I suppose next we'll be saying Einstein was just some idiot who used his understanding of mathematics to point out the "obvious" theory of relativity, spacetime, and all of that. What the hell is up with this anti-science bent society has come up with lately? It's almost as if the application of mathematics to everyday life is now to be viewed with skepticism, rather than praised for allowing us a deeper understanding of our world.
So what if music can be described mathematically? So musicians are also gifted with an intuitive understanding of mathematics that we can't fully understand yet. Wouldn't it be prudent to explore this connection? Why could Mozart and other artists grasp these fundamentals over four hundred years before our contemporaries found a natural connection between their talent and a mathematical understanding? What does this mean for the human mind? For us? Does this shed some light on an aspect of the human condition that was previously unilluminated?
You know what? I don't care whether music is created by a person or a machine -- if it enriches my life, that is what matters.
It's a good deal easier than that. It's call HAM radio, including packet radio, and it already exists. It only has to link the various NOCs with an out-of-band connection. They are the ones who take the necessary steps, not the general public. Neither facebook nor CNN is relevant, though they're welcome to listen if they know how.
True, but we can't expect everyone to have a ham radio license. We need to use the tools that are available in the field now, and fight the war with what we have, and it's the job of the military to provide that communications network for us, not the reverse.
"We want your cake too. And it'll cost us less in legal fees than the potential benefit. That's a mighty nice website you have there. It would be a shame if anything were to...happen... to it. Probable result: cross-licensing agreement to patent portfolio to lock out smaller competitors, higher costs for consumers in countries with strong IP laws. "
Once solutions are found they'll be posted to the web and disseminated faster than the new attacks can be devised. In short, cyberwarfare won't work for the exact same reasons that censorship won't work, there's too many people working against the attackers who can communicate too quickly and too effectively.
So maybe what they ought to be doing is setting up a darknet with xDSL, POTs and mobile vans with a spread of networking equipment to keep communication happening between critical infrastructure teams at major network interconnect points and certain websites (like facebook, cnn, etc.) so we retain the ability to inform the general public of what steps to take to assist to counter the threat. That way we can exchange information and coordinate our efforts should our primary communications fail.
But that would require that the military admit that they need civilian expertise and assistance in a disaster, and they're reluctant to admit that they'd need us as much as we'd need them in a real crisis. Ironic, since the military's true strength is in rapid communication, a chain of command, and the ability to rapidly get information to the right people to make tactical decisions. Delays and a lack of timely intelligence is what will kill us in a cyber attack, not lack of resources.
I think 'zero-carbon energy' implies that we could no longer use humans as fuel.
Of course, that statement implies that we currently use humans as fuel. I would like to point out to anyone reading this that I taste horrible and I'm a bit gamey on account of this diet I'm on of not eating until I'm on the verge of passing out, and then eating a sugar cube.
it's clear that they're almost as foresighted as Google when it comes to deploying next generation networking technologies
Except Google didn't try to kill bittorrent, come under a congressional investigation, and spark a row with the FCC over its use of "next generation networking technology". And while we're at it, how next generation is a network with a 250GB bandwidth cap?
This reminds me of a case in Canada, where Passport Canada (the agency responsible for passport emission) was "hacked" by changing some numbers in the URL to get from one passport request details to the other, making very confidential information available to even the most basic hackers.
I still try that out of habit when I see a record ID encoded in the URL. Still works on a lot of websites... about 8% of the time, especially for smaller shops. I usually send them an e-mail and move on. There's too many to waste my time following up with each one...
And exactly what "laws" is Google breaking in China?
The shorter list would be, what "laws" aren't they? This is China afterall, home of the government that sends the surviving family a bill for the cost of the bullet to kill their politically undesirables.
If you think military personnel are just automatons without feelings or an awareness of what they are doing, again you're living in a surreal dreamworld.
I don't. That was the point of my post -- whether you're in a missile silo or a soldier on the front line, you know what you're doing. You have to live with that. Sure, you might not have their blood on your shirt when it's over, but that doesn't lessen the emotional or ethical impact of what you've just done. People in the military aren't mindless automatons. They're human beings, just like you and I -- and they know what they're doing. All the training does is make it so at the critical moment they won't flinch. They'll do their job, they'll survive, and they'll protect us. That doesn't mean they won't have nightmares after and wish there could have been another way.
That's a personal sacrifice everyone who is in the service makes, and it's a lifetime commitment. Those memories don't go away when they go home.
Or soldiers largely untouched, but treating their experience like it was a video they watched on digg or a video game, completely detached from the inhumanity of it all - heck, during their lunch break, they may go to Walmart to get a game that will be more exciting to play after work. Even a current fighter pilot faces death, if somewhat distanced to what his weapons do on the ground.
They know it wasn't a video game. They just wasted some mother's son or daughter. They might have blown up a place they thought was insurgents but it was really a school. Or some innocent's home that was comandeered. And even if we had perfect intelligence, and never made a mistake, we would still know at the end of the day we had taken a human life. Not some digital avatar that respawns 45 seconds later as an exact copy of the original. A person. Someone who had a family, friends, and a life. A life you just ended.
Sure, you can justify it. Sure, maybe it was you or him (or one of your buddies), but you still killed that person. And you gotta live with that.
That's not war, that's a crime ( just like Aum Shinrikyo ) , and when we start thinking it's a war, and treating it as such, we begin to turn society into a militarized police state. Welcome to 1984.
War is where one group of people try to kill another group of people. Those groups just happen to be fighting for countries today instead of churches. And no, it's not 1984. We're still burying the bodies, and you can still go to the graves, and those that survive will still tell their stories. When we've lost the vocabulary to say "We were wrong," then 1984 will be here.
It's 2010, and we kill people, and we know we kill people, and a lot of us think there's another way to do this. And as long as you can still hear that voice, even if you don't listen, we're still okay.
The risk to us: We lose a drone. Pilot safe, and he can move on to another drone to keep going.
The pilot lives; It's a stretch to say he's safe. You kill someone and that's with you for life. And that's not a definition of "safe" I'm disposed to agree with.
If there's one thing that's lacking in the modern world, finding people to talk to isn't one of them.
And yet we sit in our homes watching TV that tells us the world is a big and scary place, and how many of us can truly say we know our neighbors? How many of us start conversations on the bus, or in the grocery line? Not many, and you know why? Because we're afraid they'll think we're a freak. Nobody talks to one another. Except online, where it's all nice and safe, where even if the guy has a gun and is crazy, the worst he can do is type in all caps.
Give me a break. Besides, how many guys do you know that are comfortable crying and saying "God, that was a hard thing to do." That ain't happening, not in today's society. They're too afraid they'll be thought of as gay, or weak, or less of a man for admitting that they had doubts about what they just did.
And then you know what? Then they come home to their wives, and daughters, and their friends... And they all expect him to be just like he was before he left. And he isn't. And often times those relationships shatter as a result, because he still can't say what happened. He wants to be the way he was before. But he won't be. Nobody could be. Once you've been touched by violence, it's with you for life.
And no... There aren't many people you can talk to about that, if you can even summon the courage to find your voice to begin with. Society doesn't want to hear it -- we don't want to look weak in front of our enemies, let alone our friends and family.
Wouldn't it be great if wars could be fought just by the assholes who started them?
Tell that to the person who is starving. Tell that to the man who comes home after another day waiting for a job at the work center, who comes home empty-handed. You think wars are just fought by people who want money? Not all of them. Some are fought because people are hungry. Some are fought because people are desperate -- they're afraid their culture will disappear, their natural resources will be used up... And it's hard to be civil when your neighbor next door has giant refineries and everyone has a car, and an education, and wears clean clothes.
Those people aren't assholes. They're human beings. And a lot of wars are started because despite that, a lot of us sure as hell don't act like it when it counts. We turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, and the result is violence. Whether it's in a desert, or in our streets, the blood is the same color and it's shed for the same reason: Because we can't admit that it's our smug moral superiority, our inability to share, that led us to it.
The readiness to kill is somewhat lower if you have to be involved face-to-face. It is highly problematic if you can kill as if it were a computer game.
Those people know what the hell they're doing. They're killing someone. You think the people that sat in nuclear silos at the height of the cold war didn't know what that red button would do? You think they didn't break out in cold sweats at night, hoping and praying the day would never come when they'd be ask to do their last duty for their country? It's disgraceful to think these people are calloused to the fact that they are killing people just because it happens on a computer screen instead of splattered across their chest. Don't think that just because they don't see their faces when they kill them, they won't wake up screaming at night and sobbing when they think nobody can hear them, praying to God or anyone else that'll listen to make the pain stop.
Every person you kill takes away a piece of your soul, and it doesn't matter whether it was with an button pushed or a trigger pulled. And that's how it should be. Trust me, the price of war is high enough. And it's not just them that hurt for it. They have families. The "enemy" have families. And they have friends. And communities. And prayer groups. We are all connected, and this world is a whole lot smaller than you think.
No technological advancement will ever take away the fact that a life lost makes the world a little less bright.
I'm sure we'll hear lots about the technology, but when you're in the field, surrounded by your fellow soldiers, then blowing the shit out of a car full of people is a shared experience. You can rely on your friends and fellow soldiers to help you deal with the fact that you just helped end a bunch of lives. Yes, it was the right thing. Yes, it was you or them. But all the justifications aside there's an emotional price to be paid that every person who's been in combat or seen it, or similar.
Now we have guys sitting in rooms filled with computer screens blowing people up, and is there anyone there to talk to about it? Can they light a cigarette after, put a fist in the wall, and say "Goddamnit, I wish there'd been another way!" No. You're stuck in a sterile environment, air conditioned, quiet, and after blowing the fuck out of someone you can get up and go get yourself a soda from the vend, grab your coat, file some paperwork, and drive home.
Huge disclaimer -- I'm not in the military, I don't know what these guys to for stress relief, or to deal with the emotional consequences of what they're doing. But I do know the dangers of becoming emotionally numb to violence, and without advocating for or against what the military is doing, I want to ask -- what are we doing to help these soldiers deal with those issues? For that matter, is it even an issue? I don't really know. But I think it helps to look someone in the eye if you have to kill them. To know they were a real person. To remember what you've done -- even if it was the right thing to do, even if there was no other choice, it's a statement about the value of human life.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose next we'll be saying Einstein was just some idiot who used his understanding of mathematics to point out the "obvious" theory of relativity, spacetime, and all of that. What the hell is up with this anti-science bent society has come up with lately? It's almost as if the application of mathematics to everyday life is now to be viewed with skepticism, rather than praised for allowing us a deeper understanding of our world.
So what if music can be described mathematically? So musicians are also gifted with an intuitive understanding of mathematics that we can't fully understand yet. Wouldn't it be prudent to explore this connection? Why could Mozart and other artists grasp these fundamentals over four hundred years before our contemporaries found a natural connection between their talent and a mathematical understanding? What does this mean for the human mind? For us? Does this shed some light on an aspect of the human condition that was previously unilluminated?
You know what? I don't care whether music is created by a person or a machine -- if it enriches my life, that is what matters.
It's a good deal easier than that. It's call HAM radio, including packet radio, and it already exists. It only has to link the various NOCs with an out-of-band connection. They are the ones who take the necessary steps, not the general public. Neither facebook nor CNN is relevant, though they're welcome to listen if they know how.
True, but we can't expect everyone to have a ham radio license. We need to use the tools that are available in the field now, and fight the war with what we have, and it's the job of the military to provide that communications network for us, not the reverse.
"We want your cake too. And it'll cost us less in legal fees than the potential benefit. That's a mighty nice website you have there. It would be a shame if anything were to...happen... to it. Probable result: cross-licensing agreement to patent portfolio to lock out smaller competitors, higher costs for consumers in countries with strong IP laws. "
Once solutions are found they'll be posted to the web and disseminated faster than the new attacks can be devised. In short, cyberwarfare won't work for the exact same reasons that censorship won't work, there's too many people working against the attackers who can communicate too quickly and too effectively.
So maybe what they ought to be doing is setting up a darknet with xDSL, POTs and mobile vans with a spread of networking equipment to keep communication happening between critical infrastructure teams at major network interconnect points and certain websites (like facebook, cnn, etc.) so we retain the ability to inform the general public of what steps to take to assist to counter the threat. That way we can exchange information and coordinate our efforts should our primary communications fail.
But that would require that the military admit that they need civilian expertise and assistance in a disaster, and they're reluctant to admit that they'd need us as much as we'd need them in a real crisis. Ironic, since the military's true strength is in rapid communication, a chain of command, and the ability to rapidly get information to the right people to make tactical decisions. Delays and a lack of timely intelligence is what will kill us in a cyber attack, not lack of resources.
It doesn't take a thousand swear words, scantily clad women or gratuitous violence to differentiate a ten-year-old's game from a twenty-year-old's.
No, but it helps.
Go and sequester yourself.
I already did that in the shower this morning. Your point? :P
I think 'zero-carbon energy' implies that we could no longer use humans as fuel.
Of course, that statement implies that we currently use humans as fuel. I would like to point out to anyone reading this that I taste horrible and I'm a bit gamey on account of this diet I'm on of not eating until I'm on the verge of passing out, and then eating a sugar cube.
Bah. I'm nitrogen-based, so the only thing I'll need to worry about is head shoulders shampoo.
Dude, all I have to do is inhale and I will end you.
Your carbonist agenda won't let you see the truth! I didn't come from no carbon-based life form!
That's the first time I've seen a seven line perl script with a republican agenda. Bravo.
You are hereby awarded 1 "I was retardedly obtuse on the internets on purpose" merit badge.
Oh please! They don't make that merit badge. I checked. What I deserve is an award for the correct use of irony in a public forum.
it's clear that they're almost as foresighted as Google when it comes to deploying next generation networking technologies
Except Google didn't try to kill bittorrent, come under a congressional investigation, and spark a row with the FCC over its use of "next generation networking technology". And while we're at it, how next generation is a network with a 250GB bandwidth cap?
I'm not made out of carbon, I'm made out of jesus's love power!
You don't exist. Go away.
"moving to zero-carbon energy"
That would be the end of life as we know it. Quite literally, as a matter of fact, since we're all made of carbon.
On the internet, you're never more than one click away from something horrible.
Hmmm.. "Read More..." *click*
Aww, crap.
This reminds me of a case in Canada, where Passport Canada (the agency responsible for passport emission) was "hacked" by changing some numbers in the URL to get from one passport request details to the other, making very confidential information available to even the most basic hackers.
I still try that out of habit when I see a record ID encoded in the URL. Still works on a lot of websites... about 8% of the time, especially for smaller shops. I usually send them an e-mail and move on. There's too many to waste my time following up with each one...
Is Google a country? Did I miss something?
Technically no. It's a state now.
And exactly what "laws" is Google breaking in China?
The shorter list would be, what "laws" aren't they? This is China afterall, home of the government that sends the surviving family a bill for the cost of the bullet to kill their politically undesirables.
Why isn't this ever worth noting?
Thiiiiiis.... iiiiis..... SSSSSLLLAAASSSHHDDOOOT!!!
Google: Now the digital UN, sending strongly worded letters, and sending envoys worldwide to "investigate" cases of human rights abuses.
If you think military personnel are just automatons without feelings or an awareness of what they are doing, again you're living in a surreal dreamworld.
I don't. That was the point of my post -- whether you're in a missile silo or a soldier on the front line, you know what you're doing. You have to live with that. Sure, you might not have their blood on your shirt when it's over, but that doesn't lessen the emotional or ethical impact of what you've just done. People in the military aren't mindless automatons. They're human beings, just like you and I -- and they know what they're doing. All the training does is make it so at the critical moment they won't flinch. They'll do their job, they'll survive, and they'll protect us. That doesn't mean they won't have nightmares after and wish there could have been another way.
That's a personal sacrifice everyone who is in the service makes, and it's a lifetime commitment. Those memories don't go away when they go home.
Or soldiers largely untouched, but treating their experience like it was a video they watched on digg or a video game, completely detached from the inhumanity of it all - heck, during their lunch break, they may go to Walmart to get a game that will be more exciting to play after work. Even a current fighter pilot faces death, if somewhat distanced to what his weapons do on the ground.
They know it wasn't a video game. They just wasted some mother's son or daughter. They might have blown up a place they thought was insurgents but it was really a school. Or some innocent's home that was comandeered. And even if we had perfect intelligence, and never made a mistake, we would still know at the end of the day we had taken a human life. Not some digital avatar that respawns 45 seconds later as an exact copy of the original. A person. Someone who had a family, friends, and a life. A life you just ended.
Sure, you can justify it. Sure, maybe it was you or him (or one of your buddies), but you still killed that person. And you gotta live with that.
That's not war, that's a crime ( just like Aum Shinrikyo ) , and when we start thinking it's a war, and treating it as such, we begin to turn society into a militarized police state. Welcome to 1984.
War is where one group of people try to kill another group of people. Those groups just happen to be fighting for countries today instead of churches. And no, it's not 1984. We're still burying the bodies, and you can still go to the graves, and those that survive will still tell their stories. When we've lost the vocabulary to say "We were wrong," then 1984 will be here.
It's 2010, and we kill people, and we know we kill people, and a lot of us think there's another way to do this. And as long as you can still hear that voice, even if you don't listen, we're still okay.
The risk to us: We lose a drone. Pilot safe, and he can move on to another drone to keep going.
The pilot lives; It's a stretch to say he's safe. You kill someone and that's with you for life. And that's not a definition of "safe" I'm disposed to agree with.
If there's one thing that's lacking in the modern world, finding people to talk to isn't one of them.
And yet we sit in our homes watching TV that tells us the world is a big and scary place, and how many of us can truly say we know our neighbors? How many of us start conversations on the bus, or in the grocery line? Not many, and you know why? Because we're afraid they'll think we're a freak. Nobody talks to one another. Except online, where it's all nice and safe, where even if the guy has a gun and is crazy, the worst he can do is type in all caps.
Give me a break. Besides, how many guys do you know that are comfortable crying and saying "God, that was a hard thing to do." That ain't happening, not in today's society. They're too afraid they'll be thought of as gay, or weak, or less of a man for admitting that they had doubts about what they just did.
And then you know what? Then they come home to their wives, and daughters, and their friends... And they all expect him to be just like he was before he left. And he isn't. And often times those relationships shatter as a result, because he still can't say what happened. He wants to be the way he was before. But he won't be. Nobody could be. Once you've been touched by violence, it's with you for life.
And no... There aren't many people you can talk to about that, if you can even summon the courage to find your voice to begin with. Society doesn't want to hear it -- we don't want to look weak in front of our enemies, let alone our friends and family.
Wouldn't it be great if wars could be fought just by the assholes who started them?
Tell that to the person who is starving. Tell that to the man who comes home after another day waiting for a job at the work center, who comes home empty-handed. You think wars are just fought by people who want money? Not all of them. Some are fought because people are hungry. Some are fought because people are desperate -- they're afraid their culture will disappear, their natural resources will be used up... And it's hard to be civil when your neighbor next door has giant refineries and everyone has a car, and an education, and wears clean clothes.
Those people aren't assholes. They're human beings. And a lot of wars are started because despite that, a lot of us sure as hell don't act like it when it counts. We turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, and the result is violence. Whether it's in a desert, or in our streets, the blood is the same color and it's shed for the same reason: Because we can't admit that it's our smug moral superiority, our inability to share, that led us to it.
The readiness to kill is somewhat lower if you have to be involved face-to-face. It is highly problematic if you can kill as if it were a computer game.
Those people know what the hell they're doing. They're killing someone. You think the people that sat in nuclear silos at the height of the cold war didn't know what that red button would do? You think they didn't break out in cold sweats at night, hoping and praying the day would never come when they'd be ask to do their last duty for their country? It's disgraceful to think these people are calloused to the fact that they are killing people just because it happens on a computer screen instead of splattered across their chest. Don't think that just because they don't see their faces when they kill them, they won't wake up screaming at night and sobbing when they think nobody can hear them, praying to God or anyone else that'll listen to make the pain stop.
Every person you kill takes away a piece of your soul, and it doesn't matter whether it was with an button pushed or a trigger pulled. And that's how it should be. Trust me, the price of war is high enough. And it's not just them that hurt for it. They have families. The "enemy" have families. And they have friends. And communities. And prayer groups. We are all connected, and this world is a whole lot smaller than you think.
No technological advancement will ever take away the fact that a life lost makes the world a little less bright.
I'm sure we'll hear lots about the technology, but when you're in the field, surrounded by your fellow soldiers, then blowing the shit out of a car full of people is a shared experience. You can rely on your friends and fellow soldiers to help you deal with the fact that you just helped end a bunch of lives. Yes, it was the right thing. Yes, it was you or them. But all the justifications aside there's an emotional price to be paid that every person who's been in combat or seen it, or similar.
Now we have guys sitting in rooms filled with computer screens blowing people up, and is there anyone there to talk to about it? Can they light a cigarette after, put a fist in the wall, and say "Goddamnit, I wish there'd been another way!" No. You're stuck in a sterile environment, air conditioned, quiet, and after blowing the fuck out of someone you can get up and go get yourself a soda from the vend, grab your coat, file some paperwork, and drive home.
Huge disclaimer -- I'm not in the military, I don't know what these guys to for stress relief, or to deal with the emotional consequences of what they're doing. But I do know the dangers of becoming emotionally numb to violence, and without advocating for or against what the military is doing, I want to ask -- what are we doing to help these soldiers deal with those issues? For that matter, is it even an issue? I don't really know. But I think it helps to look someone in the eye if you have to kill them. To know they were a real person. To remember what you've done -- even if it was the right thing to do, even if there was no other choice, it's a statement about the value of human life.