Sidestepping the Bush landmine for a moment, let's look at another conspiracy. The CIA and other intelligence agencies were clearly involved in a coverup after the Kennedy assassination. What was revealed after all those documents were declassified in the 90s was that the CIA et al were covering up their own incompetence in the Oswald investigation pre-assassination which was bungled every step of the way. Oswald was tracked extensively in the years leading up to the assassination, as he should have been, since he attempted to turn over classified information to the Soviets and attempted to revoke his American citizenship. But he also made a few remarks about killing the President, and if it got out that the CIA knew this and didn't do anything, it would look bad. That and they were running an illegal mail-opening operation on him. America's favorite conspiracy theory is really mostly a story of incompetence and its attempted coverup.
Before I believe any government conspiracy theory, I will believe it is simply covering up its incompetence. It's the simplest, most plausible explanation until I see overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Not going to jail would rank pretty high in my list if I were to engage in a conspiracy, and anyone finding out about said conspiracy would compromise that. I doubt anyone sitting in a Congressional hearing would consider their conspiracy a success.
Could I please see at least 1 more post about the whole 140 years ago and 28k light years conundrum? I didn't quite get it reading the first 20 of them.
{{Citation Needed}} And then we have...
The same thing that makes people think the US Gov was sneaky enough to pull off the 9/11 attacks, but not enough to hide the mountains of evidence. Without a citation. Yeah, apparently they really were that sneaky, because I haven't come across a molehill of evidence, let alone a mountain, let alone multiple mountains.
perfect way to do disinformation. Which is a good reason as to why they're not doing it. The AF just isn't that good at what it does that I'll believe they instituted a "perfect" disinformation campaign. I work with them, and I'm rather unimpressed. I mean, have you seen their commercials? Come on!
The "good stuff" seems to be mostly names of British officials, which are typically redacted from released documents. Either that, or they mistakenly used the black highlighter again.
The AF came out a few years ago and admitted to spreading rumors about aliens in Roswell and other places to cover up their experimental aircraft projects. As an intelligence analyst with a top secret and above clearance (some of the classifications have names which are themselves classified) working in "the system", I'm pretty sure there's not much more. We tend to overclassify things just to be on the safe side, classify things out of habit, overestimate the importance of what we're doing, underestimate how much is already known, etc, but to suggest there's a conspiracy to cover up UFO sightings is ridiculous. You need an act of Congress to get the CIA and FBI to talk each other. What makes anyone think the US government is competent enough to pull off a conspiracy?
I've always viewed people who are unable to accept at least one or two things on faith as having a false sense of strength. Faith being believing in something despite a lack of evidence and in spite of counter-evidence, I see using faith more indicative of a lack of critical thinking skills. I could ignore all the evidence and counter-evidence I want, but that wouldn't make me strong, just misguided and stupid.
I've been thinking just the opposite. It seems to me most summaries are followed by heaps of sarcastic, ironic, humorous, etc remarks and very few worthwhile posts that add to the discussion. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the funny posts, but I don't need to see 40 of them before I see an insightful one.
Which country? That would be China, my friend. DoD gets thousands of attacks from China a day and they've trainined millions in various forms of cyber warfare. We are already at cyberwar with China. If botnets are our defense, I say fire em up.
After having been there a few times, I'll just point out that it is 100% illegal to have any kind of pr0n in country. No DVDs, no Playboys, no nothin, so don't mail it (I realize you made the above statement in jest, but someone reading it may think it's a good idea).
That being said, I've seen more pr0n on classified servers than I've seen in the rest of my previous life. We had to remove about 3 or 4 TB off of one server so the map server could run properly. That and it was slowing down Call of Duty. Mind you, it wasn't all of it, just a couple of TB.
Really? I have pistols in a keypad combination safe. My rifles have key locks on the trigger guard and the keys are kept in a different safe. Try lowering that number quite a bit, as gun owners are not as dumb as you would like to make them out. Or better yet, try learning something about the subject. I would suggest More Guns, Less Crime, a thorough and academic work where the author started off trying to show how guns are bad and ended up buying one for home defense.
I have a lot of issues with the various things in this article, but I'll keep it to one for now. Maybe Atta could have been arrested because of better coordination between local law enforcement. But his arrest almost certainly would NOT have prevented 9/11. Moussawi was supposed to be there that fateful day, and it still went down. One person arrested, even one of the many masterminds, would not have prevented it.
Also, no local law enforcement officer would have been able to piece together this plot from looking through one car BEFORE the event. Piloting multiple planes simultaneously into various landmarks was just too implausible to be believed before it happened. Even if John McClain himself figured it out, he wouldn't be able to convince anyone to help him stop 19 other people from boarding planes in multiple airports.
Sharing information sure beats what we're doing now, both in law enforcement and the intelligence community where I work, which is holding everything close so no one else can take credit. But let's not exaggerate the benefits here.
Oh, I don't know. I quite liked it. It was a bit repetitive for the first couple of minutes to be sure, but the climactic crescendo at the four and half minute mark nicely underscored their theme of trying to sound like Nine Inch Nails background music. I found it quite bold and powerful in a scrape-your-teeth-down-the-chalkboard kind of way.
...would like to see more. Was there actually an article there, or was that just a picture? How about something about the methodologies used, a description of the organization of the network, maybe even some metrics like centrality. Something other than a picture, ferchrissakes.
Working within the intelligence community and using various government systems (I'm on one right now), I have a few guesses as to why they were so expensive.
1. They were needed to run some graphics-intensive programs, so they bought high-end gaming machines. I've seen some of these around in the 3k price range.
2. They included dongles or licenses for expensive software. I've seen many in the 3-5k range, with a few in the 100k range, though they shouldn't be factored into the price of the laptop. Government contractor produced software is considered free as in beer to those using it. When the government has a program written for it, it generally buys unlimited licenses so anyone can load and use it.
3. They bought some sort of rugged laptop for field use, like a Panasonic toughbook. I've seen many of these around. Or possibly it was a Sony Vaio micro PC, which I've seen as well, though not many.
4. The most likely one IMHO, is the budget was so high that that they got carried away and bought the most expensive cool-looking laptop they could find.
The maintaining of the separation of powers, protecting the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution as well as defending them is the is the ultimate Patriotic Act. I'm no fan of the Patriot Act, but I'd just like to point out something that bothers me. It seems the people on the left most vocal about defending the Constitution and the intent of its founders are the ones most determined to destroy its second amendment. Our founders intended us to have freedom of speech, to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, and to be able to have military weapons to defend ourselves and our nation. It's one package.
I thought you couldn't discuss a NSL, so how would we know that hundreds of thousands of them have been issued? That number bothers me too. I think it's just an arbitrary large round number the ACLU used to emphasize their point. There were probably a large number, out of which some number were unwarranted, but these exaggerations don't help anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sidestepping the Bush landmine for a moment, let's look at another conspiracy. The CIA and other intelligence agencies were clearly involved in a coverup after the Kennedy assassination. What was revealed after all those documents were declassified in the 90s was that the CIA et al were covering up their own incompetence in the Oswald investigation pre-assassination which was bungled every step of the way. Oswald was tracked extensively in the years leading up to the assassination, as he should have been, since he attempted to turn over classified information to the Soviets and attempted to revoke his American citizenship. But he also made a few remarks about killing the President, and if it got out that the CIA knew this and didn't do anything, it would look bad. That and they were running an illegal mail-opening operation on him. America's favorite conspiracy theory is really mostly a story of incompetence and its attempted coverup.
Before I believe any government conspiracy theory, I will believe it is simply covering up its incompetence. It's the simplest, most plausible explanation until I see overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Not going to jail would rank pretty high in my list if I were to engage in a conspiracy, and anyone finding out about said conspiracy would compromise that. I doubt anyone sitting in a Congressional hearing would consider their conspiracy a success.
That's amazing. I'm at -1 Redundant for pointing out the redundant posts, most of which are insightful. I know, I know. I must be new here.
Could I please see at least 1 more post about the whole 140 years ago and 28k light years conundrum? I didn't quite get it reading the first 20 of them.
Those would be the unsuccessful ones, since you know about them. Successful conspiracies, by definition, are unknowable.
The "good stuff" seems to be mostly names of British officials, which are typically redacted from released documents. Either that, or they mistakenly used the black highlighter again.
The AF came out a few years ago and admitted to spreading rumors about aliens in Roswell and other places to cover up their experimental aircraft projects. As an intelligence analyst with a top secret and above clearance (some of the classifications have names which are themselves classified) working in "the system", I'm pretty sure there's not much more. We tend to overclassify things just to be on the safe side, classify things out of habit, overestimate the importance of what we're doing, underestimate how much is already known, etc, but to suggest there's a conspiracy to cover up UFO sightings is ridiculous. You need an act of Congress to get the CIA and FBI to talk each other. What makes anyone think the US government is competent enough to pull off a conspiracy?
I've been thinking just the opposite. It seems to me most summaries are followed by heaps of sarcastic, ironic, humorous, etc remarks and very few worthwhile posts that add to the discussion. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the funny posts, but I don't need to see 40 of them before I see an insightful one.
In which case this is 5D. Thanks a lot. As if it wasn't hard enough.
I think I finally messed with someone's OODA Loop.
And imagine a Beowolf cluster, and if it ran Linux, etc etc.
Which country? That would be China, my friend. DoD gets thousands of attacks from China a day and they've trainined millions in various forms of cyber warfare. We are already at cyberwar with China. If botnets are our defense, I say fire em up.
After having been there a few times, I'll just point out that it is 100% illegal to have any kind of pr0n in country. No DVDs, no Playboys, no nothin, so don't mail it (I realize you made the above statement in jest, but someone reading it may think it's a good idea).
That being said, I've seen more pr0n on classified servers than I've seen in the rest of my previous life. We had to remove about 3 or 4 TB off of one server so the map server could run properly. That and it was slowing down Call of Duty. Mind you, it wasn't all of it, just a couple of TB.
Really? I have pistols in a keypad combination safe. My rifles have key locks on the trigger guard and the keys are kept in a different safe. Try lowering that number quite a bit, as gun owners are not as dumb as you would like to make them out. Or better yet, try learning something about the subject. I would suggest More Guns, Less Crime, a thorough and academic work where the author started off trying to show how guns are bad and ended up buying one for home defense.
"the New Yorker focuses more on how incredible it is to have a group of very intelligent people sitting around a table developing ideas."
Hey, maybe the place where they THINK could be called a TANK. I can't believe no one's thought of this before!
I have a lot of issues with the various things in this article, but I'll keep it to one for now. Maybe Atta could have been arrested because of better coordination between local law enforcement. But his arrest almost certainly would NOT have prevented 9/11. Moussawi was supposed to be there that fateful day, and it still went down. One person arrested, even one of the many masterminds, would not have prevented it.
Also, no local law enforcement officer would have been able to piece together this plot from looking through one car BEFORE the event. Piloting multiple planes simultaneously into various landmarks was just too implausible to be believed before it happened. Even if John McClain himself figured it out, he wouldn't be able to convince anyone to help him stop 19 other people from boarding planes in multiple airports.
Sharing information sure beats what we're doing now, both in law enforcement and the intelligence community where I work, which is holding everything close so no one else can take credit. But let's not exaggerate the benefits here.
Oh, I don't know. I quite liked it. It was a bit repetitive for the first couple of minutes to be sure, but the climactic crescendo at the four and half minute mark nicely underscored their theme of trying to sound like Nine Inch Nails background music. I found it quite bold and powerful in a scrape-your-teeth-down-the-chalkboard kind of way.
...would like to see more. Was there actually an article there, or was that just a picture? How about something about the methodologies used, a description of the organization of the network, maybe even some metrics like centrality. Something other than a picture, ferchrissakes.
Working within the intelligence community and using various government systems (I'm on one right now), I have a few guesses as to why they were so expensive.
1. They were needed to run some graphics-intensive programs, so they bought high-end gaming machines. I've seen some of these around in the 3k price range.
2. They included dongles or licenses for expensive software. I've seen many in the 3-5k range, with a few in the 100k range, though they shouldn't be factored into the price of the laptop. Government contractor produced software is considered free as in beer to those using it. When the government has a program written for it, it generally buys unlimited licenses so anyone can load and use it.
3. They bought some sort of rugged laptop for field use, like a Panasonic toughbook. I've seen many of these around. Or possibly it was a Sony Vaio micro PC, which I've seen as well, though not many.
4. The most likely one IMHO, is the budget was so high that that they got carried away and bought the most expensive cool-looking laptop they could find.
Three FOOT floppy? Hate to to see it when it's not floppy.