If the USSR was that cool than please explain 1956 or the Prague Spring.
If the capitalism is so cool then please explain the Ludlow Massacre, the Kent State shootings, Vietnam war, and even OWS if you want.
And if you insist on counting military interventions in neighboring countries, the USA leads that list. The USA routinely installs and removes strongmen around the globe; sometimes with military force, sometimes with money that buys local agitators and hand-picked challengers. Why do you think Egypt arrested a couple dozen foreigners just a week or two ago?
No nation, no system is perfect. There is opposition within any system - at very least because the opposition wants to climb to the top and rule the roost. You cannot expect power-hungry people to remain docile.
At the same time, it is often dangerous to let those power-hungry people rule the country. The 20th century is full of examples, may they remain unnamed to prevent invocation of Godwin's Law. Who is to judge the potential ruler? Is he a new Vaclav Havel or a new Islam Karimov? That remains to be an unanswered question. The problem of this question is not in choosing the judges, the problem is that judges have no information to base their decision upon. Campaign promises do not count; recall is contingent on acquiescence of the parliament - which gets undermined first... human history is full of dictators.
In these circumstances it is often safer to keep the devil that you know instead of letting a new, unknown devil into your home.
In any case, the GP (Alex) is absolutely right. Ex-USSR people who were raised in best years of Soviet socialism and then got magically transported into the USA have tremendous advantage. They are not burdened with all the "education" that is dished out in US public schools; they are often not drafted into the herd mentality of US universities; they are not polluted with all the wrongs of this society. As a side effect, most graduates of USSR's universities are very well educated - and they have no debts to pay for half of their life.
The old USSR was not ideal. Life there was largely boring and bland. However it offered several advantages. For example, USSR guaranteed stability of your life. There were no worries about losing one's job. There were no worries about losing one's housing (though it wasn't that great to begin with.) You were guaranteed medical services (the most basic ones, by western standards.) You weren't paid much; you actually were only paid to buy food. But in exchange everything in your life was taken care of, one way or another. The USA is moving in this direction too.
Then USSR did not have millionaires. There were a few artists and a few other workers who got paid much more than other; but the entire country knew them and could count them on fingers of one hand. Most people were poor, but they were equally poor. The money went to the state, and the state was the only entity that was filthy rich. Those monies were spent on various projects that mattered to the whole country. The USA is raising taxes bit by bit, and the end will be the same - the working stiff will be left with only food money, but an extensive net of social services will take care of the rest. This is an ideal environment for adult children who are too afraid to take risks and to try new things.
I have a drinking buddy who owns a towing company, he only has one real tow truck, the rest of his fleet are all flatbeds manufactured for transporting inoperative vehicles.
Perhaps it's because statistics of his business tell him that many calls for towing are for removal of crashed vehicles - and those can't be safely towed unless you are sure what is still intact in them and what isn't (impossible to tell on a shoulder, at night, with a flashing blue light for illumination.) A flatbed is a solution that fits nearly all problems. He might want to have one true tow truck for, say, removing vehicles from parking structures, where a long flatbed simply won't fit.
Of course, an airline is not the government - they do have the right to refuse travel on their planes
Not without a good reason, though. They have a contract for transportation, and you paid the money. They can renege only on well defined conditions. A failed RFID chip in the passport can't possibly be one of those conditions because the passport itself as a document is fine. It's not like it had been delaminated and the text is unreadable and the photo is gone... There are plenty of passports in the world (like half the planet) that don't have RFID. My passport certainly has no RFID.
That's certainly interesting, thanks! However someone who hunts deer has to suffer greatly to get his trophy. He needs to buy a tag (or win a draw.) Then he needs to go into a forest in late fall, when normal people stay in warm homes and watch TV. Then he has to sit in a treestand for who knows how long on a chance that a legal deer wanders by. Sure, shooting a deer at that range is not a challenge, I grant you that (and I don't hunt deer, actually, or anything larger than a rabbit; I like them as they are:-) (I hunt sage rats, for example - a pest that farmers go to great expense to suppress.) Well, once a deer is shot you need to field-dress it. A butcher's job is not exactly clean or pleasant. Once that is done you need to drag the rest of the deer back to your vehicle. If you went deep into the forest then you accordingly travel all the way backward, with a 100 lb. of meat on a rope. Finally, once you get to the truck you need to effortlessly load the deer into the truck, drive it home, and then start really butchering it. (Some just deliver the game to meat processors who do this job.)
If you ask me, it's a lot of work. Only those who are really determined to hunt will go through the process. It is well known among hunters that venison costs 10x more than best beef prepared in a best restaurant and delivered right onto your table. Hunters hunt their own food not because they are hungry (some do, usually in rural areas) but because they want the challenge. Some hunt with bow and arrows; that is even harder. Taking a deer "from the next county" is not considered fair, though a good scope and a sub-MOA rifle allows that.
Also it's not always correct to think that feeding and baiting is the same. I have some salt on my property (a side effect of backwashing the water softener,) deer like it, but I have no intent to use this fact to hunt them. I could hunt them out of my window if I wanted to, but I don't - it would be indeed unfair. If a coyote shows up I may actually chase it away; not only it is dangerous to deer, it is also dangerous to foxes, of which I have a few, and I need them too. Needless to say, foxes are quite safe here; in exchange they ate all the mice around, which is a good thing (unless someone says that mice have rights!:-)
If aliens scooped up all humans tomorrow, the rest of Nature would manage just fine, in its own sometimes grisly way.
You can say exactly the same about doctors...
Bigger point still remains: "game management" is used to justify hunters slaughtering animals to fulfill a human urge to kill
This statement only informs the world that you are not a hunter and you do not understand hunting. Why in the world hunters would feed animals if they hate them so much? But they do even though it costs some good money.
I would say that hunters love animals far more than a typical city dweller does. They respect them. Most animals that are seen in the fields and forests are left alone. You are probably loving your dog just as much (if you have a dog - I just posit this for the argument) but you would have it killed if its life comes to the natural and very painful end. Nothing that is alive lives forever, and animals don't have an easy time dying from old age. They are usually eaten by predators, alive, as they are dying.
Hunters pay fees, sometimes large fees, to Fish and Game, for the privilege to hunt in general and separately for privileges to hunt specific animals. You can't just walk into a forest and shoot deer left and right; you'd be dragged to prison for that. The monies that are collected are spent on improvements of wildlife habitats. But what has a common city man done to improve the life of a deer in a forest?
With regard to "killing," that same common man from the city is a killer too. How many innocent cows did he slaughter, however indirectly? How many innocent chickens and turkeys were killed on his orders? But as long as he buys the meat "in the store where it is made" he thinks his hands are clean. But they are not. Hunters are simply honest about that; humans are not ruminants, we can't live on grasses alone. Some animal food is necessary for health. Hence, we kill for food. (Vegetarians don't, but they are a minority.) A deer taken in the forest and eaten may spare one cow. Can we say that a cow's life is less important?
I understand that/. is not an ideal forum to discuss outdoor activities. However a geek would react with derision when someone clueless comes with a premade and unchangeable opinion on how to write software. What if I come and tell you that I heard on the radio that for (;;) is bad style and now you are required only to use goto? I wouldn't insist on the other party to be intimately familiar with actual cost of these statements in machine commands, but at least I'd ask for basic awareness of issues and then for willingness to accept arguments for and against the subject.
I always looked at this as weak justification for hunters' barbarian behavior.
In other words, you do not see it as barbaric to allow coyotes to grab fawns and tear them apart alive?
Here is the analysis of the problem. Beware, a photo of a half-eaten fawn is provided there. That's how nature operates. It isn't pretty. Taking a deer with a 30-06 bullet is much more humane.
Why would I want to eat the old tough deer? I might as well eat at the Sizzler, plus it's cheaper and quicker.
And that's what I do (modulo the Sizzler part, I'm too cheap for that.) I have deer on my property; they are perfectly safe here. In fact, if I see a coyote (the deer killer #1) I might do something about that...
the thought of hurting or killing an animal for sport is something I find repulsive.
I guess then you never went to one of those hunter education classes. Let me give you an example.
A certain valley can feed 100 deer during 4-month winter. There is no other food.
One year the population increased to 150 deer. Perhaps more were born than usual; perhaps some wandered in. You have 150 animals now and the 4-month winter is about to begin. How many will survive the winter?
If you think all 150 will survive, you are wrong. In fact, all 150 will die. Why?
Animals are not very smart, they don't plan ahead. They cannot calculate the amount of food and the number of consumers and set up daily rations. Deer will be eating as usual until all the food is gone. Then they begin starving. When will that happen?
Well, if 100 deer eat the whole food supply in 4 months then 150 deer will do the same in 2.66 months. Now imagine facing the last - and usually the coldest - month of winter with no food of any kind for the whole month. Probably a few fattest deer will survive, but most will perish. They can't even eat each other...
Game management talks about such scenarios. There are many more. For example, you adore those little ground squirrels that dig little burrows in fields. However the rancher hates them because his cows step into burrows and break their legs. Do you hate cows? So the rancher either poisons all squirrels, or he drags the field with a tool to bury those squirrels underground. Does it make you happy? I guess not. Wise game management here would be in reducing the number of squirrels to a reasonable number, preferrably in unused areas. Then the rancher will not have to resort to genocide.
Some critters are outright dangerous. For example, take prairie dogs (PDs.) Many of them are carriers of plague. There are signs along highways warning about that. Do you want these animals to multiply uncontrollably and contaminate huge lands? They aren't guilty that they are carriers, but the fact remains.
Nature does not care about any of that. If all deer die out, if half the country is awash in deadly diseases - it's all fine to the nature. It's self-regulating, but it uses non-human reasoning. For example, if food gets scarce young will die first. But a hunter will let young alone and will take a mature bull instead, who already lived through most of his deer's life, done all the breeding it could, and doesn't have much fire left in him anyway.
A quail is a ground-dwelling bird. It can fly, certainly, but it's not very good at that. Quails walk or even run whenever they can; their flight is quite noisy.
With all this remote sensing and especially with the now (more) common use of ACTIVE sensors, is there any way the average, non-James Bond citizen can know what exactly he's being scanned with?
No, the average citizen cannot know that. The reason is that the emitter is usually not constrained by cost, and emitters exist only in small quantities. For example, that TSA scanner van may exist in quantity one, but the whole population of the USA may be required to be on the lookout for it.
Those emitters also have all the proper antennas, lenses, and whatnot that is required for their operation. A citizen can't carry antennas for all bands (unless he is Inspector Gadget, of course.) Continuously scanning all bands from ultrasound to X-ray is not even practical in lab conditions. You'd need to have a large truck that is full of very expensive equipment (fast, FFT-based spectrum analyzers from DC to daylight.) Perhaps you can buy it all, new, for about half a million dollars. It will weigh about half a ton.
That's a pretty efficient idiot. Also, "affected" is not the same as "destroyed".
I chose the words carefully. It is also not known what is worse for the society - to have one member destroyed outright or to have one member's worldview crashing down upon him. The damage is not just psychological, it could be very physical. Some survivors of gang encounters have to escape the town completely to avoid wrath of the gang. The police will not protect them, and waging a one-man war against a gang is neither legal nor practical.
You do realize that the main difference between these was how the captain, not the rabble, behaved, right?
The captain is a part of the sample that we are looking at.
Did it ever occur to you that the "militarization of society" is not a universal problem, but mostly an American problem? It's your culture that's broken, not humanity in general.
I cannot comment on cultures that I know nothing of. If this discussion is N/A to your particular society, just ignore it. I'm sure, for example, that many Amazonian tribes have pretty stable societies; their murder trials are always quick, and the piranhas are always hungry:-)
But if you insist that the problem uniquely belongs to the USA, look at Greece today, or at UK in time of troubles, or at Germany at time of Turkish pogroms. As Quark said, humans are nice only when well fed; once that is taken away they become as bloodthirsty as a Klingon.
I just leave my house, go around conducting my business or taking my pleasure, and return home unmolested. Again you are projecting American problems to humanity as large.
Either you are claiming that your countrymen are above the average, or the US average is lower than your country's. Which may be true; but it requires having firsthand data on both societies to do a fair comparison.
However reports from UK are not very encouraging. While firearm ownership there is nearly outlawed, gangs carry knives - and you don't want to be slashed with a knife any more than you'd like to be shot. It hurts either way.
And all of these groups started by trying to make their victims seem less than humans, as rabid animals undeserving of sympathy or even life. Just like you're doing here.
Propaganda, in war times or in boot camps, distorts reality to fit the need. However there are objective methods of measuring things; there is scientific method. You can exactly measure the probability of being mugged on streets of NYC, and you can exactly measure the distribution of races involved in those muggings, and the distribution of their social characteristics (income, employment, IQ, etc.)
It is indeed not politically correct to call a spade a spade. There are many contortionists that do their best to hide who commits crimes and who does not. There is a political need for that; since you appear to not be interested in US internal affairs you probably don't know, it's convoluted enough and many US citizens willingly tune out of that discussion. The facts, however, remain. It is stupid to refuse to look at them, to humanity's benefit, just because you don't like what you see.
If you still wish to ignore history, you are free to do so. However sticking your head in the sand will not make you safe.
There are very few absolutes in statistics. Of course one pair of idle hands can be creative, while another pair will become destructive. It all depends on the level of self-control, and on the level of creativity of any given person. In short, it depends on his brains.
We can always debate what is the percentage of people who go bananas if only left unmonitored for a moment. It is not 100%, of course, and not even 50%. I think 10% is the maximum. And that is too much, simply because if each such idiot injures 9 others then the entire society is affected.
People's behavior in war times, in shipwrecks, in fires gives us an idea who is who. When Titanic went down a lot of people were willing to save others, endangering themselves in the process. But when Costa Concordia went down a lot of people were willing to kill others in their rush to lifeboats - though the land was within spitting distance.
As one bad apple spoils the entire barrel, a small percentage of antisocial people terrorizes the entire society - and changes that society. Look at any criminal scare in the USA or anywhere else, for example. People lock the doors and keep a shotgun at the ready even though their homes may never be invaded. But they know someone who knows someone who was invaded. One criminal terrorized a hundred citizens, and that hundred instead of growing roses bought reloading presses. You cannot claim that militarization of the society has no side effects.
Also, when you talk about "unemployed" and "unemployable", and then link to an article about school kid gangs
That's how they begin their career. A 25 y/o murderer has to start somewhere...
But they have a stronger impact on the society in another aspect. If you regularly walk the streets for pleasure or for business, and therefore place themselves into the path of those roving gangs, do you just pray to your god(s) before leaving home, or you make sure that your concealed-carry firearm is loaded? Whichever you choose, it changes you forever. The society of "brotherly love" morphs into the "wild west" where you have to write the will before you go outside. All these wonders are done by a sub-10% group of people. Never underestimate the influence of small but loud groups; human history is written in blood of their victims.
the billions of idle hands are trouble only because people can't set their own purpose - but if they could [...]
That little word "if" is the trouble here. USSR was trying to change the man for almost entire century and failed.
Golovachev has an interesting, if myopic view
Even later books of his are set in the Multiverse, where multiple societies, similar but minutely different, are depicted. The theme of societal decay is addressed in some of those "branches." Some of his books are officially available for free access as long as you know the language; I wouldn't use Google Translate there...
Sadly, the theme is not invented out of whole cloth, as many Fantasy writers do. It is very real. Most of the USA's social problems stem from the fact that large segments of population don't work, don't need to work, and are as matter of fact unemployable. Then they go out and entertain themselves as they may. Heard about "knockout kings?" That's them, geniuses at work. They are the fifth column of the modern civilization.
Perhaps the humankind can survive only apart from each other. We'd have no wars if anyone could at any time escape to his own, personal planet where nobody else could come without permission.
probably because they were too lazy to figure out the ramifications
They probably were either too lazy or too incompetent to decode the charges. As I said, they can't be experts on Saudi criminal code. There is a catch-all charge in the US code as well, it's called "Disturbing the peace." It could mean anything, from shooting a firearm in the street to just photographing a cop. A charge like that, coming from Saudi Arabia, translated into broken French or English, and with zero expectation of anything being wrong... Saudis likely didn't send any other materials (such as what exactly happened.) So the warrant just got rubberstamped by a lowly clerk. After all, top notch secret agents (if only Interpol would have them) don't do desk duty. It's probably an intern level position, to push papers.
When the fuck are we humans going to make it properly out of the dark ages?
What in the world prompts you to think that we are even going in that direction?
Late works of Vasily Golovachev (for example - he is far from being alone) are very deeply looking into social effects of the age of communism. He paints a Star Trek type society where nobody needs to work for food, and then investigates what happens.
The answers that he comes up with - in the "Black {Man,Time,Force}" trilogy and in other books - are very depressing. He predicts that the society will rot. Billions of idle hands, having no purpose in life and no need to be busy, turn into drug users, thrill seekers, criminals; ultimately they form a planet-wide gang trying to gain power over others; this is the last, and most powerful, drug that a happy and rich society cannot deliver. Humanity is doomed to be mired in wars until the last man who is dreaming of power over others is no more.
Unless Saudi Arabia lied about the charges against the man, Interpol had a duty not to issue a Red Notice for him.
Saudis didn't have to lie. They could simply accuse him of hate crimes, or of inciting a riot, or of something equally obscure. Interpol may not act on a warrant for "preaching a forbidden religion" but it's very difficult, without having a Saudi lawyer on hand, to understand what the accused actually did. It would require a full scale investigation on part of Interpol, and they don't have people to do that (it's not even physically possible without involving national forces - which brings us back to square one.)
But with all the international uproar about this case probably Saudis will get a slap on the wrist. Interpol cannot allow itself to be dragged into religious wars.
But while this is happening, the guy is in hot water. Malaysia has a state religion, and it is Islam. He might have a choice, however, of the country where his head is chopped off.
By demanding the secret key from the defendant, the prosecution is demanding that the defendant tell them how the document should be interpreted.
I don't think you stressed this point enough. Let me rephrase for sake of anyone reading this.
Given a completely random ciphertext X of length M I can create a set of keys K that produces all possible plaintexts of length M. That's how OTP works.
Software like Truecrypt may restrict your options. However if all the adversary has is M kB of randomness, it is trivial to create a key that decrypts that randomness into the Bible, for example, or a photo of a cat:
for (k=0; k < M; k++) { keystream[k] = cat_photo[k] ^ ciphertext[k]; }
for (k=0; k < M; k++) {
plaintext[k] = (ciphertext[k] ^ keystream[k]);
}
Guess what, plaintext[] ends up being a cat photo for any given ciphertext! (You can see that the ciphertext[] gets XORed with itself and cancels itself out.)
Let's say I know my password. It's a short poem in this example. How would I know what is its 17th character without intentionally counting? I doubt that I can count it in my head anyway.
my TruCrypt password - a 48-character collection of non-rememberable characters - was stamped into one of my gold coins
You could do better than that. Split the 256-byte (ASCII-armored) key into three pieces and stamp each piece on each one of three gold coins. (You don't need 4 coins here.) Then lose one coin. The missing segment corresponds to a 256/3 bytes = about 683 bits. That ought to keep them busy for a while. Since two segments of the key are present on the other two coins you have proof of your claim; but the available pieces are useless (even if they actually are a key to something.)
But if the 2nd amendment were in force we could own all of those things you listed as well.
Before the rebellion it does not matter. After the rebellion starts all the stockpiles of military weapons become your primary area of interest. If you have arms factories on your territory they immediately start producing what you need.
It is believed (and seen after Katrina) that the police, after TSHTF, will be primarily on the side of the police officer, his family, and his closest friends.
This is not actually bad. If TSHTF and I have to defend myself against three bandidos the last thing I need, after the fact, is a G-man with investigative powers from the government that is no more.
Science fiction books tell us that shortly after the collapse survivors band together into large groups. Police and military officers may be natural leaders of those communities, once people understand what's going on. That is fine too.
the DoD would use tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of cold-blooded (even foreign) mercenaries
Sure, you can bring 100,000 mercs in (where from? there aren't that many in the world.) However the next day your entire 5 million standing army (composed of US citizens) flips side and joins the rebellion. You just traded a queen for a pawn.
Slashdot Mirror
If the USSR was that cool than please explain 1956 or the Prague Spring.
If the capitalism is so cool then please explain the Ludlow Massacre, the Kent State shootings, Vietnam war, and even OWS if you want.
And if you insist on counting military interventions in neighboring countries, the USA leads that list. The USA routinely installs and removes strongmen around the globe; sometimes with military force, sometimes with money that buys local agitators and hand-picked challengers. Why do you think Egypt arrested a couple dozen foreigners just a week or two ago?
No nation, no system is perfect. There is opposition within any system - at very least because the opposition wants to climb to the top and rule the roost. You cannot expect power-hungry people to remain docile.
At the same time, it is often dangerous to let those power-hungry people rule the country. The 20th century is full of examples, may they remain unnamed to prevent invocation of Godwin's Law. Who is to judge the potential ruler? Is he a new Vaclav Havel or a new Islam Karimov? That remains to be an unanswered question. The problem of this question is not in choosing the judges, the problem is that judges have no information to base their decision upon. Campaign promises do not count; recall is contingent on acquiescence of the parliament - which gets undermined first... human history is full of dictators.
In these circumstances it is often safer to keep the devil that you know instead of letting a new, unknown devil into your home.
In any case, the GP (Alex) is absolutely right. Ex-USSR people who were raised in best years of Soviet socialism and then got magically transported into the USA have tremendous advantage. They are not burdened with all the "education" that is dished out in US public schools; they are often not drafted into the herd mentality of US universities; they are not polluted with all the wrongs of this society. As a side effect, most graduates of USSR's universities are very well educated - and they have no debts to pay for half of their life.
The old USSR was not ideal. Life there was largely boring and bland. However it offered several advantages. For example, USSR guaranteed stability of your life. There were no worries about losing one's job. There were no worries about losing one's housing (though it wasn't that great to begin with.) You were guaranteed medical services (the most basic ones, by western standards.) You weren't paid much; you actually were only paid to buy food. But in exchange everything in your life was taken care of, one way or another. The USA is moving in this direction too.
Then USSR did not have millionaires. There were a few artists and a few other workers who got paid much more than other; but the entire country knew them and could count them on fingers of one hand. Most people were poor, but they were equally poor. The money went to the state, and the state was the only entity that was filthy rich. Those monies were spent on various projects that mattered to the whole country. The USA is raising taxes bit by bit, and the end will be the same - the working stiff will be left with only food money, but an extensive net of social services will take care of the rest. This is an ideal environment for adult children who are too afraid to take risks and to try new things.
What could possibly be so privacy-invading, not-worth-the-disk-space-to-log-it crazy that Facebook doesn't already log it?
onmousemove events, most likely.
I have a drinking buddy who owns a towing company, he only has one real tow truck, the rest of his fleet are all flatbeds manufactured for transporting inoperative vehicles.
Perhaps it's because statistics of his business tell him that many calls for towing are for removal of crashed vehicles - and those can't be safely towed unless you are sure what is still intact in them and what isn't (impossible to tell on a shoulder, at night, with a flashing blue light for illumination.) A flatbed is a solution that fits nearly all problems. He might want to have one true tow truck for, say, removing vehicles from parking structures, where a long flatbed simply won't fit.
Of course, an airline is not the government - they do have the right to refuse travel on their planes
Not without a good reason, though. They have a contract for transportation, and you paid the money. They can renege only on well defined conditions. A failed RFID chip in the passport can't possibly be one of those conditions because the passport itself as a document is fine. It's not like it had been delaminated and the text is unreadable and the photo is gone... There are plenty of passports in the world (like half the planet) that don't have RFID. My passport certainly has no RFID.
That's certainly interesting, thanks! However someone who hunts deer has to suffer greatly to get his trophy. He needs to buy a tag (or win a draw.) Then he needs to go into a forest in late fall, when normal people stay in warm homes and watch TV. Then he has to sit in a treestand for who knows how long on a chance that a legal deer wanders by. Sure, shooting a deer at that range is not a challenge, I grant you that (and I don't hunt deer, actually, or anything larger than a rabbit; I like them as they are :-) (I hunt sage rats, for example - a pest that farmers go to great expense to suppress.) Well, once a deer is shot you need to field-dress it. A butcher's job is not exactly clean or pleasant. Once that is done you need to drag the rest of the deer back to your vehicle. If you went deep into the forest then you accordingly travel all the way backward, with a 100 lb. of meat on a rope. Finally, once you get to the truck you need to effortlessly load the deer into the truck, drive it home, and then start really butchering it. (Some just deliver the game to meat processors who do this job.)
If you ask me, it's a lot of work. Only those who are really determined to hunt will go through the process. It is well known among hunters that venison costs 10x more than best beef prepared in a best restaurant and delivered right onto your table. Hunters hunt their own food not because they are hungry (some do, usually in rural areas) but because they want the challenge. Some hunt with bow and arrows; that is even harder. Taking a deer "from the next county" is not considered fair, though a good scope and a sub-MOA rifle allows that.
Also it's not always correct to think that feeding and baiting is the same. I have some salt on my property (a side effect of backwashing the water softener,) deer like it, but I have no intent to use this fact to hunt them. I could hunt them out of my window if I wanted to, but I don't - it would be indeed unfair. If a coyote shows up I may actually chase it away; not only it is dangerous to deer, it is also dangerous to foxes, of which I have a few, and I need them too. Needless to say, foxes are quite safe here; in exchange they ate all the mice around, which is a good thing (unless someone says that mice have rights! :-)
If aliens scooped up all humans tomorrow, the rest of Nature would manage just fine, in its own sometimes grisly way.
You can say exactly the same about doctors...
Bigger point still remains: "game management" is used to justify hunters slaughtering animals to fulfill a human urge to kill
This statement only informs the world that you are not a hunter and you do not understand hunting. Why in the world hunters would feed animals if they hate them so much? But they do even though it costs some good money.
I would say that hunters love animals far more than a typical city dweller does. They respect them. Most animals that are seen in the fields and forests are left alone. You are probably loving your dog just as much (if you have a dog - I just posit this for the argument) but you would have it killed if its life comes to the natural and very painful end. Nothing that is alive lives forever, and animals don't have an easy time dying from old age. They are usually eaten by predators, alive, as they are dying.
Hunters pay fees, sometimes large fees, to Fish and Game, for the privilege to hunt in general and separately for privileges to hunt specific animals. You can't just walk into a forest and shoot deer left and right; you'd be dragged to prison for that. The monies that are collected are spent on improvements of wildlife habitats. But what has a common city man done to improve the life of a deer in a forest?
With regard to "killing," that same common man from the city is a killer too. How many innocent cows did he slaughter, however indirectly? How many innocent chickens and turkeys were killed on his orders? But as long as he buys the meat "in the store where it is made" he thinks his hands are clean. But they are not. Hunters are simply honest about that; humans are not ruminants, we can't live on grasses alone. Some animal food is necessary for health. Hence, we kill for food. (Vegetarians don't, but they are a minority.) A deer taken in the forest and eaten may spare one cow. Can we say that a cow's life is less important?
I understand that /. is not an ideal forum to discuss outdoor activities. However a geek would react with derision when someone clueless comes with a premade and unchangeable opinion on how to write software. What if I come and tell you that I heard on the radio that for (;;) is bad style and now you are required only to use goto? I wouldn't insist on the other party to be intimately familiar with actual cost of these statements in machine commands, but at least I'd ask for basic awareness of issues and then for willingness to accept arguments for and against the subject.
I always looked at this as weak justification for hunters' barbarian behavior.
In other words, you do not see it as barbaric to allow coyotes to grab fawns and tear them apart alive?
Here is the analysis of the problem. Beware, a photo of a half-eaten fawn is provided there. That's how nature operates. It isn't pretty. Taking a deer with a 30-06 bullet is much more humane.
Why would I want to eat the old tough deer? I might as well eat at the Sizzler, plus it's cheaper and quicker.
And that's what I do (modulo the Sizzler part, I'm too cheap for that.) I have deer on my property; they are perfectly safe here. In fact, if I see a coyote (the deer killer #1) I might do something about that...
the thought of hurting or killing an animal for sport is something I find repulsive.
I guess then you never went to one of those hunter education classes. Let me give you an example.
A certain valley can feed 100 deer during 4-month winter. There is no other food.
One year the population increased to 150 deer. Perhaps more were born than usual; perhaps some wandered in. You have 150 animals now and the 4-month winter is about to begin. How many will survive the winter?
If you think all 150 will survive, you are wrong. In fact, all 150 will die. Why?
Animals are not very smart, they don't plan ahead. They cannot calculate the amount of food and the number of consumers and set up daily rations. Deer will be eating as usual until all the food is gone. Then they begin starving. When will that happen?
Well, if 100 deer eat the whole food supply in 4 months then 150 deer will do the same in 2.66 months. Now imagine facing the last - and usually the coldest - month of winter with no food of any kind for the whole month. Probably a few fattest deer will survive, but most will perish. They can't even eat each other...
Game management talks about such scenarios. There are many more. For example, you adore those little ground squirrels that dig little burrows in fields. However the rancher hates them because his cows step into burrows and break their legs. Do you hate cows? So the rancher either poisons all squirrels, or he drags the field with a tool to bury those squirrels underground. Does it make you happy? I guess not. Wise game management here would be in reducing the number of squirrels to a reasonable number, preferrably in unused areas. Then the rancher will not have to resort to genocide.
Some critters are outright dangerous. For example, take prairie dogs (PDs.) Many of them are carriers of plague. There are signs along highways warning about that. Do you want these animals to multiply uncontrollably and contaminate huge lands? They aren't guilty that they are carriers, but the fact remains.
Nature does not care about any of that. If all deer die out, if half the country is awash in deadly diseases - it's all fine to the nature. It's self-regulating, but it uses non-human reasoning. For example, if food gets scarce young will die first. But a hunter will let young alone and will take a mature bull instead, who already lived through most of his deer's life, done all the breeding it could, and doesn't have much fire left in him anyway.
it's not like he fired into the air.
A quail is a ground-dwelling bird. It can fly, certainly, but it's not very good at that. Quails walk or even run whenever they can; their flight is quite noisy.
With all this remote sensing and especially with the now (more) common use of ACTIVE sensors, is there any way the average, non-James Bond citizen can know what exactly he's being scanned with?
No, the average citizen cannot know that. The reason is that the emitter is usually not constrained by cost, and emitters exist only in small quantities. For example, that TSA scanner van may exist in quantity one, but the whole population of the USA may be required to be on the lookout for it.
Those emitters also have all the proper antennas, lenses, and whatnot that is required for their operation. A citizen can't carry antennas for all bands (unless he is Inspector Gadget, of course.) Continuously scanning all bands from ultrasound to X-ray is not even practical in lab conditions. You'd need to have a large truck that is full of very expensive equipment (fast, FFT-based spectrum analyzers from DC to daylight.) Perhaps you can buy it all, new, for about half a million dollars. It will weigh about half a ton.
"Your Browser: Mozilla10" There is no such browser!
I'm running 11.0 and an update is ready. The 10.x certainly exists.
That's a pretty efficient idiot. Also, "affected" is not the same as "destroyed".
I chose the words carefully. It is also not known what is worse for the society - to have one member destroyed outright or to have one member's worldview crashing down upon him. The damage is not just psychological, it could be very physical. Some survivors of gang encounters have to escape the town completely to avoid wrath of the gang. The police will not protect them, and waging a one-man war against a gang is neither legal nor practical.
You do realize that the main difference between these was how the captain, not the rabble, behaved, right?
The captain is a part of the sample that we are looking at.
Did it ever occur to you that the "militarization of society" is not a universal problem, but mostly an American problem? It's your culture that's broken, not humanity in general.
I cannot comment on cultures that I know nothing of. If this discussion is N/A to your particular society, just ignore it. I'm sure, for example, that many Amazonian tribes have pretty stable societies; their murder trials are always quick, and the piranhas are always hungry :-)
But if you insist that the problem uniquely belongs to the USA, look at Greece today, or at UK in time of troubles, or at Germany at time of Turkish pogroms. As Quark said, humans are nice only when well fed; once that is taken away they become as bloodthirsty as a Klingon.
I just leave my house, go around conducting my business or taking my pleasure, and return home unmolested. Again you are projecting American problems to humanity as large.
Either you are claiming that your countrymen are above the average, or the US average is lower than your country's. Which may be true; but it requires having firsthand data on both societies to do a fair comparison.
However reports from UK are not very encouraging. While firearm ownership there is nearly outlawed, gangs carry knives - and you don't want to be slashed with a knife any more than you'd like to be shot. It hurts either way.
And all of these groups started by trying to make their victims seem less than humans, as rabid animals undeserving of sympathy or even life. Just like you're doing here.
Propaganda, in war times or in boot camps, distorts reality to fit the need. However there are objective methods of measuring things; there is scientific method. You can exactly measure the probability of being mugged on streets of NYC, and you can exactly measure the distribution of races involved in those muggings, and the distribution of their social characteristics (income, employment, IQ, etc.)
It is indeed not politically correct to call a spade a spade. There are many contortionists that do their best to hide who commits crimes and who does not. There is a political need for that; since you appear to not be interested in US internal affairs you probably don't know, it's convoluted enough and many US citizens willingly tune out of that discussion. The facts, however, remain. It is stupid to refuse to look at them, to humanity's benefit, just because you don't like what you see.
If you still wish to ignore history, you are free to do so. However sticking your head in the sand will not make you safe.
the Net is full of stuff idle hands built
There are very few absolutes in statistics. Of course one pair of idle hands can be creative, while another pair will become destructive. It all depends on the level of self-control, and on the level of creativity of any given person. In short, it depends on his brains.
We can always debate what is the percentage of people who go bananas if only left unmonitored for a moment. It is not 100%, of course, and not even 50%. I think 10% is the maximum. And that is too much, simply because if each such idiot injures 9 others then the entire society is affected.
People's behavior in war times, in shipwrecks, in fires gives us an idea who is who. When Titanic went down a lot of people were willing to save others, endangering themselves in the process. But when Costa Concordia went down a lot of people were willing to kill others in their rush to lifeboats - though the land was within spitting distance.
As one bad apple spoils the entire barrel, a small percentage of antisocial people terrorizes the entire society - and changes that society. Look at any criminal scare in the USA or anywhere else, for example. People lock the doors and keep a shotgun at the ready even though their homes may never be invaded. But they know someone who knows someone who was invaded. One criminal terrorized a hundred citizens, and that hundred instead of growing roses bought reloading presses. You cannot claim that militarization of the society has no side effects.
Also, when you talk about "unemployed" and "unemployable", and then link to an article about school kid gangs
That's how they begin their career. A 25 y/o murderer has to start somewhere...
But they have a stronger impact on the society in another aspect. If you regularly walk the streets for pleasure or for business, and therefore place themselves into the path of those roving gangs, do you just pray to your god(s) before leaving home, or you make sure that your concealed-carry firearm is loaded? Whichever you choose, it changes you forever. The society of "brotherly love" morphs into the "wild west" where you have to write the will before you go outside. All these wonders are done by a sub-10% group of people. Never underestimate the influence of small but loud groups; human history is written in blood of their victims.
the billions of idle hands are trouble only because people can't set their own purpose - but if they could [...]
That little word "if" is the trouble here. USSR was trying to change the man for almost entire century and failed.
Golovachev has an interesting, if myopic view
Even later books of his are set in the Multiverse, where multiple societies, similar but minutely different, are depicted. The theme of societal decay is addressed in some of those "branches." Some of his books are officially available for free access as long as you know the language; I wouldn't use Google Translate there...
Sadly, the theme is not invented out of whole cloth, as many Fantasy writers do. It is very real. Most of the USA's social problems stem from the fact that large segments of population don't work, don't need to work, and are as matter of fact unemployable. Then they go out and entertain themselves as they may. Heard about "knockout kings?" That's them, geniuses at work. They are the fifth column of the modern civilization.
Perhaps the humankind can survive only apart from each other. We'd have no wars if anyone could at any time escape to his own, personal planet where nobody else could come without permission.
probably because they were too lazy to figure out the ramifications
They probably were either too lazy or too incompetent to decode the charges. As I said, they can't be experts on Saudi criminal code. There is a catch-all charge in the US code as well, it's called "Disturbing the peace." It could mean anything, from shooting a firearm in the street to just photographing a cop. A charge like that, coming from Saudi Arabia, translated into broken French or English, and with zero expectation of anything being wrong... Saudis likely didn't send any other materials (such as what exactly happened.) So the warrant just got rubberstamped by a lowly clerk. After all, top notch secret agents (if only Interpol would have them) don't do desk duty. It's probably an intern level position, to push papers.
When the fuck are we humans going to make it properly out of the dark ages?
What in the world prompts you to think that we are even going in that direction?
Late works of Vasily Golovachev (for example - he is far from being alone) are very deeply looking into social effects of the age of communism. He paints a Star Trek type society where nobody needs to work for food, and then investigates what happens.
The answers that he comes up with - in the "Black {Man,Time,Force}" trilogy and in other books - are very depressing. He predicts that the society will rot. Billions of idle hands, having no purpose in life and no need to be busy, turn into drug users, thrill seekers, criminals; ultimately they form a planet-wide gang trying to gain power over others; this is the last, and most powerful, drug that a happy and rich society cannot deliver. Humanity is doomed to be mired in wars until the last man who is dreaming of power over others is no more.
Unless Saudi Arabia lied about the charges against the man, Interpol had a duty not to issue a Red Notice for him.
Saudis didn't have to lie. They could simply accuse him of hate crimes, or of inciting a riot, or of something equally obscure. Interpol may not act on a warrant for "preaching a forbidden religion" but it's very difficult, without having a Saudi lawyer on hand, to understand what the accused actually did. It would require a full scale investigation on part of Interpol, and they don't have people to do that (it's not even physically possible without involving national forces - which brings us back to square one.)
But with all the international uproar about this case probably Saudis will get a slap on the wrist. Interpol cannot allow itself to be dragged into religious wars.
But while this is happening, the guy is in hot water. Malaysia has a state religion, and it is Islam. He might have a choice, however, of the country where his head is chopped off.
By demanding the secret key from the defendant, the prosecution is demanding that the defendant tell them how the document should be interpreted.
I don't think you stressed this point enough. Let me rephrase for sake of anyone reading this.
Given a completely random ciphertext X of length M I can create a set of keys K that produces all possible plaintexts of length M. That's how OTP works.
Software like Truecrypt may restrict your options. However if all the adversary has is M kB of randomness, it is trivial to create a key that decrypts that randomness into the Bible, for example, or a photo of a cat:
for (k=0; k < M; k++) { keystream[k] = cat_photo[k] ^ ciphertext[k]; }
for (k=0; k < M; k++) { plaintext[k] = (ciphertext[k] ^ keystream[k]); }
Guess what, plaintext[] ends up being a cat photo for any given ciphertext! (You can see that the ciphertext[] gets XORed with itself and cancels itself out.)
Let's say I know my password. It's a short poem in this example. How would I know what is its 17th character without intentionally counting? I doubt that I can count it in my head anyway.
my TruCrypt password - a 48-character collection of non-rememberable characters - was stamped into one of my gold coins
You could do better than that. Split the 256-byte (ASCII-armored) key into three pieces and stamp each piece on each one of three gold coins. (You don't need 4 coins here.) Then lose one coin. The missing segment corresponds to a 256/3 bytes = about 683 bits. That ought to keep them busy for a while. Since two segments of the key are present on the other two coins you have proof of your claim; but the available pieces are useless (even if they actually are a key to something.)
But if the 2nd amendment were in force we could own all of those things you listed as well.
Before the rebellion it does not matter. After the rebellion starts all the stockpiles of military weapons become your primary area of interest. If you have arms factories on your territory they immediately start producing what you need.
It is believed (and seen after Katrina) that the police, after TSHTF, will be primarily on the side of the police officer, his family, and his closest friends.
This is not actually bad. If TSHTF and I have to defend myself against three bandidos the last thing I need, after the fact, is a G-man with investigative powers from the government that is no more.
Science fiction books tell us that shortly after the collapse survivors band together into large groups. Police and military officers may be natural leaders of those communities, once people understand what's going on. That is fine too.
the DoD would use tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of cold-blooded (even foreign) mercenaries
Sure, you can bring 100,000 mercs in (where from? there aren't that many in the world.) However the next day your entire 5 million standing army (composed of US citizens) flips side and joins the rebellion. You just traded a queen for a pawn.
The worst part is that it's not even old people doing it. It's young people, who were "raised with technology" that do it the most.