So, unelected civil servants are writing regulations and punishments without even marginal influence from those in control of the executive or legislative branches of government? This is not a comfort to me.
It's interesting that infectious viruses may form an essential foundation for our own evolution. It may even be that viruses are a developed strategy for "importing tallent" from competitors or neighbors. It has interesting things to say about inerconnection between organisms in a species and between species. Infectability may be a long term strategy for development.
Then again, it could be exactly the other way. Advanced organisms are just diverse platforms which viruses have evolved as elaborate tools and development shops for their survival and propagation.
In answer to your question, it would probably be the Supreme Court. This sort of First Amendment issue has been explored fairly thoroughly, so the cases would likely be predictable with regard to the censure of a person related to their speech.
You're more likely to find the interesting bits surrounding the various press offices of government orginizations. They have a responsibility to engage and inform the people regarding their work and to clarify matters that are widely misunderstood. I'm not aware of any legal obstacle to an agent of the government logging on to a website under a nom-de-plume and posting the agency's party line. I'm sure/.ers have heard of software companies doing this sort of thing to advance their products. We expect our leaders and institutions to engage the public on matters of concern. They take polls, review focus groups and consult experts. The President is expected to speak on behalf of his policies and party, as are other political figures. I expect the Surgeon General to put forth informaiton on the latest health buzz. The first difference in this case is that you could be speaking to an agent of the government online, and not be aware. This starts to get pretty creepy. You think it's bad not knowing if KittenPrincess22 is a dude or not, imagine wondering if she's actually an EPA plant. It's the sort of thing people mean when they talk about a "chilling effect on public discourse". The second worrisome point is that an individual citizen or group could be targetted by federal agencies for their speech. Again, we expect the FBI to keep an ear to the ground when an orginization has violent history or current criminal connections, but those investigations should be driven by criminal concerns, not concerns of disruptive speech. Sending a federal employee to monitor someone's communications because they say something you don't like is not a good thing. It would be hard to prevent monitornig of communications in a public space (like/. boards), but the reasoning for why an individual's communications should be monitored is the place of real concern. We want our government to be where we can see it. We want to be able to keep an eye on it. We want to know if it's keeping an eye on us as individuals.
Someone has judged it is a better idea to prevent people from using a Kindle than it is to create a text to speech companion for Kindle. It is likely that this person wanted to find the easiest way to make things EQUAL. It is unfortunate that the desire to create equality has replaced the desire for a better life for all.
BTW Kindle developers, a means for turning every Kindle book into an audio-book seems like a device with a market larger than just the blind.
You misunderstand. A game like Star Trek Online is not in the same category as The Old Republic. Star Trek Online is designed to compete with games like Aion, EVE and City of Heroes. That's their market space. The Old Republic is more ambitious. They're aiming for a game that can compete for a massive audiance. They're trying to build a game that competes with WoW. I don't think they have any dreams of supplanting WoW, but the depth and polish needed to even be considered in the same league is daunting. The years of development, feedback and testing are all being done so that when the game launches, it can not only put Galaxies out of everyone's mind, but that they can be spoken in the same breath as Blizzard's blockbuster.
Your Character: You start off as a junior officer in the position of ship's captain. Your character can be Tactical (tank/dps), Engineering(utility) or Science(buff/heal), and this largely determines your ground combat role, but your space captaining is seperate. Standard races are included as packages for character look, but you can do all sorts of things to your appearance and I've seen some strange things/people in spacedock. You also can customize your uniform to a degree. XP are invested in skills, which give you powers. Bridge Officers: BO's are pets on a planet, and powers in space. They level up and can be given specific training. You can get new BO's in the same way you can get gear, buy, mission reward and so on. Not all BO's have the same capabilities. They come in three general flavors, Tactical, Engineering, Science, with similar functions to the PC versions. In space, BO’s allow you to do special things with your ship, like fancy photon torpedo spreads and emergency power to shields. BO’s may be equipped with gear just like your main character. Your Ship: You can customize your ship’s look a good deal. Depending on your preference you can have a Miranda from WoK, something more TNG, or mix and match because you really just like the way those particular nacelles look. There’s also gear for your ship. You can install that disruptor array on your Fed ship if you like. Ground combat: It’s okay, but not great. However, if you’re ST fan the words “phaser rifles” will probably do it for you. The little phaser has a stun attack. Also, the default unarmed attack seems to be that palm-strike-to-nose thing. Space Combat: It’s ship combat, not fighter combat. Firing arcs, weapon charge, shield regeneration. Battling a single comparable ship is not intended to be quick in this game. You’re intended to fight an enemy that will try to shelter it’s weak shields and you’re expected to do the same. Many fights are against more numerous small opponents (the Orions deploy fighters), and the management of your weapons and powers is where your time is spent. It’s not about movement, it’s about management. This appeals to me for ship combat of this type. Quests: The training mission above is what it is, newb training. I never really felt like I was taking on the Borg, but rather like I was helping out after the fight, then joining the big ships to push them out. The other missions seem much more like ST episodes. Travel to a system that's having a labor disptue as the Fed representative. Discover pirates in the system and clear them out. Beam down to resolve the differences. While the diplomatic options are too simplified and need serious work, I think they've done a good job of replicating the ST episode in game. Things begin "Stardate bla...we are escorting so and so to a Vulcan monastery..." and end with the ship warping out of system or the crew beaming off planet. It feels like the game will have a story, with missions that are a part of it. Kirk vs. Picard: Definitely more Kirk. Myabe you could call it “Enterprise-E Picard”. In the Sol area there are public quests that involve Klingon incursions, and I killed a whole lot of Klingons in that Vulcan monastery. Sure, you’re expected to talk to people. Angry Federation workers are an example of people to whom one is expected to be diplomatic. The pirates in orbit you’re expected to explode. It’s a post-Dominion War post-Wolf 359 Federation. GOOD: It’s Star Trek. Travel around. Meet new folks. Talk to some. Blow up Klingons. Uncover strange anomalies. Meet the alien of the week (probably a PC). Beam in, beam out. Go to warp. Cue music. I also like the ship combat. BAD: Load screens. Too many load screens. It’s a major failure of the game. Combat pacing and dynamism needs work, but the load screens are a much bigger hurdle. Also, t
Neither of your examples are valid. If we need a terahertz scanner to see your naked body, it has clearly not been publicly exposed. It would be the same as if pictures of your naked body had not been posted on the internet. If you choose to expose your naked body in public, expect it to be publicly observed. If you choose to pose pictures of your naked body on the internet, expect it to be publicly observed. Oddly, posting pictured of your clothed body has about the same result as exposing your clothed body in public. As for recording your conversations, this is also not the same. It would be more like giving a speech. If you give a speech in public, expect it to be listend to by the public. If you post something in an online forum, expect it to be read by the public. See, no one is arguing that you don't have a right to keep your naked body concealed. They're just saying that posting it on the internet is the same as going to the grocery store in the buff when it comes to keeping your bod private.
By default, the internet is a public space. It's like a mall, or a popular part of the city. There is no expectation of privacy at the city park or at Wal-Mart. Anything you display in those places will be seen by anyone passing by. Same for the internet. Social network spaces are public as well. Like a bar with no list, cover and barely any dress code. They are designed this way to encourage personal connections and interconnections. The idea is to build an emotional attachment to the tool by osmosis from the emotional attachment to the personal content shared in the space. This "locks you in" and then they turn that into dollars. It is not to Facebook's advantage to limit the scope of interaction. The more of your life that is exposed, the more of your life is involved, the more YOU are involved. Some places are "members only", but they are not the norm. It is harder for them to gain audiance, and easier for people to depart. People are not as exposed, they are not as emotionally invested themselves, or in others.
This seems to be the nature of social networking. Exposing one's information in exchange for becoming part of the community. I'm pretty sure there's a great sci-fi cult novel in there some where.
The frightening thing is that the system itself probably did function. Most of us who've held a help-desk job will understand this when we think about it.
The call was answered correctly, got all the information, went through their checklists, and closed the call in under 15 minutes. The customer's computer was still broken, but the process was followed completely and correctly, so you won't be docked any points on your evaluation.
When she says the "the system worked" this is likely what she means. The process was followed and each person and part did what it was scripted to do.
I wouldn't say they're a "waste", but the point of diminishing returns decreases over time. A static security process is intended to establish a secure corridor. Things passing through the process are considered secure. Things outside the process are suspect. The better your process, the more secure you can make things that pass through the process. Of course, that does nothing to secure things outside the process. Restricting access to sensative areas and items to things/people that pass through the process increases the security of the area, but again, if the process can be evaded, it is not effective. It's always a struggle between the efficacy of a system, the net it casts, and the ability of an agressor to evade the net and/or defeat the system. In an ideal world, attempts to evade and defeat the system are noticed, be they novel bomb making techniques or suspicious communications. Static defenses serve best when they create a situation that increases the likelihood that evasion attempts will be noticed as "activity outside the process" and place limits on the capacity of those attempting to bypass the process. The Majinot Line wasn't a failure because the German Army went around it, it was a failure because it was thought to be something it wasn't. If the Line had been used to force German armor to fight a dynamic French force on ground of thier choosing, we'd think it was a success. Unfortunately, while it did press the Germans into a specific attack corridor, there was no complimentary dynamic force to take advantage of the situation. Warfightin paradigms aside, the resources used to make the best fort in the world might have been better spent making the second best fort and a bunch of tanks. It is the same thing here. A body scanner raises the difficulty of passing through the process undetected. However, dynamic intelligence is still needed to detect the ripples caused when people attempt to jump the higher hurdles and sneak around the longer walls. Clandestine (or not) efforts are still needed to take action when such are detected. At best, these scanners make it harder to evade the system and make the ripples caused by evading the system more noticable.
A Saudi prince was recently targetted in this way. The bomber was meeting with the prince, and smuggled in a device in his rectum. When the device detonated, the bomber's body dampened the effect and the target recieved relatively minor wounds. It's a method that has not had the best success in the past.
Perhaps it is a matter of publicity and perception, but I do not see the number of truck based attacks in the West compared to the number of airplane targets. Certainly there have been truck attacks, but it seems that the airplane is a prefered target. If similar effort were devoted to softer targets, surely there would be more casualties, and the numbers of targets hit would be larger. It may simply be a matter of perception, that attacks that reach Deployment/Attack phase are just as likely to be against aircraft as any other target.
I'd like to see the raw targetting data, including attacks that were late in Planning but not yet Deployed. Unfortunately, that data, with good reason, is likely classified. Maybe the agrigate of Prevented vs. Successful against phase that the attack was stopped in vs. target would be available somewhere?
The greatest security measure implemented since 9/11 has not been put in place by the government or any other formal policy. Before the 9/11 attacks were over, the mindset had changed. Without any official making a statement, people, using their own judgement, through out the advice to sit quietly and hope to be rescued. Prior to those attacks, the response to a guy trying to light something on fire would have been to inform a flight attendant. Now, it is to beat him down and drag him off in a head lock. That's probably the most effective security change we've had.
The NWA attack was made by a 23 year old son of a promenent banker. He attended a prep school popular with the wealthy. His college education was in London, a mechanical engineering degree program. While there he apparently lived in a multi-million dollar apartment.
What exactly is it that we sheould "Give them" so that a person like this can have "something to loose or care about"? Perhaps you'd caer to come up with an alternative motivation for his acts than "having nothing to loose"?
There's got to be a reason. Why commercial aircraft? In spite of all the failures in the system, and the gaps when it does function, they're much harder targets than most places. If my goal was to kill lots of people spectacularly, I'm sure it would be easier to use a lower powered bomb and just drive it into a daycare center at pick up time. It seems like a good question to ask, and I've heard very few answers that seem to make sense.
I find your assertion of a natural monopoly for ISP's dubious. I could, currently, pick from any of three types of service; sat, DSL, cable, and all of them could be up and running at my home within 48 hours. Further, I have multiple choices within sat and DSL service. Since the current market environment is also producing additional services, cell and wi-max among others. Please reformulate your argument for net neutrality with another premise.
The Na'vi are pretty much stone age. Maybe someone else built them, but the Na'vi are technologically primitive. They have no idea of the science behind the natural phenomenon they use. They're the equivilent of a cave man who lucks into a particlarly usefully shaped bit of iron. Neither of them understand, technologically, what they're holding. Neither has the technical skill to reproduce the artifact. Both of them treat it as magic and a gift of nature/gods/spirits/magic in an effort to explain what's going on in their world. The Na'vi can just get away with it because we don't see the impact of their current lack of sanitation technology.
The phrase "peaceful people living in harmony with nature" is the part that doesn't hold up. It completely ignores nature's primary means of maintaining harmony, namely killing off things. Preador and prey populations are regulated by scarcity for the former and hunting for the latter. These peacful people live in harmony with nature by the virtue that they are able to do the "harmonizing" better. The only reason their local super-preadator isn't using them as snacks is either A: they've developed killing skills superior to the local preadators, or B: alien-magic. Living in harmony with "nature" is like living in harmony with fire. They both have the same movtives, none. They both care about you in the same way, not at all. They both have the same feelings and desires about eating you.
As for what the Europeans did differently than the Native Americans with regard to their loved ones when they lacked the benefits of modern medicine. The Europeans invented scientific method and modern medicine. I've no doubt that the Native American's would have done so as well, eventually, but it would have come at some point after they figured out bronze.
The Microsoft example is benign, but suppose all searches for news on scandal X redirected to poltical supporters (or opponents). It just seems like a mechanism that allows for exploitation by power blocks.
Now, I had mod points, and considered using them to show a point, but it seemed in apropriate. I'm not sure if my pesonal restraint disproves the point. Still, I think without the ability to restrain a user's modding ability (like M2) you could get swarm modding on sites directed by interest groups. I think it probably has all the issues that/. modding has, but far too many users to implement an M2. Additionally, there's the possibility of owners of large numbers of IP's simply using their block vote to overwhelm the system.
Slashdot Mirror
So, unelected civil servants are writing regulations and punishments without even marginal influence from those in control of the executive or legislative branches of government? This is not a comfort to me.
It's interesting that infectious viruses may form an essential foundation for our own evolution. It may even be that viruses are a developed strategy for "importing tallent" from competitors or neighbors. It has interesting things to say about inerconnection between organisms in a species and between species. Infectability may be a long term strategy for development.
Then again, it could be exactly the other way. Advanced organisms are just diverse platforms which viruses have evolved as elaborate tools and development shops for their survival and propagation.
So, an orginization formed for the purpose of advancing an agenda (say, Sell More Oil PAC) should be allowed to contribute.
However, Exxon shouldn't.
I get that right?
In answer to your question, it would probably be the Supreme Court. This sort of First Amendment issue has been explored fairly thoroughly, so the cases would likely be predictable with regard to the censure of a person related to their speech.
/.ers have heard of software companies doing this sort of thing to advance their products. /. boards), but the reasoning for why an individual's communications should be monitored is the place of real concern.
You're more likely to find the interesting bits surrounding the various press offices of government orginizations. They have a responsibility to engage and inform the people regarding their work and to clarify matters that are widely misunderstood. I'm not aware of any legal obstacle to an agent of the government logging on to a website under a nom-de-plume and posting the agency's party line. I'm sure
We expect our leaders and institutions to engage the public on matters of concern. They take polls, review focus groups and consult experts. The President is expected to speak on behalf of his policies and party, as are other political figures. I expect the Surgeon General to put forth informaiton on the latest health buzz.
The first difference in this case is that you could be speaking to an agent of the government online, and not be aware. This starts to get pretty creepy. You think it's bad not knowing if KittenPrincess22 is a dude or not, imagine wondering if she's actually an EPA plant. It's the sort of thing people mean when they talk about a "chilling effect on public discourse".
The second worrisome point is that an individual citizen or group could be targetted by federal agencies for their speech. Again, we expect the FBI to keep an ear to the ground when an orginization has violent history or current criminal connections, but those investigations should be driven by criminal concerns, not concerns of disruptive speech. Sending a federal employee to monitor someone's communications because they say something you don't like is not a good thing. It would be hard to prevent monitornig of communications in a public space (like
We want our government to be where we can see it. We want to be able to keep an eye on it. We want to know if it's keeping an eye on us as individuals.
There is no government censorship or propaganda organization, and anyone who promotes such a baseless idea will be shut down.
Anyone interested in giving these orginizations control over which network providers are being free, open and impartial just chime in now.
Someone has judged it is a better idea to prevent people from using a Kindle than it is to create a text to speech companion for Kindle. It is likely that this person wanted to find the easiest way to make things EQUAL. It is unfortunate that the desire to create equality has replaced the desire for a better life for all. BTW Kindle developers, a means for turning every Kindle book into an audio-book seems like a device with a market larger than just the blind.
I don't think they want to be like WoW in terms of style or play, but I do think that's the quality and playspace at which they're aimed.
You misunderstand.
A game like Star Trek Online is not in the same category as The Old Republic. Star Trek Online is designed to compete with games like Aion, EVE and City of Heroes. That's their market space. The Old Republic is more ambitious. They're aiming for a game that can compete for a massive audiance. They're trying to build a game that competes with WoW. I don't think they have any dreams of supplanting WoW, but the depth and polish needed to even be considered in the same league is daunting. The years of development, feedback and testing are all being done so that when the game launches, it can not only put Galaxies out of everyone's mind, but that they can be spoken in the same breath as Blizzard's blockbuster.
My impressions from playing the game:
Your Character: You start off as a junior officer in the position of ship's captain. Your character can be Tactical (tank/dps), Engineering(utility) or Science(buff/heal), and this largely determines your ground combat role, but your space captaining is seperate. Standard races are included as packages for character look, but you can do all sorts of things to your appearance and I've seen some strange things/people in spacedock. You also can customize your uniform to a degree. XP are invested in skills, which give you powers.
Bridge Officers: BO's are pets on a planet, and powers in space. They level up and can be given specific training. You can get new BO's in the same way you can get gear, buy, mission reward and so on. Not all BO's have the same capabilities. They come in three general flavors, Tactical, Engineering, Science, with similar functions to the PC versions. In space, BO’s allow you to do special things with your ship, like fancy photon torpedo spreads and emergency power to shields. BO’s may be equipped with gear just like your main character.
Your Ship: You can customize your ship’s look a good deal. Depending on your preference you can have a Miranda from WoK, something more TNG, or mix and match because you really just like the way those particular nacelles look. There’s also gear for your ship. You can install that disruptor array on your Fed ship if you like.
Ground combat: It’s okay, but not great. However, if you’re ST fan the words “phaser rifles” will probably do it for you. The little phaser has a stun attack. Also, the default unarmed attack seems to be that palm-strike-to-nose thing.
Space Combat: It’s ship combat, not fighter combat. Firing arcs, weapon charge, shield regeneration. Battling a single comparable ship is not intended to be quick in this game. You’re intended to fight an enemy that will try to shelter it’s weak shields and you’re expected to do the same. Many fights are against more numerous small opponents (the Orions deploy fighters), and the management of your weapons and powers is where your time is spent. It’s not about movement, it’s about management. This appeals to me for ship combat of this type.
Quests: The training mission above is what it is, newb training. I never really felt like I was taking on the Borg, but rather like I was helping out after the fight, then joining the big ships to push them out.
The other missions seem much more like ST episodes. Travel to a system that's having a labor disptue as the Fed representative. Discover pirates in the system and clear them out. Beam down to resolve the differences. While the diplomatic options are too simplified and need serious work, I think they've done a good job of replicating the ST episode in game. Things begin "Stardate bla...we are escorting so and so to a Vulcan monastery..." and end with the ship warping out of system or the crew beaming off planet.
It feels like the game will have a story, with missions that are a part of it.
Kirk vs. Picard: Definitely more Kirk. Myabe you could call it “Enterprise-E Picard”. In the Sol area there are public quests that involve Klingon incursions, and I killed a whole lot of Klingons in that Vulcan monastery. Sure, you’re expected to talk to people. Angry Federation workers are an example of people to whom one is expected to be diplomatic. The pirates in orbit you’re expected to explode. It’s a post-Dominion War post-Wolf 359 Federation.
GOOD: It’s Star Trek. Travel around. Meet new folks. Talk to some. Blow up Klingons. Uncover strange anomalies. Meet the alien of the week (probably a PC). Beam in, beam out. Go to warp. Cue music. I also like the ship combat.
BAD: Load screens. Too many load screens. It’s a major failure of the game. Combat pacing and dynamism needs work, but the load screens are a much bigger hurdle. Also, t
Neither of your examples are valid.
If we need a terahertz scanner to see your naked body, it has clearly not been publicly exposed. It would be the same as if pictures of your naked body had not been posted on the internet. If you choose to expose your naked body in public, expect it to be publicly observed. If you choose to pose pictures of your naked body on the internet, expect it to be publicly observed. Oddly, posting pictured of your clothed body has about the same result as exposing your clothed body in public.
As for recording your conversations, this is also not the same. It would be more like giving a speech. If you give a speech in public, expect it to be listend to by the public. If you post something in an online forum, expect it to be read by the public.
See, no one is arguing that you don't have a right to keep your naked body concealed. They're just saying that posting it on the internet is the same as going to the grocery store in the buff when it comes to keeping your bod private.
By default, the internet is a public space. It's like a mall, or a popular part of the city. There is no expectation of privacy at the city park or at Wal-Mart. Anything you display in those places will be seen by anyone passing by. Same for the internet.
Social network spaces are public as well. Like a bar with no list, cover and barely any dress code. They are designed this way to encourage personal connections and interconnections. The idea is to build an emotional attachment to the tool by osmosis from the emotional attachment to the personal content shared in the space. This "locks you in" and then they turn that into dollars. It is not to Facebook's advantage to limit the scope of interaction. The more of your life that is exposed, the more of your life is involved, the more YOU are involved.
Some places are "members only", but they are not the norm. It is harder for them to gain audiance, and easier for people to depart. People are not as exposed, they are not as emotionally invested themselves, or in others.
This seems to be the nature of social networking. Exposing one's information in exchange for becoming part of the community. I'm pretty sure there's a great sci-fi cult novel in there some where.
The frightening thing is that the system itself probably did function. Most of us who've held a help-desk job will understand this when we think about it.
The call was answered correctly, got all the information, went through their checklists, and closed the call in under 15 minutes. The customer's computer was still broken, but the process was followed completely and correctly, so you won't be docked any points on your evaluation.
When she says the "the system worked" this is likely what she means. The process was followed and each person and part did what it was scripted to do.
I wouldn't say they're a "waste", but the point of diminishing returns decreases over time. A static security process is intended to establish a secure corridor. Things passing through the process are considered secure. Things outside the process are suspect. The better your process, the more secure you can make things that pass through the process. Of course, that does nothing to secure things outside the process. Restricting access to sensative areas and items to things/people that pass through the process increases the security of the area, but again, if the process can be evaded, it is not effective. It's always a struggle between the efficacy of a system, the net it casts, and the ability of an agressor to evade the net and/or defeat the system. In an ideal world, attempts to evade and defeat the system are noticed, be they novel bomb making techniques or suspicious communications. Static defenses serve best when they create a situation that increases the likelihood that evasion attempts will be noticed as "activity outside the process" and place limits on the capacity of those attempting to bypass the process.
The Majinot Line wasn't a failure because the German Army went around it, it was a failure because it was thought to be something it wasn't. If the Line had been used to force German armor to fight a dynamic French force on ground of thier choosing, we'd think it was a success. Unfortunately, while it did press the Germans into a specific attack corridor, there was no complimentary dynamic force to take advantage of the situation. Warfightin paradigms aside, the resources used to make the best fort in the world might have been better spent making the second best fort and a bunch of tanks.
It is the same thing here. A body scanner raises the difficulty of passing through the process undetected. However, dynamic intelligence is still needed to detect the ripples caused when people attempt to jump the higher hurdles and sneak around the longer walls. Clandestine (or not) efforts are still needed to take action when such are detected.
At best, these scanners make it harder to evade the system and make the ripples caused by evading the system more noticable.
A Saudi prince was recently targetted in this way. The bomber was meeting with the prince, and smuggled in a device in his rectum. When the device detonated, the bomber's body dampened the effect and the target recieved relatively minor wounds. It's a method that has not had the best success in the past.
...like the Maginot Line.
Perhaps it is a matter of publicity and perception, but I do not see the number of truck based attacks in the West compared to the number of airplane targets. Certainly there have been truck attacks, but it seems that the airplane is a prefered target. If similar effort were devoted to softer targets, surely there would be more casualties, and the numbers of targets hit would be larger. It may simply be a matter of perception, that attacks that reach Deployment/Attack phase are just as likely to be against aircraft as any other target.
I'd like to see the raw targetting data, including attacks that were late in Planning but not yet Deployed. Unfortunately, that data, with good reason, is likely classified. Maybe the agrigate of Prevented vs. Successful against phase that the attack was stopped in vs. target would be available somewhere?
The greatest security measure implemented since 9/11 has not been put in place by the government or any other formal policy. Before the 9/11 attacks were over, the mindset had changed. Without any official making a statement, people, using their own judgement, through out the advice to sit quietly and hope to be rescued. Prior to those attacks, the response to a guy trying to light something on fire would have been to inform a flight attendant. Now, it is to beat him down and drag him off in a head lock. That's probably the most effective security change we've had.
The NWA attack was made by a 23 year old son of a promenent banker. He attended a prep school popular with the wealthy. His college education was in London, a mechanical engineering degree program. While there he apparently lived in a multi-million dollar apartment.
What exactly is it that we sheould "Give them" so that a person like this can have "something to loose or care about"? Perhaps you'd caer to come up with an alternative motivation for his acts than "having nothing to loose"?
There's got to be a reason. Why commercial aircraft? In spite of all the failures in the system, and the gaps when it does function, they're much harder targets than most places. If my goal was to kill lots of people spectacularly, I'm sure it would be easier to use a lower powered bomb and just drive it into a daycare center at pick up time. It seems like a good question to ask, and I've heard very few answers that seem to make sense.
I find your assertion of a natural monopoly for ISP's dubious. I could, currently, pick from any of three types of service; sat, DSL, cable, and all of them could be up and running at my home within 48 hours. Further, I have multiple choices within sat and DSL service. Since the current market environment is also producing additional services, cell and wi-max among others. Please reformulate your argument for net neutrality with another premise.
The Na'vi are pretty much stone age. Maybe someone else built them, but the Na'vi are technologically primitive. They have no idea of the science behind the natural phenomenon they use. They're the equivilent of a cave man who lucks into a particlarly usefully shaped bit of iron. Neither of them understand, technologically, what they're holding. Neither has the technical skill to reproduce the artifact. Both of them treat it as magic and a gift of nature/gods/spirits/magic in an effort to explain what's going on in their world. The Na'vi can just get away with it because we don't see the impact of their current lack of sanitation technology.
The phrase "peaceful people living in harmony with nature" is the part that doesn't hold up. It completely ignores nature's primary means of maintaining harmony, namely killing off things. Preador and prey populations are regulated by scarcity for the former and hunting for the latter. These peacful people live in harmony with nature by the virtue that they are able to do the "harmonizing" better. The only reason their local super-preadator isn't using them as snacks is either A: they've developed killing skills superior to the local preadators, or B: alien-magic.
Living in harmony with "nature" is like living in harmony with fire. They both have the same movtives, none. They both care about you in the same way, not at all. They both have the same feelings and desires about eating you.
As for what the Europeans did differently than the Native Americans with regard to their loved ones when they lacked the benefits of modern medicine. The Europeans invented scientific method and modern medicine. I've no doubt that the Native American's would have done so as well, eventually, but it would have come at some point after they figured out bronze.
The Microsoft example is benign, but suppose all searches for news on scandal X redirected to poltical supporters (or opponents). It just seems like a mechanism that allows for exploitation by power blocks.
Now, I had mod points, and considered using them to show a point, but it seemed in apropriate. I'm not sure if my pesonal restraint disproves the point. Still, I think without the ability to restrain a user's modding ability (like M2) you could get swarm modding on sites directed by interest groups. I think it probably has all the issues that /. modding has, but far too many users to implement an M2. Additionally, there's the possibility of owners of large numbers of IP's simply using their block vote to overwhelm the system.