End result? A stronger federal government contrary to the beliefs and intents of the Founding Fathers. The point of a weak fed was to keep massive government stupidity on a local or state-wide level, not to allow it to infect and infest itself across the entire country.
The federal government has grown more powerful over the years, which you'd expect -- it is the United States of America afterall. The point of a weak fed wasn't to keep "massive stupidity" at a local level -- it was because the people of that era were terrified of another king in a faraway place telling them how it was going to be, and them having no say. They wanted their autonomy, and felt a weak fed would provide the best security against another run-in with corrupt royalty. "The goverment which governs best, governs least." The founding fathers intent was to have a government that would survive longer than 13 years. We tried a weak fed. It failed. So to balance the concerns of another King trying to run things, they divided the government into three branches, and further subdivided things into the state and the federal government, etc. They figured that the best insurance against another king was to distribute the power with a system of checks and balances so that many people, rather than a few, would have to be "in" on any power grab.
Also, slavery wasn't an "excuse". For the most part, our country has historically moved towards granting more rights and freedoms to an ever-widening swath of the populace. The only step backwards really was when the 'equal rights' amendment failed to pass, which would have made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex. Legally, men and women would have been identical then. Because that didn't happen, the second setback in civil rights occurred: Gay marriage. If there was no legal distinction between men and women, then it would have been a non-event. But for the time being, it seems that discrimination on the basis of sex has not only become more prevalent, but the legal divisions between the two groups has deepened. I'm not sure what this means for the future of the country, but it is definately not part of the overall historical trend of the previous 200 years.
Pretty much, yeah. But no rational person expects you to take all that responsibility onto your shoulders: Just a small part. If you write a letter to the President, about anything, whatever you feel is important, then you've done more in the ten minutes it took to sit down and make your voice heard than what fifty others will do this year. And anyone who respects the democratic process will appreciate that you did more than what was asked of you: Indeed, it's the only way problems get fixed. Do what you can, when you can, and you can consider yourself a 'good' citizen. But if all you do is pay your taxes and whine about how the world isn't fair... well, you'll have a lot of company, at least.
The people are responsible for anything done by the state, QED.
...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
In other words, we are not responsible for the actions of our government: We are responsible for stopping them when they piss us off or endanger our lives.
It sounds like you believe the sole purpose of prison is revenge against the offender. I don't want to live in a society where that's the purpose of justice.
There's no belief here. Our country has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any country. Any. And the rate accelerated dramatically since 1980, and continues to climb steeply year by year. Obviously this is not a sustainable trend; But it's quite clear that America has a very different perspective on what "Justice" is than the rest of the world... I'll leave you to your own opinions on what that perspective is. We also have the highest rate of capital punishment of any country, though if you removed Texas from the statistics, we would lose that distinction... so it is debatable. And we continue to expand extrajudiciary action: Guantanamo bay, seizing foreign nationals on foreign soil and indefinately detaining them... and we are also exporting our own citizens to other countries for indefinite detainment under semi-secret reciprocity agreements.
There is little doubt in the international community that the United States has become a police state, and continues to expand its use of military and covert force to extend its judiciary practices worldwide.
Do you have a source for that story? Because I've not heard about that happening.
It was a local only story; It ran on the Star Tribune and WCCO also picked it up sometime last summer. Unfortunately, neither site maintains a (free) searchable archive, so I can't give you anything more than that. Sorry. What I can do is point you in the direction of an expert on the matter locally: Chuck Ramsay, who won last year's Attorney of the Year award for this state and specializes in DUI convictions.
Some highlights from the website include: Cases pending where a vehicle can be seized by the government for suspicion of DUI when a conviction is not obtained. Minnesota also has a habit of destroying evidence used in DUI convictions after 1 year regardless of if a case is still on appeal or not (by law, you can request a retest of any positive result by a different lab; But if the sample isn't available for retesting, this obviously poses a legal problem). There are also widespread fraud regarding log entries for maintenance of the machines; Officers literally xerox old logs, change the dates, and put them back into the official record. This has also been upheld by the Court; Go through the archives on the blog, you'll find all the citations you need there.
We're the only state that can lock you up for life without a trial; all it takes is a judge to agree that there's a risk you could offend again. In other words, you serve your sentence, and then an unappealable, arbitrary decision, by one guy, can have you spend the rest of your life in jail. Our laws in this state are so bad that the European Union refuses to extradite people here in several cases. I am not surprised that they just basically crapped in the pool of civil rights and then shrugged and went on with their business.
We've convicted people of DUI for walking down the street. Seriously. It was upheld on the basis that he could have gotten in a motor vehicle, because he had his car keys on him. Bonus: The car didn't even run.
If you're going to throw fines you'll never be able to collect, might as well put it in the billions, and then blame him for the economy crashing.
They are already blaming piracy for crashing the economy. Hell, after 9/11, they called pirates terrorists who were bent on destroying our way of life. Apparently, when you download music, you're downloading terrorism. As for the site going down... there's already DHT and hundreds of other trackers up there. People will simply migrate to other services. They could scream about how they're going to give people trillion dollar fines and 300 years in the electric chair for downloading, but there's billions of people doing it and only thousands of people trying to enforce a law they crafted themselves. They'd have to co-opt and topple entire governments to get what they want, and even at that... the statistics are not kind.
The only way for them to have any effect on piracy is with high profile legal cases that get lots of press coverage so people think "boy, I don't want to be that guy." It's the same reason the Lottery is so popular: People suck at math, and if they hear about something a lot, they'll change their behavior... because critical thinking is hard, and following the herd is easy.
I.e. who's wining? Because customers are surely on the losing side.
No they aren't. Customers benefit from an endless system of appeals, cumbersome and byzantine laws regarding patents, trademarks and copyrights -- it saves them from having to buy a competitor's product, the poor bastards. The free market is dangerous and must be heavily regulated... unless it's labor, in which case we need as little regulation as possible because we have to remain competitive with third world sweat shops.
Everything you buy here is cheaper everywhere else, and it's because you're not working hard enough for your crumbs, Citizen.
Is it just me or does anyone actually support the actions of our government besides the government?
Our levels of civic education and the amount of civic responsibility (voting, jury duty, military service, etc.,) are shockingly low compared to other first world countries. Our public education system continues to show a steady downward trend in the diversity and depth of material, fewer graduates are capable of multi-factor analysis, critical thinking... even basic math skills markedly eroded in the 18-25 group. It doesn't matter what our government does; The population has become functionally illiterate. The general population simply lacks the ability to understand government action. If tomorrow CNN reported that we've started carpet bombing say *shakes magic 8 ball* Mauritania because *shakes magic 8 ball* they funded training camps for buddhist suicide bombers... most people would just nod their heads, shrug, and go about their business and in a few months FOX News would be showing us a picture of a buddhist monk setting himself on fire as proof of their radical buddhism, perhaps juxtaposing some people that look vaguely buddhist burning a flag before offering 15 seconds for J. Random College Professor of Sociostrategogamia at Princeton to say "I think we're really mischaracterizing thi--"... and then cut to commercial break with dancing toilet paper.
That's what America is today. I'm sorry... I can't honestly say anyone really supports or doesn't support the government on anything other than emotive thinking and a vague sense that they shouldn't really question what they're told or Bad Things Will Happen. There is no longer any public discussion of what our government does, there's no real public forum for it: The few that people have attempted to form have been stigmatized by the Department of Homeland Security. It may not be Soviet Russia in the 80s, or East Germany... people aren't exactly disappearing off the street, but there is still a palpable fear in our public places. People just don't talk to each other anymore.
slashdotters seem to want to say "no no don't go there" as if that would stop it from ever occurring.
How does one go about seeming to want to say something? Is that like wanting to seem like you're thinking something?
You'd also never see anyone here write "you know the Chinese PLA hacking into Lockheed sets a bad precedent, this is dangerous what they're doing"
You know the Chinese PLA hacking into Lockheed sets a bad precedent, this is dangerous what they're doing. And with that out of the way... Yes, it's dangerous. It's not dangerous like saying Steve Jobs was a total douchebag in a certain popular geek-culture website, but you know, I'm sure Bad Things could happen. Kinda obvious... they make missiles and other things designed to bring spectacular fireworks displays to impoverished countries around the world.
But because the attacker and victim roles are reversed in this thread, you'll never see that same reasoning.
I'm kinda lost here. I think most people would say that whether they're the ones holding the gun, or the one with the gun to their head... the gun still exists. Of course, it would matter a great deal to these two hypothetical people which was which...
Stuxnet was not industrial espionage. It was a weapon designed to destroy critical infrastructure[...]
Thinking is not your strong point. You're going to screw up a facility via a network connection that's been purpose-built with very specific hardware, requiring very specific instructions to be carried out in a very specific order, in order to refine one of the rarest chemicals in the world from some of the rarest ore in the world into one of the rarest isotopes of that rarest of chemicals... without knowing anything about the hardware, the process, the code that makes it all work... just push the "I win" button?
*shakes head sadly* Investigation prior to execution is apparently too advanced of a concept for some minds.
a state obtaining information from companies for economic gain would not be anything like a state secretly destroying part of another state's energy infrastructure and/or weapons program
The end result remains the same: Your adversary loses an asset. That loss can be quantified in monentary terms. How you get there and the morality, ethics, legality, etc., are logistical matters, not strategic.
How significant would it be if it was revealed that the French government had destroyed Russian gas drilling equipment or the Japanese government had sabotaged North Korean missiles?
Is now a bad time to point out the very word saboteur is French? They are so famous for just such things that we have named the act itself after them. Is every reported case of an industrial "accident" really an accident? Even Hollywood joked about it in Iron Man, "Call it a training accident." I'm not sure whether you're naive or arrogant to say that such a revelation about state-assisted sabotage would ever be revealed to the general public. Regardless, what you're demanding nobody here will give you: Anyone with proof of state-assisted industrial espionage is not going to hand it out on the demands of some guy on the internet who fancies himself an intellectual. Offer me a few million dollars and I'll consider it though. Offer me a few million more, and it might even be true.
As an American: at least he's honest about it. My politicians just issue bald-faced lies.
He's not being honest because it's virtuous; He's being honest because there's no consequences for him doing it. Our politicians lie their asses off when it suits them just like yours. He just knows there's no fight left in the general population. Don't go getting funny ideas about how our politicians are somehow special... they were bought and paid for same as yours, and probably by the same people.
"As America and others start the world's first undeclared cyber-wars, dangerous precedents are being set that this type of warfare is without consequences. Such ideas could not be further from from truth."
Oh please. The French have been doing this kind of thing since before the United States even had a name for it. It's called industrial espionage, and they're so good at it that the executives of major companies are frequently told to never use the fax machines in hotels, or the phones, or the internet (unless it is an encrypted VPN), because the French government aggressively works to steal industrial secrets from other countries and provide it to their own businesses. People think because you add the word "Internet" to a social problem, that suddenly makes it new and special... le sigh.
All the internet did was make it faster and more efficient; Which is (wait for it) what computers in general do to socioeconomic processes.
Let the litany of Jobs worshippers now feast upon all my +1 funnies with -1 overrateds. I suppose had I made a joke about how Apple's iDied product isn't selling so well, or another iSomething joke, it'd be -1000 flamebait and they'd have to call Malda out of retirement to help rewrite the code so it'd be more resistant to having everyone on the internet simultaniously facepalm, lol, and then -1 a single comment. *maniacal laugh* Soon my pretties...
Slashdot is running a story about some rich dude's property being sold off after he went to the great iCloud in the sky. He was sort of a jerk, so naturally we have to assume there was a conspiracy to kill him. And now all his property is being sold off and used by other people... oh, the humanity. We should have buried him with all his things like King Tut or something instead.
Sweet. Now I don't need to be anywhere near you to steal your personal account information and emulate an RFID "card present" transaction (which doesn't require an ID or any of that other security crap like PINs and stuff)... I'll just wait for your phone to download an update for one of the 100 apps that are set to autoupdate whenever it's within range of a wifi, do an injection attack, and then wait for your personal info to appear in my inbox. Oh Apple, it's nice to finally meet someone who understands me!
Look, smokers kill themselves slowly... and every consumer electronics manual says "do not use near sources of water, do not smoke near device, do not use in dusty areas," etc. Engineers design equipment for people who actually give a damn about it. You can't engineer away stupidity.
That's a definition of 'new' of which I was previously unaware. We already have big business, the status quo, the stagnation of our technology and engineering industries, the lack of people entering college who can pass the entrance exams to take science and technology courses... everything happening right now seems centered around depriving the middle class of any ability to exist, let alone move into wealth.
Whether it's Google, Intel, Apple, Microsoft... or big pharma, or big oil, or whomever... the agenda is clear across the board: It's time to kill America. We're moving in to milk it dry, wait for the infrastructure to rot out, and then move on like locusts to another country we can develop, exploit, and then impoverish.
]
But...all my fans get a layer of dust on each fan blade. What are they doing differently that will stop this?
Your blades also have hundreds of millimeters of clearance between them, not fractions of a millimeter. As well, dust requires an electric charge to stick to something... plastic has a very large static charge that 'grabs' the dust... use a different material and the charge is neutral. Problem solved.
The idea of a fleet of lower powered satellites is also less likely to be hijacked than a single "super cannon" - though, if you control the whole fleet, I suppose you could "turn up the heat on the Kremlin" if you ever wanted to....
Atmospheric refraction would mean getting all the lasers lined up on a point an inch or so across might be difficult, but not a meter across. And I think the fleet versus single cannon is a moot point, since every satellite controller is a single entity; Fleets of satellites are also controlled by a single entity, and they are hijack resistant. So whether it's MegaCorp who owns it or Rogue Nation With Nukes... it doesn't really matter. It'll still be one dude pushing the "destroy" button.
Not sure how you did your math, but wouldn't 10 people each with a 5% chance of success have close to 50% overall success? With a 1% success rate, 100 people would have close to 100% success and you'd only need 51 people for 50%.
You failed statistics. x over y where x is the chance of success and y is the total number of attempts. If it's a percentage, y is 100, otherwise y is the total possibilities. Multiply that by the number of occurrances. so (x/y)^z in C notation.
The TSA has other methods for security, and is choosing to continue with these naked pictures/shameful patdowns despite public outcry, and it wouldn't be American to not do something about it.
If 10 people make the attempt at different airports throughout the country, and detection rate is 95%... the odds of at least one of them slipping through is 37%. Now, who here thinks the TSA screeners are that good? This guy's contention is that they are substantially worse.. and he's probably right. And food for thought: Even if the detection rate was 99%, it would only take 69 people to have a 50/50 chance of getting an illicit item on board. How many terrorists are (allegedly) out there again? If you do the math, the 16 terrorists that caused 9/11 and the resulting economic downfall have cost us maybe $100 billion each.
"Try smuggling this on board along with 69 other people, and you've got a 50% chance of causing The Great Satan 1.4 billion US dollars worth of economic damage."
That's an excellent promotion when you consider you've only got a 3.2% chance of dying in the process. We should be thankful terrorists suck at math.:\ If our own soldiers were this effective at causing economic damage, we would be very feared indeed. Unfortunately, we play by the rules. Our enemies don't.
Slashdot Mirror
End result? A stronger federal government contrary to the beliefs and intents of the Founding Fathers. The point of a weak fed was to keep massive government stupidity on a local or state-wide level, not to allow it to infect and infest itself across the entire country.
The federal government has grown more powerful over the years, which you'd expect -- it is the United States of America afterall. The point of a weak fed wasn't to keep "massive stupidity" at a local level -- it was because the people of that era were terrified of another king in a faraway place telling them how it was going to be, and them having no say. They wanted their autonomy, and felt a weak fed would provide the best security against another run-in with corrupt royalty. "The goverment which governs best, governs least." The founding fathers intent was to have a government that would survive longer than 13 years. We tried a weak fed. It failed. So to balance the concerns of another King trying to run things, they divided the government into three branches, and further subdivided things into the state and the federal government, etc. They figured that the best insurance against another king was to distribute the power with a system of checks and balances so that many people, rather than a few, would have to be "in" on any power grab.
Also, slavery wasn't an "excuse". For the most part, our country has historically moved towards granting more rights and freedoms to an ever-widening swath of the populace. The only step backwards really was when the 'equal rights' amendment failed to pass, which would have made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sex. Legally, men and women would have been identical then. Because that didn't happen, the second setback in civil rights occurred: Gay marriage. If there was no legal distinction between men and women, then it would have been a non-event. But for the time being, it seems that discrimination on the basis of sex has not only become more prevalent, but the legal divisions between the two groups has deepened. I'm not sure what this means for the future of the country, but it is definately not part of the overall historical trend of the previous 200 years.
Then we are quite irresponsible.
Pretty much, yeah. But no rational person expects you to take all that responsibility onto your shoulders: Just a small part. If you write a letter to the President, about anything, whatever you feel is important, then you've done more in the ten minutes it took to sit down and make your voice heard than what fifty others will do this year. And anyone who respects the democratic process will appreciate that you did more than what was asked of you: Indeed, it's the only way problems get fixed. Do what you can, when you can, and you can consider yourself a 'good' citizen. But if all you do is pay your taxes and whine about how the world isn't fair... well, you'll have a lot of company, at least.
The people are responsible for anything done by the state, QED.
...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
In other words, we are not responsible for the actions of our government: We are responsible for stopping them when they piss us off or endanger our lives.
It sounds like you believe the sole purpose of prison is revenge against the offender. I don't want to live in a society where that's the purpose of justice.
There's no belief here. Our country has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any country. Any. And the rate accelerated dramatically since 1980, and continues to climb steeply year by year. Obviously this is not a sustainable trend; But it's quite clear that America has a very different perspective on what "Justice" is than the rest of the world... I'll leave you to your own opinions on what that perspective is. We also have the highest rate of capital punishment of any country, though if you removed Texas from the statistics, we would lose that distinction... so it is debatable. And we continue to expand extrajudiciary action: Guantanamo bay, seizing foreign nationals on foreign soil and indefinately detaining them... and we are also exporting our own citizens to other countries for indefinite detainment under semi-secret reciprocity agreements.
There is little doubt in the international community that the United States has become a police state, and continues to expand its use of military and covert force to extend its judiciary practices worldwide.
Do you have a source for that story? Because I've not heard about that happening.
It was a local only story; It ran on the Star Tribune and WCCO also picked it up sometime last summer. Unfortunately, neither site maintains a (free) searchable archive, so I can't give you anything more than that. Sorry. What I can do is point you in the direction of an expert on the matter locally: Chuck Ramsay, who won last year's Attorney of the Year award for this state and specializes in DUI convictions.
Some highlights from the website include: Cases pending where a vehicle can be seized by the government for suspicion of DUI when a conviction is not obtained. Minnesota also has a habit of destroying evidence used in DUI convictions after 1 year regardless of if a case is still on appeal or not (by law, you can request a retest of any positive result by a different lab; But if the sample isn't available for retesting, this obviously poses a legal problem). There are also widespread fraud regarding log entries for maintenance of the machines; Officers literally xerox old logs, change the dates, and put them back into the official record. This has also been upheld by the Court; Go through the archives on the blog, you'll find all the citations you need there.
We're the only state that can lock you up for life without a trial; all it takes is a judge to agree that there's a risk you could offend again. In other words, you serve your sentence, and then an unappealable, arbitrary decision, by one guy, can have you spend the rest of your life in jail. Our laws in this state are so bad that the European Union refuses to extradite people here in several cases. I am not surprised that they just basically crapped in the pool of civil rights and then shrugged and went on with their business.
We've convicted people of DUI for walking down the street. Seriously. It was upheld on the basis that he could have gotten in a motor vehicle, because he had his car keys on him. Bonus: The car didn't even run.
If you're going to throw fines you'll never be able to collect, might as well put it in the billions, and then blame him for the economy crashing.
They are already blaming piracy for crashing the economy. Hell, after 9/11, they called pirates terrorists who were bent on destroying our way of life. Apparently, when you download music, you're downloading terrorism. As for the site going down... there's already DHT and hundreds of other trackers up there. People will simply migrate to other services. They could scream about how they're going to give people trillion dollar fines and 300 years in the electric chair for downloading, but there's billions of people doing it and only thousands of people trying to enforce a law they crafted themselves. They'd have to co-opt and topple entire governments to get what they want, and even at that... the statistics are not kind.
The only way for them to have any effect on piracy is with high profile legal cases that get lots of press coverage so people think "boy, I don't want to be that guy." It's the same reason the Lottery is so popular: People suck at math, and if they hear about something a lot, they'll change their behavior... because critical thinking is hard, and following the herd is easy.
I.e. who's wining? Because customers are surely on the losing side.
No they aren't. Customers benefit from an endless system of appeals, cumbersome and byzantine laws regarding patents, trademarks and copyrights -- it saves them from having to buy a competitor's product, the poor bastards. The free market is dangerous and must be heavily regulated... unless it's labor, in which case we need as little regulation as possible because we have to remain competitive with third world sweat shops.
Everything you buy here is cheaper everywhere else, and it's because you're not working hard enough for your crumbs, Citizen.
Is it just me or does anyone actually support the actions of our government besides the government?
Our levels of civic education and the amount of civic responsibility (voting, jury duty, military service, etc.,) are shockingly low compared to other first world countries. Our public education system continues to show a steady downward trend in the diversity and depth of material, fewer graduates are capable of multi-factor analysis, critical thinking... even basic math skills markedly eroded in the 18-25 group. It doesn't matter what our government does; The population has become functionally illiterate. The general population simply lacks the ability to understand government action. If tomorrow CNN reported that we've started carpet bombing say *shakes magic 8 ball* Mauritania because *shakes magic 8 ball* they funded training camps for buddhist suicide bombers... most people would just nod their heads, shrug, and go about their business and in a few months FOX News would be showing us a picture of a buddhist monk setting himself on fire as proof of their radical buddhism, perhaps juxtaposing some people that look vaguely buddhist burning a flag before offering 15 seconds for J. Random College Professor of Sociostrategogamia at Princeton to say "I think we're really mischaracterizing thi--"... and then cut to commercial break with dancing toilet paper.
That's what America is today. I'm sorry... I can't honestly say anyone really supports or doesn't support the government on anything other than emotive thinking and a vague sense that they shouldn't really question what they're told or Bad Things Will Happen. There is no longer any public discussion of what our government does, there's no real public forum for it: The few that people have attempted to form have been stigmatized by the Department of Homeland Security. It may not be Soviet Russia in the 80s, or East Germany... people aren't exactly disappearing off the street, but there is still a palpable fear in our public places. People just don't talk to each other anymore.
Technology changes the way things are done.
Captain Obvious, is that you?
slashdotters seem to want to say "no no don't go there" as if that would stop it from ever occurring.
How does one go about seeming to want to say something? Is that like wanting to seem like you're thinking something?
You'd also never see anyone here write "you know the Chinese PLA hacking into Lockheed sets a bad precedent, this is dangerous what they're doing"
You know the Chinese PLA hacking into Lockheed sets a bad precedent, this is dangerous what they're doing. And with that out of the way... Yes, it's dangerous. It's not dangerous like saying Steve Jobs was a total douchebag in a certain popular geek-culture website, but you know, I'm sure Bad Things could happen. Kinda obvious... they make missiles and other things designed to bring spectacular fireworks displays to impoverished countries around the world.
But because the attacker and victim roles are reversed in this thread, you'll never see that same reasoning.
I'm kinda lost here. I think most people would say that whether they're the ones holding the gun, or the one with the gun to their head... the gun still exists. Of course, it would matter a great deal to these two hypothetical people which was which...
Stuxnet was not industrial espionage. It was a weapon designed to destroy critical infrastructure[...]
Thinking is not your strong point. You're going to screw up a facility via a network connection that's been purpose-built with very specific hardware, requiring very specific instructions to be carried out in a very specific order, in order to refine one of the rarest chemicals in the world from some of the rarest ore in the world into one of the rarest isotopes of that rarest of chemicals... without knowing anything about the hardware, the process, the code that makes it all work... just push the "I win" button?
*shakes head sadly* Investigation prior to execution is apparently too advanced of a concept for some minds.
a state obtaining information from companies for economic gain would not be anything like a state secretly destroying part of another state's energy infrastructure and/or weapons program
The end result remains the same: Your adversary loses an asset. That loss can be quantified in monentary terms. How you get there and the morality, ethics, legality, etc., are logistical matters, not strategic.
How significant would it be if it was revealed that the French government had destroyed Russian gas drilling equipment or the Japanese government had sabotaged North Korean missiles?
Is now a bad time to point out the very word saboteur is French? They are so famous for just such things that we have named the act itself after them. Is every reported case of an industrial "accident" really an accident? Even Hollywood joked about it in Iron Man, "Call it a training accident." I'm not sure whether you're naive or arrogant to say that such a revelation about state-assisted sabotage would ever be revealed to the general public. Regardless, what you're demanding nobody here will give you: Anyone with proof of state-assisted industrial espionage is not going to hand it out on the demands of some guy on the internet who fancies himself an intellectual. Offer me a few million dollars and I'll consider it though. Offer me a few million more, and it might even be true.
As an American: at least he's honest about it. My politicians just issue bald-faced lies.
He's not being honest because it's virtuous; He's being honest because there's no consequences for him doing it. Our politicians lie their asses off when it suits them just like yours. He just knows there's no fight left in the general population. Don't go getting funny ideas about how our politicians are somehow special... they were bought and paid for same as yours, and probably by the same people.
"As America and others start the world's first undeclared cyber-wars, dangerous precedents are being set that this type of warfare is without consequences. Such ideas could not be further from from truth."
Oh please. The French have been doing this kind of thing since before the United States even had a name for it. It's called industrial espionage, and they're so good at it that the executives of major companies are frequently told to never use the fax machines in hotels, or the phones, or the internet (unless it is an encrypted VPN), because the French government aggressively works to steal industrial secrets from other countries and provide it to their own businesses. People think because you add the word "Internet" to a social problem, that suddenly makes it new and special... le sigh.
All the internet did was make it faster and more efficient; Which is (wait for it) what computers in general do to socioeconomic processes.
Let the litany of Jobs worshippers now feast upon all my +1 funnies with -1 overrateds. I suppose had I made a joke about how Apple's iDied product isn't selling so well, or another iSomething joke, it'd be -1000 flamebait and they'd have to call Malda out of retirement to help rewrite the code so it'd be more resistant to having everyone on the internet simultaniously facepalm, lol, and then -1 a single comment. *maniacal laugh* Soon my pretties...
...so naturally we have to assume there was a conspiracy to kill him.
Conversely, for people who believe Steve was a really nice guy... we can also discuss the conspiracy to save him from the conspiracy to kill him.
Slashdot is running a story about some rich dude's property being sold off after he went to the great iCloud in the sky. He was sort of a jerk, so naturally we have to assume there was a conspiracy to kill him. And now all his property is being sold off and used by other people... oh, the humanity. We should have buried him with all his things like King Tut or something instead.
Sweet. Now I don't need to be anywhere near you to steal your personal account information and emulate an RFID "card present" transaction (which doesn't require an ID or any of that other security crap like PINs and stuff)... I'll just wait for your phone to download an update for one of the 100 apps that are set to autoupdate whenever it's within range of a wifi, do an injection attack, and then wait for your personal info to appear in my inbox. Oh Apple, it's nice to finally meet someone who understands me!
-- Your Best Fan, J. Random Criminal
Or tar, i.e. smoke.
Look, smokers kill themselves slowly... and every consumer electronics manual says "do not use near sources of water, do not smoke near device, do not use in dusty areas," etc. Engineers design equipment for people who actually give a damn about it. You can't engineer away stupidity.
Status quo all the way baby...it's a new world.
That's a definition of 'new' of which I was previously unaware. We already have big business, the status quo, the stagnation of our technology and engineering industries, the lack of people entering college who can pass the entrance exams to take science and technology courses... everything happening right now seems centered around depriving the middle class of any ability to exist, let alone move into wealth.
Whether it's Google, Intel, Apple, Microsoft... or big pharma, or big oil, or whomever... the agenda is clear across the board: It's time to kill America. We're moving in to milk it dry, wait for the infrastructure to rot out, and then move on like locusts to another country we can develop, exploit, and then impoverish. ]
But...all my fans get a layer of dust on each fan blade. What are they doing differently that will stop this?
Your blades also have hundreds of millimeters of clearance between them, not fractions of a millimeter. As well, dust requires an electric charge to stick to something... plastic has a very large static charge that 'grabs' the dust... use a different material and the charge is neutral. Problem solved.
The idea of a fleet of lower powered satellites is also less likely to be hijacked than a single "super cannon" - though, if you control the whole fleet, I suppose you could "turn up the heat on the Kremlin" if you ever wanted to....
Atmospheric refraction would mean getting all the lasers lined up on a point an inch or so across might be difficult, but not a meter across. And I think the fleet versus single cannon is a moot point, since every satellite controller is a single entity; Fleets of satellites are also controlled by a single entity, and they are hijack resistant. So whether it's MegaCorp who owns it or Rogue Nation With Nukes... it doesn't really matter. It'll still be one dude pushing the "destroy" button.
ever see a single dollar bill in a tip jar? Priming isn't new.
Well, I have.. I took all the other bills out when the cashier had his back turned. :D Everything I learned, I learned from Batman movies.
Not sure how you did your math, but wouldn't 10 people each with a 5% chance of success have close to 50% overall success? With a 1% success rate, 100 people would have close to 100% success and you'd only need 51 people for 50%.
You failed statistics. x over y where x is the chance of success and y is the total number of attempts. If it's a percentage, y is 100, otherwise y is the total possibilities. Multiply that by the number of occurrances. so (x/y)^z in C notation.
The TSA has other methods for security, and is choosing to continue with these naked pictures/shameful patdowns despite public outcry, and it wouldn't be American to not do something about it.
If 10 people make the attempt at different airports throughout the country, and detection rate is 95%... the odds of at least one of them slipping through is 37%. Now, who here thinks the TSA screeners are that good? This guy's contention is that they are substantially worse.. and he's probably right. And food for thought: Even if the detection rate was 99%, it would only take 69 people to have a 50/50 chance of getting an illicit item on board. How many terrorists are (allegedly) out there again? If you do the math, the 16 terrorists that caused 9/11 and the resulting economic downfall have cost us maybe $100 billion each.
"Try smuggling this on board along with 69 other people, and you've got a 50% chance of causing The Great Satan 1.4 billion US dollars worth of economic damage."
That's an excellent promotion when you consider you've only got a 3.2% chance of dying in the process. We should be thankful terrorists suck at math. :\ If our own soldiers were this effective at causing economic damage, we would be very feared indeed. Unfortunately, we play by the rules. Our enemies don't.