What you fail to understand is that once it reaches the journalists, wikileaks and others in foreign countries it is no longer a secret.
The mechanisms to guard the secrets have failed.
And when somebody is murdered, they are no longer a living person. That doesn't mean we don't prosecute the killer because there is no living victim.
I fail to see why if secrets are worth protecting in the first place, that once they are ex-secrets we should not punish those who caused them to become ex-secrets.
WRT journalists, I think you have a point that a journalist may have a duty to publish. However, the idea that Wikileaks are 'super-national' and thus not subject to other nation's laws is silly. I expect them to be treated according to the same rules and laws as everybody else.
"Thus the US being the one in charge and the rule-maker does give it the upper hand, for better or worse. "
Really?
You guys are in charge of everyone are you now?
I was referring, of course, to US soil. If both people have equally tenuous arguments, the one that makes the rules wins.
I'm just saying that Wikileaks declaring themselves 'ultra-national' and thus not subject to laws of state secrets is no more or less legitimate than a nation declaring 'this is a state secret'. Thus the US being the one in charge and the rule-maker does give it the upper hand, for better or worse.
Again, the problem is that either way the argument seems to become a straw-man (either it's always abuse, or always legitimate). There are legitimate secrets worth protecting with force of law, and there are embarassing non-secrets which those same laws can be abused to hide. Neither invalidates the other.
I think GP is talking about what you see in the advertisements, including people sitting down (which apparently is still causing calibration issues in-the-field). You are correct that the hands-on demos are real, but many of the demos recorded to video are, in fact, fake. It's the same with the Wii commercials, where the actors obviously aren't actually playing the game.
Though there are people who can't grasp the simplest of "hardcore" gaming concepts, like how to move and look around in a first-person game. I mean, that's gotten about as simple as it can get, and yet still some people just can't learn it. Honestly, if someone can't get that after a little bit of effort, I think they might have a learning disability.
Or they simply aren't able to perform the mental gymnastics to work from a first-person view that comes easy for us. Not a learning disability, just less aptitude in spatial visualization. As a gamer, you're probably easily able to imagine yourself in the body of the character, but it's by no means a given. One could say the same thing about many other 'simple' skills with wide variations in talent, such as rhythm, facial and name recognition, or language skills.
Non-gamers have no more a learning disability for not being able to control an FPS than you do for whatever geeky quality you have that sets you apart for not being as naturally talented as others.
I can perhaps agree on Assange. He was under no agreement initially not to disseminate this information, thus requests to not publish are best. However, if he now knows that publishing the information would be illegal, then I would expect him to be prosecuted if he visited America.
Manning, on the other hand, has no reason to be surprised. He was not given this information (he seeked out info that he was not privy to), and did not let it slip (he intentionally released it). More importantly, he violated the contract he signed stating he would do neither action.
I would also disagree with calling distributing classified information 'political speech'. That would be like claiming your right to liberty is being violated when the police enter the house you are robbing without receiving your permission to enter. Again, you could make a convincing argument for Assange (since as you say, the secret is already out by then), but this in no way protects Manning.
With a government, or at least, any organization that I am willing to consider as such in a legitimate fashion, the people are the share holders, we are the board. There is no legitimate reason to hide information from even the lowest of us. We OWN IT. It is OUR SECRET.
And the problem is that some people are really shitty at keeping a secret. If we have the right to know all these secrets, then they won't be secret anymore, and not just within our country. Instead it's a privelege to those who need access to these secrets and have shown they can be trusted to keep them.
That said, the system does need more protection against abuses. Any idea how? If not, I qualify this as an unfortunate, yet necessary evil.
Assange's answer to this is that they (WikiLeaks) are super-national, so the concept of national security or state secret is irrelevant for them.
But it doesn't matter that Wikileaks thinks it is ok, they aren't the ones who decide whether or not to prosecute people. It only matters that the US government told him not to do it, he agreed not to, then did it anyway knowing he was in violation of the law.
That said, the fact that he gave the information to foreign nationals makes it even more severe from the US's POV.
How can you guarantee anything while everything is still classified?
The law of averages. He grabbed communications in bulk, so he didn't verify all of them were of 'wrong-doing'. Perhaps I should say 'practically guarantee'.
That said, something can be embarassing yet still worthy of remaining classified. Unless they are all evidence of criminal wrong-doing (according to a guy who himself breaks the law and gets in fist-fights), I would still say he should be prosecuted for that crime.
I agree that it's a burden of trust, but do you have an alternative system that protects legitimate state secrets without potential for abuse?
And if you don't, then you have no counterintelligence capabilities. You are correct that stuff falls through the cracks (because nobody wants to spend the time to declassify information that didn't need to be classified) and I'm sure there are abuses, but the legitimate uses make that a necessary evil.
So the issue with this whistle-blower is he dumped a lot of information, and a lot of it was likely classified for good reason, or arguably wasn't worth releasing (the 'Collateral Murder' video mirrored the official Army investigation findings). Even if he did break the law for what he felt was a good reason, I'm also willing to bet that somewhere in those 'cables' is legitimate classified information with no illegal, immoral, or embarassing content. Thus he still certainly commited a felony and deserves no protection for those acts.
I fail to see how much of the information leaked should be public domain. I can see a case for releasing a declassified video of civilian deaths, but not the rest. Classified state department communications en masse? I guarantee that not all of them are criminal, or even embarassing. Some of them likely have legitimate state secrets that will cause harm if released.
Websites sometimes send unobscured passwords to your email. While it's unlikely that you would be looking there on your phone, it's still a potential hole.
Convicted violent felons violating the terms of their parole don't represent a sufficiently big enough problem to investigate? Hell, there wouldn't even be a long drawn out investigation. *keystrokes*, "Hmm, looks like he is at Sams Club, send a radio car to that location...."
This is California. You think they have gas money for their patrol cars to get them to the parole violator's location? Let alone the money for additional cops who aren't making money for the state (such as speeding tickets or issuing other fines)?
But if they led people to believe that something was going to happen, and there were negative consequences because of it, they should be hung out to dry like the rest of us. Not for being wrong, but for basing a strong conclusion on incredibly flimsy ground.
It's actually backwards. They said there wasn't evidence that a strong earthquake was imminent, and thus no justification for evacuation. The prosecutor apparently expected them to make a strong conclusion (and the correct one) even though they had little evidence.
Your case would be if they claimed "OMG, there will be an earthquake tomorrow, we need to evacuate" and then there wasn't. Even then, this would only be an issue if they gave grossly inaccurate probabilities (they said 90% probably when most scientists would give 10%, for example).
Apple is not a museum or a library, and free speech is not at issue.
Agreed. It's reasonable to disagree with the policy when it does things wrong or stupid. It's unreasonable to bring topics like 'free speech' and 'programmers rights' into it, because they either don't apply, or don't exist.
Ultrasound works well any time the entire item to be checked conducts sound uniformly. Gas diffuses the sound wave too much (particularly at such high frequencies), and I assume the fact that bone is essentially a calcium foam also causes odd echos.
My experience with ultrasound comes from using it to determine the depth of an oil resevior on pressure sensors at an old job. We're talking thousandths of an inch of oil under a metal foil another couple thousandths thick. Basically, we submerged the sensor in water to allow the ultrasound waves to be nice and smooth, giving us good echos. When using ultrasound to determine paint thickness or find cracks, they need a gel or other liquid to transmit the sound well enough to the metal.
Well to be fair, a large organized terrorist attack that is distributed enough to require this number of spares wouldn't be mitigated much by having spares (terrorists can/would destroy spares). Alternatively, if the companies end up making so many spares to protect against terrorist attack, then they don't even need to attack to cause economic damage (and 'the terrorists win').
Nope (I'm an EE), I really do mean dishwasher-sized ohmic resistor.
The power transmission is three-phase power. So, at the common terminal of the transformer on each end of a long transmission line there should be zero net current. Under all normal circumstances there is.
In the event of a solar storm, there is a DC current flowing through the wire, which usually isn't present. This resistor would go between the common terminal and earth ground, and both reduce the current present in the line and dissipate the power. See this picture.
But 'some' extra won't do you any significant good. We're not talking a solar storm knocking 1% of transformers out, and having spares for the ones at critical nodes. We're talking about 50+% of the transformers all across the country being destroyed simultaneously. To be effective, we would need to require they keep hundreds (or many more) transformers in reserve, which is not practical or effective.
Really, the only effective solution is 100% coverage with protection resistors.
The article mentions this as the best bet. Of course, it requires advance warning, fast reaction, and the will to shut down the electric grid before a problem occurs (risking there not actually being an issue and pissing everyone off).
Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims. And all of us that rely on having a power grid, of course.
As long as you keep a spare car battery to recharge any bionics that require that, and provided that the outage doesn't last too long, I'd expect something like a pacemaker to be just fine.
The issue you refer is to ground loop currents in the electric grid. The storm creates a difference in the ground voltage between different transformers. This creates a massive current that blows out the transformer.
The real issue is that the devices to prevent this (basically huge resistors) are expensive, rare, and take a long time to manufacture. And when we suddenly have half of the transformers in the US explode at once, the outage will not be brief. There is not a large stock of transformers sitting in warehouses as replacements. Transformers take even longer to produce than those resistors, and we would be waiting months before we could repair most of the grid. That's a huge issue.
Slashdot Mirror
What you fail to understand is that once it reaches the journalists, wikileaks and others in foreign countries it is no longer a secret. The mechanisms to guard the secrets have failed.
And when somebody is murdered, they are no longer a living person. That doesn't mean we don't prosecute the killer because there is no living victim.
I fail to see why if secrets are worth protecting in the first place, that once they are ex-secrets we should not punish those who caused them to become ex-secrets.
WRT journalists, I think you have a point that a journalist may have a duty to publish. However, the idea that Wikileaks are 'super-national' and thus not subject to other nation's laws is silly. I expect them to be treated according to the same rules and laws as everybody else.
"Thus the US being the one in charge and the rule-maker does give it the upper hand, for better or worse. " Really? You guys are in charge of everyone are you now?
I was referring, of course, to US soil. If both people have equally tenuous arguments, the one that makes the rules wins.
I'm just saying that Wikileaks declaring themselves 'ultra-national' and thus not subject to laws of state secrets is no more or less legitimate than a nation declaring 'this is a state secret'. Thus the US being the one in charge and the rule-maker does give it the upper hand, for better or worse.
Again, the problem is that either way the argument seems to become a straw-man (either it's always abuse, or always legitimate). There are legitimate secrets worth protecting with force of law, and there are embarassing non-secrets which those same laws can be abused to hide. Neither invalidates the other.
I think GP is talking about what you see in the advertisements, including people sitting down (which apparently is still causing calibration issues in-the-field). You are correct that the hands-on demos are real, but many of the demos recorded to video are, in fact, fake. It's the same with the Wii commercials, where the actors obviously aren't actually playing the game.
When the Wii came out I was unimpressed (and still am)
Thus proving GP's assertion that the standard /.er is not good at predicting which technology will be commercially successful.
We're good at seeing what is most advanced technically, not what will sell best or be most used. The two are not the same (again, as the Wii showed).
Though there are people who can't grasp the simplest of "hardcore" gaming concepts, like how to move and look around in a first-person game. I mean, that's gotten about as simple as it can get, and yet still some people just can't learn it. Honestly, if someone can't get that after a little bit of effort, I think they might have a learning disability.
Or they simply aren't able to perform the mental gymnastics to work from a first-person view that comes easy for us. Not a learning disability, just less aptitude in spatial visualization. As a gamer, you're probably easily able to imagine yourself in the body of the character, but it's by no means a given. One could say the same thing about many other 'simple' skills with wide variations in talent, such as rhythm, facial and name recognition, or language skills.
Non-gamers have no more a learning disability for not being able to control an FPS than you do for whatever geeky quality you have that sets you apart for not being as naturally talented as others.
I can perhaps agree on Assange. He was under no agreement initially not to disseminate this information, thus requests to not publish are best. However, if he now knows that publishing the information would be illegal, then I would expect him to be prosecuted if he visited America.
Manning, on the other hand, has no reason to be surprised. He was not given this information (he seeked out info that he was not privy to), and did not let it slip (he intentionally released it). More importantly, he violated the contract he signed stating he would do neither action.
I would also disagree with calling distributing classified information 'political speech'. That would be like claiming your right to liberty is being violated when the police enter the house you are robbing without receiving your permission to enter. Again, you could make a convincing argument for Assange (since as you say, the secret is already out by then), but this in no way protects Manning.
With a government, or at least, any organization that I am willing to consider as such in a legitimate fashion, the people are the share holders, we are the board. There is no legitimate reason to hide information from even the lowest of us. We OWN IT. It is OUR SECRET.
And the problem is that some people are really shitty at keeping a secret. If we have the right to know all these secrets, then they won't be secret anymore, and not just within our country. Instead it's a privelege to those who need access to these secrets and have shown they can be trusted to keep them.
That said, the system does need more protection against abuses. Any idea how? If not, I qualify this as an unfortunate, yet necessary evil.
Assange's answer to this is that they (WikiLeaks) are super-national, so the concept of national security or state secret is irrelevant for them.
But it doesn't matter that Wikileaks thinks it is ok, they aren't the ones who decide whether or not to prosecute people. It only matters that the US government told him not to do it, he agreed not to, then did it anyway knowing he was in violation of the law.
That said, the fact that he gave the information to foreign nationals makes it even more severe from the US's POV.
How can you guarantee anything while everything is still classified?
The law of averages. He grabbed communications in bulk, so he didn't verify all of them were of 'wrong-doing'. Perhaps I should say 'practically guarantee'.
That said, something can be embarassing yet still worthy of remaining classified. Unless they are all evidence of criminal wrong-doing (according to a guy who himself breaks the law and gets in fist-fights), I would still say he should be prosecuted for that crime.
I agree that it's a burden of trust, but do you have an alternative system that protects legitimate state secrets without potential for abuse?
And if you don't, then you have no counterintelligence capabilities. You are correct that stuff falls through the cracks (because nobody wants to spend the time to declassify information that didn't need to be classified) and I'm sure there are abuses, but the legitimate uses make that a necessary evil.
So the issue with this whistle-blower is he dumped a lot of information, and a lot of it was likely classified for good reason, or arguably wasn't worth releasing (the 'Collateral Murder' video mirrored the official Army investigation findings). Even if he did break the law for what he felt was a good reason, I'm also willing to bet that somewhere in those 'cables' is legitimate classified information with no illegal, immoral, or embarassing content. Thus he still certainly commited a felony and deserves no protection for those acts.
I fail to see how much of the information leaked should be public domain. I can see a case for releasing a declassified video of civilian deaths, but not the rest. Classified state department communications en masse? I guarantee that not all of them are criminal, or even embarassing. Some of them likely have legitimate state secrets that will cause harm if released.
Websites sometimes send unobscured passwords to your email. While it's unlikely that you would be looking there on your phone, it's still a potential hole.
Don't think this is a big deal.
Until you lose your phone and someone is able to see your e-mails with passwords contained.
It probably is a debug feature, but it's one that DEFINITELY should have been disabled before release.
MMS will also fit the actual nude photos...
Convicted violent felons violating the terms of their parole don't represent a sufficiently big enough problem to investigate? Hell, there wouldn't even be a long drawn out investigation. *keystrokes*, "Hmm, looks like he is at Sams Club, send a radio car to that location...."
This is California. You think they have gas money for their patrol cars to get them to the parole violator's location? Let alone the money for additional cops who aren't making money for the state (such as speeding tickets or issuing other fines)?
But if they led people to believe that something was going to happen, and there were negative consequences because of it, they should be hung out to dry like the rest of us. Not for being wrong, but for basing a strong conclusion on incredibly flimsy ground.
It's actually backwards. They said there wasn't evidence that a strong earthquake was imminent, and thus no justification for evacuation. The prosecutor apparently expected them to make a strong conclusion (and the correct one) even though they had little evidence.
Your case would be if they claimed "OMG, there will be an earthquake tomorrow, we need to evacuate" and then there wasn't. Even then, this would only be an issue if they gave grossly inaccurate probabilities (they said 90% probably when most scientists would give 10%, for example).
Content creators can't trust Apple. Of course, Apple is alright with this, since they still haul in boat-loads of money.
Apple is not a museum or a library, and free speech is not at issue.
Agreed. It's reasonable to disagree with the policy when it does things wrong or stupid. It's unreasonable to bring topics like 'free speech' and 'programmers rights' into it, because they either don't apply, or don't exist.
Ultrasound works well any time the entire item to be checked conducts sound uniformly. Gas diffuses the sound wave too much (particularly at such high frequencies), and I assume the fact that bone is essentially a calcium foam also causes odd echos.
My experience with ultrasound comes from using it to determine the depth of an oil resevior on pressure sensors at an old job. We're talking thousandths of an inch of oil under a metal foil another couple thousandths thick. Basically, we submerged the sensor in water to allow the ultrasound waves to be nice and smooth, giving us good echos. When using ultrasound to determine paint thickness or find cracks, they need a gel or other liquid to transmit the sound well enough to the metal.
Well to be fair, a large organized terrorist attack that is distributed enough to require this number of spares wouldn't be mitigated much by having spares (terrorists can/would destroy spares). Alternatively, if the companies end up making so many spares to protect against terrorist attack, then they don't even need to attack to cause economic damage (and 'the terrorists win').
Nope (I'm an EE), I really do mean dishwasher-sized ohmic resistor.
The power transmission is three-phase power. So, at the common terminal of the transformer on each end of a long transmission line there should be zero net current. Under all normal circumstances there is.
In the event of a solar storm, there is a DC current flowing through the wire, which usually isn't present. This resistor would go between the common terminal and earth ground, and both reduce the current present in the line and dissipate the power. See this picture.
I appologize, I misremembered the values, and finally found the article again.
There are 5,000 transformers that need the resistors, and they would cost about $40k each. In the grand scheme of things, pretty cheap.
But 'some' extra won't do you any significant good. We're not talking a solar storm knocking 1% of transformers out, and having spares for the ones at critical nodes. We're talking about 50+% of the transformers all across the country being destroyed simultaneously. To be effective, we would need to require they keep hundreds (or many more) transformers in reserve, which is not practical or effective.
Really, the only effective solution is 100% coverage with protection resistors.
The article mentions this as the best bet. Of course, it requires advance warning, fast reaction, and the will to shut down the electric grid before a problem occurs (risking there not actually being an issue and pissing everyone off).
Big transformers in the power grids will be the main victims. And all of us that rely on having a power grid, of course. As long as you keep a spare car battery to recharge any bionics that require that, and provided that the outage doesn't last too long, I'd expect something like a pacemaker to be just fine.
The issue you refer is to ground loop currents in the electric grid. The storm creates a difference in the ground voltage between different transformers. This creates a massive current that blows out the transformer.
The real issue is that the devices to prevent this (basically huge resistors) are expensive, rare, and take a long time to manufacture. And when we suddenly have half of the transformers in the US explode at once, the outage will not be brief. There is not a large stock of transformers sitting in warehouses as replacements. Transformers take even longer to produce than those resistors, and we would be waiting months before we could repair most of the grid. That's a huge issue.