Curiously, for a state whose motto is "Live free or die", NH continues to permit a government monopoly on the sale of any booze punchier than beer or wine. Those two can be purchased at grocery and convenience stores; but if you want the hard stuff it's off to one of the state's state-owned liquor distribution facilities.
Even Snowden knew this would happen. There's a reason he's gone public with his identity. Now he can't be killed or disappeared without everyone knowing exactly what's going on.
I'd still be pretty nervous, if I were in his shoes, about letting the feds take me alive(even if the public eye doesn't allow them to give you a full Bagram special, prolonged solitary confinement is pretty harrowing and de-facto entirely legal); but it probably does reduce his odds of just mysteriously disappearing to one of our black sites.
Now that being said: Breaking confidentiality on top-secret stuff is no laughing matter. It's treason, a capital offense.
It's no laughing matter, but it's not treason. Treason is defined in the Constitution and this ain't it.
It's worth noting that 'treason' is one of the very few(possibly only, I can't remember if there are any others) offenses specifically defined in the constitution, rather than being left to "eh, congress will write some laws when they get together, and the several states already have things in place to keep murder and cannibalism to a minimum". And that's because the framers knew how... versatile... 'treason' can be if you allow it to be defined by whatever butthurt government is vexed with somebody at the moment.
Isn't it obvious? There is nothing more destructive to democracy than allowing the electorate to know what they are voting for! How can you possibly get things done with a bunch of 'constituents' whining about what is being done in their name?
And if it turns out that he just blew what might have prevented several 9/11 level attacks? We're talking about saving lives here. He should be prosecuted, no doubt.
Do tell me, because I'd like to hear an actual argument to this effect, how his revelations threaten much of anything, except the wounded self-importance of the people behind the program...
It is customary to keep the existence of a specific wiretap a secret for a period of time, until the evidence has been gathered and is ready for use. The logic here is obvious: If wiretap orders were public, John Smith could just check the daily wiretaps RSS feed and determine whether he is being listened to, thus destroying the value of the wiretap.
For extraordinarily broad, no-end-in-sight, wiretaps, though, essentially no useful information is provided to any suspect by the revelation of the program. If all I know is that the NSA demands every phone metadata record in the US and has swift, privileged, access to the who's who of internet companies, that tells me absolutely nothing of use. All the paranoids and skeptics already strongly suspected that this was the case, so this merely provides proof in writing of what any sensible perp would have already assumed, and the scope of the programs is so vast that it is impossible to infer anything about your specific case that would make it easier to hide.
Obviously, the program was secret because its operators didn't want any inconvenient 'questions' or 'displeasure'; but that isn't a good reason, just an attractive one.
Had he leaked "The NSA knows Muhammad Ibn Al-Jihad's 4 phone-numbers-he-thinks-are-secret and is recording all of them", that'd be the sort of leak that would be obviously damaging and irresponsible. "The NSA tracks all calls routed through US telcos", though, tells nobody anything specific to them. Plus, the program is supposedly all-totally-legal-and-on-the-up-and-up-and-whatnot, so being exposed shouldn't even threaten its continuation(unlike the previous illegal wiretapping program that we threw some after-the-fact legality on when it was revealed).
So, please, let's hear an argument about why revealing this program is harmful. I'd be interested to hear a good one; because so far I haven't even heard bad ones.
I'm not an expert on the matter; but my understanding is that there are all sorts of tools for drawing inferences about historical climate. The resolution tends to get coarser, and the precision isn't as good as having a network of contemporary monitoring stations; but it isn't a total shot in the dark.
Ice cores, if you can find suitably deep drill sites and observe good handling practices, can be very helpful. I don't think we have any that go back more than ~800,000 years; but that's certainly something.
For older stuff, plant and animal fossils can help you map out what climate zone a given area was subject to when the fossils were laid down. The geologic record should also provide some information on how active volcanic activity has been as a greenhouse gas source at various points in time.
For relatively recent; but pre-contemporary-monitoring, you can draw inferences from records of crop yields/successes/failures(a matter that has been of considerable interest, often complete with tax records from the relevant authority, for most of human civilization) and, once fossil fuel use kicks up, economic historians can provide decent estimates of burn volumes for much of modern human history.
If you really want to play the 'OMG Poor People!' card, it'd probably be worth considering the impact of even relatively modest shifts in climate or precipitation on the billion or two economically marginal subsistence dirt farmers and 'squalid urbanites who spend 50% or more of their household income on staple foods'...
The value of some highbrow beachfront property is highly visible; but total chickenshit compared to perturbations in the low-rent side of the agricultural sector.
Man, I certainly can't think of any better candidates for the chairmanship of the House Comittee on Science, Space, and Technology than a lawyer without any technical or scientific background, a big fan of SOPA, expanding the DMCA's restrictive elements, and PCIP. Just as icing on the cake, the guy is a Christian Scientist, so he probably has a worse-than-average relationship with medical science.
Hey, by the standards of US anti-communist puppets, the guy is practically a saint... Moderate levels of political repression, limited extrajudicial killings, no genocides!
Thailand's Rangers Task Force 45, in response to Army policy, has put its troops to the task of promoting and protecting the monarchy in cyber space,...
Retweeting Private Ryan.
And yet that made sense to someone in their military.
If I were in their military, I'd seriously consider trying to get a heroic assignment with the Rangers Task Force 45, Fightin' Keyboards Company, if it meant getting to spend my tour trolling the internet rather than any of the numerous dirty, dangerous, and/or tedious assignments that soldiers tend to get stuck with. Maybe even get a mild carpal tunnel injury from defending the king too hard, and have to accept an honorable discharge, wounded serving king and country!
I'd roll my eyes the whole time, of course; but it'd beat many of the alternatives...
Ironically, the Red Chinese appear to be hiring private 'social marketing contractors' to espouse the virtues of the Glorious Communist Party, while the Thais are using public-sector employees for the purpose...
(Incidentally, has anyone ever come out looking less foolish by using sock puppets?)
We are already doing this test. Haven't you noticed that the older people get and the closer to death, the more likely they are to turn to God?
Old people have a couple of inconvenient confounding variables:
By virtue of being old people, they tend to exhibit a definite demographic skew toward being old. Since religious activity has drifted in various ways over time, you run the risk of looking at 'attitudes of people who grew up ~60-70 years ago' rather than anything death specific. You'd want some controls among atypically healthy people of a similar age, if available, and people from other demographics who are atypically close to death.
You'd also want to control for dementia and other serious cognitive disruptions common in old people. Luckily, awareness of that is greater than it used to be, and cognitive screening more common, so it would probably be doable(if not convenient) to get a properly controlled sample to ensure that you aren't just looking at 'effects of memory loss and mental degradation on religiosity'(an interesting question in itself; but not the one you were looking to answer).
But let's say, um, hypothetically and all, that a... ah... friend happened to have recordings of a few hundred million people's phone calls and needed a giant computer to be able to interpret them....
WTF? The base of science is doubting everything - if you can't falsify a hypothesis, that hypothesis is outside the area of science.
Is this some insidious way to push towards the position that science and religion are both a matter of belief?
'Science' as a method and body of accrued knowledge isn't a matter of belief(which is why it has a long history of getting shit done while lesser epistemology waves its hands at uncertainty or contentedly chews its own cud); but an individual's relation to that body of knowledge is, necessarily, largely a belief test:
Even a practicing scientist will have personally tested only a tiny area of the world, and read in any detail only a slightly larger one(at which point they are already trusting their colleagues to, on average, have neither fucked up nor falsified their figures). Outside that, they pretty much depend on others to do the work and hand them the results.
This is not to say that all flavors of belief are identical: believing in some result because you've been told that it was obtained by scientific means is a different thing than believing in some result because you've been told that a magical pixie delivered it directly in a vision; but nobody has even close to enough time to actually do empiricism on more than a tiny sliver of the world. At best, we can do our best to seek out information that is highly likely to be the result of other people doing empiricism, properly, and accept that until further notice.
I'd be interested to see(though am at a loss for how one could...ethically...arrange such a test) whether you see the same thing in mortality-salience scenarios where it is explicitly clear that science won't help here, or whether that leads to a sharp jump in enthusiasm for something else.
Given the sheer scale of applied science's obvious successes(and, where applicable, the equally dramatic and unmistakable nature of its fuckups) it isn't a huge surprise that people would find some degree of belief in it almost inevitable. To do otherwise would be like trying to make it through a dinner party with the Hellenic pantheon without recourse to polytheism.
However, there are plenty of things that(while fundamentally amenable to scientific investigation) the answers available so far are incomplete and/or very bad news. I'm inclined to wonder if, in the face of this sort of 'failure' by science, people would skew in some other direction. Anecdotally, the steady trickle of terminal cancer cases and other incurables to the wacky and sometimes gruesome world of alt-med suggests yes; but anecdotes are more emotionally compelling than actually informative.
It is extremely convenient when doing large building and/or campus networking, though...
Sure, it makes very little sense to do 10Gb to the drop(barring fairly unusual workstation use cases); but if all those 1GbE clients actually start leaning on the network(and with everybody's documents on the fileserver, OS and application deployment over the network, etc, etc. you don't even need a terribly impressive internet connection for this to happen), having a 1Gb link to a 48-port(sometimes more, if stacked) switch becomes a bit of an issue.
Same principle applies, over shorter distances, with datacenter cabling.
For what? What's the application? Way too expensive to run to my IP Phone or Desktop PC (could juse use fiber or copper, why both?). Unnecessary in the datacenter (we don't need PoE). What's the use case?
Purists demand that One Cable Rule Them All. This naturally leads to a One True Cable that is wildly overengineered and expensive for the keyboards and mice and IP phones of the world, while still failing to support common, but in some way unusually demanding, edge scenarios.
If it was a EU bear it would be flopping on the ground like a soccer player.
Well, if it were an EU bear, it would qualify for healthcare and a generous period of sick leave, so that behavior would be totally adaptive. It's all about evolving to suit your ecological niche!
"We might not see them since the demand for them nearly anywhere else is naturally going to be weak."
I'd be inclined to imagine that the dashcam market, except to the extent that parts of it are still hanging on to hardware built around old analog video standards(and, to be fair, NTSC/PAL are crap; but composite video cabling is cheap and fairly idiot proof, so it has its charms for things like DIY rear-view cam installs, just as VGA seems likely to endure for ages in in-wall and long-run projector wiring, because it is far more tolerant of long runs without active repeaters than its fancy digital successors), is fairly closely tied to the hardware that cellphones are being built with.
Lower resolution will continue to be cheaper, of course, (and easier on the batteries and the SD card for long recording sessions); but given the massive volume of camera module shipments, and SoC support for those camera modules, even in really lousy phones, I'd imagine that 'HD' will become available, if not necessarily ubiquitous fairly soon, and at a fairly modest premium.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hello, this is Fred who-is-definitely-not-from-Hyderabad, thank you for calling killbot technical support, how can I help you today?"
"Hi Fred, I'm afraid my killbot has been refusing all targeting instructions and attempting to kill me."
"Ah, let me check with my supervisor, one moment please."
"Thank you for your patience. Please try turning it off and never turning it on again."
Curiously, for a state whose motto is "Live free or die", NH continues to permit a government monopoly on the sale of any booze punchier than beer or wine. Those two can be purchased at grocery and convenience stores; but if you want the hard stuff it's off to one of the state's state-owned liquor distribution facilities.
I'm hoping that they are still implied by the sheer absurdity of what I wrote. Hoping.
Even Snowden knew this would happen. There's a reason he's gone public with his identity. Now he can't be killed or disappeared without everyone knowing exactly what's going on.
I'd still be pretty nervous, if I were in his shoes, about letting the feds take me alive(even if the public eye doesn't allow them to give you a full Bagram special, prolonged solitary confinement is pretty harrowing and de-facto entirely legal); but it probably does reduce his odds of just mysteriously disappearing to one of our black sites.
It's no laughing matter, but it's not treason. Treason is defined in the Constitution and this ain't it.
It's worth noting that 'treason' is one of the very few(possibly only, I can't remember if there are any others) offenses specifically defined in the constitution, rather than being left to "eh, congress will write some laws when they get together, and the several states already have things in place to keep murder and cannibalism to a minimum". And that's because the framers knew how... versatile... 'treason' can be if you allow it to be defined by whatever butthurt government is vexed with somebody at the moment.
Isn't it obvious? There is nothing more destructive to democracy than allowing the electorate to know what they are voting for! How can you possibly get things done with a bunch of 'constituents' whining about what is being done in their name?
And if it turns out that he just blew what might have prevented several 9/11 level attacks?
We're talking about saving lives here. He should be prosecuted, no doubt.
Do tell me, because I'd like to hear an actual argument to this effect, how his revelations threaten much of anything, except the wounded self-importance of the people behind the program...
It is customary to keep the existence of a specific wiretap a secret for a period of time, until the evidence has been gathered and is ready for use. The logic here is obvious: If wiretap orders were public, John Smith could just check the daily wiretaps RSS feed and determine whether he is being listened to, thus destroying the value of the wiretap.
For extraordinarily broad, no-end-in-sight, wiretaps, though, essentially no useful information is provided to any suspect by the revelation of the program. If all I know is that the NSA demands every phone metadata record in the US and has swift, privileged, access to the who's who of internet companies, that tells me absolutely nothing of use. All the paranoids and skeptics already strongly suspected that this was the case, so this merely provides proof in writing of what any sensible perp would have already assumed, and the scope of the programs is so vast that it is impossible to infer anything about your specific case that would make it easier to hide.
Obviously, the program was secret because its operators didn't want any inconvenient 'questions' or 'displeasure'; but that isn't a good reason, just an attractive one.
Had he leaked "The NSA knows Muhammad Ibn Al-Jihad's 4 phone-numbers-he-thinks-are-secret and is recording all of them", that'd be the sort of leak that would be obviously damaging and irresponsible. "The NSA tracks all calls routed through US telcos", though, tells nobody anything specific to them. Plus, the program is supposedly all-totally-legal-and-on-the-up-and-up-and-whatnot, so being exposed shouldn't even threaten its continuation(unlike the previous illegal wiretapping program that we threw some after-the-fact legality on when it was revealed).
So, please, let's hear an argument about why revealing this program is harmful. I'd be interested to hear a good one; because so far I haven't even heard bad ones.
You vote for them.
Please don't insinuate that I'm a Texan voter, I have feelings too you know...
I'm not an expert on the matter; but my understanding is that there are all sorts of tools for drawing inferences about historical climate. The resolution tends to get coarser, and the precision isn't as good as having a network of contemporary monitoring stations; but it isn't a total shot in the dark.
Ice cores, if you can find suitably deep drill sites and observe good handling practices, can be very helpful. I don't think we have any that go back more than ~800,000 years; but that's certainly something.
For older stuff, plant and animal fossils can help you map out what climate zone a given area was subject to when the fossils were laid down. The geologic record should also provide some information on how active volcanic activity has been as a greenhouse gas source at various points in time.
For relatively recent; but pre-contemporary-monitoring, you can draw inferences from records of crop yields/successes/failures(a matter that has been of considerable interest, often complete with tax records from the relevant authority, for most of human civilization) and, once fossil fuel use kicks up, economic historians can provide decent estimates of burn volumes for much of modern human history.
If you really want to play the 'OMG Poor People!' card, it'd probably be worth considering the impact of even relatively modest shifts in climate or precipitation on the billion or two economically marginal subsistence dirt farmers and 'squalid urbanites who spend 50% or more of their household income on staple foods'...
The value of some highbrow beachfront property is highly visible; but total chickenshit compared to perturbations in the low-rent side of the agricultural sector.
Man, I certainly can't think of any better candidates for the chairmanship of the House Comittee on Science, Space, and Technology than a lawyer without any technical or scientific background, a big fan of SOPA, expanding the DMCA's restrictive elements, and PCIP. Just as icing on the cake, the guy is a Christian Scientist, so he probably has a worse-than-average relationship with medical science.
Honestly, how do we end up with these jokers?
Go ahead and hack the world. If you get caught, I never said that and we've never heard of you.
Hey, by the standards of US anti-communist puppets, the guy is practically a saint... Moderate levels of political repression, limited extrajudicial killings, no genocides!
Retweeting Private Ryan.
And yet that made sense to someone in their military.
If I were in their military, I'd seriously consider trying to get a heroic assignment with the Rangers Task Force 45, Fightin' Keyboards Company, if it meant getting to spend my tour trolling the internet rather than any of the numerous dirty, dangerous, and/or tedious assignments that soldiers tend to get stuck with. Maybe even get a mild carpal tunnel injury from defending the king too hard, and have to accept an honorable discharge, wounded serving king and country!
I'd roll my eyes the whole time, of course; but it'd beat many of the alternatives...
I, for one, welcome our new 50 Cent Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party Overlords (Thailand Branch).
Ironically, the Red Chinese appear to be hiring private 'social marketing contractors' to espouse the virtues of the Glorious Communist Party, while the Thais are using public-sector employees for the purpose...
(Incidentally, has anyone ever come out looking less foolish by using sock puppets?)
You might be able to do so ethically with terminally ill patients.
That does sound a good deal more ethical than my 'banal questionnaires and harrowing mock-executions' strategy...
We are already doing this test. Haven't you noticed that the older people get and the closer to death, the more likely they are to turn to God?
Old people have a couple of inconvenient confounding variables:
By virtue of being old people, they tend to exhibit a definite demographic skew toward being old. Since religious activity has drifted in various ways over time, you run the risk of looking at 'attitudes of people who grew up ~60-70 years ago' rather than anything death specific. You'd want some controls among atypically healthy people of a similar age, if available, and people from other demographics who are atypically close to death.
You'd also want to control for dementia and other serious cognitive disruptions common in old people. Luckily, awareness of that is greater than it used to be, and cognitive screening more common, so it would probably be doable(if not convenient) to get a properly controlled sample to ensure that you aren't just looking at 'effects of memory loss and mental degradation on religiosity'(an interesting question in itself; but not the one you were looking to answer).
But let's say, um, hypothetically and all, that a... ah... friend happened to have recordings of a few hundred million people's phone calls and needed a giant computer to be able to interpret them....
Actually, that would be considerably easier and cheaper to implement.
WTF? The base of science is doubting everything - if you can't falsify a hypothesis, that hypothesis is outside the area of science.
Is this some insidious way to push towards the position that science and religion are both a matter of belief?
'Science' as a method and body of accrued knowledge isn't a matter of belief(which is why it has a long history of getting shit done while lesser epistemology waves its hands at uncertainty or contentedly chews its own cud); but an individual's relation to that body of knowledge is, necessarily, largely a belief test:
Even a practicing scientist will have personally tested only a tiny area of the world, and read in any detail only a slightly larger one(at which point they are already trusting their colleagues to, on average, have neither fucked up nor falsified their figures). Outside that, they pretty much depend on others to do the work and hand them the results.
This is not to say that all flavors of belief are identical: believing in some result because you've been told that it was obtained by scientific means is a different thing than believing in some result because you've been told that a magical pixie delivered it directly in a vision; but nobody has even close to enough time to actually do empiricism on more than a tiny sliver of the world. At best, we can do our best to seek out information that is highly likely to be the result of other people doing empiricism, properly, and accept that until further notice.
I'd be interested to see(though am at a loss for how one could...ethically...arrange such a test) whether you see the same thing in mortality-salience scenarios where it is explicitly clear that science won't help here, or whether that leads to a sharp jump in enthusiasm for something else.
Given the sheer scale of applied science's obvious successes(and, where applicable, the equally dramatic and unmistakable nature of its fuckups) it isn't a huge surprise that people would find some degree of belief in it almost inevitable. To do otherwise would be like trying to make it through a dinner party with the Hellenic pantheon without recourse to polytheism.
However, there are plenty of things that(while fundamentally amenable to scientific investigation) the answers available so far are incomplete and/or very bad news. I'm inclined to wonder if, in the face of this sort of 'failure' by science, people would skew in some other direction. Anecdotally, the steady trickle of terminal cancer cases and other incurables to the wacky and sometimes gruesome world of alt-med suggests yes; but anecdotes are more emotionally compelling than actually informative.
its also not needed for most work environment.
It is extremely convenient when doing large building and/or campus networking, though...
Sure, it makes very little sense to do 10Gb to the drop(barring fairly unusual workstation use cases); but if all those 1GbE clients actually start leaning on the network(and with everybody's documents on the fileserver, OS and application deployment over the network, etc, etc. you don't even need a terribly impressive internet connection for this to happen), having a 1Gb link to a 48-port(sometimes more, if stacked) switch becomes a bit of an issue.
Same principle applies, over shorter distances, with datacenter cabling.
For what? What's the application? Way too expensive to run to my IP Phone or Desktop PC (could juse use fiber or copper, why both?). Unnecessary in the datacenter (we don't need PoE). What's the use case?
Purists demand that One Cable Rule Them All. This naturally leads to a One True Cable that is wildly overengineered and expensive for the keyboards and mice and IP phones of the world, while still failing to support common, but in some way unusually demanding, edge scenarios.
If it was a EU bear it would be flopping on the ground like a soccer player.
Well, if it were an EU bear, it would qualify for healthcare and a generous period of sick leave, so that behavior would be totally adaptive. It's all about evolving to suit your ecological niche!
"We might not see them since the demand for them nearly anywhere else is naturally going to be weak."
I'd be inclined to imagine that the dashcam market, except to the extent that parts of it are still hanging on to hardware built around old analog video standards(and, to be fair, NTSC/PAL are crap; but composite video cabling is cheap and fairly idiot proof, so it has its charms for things like DIY rear-view cam installs, just as VGA seems likely to endure for ages in in-wall and long-run projector wiring, because it is far more tolerant of long runs without active repeaters than its fancy digital successors), is fairly closely tied to the hardware that cellphones are being built with.
Lower resolution will continue to be cheaper, of course, (and easier on the batteries and the SD card for long recording sessions); but given the massive volume of camera module shipments, and SoC support for those camera modules, even in really lousy phones, I'd imagine that 'HD' will become available, if not necessarily ubiquitous fairly soon, and at a fairly modest premium.