Well, maybe I can do a better job of antagonizing you here than in the previous post. I will apologize in advance if I fail to be obnoxious enough to attend to your tastes, though.:(
Aww, don't be sad! I was just being snarky. It was a backhanded compliment.
The GP didn't imply that there is a relation between lawfulness and wrongness. Actually he not so subtly implied the exact opposite, that the two things are different concepts and should not be confused with each other, idea that I completely agree with, by the way.
Why the hell do I attract rational and well-reasoned posters like you from time to time, despite my best efforts? I don't want you to see the logic here! I want you to fly into a frothing rage, saying how I'm oppressing some off-beat political view of yours, making giant leaps to conclusions, twisting my words, and typing in all caps with at least three exclamation points in your 15 paragraph masterpiece. Yeesh, this is slashdot... we have standards here.
I appreciate your support, but if you really want to help me out, go throw out some catch phrase in an argument... like "correlation is not causation", or imply some esoteric logical fallacy like I'm making a "straw man" or an "ad hominim" attack. If you're feeling particularly supportive, I haven't seen anything digging into my gender or sexuality in awhile and I'm really growing concerned about the overall quality of posts from my detractors!:) But above all else, you have to display a vague sense of intellectualism, implying that you're smarter than me, and making thinly veiled personal attacks. That's really what I'm looking for in a detractor.
We don't have it easier. If anything we have it much harder. The illusion of democracy in which we live today is a much more immutable beast than any kind of authoritative regimen.
It's not an illusion; we really do have democracy. But that doesn't mean we don't also live in a police state. And a lot of it is because we're a democracy, not in spite of it. We threw away trillions of dollars and our civil liberties willingly to combat terrorism -- that was popular opinion after 9/11, and it still holds a slight majority today. Nevermind that we didn't have to do either, that there were more effective and cheaper options available. Democracy doesn't prevent mass-stupidity and hysteria... if anything, it reinforces and amplifies it. The greatest thing about democracy is also the worst thing about it. While we have freedom of speech, we also have anti-gay legislation on the books. We have the right to vote, but the candidates we vote for were bought and paid for by corporate interests, not us. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point; Democracy is just a method of selection. It does not give any promises about the selection itself; We can vote ourselves into an oppressive government just as well as a military dictator can create one.
Democracy promises the vote: It does not make promises about the result.
Our ancestors fought and die for democracy. We have it much easier : we just have to work one or two hours a week to maintain it.
And we haven't lost it. In fact, democracy is what has accelerated the problem: How many well-meaning lawmakers and citizens have clamored for "tougher laws" after a high-profile incident? Those tougher laws often remove critical elements of criminal law and due process, as well as tougher punishments under the (false) statement that it'll act as a deterrent. In truth, those tougher punishments aren't there as a deterrent, but as retribution. A critical element of our judicial process is satisfying the public's idea that the criminal "got what he deserved", which is in sharp contrast to the idea of rehabilitation or restitution. The democratic process results in a lot of people's emotions being used as the basis for justice -- but there's a fine line between justice and vengance, and when you have a democracy, it tends to fall more on the side of second than the first.
These problems can be fixed; But it won't be through fighting or dying for our country, nor will it be through blind faith in democracy. To achieve the changes needed, unneeded complexity must be removed. Control must be ceded. Our understanding of the problems need to be improved, and our personal interest and emotions removed. That is a lot harder to do for your country than taking a bullet for it -- it's easy to die. It's harder to change how we live.
Guys, I'm gonna make it easy for you: You can't possibly follow all the laws. Everyone is a criminal. And it's been that way for a long time now -- they've had a reason to get rid of anyone they want for a long time now. And who's they? Well, them, you know, the guys, the illuminati, the conspiracy, the wizard of oz, whatever. People who are more powerful than you. Accept this.
Following the law is no longer a measure of ethical behavior, and neither is violating it. This is just part of the typical evolution of societies -- Rome had the same problem, right before the Visigoths came marching over the 7th hill. Laws grow increasingly complex, eventually strangling and murdering the very things it was instituted to correct. And then, out of the ashes, comes a new society, that advances to the butter zone, reaches its golden age... and then murders itself.
No matter where you are in the cycle, the answer has always been the same: Do what you feel is right, for you'll be punished for it anyway. The law has never been there to guide the behaviors and actions of a moral and ethical person... it exists solely to educate unethical and immoral people on how to go about their business without getting noticed. That's why ethical people don't say "But it's illegal!" -- they say "That's wrong." The only people who place a high importance on the legality of a thing are the unethical... and if they have a modicum of power and wealth, then they're probably busy passing laws to rob Peter to pay Paul, and trying to convince others that legal = ethical.
Don't buy their story: Do what you feel is right, and fuck the law.
What amazes me is the things which weren't predicted.
The future can't be predicted with any certainty beyond only the smallest of timeframes -- the further you look out, the more likely something major that you couldn't anticipate will significantly impact the prediction being made. Nobody could have predicted in 2000 that we'd be looking at the longest period of economic downturn ever seen in this country's history (if not globally). But all it took was a few airplanes slamming into the side of some buildings to cause radical shifts in our way of life, our economy, etc. There's nothing particularly amazing about that.
Very few got the internet, or the pervalence of pocket computing and connectivity that we take for granted 20 years later.
Even in the late 90s, when the technology was already on the market, people still didn't see its importance. Babylon 5, considered at the time as one of the most progressive scifi shows of the era, showed people on space stations standing in line to get newspapers dispensed by computers. It was inconceivable even then that computers would replace printed media. And that was at a time when exactly that was starting to happen right under their noses.
The future can't be predicted. That's what makes living so worthwhile: What kind of life would it be if we knew what would happen tomorrow?
You want to discuss amazing predictions? These postcards from 1899 predicted Nostradamus would monopolize the History Channel!
He also predicted impossibly-thin french women doing chores for you. But you're still in mom's basement, your room is a mess, and your girlfriend, while impossibly thin, is only that way because you haven't patched the hole in her yet...
There are many places in this country that the OTA signal is not reliable unless you have a massive antenna due to LOS issues.
Funny... that old 1950s analog technology for beaming TV signals worked just great. No LOS issues, or anything else. But then, there was something about being able to make a ton of money selling off that bandwidth, then changing around all the protocols, technology, etc., so that consumers had to pay a fortune to get less and less... and now you can't even find something that can do what a VCR did in the 80s.
I suspect that lack of reliability is quite deliberate.
The problem with predictions is that if you make enough of them, whether vague or detailed, you'll find some of them came true. That is not surprising in and of itself, but some people take this as proof of something. But it's not proof, because they aren't looking at all the predictions that didn't come true, or weren't close. It's all about coincidence and the laws of probability -- things that are highly improbable by themselves can become highly probable with repetition or over time. So even if one of the greatest minds of the time predicted all these things for the future that came true, we cannot consider them in isolation -- we also have to consider all the things predicted that didn't come true.
Mr. Newton would have understood that as a scientist, and if he could be conjured up from the dead to utter a few words on this, he'd likely agree.
This isn't an argument. The first casualty of war is the truth. I am not going to try to defend whether Japan's or America's actions were justified, nor engage in some hypothetical "what if" discussion about what would have happened if certain actions were or were not taken.
All I'm saying is war is a messy affair, and nobody has the moral highground in WWII, or for that matter, most any other war. You can't just claim it's "fatally flawed" because you disagree with it... you weren't there and neither was I. Nobody can predict what would have happened. For all we know, China could just as easily have become a utopia owned by Japan, and people would dance in the streets and send us supercarriers full of flowers.
My point is Japan felt provoked and they had good reasons to. That's it. That's all I'm prepared to discuss here. I am not going to get into a lengthy discussion of the whole goddamned world war, or whether we were justified or not. They felt provoked. End. Of. Commentary.
Except your entire argument boils down to "ignore the fact that Japan was the hostile invader of China way back in 193*" (depending on which historian you ask).
It doesn't matter if Japan was the aggressor or not; We were not allies with China at the time. We had no treaty obligations to satisfy as a result of any action Japan took during the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. FDR wanted his war, and so he squeezed Japan until they lashed out and dragged us into a global conflict that cost millions of lives. And later, we dropped the only two nuclear bombs ever used in a war on civilian targets. FDR ensured he got himself in the history books, and he didn't give a fuck how many people he had to turn into carbon scorch marks to do it. There's nothing you can say about Japan's conduct during that time period that can equal the evil we visited upon the world at the same time.
but what i can not tolerate is the death defying leap into stupidity represented by people who believe iran is after only nuclear power and not after nuclear weapons
Well, every country can benefit from nuclear power. Most also don't want to be dependent on another country to keep fuel in those reactors, either. Especially when the countries that they'd be depending on have a long history of military aggression and refuse to participate in the Geneva Conventions, and have withdrawn from dozens of international treaties, while demanding other countries turn over their own citizens, who will upon deportation face indefinite imprisonment ahead of a mock trial, if one is even given. The people who currently control nuclear fuel simply can't be trusted not to leverage that access for their own political ends.
And nuclear weapons are attractive for a great number of reasons, not the least of which is, once you're a nuclear power, the aforementioned countries can't bully you around anymore. Iran probably wouldn't be developing a nuclear weapons program with such furvor if it wasn't under constant threat of attack... and whose enemies on all of its borders were receiving large shipments of state of the art weapons from other nuclear powers.
Do I think Iran should have nuclear weapons? Hell no. But do I understand why they want them? Absolutely. The United States' chief diplomat right now is a Predator drone in the region. You can't blame them for wanting to defend themselves -- and given the prohibitively-high cost of developing a military capable of providing adequate defense against its enemies, a nuclear weapons program is the only logical choice.
Whatever I may think of their ideology, religious beliefs, etc., as a country, I can step away from that and recognize that they are a sovereign nation with clear and present threats to its continued existance and way of life. If we were really the humanitarians we tell our children we are in school, we'd spend less time hitting them with the stick and more offering them the carrot. Iran's nuclear weapons program is ambitious and costly, especially for the citizens who's quality of life is already marginal. The only reason a country in such a situation would put forth the resources to fund a nuclear weapons program is out of desperation. They're scared... and they have good reason to be.
Durring Pearl Harbor, we were unprovakably attacked.
The Japanese would disagree. The United States and its allies at the time were shipping arms and providing war-time loans to China and other countries Japan was at war with. The situation was such a problem for the Japanese that they invaded French Indochina in 1940 in an attempt to cut off the supplies of airplanes, machine tools, etc. from the United States into the region. The United States was also staging troops and equipment in the Philippines ahead of Pearl Harbor. The final straw for them was when the entire fleet was moved from San Diego to Hawaii, which to the Japanese looked like a clear sign the United States was planning on moving into the area, and thus restoring the supply lines to China. Making matters worse, after France fell the United States restricted oil shipments to Japan (amongst other countries), forcing the Japanese to attack european-controlled southeast Asia to secure oil (amongst other things).
Feeling backed into a corner, their military advisors decided that a pre-emptive strike on the fleet was the only way to prevent the United States from interfering with the war effort with its navy. So to say it was an unprovoked attack is stupid -- we'd recently cut off oil supplies, were supplying arms to their enemies, and had recently moved our entire navy to a staging area, with the clear aim of moving into the contested region. I hardly blame you though for believing it was unprovoked -- it's what all the (revised) history books tell us.
Mr. Panetta is making the same mistake we made 80 years ago: Backing our enemies into a corner. Well, what happens when you back any animal (or person!) into a corner? They attack, of course. And the United States has a long tradition of setting traps just like this -- using economic manipulation and supplies to tip the balance of conflicts while claiming it's not involved... and then using the inevitable military response by its enemies as an excuse to enter said conflict.
What? There would be no reasonable suspicion that the guy broke into every other home in the neighborhood. So no, it isn't like that.
One of the goals of a police interog--er, interview is to get a confession out of a person. The Innocence Project regularly comes across cases where DNA evidence proves their innocence beyond a reasonable doubt but the person had confessed anyway. There have been numerous high profile cases where the police would interview people who were mentally ill, and convince them to confess to a whole string of unsolved crimes when there wasn't just a lack of reasonable suspicion, but a total lack of any evidence whatsoever to link them to the crime. Something like 86% of cases never even make it to trial because of confessions.
So yes, the police will throw down a bunch of trumped-up charges and hope for a confession when they don't have a shred of evidence; It happens every day. My point is that governments will claim responsibility for something they didn't do, because it looks good politically. Iran in the not too distant past claimed to have shot down a US drone. The truth was it malfunctioned, crashed, and the following day the neighbors found the wreckage and that was the first they'd heard of it. Didn't even know there was a bird in the air; Weren't looking for it, and certainly didn't shoot it down. But admitting that is a lot less glamorous than detailing how their crack team of military geniuses shot down state of the art enemy tech.
Is this like how when they catch a guy breaking into someone's home, they charge him with breaking into every other home in the neighborhood too? Suspicion isn't evidence. It isn't proof. And guess what, there probably won't ever be any proof. Everything about "cyber" warfare (please, god, can we get a better name?) is centered around deception. But if we're going to play the "I have in my hands the names of members of congress known to be in the communist party" rhetoric game... Well, Stuxnet did recently come up from behind them and ruin a lot of very expensive equipment... which many people suspect Israel and the United States to have jointly produced. Are we going to sit here and cry about how two sovereign powers ganged up on a third and then (whine! boo hoo! oh noes!) the third decided to give the other two a bloody nose right back?
Propaganda. That's all this is. Rumors, hints, allegations, and nothing of any substance. Whoopde-fuckin-do. Neither side can be believed -- all the players are lying, cheating bastards when it suits their own political purposes. Hell, everytime some terrorist blows himself up in a public square, dozens of groups come forward to claim responsibility... and governments are no different. Publicity whoring is nothing new...
'Our hearts go out to these young people. Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls.'"
How about instead of giving them some false sympathies deep fried and battered in guilt, served with a side of buzzwords, you put your money where your mouth is? You people don't have a heart to speak of, so it's not going out anywhere -- so why not send them something you actually value, like the cash you earned in extra publicity and selling of their personal data after you outed them?
Your entire business model is built on invasive marketing, selling people's personal data to the highest bidder, and despite numerous high-profile security and privacy failings, including pictures that don't get deleted off servers and remain publicly accessible for years after they've been pulled from user profiles and indefinate storage of all data ever submitted to facebook, even after it has been deleted and the profile removed, you people still have the gumption to say you have "robust" privacy controls? Screw you. Give the kids some money, then maybe I'll believe you actually give a damn.
I just gave myself a mental highfive on the level of crazy.
If this is a simulation, then any break in the simulation would simply result in them restoring from an earlier backup. The universe could have been destroyed thousands of times over due to data corruption, but we'd never know it. There may be no way from within the system to tell this has happened. You're also forgetting error correction; Any civilization advanced enough to simulate something as complex as the Universe has probably figured out how to detect anomalies in the system and normalize them, possibly without requiring a system restart.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." It's the Occam's Razor of the corporate world. Yes, people get greedy or manipulative, it's true... but that's the exception, not the rule. For the most part, people are just really, really, fucking stupid. Senior management in particular tends to develop problems like target fixation, confirmation bias, and even when everything is in the spiral of death and the alarms are going off, engines on fire, they somehow think they'll be able to pull out of the dive and fix the problem... right up until the part where they crater. They teach this in every management course studies... Have an exit strategy. Know what your breakpoints are and when to bail. And company after company, even big ones, really really big ones, still fail at this, not because of greed, but because of stupidity.
Excuse me, but when I use the term blizzard, I mean it. We get 1 or 2 a year up here, and the "persistent strong winds" can exceed 50 MPH up here, creating white-out conditions where visibility barely exceeds the reach of your arm. We host one of the largest international airports in the country - MSP, and the only birds we put in the air during then are military during those times, to support search and rescue teams.
So please, don't get condescending -- when I say blizzard, I mean it. And our schools don't close due to snow, they close due to windchill -- which can cause permanent injury with 15 minutes or less of exposure. Wisconsin legislature passed an emergency law about a decade ago when the windchill clocked in at around -70 throughout the central and northern parts of the state, but due to the lack of snow, the state superintendent of schools refused to order the schools closed. The state legislature passed a law then on the spot saying schools automatically close whenever windchill exceeds -50. That temperature will still give you freezer burn in minutes, by the way.
And do not try to curmudgeon me -- when I was a kid, it was 8 miles to school, and skis were for pussies. We wore snow shoes.
Here's the problem: the leaks are so big that it's impossible to know what's in them.
That's a new definition of "Impossible" of which I was previously unaware. See, the word I would use is "inconvenient." Well, taking responsibility is inconvenient, but that's not an excuse for being irresponsible. That's the kind of thinking teenagers and children use, not mature adults who come into possession of information that could cost others their lives if handled poorly.
The analogy with personal communications is a false one.
Does the same argument apply to the e-mails you send your friends from work? Unless you're doing some kind of mental acrobatics to justify some political idea, you can admit that people's work and personal lives overlap sometimes. So don't go lumping everything into either/or, black and white, right and wrong. Real life, kid, isn't like that. There are shades of grey.
I'm not asking for perfection; I'm asking that people make a reasonable effort. Sometimes personal information gets leaked -- but if it's accidental, then that's a lot easier to forgive than when someone negligently allows it to become public. And I can't forgive when someone recklessly or intentionally causes personal information to become public. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I respect people's right to privacy, the right to be separate from their job, and the right to be forgotten. And yeah, I know it's really easy to copy and paste in the digital age... but that doesn't make it ethical, fair, or even honest.
I hope they brought extra duct tape and paint to cover all the bullet holes... and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows up without its landing wheels.:)
How do these things perform in weather? ex. Blizzards
The same way cars driven by people do: They get stuck in snowdrifts several feet wide and thick. And that's before you back out of the driveway. Disclaimer: I'm from Minnesota. Autonomous vehicles can't unbury your car, and any visual sensor would be as blind as you are in a blizzard. For that matter, even radar operating at microwave frequencies would be... snow is made of water, and water attenuates it. That's why you're supposed to stay inside during a blizzard... It's suicidally stupid to try driving in conditions where, should your vehicle become disabled, not only are you at risk yourself, but others have to risk themselves to come rescue your sorry, impatient ass. And incase you're wondering, no -- your cell phone doesn't work very well in a blizzard and GPS is straight out too, so if you don't know exactly where you are, emergency workers may not find you even with E911 capability; It's only accurate to within 50 meters. In a blizzard... you have trouble even seeing a couple meters in front of you.
Take it from someone who lives and breathes the fluffy white death from above -- Never, ever, trust a vehicle with your life. Any vehicle, even ones connected to Skynet with an IQ of a billion and a hundred different types of sensors. If you can't walk 10 miles in the weather, don't go out in it.
Well, police departments have started stocking up on all kinds of military and paramilitary gear ever since the federal government started giving away excess or "out of warranty" military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies. I mean, Texas recently took delivery of a tank. Cost? Gas. And there's pics on the internet of someone being pulled over for speeding by a giant tank.
On one hand, that's recycling and reusing, which is a sound financial principle that reduces operating costs. Given our massive debt load, this kind of thinking should be encouraged. On the other hand, there are disturbing civil rights implications when the police start amassing large quantities of military gear. It's like the old saying "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." We're seeing increased use of SWAT teams, no-knock search warrants, and violence by our police against the civilian population that simply wasn't present 10 or 15 years ago. I can't help but wonder if it's not just a little because they're being handed military gear by the truckload -- there's no incentive to look for less violent solutions, and that bullets cost less than tazer cartridges.
It's not that civilian law enforcement has access to, or owns, drones, or even that the military is practically giving them away that concerns me... but that there's not much incentive for less-than-lethal weapondry when letal weapons cost less (if anything). It has always cost more to protect something than destroy it. But the police are supposed to be tasked with preserving life -- taking it is a last resort. But when the only tools they're given are all made with the idea of being used against our enemies instead of our peers, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the user's thinking adapts to the tool... not the other way around.
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Well, maybe I can do a better job of antagonizing you here than in the previous post. I will apologize in advance if I fail to be obnoxious enough to attend to your tastes, though. :(
Aww, don't be sad! I was just being snarky. It was a backhanded compliment.
The GP didn't imply that there is a relation between lawfulness and wrongness. Actually he not so subtly implied the exact opposite, that the two things are different concepts and should not be confused with each other, idea that I completely agree with, by the way.
Why the hell do I attract rational and well-reasoned posters like you from time to time, despite my best efforts? I don't want you to see the logic here! I want you to fly into a frothing rage, saying how I'm oppressing some off-beat political view of yours, making giant leaps to conclusions, twisting my words, and typing in all caps with at least three exclamation points in your 15 paragraph masterpiece. Yeesh, this is slashdot... we have standards here.
I appreciate your support, but if you really want to help me out, go throw out some catch phrase in an argument... like "correlation is not causation", or imply some esoteric logical fallacy like I'm making a "straw man" or an "ad hominim" attack. If you're feeling particularly supportive, I haven't seen anything digging into my gender or sexuality in awhile and I'm really growing concerned about the overall quality of posts from my detractors! :) But above all else, you have to display a vague sense of intellectualism, implying that you're smarter than me, and making thinly veiled personal attacks. That's really what I'm looking for in a detractor.
Thanks again! Look forward to the hate mail. :D
We don't have it easier. If anything we have it much harder. The illusion of democracy in which we live today is a much more immutable beast than any kind of authoritative regimen.
It's not an illusion; we really do have democracy. But that doesn't mean we don't also live in a police state. And a lot of it is because we're a democracy, not in spite of it. We threw away trillions of dollars and our civil liberties willingly to combat terrorism -- that was popular opinion after 9/11, and it still holds a slight majority today. Nevermind that we didn't have to do either, that there were more effective and cheaper options available. Democracy doesn't prevent mass-stupidity and hysteria... if anything, it reinforces and amplifies it. The greatest thing about democracy is also the worst thing about it. While we have freedom of speech, we also have anti-gay legislation on the books. We have the right to vote, but the candidates we vote for were bought and paid for by corporate interests, not us. I could go on, but I'm sure you get the point; Democracy is just a method of selection. It does not give any promises about the selection itself; We can vote ourselves into an oppressive government just as well as a military dictator can create one.
Democracy promises the vote: It does not make promises about the result.
Our ancestors fought and die for democracy. We have it much easier : we just have to work one or two hours a week to maintain it.
And we haven't lost it. In fact, democracy is what has accelerated the problem: How many well-meaning lawmakers and citizens have clamored for "tougher laws" after a high-profile incident? Those tougher laws often remove critical elements of criminal law and due process, as well as tougher punishments under the (false) statement that it'll act as a deterrent. In truth, those tougher punishments aren't there as a deterrent, but as retribution. A critical element of our judicial process is satisfying the public's idea that the criminal "got what he deserved", which is in sharp contrast to the idea of rehabilitation or restitution. The democratic process results in a lot of people's emotions being used as the basis for justice -- but there's a fine line between justice and vengance, and when you have a democracy, it tends to fall more on the side of second than the first.
These problems can be fixed; But it won't be through fighting or dying for our country, nor will it be through blind faith in democracy. To achieve the changes needed, unneeded complexity must be removed. Control must be ceded. Our understanding of the problems need to be improved, and our personal interest and emotions removed. That is a lot harder to do for your country than taking a bullet for it -- it's easy to die. It's harder to change how we live.
Guys, I'm gonna make it easy for you: You can't possibly follow all the laws. Everyone is a criminal. And it's been that way for a long time now -- they've had a reason to get rid of anyone they want for a long time now. And who's they? Well, them, you know, the guys, the illuminati, the conspiracy, the wizard of oz, whatever. People who are more powerful than you. Accept this.
Following the law is no longer a measure of ethical behavior, and neither is violating it. This is just part of the typical evolution of societies -- Rome had the same problem, right before the Visigoths came marching over the 7th hill. Laws grow increasingly complex, eventually strangling and murdering the very things it was instituted to correct. And then, out of the ashes, comes a new society, that advances to the butter zone, reaches its golden age... and then murders itself.
No matter where you are in the cycle, the answer has always been the same: Do what you feel is right, for you'll be punished for it anyway. The law has never been there to guide the behaviors and actions of a moral and ethical person... it exists solely to educate unethical and immoral people on how to go about their business without getting noticed. That's why ethical people don't say "But it's illegal!" -- they say "That's wrong." The only people who place a high importance on the legality of a thing are the unethical... and if they have a modicum of power and wealth, then they're probably busy passing laws to rob Peter to pay Paul, and trying to convince others that legal = ethical.
Don't buy their story: Do what you feel is right, and fuck the law.
What amazes me is the things which weren't predicted.
The future can't be predicted with any certainty beyond only the smallest of timeframes -- the further you look out, the more likely something major that you couldn't anticipate will significantly impact the prediction being made. Nobody could have predicted in 2000 that we'd be looking at the longest period of economic downturn ever seen in this country's history (if not globally). But all it took was a few airplanes slamming into the side of some buildings to cause radical shifts in our way of life, our economy, etc. There's nothing particularly amazing about that.
Very few got the internet, or the pervalence of pocket computing and connectivity that we take for granted 20 years later.
Even in the late 90s, when the technology was already on the market, people still didn't see its importance. Babylon 5, considered at the time as one of the most progressive scifi shows of the era, showed people on space stations standing in line to get newspapers dispensed by computers. It was inconceivable even then that computers would replace printed media. And that was at a time when exactly that was starting to happen right under their noses.
The future can't be predicted. That's what makes living so worthwhile: What kind of life would it be if we knew what would happen tomorrow?
You want to discuss amazing predictions? These postcards from 1899 predicted Nostradamus would monopolize the History Channel!
He also predicted impossibly-thin french women doing chores for you. But you're still in mom's basement, your room is a mess, and your girlfriend, while impossibly thin, is only that way because you haven't patched the hole in her yet...
Some people just can't see the future.
Or maybe they just don't want to see you.
There are many places in this country that the OTA signal is not reliable unless you have a massive antenna due to LOS issues.
Funny... that old 1950s analog technology for beaming TV signals worked just great. No LOS issues, or anything else. But then, there was something about being able to make a ton of money selling off that bandwidth, then changing around all the protocols, technology, etc., so that consumers had to pay a fortune to get less and less... and now you can't even find something that can do what a VCR did in the 80s.
I suspect that lack of reliability is quite deliberate.
The problem with predictions is that if you make enough of them, whether vague or detailed, you'll find some of them came true. That is not surprising in and of itself, but some people take this as proof of something. But it's not proof, because they aren't looking at all the predictions that didn't come true, or weren't close. It's all about coincidence and the laws of probability -- things that are highly improbable by themselves can become highly probable with repetition or over time. So even if one of the greatest minds of the time predicted all these things for the future that came true, we cannot consider them in isolation -- we also have to consider all the things predicted that didn't come true.
Mr. Newton would have understood that as a scientist, and if he could be conjured up from the dead to utter a few words on this, he'd likely agree.
All I'm saying is war is a messy affair, and nobody has the moral highground in WWII, or for that matter, most any other war. You can't just claim it's "fatally flawed" because you disagree with it... you weren't there and neither was I. Nobody can predict what would have happened. For all we know, China could just as easily have become a utopia owned by Japan, and people would dance in the streets and send us supercarriers full of flowers.
My point is Japan felt provoked and they had good reasons to. That's it. That's all I'm prepared to discuss here. I am not going to get into a lengthy discussion of the whole goddamned world war, or whether we were justified or not. They felt provoked. End. Of. Commentary.
Except your entire argument boils down to "ignore the fact that Japan was the hostile invader of China way back in 193*" (depending on which historian you ask).
It doesn't matter if Japan was the aggressor or not; We were not allies with China at the time. We had no treaty obligations to satisfy as a result of any action Japan took during the events leading up to Pearl Harbor. FDR wanted his war, and so he squeezed Japan until they lashed out and dragged us into a global conflict that cost millions of lives. And later, we dropped the only two nuclear bombs ever used in a war on civilian targets. FDR ensured he got himself in the history books, and he didn't give a fuck how many people he had to turn into carbon scorch marks to do it. There's nothing you can say about Japan's conduct during that time period that can equal the evil we visited upon the world at the same time.
but what i can not tolerate is the death defying leap into stupidity represented by people who believe iran is after only nuclear power and not after nuclear weapons
Well, every country can benefit from nuclear power. Most also don't want to be dependent on another country to keep fuel in those reactors, either. Especially when the countries that they'd be depending on have a long history of military aggression and refuse to participate in the Geneva Conventions, and have withdrawn from dozens of international treaties, while demanding other countries turn over their own citizens, who will upon deportation face indefinite imprisonment ahead of a mock trial, if one is even given. The people who currently control nuclear fuel simply can't be trusted not to leverage that access for their own political ends.
And nuclear weapons are attractive for a great number of reasons, not the least of which is, once you're a nuclear power, the aforementioned countries can't bully you around anymore. Iran probably wouldn't be developing a nuclear weapons program with such furvor if it wasn't under constant threat of attack... and whose enemies on all of its borders were receiving large shipments of state of the art weapons from other nuclear powers.
Do I think Iran should have nuclear weapons? Hell no. But do I understand why they want them? Absolutely. The United States' chief diplomat right now is a Predator drone in the region. You can't blame them for wanting to defend themselves -- and given the prohibitively-high cost of developing a military capable of providing adequate defense against its enemies, a nuclear weapons program is the only logical choice.
Whatever I may think of their ideology, religious beliefs, etc., as a country, I can step away from that and recognize that they are a sovereign nation with clear and present threats to its continued existance and way of life. If we were really the humanitarians we tell our children we are in school, we'd spend less time hitting them with the stick and more offering them the carrot. Iran's nuclear weapons program is ambitious and costly, especially for the citizens who's quality of life is already marginal. The only reason a country in such a situation would put forth the resources to fund a nuclear weapons program is out of desperation. They're scared... and they have good reason to be.
Durring Pearl Harbor, we were unprovakably attacked.
The Japanese would disagree. The United States and its allies at the time were shipping arms and providing war-time loans to China and other countries Japan was at war with. The situation was such a problem for the Japanese that they invaded French Indochina in 1940 in an attempt to cut off the supplies of airplanes, machine tools, etc. from the United States into the region. The United States was also staging troops and equipment in the Philippines ahead of Pearl Harbor. The final straw for them was when the entire fleet was moved from San Diego to Hawaii, which to the Japanese looked like a clear sign the United States was planning on moving into the area, and thus restoring the supply lines to China. Making matters worse, after France fell the United States restricted oil shipments to Japan (amongst other countries), forcing the Japanese to attack european-controlled southeast Asia to secure oil (amongst other things).
Feeling backed into a corner, their military advisors decided that a pre-emptive strike on the fleet was the only way to prevent the United States from interfering with the war effort with its navy. So to say it was an unprovoked attack is stupid -- we'd recently cut off oil supplies, were supplying arms to their enemies, and had recently moved our entire navy to a staging area, with the clear aim of moving into the contested region. I hardly blame you though for believing it was unprovoked -- it's what all the (revised) history books tell us.
Mr. Panetta is making the same mistake we made 80 years ago: Backing our enemies into a corner. Well, what happens when you back any animal (or person!) into a corner? They attack, of course. And the United States has a long tradition of setting traps just like this -- using economic manipulation and supplies to tip the balance of conflicts while claiming it's not involved... and then using the inevitable military response by its enemies as an excuse to enter said conflict.
What? There would be no reasonable suspicion that the guy broke into every other home in the neighborhood. So no, it isn't like that.
One of the goals of a police interog--er, interview is to get a confession out of a person. The Innocence Project regularly comes across cases where DNA evidence proves their innocence beyond a reasonable doubt but the person had confessed anyway. There have been numerous high profile cases where the police would interview people who were mentally ill, and convince them to confess to a whole string of unsolved crimes when there wasn't just a lack of reasonable suspicion, but a total lack of any evidence whatsoever to link them to the crime. Something like 86% of cases never even make it to trial because of confessions.
So yes, the police will throw down a bunch of trumped-up charges and hope for a confession when they don't have a shred of evidence; It happens every day. My point is that governments will claim responsibility for something they didn't do, because it looks good politically. Iran in the not too distant past claimed to have shot down a US drone. The truth was it malfunctioned, crashed, and the following day the neighbors found the wreckage and that was the first they'd heard of it. Didn't even know there was a bird in the air; Weren't looking for it, and certainly didn't shoot it down. But admitting that is a lot less glamorous than detailing how their crack team of military geniuses shot down state of the art enemy tech.
Is this like how when they catch a guy breaking into someone's home, they charge him with breaking into every other home in the neighborhood too? Suspicion isn't evidence. It isn't proof. And guess what, there probably won't ever be any proof. Everything about "cyber" warfare (please, god, can we get a better name?) is centered around deception. But if we're going to play the "I have in my hands the names of members of congress known to be in the communist party" rhetoric game... Well, Stuxnet did recently come up from behind them and ruin a lot of very expensive equipment... which many people suspect Israel and the United States to have jointly produced. Are we going to sit here and cry about how two sovereign powers ganged up on a third and then (whine! boo hoo! oh noes!) the third decided to give the other two a bloody nose right back?
Propaganda. That's all this is. Rumors, hints, allegations, and nothing of any substance. Whoopde-fuckin-do. Neither side can be believed -- all the players are lying, cheating bastards when it suits their own political purposes. Hell, everytime some terrorist blows himself up in a public square, dozens of groups come forward to claim responsibility... and governments are no different. Publicity whoring is nothing new...
'Our hearts go out to these young people. Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls.'"
How about instead of giving them some false sympathies deep fried and battered in guilt, served with a side of buzzwords, you put your money where your mouth is? You people don't have a heart to speak of, so it's not going out anywhere -- so why not send them something you actually value, like the cash you earned in extra publicity and selling of their personal data after you outed them?
Your entire business model is built on invasive marketing, selling people's personal data to the highest bidder, and despite numerous high-profile security and privacy failings, including pictures that don't get deleted off servers and remain publicly accessible for years after they've been pulled from user profiles and indefinate storage of all data ever submitted to facebook, even after it has been deleted and the profile removed, you people still have the gumption to say you have "robust" privacy controls? Screw you. Give the kids some money, then maybe I'll believe you actually give a damn.
I just gave myself a mental highfive on the level of crazy.
If this is a simulation, then any break in the simulation would simply result in them restoring from an earlier backup. The universe could have been destroyed thousands of times over due to data corruption, but we'd never know it. There may be no way from within the system to tell this has happened. You're also forgetting error correction; Any civilization advanced enough to simulate something as complex as the Universe has probably figured out how to detect anomalies in the system and normalize them, possibly without requiring a system restart.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity." It's the Occam's Razor of the corporate world. Yes, people get greedy or manipulative, it's true... but that's the exception, not the rule. For the most part, people are just really, really, fucking stupid. Senior management in particular tends to develop problems like target fixation, confirmation bias, and even when everything is in the spiral of death and the alarms are going off, engines on fire, they somehow think they'll be able to pull out of the dive and fix the problem... right up until the part where they crater. They teach this in every management course studies... Have an exit strategy. Know what your breakpoints are and when to bail. And company after company, even big ones, really really big ones, still fail at this, not because of greed, but because of stupidity.
Excuse me, but when I use the term blizzard, I mean it. We get 1 or 2 a year up here, and the "persistent strong winds" can exceed 50 MPH up here, creating white-out conditions where visibility barely exceeds the reach of your arm. We host one of the largest international airports in the country - MSP, and the only birds we put in the air during then are military during those times, to support search and rescue teams.
So please, don't get condescending -- when I say blizzard, I mean it. And our schools don't close due to snow, they close due to windchill -- which can cause permanent injury with 15 minutes or less of exposure. Wisconsin legislature passed an emergency law about a decade ago when the windchill clocked in at around -70 throughout the central and northern parts of the state, but due to the lack of snow, the state superintendent of schools refused to order the schools closed. The state legislature passed a law then on the spot saying schools automatically close whenever windchill exceeds -50. That temperature will still give you freezer burn in minutes, by the way.
And do not try to curmudgeon me -- when I was a kid, it was 8 miles to school, and skis were for pussies. We wore snow shoes.
Here's the problem: the leaks are so big that it's impossible to know what's in them.
That's a new definition of "Impossible" of which I was previously unaware. See, the word I would use is "inconvenient." Well, taking responsibility is inconvenient, but that's not an excuse for being irresponsible. That's the kind of thinking teenagers and children use, not mature adults who come into possession of information that could cost others their lives if handled poorly.
The analogy with personal communications is a false one.
Does the same argument apply to the e-mails you send your friends from work? Unless you're doing some kind of mental acrobatics to justify some political idea, you can admit that people's work and personal lives overlap sometimes. So don't go lumping everything into either/or, black and white, right and wrong. Real life, kid, isn't like that. There are shades of grey.
I'm not asking for perfection; I'm asking that people make a reasonable effort. Sometimes personal information gets leaked -- but if it's accidental, then that's a lot easier to forgive than when someone negligently allows it to become public. And I can't forgive when someone recklessly or intentionally causes personal information to become public. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I respect people's right to privacy, the right to be separate from their job, and the right to be forgotten. And yeah, I know it's really easy to copy and paste in the digital age... but that doesn't make it ethical, fair, or even honest.
I hope they brought extra duct tape and paint to cover all the bullet holes... and I wouldn't be surprised if it shows up without its landing wheels. :)
How do these things perform in weather? ex. Blizzards
The same way cars driven by people do: They get stuck in snowdrifts several feet wide and thick. And that's before you back out of the driveway. Disclaimer: I'm from Minnesota. Autonomous vehicles can't unbury your car, and any visual sensor would be as blind as you are in a blizzard. For that matter, even radar operating at microwave frequencies would be... snow is made of water, and water attenuates it. That's why you're supposed to stay inside during a blizzard... It's suicidally stupid to try driving in conditions where, should your vehicle become disabled, not only are you at risk yourself, but others have to risk themselves to come rescue your sorry, impatient ass. And incase you're wondering, no -- your cell phone doesn't work very well in a blizzard and GPS is straight out too, so if you don't know exactly where you are, emergency workers may not find you even with E911 capability; It's only accurate to within 50 meters. In a blizzard... you have trouble even seeing a couple meters in front of you.
Take it from someone who lives and breathes the fluffy white death from above -- Never, ever, trust a vehicle with your life. Any vehicle, even ones connected to Skynet with an IQ of a billion and a hundred different types of sensors. If you can't walk 10 miles in the weather, don't go out in it.
If I was suffering from micropenis, I would keep my mouth shut.
If you were suffering from micropenis, your mouth might be the only other thing you have to offer...
Well, police departments have started stocking up on all kinds of military and paramilitary gear ever since the federal government started giving away excess or "out of warranty" military equipment to civilian law enforcement agencies. I mean, Texas recently took delivery of a tank. Cost? Gas. And there's pics on the internet of someone being pulled over for speeding by a giant tank.
On one hand, that's recycling and reusing, which is a sound financial principle that reduces operating costs. Given our massive debt load, this kind of thinking should be encouraged. On the other hand, there are disturbing civil rights implications when the police start amassing large quantities of military gear. It's like the old saying "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." We're seeing increased use of SWAT teams, no-knock search warrants, and violence by our police against the civilian population that simply wasn't present 10 or 15 years ago. I can't help but wonder if it's not just a little because they're being handed military gear by the truckload -- there's no incentive to look for less violent solutions, and that bullets cost less than tazer cartridges.
It's not that civilian law enforcement has access to, or owns, drones, or even that the military is practically giving them away that concerns me... but that there's not much incentive for less-than-lethal weapondry when letal weapons cost less (if anything). It has always cost more to protect something than destroy it. But the police are supposed to be tasked with preserving life -- taking it is a last resort. But when the only tools they're given are all made with the idea of being used against our enemies instead of our peers, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the user's thinking adapts to the tool... not the other way around.