> Then get him some therapy and get him back on the streets as > soon as possible to be a constructive member of society.
Might be worth trying once. But the odds are people with those sort of sexual malfunctions are beyond current skill in head shrinking. They repeat offend with shocking regularity.
> The reason is that the Roe v Wade decision rested on the idea that > we have a right to privacy and anti-abortion laws violate it.
Except that almost every serious scholar now admits the Supreme Court was simply finding a justification for a decision they had already made. Roe is horrible Constitutional law and nobody uses it as an anchor for an argument anymore since it is only a matter of time before a future court revisits it, the outcome of which revisit is totally unknown.
Note that I'm not trying to open up an abortion thread here, even well respected pro abortion scholars admit the weakness of the reasoning in Roe. When it falls abortion itself will simply get tossed into the political arena where it should have been decided thirty years ago and nothing much will change.
To further clarify an idea several other posters have been trying to make, the Constitution itself does grant powers to the Federal Government. The Bill of Rights on the other hand is concerned with marking out areas where the government CANNOT go, i.e. it is entirely negative.
You want to know who I'd like to sue? The idiot who designed the webcam. They all have a light that is supposed to let you know when it is on. But of course it is just software in the windows driver and can be disabled by any idiot with a hex editor. THAT is the crime here.
You should be able to trust that light. That mofo should be hard wired to go on whenever the CCD is charged or when data is actually being sent. And it should have a delay (a simple capacitor would do) to make sure it stays lit for at least 1.0 seconds anytime it is triggered to stop single frame caps being hard to spot.
The light's specific purpose is to notify the user and it is obviously DEFECTIVE. A mandatory recall or two would drive the point home to the hardware makers about putting vital safety functions into the driver.
> I am assuming you have never heard of the linux distros that fit on a floppy?
My first exposure to Linux was when you downloaded a boot/root floppy set from a BBS.
And yes I actually ran Linux on a 386SX-16 with 5MB RAM. It wasn't pretty. Now scale down to a machine that MIGHT have 1MB of memory but would probably have 256K or 512K. Yes you could probably build a kernel that would load but you wouldn't have much of a userspace and the idea is to run (simple) graphical programs so keeping as much of the system free has to be a design goal.
> Would the 46 million card numbers recently hijacked and sent to > Russia and eastern Europe meet your specs?
That would be a major component yes. If the Russian mob does their usual crime with the information it will be a managable problem. The Russians want to milk actual money from the deal instead of just sow chaos.
Imagine a worst case scenario. Instead of mining a retailer or card clearing server imagine a trojan harvests the millions of card numbers along with other information from the victim PCs. That additional info is what would make it nasty. Add in some manual labor to sift the raw data and you work up a list of say half a million people ALONG with a list of plausible associations for each mined from their documents and address book. Now you wait until the Xmas frenzy is upon the retailing world.
You launch a bot that hits major etailers, sites that the cardholder is already known to use and you order expensive gifts for associates of that target and have them shipped to their address. Repeat at different etailers until the card bounces. The ultimate twist is on machines you still 0wn you get the cardholder's own machine to do the deed so they can't even pick up on the bad orders via geolocaton..
The card companies will see the spike and within a few hours realize what you are doing but now it gets fun. What do they DO? Stop people from sending presents via ecommerce? Whatever happens, once it hits the MSM confidence in ecommerce will be somewhere between zero and null for years.
> but that doesn't mean Linux is. DSLinux and other uClinux > distributions run on ARM CPUs.
Take a look at the specs on those ARMs and go lookup the quantity 1000 price on the chip. In a $39.95 router they are great but won't get you to $10-$15 products. The gadget I have in mind would need to be a total system on chip with sound, video, USB, etc all in the one chip that would wholesale in the $3-$4 range.. When you find out just how puny the CPU power on such a beastie will be you will realize that no Linux kernel is going to boot on it.
> Think again. There are BASIC compilers that run on a Commodore 64.
Yup, but that will just be a BASIC. Most apps would probably not be BASIC programs but C/C++ programs cross compiled on a PC. Just as in the day most programs for that C64 (I had one too) you mention were not written in BASIC, compiled or interpreted.
Totally a dumb idea as they are trying it. But it could be done and be practical.
1. Forget putting it into a keyboard. Standalone keyboards are such a commodity they are dirt cheap and by leaving it external the possibility of different layouts becomes much easier since a small outfit doesn't have to make a gadget in a dozen flavors. Plus it lets you leave out the keyboard/mouse and let people scrounge or buy a bulk lot locally.
2. Forget 8-bit. Go just a bit higher up the food chain. Admit up front that even if you avoid it on 1.0 you need a future upgrade path to a web browser and it would be best if that didn't mean tossing the entire platform and software base. Today's word is ARM.
3. Build a tiny little box with several USB ports, an S-Video (easy to adapt to composite) port, audio i/o, possibly a VGA port and depending on pricing a pair of PS/2 ports. (If the cost of adding the ports is less than the cost of two more USB + price diff on keyboard/mouse.)
4. Develop a SIMPLE Operating System for it. Linux is way too big for the sort of cheap ARM chips available today. Most modern BSDs are also probably too big. Think much smaller. UNIX used to run on small machines though so it could be POSIXish.
5. USB drives would be the software delivery method. When writing software for a machine with at best a megabyte of RAM and 2D TV graphics you can fit a boatload of software on a single 256MB flash drive.
6. Ship them with a software development environment. The oldskool machines always had BASIC available and it spawned a generation of users who, if not outright developers could at least read code and make small changes. A modern BASIC wouldn't be the worst thing to ship and there are good Free implementations available. I'm afraid a fully self hosted development environment probably isn't possible on such a limited platform but ship the cross compiler on a CD in the box or make it generally available for download.
>.. but I do think they should be authorized to make them. It is > that which is the difference between between us.
Ok, lemme get this right. You claim to be able to read so you have to know some of what they have been pushing on us is just an outright power grab, you even sorta admit it even, but in the end you insist they have the authority to do whatever they decide they have the authority to do.
Straight up, if you believe they have the legitimate authority to excise three (and almost four) of the ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights, precisely what do you think is beyond their authority. And is it still possible to even use phrases like "seperation of powers", "rule of law" or "limited government" without it being a joke?
It sounds like you either fear the peer pressure you might get if you started saying things like "The Supreme Court is outlaws" or just don't want to admit it to yourself because of what the logical consequences of that admission might be.
Me, I don't care. If they tortured my ass enough I'd probably love Big Brother as much as Winston ended up doing. But mere peer pressue induce me to believing the Emperor is wearing clothes? No way, I'm the sort of prick who would shout, "Dude, put some fucking cloths on." and then run like hell from the pissed off royal guards.
> It's not *my* interpretation that matters here, nor is it yours.
You are free to think as you will, please don't presume to make you lack of self confidence binding upon me. I can read and no amount of argument will ever convince me that the Supreme Court hasn't usurped it's legitimate authority. They do not have the power to amend the Constituition. So far they have removed the 1st, 9th and 10th Amendments entirely and came within a single vote of removing the 2nd. They are outlaws.
At this point I'm still petitioning my government for a redress of grievences hoping for a miracle because revolution isn't even much of an option anymore.... a nation fit for self government wouldn't have allowed things to get this out of hand.
> That is, of course, until they invaded Iraq, gaving Bin-Laden > everything he could have possibly dreamed of and then some.
Except it appears that after a lot of missteps, bungling and otherwise doing the wrong things we turned things around in Iraq. Turned it around to the point AQ has pretty much abandoned the field and shifted thier efforts into a last ditch attempt to salvage Afghanistan and/or destabilize Pakistan.
But yea, for several years there it looked like Iraq might have ended up in the loss column and the consequences had that happened would indeed have been horrific. Iraq was a huge gamble. But the thing about huge gambles is that while losing will hurt bigtime since by definition they involve putting lots of chips on the table, winning them is usually game changing.
I was, to say it nicely, rather dubious on Bush's belief that self government was possible in such a third world pesthole, but I'm now hopeful that he is going to get the last laugh when the history books are written. That change in conventional wisdom won't happen in time to change this election cycle though.
> On the real 9/11 thousands of innocent people lost their lives.
So? Not trying to make light of the losses on 9/11 but the loss of life was not the major damage on that day. We got lucky, the loss of life could indeed have been much worse. But the damage to the morale and economic power of the US was almost incalculable. Had AQ been able to follow up with one or two similar attacks in the following months they just might have brought down the entirety of Western Civilization.
There is the potential to carry out attacks of similar impact via the Internet entirely and/or use the Internet as a major component of a physical attack.
It is the responsibility of some people to think about such things, plan for them and work on reducing the likelihood of such attacks. Those people don't sleep well with the current security state of the Internet.
> Successfully attack all 13 root name servers simultaneously.
Nope. You won't able to actually subvert more than one or two since there is a good diversity in the hardware and software... and none run on Windows. (ok, uncalled for bitchslap but what the heck) A DoS attack could slwo things down for a day or two but I'd expect swift action to clear things up long before it caused a total meltdown. Hell, they would cut whole countries if it took it to stop something like that.
Nah. There isn't as much redundency as there should be anymore, but I doubt that could cause a full meltdown. Truckbombing a couple of the NAPs might have possibilities.
> Something like the Storm worm starts emailing randomly-named > child pornography to everybody..
But once it because known it would be impossible to convict anyone, besides which the cops aren't that stupid. And AQ probably doesn't even want to be associated with kiddie porn, they have SOME standards. They might marry em at 9 like their pedophile prophet but they probably wouldn't encourage posting pictures of it. (Think that can get me to -1 Flamebait?)
You are starting to think the unthinkable, now just think bigger. When you get there though, probably not a good idea to post those thoughts.
> Yes, necessary and proper and the commerce clause among others.
No. Don't even try the commerce clause. And forget necessary and proper as that is literally a unlimited license to legislate. Consider that the 9th and 10th Amendments were added after and thus superceed. And they explicitly say any power not spelled out is forbidden to the Federal Government.
> Because the constitution says that the Supreme Court gets to > interpret the law, not you, not Obama and not some random > congresscritter from Texas.
No, that was just a bad Star Trek episode you are thinking about. The "e plub neista" isn't just for Chiefs and Sons of Chiefs and it isn't just for Supremes to hand down from on high. The Constituition is a remarkably well written document that should be understandable by anyone with a basic compentecy in English. The Courts are indeed required to rule on corner cases, complex interractions between laws and various levels of government, etc. But any fool can see where the Socialists have been wiping their asses on the Constituition. And frankly it is about time we loudly and clearly called them on it, and if that doesn't work use our 'sporting goods' to add extra emphasis. While we still can.
> Are you one of those idiots who think the income tax isn't valid too?
Although some do make arguments that that Amendment wasn't properly ratified, questions of that nature ARE within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and we have to abide by their rulings or declare a Revolution. Not quite ready for THAT.:)
> Either every single Supreme Court justice since ever is illiterate > or they're all evil.
No, four could read "Congress shall make no law..." and understood that McCain Fiengold was clearly infringing. And five managed to parse "shall not be infringed." and rule the DC gun ban out of bounds.
> They just realize the reality of the situation, which is that the > Bill of Rights is simply wrong in that respect and you need to ignore > it and get onto more pressing matters.
And now it is clear, we won't be agreeing on much because you serve the forces of darkness. You can't just "ignore" the Bill of Rights and remain a nation of laws. What you pine for is a dictator who will make all of your decisions for you.
And we have the answer to how so many educated Supremes can fail to read the Constituition and not get the right answer. They understand perfectly, but being Socialists they simply don't give a damn what it says.
Note that it IS perfectly acceptable to disagree with the 2nd Amendment, private possession of arms, etc. and still be an American. But you can only do so by first proposing the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Remember that the Founding Fathers were very wise men, but they were not God Kings handing down the law on graven tablets, thus they realized that their laws might need to be adjusted for differing times, and the procedure for Amendments. Done that way it doesn't turn us into a nation of men instead of laws.
Of course you will repeal the 2nd Amendment only after I have fought you to my last breath and last dollar.
You aren't nearly paranoid enough. Those of us who have thought the unthinkable can see dozens of really nasty possibilities. I'm more amazed that we haven't had a major attack yet. Seems that some parts of the government is actually functioning since we haven't been attacked physically or over the net since 9/11. Sad that the only parts that are still working are the parts nobody can talk about.
Remember that 9/11 wasn't about killing people, athough that was certainly a goal. The point of terrorism is to terrify civilian populations with the goal of effecting the policy decisions of the government, or to so disrupt a civilization that it can't continue. 9/11 came a lot closer than a lot of people want to admit to achieving that second goal. The world economy tettered on the brink of a total collapse for several weeks. Only a massive tax cut sufficed to jump start the economy, something that can't be repeated all that many times without itself causing serious problems to economic stability.
So, given the goals of terrorists, what sort of things could they do that would have similar disruptive effects to taking out the most prime block of real estate in the world? What could qualify as a 'cyber 9/11?'
Number one on my list would be to go for the ultimate prize. Destroy the entire Internet economy. Not wanting to dwell on specifics for obvious reasons, but how hard would it be to destroy public confidence in ecommerce? Think dark thoughts along those lines and you will get scared pretty goddamn fast. Microsoft's chronic insecuity could very well end up destroying our very Civilization.
Or leverage an Internet attack into a wholesale attack on the banking system. Steal enough credit cards and launch a massive fraud attack right at the peak of Xmas shopping. Does Mastercard & Visa cease operation for a few weeks (and tank themselves and most retailers) or allow the fraud and hope to pick up the pieces without going broke?
Remember the goal is fear, panic and chaos. Dead people are just one way to create fear, not even the best one since (as they discovered) killing Americans has a nasty tendency to piss us off and cause us to break things.
Oh really. Seems they have made it to gun licensing already, confiscation always comes next. Hate Speech laws are already on their books and arrests are being made so forget free speech there.
And thus the problem. The US is sliding down the slippery slope to a Worker's Paradise but everyone else seems to be ahead of us leaving nowhere to run.
Yes, Obambi. The terrorists will be dancing in the streets when[1] he gets elected. Expect things to get very bad during his single term in office.
[1] I'm under no illusions on the when part. McCain has no more chance of defeating Obama than Dole had vs Clinton in '96. Primogeniture is a bad way of picking nominees, wish the Republicans could figure that out.
> There are only a handful of people in this country who know the > Constitution better than he does...
The man is an illiterate fool. He can't even parse simple English phrases like "Congress shall make no law..." or "...shall not be infringed."
Seriously. Either he is a total illiterate and is thus excused for being a gun banner and free speech infringer (but also unfit for elective office) or he does know and doesn't care, thus is evil. Not that McCain (of McCain/Fielgold) is much of an improvement on the 1st Amendment. Grr.
Well I wouldn't exactly haev a lot of confidence in anything Richard Clarke says. Besides being dimwitted enough to be supporting Obambi (says a lot about how serious he considers the threat of Islamic terrorism doesn't it....) he didn't exactly cover himself in glory in the portmortems of 9/11.
Yea. Except you can't fire an elected official. Democrats, having no respect for the instituitions in our system of government, are free to abuse their positions for the greater glory of the Party. It puts our team at a decided disadvantage.
> As far as the 5.25's go, there's a chance that you could get one to > work with one of the powered 5.25 usb cases that they make to let > people build their own external drives.
Nope, zero chance. Those have either an EIDE to USB bridge or a SATA to USB bridge. If you took one and gutted out the bridge and just kept the power supply, then gutted the floppy to USB controller from a USB floppy you should be able to get there, but that is advanced electronic hobbiest stuff outside the abilities one would expect a typical IT guy in a small business to possess. And since it sounded like the machine is mission critical line of business stuff I would hesitate to do it if I were their IT guy.
> You do realize it is a violation of labor laws to withhold someone's > pay check or refuse to pay them as the result of a third party > failure, correct?
You mean it is against the law to stop payment on a check you discover is made out for more than the correct amount? Sounds stupid enough to be a law in CA, but it doesn't apply to the government. Soverign Immunity. See yesterday's/. story about the USAF vs the DMCA for a refresher.
Don't be so sure. IF it is something truly ancient being kept working it could be far, far worse. It could be DOS, where USB floppies aren't so reliable. Or worse still, it could be using a 5 1/4" floppy and I haven't seen one of those on a USB cord. Hell, you would need an external power supply to run the big honking motors on a 5 1/4 since USB doesn't supply the +12 those things run on.
> If that politician can't think of a creative solution to a problem..
They could do it, but they don't want to so they announce it can't be done. Were the controller not an elected position it would be a firing offense to refuse a direct order and to politicize a normally functional ( vs overtly political, like the Legislature or Executive... or these days the Judiciary) unit of the government.
Problem is, for a Democrat aparatchik these sort of highjinks ARE a 'creative solution.' to the problem.
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> Then get him some therapy and get him back on the streets as
> soon as possible to be a constructive member of society.
Might be worth trying once. But the odds are people with those sort of sexual malfunctions are beyond current skill in head shrinking. They repeat offend with shocking regularity.
> The reason is that the Roe v Wade decision rested on the idea that
> we have a right to privacy and anti-abortion laws violate it.
Except that almost every serious scholar now admits the Supreme Court was simply finding a justification for a decision they had already made. Roe is horrible Constitutional law and nobody uses it as an anchor for an argument anymore since it is only a matter of time before a future court revisits it, the outcome of which revisit is totally unknown.
Note that I'm not trying to open up an abortion thread here, even well respected pro abortion scholars admit the weakness of the reasoning in Roe. When it falls abortion itself will simply get tossed into the political arena where it should have been decided thirty years ago and nothing much will change.
To further clarify an idea several other posters have been trying to make, the Constitution itself does grant powers to the Federal Government. The Bill of Rights on the other hand is concerned with marking out areas where the government CANNOT go, i.e. it is entirely negative.
> I smell a lawsuit.
You want to know who I'd like to sue? The idiot who designed the webcam. They all have a light that is supposed to let you know when it is on. But of course it is just software in the windows driver and can be disabled by any idiot with a hex editor. THAT is the crime here.
You should be able to trust that light. That mofo should be hard wired to go on whenever the CCD is charged or when data is actually being sent. And it should have a delay (a simple capacitor would do) to make sure it stays lit for at least 1.0 seconds anytime it is triggered to stop single frame caps being hard to spot.
The light's specific purpose is to notify the user and it is obviously DEFECTIVE. A mandatory recall or two would drive the point home to the hardware makers about putting vital safety functions into the driver.
> I am assuming you have never heard of the linux distros that fit on a floppy?
My first exposure to Linux was when you downloaded a boot/root floppy set from a BBS.
And yes I actually ran Linux on a 386SX-16 with 5MB RAM. It wasn't pretty. Now scale down to a machine that MIGHT have 1MB of memory but would probably have 256K or 512K. Yes you could probably build a kernel that would load but you wouldn't have much of a userspace and the idea is to run (simple) graphical programs so keeping as much of the system free has to be a design goal.
> Would the 46 million card numbers recently hijacked and sent to
> Russia and eastern Europe meet your specs?
That would be a major component yes. If the Russian mob does their usual crime with the information it will be a managable problem. The Russians want to milk actual money from the deal instead of just sow chaos.
Imagine a worst case scenario. Instead of mining a retailer or card clearing server imagine a trojan harvests the millions of card numbers along with other information from the victim PCs. That additional info is what would make it nasty. Add in some manual labor to sift the raw data and you work up a list of say half a million people ALONG with a list of plausible associations for each mined from their documents and address book. Now you wait until the Xmas frenzy is upon the retailing world.
You launch a bot that hits major etailers, sites that the cardholder is already known to use and you order expensive gifts for associates of that target and have them shipped to their address. Repeat at different etailers until the card bounces. The ultimate twist is on machines you still 0wn you get the cardholder's own machine to do the deed so they can't even pick up on the bad orders via geolocaton..
The card companies will see the spike and within a few hours realize what you are doing but now it gets fun. What do they DO? Stop people from sending presents via ecommerce? Whatever happens, once it hits the MSM confidence in ecommerce will be somewhere between zero and null for years.
> but that doesn't mean Linux is. DSLinux and other uClinux
> distributions run on ARM CPUs.
Take a look at the specs on those ARMs and go lookup the quantity 1000 price on the chip. In a $39.95 router they are great but won't get you to $10-$15 products. The gadget I have in mind would need to be a total system on chip with sound, video, USB, etc all in the one chip that would wholesale in the $3-$4 range.. When you find out just how puny the CPU power on such a beastie will be you will realize that no Linux kernel is going to boot on it.
> Think again. There are BASIC compilers that run on a Commodore 64.
Yup, but that will just be a BASIC. Most apps would probably not be BASIC programs but C/C++ programs cross compiled on a PC. Just as in the day most programs for that C64 (I had one too) you mention were not written in BASIC, compiled or interpreted.
Totally a dumb idea as they are trying it. But it could be done and be practical.
1. Forget putting it into a keyboard. Standalone keyboards are such a commodity they are dirt cheap and by leaving it external the possibility of different layouts becomes much easier since a small outfit doesn't have to make a gadget in a dozen flavors. Plus it lets you leave out the keyboard/mouse and let people scrounge or buy a bulk lot locally.
2. Forget 8-bit. Go just a bit higher up the food chain. Admit up front that even if you avoid it on 1.0 you need a future upgrade path to a web browser and it would be best if that didn't mean tossing the entire platform and software base. Today's word is ARM.
3. Build a tiny little box with several USB ports, an S-Video (easy to adapt to composite) port, audio i/o, possibly a VGA port and depending on pricing a pair of PS/2 ports. (If the cost of adding the ports is less than the cost of two more USB + price diff on keyboard/mouse.)
4. Develop a SIMPLE Operating System for it. Linux is way too big for the sort of cheap ARM chips available today. Most modern BSDs are also probably too big. Think much smaller. UNIX used to run on small machines though so it could be POSIXish.
5. USB drives would be the software delivery method. When writing software for a machine with at best a megabyte of RAM and 2D TV graphics you can fit a boatload of software on a single 256MB flash drive.
6. Ship them with a software development environment. The oldskool machines always had BASIC available and it spawned a generation of users who, if not outright developers could at least read code and make small changes. A modern BASIC wouldn't be the worst thing to ship and there are good Free implementations available. I'm afraid a fully self hosted development environment probably isn't possible on such a limited platform but ship the cross compiler on a CD in the box or make it generally available for download.
> .. but I do think they should be authorized to make them. It is
> that which is the difference between between us.
Ok, lemme get this right. You claim to be able to read so you have to know some of what they have been pushing on us is just an outright power grab, you even sorta admit it even, but in the end you insist they have the authority to do whatever they decide they have the authority to do.
Straight up, if you believe they have the legitimate authority to excise three (and almost four) of the ten Amendments in the Bill of Rights, precisely what do you think is beyond their authority. And is it still possible to even use phrases like "seperation of powers", "rule of law" or "limited government" without it being a joke?
It sounds like you either fear the peer pressure you might get if you started saying things like "The Supreme Court is outlaws" or just don't want to admit it to yourself because of what the logical consequences of that admission might be.
Me, I don't care. If they tortured my ass enough I'd probably love Big Brother as much as Winston ended up doing. But mere peer pressue induce me to believing the Emperor is wearing clothes? No way, I'm the sort of prick who would shout, "Dude, put some fucking cloths on." and then run like hell from the pissed off royal guards.
> It's not *my* interpretation that matters here, nor is it yours.
You are free to think as you will, please don't presume to make you lack of self confidence binding upon me. I can read and no amount of argument will ever convince me that the Supreme Court hasn't usurped it's legitimate authority. They do not have the power to amend the Constituition. So far they have removed the 1st, 9th and 10th Amendments entirely and came within a single vote of removing the 2nd. They are outlaws.
At this point I'm still petitioning my government for a redress of grievences hoping for a miracle because revolution isn't even much of an option anymore.... a nation fit for self government wouldn't have allowed things to get this out of hand.
> That is, of course, until they invaded Iraq, gaving Bin-Laden
> everything he could have possibly dreamed of and then some.
Except it appears that after a lot of missteps, bungling and otherwise doing the wrong things we turned things around in Iraq. Turned it around to the point AQ has pretty much abandoned the field and shifted thier efforts into a last ditch attempt to salvage Afghanistan and/or destabilize Pakistan.
But yea, for several years there it looked like Iraq might have ended up in the loss column and the consequences had that happened would indeed have been horrific. Iraq was a huge gamble. But the thing about huge gambles is that while losing will hurt bigtime since by definition they involve putting lots of chips on the table, winning them is usually game changing.
I was, to say it nicely, rather dubious on Bush's belief that self government was possible in such a third world pesthole, but I'm now hopeful that he is going to get the last laugh when the history books are written. That change in conventional wisdom won't happen in time to change this election cycle though.
> On the real 9/11 thousands of innocent people lost their lives.
So? Not trying to make light of the losses on 9/11 but the loss of life was not the major damage on that day. We got lucky, the loss of life could indeed have been much worse. But the damage to the morale and economic power of the US was almost incalculable. Had AQ been able to follow up with one or two similar attacks in the following months they just might have brought down the entirety of Western Civilization.
There is the potential to carry out attacks of similar impact via the Internet entirely and/or use the Internet as a major component of a physical attack.
It is the responsibility of some people to think about such things, plan for them and work on reducing the likelihood of such attacks. Those people don't sleep well with the current security state of the Internet.
> Successfully attack all 13 root name servers simultaneously.
Nope. You won't able to actually subvert more than one or two since there is a good diversity in the hardware and software... and none run on Windows. (ok, uncalled for bitchslap but what the heck) A DoS attack could slwo things down for a day or two but I'd expect swift action to clear things up long before it caused a total meltdown. Hell, they would cut whole countries if it took it to stop something like that.
> Middle-east underwater fiber-seeking backhoes...
Nah. There isn't as much redundency as there should be anymore, but I doubt that could cause a full meltdown. Truckbombing a couple of the NAPs might have possibilities.
> Something like the Storm worm starts emailing randomly-named
> child pornography to everybody..
But once it because known it would be impossible to convict anyone, besides which the cops aren't that stupid. And AQ probably doesn't even want to be associated with kiddie porn, they have SOME standards. They might marry em at 9 like their pedophile prophet but they probably wouldn't encourage posting pictures of it. (Think that can get me to -1 Flamebait?)
You are starting to think the unthinkable, now just think bigger. When you get there though, probably not a good idea to post those thoughts.
> Yes, necessary and proper and the commerce clause among others.
No. Don't even try the commerce clause. And forget necessary and proper as that is literally a unlimited license to legislate. Consider that the 9th and 10th Amendments were added after and thus superceed. And they explicitly say any power not spelled out is forbidden to the Federal Government.
> Because the constitution says that the Supreme Court gets to
> interpret the law, not you, not Obama and not some random
> congresscritter from Texas.
No, that was just a bad Star Trek episode you are thinking about. The "e plub neista" isn't just for Chiefs and Sons of Chiefs and it isn't just for Supremes to hand down from on high. The Constituition is a remarkably well written document that should be understandable by anyone with a basic compentecy in English. The Courts are indeed required to rule on corner cases, complex interractions between laws and various levels of government, etc. But any fool can see where the Socialists have been wiping their asses on the Constituition. And frankly it is about time we loudly and clearly called them on it, and if that doesn't work use our 'sporting goods' to add extra emphasis. While we still can.
> Are you one of those idiots who think the income tax isn't valid too?
Although some do make arguments that that Amendment wasn't properly ratified, questions of that nature ARE within the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and we have to abide by their rulings or declare a Revolution. Not quite ready for THAT. :)
> Either every single Supreme Court justice since ever is illiterate
> or they're all evil.
No, four could read "Congress shall make no law..." and understood that McCain Fiengold was clearly infringing. And five managed to parse "shall not be infringed." and rule the DC gun ban out of bounds.
> They just realize the reality of the situation, which is that the
> Bill of Rights is simply wrong in that respect and you need to ignore
> it and get onto more pressing matters.
And now it is clear, we won't be agreeing on much because you serve the forces of darkness. You can't just "ignore" the Bill of Rights and remain a nation of laws. What you pine for is a dictator who will make all of your decisions for you.
And we have the answer to how so many educated Supremes can fail to read the Constituition and not get the right answer. They understand perfectly, but being Socialists they simply don't give a damn what it says.
Note that it IS perfectly acceptable to disagree with the 2nd Amendment, private possession of arms, etc. and still be an American. But you can only do so by first proposing the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Remember that the Founding Fathers were very wise men, but they were not God Kings handing down the law on graven tablets, thus they realized that their laws might need to be adjusted for differing times, and the procedure for Amendments. Done that way it doesn't turn us into a nation of men instead of laws.
Of course you will repeal the 2nd Amendment only after I have fought you to my last breath and last dollar.
> What could possibly count as a cyber 9/11?
You aren't nearly paranoid enough. Those of us who have thought the unthinkable can see dozens of really nasty possibilities. I'm more amazed that we haven't had a major attack yet. Seems that some parts of the government is actually functioning since we haven't been attacked physically or over the net since 9/11. Sad that the only parts that are still working are the parts nobody can talk about.
Remember that 9/11 wasn't about killing people, athough that was certainly a goal. The point of terrorism is to terrify civilian populations with the goal of effecting the policy decisions of the government, or to so disrupt a civilization that it can't continue. 9/11 came a lot closer than a lot of people want to admit to achieving that second goal. The world economy tettered on the brink of a total collapse for several weeks. Only a massive tax cut sufficed to jump start the economy, something that can't be repeated all that many times without itself causing serious problems to economic stability.
So, given the goals of terrorists, what sort of things could they do that would have similar disruptive effects to taking out the most prime block of real estate in the world? What could qualify as a 'cyber 9/11?'
Number one on my list would be to go for the ultimate prize. Destroy the entire Internet economy. Not wanting to dwell on specifics for obvious reasons, but how hard would it be to destroy public confidence in ecommerce? Think dark thoughts along those lines and you will get scared pretty goddamn fast. Microsoft's chronic insecuity could very well end up destroying our very Civilization.
Or leverage an Internet attack into a wholesale attack on the banking system. Steal enough credit cards and launch a massive fraud attack right at the peak of Xmas shopping. Does Mastercard & Visa cease operation for a few weeks (and tank themselves and most retailers) or allow the fraud and hope to pick up the pieces without going broke?
Remember the goal is fear, panic and chaos. Dead people are just one way to create fear, not even the best one since (as they discovered) killing Americans has a nasty tendency to piss us off and cause us to break things.
> they seem to cover the specified amendments...
Oh really. Seems they have made it to gun licensing already, confiscation always comes next. Hate Speech laws are already on their books and arrests are being made so forget free speech there.
And thus the problem. The US is sliding down the slippery slope to a Worker's Paradise but everyone else seems to be ahead of us leaving nowhere to run.
Yes, Obambi. The terrorists will be dancing in the streets when[1] he gets elected. Expect things to get very bad during his single term in office.
[1] I'm under no illusions on the when part. McCain has no more chance of defeating Obama than Dole had vs Clinton in '96. Primogeniture is a bad way of picking nominees, wish the Republicans could figure that out.
> There are only a handful of people in this country who know the
> Constitution better than he does...
The man is an illiterate fool. He can't even parse simple English phrases like "Congress shall make no law..." or "...shall not be infringed."
Seriously. Either he is a total illiterate and is thus excused for being a gun banner and free speech infringer (but also unfit for elective office) or he does know and doesn't care, thus is evil. Not that McCain (of McCain/Fielgold) is much of an improvement on the 1st Amendment. Grr.
Well I wouldn't exactly haev a lot of confidence in anything Richard Clarke says. Besides being dimwitted enough to be supporting Obambi (says a lot about how serious he considers the threat of Islamic terrorism doesn't it....) he didn't exactly cover himself in glory in the portmortems of 9/11.
Yea. Except you can't fire an elected official. Democrats, having no respect for the instituitions in our system of government, are free to abuse their positions for the greater glory of the Party. It puts our team at a decided disadvantage.
> As far as the 5.25's go, there's a chance that you could get one to
> work with one of the powered 5.25 usb cases that they make to let
> people build their own external drives.
Nope, zero chance. Those have either an EIDE to USB bridge or a SATA to USB bridge. If you took one and gutted out the bridge and just kept the power supply, then gutted the floppy to USB controller from a USB floppy you should be able to get there, but that is advanced electronic hobbiest stuff outside the abilities one would expect a typical IT guy in a small business to possess. And since it sounded like the machine is mission critical line of business stuff I would hesitate to do it if I were their IT guy.
> You do realize it is a violation of labor laws to withhold someone's
> pay check or refuse to pay them as the result of a third party
> failure, correct?
You mean it is against the law to stop payment on a check you discover is made out for more than the correct amount? Sounds stupid enough to be a law in CA, but it doesn't apply to the government. Soverign Immunity. See yesterday's /. story about the USAF vs the DMCA for a refresher.
> Would a USB floppy drive work?
Don't be so sure. IF it is something truly ancient being kept working it could be far, far worse. It could be DOS, where USB floppies aren't so reliable. Or worse still, it could be using a 5 1/4" floppy and I haven't seen one of those on a USB cord. Hell, you would need an external power supply to run the big honking motors on a 5 1/4 since USB doesn't supply the +12 those things run on.
> If that politician can't think of a creative solution to a problem..
They could do it, but they don't want to so they announce it can't be done. Were the controller not an elected position it would be a firing offense to refuse a direct order and to politicize a normally functional ( vs overtly political, like the Legislature or Executive... or these days the Judiciary) unit of the government.
Problem is, for a Democrat aparatchik these sort of highjinks ARE a 'creative solution.' to the problem.