail darters"? You must be american, only Merkins come out with such cretinous shite. Why don't you pull your head out of your arse for a second? You might learn something.
Yeah - I grew up within 20 miles of the biggest concentration of
nuclear power plants in western Europe (Oldbury, Berkeley and Hinkley
Point PWR.) Berkeley and Oldbury are sleepy villages on the south
bank of the River Severn (
roughly in the middle of this map) in western England. With two
reactors each, of the earliest production models built in the UK, in
the late 50s. They had an original design life of 21 years. They
extended this several times until finally closing them in the mid
90s. Now they're the testbed: they're the first reactors in the
world to be decommissioned, so they're trying out all sorts of
approaches. It turns out that the cost of decommissioning is gigantic,
and open-ended. The current plan is complete in another 120 years,
when only the reactor cores will remain onsite, incased in 200ft
square concrete cubes. The artists impressions show cows grazing in
peaceful fields next to them. Yes, the civil engineering work will
last for AT LEAST a century.
Question for all the SF fans out there. What are the odds that
there'll be some sort of natural, cyclical downturn in the level of
human civilisation within the next thousand years? Without speculating
on scenarios, it's obvious that even on a regional scale,
civilisations rise and fall with monotonous regularity. So, sooner or
later there'll be non-industrial primitive types dancing round these
things, waving spears, and saluting the Great Square Temple left
behind by the Gods of the Elder Days...
Now think of the several thousand other reactors scattered around
the world. Remember that these century-long civil engineering
projects are needed for all these, too.
Oh, and guess what happens to the radioactive dust, rubble and steel
that IS removed from the site? NO-ONE KNOWS . No nation,
anywhere in the world, is doing long term disposal of nuclear
waste. (We've worked out that dumping it in drums of concrete in a
couple of hundred feet of water isn't such a great idea.) And let's
not forget the radioactive fish and beaches all along the east coast
of Ireland - from Windscale, aka Sellafield.
reference was perhaps a little... reckless, dare I say trollish. Neverthless, I
continue to find the general attitude of scorn
and derision, backed up with half-baked, long-discredited pseudo science,
misunderstandings of half-remembered TV documentaries and ads paid for by the
oil industry, profoundly depressing. Speaking as a goddam limey, it's seems
to be that this attitude is far more prevalent amongst Americans that others.
And that's just skimming at +4! Gawd knows what it's like at -1... *wince*
Depressing to see such (accidental, presumably) misinformation and just plain
wrong "facts" being moderated up as "informative".
There are so many myths and straw men arguments... I'm going to go through
all the comments, isolate each duff point made and refute it. (Mail me if
you'd like to know when it's done. I mis-munged my email address in the
submission: it's cally, at zpok, dot demon, dot co, dot uk . I'll try to
draw attention to any genuine areas of disagreement, or doubt, or even where
there are some real science people who disagree on an area.
To everyone who pointed out that the sun has or is getting hotter or colder:
yes, of course the sun's output has fluctuated over time. How do you know that?
And don't you think that the climate modelling people might have thought of that,
too, and ALLOWED for it in their calculations? Well, of course they have, and
yes they have.
Lots of straw-man arguments about what "environmentalists" think. The IPCC,
the Hadley Centre, and all the other groups around the world working on
the fantastically complex area of (a) working out what the climate was like
in the past, (2) modelling it well enough to predict the present from the past,
and (3) make assessments about the probability of various outcomes - that is,
to "make predictions" - are NOT "environmentalists". They are reputable
scientists. They study data, test hypothesis, publish in peer reviewed journals,
argue with each other, test models, criticise other models, and all the rest
of the "scientific method" as practiced today, with all the crap that goes
along with it. This is the BEST WE HAVE. If it's good enough to make engrave
computers on slivers of rock so small that quantum effects start to make
themselves felt - and make the planes fly and drugs work and all the rest of
it - then the overall consensus is probably a pretty damn good guess. It's
the best we are going to get, for now anyway.
Whatever. I'm knackered (I have a 4.5 hour commute, gotta get up again in
7 hrs), and no-one will read or moderate up this comment, coming so late,
but I AM going to write that page listing the myths and broken arguments
that keep getting trotted out here. Then perhaps we can get on with arguing
about whether it's worth spending money to prevent socio-political problems
that will affect our kids, and, with luck, their kids...
Sigh. Go read the "Global Climate Change 101" at eg New Scientist.com. CFCs are greenhouse gases, true, but they were a problem cos they destroyed the ozone layer. CO2 and methane are the two biggest problem greenhouse gases. Ozone destruction appears to be under control, thanks to prompt global action (the Montreal Protocol): the Antarctic ozone hole seems to have stabilised in the last few years and even to be shrinking over the last 2 years.
...and by the way the quotes are from the British Antarctic Survey who, as I said in the story, are respected around the world - what with having been there since 1912, and all. THEY are not sandal-wearing hippie museli munchers: they'r PhDs, grad students, professors etc who spend 6 months a year living on the ice.
Some more sources.
. org/: //www.scienceforum.net/n t/ipcc/tar.html: //www.epa.gov/globalwarming/index.htmlw .ipcc.ch/
http://www.earthdot.org/a nl.govh tml
i d_ 1880000/1880566.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1833000/1833902.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1528000/1528348.stmg lish/in_depth/sci_tec h/2002/boston_2002/newsid_1825000/1825283.stmt p://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/americas/n ewsid_1820000/1820584.stml ow/english/sci/tech/newsid_ 1804000/1804467.stml ines/y2002/15jan_gree nhouse.htm?list98953n glish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1782000/1782691.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1779000/1779619.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1718000/1718183.stmw s/early-earth-01k.htm la s/n ewsid_1375000/1375089.stml ow/english/sci/tech/newsid_ 1664000/1664887.stmg lish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1706000/1706823.stmg lish/uk/england/newsi d_1661000/1661560.stme nglish/sci/tech/newsid_ 1643000/1643156.stml ines/y2001/ast07sep_1 .htm?list98953
http://www.pewclimate.org/
http://www.marshall
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/welcome.html
http
http://www.rivm.nl/env/i
http://www.worldwatch.org/
http
http://ww
http://www.unep.org/unep/eia/geo2000/
http://www-climate.mcs.
http://wwwghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/Model/model.
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/acpi/
And some (mostly BBC) stories related to climate change:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/sci/tech/news
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
ht
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://science.nasa.gov/head
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/e
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://www.spacedaily.com/ne
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/world/americ
http://news.bbc.co.uk/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/en
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/
http://science.nasa.gov/head
FUD, nonsense, guff, bullshit. Any idea what a 10m sealevel rise would do to the world econom? C'mon bunky, you can work it out...
It bothers me that people think they can make assumptions about the Earth's weather patterns based on roughly 100 years (NASA: Surface Temperature Analysis [nasa.gov]) of temperature data.
We don't. We use proxy measurements such as bubbles of air trapped in ice core samples, sediments from lake beds, tree rings, etc etc etc. using many different measurements, which often overlap (and hence correlate each other) we have a fairly good idea of the paleoclimate back to several billion years ago.
And your evidence for disagreeing with almost every reputable scientist who's worked in the field?
You know it's amazing how, with our hacker hats on, we laugh our asses off when a PHB tries to tell us how to program, or what software to run. But when it comes to telling climate modellers what their work REALLY means, why! we can sort thsat stuff out over lunch!
At the end of the day, the only people qualified to describe what's happening and where it's going over the next few decades have spent many, many years in the field. (I'm an interested lay observer, with a reasonable science educational background, & been following the debate, new findeings etc., for the last 10 - 15 years.) I'm sure the majority of the posts here (apart from the trolls and the jokes) are going to be arguing the case one way or the other. Well frankly I think none of us (those of us who aren't in the field) are qualified to say "this study's right, that model's wrong"; thus we can only make a judgement about the credibility of the people advanccing the various cases. And the the IPCC have the most credible findings - if anything, they err on the conservative side so as not to freak out certain wobbly 'Western' nations with shakey commitment to doing anything. (The IPCC was set up to establish the global consensus amongst eveyone working in the field.)
Who are you going to believe - fat cats with strong financial interest in doing nothing to halt CO2 production, or imkpartial scientists whose career and reputation rests on the validity of their findings, models, and predictions?
No punishment? Is he just saying the STATES aren't there to do the punishing, that's the judge's job? You do have a system of punitive damages, right? And if your conduct is especially insidious, and you're a large, well-known organisation which is looked up to by many, and treated as a role model by other companies, you impose - I can't recall the legal jargon, help me out someone - 'exemplary" damages, right? That is, Microsoft should receive a far HARSHER penalty than some small firm that tried the same things, because Microsoft have more public visibility? That's (roughly) the way it works over here (well, in the UK anyway: dunno about the EU systems, which, yes, we are part of...)
Anyway I sure as hell want to see punitive damages imposed on Microsoft. Whether or not that happens in the US, I'm pretty sure the EU is going to fine them several billion dollars. And not a penny too much. They should be fined the equivalent of the profits they made from their illegal activities over the last decade.
Myth I'm afraid. Obviously wintel viruses won't run on MacOS but there are plenty of Mac viruses out there... someone who works here (anonymous a/v co) is about to buy their n-th Ferrari from the proceeds of Mac a/v software.
Disclaimer - I work for A.N. well-known a/v company.
How do you handle worms in Javascript? Do you quarantine HTML email too? (Not that this would be a bad idea, IMHO - but I'd never get another mail from the PHBs again...)
Cygwin comes with ports of tons of the GNU tools including bash, grep, ls, blah blah hundreds more. It's the first thing I install when I start somewhere new (like I did last week) and the PHB's force me to use Windows for work.
I'm appalled and amazed by this. Can Microsoft really get away with a licence that forbids you from using your computer in a particular way? Do they really think they can forbid people from running an entire CLASS of programs??? It really beggars belief. How have these bastards got away with this crap for so long?!
Ooh, a meta-bookmark -- cheers ;)
(this ones based on BSD IIRC)
/cygdrive/[...]/WINNT/system32 $ strings *.EXE --print-file-name | grep -i regent
FINGER.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1980 The Regents of the University of California.
FTP.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
RCP.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
RSH.EXE: @(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Satisfied now???
Well it's easy to show that they use
code, at least. This is Cygwin / bash on NT4:
andrew@INEGO(22:18:47)
[path...]
Binary file FINGER.EXE matches
Binary file FTP.EXE matches
Binary file RCP.EXE matches
Binary file RSH.EXE matches
Unless you run AV software like that produced by my current employer (who shall remain nameless: if you're shopping for a/v software it's not hard to find. And of course STD disclaimer applies - I speak for myself only, etc etc) which checks NTFS alternate streams as well as the main fs.
> Im a sysadmin for a major university, and I can
>tell you first hand that even pinging will get you a
>letter from the agency you pinged.
I can assure you that this is NOT the case for us outside the US. I've been known to use www.af.mil as a test of connectivity / UDP / ICMP, and I've not seen a letter, an email or indeed any MIB.
>I wouldn't say that they mapped the CIA's network.
>Sure, they found some machine names that route mail.
>Big deal.
Ah, you've never done any pen-testing I see... the first stage of which is always information gathering. It's not unknown to be able to pick out the most vulnerable point of entry without a single packet passing from between yourself and the target.
Well, I'm sorry, but you're completely wrong with your population growth forecasts, so I shan't bother to address your other points. Especially as you insulted me
Jesus, I wish you folks would learn the distinction between fact and fantasy. THIS IS FANTASY. IT IS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.
> rocket over a chemical rocket.
Yeah, and one fsckin massive DISadvantage: it'll never happen, buddy, and you're dreaming if you think different. (for a given value of "never" meaning "not in the lifetime of anyone alive today.")