Because the vocal minority is still just that, the vocal minority. When a given subject only ever gets coverage from one side by the media than it's easy to think that's the side that represents how the public feels. This has been a problem since at least the days of the earliest telephone polls for politics when conservatives were heavily favored by the polls. When the results came back against it was eventually determined that the only people who could afford telephones at the time were rich (and generally conservative).
You have to remember that just because you always hear a given view always getting coverage at the places or sites you frequent, it doesn't represent how the public feels. It only represents the view that is vocal and being picked up by the media you consume. The same types of questions were being asked about Occupy Wall Street when some people were absolutely baffled that the only change they caused was in local clean up costs.
For another example you need only look at the surprise that happened in California where the gay marriage amendment was voted down. Many people in the public at large (especially outside California) assumed it was a shoe in since most media only ever portrayed one side favorably. My examples listed above were just that examples, other examples exist in other ends of the political spectrum as well. I'm not taking positions, I'm just using them to illustrate the point of how the vocal minority can be over-represented.
It's a self reinforcing effect that can happen in any society over any given issue. All it takes is a given set of people to speak loudly about a subject at every opportunity. Since dissent and other viewpoints are suppressed or mod-bombed into oblivion it's easy to think everyone must hold the vocal view. When in reality all that happens is people quit commenting while support for the position of the vocal minority actually drops with the public at large. You can easily see examples of this here on Slashdot with subjects such as Snowden and Wikileaks.
You also probably live in the US where you are closer to the local religious fundamentalists. If you lived in the Philippines you would probably be more worried about their local religious fundamentalists. The same thing could be said in any number of nations where local fundamentalists use terrorism to enforce religious fundamentalism.
In the US we get idiots like Pat Robertson going on TV and they might hold a protest. In places like Pakistan or Israel their idiots will blow up the local supermarket or coffee shop. While I hold our fundamentalists in contempt, it's pretty rare that even the most extreme cases will engage in terror, and when they do, society quickly condemns them. Even our idea of local bad guys like the KKK can't hold a candle to organizations like Hezbollah.
I've got exactly what you need! Tinfoil hats are cheap. They are easy, to make too, it takes less than two minutes. Don't believe the MIT study that debunks the time honored tinfoil hat, it's a government conspiracy you know!
Don't worry, there are support groups for conspiracy theorists! Now I know like any number of other conspiracy theories those pesky facts might get in the way. However, learn from Joseph Goebbels and don't ever let logic, facts or reality get in your way. I know you look like a raving lunatic to any rational person, but not to worry, there is someone even crazier will soon show up to defend you, so cheer up!
Name one single set of supporting documents that was written by the entire committee that wrote them instead of a subset of that committee. Try to start with well known documents that were written for government like various Constitutions, you have all of history to go through in any culture you want. Now since nations aren't likely to do you any good you should try looking at regional governments (States, Provinces, Cantons etc).
After you've banged your head on those for a while you might want to try looking at treaties, those are well known and it's possible someone bothered to write supporting documents for those. You might have a little more luck here, but getting documents from all the sides (don't forget the losers) that weren't actually written by the winners is going prove to a bit more challenging than you might think.
Think back to your own office, how many important documents had supporting documents written by all of the members of the committee? You see, you've made a straw man of an argument as there has likely never been a single committee in all of human history that has done what you have demanded. That isn't human nature. The fact of the matter is that a very notable subset of very influential members of the committee that wrote these documents wrote the Federal Papers.
More to the point there are/no/ known papers disputing their legitimacy, context or intent. That this comes from a time and place when propaganda was considered such an art form that a substantial number of the countries newspapers were dedicated solely to the purpose of producing propaganda of one point or another. Your an utter twat.
Nero original made himself a hero to the people of Rome by burning (what turned out to be just a copy) of the surveillance records that were kept by the government. That's the first example that comes to mind, however I'm sure it wouldn't take long to find examples even older than that. If you know your history you know what Nero's stance on Democracy.
Stalin had a surveillance state that was pretty much the very definition of a Communist dictatorship. The East Germans employed a significant portion of their economy doing nothing but spying on their own people, I do believe history labels them more Communist than dictatorship though. China employs millions of people that do nothing but watch what people post online and censor it, again they are more of a Communist dictatorship. Hitler monitored everything he could, he was a Socialist. Mussolini did the same, however he was more a Fascist.
Actually the Constitution, Bill of Rights and other critical documents that the Founding Fathers wrote did come with what you could call a 'dictionary' where they spelled out their intent and meaning. The set of documents that was written where they described exactly what they meant when they wrote what they wrote, context of meaning and so on. These documents are called the "Federalist Papers" and have been available for anyone to look at online for many years. They arguably are among the most important documents the country has as they do exactly the kinds of things that you think can't be done (amongst many other things).
Read the Federalist Papers, they are the ones written by the people that wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was very much meant to be a 'literal' document, written in plain language, to set the tone for a new government. For example the colonial government (which was a very fragile group of very different people) was formed of people from very different religions and the only way to make sure that the other guy (Protestant, Catholic etc) didn't establish their religion as a state religion in the future - as was the status quo around the world and very much a reason for people to move to the United States to begin was to put things in literal plain language. The entire intention was to ensure that laws attempting to thwart their work would be so fruitless that they would never be passed to begin as they could never be upheld as Constitutionally valid.
I am not a member of the NRA. I do not have a hand gun, machine gun or other similar weapon. I am however a person that takes a very hard lined view that all Constitutional rights should be untrampled. If there was a group that combined the ACLU, the EFF and the NRA I would be a member of said group.
Many people have argued that this is intended to give people the right to privacy, and I originally thought of posting your argument. Unfortunately it doesn't actually call out the word "privacy" and that is why in today's climate you need a separate and explicit amendment to that effect.
The more I thought about it though, the bigger is really the issue of plain "shall" being allowed to be trumped by Congress on a routine basis. Until you can restore the plain language meaning of the Bill of Rights as written the right to Privacy would be completely and utterly meaningless. Can you imagine what would happen to such a right if it was was explicitly named? We would have a thousands of different standards for your right to privacy depending on where you lived. Everything boils down to restoring the plain language meaning of the Bill of Rights, that has to be done before a Right to Privacy can ever be anything more than a dream.
I can't argue your point actually, and I think it's one that many people overlook. When you get down to brass tacks private industry does far more of the day to intrusion into peoples lives than the government does, and they arguably are a lot more effective at it. Your point can and should be addressed, but without the concept of having the right to begin with, how on earth are you ever going to protect it from private industry?
The only way to stop surveillance of civilians is to have a clear and unequivocal constitutional amendment that strictly enshrines the right to privacy and limits surveillance of US civilians by our government.
This is a lot tougher than it sounds as previous language that was pretty plain language to the people that wrote them (read the Federalist papers sometime) about limiting the right of the Federal government from infringing the rights of the people. The first and second amendments alone have been trampled with literally tens of thousands of laws that take away or limit said rights (I haven't even touched the other amendments).
What you really need is an entirely secondary constitutional amendment that spells out in plain language that "Shall make / not" means exactly what the dictionary says it does. Once you can do that and wipe out tens of thousands of laws that have been written to take away the effective meaning of your rights to begin with you can have an effective right to privacy.
The right to privacy is a wonderful idea, but it's worthless until we restore the concept of the "right" to begin with.
Brazil keeps forgetting about something I like to call the rest of the world. It's easy to find. Grab and atlas and look at everything that isn't labeled "USA". Give or take your talking about roughly 200 countries that have an interest in spying as it is in the interest of every government to know what is going on with every other government.
Now figure that your system magically works against the NSA with faerie dust and a good dose of anti-US propaganda. Nevermind the technicalities, just go with it for a moment and look back at that list of 200 countries. A fair number of those countries could be thought of as technically incompetent, but then again many a third world country has managed to develop hackers as they are relatively about the cheapest form of espionage that you can get. They also have this wonderful ability not to get imprisoned when they get caught by the country their spying on (entire dossiers are available on certain Chinese or Pakistani state hackers, you'll note they still remain happily out of prison).
So let's go back to all of these other countries that now have a technical challenge that is keeping the NSA out. If it's good enough to keep the NSA out, than it's good enough to attract their attention for the express reason that it can keep the NSA out. That means there's a lot to learn about security there and that makes it an attractive target of it's own right, even if you could care less about the contents what lies within.
The hard reality is that all of the naive anti-US sentiment in the world isn't going to save you from the fact that the rest of the world has people that are perfectly intelligent, capable, willing to act. It's ivory tower thinking to believe that only a given country has the intellect and capacity to develop minds that can do something.
I think I'll take the CDC as authoritative over wikipedia.
What you did is called lying through statistics, their are entire books and website about how to use statistics to lie like you did. I called you out on it, in fact here are some websites exposing the types of tactics you used.
Your personal desire to make revisionist history doesn't actually change anything. You've even attempted revisionist history on my posting where I said the US hasn't bombed civilian centers since WW2. Your either deluded or so full of hate that you couldn't see the truth if it smacked you across the face.
What makes you think anyone would ever tolerate using robots on civilians? Your asking that the civilians in charge start ordering the murder of civilians in a manner that only happens in science fiction books.
If anything it could be argued that by removing emotions they are less likely to lose their cool and go overboard. A robot doesn't have PTSD, doesn't suffer from racism, sexism or other ism's and isn't subject to the same discrimination that humans are subject too.
It doesn't care that someone is smelly, it doesn't get annoyed, doesn't suffer from mental illness and can have the rules of engagement hard coded into it's instruction set. Robots are less likely to make mistakes, get sloppy, suffer fatigue and in the end are probably less likely to suffer friendly fire incidents.
Can a robot be subject to programming errors? Of course, entire books and movies have covered the subject for decades, meaning anybody working on one is highly cognizant of the possibility and likely to do their damnedest to make sure that doesn't happen.
For an example of something where the two sides had something close you need only look at WWI.
The death toll of WWI was around 37,000,000 - which sounds a lot like 'tens of millions'. The death toll of the Spanish flu was about 50 million (with high estimates of 100 million), which also sounds a lot like 'tens of millions'.
Foreign aid of the USA per capita is more or less the same as other civilized nations and far behind scandinavian nations.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics, and what you did right there is a perfect example. My statement is factual and you are trying to manipulate statistics in such a way to take credit away from where it is due. Your statement is disingenuous when the US gives tens of Billions of dollars more in Foreign aid per year, every single year.
The US army was crippled in Vietnam by a policy of not bombing near civilian centers which is why the North built as much of their military strength their as they could. They knew the US wouldn't touch anything near the cities and fully exploited the policy. The inability to target anything near a city was directly inspirational for the development of GPS guided munitions that are in use today.
Next time you might want to pause and read what I actually wrote and take a moment to look for some citations before responding. Just like with the other guy, remove the hyberbole and it's much easier to take you seriously. For the meanwhile I'd like to suggest you spend a little time in the history section of your local library before trying to argue history next time.
Cadillac has picked up their game across the board from the ATS, CTS and the XTS with what has to be just about the greatest turn around of any automotive manufacture ever. I have every confidence that they will get this car right and that it will be worth the proverbial money. Hell, even Top Gear magazine (typically very Anti American) gave the ATS and new CTS high praise.
GM should have made this car before they made the Volt. People are far more likely to accept a pricier car at the luxury end of the segment (eco-sheek) than in the family segment where it is much harder to justify the price differential. Now the problem is that people will think of this as an expensive Volt and that may make it difficult to sell.
Remove the hyberbole from your argument and people are much more likely to take you seriously.
My problem isn't the fact that they are building killer robots.... it's the fact that the other side doesn't have anything close
For an example of something where the two sides had something close you need only look at WWI. The two sides had very close capacity, the result was a multiyear quagmire that resulted in the death in tens of millions of people as neither side was able to quickly 'win'. Because it was so drawn out with everyone tied down it also directly resulted in the Spanish flu killing tens of millions of people. Wars that are "fair" are wars that kill far more people than wars that aren't and history is riddle with countless millions of dead bodies that prove my point.
these will be used to hit non-military targets and/or populations of civilians
The US hasn't targeted civilian centers since WW2, luckily technology has changed quite a bit since then. The reality is that they have spent billions of dollars developing better technology for the sole purpose of not hitting civilians. Hitting civilians only pisses off the local population and it places your assets at risk for another run because your original military target still has to be taken out. A more accurate weapon is far more valuable for any military. Unless your Hezbollah or a similiar terrorist organization, there simply isn't any value in using weapons against civilians.
Then we'll use our robot army to ensure no one has the power to ever be a considerable threat to the US and bully the planet with it forever.
The US provides more foreign aid than other country on earth and has done so for decades. Any number of nations depend of the US for medical and food aid for basic survival and have for decades. I know it's popular in certain circles to hate on the US, but try doing a little actual research before hopping on the hype train.
It's the future and whining about it is no different than whining about the advent of the rifle or the machine gun or the bow. Your taking the fight away from the human being through a layer of abstraction to keep your soldier alive. The layer of abstraction in this case happens to be a robot, once upon a time it was a gun or a bow.
The people complaining about this are really no different than the Luddites that think warfare should be conduced hand to hand with swords and maces. They wont be satisfied unless their own soldiers are getting killed on the battlefield too. Technology advances whether you want it to or not. Change and human nature are the only things that stay the same.
You are quite right about the wobble effect used to help find candidates. It's extremely difficult to get direct pictures, however we have done it. Since it sounds like you have some interest in the subject I'll provide some links for you to read on. Interestingly enough the planet first planet we directly pictured had been captured by Hubble and overlooked for years as we didn't have the technique for combing through the data at the time!
Because a set of statistics for rocky worlds outside of this solar system with water now has a 1 in the column where it used to have a zero. We now have a data point where we used to have nothing, and that is a beginning. It's really the entire point of the Kepler mission when you think about it, to gather data so that we can better generate state statistics. We need data and in any number of critical fields the slot has a 0 in it.
Science starts somewhere and this is an indicator that were not wasting our resources by looking for rocky planets with water. We now know that they have existed in at least one other place in the universe, even if it wasn't a fully formed planet. For a while when we first started finding planets all we found were gas giants that were far larger than Jupiter and there were calls to stop looking as the costs were considered a waste.
How do we know if something is common or not until we go looking and persist for a scientifically meaningful period of time? When I was in school the idea that we would ever actually take a physical picture of a planet around another solar system was science fiction. Decades later and we have pictures of many planets around other solar systems and even planets that do not orbit a solar system at all.
Remember that all the the security in the world is considered worthless if the other person has physical access to your disk. Encryption can be broken in a number of different ways, it often simply isn't implemented correctly. However you have to recall that your encryption is really quite worthless when I can install a cheap camera above your desk or a keylogger on your keyboard and simply capture your password.
This shouldn't really surprise someone. When you think about a data center or server rack is arguably about the most valuable square footage that you can have. Think of a comparison to a typical jewelry shop, it might have $250,000 to a $1,000,000 in a vault and it's not easy to liquidate for anything resembling it's retail value. Now think of a typical bank vault, it probably has a typical amount of money, and again liquidation is an issue (look up money laundering for the challenges drug dealers face plus serial numbers).
Now think of a single rack in a data-center where a low end server can easily cost $5000 and nobody blinks an eye at something costing $25,000. A single rack can easily be worth a million dollars or more depending on how it is loaded. You can also easily resell IT equipment or part it out and there is a much smaller chance of getting caught. Serial numbers are an issue of course, but if something gets sent overseas the cost of getting caught drops significanly while the value is pretty much retained.
If you were to look at the sheer value of the contents of a building the only buildings that could possibly compete with a data center would be the exceptional bank vault and factories such as where they build new jetliners.
I sincerely doubt that they have people manually review much of anything (new accounts perhaps?). Companies are going to fight this kind of thing at the macro level, not at the micro level. I'm sure security staff investigate individual instances of note that are flagged by automated system in order to beef up security knowledge or see if an account should be banned. That being said I would imagine that they have automate the overwhelming majority of the work.
The ad agencies have been battling this kind of thing since at least the 90's as getting caught serving malicious ads is a good way to get blocked by any number of companies. It's not that they do it necessarily out of altruistic behavior for the better of mankind. It's more a case of having someone like Google warn users that your site is delivering malicious content is a good way to see a serious drop in page rank and traffic in a hurry.
Not defending Bing in particular here, but every ad network gets utilized to deliver ads by malicious parties. Every ad company you can think of has staff that work full time just to look for and filter out malicious ads. A pretty significant portion of all malware is delivered my ads that are unwittingly served by sites from Facebook to CNN or any other site you can think of.
Here's a nice link to a NIST report on the matter that you can get to once the government gets back to work. The problem goes back many, many years, so why on earth is this being reported as news?
Is 500,000 in sales considered pretty good? To put this in comparison the Surface has been considered a disaster by many here (myself included) and that sold 1.7 million.
I won't argue your other points on mouse and multiple on-screen app windows as they are quite valid. My point is that I think Google could be much more successful in pushing Android on laptops than Chrome. Certainly there is work that would be needed, but that is absolutely paltry compared to the amount of work that it would take to bring Chrome up to par in terms of apps, developer familiarity and market acceptance.
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Because the vocal minority is still just that, the vocal minority. When a given subject only ever gets coverage from one side by the media than it's easy to think that's the side that represents how the public feels. This has been a problem since at least the days of the earliest telephone polls for politics when conservatives were heavily favored by the polls. When the results came back against it was eventually determined that the only people who could afford telephones at the time were rich (and generally conservative).
You have to remember that just because you always hear a given view always getting coverage at the places or sites you frequent, it doesn't represent how the public feels. It only represents the view that is vocal and being picked up by the media you consume. The same types of questions were being asked about Occupy Wall Street when some people were absolutely baffled that the only change they caused was in local clean up costs.
For another example you need only look at the surprise that happened in California where the gay marriage amendment was voted down. Many people in the public at large (especially outside California) assumed it was a shoe in since most media only ever portrayed one side favorably. My examples listed above were just that examples, other examples exist in other ends of the political spectrum as well. I'm not taking positions, I'm just using them to illustrate the point of how the vocal minority can be over-represented.
It's a self reinforcing effect that can happen in any society over any given issue. All it takes is a given set of people to speak loudly about a subject at every opportunity. Since dissent and other viewpoints are suppressed or mod-bombed into oblivion it's easy to think everyone must hold the vocal view. When in reality all that happens is people quit commenting while support for the position of the vocal minority actually drops with the public at large. You can easily see examples of this here on Slashdot with subjects such as Snowden and Wikileaks.
You also probably live in the US where you are closer to the local religious fundamentalists. If you lived in the Philippines you would probably be more worried about their local religious fundamentalists. The same thing could be said in any number of nations where local fundamentalists use terrorism to enforce religious fundamentalism.
In the US we get idiots like Pat Robertson going on TV and they might hold a protest. In places like Pakistan or Israel their idiots will blow up the local supermarket or coffee shop. While I hold our fundamentalists in contempt, it's pretty rare that even the most extreme cases will engage in terror, and when they do, society quickly condemns them. Even our idea of local bad guys like the KKK can't hold a candle to organizations like Hezbollah.
I've got exactly what you need! Tinfoil hats are cheap. They are easy, to make too, it takes less than two minutes. Don't believe the MIT study that debunks the time honored tinfoil hat, it's a government conspiracy you know!
Don't worry, there are support groups for conspiracy theorists! Now I know like any number of other conspiracy theories those pesky facts might get in the way. However, learn from Joseph Goebbels and don't ever let logic, facts or reality get in your way. I know you look like a raving lunatic to any rational person, but not to worry, there is someone even crazier will soon show up to defend you, so cheer up!
Name one single set of supporting documents that was written by the entire committee that wrote them instead of a subset of that committee. Try to start with well known documents that were written for government like various Constitutions, you have all of history to go through in any culture you want. Now since nations aren't likely to do you any good you should try looking at regional governments (States, Provinces, Cantons etc).
After you've banged your head on those for a while you might want to try looking at treaties, those are well known and it's possible someone bothered to write supporting documents for those. You might have a little more luck here, but getting documents from all the sides (don't forget the losers) that weren't actually written by the winners is going prove to a bit more challenging than you might think.
Think back to your own office, how many important documents had supporting documents written by all of the members of the committee? You see, you've made a straw man of an argument as there has likely never been a single committee in all of human history that has done what you have demanded. That isn't human nature. The fact of the matter is that a very notable subset of very influential members of the committee that wrote these documents wrote the Federal Papers.
More to the point there are /no/ known papers disputing their legitimacy, context or intent. That this comes from a time and place when propaganda was considered such an art form that a substantial number of the countries newspapers were dedicated solely to the purpose of producing propaganda of one point or another. Your an utter twat.
Nero original made himself a hero to the people of Rome by burning (what turned out to be just a copy) of the surveillance records that were kept by the government. That's the first example that comes to mind, however I'm sure it wouldn't take long to find examples even older than that. If you know your history you know what Nero's stance on Democracy.
Stalin had a surveillance state that was pretty much the very definition of a Communist dictatorship. The East Germans employed a significant portion of their economy doing nothing but spying on their own people, I do believe history labels them more Communist than dictatorship though. China employs millions of people that do nothing but watch what people post online and censor it, again they are more of a Communist dictatorship. Hitler monitored everything he could, he was a Socialist. Mussolini did the same, however he was more a Fascist.
Actually the Constitution, Bill of Rights and other critical documents that the Founding Fathers wrote did come with what you could call a 'dictionary' where they spelled out their intent and meaning. The set of documents that was written where they described exactly what they meant when they wrote what they wrote, context of meaning and so on. These documents are called the "Federalist Papers" and have been available for anyone to look at online for many years. They arguably are among the most important documents the country has as they do exactly the kinds of things that you think can't be done (amongst many other things).
Read the Federalist Papers, they are the ones written by the people that wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights was very much meant to be a 'literal' document, written in plain language, to set the tone for a new government. For example the colonial government (which was a very fragile group of very different people) was formed of people from very different religions and the only way to make sure that the other guy (Protestant, Catholic etc) didn't establish their religion as a state religion in the future - as was the status quo around the world and very much a reason for people to move to the United States to begin was to put things in literal plain language. The entire intention was to ensure that laws attempting to thwart their work would be so fruitless that they would never be passed to begin as they could never be upheld as Constitutionally valid.
I am not a member of the NRA. I do not have a hand gun, machine gun or other similar weapon. I am however a person that takes a very hard lined view that all Constitutional rights should be untrampled. If there was a group that combined the ACLU, the EFF and the NRA I would be a member of said group.
Many people have argued that this is intended to give people the right to privacy, and I originally thought of posting your argument. Unfortunately it doesn't actually call out the word "privacy" and that is why in today's climate you need a separate and explicit amendment to that effect.
The more I thought about it though, the bigger is really the issue of plain "shall" being allowed to be trumped by Congress on a routine basis. Until you can restore the plain language meaning of the Bill of Rights as written the right to Privacy would be completely and utterly meaningless. Can you imagine what would happen to such a right if it was was explicitly named? We would have a thousands of different standards for your right to privacy depending on where you lived. Everything boils down to restoring the plain language meaning of the Bill of Rights, that has to be done before a Right to Privacy can ever be anything more than a dream.
I can't argue your point actually, and I think it's one that many people overlook. When you get down to brass tacks private industry does far more of the day to intrusion into peoples lives than the government does, and they arguably are a lot more effective at it. Your point can and should be addressed, but without the concept of having the right to begin with, how on earth are you ever going to protect it from private industry?
The only way to stop surveillance of civilians is to have a clear and unequivocal constitutional amendment that strictly enshrines the right to privacy and limits surveillance of US civilians by our government.
This is a lot tougher than it sounds as previous language that was pretty plain language to the people that wrote them (read the Federalist papers sometime) about limiting the right of the Federal government from infringing the rights of the people. The first and second amendments alone have been trampled with literally tens of thousands of laws that take away or limit said rights (I haven't even touched the other amendments).
What you really need is an entirely secondary constitutional amendment that spells out in plain language that "Shall make / not" means exactly what the dictionary says it does. Once you can do that and wipe out tens of thousands of laws that have been written to take away the effective meaning of your rights to begin with you can have an effective right to privacy.
The right to privacy is a wonderful idea, but it's worthless until we restore the concept of the "right" to begin with.
Brazil keeps forgetting about something I like to call the rest of the world. It's easy to find. Grab and atlas and look at everything that isn't labeled "USA". Give or take your talking about roughly 200 countries that have an interest in spying as it is in the interest of every government to know what is going on with every other government.
Now figure that your system magically works against the NSA with faerie dust and a good dose of anti-US propaganda. Nevermind the technicalities, just go with it for a moment and look back at that list of 200 countries. A fair number of those countries could be thought of as technically incompetent, but then again many a third world country has managed to develop hackers as they are relatively about the cheapest form of espionage that you can get. They also have this wonderful ability not to get imprisoned when they get caught by the country their spying on (entire dossiers are available on certain Chinese or Pakistani state hackers, you'll note they still remain happily out of prison).
So let's go back to all of these other countries that now have a technical challenge that is keeping the NSA out. If it's good enough to keep the NSA out, than it's good enough to attract their attention for the express reason that it can keep the NSA out. That means there's a lot to learn about security there and that makes it an attractive target of it's own right, even if you could care less about the contents what lies within.
The hard reality is that all of the naive anti-US sentiment in the world isn't going to save you from the fact that the rest of the world has people that are perfectly intelligent, capable, willing to act. It's ivory tower thinking to believe that only a given country has the intellect and capacity to develop minds that can do something.
I think I'll take the CDC as authoritative over wikipedia.
What you did is called lying through statistics, their are entire books and website about how to use statistics to lie like you did. I called you out on it, in fact here are some websites exposing the types of tactics you used.
http://www.amazon.com/How-Lie-Statistics-Darrell-Huff/dp/0393310728
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~ricko/CSE3/Lie_with_Statistics.pdf
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/bag-of-tricks/chap10.pdf
http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/stat3.html
Your personal desire to make revisionist history doesn't actually change anything. You've even attempted revisionist history on my posting where I said the US hasn't bombed civilian centers since WW2. Your either deluded or so full of hate that you couldn't see the truth if it smacked you across the face.
What makes you think anyone would ever tolerate using robots on civilians? Your asking that the civilians in charge start ordering the murder of civilians in a manner that only happens in science fiction books.
If anything it could be argued that by removing emotions they are less likely to lose their cool and go overboard. A robot doesn't have PTSD, doesn't suffer from racism, sexism or other ism's and isn't subject to the same discrimination that humans are subject too.
It doesn't care that someone is smelly, it doesn't get annoyed, doesn't suffer from mental illness and can have the rules of engagement hard coded into it's instruction set. Robots are less likely to make mistakes, get sloppy, suffer fatigue and in the end are probably less likely to suffer friendly fire incidents.
Can a robot be subject to programming errors? Of course, entire books and movies have covered the subject for decades, meaning anybody working on one is highly cognizant of the possibility and likely to do their damnedest to make sure that doesn't happen.
I said WWI, not WW2.
The death toll of WWI was around 37,000,000 - which sounds a lot like 'tens of millions'. The death toll of the Spanish flu was about 50 million (with high estimates of 100 million), which also sounds a lot like 'tens of millions'.
There are lies, damn lies and statistics, and what you did right there is a perfect example. My statement is factual and you are trying to manipulate statistics in such a way to take credit away from where it is due. Your statement is disingenuous when the US gives tens of Billions of dollars more in Foreign aid per year, every single year.
The US army was crippled in Vietnam by a policy of not bombing near civilian centers which is why the North built as much of their military strength their as they could. They knew the US wouldn't touch anything near the cities and fully exploited the policy. The inability to target anything near a city was directly inspirational for the development of GPS guided munitions that are in use today.
Next time you might want to pause and read what I actually wrote and take a moment to look for some citations before responding. Just like with the other guy, remove the hyberbole and it's much easier to take you seriously. For the meanwhile I'd like to suggest you spend a little time in the history section of your local library before trying to argue history next time.
Cadillac has picked up their game across the board from the ATS, CTS and the XTS with what has to be just about the greatest turn around of any automotive manufacture ever. I have every confidence that they will get this car right and that it will be worth the proverbial money. Hell, even Top Gear magazine (typically very Anti American) gave the ATS and new CTS high praise.
GM should have made this car before they made the Volt. People are far more likely to accept a pricier car at the luxury end of the segment (eco-sheek) than in the family segment where it is much harder to justify the price differential. Now the problem is that people will think of this as an expensive Volt and that may make it difficult to sell.
Remove the hyberbole from your argument and people are much more likely to take you seriously.
For an example of something where the two sides had something close you need only look at WWI. The two sides had very close capacity, the result was a multiyear quagmire that resulted in the death in tens of millions of people as neither side was able to quickly 'win'. Because it was so drawn out with everyone tied down it also directly resulted in the Spanish flu killing tens of millions of people. Wars that are "fair" are wars that kill far more people than wars that aren't and history is riddle with countless millions of dead bodies that prove my point.
The US hasn't targeted civilian centers since WW2, luckily technology has changed quite a bit since then. The reality is that they have spent billions of dollars developing better technology for the sole purpose of not hitting civilians. Hitting civilians only pisses off the local population and it places your assets at risk for another run because your original military target still has to be taken out. A more accurate weapon is far more valuable for any military. Unless your Hezbollah or a similiar terrorist organization, there simply isn't any value in using weapons against civilians.
The US provides more foreign aid than other country on earth and has done so for decades. Any number of nations depend of the US for medical and food aid for basic survival and have for decades. I know it's popular in certain circles to hate on the US, but try doing a little actual research before hopping on the hype train.
It's the future and whining about it is no different than whining about the advent of the rifle or the machine gun or the bow. Your taking the fight away from the human being through a layer of abstraction to keep your soldier alive. The layer of abstraction in this case happens to be a robot, once upon a time it was a gun or a bow.
The people complaining about this are really no different than the Luddites that think warfare should be conduced hand to hand with swords and maces. They wont be satisfied unless their own soldiers are getting killed on the battlefield too. Technology advances whether you want it to or not. Change and human nature are the only things that stay the same.
You are quite right about the wobble effect used to help find candidates. It's extremely difficult to get direct pictures, however we have done it. Since it sounds like you have some interest in the subject I'll provide some links for you to read on. Interestingly enough the planet first planet we directly pictured had been captured by Hubble and overlooked for years as we didn't have the technique for combing through the data at the time!
http://www.universetoday.com/26353/new-technique-allows-astronomers-to-discover-exoplanets-in-old-hubble-images/
I like the list of habitable exoplanets, as this is where the future of humanity has to go someday.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/bad_astronomy/2012/11/exoplanet_pictures_astronomers_have_photos_of_alien_planets.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2452217/A-lonely-planet-Giant-gas-world-sun-orbit-floating-space.html
http://www.google.com/imgres?biw=1920&bih=963&tbm=isch&tbnid=kjlHVn7dUiT4lM:&imgrefurl=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3453478/First-direct-pictures-of-planets-outside-our-solar-system.html&docid=WY-uZHkJtvY5FM&imgurl=http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01113/HR_8799_1113907c.jpg&w=460&h=288&ei=qp5aUonvOYnM9QTa1IHICw&zoom=1&ved=1t:3588,r:89,s:0,i:354&iact=rc&page=3&tbnh=178&tbnw=284&start=76&ndsp=38&tx=85&ty=84
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/nov/13/first-bona-fide-direct-images-of-exoplanets
Because a set of statistics for rocky worlds outside of this solar system with water now has a 1 in the column where it used to have a zero. We now have a data point where we used to have nothing, and that is a beginning. It's really the entire point of the Kepler mission when you think about it, to gather data so that we can better generate state statistics. We need data and in any number of critical fields the slot has a 0 in it.
Science starts somewhere and this is an indicator that were not wasting our resources by looking for rocky planets with water. We now know that they have existed in at least one other place in the universe, even if it wasn't a fully formed planet. For a while when we first started finding planets all we found were gas giants that were far larger than Jupiter and there were calls to stop looking as the costs were considered a waste.
How do we know if something is common or not until we go looking and persist for a scientifically meaningful period of time? When I was in school the idea that we would ever actually take a physical picture of a planet around another solar system was science fiction. Decades later and we have pictures of many planets around other solar systems and even planets that do not orbit a solar system at all.
Remember that all the the security in the world is considered worthless if the other person has physical access to your disk. Encryption can be broken in a number of different ways, it often simply isn't implemented correctly. However you have to recall that your encryption is really quite worthless when I can install a cheap camera above your desk or a keylogger on your keyboard and simply capture your password.
This shouldn't really surprise someone. When you think about a data center or server rack is arguably about the most valuable square footage that you can have. Think of a comparison to a typical jewelry shop, it might have $250,000 to a $1,000,000 in a vault and it's not easy to liquidate for anything resembling it's retail value. Now think of a typical bank vault, it probably has a typical amount of money, and again liquidation is an issue (look up money laundering for the challenges drug dealers face plus serial numbers).
Now think of a single rack in a data-center where a low end server can easily cost $5000 and nobody blinks an eye at something costing $25,000. A single rack can easily be worth a million dollars or more depending on how it is loaded. You can also easily resell IT equipment or part it out and there is a much smaller chance of getting caught. Serial numbers are an issue of course, but if something gets sent overseas the cost of getting caught drops significanly while the value is pretty much retained.
If you were to look at the sheer value of the contents of a building the only buildings that could possibly compete with a data center would be the exceptional bank vault and factories such as where they build new jetliners.
I sincerely doubt that they have people manually review much of anything (new accounts perhaps?). Companies are going to fight this kind of thing at the macro level, not at the micro level. I'm sure security staff investigate individual instances of note that are flagged by automated system in order to beef up security knowledge or see if an account should be banned. That being said I would imagine that they have automate the overwhelming majority of the work.
The ad agencies have been battling this kind of thing since at least the 90's as getting caught serving malicious ads is a good way to get blocked by any number of companies. It's not that they do it necessarily out of altruistic behavior for the better of mankind. It's more a case of having someone like Google warn users that your site is delivering malicious content is a good way to see a serious drop in page rank and traffic in a hurry.
If you aren't paying for the product you are the product.
Not defending Bing in particular here, but every ad network gets utilized to deliver ads by malicious parties. Every ad company you can think of has staff that work full time just to look for and filter out malicious ads. A pretty significant portion of all malware is delivered my ads that are unwittingly served by sites from Facebook to CNN or any other site you can think of.
Here's a nice link to a NIST report on the matter that you can get to once the government gets back to work. The problem goes back many, many years, so why on earth is this being reported as news?
Is 500,000 in sales considered pretty good? To put this in comparison the Surface has been considered a disaster by many here (myself included) and that sold 1.7 million.
I won't argue your other points on mouse and multiple on-screen app windows as they are quite valid. My point is that I think Google could be much more successful in pushing Android on laptops than Chrome. Certainly there is work that would be needed, but that is absolutely paltry compared to the amount of work that it would take to bring Chrome up to par in terms of apps, developer familiarity and market acceptance.