You know, I'd go with "citation needed", but how about I just bust this myth right here and now.
Thorium reactors require uranium and/or other fissile material. They are not any safer than conventional reactors on this basis. A shorter explanation of just how much of a pipe dream thorium reactors are is here along with the caveat that dropping a bomb on one would be a very messy affair.
And they are not meltdown proof; if the safety controls fail. Thorium reactors are so-called "meltdown-proof" because they have a plug in the bottom of the reactor that will disintegrate and drop the core into a large holding tank. As the molten salt that acts as the coolant is now spread out, the theory is this is safer. But it all depends on that plug giving way, and this is only a theoretical model.
Meltdowns are one possible failure mode of a reactor. They aren't even the most common, nor most dangerous, depending on the design. A thorium reactor can still fail catastrophically if the piping becomes plugged. Think about this for a second; the primary coolant is molten salt. What happens if it becomes too cool or solidifies in places; The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.
Thorium reactors are not meltdown proof; Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other. And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.
Thank you for playing though... now kindly stop spreading bullshit.
First, the safer nuclear reactors are prohibited by the government.
Not an accurate statement. All nuclear reactors are restricted by the government, to the point that building a new one is effectively impossible. And while the government is enforcing these laws, it is because of idiot environmentalists that the situation persists. As well, coal power plants could dramatically reduce their radioactive materials and carbon output with newer technology, but because of NIMBY and the high expense of overcoming it, companies do not build many of those either. It is in fact a lot cheaper to maintain dirty old plants than build shiny new ones -- not just because of NIMBY but because new plants are subject to environmental restrictions so onerous that they are effectively impossible to build and not operate at a loss.
Why would they charge the same premiums to a meltdown-able (I know, not a word) reactor as a meltdown-proof design like integral fast reactors or thorium reactors?
There is no such thing as a "meltdown-proof" design. All reactors can suffer catastrophic failure that releases radioactive material into the surrounding environment. It would be more accurate to say the alternative designs you have mentioned are meltdown-resistant, in the same way bulletproof glass isn't truly bulletproof... you just need a bigger gun.
Why would the power companies be able to afford the insurance on rusting barrels of nuclear waste next to the river that they just store there? That's both an insurance problem and one of the feds promising they'll take care of the waste (but never doing it).
NIMBY. Stuff the environmentalists into rusty barrels by the river instead and the problem abates.
Because they can consume that waste, integral fast reactors would be a business opportunity all their own if the economics of the nuclear industry wasn't wildly distorted by the government(s).
Not entirely accurate. Our proven stockpile of fissile uranium is sufficient to last us for the next 500 years if energy consumption and world population continue along current trends. It is cheap, the reactors are of simple design, and when we have used it all up, we can reprocess the spent rods and use them to power next-generation nuclear plants as well. There's no need at present to build reactors of the types you are mentioning because the operating costs would be higher and the net energy output lower. Yes, these technologies should be explored, and perhaps see limited deployment in certain scenarios, but mostly to advance our understanding of nuclear physics. There are very few cases to be made where those technologies are economically superior, and in many cases, not even viable. It's like suggesting solar power to replace everything... it just doesn't have the "oomph" needed.
But, then again, the coal plants don't have to pay a dime towards the externalities they introduce by spewing both radioactivity (so much more than any nuclear incident ever did) and mercury and other heavy metals.
Actually, in many European countries they do (since you used the example of England and France); via their brain-damaged "carbon offset" programs, the reason for which the designation of "brain-damaged" merits many paragraphs, but for purposes of brevity I will leave off.
We don't have a technology problem here and we don't have an economics problem either.
False. We have both.
It's know-nothing wonder-mutts screwing with those that have us in this position.
Your conclusion is accurate, although your supporting logic is badly flawed.
ARE YOU CRAZY?! if we do that, we'll bankrupt the economy, everyone will be homeless and we'll be slaves to Big Green and Big Nuke! before you know it, we'll be GLOWING green because of all that radiation! DO YOU WANT THAT?!
Yes, he's crazy. But he also has the virtue of being right. And glowing green could be fun. It would save me having to search for the damn light switch at 2am when I go to the bathroom and then blind myself when I do.
But if you mean "Are you worried about radiological catastrophe?" the answer is no. I worry about some small-dick dictator somewhere getting the idea that nuking someone would be fun. Nuclear bombs I worry about. Nuclear energy I do not.
Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.
Really? Because over here in the United States, we seem to be encouraging exactly that scenario -- cut education, oppose health care, restrict labor unions, drive wages down, concentrate wealth, ignore environmental initiatives, and create a debt-based economy for the poor and an investment-based economy for the rich.
Are you suggesting the United States is striving to leave modern society? Or perhaps, what you meant to say that fighting over the scarce resources is what an idealized society strives to avoid.
The insult is that I read another stupid post from timothy.
Yeah, but nobody answered his question: If so, why haven't they picked it up by now?
Well, we've already demonstrated that it isn't so, but hypothetically, if this was the case, then it would be because we're so used to being taxed that we all but ignore it. 10%? 10.5%? 13%? Whatever. Just put it on the card. Many a scam has been perpetuated based on a fraction of a percent "error" in tax or regulatory rates, and companies pocketed the difference for decades before anyone noticed.
Take a look at your cell phone bill sometime. How many of those taxes, regulatory fees, administrative costs, etc., are actually mandated by the government and at the correct rate?
Lowest pollution? I guess little things like Windscale, Tchernobyl, and Fuckushima are removed from that calculation...
Nope. Go ahead and include them. You'll get to about.1% of the emissions of coal power plants with every nuclear disaster. Ever. Including all of the nuclear bomb tests, the two bombs we dropped on Japan, three mile island, and more.
Fun fact: Coal plants collectively emit more radiation in a year than all those disasters combined have, and that's when you include into the figures the yearly radiation the nuclear plants emit into the environment as well.
it calls upon members of the European Union 'to give the European Commission the mandate to draft the laws and develop initiatives necessary to stop digital arms trade'
Amazing. The response of the Europeans is apparently to demand their governments give up control over their own intelligence agencies and the ability to develop cyberweapons, crippling their telecommunications infrastructure... Because one government agency in the United States got caught peeping through the windows.
Explain to me the logic here, because to me it looks like the Europeans are shooting themselves in the foot while screaming "Look what you made me do! Now you'd better stop or I'm gonna do it again!"
Girl - you write some pretty smart, insightful comments from time to time. But your logic is missing a few cogs here.
Hanlon's razor isn't a proof... it's an opinion. People do want to see Obamacare fail. Powerful people. And powerful people have ways of getting what they want, without it being known they're the ones pulling the strings.
Hanlon may be smart, but I'll take Machiavelli any day of the week if we want to debate.
This article is dated oct 8. I had assumed it would be more recent.
Obligatory: You must be new here...
In other news, it's still a relevant and current event; Just because something's a month old doesn't mean it might as well have been written on stone tablets. I know the iThingie generation has the attention span of... oh who am I kidding, they didn't even finish reading the summary let alone the comments.:) But more seriously, it's pretty clear at this point the problem isn't because of the technology, but rather that the implimentation was divided up into two teams without much regard for communication between the two, or management oversight.
The fact is, what happened with ObamaCare happens in government IT all the time. Too many chefs, not enough cooks. When the dust settles we will undoubtedly discover that the true cause of failure was not in IT, or even the contractors, who I am sure met their contractual obligations, but rather that it was setup for failure by political interests who are right now getting a lot of play over its failure, without being identified as the cause. They will undoubtedly have plausible deniability of the "Well, I was sure this wouldn't happen because of my inserting language into the bill requiring process xyzzy be followed instead of yzzyx!"... and a half-dozen co-conspirators all did similar to structure it in such a way that there was no other possible outcome than failure.
Failure like this requires planning; You can't accidentally crash and burn this badly. And what we're going to find when we do the autopsy is that a few dozen people conspired to create the conditions necessary for it to fail, but we'll never be able to prove the conspiracy, and because the blame will be on this group of individuals, each of whom can legitimately claim their own contribution shouldn't/couldn't have caused the failure, nobody will be held accountable.
Except of course the people who implimented it, and the guy who's name was on the proposal.
Just like every private sector IT project that blows up.
A very vocal part of the bitcoin community would disagree with you there. The idea of calculating a "taint" value for coins (based on whether they were involved in any undesirable/shady activities) and refusing to accept highly tainted coins seems to be a pretty popular idea.
Let us hope then they never discover that almost all of the money they've ever handled contains detectable quantities of cocaine and other drugs. In other words, almost every dollar in circulation has been used to buy drugs.
I love anarchists... they rail against rules but then were they to ever try and live up to their whacky ideas, they'd quickly all die of starvation or similar.
It's not that that statement makes me angry; it just makes me shrug. Even if it is true, it's utterly irrelevant. You don't give people powers that could easily be abused if you can help it because they will very likely abuse them.
And yet, if you give nobody any power, then you cannot prevent injustice. Government needs to be bigger than any individual or group that can be a source of injustice, or it will be powerless to prevent it. This argument is as old as civilization. Without laws, there would be chaos. So we struggle eternally with finding a way of balancing perfect order -- which is synonymous with tyranny and oppression, and perfect chaos -- which is mob rule and violence.
It's counterintuitive, but for a group of humans to be at their happiest and most content... there must be a measure of both extremes.
While we're telling other people how they think or feel, I will say this: You don't really believe what you wrote. You might say you do, but you don't.
That's the interesting thing about beliefs though. Social reality is like shining a bright flashlight on a rainy night. Wherever you point it, it creates a cone. The rain, which was random and disorganized before, suddenly assumes a specific shape. And this is how society is organized. Why does red mean stop and green mean go? We all agree on it, and thus it has value. If we didn't, then nobody would stop, or go... it would be chaos. Such as it is with much of our 'justice'. We arbitrarily separate things that are naturally in equilibrium so that we can create meaning.
Yeah, this is often true. However, there are some counterexamples, e.g. virtual goods and services. The point of the coin mixers is to disassociate all illicit activity from all legitimate activity, such that any real world names, addresses, or other PII are tied purely to legitimate accounts.
The accounts were legitimate to begin with. Money isn't inherently good or evil. It doesn't develop bad karma because it was used to buy drugs with, or a child for sex. And real world names, addresses, etc., are all what you need to complete a transaction for virtual goods and services. There is not a lot that you can do online that at some point doesn't require some form of identification. It may just be a username and password, or a cookie, or a data file somewhere that just points to an ip address... but everything you do online leaves a trace of you behind.
It's as Sherlock Holmes said: Nobody can enter and leave a room without taking something with, and leaving something behind. This is the foundation of all forms of forensic analysis... and running your money through a mixer doesn't improve your anonymity.. it actually harms it. It's like trying to go through a forest unseen... if you step on a leaf and crumple it, your attempt to put the it back the way it was before leaves an even bigger footprint than had you simply continued.
If I were to anthropromorphize the NSA, FBI, or [insert big bad here], it would probably grin contentedly at these crypto-anarchists attempt to create anonymity. The very act of attempting to anonymize yourself separates you from others. It provides a unique datapoint. It's like the leaf you stepped on. Find enough, and I can pick up your trail.
I don't think government thugs harassing people is at all "reasonable."
I suppose it all comes down to which people they're harassing. Nobody's going to say too much if a terrorist gets shipped to Gitmo and spends the rest of his years being beaten for information. And maybe that isn't right -- maybe we should be less vindictive as a society. But nevertheless, who the government targets has a great degree of bearing on how much public resistance it encounters.
After 9/11, thousands of Muslims were attacked in public. There have been several mosque burnings and bombings, and the government has never identified the culprits. In New York there was, until very recently, a "stop and frisk" law that had been proven many times over to be excessively discriminatory towards black people. But nobody complained, because it only affected black people. To quote "First they came for the..." and you know the rest. Everybody knows the words by heart.
But they forget that it's human nature to look the other way, or even smile a little, when you see your enemy (actual or perceived) being hurt... and it doesn't much matter how justified it is. It's called the Just World hypothesis in the academic community... but basically; If we see somebody being hurt, we assume the must have done something to deserve it.
And for this reason... the government can harass lots of people -- just as long as they're the right people. And nobody will say anything. Whether it's reasonable or not... well, that really depends on who you ask.
To the NSA... we're all potential terrorists until proven otherwise. Innocent, guilty... doesn't really matter. To them, they're defending freedom. What's a little harassment in the name of freedom? And here's the thing that really pisses most people off: You aren't so different. So don't act like you are. Just like the NSA, you don't care so much about innocence or guilty (oh I know, you believe you do), not nearly as much as watching someone you don't like get their just desserts. It takes a rare kind of conviction to ideals to defend one's enemy; To put adherence to a belief above individual desire for vengeance. A very rare kind indeed; So much so, that only a handful of people have ever been possessed of it. And very often, those people either inspire us... or wind up dead.
Silk Road allegedly mixed some coins but, also allegedly, did so poorly. Not surprising given the amounts it was trying to mix. It did not, afaik, use the coinjoin method linked above. Also, the founder wasn't tracked down due to coin mixing or lack thereof anyway.
More to the point.. coin mixing did not prevent the Feds from identifying thousands of people who used the service and were able to match realworld transactions to their bitcoin equivalents. In fact, from what I can tell... it wasn't much more than a slight irritation to their forensic accountants.
The fact is that crypto-anarchists may be very good at code, but they're very bad at high level analysis. You (and the crypto people too) need to understand that if you take a hundred people, walk them into a room, and they all empty their pockets and record the cash they throw into a giant bin on a ledger, and when everyone has gone through, they line up again and take money back out... which is effectively what the 'perfect' mixer would do... you aren't improving the anonymity of your cash expenditures by that much.
Your anonymity is not dependent on where you got the money from but rather who you're giving it to. It's the spending of money that destroys your anonymity, not the acquisition of it.
You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks
Actually, that ordinarily would be a problem. However, you're not understanding that bitcoin isn't encrypting anything. It's hashing it. The bitcoin system doesn't protect against seizure and use of bitcoins; it protects against ledger fraud.
Think of it this way: It will always be hard (hopefully too hard) to undo, invalidate, or duplicate a transaction; The older it is, the more secure it becomes. But let's remove the idea of a bitcoin for the moment and instead say that everyone has a user account in this 'BT' system, and after supplying their login and password, can trade any coins they have with anyone else. Any transaction made is secure; until and unless you lose your password or someone else gets it. Then whatever bitcoins you have are now theirs, the end. But they cannot unspend your coins; they cannot change the transactions. They can only spend what's in your wallet now.
So these "grave" robbers can't reclaim old blocks... they can only decrypt the wallets the coins are stored in. Assuming they were ever encrypted to begin with.
The bit coin system is not secured against theft of coins. That's your job (either to steal or to protect)... all it guarantees is that transactions are permanent (and public).
including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger."
I got some bad news; The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed. But I mean, whadda expect... the government likes getting paid. Kindof a lot. And so they have entire divisions of the government setup to make sure they can track down people who try to hide money from them and, well, make them pay.
But for the moment, let's ignore all that. Some crypto-anarchist hacked something together over the course of a few weekends and that's all solved. Great!
Next question: The NSA is evil and watching everything, except of course this, which is totally impregnable and would be pretty much the terrorist currency of choice... what compelling moral, ethical, or technical arguments can you provide that dropping my "money" into a e-blender and setting it to frappe will result in delicious privacy juices coming out in the same quantity as I put in, and is totally resistant to attack? I've learned in security that you can get either tamper-evident, or tamper-resistant... but trying to get both is enormously difficult. So I really, well and truly, want to know how you plan on having the necessary robust auditing and controls necessary to ensure that transactions are fair and correctly executed, while at the same time dropping the ledgers into your e-blender... while trusting the now-anonymized agents utilizing such a thing not to find some way to exploit the system... using the system itself to cover their tracks?
Really, you still resort to ad hominem to support your delusion...
Dude, it's your tin foil hat, not mine. You just suggested the most massive conspiracy theory since the faking of the apollo moon landings. So yes, I'm gonna mock you. Mercilessly. The idea that the FBI has faked every single capture of every single terrorist... ever... is so incredibly stupid that I award you no points sir, and may God have mercy on your soul.
What does the Declaration of Independence have to do with the rule of Law?
Yes... what does one of the most seminal works in the annals of political writing have to do with anything? Nothing, that's what! Because I'm a delusional tin-foil hat wearing nutjob who thinks the FBI is fake and baking their criminals! ahaahahahaha.... and now I shall demonstrate the power of crystal healing on this inanimate carbon rod!
There are no straw men left standing!
No, that's because you used them all already.
Fact checking is really not that difficult...
No, but being as short bus special as you is.
Look, at this point you've completely given up on any semblence of rationality and you're just trying to get in the last word... so let me save you the trouble:
You're not going to get it. If there is but one thing I can do for your retarded ass, it's to deny you this thing. I will continue replying until slashdot closes this thread down. And it will be only, and solely, to mock the utter depths of your incompetence.
What people are upset about is not "spying", they are upset about Government surveillance and espionage against non-military targets.
What the government is saying is you can't tell the difference in today's world: Terrorist don't wear uniforms.
You are confusing border security with domestic espionage and surveillance, they are two vastly separate areas for concern.
No. The government has repeatedly stated those things are now relevant and related. Sorry if you didn't get that memo back in 2001.
I'll go one up on you. Every plot foiled that the Government is crediting to the surveillance state has been a setup by the FBI. [...] The joke is on you, do you get it?
*facepalm* The Tin Foil is strong with this one.
Next, you miss the whole point of being a constitutional republic. It's not a democracy and "what's good for me", it's about a rule of law and what's good for society as a whole.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Please tell me why if "rule of law" and "good for society" were so important, the declaration of independence didn't open with that instead? Answer: Because the purpose of a democracy (or a republic, if you want to be a pedant) is not to create a great country, but to create great people.
If you desire order above happiness, then you get despotism. But don't take my word for it; "" Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Conjecture and doomsday? Go back and read it again. There is no doomsday anything, but I do claim that nothing good can happen with that much information in the Government's hands
Actually, I was pointing out that your all or nothing thinking regarding government surveillance was a logical fallacy. You claimed surveillance never helps. Ever. Not even once. We academics call people who make statements that use the word always, never, or similar, outside of the context of mathematics to be, achem... coo coo for cocopuffs.
You started by claiming that everyone who questions is wrong and just claiming "oh noes" without questioning "why". That is absolutely wrong.
This just in: Motive is irrelevant. Also, the price of tin foil is rising.
I gave a very cohesive argument against spying, you don't like the answer.
âoeHow many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.â -- Abraham Lincoln.
Aircraft that have sufficient power do not "level at 10,000" during their climb, and ATC does not expect them to. That would include just about any aircraft that was already going 250 knots during the climb. ATC does expect, and pilots may have to, temporarily suspend descent before going below 10,000 feet so they can meet the 250 knot limit.
Flight profile for a 737 typically means reducing throttle at 10,000 feet... thus the climb becomes more shallow... if you're heavy, you're going to want to build up whatever speed you lost getting to 10,000 feet before ascending more; This isn't an ATC rule, this is the nature of the plane and about conserving fuel.
*Anybody who talks about '10 minutes during takeoff and landing' is clearly flying from different airports than me...
Well, the FAA limits your climb velocity to 250 knots for all aircraft. But for a 737 a typical flight profile is that rotation (V2) occurs around 150 knots. Full power is maintained until around 1500 feet, while the aircraft speed continues to increase to around 250 knots. Sometime before around 200-210 the flaps are retracted and angle of ascent is dictated by the 250 knot regulation.... you hold at 250 knots until attaining 10,000 feet. Then level at 10,000 feet and build up to about 300 knots or so before beginning the final climb to cruising altitude (and speed). There's some adjustments that happen around 25000-27000 as atmosphere thins and airspeed drops, which is normal and usually some pitch adjustment occurs to continue the climb safely until achieving cruise altitude around 35-40,000. That's usually when the pilot kicks on the autopilot, levels the wings, and comes on comms to announce to the world he's bored for awhile.:)
From rotation (V2) to 10,000 feet, it is about ten minutes... obviously this can vary depending on the airport, local conditions, weight, just to name a few things... but 10 minutes is a good average. It just seems like longer because you're stuck on the ground waiting for takeoff, then clearance, then actually powering up and starting down the runway, etc. In actuality, from the time you start taxing until 10,000 feet, it's probably more like half an hour on average.
So what the FAA is saying is an accurate statement; Your impression it is longer is because as a passenger, the "flight" starts when you're on the plane, whereas for the FAA, the flight doesn't start until you're in the air.
No. I'll be happy when we start having a discussion about how to address the threats before us. It doesn't sit right with me saying it's okay for people to come into my home (America) and start blowing shit up and for us to just sit back and say "Well, not much we can do about that." Is what we're doing right now the right answer? I don't know. But it's a better answer than not meeting the threat at all.
Here on slashdot and all across the blogosphere, I find people raging against the NSA and surveillance, but I don't see anyone offering up a better way to deal with the threats they have been tasked with handling. We need a response. Maybe not this response, but we need some response. And comments like yours and others here don't do that.
These threats aren't abstract; The Boston marathon bombing happened. School shootings are a weekly thing. China is actively trying to hack into our financial systems, industrial control systems, infrastructure like water and electricity, etc. The threats they describe are tangible things with evidence to back up their claim.
We need to balance out our response with the need for citizen privacy, and the rights outlined in the Constitution and elsewhere. I do feel that there is a lack of oversight and guidance from Congress and from private citizens, regarding mass surveillance and other threat-response technology. Full body airport scanners were a tragic mistake -- people got cancer from them, and it was a preventable mistake because the same thing happened when x-ray technology was discovered. There has been a lot of mismanagement and incompetence that didn't need to happen. And there are a large number of government programs that have shown only limited benefit, if any.
All of these are legitimate concerns to raise. But people raise them as absolutes, as black and white; Like privacy is some kind of inviolate thing for the government, while these people give it away for fractions of a penny to Google and Facebook! I'm sorry, but it's hypocritical and almost every argument against the government has been either propaganda, mob mentality, or false dichotomy thinking. There are good arguments to be had here.
The "that is the price we will pay" is the one that only barely manages to cross the line that delineates the rational ones from the irrational. We can do better.
While you make a nice speech you have a huge misnomer in your statements. We are not seeing a "spying on enemies and troops"!
You need to go look up the word misnomer. I said that was the case... FIFTY YEARS AGO. Today's threats are small, highly mobile, and thanks to technology small groups of people can have huge force multiplers in their favor. We can now bomb entire armies to dust with one guy sitting in a room using remote-controlled airplanes. And likewise... one guy can strap a bomb to his chest, run into a crowd, and kill or maim many of them.
The days of limiting surveillance to only troops and governments is long gone. It is incredibly naive to suggest we dial back the clock fifty years because you got a hair up your ass about privacy getting stepped on. You want reform in the government? You want the NSA to have reasonable restrictions on their spy programs? That's fine. Let's have that discussion. But saying they should just board up and close shop? Get real.
Our enemies are not going to be so kind as to march in nice, regular rows, and then line up single file so we can shoot at them; That hasn't happened since we fought the British during our war for independence. You may well recall, that tactic didn't work very well for them. We're dealing with small and highly mobile threats. Threats like someone buying an automatic assault rifle, walking into a school, and killing people by the dozens to hundreds. People loading up cars with tanks of gasoline and gun powder, and driving into a gathered crowd. There are lots of people out there right now that have been made desperate due to poor economic conditions and some of them are going to get the idea that it would be pretty "cool" to make a bunch of other people part of their last political statement on this Earth.
Maybe you can handwave that away. Maybe you think the restrictions are too onerous to contemplate, and so we should just accept that the price of freedom is every few weeks hearing about a bunch of innocent people going up in flames. But a lot of people don't. And almost none of our representatives feel that way.
And if we're going to convince anyone to either support or reject what the government is doing, we need a better position than "fire bad, tree pretty."
"Nothing good can come from this level of spying and information gathering. Nothing! "
We caught the boston bomber in a matter of days... using surveillance information from civilian resources. Shop cameras. Cell phones. Television footage. You can't say that "nothing" good comes from it. You might be able to say "not much" good comes of it... small comfort I suppose to the victims, but go ahead and say it. But surveillance has caught many criminals so far. You can argue that's not enough to justify what's going on, but you're being either incredibly naive, or so biased as to be effectively blind, if you say there has been no benefit.
Perhaps _you_ have not paid attention or not weighed much, but many of us have!
Oh, I'm paying attention. I'm just resisting this mob mentality right now over all things NSA and surveillance. It came about for a reason, and I'd rather understand that reason and make informed decisions about what to tell my representatives as far as where the lines need to be drawn, and to be able to assert my position with such force and logic as to command their assent. But going to my representatives and knee-jerking my way through the conversation isn't going to convince them that anything is wrong (or right). It doesn't improve anyone's understanding of the issues.
Your entire post is nothing but conjecture, doomsday prophecy, and knee-jerk reactionism. It doesn't even attempt to ask the most fundamental question here: Why did they do it? You offer absolutely nothing for motive. You put nothing on the table to bargain with. You give neither me, nor your representatives, nor anyone who has read any of your comme
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Thorium reactors by design are meltdown proof.
You know, I'd go with "citation needed", but how about I just bust this myth right here and now.
Thorium reactors require uranium and/or other fissile material. They are not any safer than conventional reactors on this basis. A shorter explanation of just how much of a pipe dream thorium reactors are is here along with the caveat that dropping a bomb on one would be a very messy affair.
And they are not meltdown proof; if the safety controls fail. Thorium reactors are so-called "meltdown-proof" because they have a plug in the bottom of the reactor that will disintegrate and drop the core into a large holding tank. As the molten salt that acts as the coolant is now spread out, the theory is this is safer. But it all depends on that plug giving way, and this is only a theoretical model.
Meltdowns are one possible failure mode of a reactor. They aren't even the most common, nor most dangerous, depending on the design. A thorium reactor can still fail catastrophically if the piping becomes plugged. Think about this for a second; the primary coolant is molten salt. What happens if it becomes too cool or solidifies in places; The plug as at the bottom, and heat rises. Impurities could slowly build up, the plug could fail to melt away due to corrosion, etc.
Thorium reactors are not meltdown proof; Poor maintenance is as much as hazard for them as any other. And as a bonus... they're about 50 years away from being feasible anyway.
Thank you for playing though... now kindly stop spreading bullshit.
First, the safer nuclear reactors are prohibited by the government.
Not an accurate statement. All nuclear reactors are restricted by the government, to the point that building a new one is effectively impossible. And while the government is enforcing these laws, it is because of idiot environmentalists that the situation persists. As well, coal power plants could dramatically reduce their radioactive materials and carbon output with newer technology, but because of NIMBY and the high expense of overcoming it, companies do not build many of those either. It is in fact a lot cheaper to maintain dirty old plants than build shiny new ones -- not just because of NIMBY but because new plants are subject to environmental restrictions so onerous that they are effectively impossible to build and not operate at a loss.
Why would they charge the same premiums to a meltdown-able (I know, not a word) reactor as a meltdown-proof design like integral fast reactors or thorium reactors?
There is no such thing as a "meltdown-proof" design. All reactors can suffer catastrophic failure that releases radioactive material into the surrounding environment. It would be more accurate to say the alternative designs you have mentioned are meltdown-resistant, in the same way bulletproof glass isn't truly bulletproof... you just need a bigger gun.
Why would the power companies be able to afford the insurance on rusting barrels of nuclear waste next to the river that they just store there? That's both an insurance problem and one of the feds promising they'll take care of the waste (but never doing it).
NIMBY. Stuff the environmentalists into rusty barrels by the river instead and the problem abates.
Because they can consume that waste, integral fast reactors would be a business opportunity all their own if the economics of the nuclear industry wasn't wildly distorted by the government(s).
Not entirely accurate. Our proven stockpile of fissile uranium is sufficient to last us for the next 500 years if energy consumption and world population continue along current trends. It is cheap, the reactors are of simple design, and when we have used it all up, we can reprocess the spent rods and use them to power next-generation nuclear plants as well. There's no need at present to build reactors of the types you are mentioning because the operating costs would be higher and the net energy output lower. Yes, these technologies should be explored, and perhaps see limited deployment in certain scenarios, but mostly to advance our understanding of nuclear physics. There are very few cases to be made where those technologies are economically superior, and in many cases, not even viable. It's like suggesting solar power to replace everything... it just doesn't have the "oomph" needed.
But, then again, the coal plants don't have to pay a dime towards the externalities they introduce by spewing both radioactivity (so much more than any nuclear incident ever did) and mercury and other heavy metals.
Actually, in many European countries they do (since you used the example of England and France); via their brain-damaged "carbon offset" programs, the reason for which the designation of "brain-damaged" merits many paragraphs, but for purposes of brevity I will leave off.
We don't have a technology problem here and we don't have an economics problem either.
False. We have both.
It's know-nothing wonder-mutts screwing with those that have us in this position.
Your conclusion is accurate, although your supporting logic is badly flawed.
ARE YOU CRAZY?! if we do that, we'll bankrupt the economy, everyone will be homeless and we'll be slaves to Big Green and Big Nuke! before you know it, we'll be GLOWING green because of all that radiation! DO YOU WANT THAT?!
Yes, he's crazy. But he also has the virtue of being right. And glowing green could be fun. It would save me having to search for the damn light switch at 2am when I go to the bathroom and then blind myself when I do.
But if you mean "Are you worried about radiological catastrophe?" the answer is no. I worry about some small-dick dictator somewhere getting the idea that nuking someone would be fun. Nuclear bombs I worry about. Nuclear energy I do not.
Degenerating into primitive fighting over the scarce resources is precisely what society strives to avoid.
Really? Because over here in the United States, we seem to be encouraging exactly that scenario -- cut education, oppose health care, restrict labor unions, drive wages down, concentrate wealth, ignore environmental initiatives, and create a debt-based economy for the poor and an investment-based economy for the rich.
Are you suggesting the United States is striving to leave modern society? Or perhaps, what you meant to say that fighting over the scarce resources is what an idealized society strives to avoid.
The insult is that I read another stupid post from timothy.
Yeah, but nobody answered his question: If so, why haven't they picked it up by now?
Well, we've already demonstrated that it isn't so, but hypothetically, if this was the case, then it would be because we're so used to being taxed that we all but ignore it. 10%? 10.5%? 13%? Whatever. Just put it on the card. Many a scam has been perpetuated based on a fraction of a percent "error" in tax or regulatory rates, and companies pocketed the difference for decades before anyone noticed.
Take a look at your cell phone bill sometime. How many of those taxes, regulatory fees, administrative costs, etc., are actually mandated by the government and at the correct rate?
Lowest pollution? I guess little things like Windscale, Tchernobyl, and Fuckushima are removed from that calculation...
Nope. Go ahead and include them. You'll get to about .1% of the emissions of coal power plants with every nuclear disaster. Ever. Including all of the nuclear bomb tests, the two bombs we dropped on Japan, three mile island, and more.
Fun fact: Coal plants collectively emit more radiation in a year than all those disasters combined have, and that's when you include into the figures the yearly radiation the nuclear plants emit into the environment as well.
Coal: Because glowing green is fun.
it calls upon members of the European Union 'to give the European Commission the mandate to draft the laws and develop initiatives necessary to stop digital arms trade'
Amazing. The response of the Europeans is apparently to demand their governments give up control over their own intelligence agencies and the ability to develop cyberweapons, crippling their telecommunications infrastructure... Because one government agency in the United States got caught peeping through the windows.
Explain to me the logic here, because to me it looks like the Europeans are shooting themselves in the foot while screaming "Look what you made me do! Now you'd better stop or I'm gonna do it again!"
Girl - you write some pretty smart, insightful comments from time to time. But your logic is missing a few cogs here.
Hanlon's razor isn't a proof... it's an opinion. People do want to see Obamacare fail. Powerful people. And powerful people have ways of getting what they want, without it being known they're the ones pulling the strings.
Hanlon may be smart, but I'll take Machiavelli any day of the week if we want to debate.
This article is dated oct 8. I had assumed it would be more recent.
Obligatory: You must be new here...
In other news, it's still a relevant and current event; Just because something's a month old doesn't mean it might as well have been written on stone tablets. I know the iThingie generation has the attention span of... oh who am I kidding, they didn't even finish reading the summary let alone the comments. :) But more seriously, it's pretty clear at this point the problem isn't because of the technology, but rather that the implimentation was divided up into two teams without much regard for communication between the two, or management oversight.
The fact is, what happened with ObamaCare happens in government IT all the time. Too many chefs, not enough cooks. When the dust settles we will undoubtedly discover that the true cause of failure was not in IT, or even the contractors, who I am sure met their contractual obligations, but rather that it was setup for failure by political interests who are right now getting a lot of play over its failure, without being identified as the cause. They will undoubtedly have plausible deniability of the "Well, I was sure this wouldn't happen because of my inserting language into the bill requiring process xyzzy be followed instead of yzzyx!" ... and a half-dozen co-conspirators all did similar to structure it in such a way that there was no other possible outcome than failure.
Failure like this requires planning; You can't accidentally crash and burn this badly. And what we're going to find when we do the autopsy is that a few dozen people conspired to create the conditions necessary for it to fail, but we'll never be able to prove the conspiracy, and because the blame will be on this group of individuals, each of whom can legitimately claim their own contribution shouldn't/couldn't have caused the failure, nobody will be held accountable.
Except of course the people who implimented it, and the guy who's name was on the proposal.
Just like every private sector IT project that blows up.
A very vocal part of the bitcoin community would disagree with you there. The idea of calculating a "taint" value for coins (based on whether they were involved in any undesirable/shady activities) and refusing to accept highly tainted coins seems to be a pretty popular idea.
Let us hope then they never discover that almost all of the money they've ever handled contains detectable quantities of cocaine and other drugs. In other words, almost every dollar in circulation has been used to buy drugs.
I love anarchists... they rail against rules but then were they to ever try and live up to their whacky ideas, they'd quickly all die of starvation or similar.
It's not that that statement makes me angry; it just makes me shrug. Even if it is true, it's utterly irrelevant. You don't give people powers that could easily be abused if you can help it because they will very likely abuse them.
And yet, if you give nobody any power, then you cannot prevent injustice. Government needs to be bigger than any individual or group that can be a source of injustice, or it will be powerless to prevent it. This argument is as old as civilization. Without laws, there would be chaos. So we struggle eternally with finding a way of balancing perfect order -- which is synonymous with tyranny and oppression, and perfect chaos -- which is mob rule and violence.
It's counterintuitive, but for a group of humans to be at their happiest and most content... there must be a measure of both extremes.
While we're telling other people how they think or feel, I will say this: You don't really believe what you wrote. You might say you do, but you don't.
That's the interesting thing about beliefs though. Social reality is like shining a bright flashlight on a rainy night. Wherever you point it, it creates a cone. The rain, which was random and disorganized before, suddenly assumes a specific shape. And this is how society is organized. Why does red mean stop and green mean go? We all agree on it, and thus it has value. If we didn't, then nobody would stop, or go... it would be chaos. Such as it is with much of our 'justice'. We arbitrarily separate things that are naturally in equilibrium so that we can create meaning.
Yeah, this is often true. However, there are some counterexamples, e.g. virtual goods and services. The point of the coin mixers is to disassociate all illicit activity from all legitimate activity, such that any real world names, addresses, or other PII are tied purely to legitimate accounts.
The accounts were legitimate to begin with. Money isn't inherently good or evil. It doesn't develop bad karma because it was used to buy drugs with, or a child for sex. And real world names, addresses, etc., are all what you need to complete a transaction for virtual goods and services. There is not a lot that you can do online that at some point doesn't require some form of identification. It may just be a username and password, or a cookie, or a data file somewhere that just points to an ip address... but everything you do online leaves a trace of you behind.
It's as Sherlock Holmes said: Nobody can enter and leave a room without taking something with, and leaving something behind. This is the foundation of all forms of forensic analysis... and running your money through a mixer doesn't improve your anonymity.. it actually harms it. It's like trying to go through a forest unseen... if you step on a leaf and crumple it, your attempt to put the it back the way it was before leaves an even bigger footprint than had you simply continued.
If I were to anthropromorphize the NSA, FBI, or [insert big bad here], it would probably grin contentedly at these crypto-anarchists attempt to create anonymity. The very act of attempting to anonymize yourself separates you from others. It provides a unique datapoint. It's like the leaf you stepped on. Find enough, and I can pick up your trail.
I don't think government thugs harassing people is at all "reasonable."
I suppose it all comes down to which people they're harassing. Nobody's going to say too much if a terrorist gets shipped to Gitmo and spends the rest of his years being beaten for information. And maybe that isn't right -- maybe we should be less vindictive as a society. But nevertheless, who the government targets has a great degree of bearing on how much public resistance it encounters.
After 9/11, thousands of Muslims were attacked in public. There have been several mosque burnings and bombings, and the government has never identified the culprits. In New York there was, until very recently, a "stop and frisk" law that had been proven many times over to be excessively discriminatory towards black people. But nobody complained, because it only affected black people. To quote "First they came for the..." and you know the rest. Everybody knows the words by heart.
But they forget that it's human nature to look the other way, or even smile a little, when you see your enemy (actual or perceived) being hurt... and it doesn't much matter how justified it is. It's called the Just World hypothesis in the academic community... but basically; If we see somebody being hurt, we assume the must have done something to deserve it.
And for this reason... the government can harass lots of people -- just as long as they're the right people. And nobody will say anything. Whether it's reasonable or not... well, that really depends on who you ask.
To the NSA... we're all potential terrorists until proven otherwise. Innocent, guilty... doesn't really matter. To them, they're defending freedom. What's a little harassment in the name of freedom? And here's the thing that really pisses most people off: You aren't so different. So don't act like you are. Just like the NSA, you don't care so much about innocence or guilty (oh I know, you believe you do), not nearly as much as watching someone you don't like get their just desserts. It takes a rare kind of conviction to ideals to defend one's enemy; To put adherence to a belief above individual desire for vengeance. A very rare kind indeed; So much so, that only a handful of people have ever been possessed of it. And very often, those people either inspire us... or wind up dead.
Silk Road allegedly mixed some coins but, also allegedly, did so poorly. Not surprising given the amounts it was trying to mix. It did not, afaik, use the coinjoin method linked above. Also, the founder wasn't tracked down due to coin mixing or lack thereof anyway.
More to the point.. coin mixing did not prevent the Feds from identifying thousands of people who used the service and were able to match realworld transactions to their bitcoin equivalents. In fact, from what I can tell... it wasn't much more than a slight irritation to their forensic accountants.
The fact is that crypto-anarchists may be very good at code, but they're very bad at high level analysis. You (and the crypto people too) need to understand that if you take a hundred people, walk them into a room, and they all empty their pockets and record the cash they throw into a giant bin on a ledger, and when everyone has gone through, they line up again and take money back out... which is effectively what the 'perfect' mixer would do... you aren't improving the anonymity of your cash expenditures by that much.
Your anonymity is not dependent on where you got the money from but rather who you're giving it to. It's the spending of money that destroys your anonymity, not the acquisition of it.
You can, therefore, expect an entire community of BTC "grave" robbers to develop, who will, instead of wasting CPU time on mining new blocks, waste it on reclaiming old blocks
Actually, that ordinarily would be a problem. However, you're not understanding that bitcoin isn't encrypting anything. It's hashing it. The bitcoin system doesn't protect against seizure and use of bitcoins; it protects against ledger fraud.
Think of it this way: It will always be hard (hopefully too hard) to undo, invalidate, or duplicate a transaction; The older it is, the more secure it becomes. But let's remove the idea of a bitcoin for the moment and instead say that everyone has a user account in this 'BT' system, and after supplying their login and password, can trade any coins they have with anyone else. Any transaction made is secure; until and unless you lose your password or someone else gets it. Then whatever bitcoins you have are now theirs, the end. But they cannot unspend your coins; they cannot change the transactions. They can only spend what's in your wallet now.
So these "grave" robbers can't reclaim old blocks... they can only decrypt the wallets the coins are stored in. Assuming they were ever encrypted to begin with.
The bit coin system is not secured against theft of coins. That's your job (either to steal or to protect)... all it guarantees is that transactions are permanent (and public).
including a protocol called "trustless mixing" that combines users' coins together before encoding it into the ledger."
I got some bad news; The Silk Road tried the same thing. It failed. But I mean, whadda expect... the government likes getting paid. Kindof a lot. And so they have entire divisions of the government setup to make sure they can track down people who try to hide money from them and, well, make them pay.
But for the moment, let's ignore all that. Some crypto-anarchist hacked something together over the course of a few weekends and that's all solved. Great!
Next question: The NSA is evil and watching everything, except of course this, which is totally impregnable and would be pretty much the terrorist currency of choice... what compelling moral, ethical, or technical arguments can you provide that dropping my "money" into a e-blender and setting it to frappe will result in delicious privacy juices coming out in the same quantity as I put in, and is totally resistant to attack? I've learned in security that you can get either tamper-evident, or tamper-resistant... but trying to get both is enormously difficult. So I really, well and truly, want to know how you plan on having the necessary robust auditing and controls necessary to ensure that transactions are fair and correctly executed, while at the same time dropping the ledgers into your e-blender... while trusting the now-anonymized agents utilizing such a thing not to find some way to exploit the system... using the system itself to cover their tracks?
Wrong. Wrong. So. Very. Wrong. Very.
I'm reminded of a supreme court quote:
The power to tax is the power to destroy.
Wrong. Wrong. So. Very. Wrong.
Wrong, that is not what the Government is saying.
Wrong. You're wrong. Because wrong.
Really, you still resort to ad hominem to support your delusion...
Dude, it's your tin foil hat, not mine. You just suggested the most massive conspiracy theory since the faking of the apollo moon landings. So yes, I'm gonna mock you. Mercilessly. The idea that the FBI has faked every single capture of every single terrorist... ever... is so incredibly stupid that I award you no points sir, and may God have mercy on your soul.
What does the Declaration of Independence have to do with the rule of Law?
Yes... what does one of the most seminal works in the annals of political writing have to do with anything? Nothing, that's what! Because I'm a delusional tin-foil hat wearing nutjob who thinks the FBI is fake and baking their criminals! ahaahahahaha.... and now I shall demonstrate the power of crystal healing on this inanimate carbon rod!
There are no straw men left standing!
No, that's because you used them all already.
Fact checking is really not that difficult...
No, but being as short bus special as you is.
Look, at this point you've completely given up on any semblence of rationality and you're just trying to get in the last word... so let me save you the trouble:
You're not going to get it. If there is but one thing I can do for your retarded ass, it's to deny you this thing. I will continue replying until slashdot closes this thread down. And it will be only, and solely, to mock the utter depths of your incompetence.
What people are upset about is not "spying", they are upset about Government surveillance and espionage against non-military targets.
What the government is saying is you can't tell the difference in today's world: Terrorist don't wear uniforms.
You are confusing border security with domestic espionage and surveillance, they are two vastly separate areas for concern.
No. The government has repeatedly stated those things are now relevant and related. Sorry if you didn't get that memo back in 2001.
I'll go one up on you. Every plot foiled that the Government is crediting to the surveillance state has been a setup by the FBI. [...] The joke is on you, do you get it?
*facepalm* The Tin Foil is strong with this one.
Next, you miss the whole point of being a constitutional republic. It's not a democracy and "what's good for me", it's about a rule of law and what's good for society as a whole.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Please tell me why if "rule of law" and "good for society" were so important, the declaration of independence didn't open with that instead? Answer: Because the purpose of a democracy (or a republic, if you want to be a pedant) is not to create a great country, but to create great people.
If you desire order above happiness, then you get despotism. But don't take my word for it; "" Law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice . . . when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. " -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Conjecture and doomsday? Go back and read it again. There is no doomsday anything, but I do claim that nothing good can happen with that much information in the Government's hands
Actually, I was pointing out that your all or nothing thinking regarding government surveillance was a logical fallacy. You claimed surveillance never helps. Ever. Not even once. We academics call people who make statements that use the word always, never, or similar, outside of the context of mathematics to be, achem... coo coo for cocopuffs.
You started by claiming that everyone who questions is wrong and just claiming "oh noes" without questioning "why". That is absolutely wrong.
This just in: Motive is irrelevant. Also, the price of tin foil is rising.
I gave a very cohesive argument against spying, you don't like the answer.
âoeHow many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.â -- Abraham Lincoln.
Aircraft that have sufficient power do not "level at 10,000" during their climb, and ATC does not expect them to. That would include just about any aircraft that was already going 250 knots during the climb. ATC does expect, and pilots may have to, temporarily suspend descent before going below 10,000 feet so they can meet the 250 knot limit.
Flight profile for a 737 typically means reducing throttle at 10,000 feet... thus the climb becomes more shallow... if you're heavy, you're going to want to build up whatever speed you lost getting to 10,000 feet before ascending more; This isn't an ATC rule, this is the nature of the plane and about conserving fuel.
*Anybody who talks about '10 minutes during takeoff and landing' is clearly flying from different airports than me...
Well, the FAA limits your climb velocity to 250 knots for all aircraft. But for a 737 a typical flight profile is that rotation (V2) occurs around 150 knots. Full power is maintained until around 1500 feet, while the aircraft speed continues to increase to around 250 knots. Sometime before around 200-210 the flaps are retracted and angle of ascent is dictated by the 250 knot regulation.... you hold at 250 knots until attaining 10,000 feet. Then level at 10,000 feet and build up to about 300 knots or so before beginning the final climb to cruising altitude (and speed). There's some adjustments that happen around 25000-27000 as atmosphere thins and airspeed drops, which is normal and usually some pitch adjustment occurs to continue the climb safely until achieving cruise altitude around 35-40,000. That's usually when the pilot kicks on the autopilot, levels the wings, and comes on comms to announce to the world he's bored for awhile. :)
From rotation (V2) to 10,000 feet, it is about ten minutes... obviously this can vary depending on the airport, local conditions, weight, just to name a few things... but 10 minutes is a good average. It just seems like longer because you're stuck on the ground waiting for takeoff, then clearance, then actually powering up and starting down the runway, etc. In actuality, from the time you start taxing until 10,000 feet, it's probably more like half an hour on average.
So what the FAA is saying is an accurate statement; Your impression it is longer is because as a passenger, the "flight" starts when you're on the plane, whereas for the FAA, the flight doesn't start until you're in the air.
Happy now?
No. I'll be happy when we start having a discussion about how to address the threats before us. It doesn't sit right with me saying it's okay for people to come into my home (America) and start blowing shit up and for us to just sit back and say "Well, not much we can do about that." Is what we're doing right now the right answer? I don't know. But it's a better answer than not meeting the threat at all.
Here on slashdot and all across the blogosphere, I find people raging against the NSA and surveillance, but I don't see anyone offering up a better way to deal with the threats they have been tasked with handling. We need a response. Maybe not this response, but we need some response. And comments like yours and others here don't do that.
These threats aren't abstract; The Boston marathon bombing happened. School shootings are a weekly thing. China is actively trying to hack into our financial systems, industrial control systems, infrastructure like water and electricity, etc. The threats they describe are tangible things with evidence to back up their claim.
We need to balance out our response with the need for citizen privacy, and the rights outlined in the Constitution and elsewhere. I do feel that there is a lack of oversight and guidance from Congress and from private citizens, regarding mass surveillance and other threat-response technology. Full body airport scanners were a tragic mistake -- people got cancer from them, and it was a preventable mistake because the same thing happened when x-ray technology was discovered. There has been a lot of mismanagement and incompetence that didn't need to happen. And there are a large number of government programs that have shown only limited benefit, if any.
All of these are legitimate concerns to raise. But people raise them as absolutes, as black and white; Like privacy is some kind of inviolate thing for the government, while these people give it away for fractions of a penny to Google and Facebook! I'm sorry, but it's hypocritical and almost every argument against the government has been either propaganda, mob mentality, or false dichotomy thinking. There are good arguments to be had here.
The "that is the price we will pay" is the one that only barely manages to cross the line that delineates the rational ones from the irrational. We can do better.
While you make a nice speech you have a huge misnomer in your statements. We are not seeing a "spying on enemies and troops"!
You need to go look up the word misnomer. I said that was the case... FIFTY YEARS AGO. Today's threats are small, highly mobile, and thanks to technology small groups of people can have huge force multiplers in their favor. We can now bomb entire armies to dust with one guy sitting in a room using remote-controlled airplanes. And likewise... one guy can strap a bomb to his chest, run into a crowd, and kill or maim many of them.
The days of limiting surveillance to only troops and governments is long gone. It is incredibly naive to suggest we dial back the clock fifty years because you got a hair up your ass about privacy getting stepped on. You want reform in the government? You want the NSA to have reasonable restrictions on their spy programs? That's fine. Let's have that discussion. But saying they should just board up and close shop? Get real.
Our enemies are not going to be so kind as to march in nice, regular rows, and then line up single file so we can shoot at them; That hasn't happened since we fought the British during our war for independence. You may well recall, that tactic didn't work very well for them. We're dealing with small and highly mobile threats. Threats like someone buying an automatic assault rifle, walking into a school, and killing people by the dozens to hundreds. People loading up cars with tanks of gasoline and gun powder, and driving into a gathered crowd. There are lots of people out there right now that have been made desperate due to poor economic conditions and some of them are going to get the idea that it would be pretty "cool" to make a bunch of other people part of their last political statement on this Earth.
Maybe you can handwave that away. Maybe you think the restrictions are too onerous to contemplate, and so we should just accept that the price of freedom is every few weeks hearing about a bunch of innocent people going up in flames. But a lot of people don't. And almost none of our representatives feel that way.
And if we're going to convince anyone to either support or reject what the government is doing, we need a better position than "fire bad, tree pretty."
"Nothing good can come from this level of spying and information gathering. Nothing! "
We caught the boston bomber in a matter of days... using surveillance information from civilian resources. Shop cameras. Cell phones. Television footage. You can't say that "nothing" good comes from it. You might be able to say "not much" good comes of it... small comfort I suppose to the victims, but go ahead and say it. But surveillance has caught many criminals so far. You can argue that's not enough to justify what's going on, but you're being either incredibly naive, or so biased as to be effectively blind, if you say there has been no benefit.
Perhaps _you_ have not paid attention or not weighed much, but many of us have!
Oh, I'm paying attention. I'm just resisting this mob mentality right now over all things NSA and surveillance. It came about for a reason, and I'd rather understand that reason and make informed decisions about what to tell my representatives as far as where the lines need to be drawn, and to be able to assert my position with such force and logic as to command their assent. But going to my representatives and knee-jerking my way through the conversation isn't going to convince them that anything is wrong (or right). It doesn't improve anyone's understanding of the issues.
Your entire post is nothing but conjecture, doomsday prophecy, and knee-jerk reactionism. It doesn't even attempt to ask the most fundamental question here: Why did they do it? You offer absolutely nothing for motive. You put nothing on the table to bargain with. You give neither me, nor your representatives, nor anyone who has read any of your comme