Why do people insist upon treating a corporation like it is anything other than a legal fiction?
A corporation is a thing, not a person. It has no more consciousness than a hammer does, and therefore the concept of morality does not apply. A hammer is neither moral not immoral. It is amoral, and a corporation should be handled similarly.
This unconscious anthropomorphizing and the atmosphere of anonymization it creates has tempted more than a few people to try to pull some pretty underhanded stunts, particularly in the last ten years, then turn around and point at the sign out on the front lawn and claim that it was the "corporation" that actually did the foul deed. Then the hue and cry goes out to punish the instrument instead of the instigators. As if the cubicle worker and the office janitor had the faintest idea.
What rubbish.
In a hit-and-run, it isn't the car that is prosecuted. Similarly, the question should not what "Google" is doing, but what the CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt is doing. Or, at most, what the members of the Board of Directors are doing. People make the decisions; not the hammer.
Now; how about we this try again, and this time plug the names of people in, instead of an anonymous, faceless corporation's?
What "weather modification professionals?" Just where have you ever heard of anyone having a booming business of "modifying" the weather, outside of the funny papers?
The Red Chinese are looking more like bludgeoning buffoons every day. .
We've all carved our names in a tree in a park. We've all stolen a pack of gum or something from a store. We've all done petty crimes when we were young. Speak for yourself.
....who can legally kill.
"I would be very interested to see what would happen if a tech giant decided to play hardball with a government." Simple: EU would swear-out an arrest warrant and start extradition procedures on the idiots who thought they could play "hardball" with sovereign states.
A pity the Germans tore down Spandau Prison; that would have been just the place.
I had a bunch of users who wanted laptops as they spend a lot of time on the road. Understandable, but difficult to support without extra staffing. So I set the laptops up with nothing on them except a terminal session app that connects to XP-based virtual machines in the computer room, communicating via SSL-wrapped RDP. It works fairly well, and if a laptop is stolen or destroyed no data is lost.
Vivendi Universal bought-up mp3.com and bulldozed it, Microsoft bought-up RAV AntiVirus and buried it. Now, M$ will probably do the same with these others; buy-up the businesses and turn them into parking lots.
I take it you didn't bother to research the capabilities and limitations of spysats before you started your rant?
If you wish to make a valid point in the future, may I suggest you at least try to have at least a passing familiarity with the topic? And by that, I mean more than just sitting in a theater, watching some silly piece of Hollywood tripe. .
In any army, just like in any populace, you have the good, the bad, and the ugly. Distill-out the baddest of the bad, concentrate them into a single military unit ruled with an iron hand, and you have a Sondergruppe, or 'special group,' which you use for those jobs the regular army Joes would flat-out rebel over if ordered to do.
Sondergruppen have been around for quite awhile; they ran the death camps for the Nazis, cleaned-up Tiananmen Square for the Red Chinese, and are now deployed in Rangoon. The fact that the 66th, a regular army unit, is involved at all is an indicator that the Sondergruppen may be stretched too thin to handle the problem by themselves. A horrible idea, to supplement Sondergruppen with normal troops; regulars would sooner gun them down than have anything to do with that sort.
If they are, however, and if this military rebellion spreads, we could soon be looking at a full-blown civil war in Burma.
P.S.: Unless they're sophisticated enough to employ troposcatter or other techniques to mask their transmission site, any ham that keyed-up would either be incredibly stupid, or incredibly brave. Either way, they wouldn't live long if the junta took a dislike to them. .
I haven't seen many pro-democracy protesters in the USA either. That's because there is democracy in the U.S., though there are many who would love to be able to claim otherwise; then they wouldn't have to take responsibility for their government's actions.
Besides; it there wasn't any democracy in the U.S., I sincerely doubt you'd have had the courage to write what you just did, or survived it. .
Sanctions only work against governments that give a rat's ass about their citizens. The elite never feel a thing, unless you ferret-out and deliberately target just those resources available only to the elite.
The ruling class of the 'People's Republic' of North Korea didn't even blink when most of their populace were starving; it was only when it became difficult to get access to luxury items for their personal use that they came back to the negotiating table. .
Goodness; if you'd replace "business" with "irresponsible government", and "Capitalism" with "Socialism" in most of that lovely rant, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly.
Short-selling is actually selling shares you don't yet have, in the hopes the price will drop before you have to buy them back to balance the books. Those six million shares traded are most probably short-sellers taking their profits.
Only when the political will to do so is required, say population explosion is causing massive food/energy shortages will something like this possibly be considered.
Nope; sorry. That's when the "We need to solve our problems here first" crowd really gets into full throat. Funny thing, though; there's always one more problem that needs to be solved "first."
"I dunno about this 'climbing down out of the trees' thing, man. Seems to me we need to solve our problems here, first...."
I beg to disagree. Number stations are quite real. What possibly confused you is how some number stations operate.
Take the old Radio Moscow transmitter in East Berlin, for example. You are quite right that such HF broadcasts would often end with a looping tape containing info on what freq(s) the site would be transmitting next. Well and good.
Eventually, though, the tape ends and the transmitter shuts down. Fine. Now all you're listening to is a whole lot of nothing but white noise, right? STAY ON THE FREQ FOR ANOTHER 5-10 MINUTES. Suddenly another carrier comes up, and a woman's voice starts. On the Radio Moscow freq she would always start with "Achtung, achtung," then proceed to read-off a long string of number groups (NOT freqs!). When done, she would finish with "Ende," and the carrier would immediately drop.
The problem with DF-ing HF sites can be realized when you take a look at a FLR-9's or equivalent's antenna arrays: The wavelength of transmissions in the HF range are so long that a huge amount of space must be mapped-out between the receiving elements in order to produce sufficient phase-shift to generate an acceptably accurate line of bearing (LOB). This results in a very large, decidedly non-portable system that, in spite of its size and expense, will only generate a compass bearing, along which bearing the transmitter could be anywhere. You need a dead-minimum of TWO such facilities with AN/FLR-9s or the equivalent, geographically separated enough to create as close to a perpendicular LOB relative to the first as you can get. The width of a major continent will do nicely.
Unfortunately, a two-LOB fix is rarely used on its own, as there is no way to estimate the reliability of the fix. For that, you need at least ONE MORE site, itself just as geographically dispersed from the others, in order to create what is called an Elliptical Error Probablility, or EEP. I'm not going to attempt the math, but in a nutshell it's a circle drawn on the map within which the target transmitter has a certain chance of being found. EEPs range in confidence from 50-90%, depending upon the number of LOBs that can be taken upon a given target. The more LOBs taken, the higher the confidence and the smaller the size of the circle (not a job for the impatient).
Okay, now that's for your plain-vanilla HF transmitter with a plain-vanilla dipole antenna, sending a plain-vanilla carrier wave. Now, toss in a few rather interesting monkey-wrenches that folks can employ when they're not-too keen on being found: Troposcatter. Ionoscatter. Meteorscatter. Spread-spectrum. Hoppers. Things start getting fun at this point.
So, yes; in a way DF-ing a HF broadcast is 'simple,' as long as you have the BOO-KOO BUCKS required to construct, man, and maintain such a string of facilities, as well as the inter-site telecommunications network required to coordinate all operations.
NSA can do it. Me? Sorry; I already spent my lunch money for today.:)
Microsoft has conditioned you to expect suffering.
I agree whole-heartedly. It is just disgusting to watch how people wince and cross their fingers every time they make a change on a Microsoft OS, blink in astonishment if it works the first time, and think of this as normal.
I'm a fossil; I date back to the days when computers were housed in big white rooms, programs were punched into little pieces of cardboard or paper tape, and little Billy Gates slept on computer room floors. Want to know something? Even with those clunky, cantankerous, 16-64KB machines, we were astonished if things didn't work the first time. What happened? Microsoft happened.
I never heard of a "snow crash" until the first time I touched MS-DOS. Windows 1 & 2 were sick jokes. Windows 3.x froze the machine at least four times a day, to the point that PC manufacturers actually started installing a button leading directly to the CPU's RESET pin on the front panels of their machines. That sort of thing was unheard of until MS came into town.
I was foolish enough to hope the MS hell was over when NT 3.51 showed up, it was so good in comparison to what went before; probably because most of the code was derived from IBM's work. But then Bill Gate's so-called programmers 'accelerated' NT 4.x by loading the drivers into kernel space and everything went to crap again. An earlier post tried to point fingers at badly-written device drivers. Here's news for you, kiddies: bad drivers should not be able to crash a properly-written OS!
Then their horrific coding practices began to catch up with them, and now every user of a MS OS has to wrap it in layer after layer of security software just to keep the silly thing from getting eaten alive the moment it's connected to the Internet....
And people think this is all normal.
Shall I now mention a few of the lovely, anti-competitive dirty tricks built into the code? I personally remember the coding trap deliberately written into Windows 3.x so it would bomb when you tried to run the thing atop Digital Research's DR-DOS. Then there was the esoteric memory-addressing stunts built into a lot of MS apps and designed to do just one thing: page-fault Windows emulation sessions under OS/2.
And that last paragraph, my friends, is as far as I'm going to get into their business practices, as Wired did a very nice job of that back in 2000 with this article at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microsoft_ pr.html. I'm done; just thinking about Microsoft and all the grief they've caused people over the years has just about ruined the rest of my day.
And people still think this is all so very, very, normal.
Trying to stop botnets by taking-down servers is like trying to stop rock-throwing by confiscating rocks.
An exercise in futility.
You stop rock-throwing by going after the throwers. If these propeller-heads would stop playing with their toys long enough to spend fifteen minutes talking to the nearest cop they would realize this.
Ignore the silly botnets and invest the resources to find and punish their creators. Criminal behavior declines only when there is substantial risk of substantial punishment. Until that risk exists, you're just wasting everyone's time.
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Why do people insist upon treating a corporation like it is anything other than a legal fiction?
A corporation is a thing, not a person. It has no more consciousness than a hammer does, and therefore the concept of morality does not apply. A hammer is neither moral not immoral. It is amoral, and a corporation should be handled similarly.
This unconscious anthropomorphizing and the atmosphere of anonymization it creates has tempted more than a few people to try to pull some pretty underhanded stunts, particularly in the last ten years, then turn around and point at the sign out on the front lawn and claim that it was the "corporation" that actually did the foul deed. Then the hue and cry goes out to punish the instrument instead of the instigators. As if the cubicle worker and the office janitor had the faintest idea.
What rubbish.
In a hit-and-run, it isn't the car that is prosecuted. Similarly, the question should not what "Google" is doing, but what the CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt is doing. Or, at most, what the members of the Board of Directors are doing. People make the decisions; not the hammer.
Now; how about we this try again, and this time plug the names of people in, instead of an anonymous, faceless corporation's?
'Nuff said.
.
What "weather modification professionals?" Just where have you ever heard of anyone having a booming business of "modifying" the weather, outside of the funny papers?
The Red Chinese are looking more like bludgeoning buffoons every day.
.
A pity the Germans tore down Spandau Prison; that would have been just the place.
I had a bunch of users who wanted laptops as they spend a lot of time on the road. Understandable, but difficult to support without extra staffing. So I set the laptops up with nothing on them except a terminal session app that connects to XP-based virtual machines in the computer room, communicating via SSL-wrapped RDP. It works fairly well, and if a laptop is stolen or destroyed no data is lost.
So it might appear, but please observe one salient point:
GM & Associates bought-up the firms. Why, when it would have been simpler and far more profitable to simply sell those same firms their products?
This is not a new strategy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Vivendi Universal bought-up mp3.com and bulldozed it, Microsoft bought-up RAV AntiVirus and buried it. Now, M$ will probably do the same with these others; buy-up the businesses and turn them into parking lots.
Think Somalia. Just before the old despot fell, he opened the armories to any yahoo who came shuffling in and parroted the right slogans.
Flooding Burma with uncontrolled military hardware would very likely produce the same result.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3DE163DF93AA35751C1A964958260&n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes%20Topics%2FSubjects%2FF%2FFirearms
There was plenty of the same thing happening in Cambodia not-all that long ago, and not-all that far away, either.
They may be indeed be jumping to conclusions, but after the monstrosities of the Khmer Rouge http://columbia.thefreedictionary.com/Khymer+Rouge, perhaps they're a bit jumpy.
.
Oh, I've been there for the past twelve years.
Before then, I was in lovely little garden spots like Panama, Colombia, Peru, the East German 1-K Zone, Bolivia, and other such spiffy places.
When were you last in the USA?
.
I take it you didn't bother to research the capabilities and limitations of spysats before you started your rant?
If you wish to make a valid point in the future, may I suggest you at least try to have at least a passing familiarity with the topic? And by that, I mean more than just sitting in a theater, watching some silly piece of Hollywood tripe.
.
. . . for this sort of thing.
In any army, just like in any populace, you have the good, the bad, and the ugly. Distill-out the baddest of the bad, concentrate them into a single military unit ruled with an iron hand, and you have a Sondergruppe, or 'special group,' which you use for those jobs the regular army Joes would flat-out rebel over if ordered to do.
Sondergruppen have been around for quite awhile; they ran the death camps for the Nazis, cleaned-up Tiananmen Square for the Red Chinese, and are now deployed in Rangoon. The fact that the 66th, a regular army unit, is involved at all is an indicator that the Sondergruppen may be stretched too thin to handle the problem by themselves. A horrible idea, to supplement Sondergruppen with normal troops; regulars would sooner gun them down than have anything to do with that sort.
If they are, however, and if this military rebellion spreads, we could soon be looking at a full-blown civil war in Burma.
P.S.: Unless they're sophisticated enough to employ troposcatter or other techniques to mask their transmission site, any ham that keyed-up would either be incredibly stupid, or incredibly brave. Either way, they wouldn't live long if the junta took a dislike to them.
.
Besides; it there wasn't any democracy in the U.S., I sincerely doubt you'd have had the courage to write what you just did, or survived it.
.
Sanctions only work against governments that give a rat's ass about their citizens. The elite never feel a thing, unless you ferret-out and deliberately target just those resources available only to the elite.
The ruling class of the 'People's Republic' of North Korea didn't even blink when most of their populace were starving; it was only when it became difficult to get access to luxury items for their personal use that they came back to the negotiating table.
.
Goodness; if you'd replace "business" with "irresponsible government", and "Capitalism" with "Socialism" in most of that lovely rant, I'd agree with you wholeheartedly.
];)
"Now I know about "short" and "long"...."
Um, no; I'm afraid you don't.
Short-selling is actually selling shares you don't yet have, in the hopes the price will drop before you have to buy them back to balance the books. Those six million shares traded are most probably short-sellers taking their profits.
];)
Only when the political will to do so is required, say population explosion
is causing massive food/energy shortages will something like this possibly
be considered.
Nope; sorry. That's when the "We need to solve our problems here first" crowd really gets into full throat. Funny thing, though; there's always one more problem that needs to be solved "first."
"I dunno about this 'climbing down out of the trees' thing, man. Seems to me we need to solve our problems here, first...."
....we have nothing to gain by moving towards them.
....Except significance.
If you disagree, please feel free to rip Samba out of your current Linux distribution.
....In the old Soviet Union, road maps (yeah, like the kind you get at the 7-11) were considered classified documents.
There is a difference in degree, but not much else.
Welcome to the Brave New World, kids, and the best part about it is that we did it all to ourselves.
How many more debates. . . . ?
Easy: Until the fuel bill for Suzy Soccermom's ten-ton SUV exceeds the car payments.
.
". . . . OR YOU WILL BE SHOT!"
Hm; sounds familiar, like something out of the 1940s.
So much for scientific objectivity and dissent....
Take the old Radio Moscow transmitter in East Berlin, for example. You are quite right that such HF broadcasts would often end with a looping tape containing info on what freq(s) the site would be transmitting next. Well and good.
Eventually, though, the tape ends and the transmitter shuts down. Fine. Now all you're listening to is a whole lot of nothing but white noise, right? STAY ON THE FREQ FOR ANOTHER 5-10 MINUTES. Suddenly another carrier comes up, and a woman's voice starts. On the Radio Moscow freq she would always start with "Achtung, achtung," then proceed to read-off a long string of number groups (NOT freqs!). When done, she would finish with "Ende," and the carrier would immediately drop.
Still sound like a freq change notice to you?
That looks a lot like a AN/FLR-9 (http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/an-flr-9.h tm).
:)
The problem with DF-ing HF sites can be realized when you take a look at a FLR-9's or equivalent's antenna arrays: The wavelength of transmissions in the HF range are so long that a huge amount of space must be mapped-out between the receiving elements in order to produce sufficient phase-shift to generate an acceptably accurate line of bearing (LOB). This results in a very large, decidedly non-portable system that, in spite of its size and expense, will only generate a compass bearing, along which bearing the transmitter could be anywhere. You need a dead-minimum of TWO such facilities with AN/FLR-9s or the equivalent, geographically separated enough to create as close to a perpendicular LOB relative to the first as you can get. The width of a major continent will do nicely.
Unfortunately, a two-LOB fix is rarely used on its own, as there is no way to estimate the reliability of the fix. For that, you need at least ONE MORE site, itself just as geographically dispersed from the others, in order to create what is called an Elliptical Error Probablility, or EEP. I'm not going to attempt the math, but in a nutshell it's a circle drawn on the map within which the target transmitter has a certain chance of being found. EEPs range in confidence from 50-90%, depending upon the number of LOBs that can be taken upon a given target. The more LOBs taken, the higher the confidence and the smaller the size of the circle (not a job for the impatient).
Okay, now that's for your plain-vanilla HF transmitter with a plain-vanilla dipole antenna, sending a plain-vanilla carrier wave. Now, toss in a few rather interesting monkey-wrenches that folks can employ when they're not-too keen on being found: Troposcatter. Ionoscatter. Meteorscatter. Spread-spectrum. Hoppers. Things start getting fun at this point.
So, yes; in a way DF-ing a HF broadcast is 'simple,' as long as you have the BOO-KOO BUCKS required to construct, man, and maintain such a string of facilities, as well as the inter-site telecommunications network required to coordinate all operations.
NSA can do it. Me? Sorry; I already spent my lunch money for today.
I agree whole-heartedly. It is just disgusting to watch how people wince and cross their fingers every time they make a change on a Microsoft OS, blink in astonishment if it works the first time, and think of this as normal.
I'm a fossil; I date back to the days when computers were housed in big white rooms, programs were punched into little pieces of cardboard or paper tape, and little Billy Gates slept on computer room floors. Want to know something? Even with those clunky, cantankerous, 16-64KB machines, we were astonished if things didn't work the first time. What happened? Microsoft happened.
I never heard of a "snow crash" until the first time I touched MS-DOS. Windows 1 & 2 were sick jokes. Windows 3.x froze the machine at least four times a day, to the point that PC manufacturers actually started installing a button leading directly to the CPU's RESET pin on the front panels of their machines. That sort of thing was unheard of until MS came into town.
I was foolish enough to hope the MS hell was over when NT 3.51 showed up, it was so good in comparison to what went before; probably because most of the code was derived from IBM's work. But then Bill Gate's so-called programmers 'accelerated' NT 4.x by loading the drivers into kernel space and everything went to crap again. An earlier post tried to point fingers at badly-written device drivers. Here's news for you, kiddies: bad drivers should not be able to crash a properly-written OS!
Then their horrific coding practices began to catch up with them, and now every user of a MS OS has to wrap it in layer after layer of security software just to keep the silly thing from getting eaten alive the moment it's connected to the Internet....
And people think this is all normal.
Shall I now mention a few of the lovely, anti-competitive dirty tricks built into the code? I personally remember the coding trap deliberately written into Windows 3.x so it would bomb when you tried to run the thing atop Digital Research's DR-DOS. Then there was the esoteric memory-addressing stunts built into a lot of MS apps and designed to do just one thing: page-fault Windows emulation sessions under OS/2.
And that last paragraph, my friends, is as far as I'm going to get into their business practices, as Wired did a very nice job of that back in 2000 with this article at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microsoft_ pr.html. I'm done; just thinking about Microsoft and all the grief they've caused people over the years has just about ruined the rest of my day.
And people still think this is all so very, very, normal.
Incredible.
Trying to stop botnets by taking-down servers is like trying to stop rock-throwing by confiscating rocks.
An exercise in futility.
You stop rock-throwing by going after the throwers. If these propeller-heads would stop playing with their toys long enough to spend fifteen minutes talking to the nearest cop they would realize this.
Ignore the silly botnets and invest the resources to find and punish their creators. Criminal behavior declines only when there is substantial risk of substantial punishment. Until that risk exists, you're just wasting everyone's time.
'Nuff said.