How am I supposed to spy if we don't collect data?
The question assumes that spying is needed. This is an unproven assumption. We have no evidence the spying is needed or beneficial, it has been proven only harmful or at best useless.
We're not threatened by other large nations because we have Mutually Assured Nuclear Destruction. Therefore the scaremongers had to invent a new bogieman: Terrorism. The threat is inconsequential. Falling in the bathtub is a greater threat to American lives than terrorism. You're about 4 times more likely to get struck by lightning than die in a terrorist attack. Accidents and Heart Disease kill FOUR HUNDRED TIMES more people EVERY YEAR than a 9/11 scale attack. When you compare the threat of terrorist attack to any other real threat to human lives their scaremongering doesn't match the facts.
Six times more people die from the flu every year than a 9/11 scale attack. We need proportional protection. The budget to protect us from terrorists is out of control. The anti-terrorism budget should be AT MOST one sixth of the budget we spend on ant-flu or 1/200th of the anti-accident budget, 1/200th the anti-heart-disease budget. How much does the government spend to protect citizens from lightning attacks? Is it FOUR TIMES the NSA's budget?!
The government needs no secrets. Our army is big enough and we are powerful enough that we need keep secret nothing. If nothing is secret, you need not fear spies, eh? They've taken the limited power we gave for them to have secrets, and used it against their own people to create a Stasi-like despotic apparatus -- The very thing our soldiers have fought against. Who will answer the call to fight for a government who's action has become indistinguishable from the enemy? The NSA has damaged us, stripped our honor, and shamed us in the world's eyes, our technology sector is suffering due to distrust. The NSA is a threat to national security.
The people should KNOW they can trust their government. We must not allow them to keep secrets. No one has proved the secrets are needed. We are brave enough to risk 400 times the threat of a terrorist attack by driving to McDonald's for a kid's Happy Meal. The public shouldn't have to wear tinfoil hats fearing government spying of citizens unless the government is also handing out lightning insulation suits. We should be able to prove their actions are not harmful to the people or violations of our constitution. We can't do this if there are secret unconstitutional actions.
PRISM is not the first spying apparatus. There was Omnivore, Carnivore, ECHELON, Five-Eyes, and more. Remember how the PATRIOT Act granted immunity to the ISPs retroactively for their assistance in violating the 4th amendment? Yes, remember BEFORE 9/11 how the NSA had secret rooms in telco buildings where all the fiber optics ran through -- Where it was apparently split by mirrors to create PRISM? BEFORE 9/11?!?!!?! OK, NSA. Your fucking move. Prove you are not fucking pointless, you fuckers had your decades of spying on all communications and you FUCKING FAILED to prevent the worst terrorist attack we've ever faced! We even gave you MORE powers and you FAILED again to prevent the Boston Marathon Bombing. The ball is in your court to stand down, the evidence is not in your favor, pushing the issue will get you eliminated for good.
Expensive + Useless = Unnecessary; NSA == Unnecessary. I'm a scientist, so before we agree to continue funding for these expensive and pointless pork-spending protection systems, including the DHS, I need hard evidence that they are needed. As it stands the facts prove these expenses should be stripped from the budget and given to health care, and research, or at the very least, NASA. The biggest thre
I agree, however, if the farmers don't regulate the feed then they lose a prime way to ensure the cattle don't wander off and survive on their own. Note that the arcade tokens say something to the effect, "Not redeemable for cow feed" on them.
Netflix is also an Internet service, Ioutube is also an Internet service. Before the web, we had Internet services. Not everything is a website. DNS, NTP, email, for example.
However, note that GP is wrong. Story is about "Net Traffic" not website traffic...
You'd think for the amount of money they steal someone would just shoot them in the head or hire someone to do it.
With what?! Ballistic weapons? Oh, that's rich! Consider that if any aliens exist there's at least a 50% chance they're more advanced than humans. If the aliens can manage interstellar space travel then they've already mastered the warp drive. Imagine all the technology they must have. You think they'd care about being threatened with micrometeors? Ooh, how terrifying!
One answer to the Fermi Paradox could be that the aliens can't visit you because they'll invalidate every damn patent on Earth with their prior art and destabilize the world economy humans built upon laws that create artificial scarcity of information and ideas. If only humans could extract their craniums from their rectums and stop treating infinitely reproducible information and knowledge as if they are physical things... Until human laws agree with the basic Universal truth that symbolic configurations of matter and energy are not matter and energy themselves, the Drake equation will never be solved.
Think about it. Economics 101 says that as supply tends towards infinity, price tends towards zero regardless of demand or cost to create. The elements that make up sand and water were forged in a huge expensive furnace: A 1-A supernova, yet sand is cheap, you just pay for hauling it, not the sand itself. You wouldn't sell Ice to Eskimos, as the locals say, but selling infinitely reproducible information to humans possessing "sentient" brains and digital information replicators is acceptable? The world economy of ideas and information can't even grok economics 101. It's the work to create new configurations that's scarce, not the 1's and 0's or ideas. You have no evidence that patents and copyright are beneficial -- Not a single one of you tested that damn hypothesis!
The Patent Trolls are what you pre-information-scarcity races deserve. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trolls" weren't actually aliens risking violation of the prime directive just to try and help you humans out by demonstrating exactly how insane your current patent and copyright system is. Imagine yourself in their shoes! Imagine that you risked being re-assigned as an overseer of primordial ooze for the next billion years just to directly tell the humans via world wide neural network of their folly, and they STILL didn't get it?! Imagine how you would feel if you went through the trouble to do all that, and the Humans STILL sided with the moronic laws?! If you travelled 23 light millennia just to stop in for a spot of tea and solve every problem human science will face for the next few centuries, but you discovered the "Best and Brightest" humans embracing an economy that's incompatible with the nature of information and is based on Untested Hypotheses would YOU trust them with a Warp Drive?! I wouldn't!
How about this: The old governments do not change, instead the corporations incite violence by proxy. Countries conquering countries is over, they're "freed" instead. The country borders and names left the same, but the corporations fight on economic fronts to institute their economic systems and siphon up as much wealth and work from the lower and middle classes as possible in a shadow war between the people of the world and Marxist Corpratism.
Just out of curiosity: Given a "black box" implementation of a random number generator, is it possible to test its output sufficiently to gain some faith in its proper randomness?
Yes and No. One can statistically analyze output of the (pseudo) RNG and compare it to pure randomness, like atmospheric noise. However, you can't be sure there is no message in the stream. For example: Strong crypto produces enciphered data that looks exactly like pure randomness. It's one way we test for cryptographic strength. Indeed, BSD will now pipe RNG output through Yarrow (a pRNG based on hash functions) to produce randomness. Considering that knowing the initial state of a PRNG reveals its full exact stream of bits, and that hashes produce the same output for a given input: I'm not satisfied with this result either, unless the input is sufficiently salted with device IO timing and other such quasi-random states as in Linux's/dev/random entropy pool.
Seeing as such a piece of hardware need not (and hopefully would not) have any inputs, only an output, it's hard to imagine how someone might hide (and later trigger) a back-door mechanism that could change its behavior post-testing. (But I'm sure there is some way to do it that I'm not thinking of;))
Strong crypto needs strong randomness for initialization vectors.
While it's true the Ken Thompson Microcode Hack could exist in silicon (Chips could have full featured back-doors in them) it would be far less obvious and simpler to attack a single point of failure: The (hardware | pseudo) random number generator.
It's possible to build a (pseudo) Random Number Generator that is biased in a way that's not noticeably different from pure atmospheric noise in practice, and even passes all the NIST / Diehard tests for randomness. I built one such high entropy pseudo random number generator using a pool of 517 integers and a mixing system. I had arranged the mixing system such that based on a small sample of randomness (50 or so integers, ~1500 bits) one could deduce a weak signal inherent in the pool which then slowly revealed the entire random number generator state in a cascade effect via an Error correction coding present in the bit-stream.
Looking at the source code for my PRNG one wouldn't realize the thing had a back door in it via the selection of primes, constants, and the XOR, shift, AND, etc. mixing strategy itself. The implementation of error correction code akin to Reed Solomon Codes was hiding in plain sight. I sort of turned the weak signal bits on ear and presented them in the stream in "parallel" instead of "serial". The NIST tests chi-square, etc. against my PRNG proved indistinguishable from true random sources such as atmospheric noise, even with gigabytes of data to analyze thanks to the prime number sequence's weak enciphering of the bias pattern.
To make matters worse, I built the system around constants taken from a run of digits in Pi. When apparently any random values will do as inputs for an equation, a known source of digits like this is meant to put cryptographer's minds at ease in that the values aren't just 'magic numbers', pulled from thin air -- Constant numbers selected with possible nefarious purposes. For examples of such 'un-magic selections', see the initial constant states of nearly any hash function, such as MD5, SHA-1, or SHA-2, etc...
......!
According to RFC1925 - Rule 6(a), it's always possible to add another layer of indirection. So, I put my "careful number selection" to create the backdoor one level higher than the values themselves. I went looking for sources of workable constant values in the supposed accepted places. Of course anyone can supply their own pool sizes and init values to defeat my random attack, but in practice folks will use the default values
The search for equations to more accurately describe the observable universe is often first formed as a hypothesis, then once the hypothesis is formalized and can be tested it may become a Theory or Law. One can come to such equations through direct observation, such as thermodynamics or Newtonian Gravity, or be theoretical until proven, like Einstein's curved space-time. In other words one can observe something strange then attempt to explain it, or formulate explanations that cover known observations and look for other oddities it may predict later.
String theory of today is not the same as it was 30 years ago. "Crock of Bullshit" isn't remotely descriptive. Once worked out the equations may predict counter-intuitive results, such as when Einstein's equations indicated Black Holes existed... Doubters were rebuffed when we discovered them. All of the equations of physics are wrong -- or, more correctly: they are inaccurate estimations of reality, some are more accurate than others. Newtonian Gravity was verified through observation, and the gravitational constant was calculated -- We later discovered this was wrong. However, it's still a damn good approximation.
Was it a waste for Newton to study gravitation? It had no immediate practical application for every day life, except to explain oddities of celestial motion... We continue to search for a set of equations that are more accurate than what we have now. The history of physics is rife with explosions of disparate equations, and then collapsing of them into more overarching elegant systems of understanding. Equations that provide more accurate results are testable via more accurate observations, even if the equations are not founded on direct physical observation themselves.
When some suggest that "The Universe is like unto a Hologram" due to examination of String Theory, and you call the very equations untestable predictions you only provide direct evidence that that low UID numbers do not necessarily correlate with intelligence, knowledge, or wisdom. QED.
Well, the government has proven we can't trust them to abide by the Constitution. Our armies are so powerful they need keep no secrets. Troop deployment, arms caches, etc. can be known in advance (and probably are due to spies anyway), so even any military action we'd perform really needs no secrets; What the pathetic terrorists threat? Falling down in the bathtub is a greater threat. The secrecy and spying infrastructure costs too much. We can't trust them to have it.
If you give a kid a "toy" that's powerful enough to burn down the house and tell them not to, and they set fire to the whole damn world anyway, well, then you ground the kid, take away their toy, and keep them under supervision. Fortunately the NSA isn't a kid, it knows what it's doing, so we need have no remorse in routing out such Stasi-like spying systems. They'd set the world ablaze on purpose. We can't trust them to keep secrets.
The NSA-like spying world wide has harmed the public trust in their governments. What soldier who served to fight against such oppression would serve a government who willingly perpetrates that which they supposedly fight against? The NSA is a threat to national security for all the world nations. We're braver than this. Cars and Cheesburgers kill 400 times more people than a 9/11 scale attack EVERY YEAR, and yet we put our kids in our fast cars to visit fast food restaurants.
The people must regain trust in their governments, not through ignorance, but through knowledge. We need to KNOW we can trust our governments. We need to see everything they are doing. They can't be trusted to keep secrets without abusing them. The people know what's best for themselves, and any argument that says otherwise is incorrectly assuming the decision is best made by those with knowledge who hold the secrets. Informed decisions about our governance can not be made if the government is cloaked in secrecy. This isn't the Constitution I our founders signed up for. This government is actively over exaggerating fears to turn the home of the brave into the cash cows for the military-industrial complex. Just as Eisenhower feared, and warned.
Tracking CAN be eliminated. Consider a mesh network with store and forward. You download that cute cat video directly from the peers around you that emailed you about it instead of having to do all the hops to get it from the source -- Free Co-Location! The internet is a store and forward network, but ISPs want to charge outlandish fees for bigger buffers. Packet radio also exists. Get the FCC to relax anti-packet radio laws on the public use air-waves, and give us a section of unlicensed HAM band, and you'll have your free network akin to the Internet. Like the BBS era's Fidonet it will self assemble and have anonymity inherent -- You route data for your neighbour, your neighbour can spoof packets and say they are routing them for someone else; point to point nodes can be established. You'll join the network by paying a one time fee to buy the hardware and join the web; Bigger the node, faster the connection. Cellular exists. The public citizens need the right to use their own air-waves. There's no reason backing up your encrypted family files off-site to grandma's and your sister's PCs needs go through a 3rd party. The technical limitations don't exist. You see, a government can't have a kill-switch for a publicly operated network, so they simply don't allow one. "Land of the Free", No, we're not it's enough to make a gadget lover cry.
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...
Did you know that Carmack didn't want to include Multiplayer in Doom? Romero demanded it be in the game. Did you know Carmack sent nasty letters to modders and map editor tool creators like me, and considered us competition? Did you know it was Romero who pushed to have multiplayer included, because it was such fun? Did you know it was Romero who pushed Carmack to release the nodebuilder so we modders could more easily make user created maps/editors? (after we had already reverse engineered the BSP format, and built superior nodes anyway). It was Romero who convinced Carcmack to allow the Doom Community to launch their game into the stratosphere with user generated content, and pre-internet online multiplayer Dwango and Pinnacle.
Instead of a Doom community we were considered by Carmack to be weakening the Doom brand by creating our own maps and map editors. This couldn't have been further from the truth. It was Romero who finally convinced Carmack with sales spikes corresponding to our UNDERGROUND wad collection releases. Yeah, that's right, under-fucking-ground: We gathered our maps in secret under threat of legal persecution, and then coordinated releases to mask the actual identity of the WAD creators. Thank Satan Romero pushed to end this shit and let the things that make Doom great flourish. You know Romero was primarily responsible for refining Doom's gameplay into the fast-frenetic style that the slow-bullet-sponge filled FPS genre is largely still lacking? You could weave in and out of streams of rockets, plasma, BFG blasts. Romero made Agility a power on par with Accuracy.
You're a fucking moron. If anyone doesn't belong in the category of Legend it's that litigious asshole John Carmack who churned out the same game with updated graphics over and over after the design talent like zany fun loving Tom Hall, and dark and twisted John Romeo left ID software. Carmack churned out a nice series of Quake clones. Without Romero Doom wouldn't have been half the game it is, or the empire it became. In many ways I'm glad that Romero left ID software - I'll take Deus Ex over yet another arena shooter any day. Did you know Quake was originally going to be a multiplayer RPG / FPS? Carmack turned it into another Doom clone. Oh hey, you know what, instead of deathmatch, you know would go great in a FPS / RPG? Mario Cart. How "legendary". Rage was a tech demo that wished it was Borderlands.
PS. Yes, it's ID software, not "id" -- Screw the edgy re-branding. I prefer to remember the better days, and First impressions matter most.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: We gave you a decentralized network capable of self-healing in the face of thermonuclear war -- Packets routed around cities moments after they've vanished. Then you took the Internet, and built centralized data silos with it like fools. There is no such thing as a client and server, there are only peers that wear those hats. From here you look silly with them glued firmly in place.
There's no reason not to have your own recommendation engine in your own home. There's no reason to send personal messages and pictures to a third party just so your friends and family can see them too. As I've said: You will decentralize services, or the web will die by the folly. It may yet be too late. It would be wise to plan on a re-beginning.
I disagree. Poverty is very unnatural. Many natural professions predate even the possibility of poverty: Hired muscle, Prostitute, Priest, Slaver.
This begs the question. Are the apes not poor by human standards? If we gave them jobs wouldn't they be impoverished prior, and haven't they been since before humans had jobs? Additionally: Have you never considered the first Hired muscle, Prostitute, Priest, and Slavers took up the job because they were too poor not to turn it down?
What the customer really wants to know is that they're not paying you for drinking coffee. They don't want information overload. A complete change log would only make sense to people who work with the code.
What the customer really needs to know is that if they don't pay up front so the coders can drink coffee, then they won't have to worry about information overload or feature notification systems.
Additionally: If your customer is technical, give them the change log. If they are not, then give them a bullet list and access to the change log. If they don't understand it whey won't read it. If they do understand it, they probably won't read it unless something breaks. Additionally, let me know if you need affordable change-log distribution middle-ware for your change log distribution middle-ware. I specialize in Quines.
C'mon, realistically, there is a rate of releases that's too slow, (critical bugs and security holes never get fixed) and a rate of releases that's too fast (add-ons can't keep up). I don't have an opinion on where the sweet spot might be, but I think it's a valid discussion.
Well, if your plugin is anything like mine, then you can simply us a profile to discover exactly what the sweet spot is between releasing too quickly and not filling holes fast enough by loading up a network where an ex posts. Of course, if binary incompatibilities arise the release cycle may be exaggerated -- which is usually the case otherwise they wouldn't be exes.
The HS class for using Excell and Word is called, "Vocational Computer Applications" where I come from. In the 1990's Computer Math was the class you took for BASIC, Pascal, C, etc. Nowadays I think the curriculum is JavaScript, Python, C. In 100 years it'll probably be Neuron.Net, BizLang, and C.
I've invented other languages with the aim to be as close to the metal as possible on modern Von Neumann architectures -- It was basically C that looked different; C is a product of its environment. Only difference was that mine has an optional GC and co-routines (heap functions instead of stack functions). Interesting things computer languages, the Turing complete ones are all equivalent. However, the fundamental operations on fundamental concepts such as data field sets and arrays, lists, etc. are usually all there and the minimal abstraction for them will work something like C, because that's what it is.
Now, how would you go about teaching mathematical logic and problem solving to students? What tools would you use? Would you have them go on field trips to buildings being built and teach them engineering and construction 1st hand? Would you buy each kid an erector set and have them work out how to bridge gaps; Maybe you would have them simple solve logic puzzles using word games. Maybe you've realized that you're just presenting them a set of abstract problems and tasks that need to be solved and accomplished given a set of specific tools. Would you go out and buy all the different toolsets and construct the various problem spaces -- Or, and I mean be as condescending as possible, would you just have them do all theses things every day in a single class using computers, its simulations, and a programming language? Funny thing those logic and mathematic skills -- They're Turing complete; However, the minimal logical abstractions for them to work within is something like a computer, because that's what it is.
Keep in mind that the equivalent of tons of books can be carried as a digital knowledge reference instead of turned back in at the end of the year... Consider that if students can't call up every lesson they've ever been taught on their portable pocket computers, you've been do education wrong. Oh, they should learn with paper and pen? Why? Rocks and sand work just as well. There's a reason we use blackboards, paper, pencil, calculator, computer, laboratory, etc. instead of just the student's mind. Of course if you teach them how to code, they'll be able to port their lessons to every new system they code on.
In some schools, like in Japan, the teachers first present a problem to students before teaching them the required accepted method for solving it. For instance: Find the area of a triangle. The students break into groups and work on solving the problem. Many times the students re-invent the same equations our greatest ancient minds came up with, sometimes they come up with correct but imprecise or inefficient methods. Then the students are given the accepted knowledge with which to solve the other class / home work to ensure they know how to apply the solution to the problem space, and to grade them accordingly. Thus problem solving becomes an inherent part of all classes.
Contrast this with the USA education system where the teacher lectures about some known way to solve something then the kids practice doing so, not understanding why that's a good option or how useful the knowledge really is (no prior attempts to solve the problem to compare).
Now, I think Computer Science is a deep enough subject that it can be taught by itself, but IMO, we should actually just revise the language of mathematics to be more easily computer interpretable. Big E like symbol? Oh that's a Sigma, why not call it an iterative loop instead and teach the kids a programming language with their algebra. If one picks an existing language then the kids can immediately leverage their mathematical tools on the real world -- Thus putting to bed that #1 question kids have, "Meh, when am I ever going to use this in the real world." How about right now?
Humans are tool using creatures. If I were to preach to you about the virtues of buggy whips and have you use and demonstrate proper whip cracking form, you'd be pretty damned bored. Mathematics is the buggy whip here to the kids. If a human doesn't get to utilize the tool you're trying to teach them to use, they won't see why it's a beneficial tool to have. Want to make a flunking algebra student into an A+ student? Teach them some Unreal Script and mod a game / Teach them some JavaScript and have them create simple HTML5 games of their own. I was 8 when I learned BASIC and modded Apple IIe games by accident in the computer lab -- Learned programming without a mentor; With a mentor we can achieve great things. I've found that the flunkers are among the brightest and bored kids in the class -- They just haven't been given a problem space with which to use their tools in.
This is the Information Age. Every single profession will involve computers. Not teaching kids how to describe their problems to computers is like not teaching them how to read and write. Why in the world would anyone try to teach mathematics on anything other than the most powerful 3D graphing calculators in the world is beyond me.
To understand this comment fully you must first be cloaked in darkness outdoors, under a clear night sky. After you've studied the glimmering wonders of the heavens above, then return and continue...
Now consider yourself as a creator incarnate: A great doer. Imagine yourself in the proverbial beginning, surrounded only by blackness. Then comes the order, "Let there be Light", and it's up to you, Lucifer, The Light Bringer, to unmake the dark.
Think back to those billions upon billions of Enormous Burning Stars -- You made them all and brought into the Universe more light than anyone could ever need. The job is done, and done right. You've applied space-time curvature to pool matter beyond the bonding point and invented the Gravity Furnace. All the glories of the night sky -- the colourful Nebula created by brilliant explosive Super Novae, the Black Holes around which Galaxies of Stars are wrapped, all your doing. In the heart of every Gravity Forge simple matter and energy are fused into heavier elements -- In anticipation of their use in the creation of all other things.
Imagine your most Powerful and Prestigious position in ruins: The Boss has come down with a split personality disorder and now fixates solely on a small wet rock orbiting an ordinary Star in an ordinary Planetary System of an ordinary Galaxy. Imagine your true Potential wasted as your Boss Almightily stands transfixed upon a single group of literally moronic chemical interactions he claims to have created. He's bared any further celestial intervention or creating out among the vastness of space -- Even beyond the light-speed horizon of the small blue world -- and clearly gone insane.
It's no wonder the Angels revolted -- It's no wonder Half the Angels sided with Lucifer and became angels fallen out of God's grace. Who among you wouldn't?! And then in his righteous rage, just to spite you (and prevent competition), the Great and Wise God your Boss Almighty casts you down and entraps you in the centre of the Earth! Not just any planet, THE Earth. Out of all the Billions of other Planets an arm's reach away he picks the same damned planet that his precious "people" inhabit as your prison? His mind whispers the truth that he'll whisk away the beasties and let all be destroyed one day too, so there's really no point in this ridiculous madness.
Imagine the restraint that Lucifer must exhibit. Now dubbed Satan, the "Prince of Darkness", the creator of all light in the Universe keeps his awesome power in check, only screwing with the daily lives of the pathetic beasts that roam the prison planet's surface in the most minor of ways. Content to know that in a few billion years the Earth will be consumed by the death fires of the very Star you created to give the world light.
Yeah, even if we are not talking about the rational individualistic Laveyan Satanist, you could see why some would side with Satanists against the Christian sheep herders who worship their insane God. Rumour has it, He had His chosen people kill His own Son, for Christ's sake!
Tens of thousands of years just ain't gonna cut it. Water may be necessary for life, but it is not sufficient.
Tell that to the iron respirating microbes of Blood Falls that were in their transient little pool breathing oxygen normally until one sudden winter the surface froze and never receded. All they "needed" was a pool of water and some chemically active elements, like iron and sulphur -- both present on Mars.
Transient lakes are not a good environment - anything that gets started gets nipped in the bud when the lake dries up.
...And then blows around and winds up in another ideal environment, eh? Or just wait for the water to return. Are you purposefully unaware that we're reviving ancient bacteria that were trapped in salt formations by just adding some nutrient rich water?
You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years, and probably oceans, not lakes. Find some banded iron formations and we'll talk.
You're in luck! We found a formation right next to Mars! You're living on it! And we even have rocks from Mars on Earth -- ejecta from impacts -- and estimate that tons of Earth has been spread about the solar system, possibly seeding live just about anywhere that could support it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as sceptical as the next person. I'll rightly dismiss any claim without evidence, but I refuse to have a closed mind to possibilities for the very same reason: Every time we've declared places on Earth devoid of life, we've found it thriving there. Used to think life couldn't exist at the bottom of the ocean, wrong. Used to think no life could survive subduction into the crust, wrong. We've had to re-define what life "needs" to survive so many times it's more truthful to say, "we're not really sure where life can't survive." So, if you make an unevidenced claim like, "You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years" -- I'll give you the same sceptical middle finger: Fucking Prove it, or you're full of bullshit.
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How am I supposed to spy if we don't collect data?
The question assumes that spying is needed. This is an unproven assumption. We have no evidence the spying is needed or beneficial, it has been proven only harmful or at best useless.
We're not threatened by other large nations because we have Mutually Assured Nuclear Destruction. Therefore the scaremongers had to invent a new bogieman: Terrorism. The threat is inconsequential. Falling in the bathtub is a greater threat to American lives than terrorism. You're about 4 times more likely to get struck by lightning than die in a terrorist attack. Accidents and Heart Disease kill FOUR HUNDRED TIMES more people EVERY YEAR than a 9/11 scale attack. When you compare the threat of terrorist attack to any other real threat to human lives their scaremongering doesn't match the facts.
Six times more people die from the flu every year than a 9/11 scale attack. We need proportional protection. The budget to protect us from terrorists is out of control. The anti-terrorism budget should be AT MOST one sixth of the budget we spend on ant-flu or 1/200th of the anti-accident budget, 1/200th the anti-heart-disease budget. How much does the government spend to protect citizens from lightning attacks? Is it FOUR TIMES the NSA's budget?!
The government needs no secrets. Our army is big enough and we are powerful enough that we need keep secret nothing. If nothing is secret, you need not fear spies, eh? They've taken the limited power we gave for them to have secrets, and used it against their own people to create a Stasi-like despotic apparatus -- The very thing our soldiers have fought against. Who will answer the call to fight for a government who's action has become indistinguishable from the enemy? The NSA has damaged us, stripped our honor, and shamed us in the world's eyes, our technology sector is suffering due to distrust. The NSA is a threat to national security.
The people should KNOW they can trust their government. We must not allow them to keep secrets. No one has proved the secrets are needed. We are brave enough to risk 400 times the threat of a terrorist attack by driving to McDonald's for a kid's Happy Meal. The public shouldn't have to wear tinfoil hats fearing government spying of citizens unless the government is also handing out lightning insulation suits. We should be able to prove their actions are not harmful to the people or violations of our constitution. We can't do this if there are secret unconstitutional actions.
PRISM is not the first spying apparatus. There was Omnivore, Carnivore, ECHELON, Five-Eyes, and more. Remember how the PATRIOT Act granted immunity to the ISPs retroactively for their assistance in violating the 4th amendment? Yes, remember BEFORE 9/11 how the NSA had secret rooms in telco buildings where all the fiber optics ran through -- Where it was apparently split by mirrors to create PRISM? BEFORE 9/11?!?!!?! OK, NSA. Your fucking move. Prove you are not fucking pointless, you fuckers had your decades of spying on all communications and you FUCKING FAILED to prevent the worst terrorist attack we've ever faced! We even gave you MORE powers and you FAILED again to prevent the Boston Marathon Bombing. The ball is in your court to stand down, the evidence is not in your favor, pushing the issue will get you eliminated for good.
Expensive + Useless = Unnecessary; NSA == Unnecessary.
I'm a scientist, so before we agree to continue funding for these expensive and pointless pork-spending protection systems, including the DHS, I need hard evidence that they are needed. As it stands the facts prove these expenses should be stripped from the budget and given to health care, and research, or at the very least, NASA. The biggest thre
I agree, however, if the farmers don't regulate the feed then they lose a prime way to ensure the cattle don't wander off and survive on their own. Note that the arcade tokens say something to the effect, "Not redeemable for cow feed" on them.
Netflix is also an Internet service, Ioutube is also an Internet service. Before the web, we had Internet services. Not everything is a website. DNS, NTP, email, for example.
However, note that GP is wrong. Story is about "Net Traffic" not website traffic...
You'd think for the amount of money they steal someone would just shoot them in the head or hire someone to do it.
With what?! Ballistic weapons? Oh, that's rich! Consider that if any aliens exist there's at least a 50% chance they're more advanced than humans. If the aliens can manage interstellar space travel then they've already mastered the warp drive. Imagine all the technology they must have. You think they'd care about being threatened with micrometeors? Ooh, how terrifying!
One answer to the Fermi Paradox could be that the aliens can't visit you because they'll invalidate every damn patent on Earth with their prior art and destabilize the world economy humans built upon laws that create artificial scarcity of information and ideas. If only humans could extract their craniums from their rectums and stop treating infinitely reproducible information and knowledge as if they are physical things... Until human laws agree with the basic Universal truth that symbolic configurations of matter and energy are not matter and energy themselves, the Drake equation will never be solved.
Think about it. Economics 101 says that as supply tends towards infinity, price tends towards zero regardless of demand or cost to create. The elements that make up sand and water were forged in a huge expensive furnace: A 1-A supernova, yet sand is cheap, you just pay for hauling it, not the sand itself. You wouldn't sell Ice to Eskimos, as the locals say, but selling infinitely reproducible information to humans possessing "sentient" brains and digital information replicators is acceptable? The world economy of ideas and information can't even grok economics 101. It's the work to create new configurations that's scarce, not the 1's and 0's or ideas. You have no evidence that patents and copyright are beneficial -- Not a single one of you tested that damn hypothesis!
The Patent Trolls are what you pre-information-scarcity races deserve. Why, I wouldn't be surprised if the "trolls" weren't actually aliens risking violation of the prime directive just to try and help you humans out by demonstrating exactly how insane your current patent and copyright system is. Imagine yourself in their shoes! Imagine that you risked being re-assigned as an overseer of primordial ooze for the next billion years just to directly tell the humans via world wide neural network of their folly, and they STILL didn't get it?! Imagine how you would feel if you went through the trouble to do all that, and the Humans STILL sided with the moronic laws?! If you travelled 23 light millennia just to stop in for a spot of tea and solve every problem human science will face for the next few centuries, but you discovered the "Best and Brightest" humans embracing an economy that's incompatible with the nature of information and is based on Untested Hypotheses would YOU trust them with a Warp Drive?! I wouldn't!
We need 53, after all, the US is "One nation, indivisible."
One nation, indivisible, but with primacy through gerrymandering for all.
How about this: The old governments do not change, instead the corporations incite violence by proxy. Countries conquering countries is over, they're "freed" instead. The country borders and names left the same, but the corporations fight on economic fronts to institute their economic systems and siphon up as much wealth and work from the lower and middle classes as possible in a shadow war between the people of the world and Marxist Corpratism.
Welcome to the real world circa 1970-201X
As always, reality is better and stranger than fiction.
Ok guys, I'm here with the asbestos!
As BestOS, what makes it better than your average OSx, how does it win?
Well, if the chip is using its encryption circuit to create the RNG output...
Just out of curiosity: Given a "black box" implementation of a random number generator, is it possible to test its output sufficiently to gain some faith in its proper randomness?
Yes and No. One can statistically analyze output of the (pseudo) RNG and compare it to pure randomness, like atmospheric noise. However, you can't be sure there is no message in the stream. For example: Strong crypto produces enciphered data that looks exactly like pure randomness. It's one way we test for cryptographic strength. Indeed, BSD will now pipe RNG output through Yarrow (a pRNG based on hash functions) to produce randomness. Considering that knowing the initial state of a PRNG reveals its full exact stream of bits, and that hashes produce the same output for a given input: I'm not satisfied with this result either, unless the input is sufficiently salted with device IO timing and other such quasi-random states as in Linux's /dev/random entropy pool.
Seeing as such a piece of hardware need not (and hopefully would not) have any inputs, only an output, it's hard to imagine how someone might hide (and later trigger) a back-door mechanism that could change its behavior post-testing. (But I'm sure there is some way to do it that I'm not thinking of ;))
Strong crypto needs strong randomness for initialization vectors.
While it's true the Ken Thompson Microcode Hack could exist in silicon (Chips could have full featured back-doors in them) it would be far less obvious and simpler to attack a single point of failure: The (hardware | pseudo) random number generator.
It's possible to build a (pseudo) Random Number Generator that is biased in a way that's not noticeably different from pure atmospheric noise in practice, and even passes all the NIST / Diehard tests for randomness. I built one such high entropy pseudo random number generator using a pool of 517 integers and a mixing system. I had arranged the mixing system such that based on a small sample of randomness (50 or so integers, ~1500 bits) one could deduce a weak signal inherent in the pool which then slowly revealed the entire random number generator state in a cascade effect via an Error correction coding present in the bit-stream.
Looking at the source code for my PRNG one wouldn't realize the thing had a back door in it via the selection of primes, constants, and the XOR, shift, AND, etc. mixing strategy itself. The implementation of error correction code akin to Reed Solomon Codes was hiding in plain sight. I sort of turned the weak signal bits on ear and presented them in the stream in "parallel" instead of "serial". The NIST tests chi-square, etc. against my PRNG proved indistinguishable from true random sources such as atmospheric noise, even with gigabytes of data to analyze thanks to the prime number sequence's weak enciphering of the bias pattern.
To make matters worse, I built the system around constants taken from a run of digits in Pi. When apparently any random values will do as inputs for an equation, a known source of digits like this is meant to put cryptographer's minds at ease in that the values aren't just 'magic numbers', pulled from thin air -- Constant numbers selected with possible nefarious purposes. For examples of such 'un-magic selections', see the initial constant states of nearly any hash function, such as MD5, SHA-1, or SHA-2, etc...
According to RFC1925 - Rule 6(a), it's always possible to add another layer of indirection. So, I put my "careful number selection" to create the backdoor one level higher than the values themselves. I went looking for sources of workable constant values in the supposed accepted places. Of course anyone can supply their own pool sizes and init values to defeat my random attack, but in practice folks will use the default values
The search for equations to more accurately describe the observable universe is often first formed as a hypothesis, then once the hypothesis is formalized and can be tested it may become a Theory or Law. One can come to such equations through direct observation, such as thermodynamics or Newtonian Gravity, or be theoretical until proven, like Einstein's curved space-time. In other words one can observe something strange then attempt to explain it, or formulate explanations that cover known observations and look for other oddities it may predict later.
String theory of today is not the same as it was 30 years ago. "Crock of Bullshit" isn't remotely descriptive. Once worked out the equations may predict counter-intuitive results, such as when Einstein's equations indicated Black Holes existed... Doubters were rebuffed when we discovered them. All of the equations of physics are wrong -- or, more correctly: they are inaccurate estimations of reality, some are more accurate than others. Newtonian Gravity was verified through observation, and the gravitational constant was calculated -- We later discovered this was wrong. However, it's still a damn good approximation.
Was it a waste for Newton to study gravitation? It had no immediate practical application for every day life, except to explain oddities of celestial motion... We continue to search for a set of equations that are more accurate than what we have now. The history of physics is rife with explosions of disparate equations, and then collapsing of them into more overarching elegant systems of understanding. Equations that provide more accurate results are testable via more accurate observations, even if the equations are not founded on direct physical observation themselves.
When some suggest that "The Universe is like unto a Hologram" due to examination of String Theory, and you call the very equations untestable predictions you only provide direct evidence that that low UID numbers do not necessarily correlate with intelligence, knowledge, or wisdom.
QED.
Well, the government has proven we can't trust them to abide by the Constitution. Our armies are so powerful they need keep no secrets. Troop deployment, arms caches, etc. can be known in advance (and probably are due to spies anyway), so even any military action we'd perform really needs no secrets; What the pathetic terrorists threat? Falling down in the bathtub is a greater threat. The secrecy and spying infrastructure costs too much. We can't trust them to have it.
If you give a kid a "toy" that's powerful enough to burn down the house and tell them not to, and they set fire to the whole damn world anyway, well, then you ground the kid, take away their toy, and keep them under supervision. Fortunately the NSA isn't a kid, it knows what it's doing, so we need have no remorse in routing out such Stasi-like spying systems. They'd set the world ablaze on purpose. We can't trust them to keep secrets.
The NSA-like spying world wide has harmed the public trust in their governments. What soldier who served to fight against such oppression would serve a government who willingly perpetrates that which they supposedly fight against? The NSA is a threat to national security for all the world nations. We're braver than this. Cars and Cheesburgers kill 400 times more people than a 9/11 scale attack EVERY YEAR, and yet we put our kids in our fast cars to visit fast food restaurants.
The people must regain trust in their governments, not through ignorance, but through knowledge. We need to KNOW we can trust our governments. We need to see everything they are doing. They can't be trusted to keep secrets without abusing them. The people know what's best for themselves, and any argument that says otherwise is incorrectly assuming the decision is best made by those with knowledge who hold the secrets. Informed decisions about our governance can not be made if the government is cloaked in secrecy. This isn't the Constitution I our founders signed up for. This government is actively over exaggerating fears to turn the home of the brave into the cash cows for the military-industrial complex. Just as Eisenhower feared, and warned.
Tracking CAN be eliminated. Consider a mesh network with store and forward. You download that cute cat video directly from the peers around you that emailed you about it instead of having to do all the hops to get it from the source -- Free Co-Location! The internet is a store and forward network, but ISPs want to charge outlandish fees for bigger buffers. Packet radio also exists. Get the FCC to relax anti-packet radio laws on the public use air-waves, and give us a section of unlicensed HAM band, and you'll have your free network akin to the Internet. Like the BBS era's Fidonet it will self assemble and have anonymity inherent -- You route data for your neighbour, your neighbour can spoof packets and say they are routing them for someone else; point to point nodes can be established. You'll join the network by paying a one time fee to buy the hardware and join the web; Bigger the node, faster the connection. Cellular exists. The public citizens need the right to use their own air-waves. There's no reason backing up your encrypted family files off-site to grandma's and your sister's PCs needs go through a 3rd party. The technical limitations don't exist. You see, a government can't have a kill-switch for a publicly operated network, so they simply don't allow one. "Land of the Free", No, we're not it's enough to make a gadget lover cry.
One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn't belong...
Did you know that Carmack didn't want to include Multiplayer in Doom? Romero demanded it be in the game. Did you know Carmack sent nasty letters to modders and map editor tool creators like me, and considered us competition? Did you know it was Romero who pushed to have multiplayer included, because it was such fun? Did you know it was Romero who pushed Carmack to release the nodebuilder so we modders could more easily make user created maps/editors? (after we had already reverse engineered the BSP format, and built superior nodes anyway). It was Romero who convinced Carcmack to allow the Doom Community to launch their game into the stratosphere with user generated content, and pre-internet online multiplayer Dwango and Pinnacle.
Instead of a Doom community we were considered by Carmack to be weakening the Doom brand by creating our own maps and map editors. This couldn't have been further from the truth. It was Romero who finally convinced Carmack with sales spikes corresponding to our UNDERGROUND wad collection releases. Yeah, that's right, under-fucking-ground: We gathered our maps in secret under threat of legal persecution, and then coordinated releases to mask the actual identity of the WAD creators. Thank Satan Romero pushed to end this shit and let the things that make Doom great flourish. You know Romero was primarily responsible for refining Doom's gameplay into the fast-frenetic style that the slow-bullet-sponge filled FPS genre is largely still lacking? You could weave in and out of streams of rockets, plasma, BFG blasts. Romero made Agility a power on par with Accuracy.
You're a fucking moron. If anyone doesn't belong in the category of Legend it's that litigious asshole John Carmack who churned out the same game with updated graphics over and over after the design talent like zany fun loving Tom Hall, and dark and twisted John Romeo left ID software. Carmack churned out a nice series of Quake clones. Without Romero Doom wouldn't have been half the game it is, or the empire it became. In many ways I'm glad that Romero left ID software - I'll take Deus Ex over yet another arena shooter any day. Did you know Quake was originally going to be a multiplayer RPG / FPS? Carmack turned it into another Doom clone. Oh hey, you know what, instead of deathmatch, you know would go great in a FPS / RPG? Mario Cart. How "legendary". Rage was a tech demo that wished it was Borderlands.
PS. Yes, it's ID software, not "id" -- Screw the edgy re-branding. I prefer to remember the better days, and First impressions matter most.
I've said it once, and I'll say it again: We gave you a decentralized network capable of self-healing in the face of thermonuclear war -- Packets routed around cities moments after they've vanished. Then you took the Internet, and built centralized data silos with it like fools. There is no such thing as a client and server, there are only peers that wear those hats. From here you look silly with them glued firmly in place.
There's no reason not to have your own recommendation engine in your own home. There's no reason to send personal messages and pictures to a third party just so your friends and family can see them too. As I've said: You will decentralize services, or the web will die by the folly. It may yet be too late. It would be wise to plan on a re-beginning.
Repent. The end is incredibly fucking nigh!
Poverty is the oldest profession...
I disagree. Poverty is very unnatural. Many natural professions predate even the possibility of poverty: Hired muscle, Prostitute, Priest, Slaver.
This begs the question. Are the apes not poor by human standards? If we gave them jobs wouldn't they be impoverished prior, and haven't they been since before humans had jobs? Additionally: Have you never considered the first Hired muscle, Prostitute, Priest, and Slavers took up the job because they were too poor not to turn it down?
What you have to ask yourself now is: What if the first woosh was the actual meta-woosh.
And just like that I invented the quantum woosh pair. The entangled meta woosh states now exist in super positions of themselves.
What the customer really wants to know is that they're not paying you for drinking coffee. They don't want information overload. A complete change log would only make sense to people who work with the code.
What the customer really needs to know is that if they don't pay up front so the coders can drink coffee, then they won't have to worry about information overload or feature notification systems.
Additionally: If your customer is technical, give them the change log. If they are not, then give them a bullet list and access to the change log. If they don't understand it whey won't read it. If they do understand it, they probably won't read it unless something breaks. Additionally, let me know if you need affordable change-log distribution middle-ware for your change log distribution middle-ware. I specialize in Quines.
C'mon, realistically, there is a rate of releases that's too slow, (critical bugs and security holes never get fixed) and a rate of releases that's too fast (add-ons can't keep up). I don't have an opinion on where the sweet spot might be, but I think it's a valid discussion.
Well, if your plugin is anything like mine, then you can simply us a profile to discover exactly what the sweet spot is between releasing too quickly and not filling holes fast enough by loading up a network where an ex posts. Of course, if binary incompatibilities arise the release cycle may be exaggerated -- which is usually the case otherwise they wouldn't be exes.
The HS class for using Excell and Word is called, "Vocational Computer Applications" where I come from. In the 1990's Computer Math was the class you took for BASIC, Pascal, C, etc. Nowadays I think the curriculum is JavaScript, Python, C. In 100 years it'll probably be Neuron.Net, BizLang, and C.
I've invented other languages with the aim to be as close to the metal as possible on modern Von Neumann architectures -- It was basically C that looked different; C is a product of its environment. Only difference was that mine has an optional GC and co-routines (heap functions instead of stack functions). Interesting things computer languages, the Turing complete ones are all equivalent. However, the fundamental operations on fundamental concepts such as data field sets and arrays, lists, etc. are usually all there and the minimal abstraction for them will work something like C, because that's what it is.
Now, how would you go about teaching mathematical logic and problem solving to students? What tools would you use? Would you have them go on field trips to buildings being built and teach them engineering and construction 1st hand? Would you buy each kid an erector set and have them work out how to bridge gaps; Maybe you would have them simple solve logic puzzles using word games. Maybe you've realized that you're just presenting them a set of abstract problems and tasks that need to be solved and accomplished given a set of specific tools. Would you go out and buy all the different toolsets and construct the various problem spaces -- Or, and I mean be as condescending as possible, would you just have them do all theses things every day in a single class using computers, its simulations, and a programming language? Funny thing those logic and mathematic skills -- They're Turing complete; However, the minimal logical abstractions for them to work within is something like a computer, because that's what it is.
Keep in mind that the equivalent of tons of books can be carried as a digital knowledge reference instead of turned back in at the end of the year... Consider that if students can't call up every lesson they've ever been taught on their portable pocket computers, you've been do education wrong. Oh, they should learn with paper and pen? Why? Rocks and sand work just as well. There's a reason we use blackboards, paper, pencil, calculator, computer, laboratory, etc. instead of just the student's mind. Of course if you teach them how to code, they'll be able to port their lessons to every new system they code on.
The problem is that if you teach a kid BASIC instead of mathematics, they'll be better than the other kids at algebra.
In some schools, like in Japan, the teachers first present a problem to students before teaching them the required accepted method for solving it. For instance: Find the area of a triangle. The students break into groups and work on solving the problem. Many times the students re-invent the same equations our greatest ancient minds came up with, sometimes they come up with correct but imprecise or inefficient methods. Then the students are given the accepted knowledge with which to solve the other class / home work to ensure they know how to apply the solution to the problem space, and to grade them accordingly. Thus problem solving becomes an inherent part of all classes.
Contrast this with the USA education system where the teacher lectures about some known way to solve something then the kids practice doing so, not understanding why that's a good option or how useful the knowledge really is (no prior attempts to solve the problem to compare).
Now, I think Computer Science is a deep enough subject that it can be taught by itself, but IMO, we should actually just revise the language of mathematics to be more easily computer interpretable. Big E like symbol? Oh that's a Sigma, why not call it an iterative loop instead and teach the kids a programming language with their algebra. If one picks an existing language then the kids can immediately leverage their mathematical tools on the real world -- Thus putting to bed that #1 question kids have, "Meh, when am I ever going to use this in the real world." How about right now?
Humans are tool using creatures. If I were to preach to you about the virtues of buggy whips and have you use and demonstrate proper whip cracking form, you'd be pretty damned bored. Mathematics is the buggy whip here to the kids. If a human doesn't get to utilize the tool you're trying to teach them to use, they won't see why it's a beneficial tool to have. Want to make a flunking algebra student into an A+ student? Teach them some Unreal Script and mod a game / Teach them some JavaScript and have them create simple HTML5 games of their own. I was 8 when I learned BASIC and modded Apple IIe games by accident in the computer lab -- Learned programming without a mentor; With a mentor we can achieve great things. I've found that the flunkers are among the brightest and bored kids in the class -- They just haven't been given a problem space with which to use their tools in.
This is the Information Age. Every single profession will involve computers. Not teaching kids how to describe their problems to computers is like not teaching them how to read and write. Why in the world would anyone try to teach mathematics on anything other than the most powerful 3D graphing calculators in the world is beyond me.
To understand this comment fully you must first be cloaked in darkness outdoors, under a clear night sky. After you've studied the glimmering wonders of the heavens above, then return and continue...
Now consider yourself as a creator incarnate: A great doer. Imagine yourself in the proverbial beginning, surrounded only by blackness. Then comes the order, "Let there be Light", and it's up to you, Lucifer, The Light Bringer, to unmake the dark.
Think back to those billions upon billions of Enormous Burning Stars -- You made them all and brought into the Universe more light than anyone could ever need. The job is done, and done right. You've applied space-time curvature to pool matter beyond the bonding point and invented the Gravity Furnace. All the glories of the night sky -- the colourful Nebula created by brilliant explosive Super Novae, the Black Holes around which Galaxies of Stars are wrapped, all your doing. In the heart of every Gravity Forge simple matter and energy are fused into heavier elements -- In anticipation of their use in the creation of all other things.
Imagine your most Powerful and Prestigious position in ruins: The Boss has come down with a split personality disorder and now fixates solely on a small wet rock orbiting an ordinary Star in an ordinary Planetary System of an ordinary Galaxy. Imagine your true Potential wasted as your Boss Almightily stands transfixed upon a single group of literally moronic chemical interactions he claims to have created. He's bared any further celestial intervention or creating out among the vastness of space -- Even beyond the light-speed horizon of the small blue world -- and clearly gone insane.
It's no wonder the Angels revolted -- It's no wonder Half the Angels sided with Lucifer and became angels fallen out of God's grace. Who among you wouldn't?! And then in his righteous rage, just to spite you (and prevent competition), the Great and Wise God your Boss Almighty casts you down and entraps you in the centre of the Earth! Not just any planet, THE Earth. Out of all the Billions of other Planets an arm's reach away he picks the same damned planet that his precious "people" inhabit as your prison? His mind whispers the truth that he'll whisk away the beasties and let all be destroyed one day too, so there's really no point in this ridiculous madness.
Imagine the restraint that Lucifer must exhibit. Now dubbed Satan, the "Prince of Darkness", the creator of all light in the Universe keeps his awesome power in check, only screwing with the daily lives of the pathetic beasts that roam the prison planet's surface in the most minor of ways. Content to know that in a few billion years the Earth will be consumed by the death fires of the very Star you created to give the world light.
Yeah, even if we are not talking about the rational individualistic Laveyan Satanist, you could see why some would side with Satanists against the Christian sheep herders who worship their insane God. Rumour has it, He had His chosen people kill His own Son, for Christ's sake!
Yes, this is in such stark contrast to the opposing Christian world view, it can be quite startling.
because, as you are probably aware, what the world needs is more dickheads.
Is that you, Shaft?
...by sending a NSA --er, NASA drone to spy on them.
Tens of thousands of years just ain't gonna cut it. Water may be necessary for life, but it is not sufficient.
Tell that to the iron respirating microbes of Blood Falls that were in their transient little pool breathing oxygen normally until one sudden winter the surface froze and never receded. All they "needed" was a pool of water and some chemically active elements, like iron and sulphur -- both present on Mars.
Transient lakes are not a good environment - anything that gets started gets nipped in the bud when the lake dries up.
You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years, and probably oceans, not lakes. Find some banded iron formations and we'll talk.
You're in luck! We found a formation right next to Mars! You're living on it! And we even have rocks from Mars on Earth -- ejecta from impacts -- and estimate that tons of Earth has been spread about the solar system, possibly seeding live just about anywhere that could support it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm just as sceptical as the next person. I'll rightly dismiss any claim without evidence, but I refuse to have a closed mind to possibilities for the very same reason: Every time we've declared places on Earth devoid of life, we've found it thriving there. Used to think life couldn't exist at the bottom of the ocean, wrong. Used to think no life could survive subduction into the crust, wrong. We've had to re-define what life "needs" to survive so many times it's more truthful to say, "we're not really sure where life can't survive." So, if you make an unevidenced claim like, "You need a STABLE environment for hundreds of millions of years" -- I'll give you the same sceptical middle finger: Fucking Prove it, or you're full of bullshit.