Instead of charging customers for opening the port, they could have a provision where you request in writing that the port be opened for your IP address. Upon finding that you have been spamming (intentionally or not), they disconnect you (for a minimum time, say, 24 hours) until you pay a reconnect fee. A second time results in a longer disconnect (a week, perhaps) and a higher fee. A third offense bars you from their network for a year.
Depends on who complains about construction happening without a permit. Usually, changes over a certain dollar amount have to be inspected, so unless you're buying off the building inspector, someone will know.
Re:Which scenario makes more sense?
on
Tinfoil Hat House
·
· Score: 1
Even if we did, you couldn't afford to live here.:-\
I think the 48-hour DVDs failed more because people didn't like the idea of throwing away that much. Most people that I talked to said this almost immediately: "Think of how much additional trash there would be." The next thought was usually wondering about what happens if the seal breaks before you intend to open it, and then eventually they might get around to wondering about something related to security. A clever few figured it would be a cheap way to get the copies -- buy one of these legit, and then rip it/copy it.
Conventional wars of attrition aren't planned for by modern military planners (those running guerilla wars see things differently). While you're expending bombs taking out homes, your enemy is likely expending his bombs taking out your munitions factories. The advent of smart bombs and missiles has completely changed the way that war works, and the coming Small Diameter Bomb will allow even more changes. No more needing to use a 500-pound bomb to take out that annoying target sitting next to a hospital -- the SDB is much smaller at only 250 pounds, and can, like most bombs, be equipped for delayed detonation to improve internal damage and at the same time contain the blast further.
This also means an increase in capacity -- standard loadouts that now carry perhaps six bombs will be able to carry a dozen, and extreme loadouts like what the F-15E can carry will improve even further. The B-1 will be able to carry 96 of these, and if the B-52 will be able to carry them... Well, that number will just be really scary.:) And since the SDB is going to be guided, that's a lot of targets to hit in one strike. The guidance system now is very similar to that of the JDAM, and the next revision of the system will include active seeking and target recognition, enabling striking of moving targets, and perhaps even open release to let them find their own targets on a busy battlefield.
Homes were considered fair game, especially when the planners were pissed off. Consider the infamous firebombing of Dresden which, in retrospect, probably should have gotten some Allied commanders fired, court-martialed, or brought up on war crimes. It was the deliberate targeting of civilians for no reason that could be militarily justified.
Homes were considered logistical targets, as you suggest, but Dresden was a pure vengeance raid.
Hmm. Owning roughly 90% of USA's debt and having the nukes to kneecap the debtor...
Your debt statement sounds as lame as the "they're buying everything!" anti-Japanese paranoia of the 80s. As much as you may have been going for the sarcastic exaggeration angle, you missed entirely because you overshot too much. Mainland China holds, as of March, $223.5B in Treasury notes, out of a bit over $1977B -- just about 11% of the foreign-held debt, and a mere 3% or so of the overall debt. They can create a nuisance with that, and that might be enough to destabilize Japan and other fragile Asian economies, upsetting China's economy.
China has only about two dozen warheads, and not all can reach the US. At any given time, I'm certain that an Ohio-class submarine is sitting off the coast of China with about 288 warheads, all of which can reach them. Flight time from China would be about 30-45 minutes; flight time from the boomer would be 20 minutes or less. Any Chinese government that launches on the US wouldn't even survive to hear about the initial strikes.
And two dozen warheads, even large ones, would not cripple the US. On launch detection, aircraft and ships would be moved from their locations with as much speed as could be mustered. Even if all of them struck, that leaves a mostly intact US military poised to do something China can't do and still win: cross the Pacific. I guarantee that any first strike on US soil by the Chinese would result in sign-ups to the military unseen since World War II.
On the topic of economic "destruction", the unilateral closing of all trade from China to the US would result in the sudden loss of a fifth of their exports, as opposed to about an eighth of US imports. While this would be tremendously problematic for the US, too, considering that China's economy is propped up artificially as it is, I dare say that China would have far more trouble than would the US.
But this is the very reason that we engage other nations in trade: the more trade involved between any two nations, the less likely they are to go to war. Because US and Chinese trade interests are so intertwined, there is little chance that they will go to war.
Actually, they did attempt to plan around certain things like hospitals, churches, and museums when planning raids. Nations at that time were, in some ways, more civilized, in that they usually didn't plant a hospital in the middle of a munitions factory.
Both the US and Russia (by way of the Soviet Union) have ASAT technology already, though I believe that treaties were signed to avoid use of these after the US had one successful test of its missile. That makes me wonder just how useful these satellites would be. They wouldn't be hard to find, or at least to extrapolate from launch monitoring (until they slowly move into alternate orbits by means of on-board thrusters).
Yup...nuke 'em from orbit...that sure sounds like us.
They mean keeping their options open, and being at the forefront of technology.
'Rods of God'? Just when I think that the neoconservatives can't get any more arrogant, they serve up this gem. Way to go, guys.
I dunno. I'd call them Pennies from Heaven, but I'm not religious. Just because some guys in the Pentagon's R&D back office come up with a name like that doesn't mean that the Religious Police are forming up ranks.
Sounds like those Air Force boys have been watching too much Real Genius.
It's to enable them to legally deploy them. From TFA:
With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them.
I'm wondering if perhaps this isn't also the military wanting to show off a little and provide the public a glimpse of yesterday's technology, similar to what happened with the F-117 circa 1990. Maybe they want to show us what the Aurora really looks like.
Perhaps there's a timing and/or strength circuit, too, so that anything that takes a longer path and/or introduces extra resistance (I think that's the effect -- electrician I am not) will set it off, too.
They should be tracked for such time as they are on parole or probation. Release from jail is not always a completion of sentence.
Now, the extent of that tracking may be something to be debated. Right now, most of them just have to check in with their parole/probation officer on a particular schedule, and usually must let law enforcement conduct unannounced searches for contraband. Whether they should be tracked with more detail, such as with a GPS band or other similar instrument is worth discussing.
It will be interesting to see if the number of inmates begins to decline in the coming years as three-strikers begin to get released at the end of their sentences, or die in prison. Not sure if there will be quite as many of them going in, barring something like a new crack epidemic.
If it works to improve safety and reduce escapes, then it results in lower costs through greater public safety, lower prison hospital bills, and fewer lawsuits against the state over effects of prison violence.
Tracking the guards allows a display of where they all are, so as to identify gaps in the patrol structure. Knowing where they should be is helpful; knowing where they are exactly is even better. In addition, this may allow rapid action if several personnel are seeing congregating rapidly on one location (perhaps stopping a fight) just in case transmission is difficult or impossible due to circumstances.
While I certainly wouldn't call China undeveloped, it's most certainly not a superpower. A large economy doesn't make one a superpower alone, nor does possession of some nuclear warheads, or else India, Pakistan, and Israel would be considered superpowers. To be considered a superpower, a nation must have the ability to project its influence significantly beyond its borders, and I would argue that there is still only one nation that can do this through economic, political, diplomatic, and (if necessary) military means, and that is the United States.
This doesn't mean that other nations with significant economies cannot make themselves a real nuisance -- or worse -- on the world stage. However, those nations have more difficulty projecting themselves in other ways. For instance, China has a great deal of economic power, and has some diplomatic power in the form of its UN Security Council veto power, but has substantially less political power because there are few nations that really want to emulate China specifically, and even less military power because it has almost zero capacity to project military power much beyond its immediate neighborhood.
Other nations have different balances. India has some political power through its position as the world's largest democracy, although this is tempered somewhat by the touchy relations with its Muslim community and continued strains with Pakistan over Kashmir. It is a growing economic power, though less than China. India's military power is also rapidly growing, and its coming addition of the MiG-29 capable carrier Admiral Gorshkov, recently purchased from Russa, will provide it with a heavy naval strike capacity that its current Sea Harrier carriers lack, and put it into a class in which only the US, UK, and France currently exist. Yet it has far less diplomatic power than many of its neighbors due to a lack of a Security Council veto and due to strained relations with its neighbors.
Other nations have small militaries and economies, but wield disproportionate diplomatic and political power to their size because they are perceived as being above many of the squabbles and frays in which other nations involve themselves. But even nations like the UK aren't superpowers despite their influence over nations around the world, their powerful militaries, and strong diplomatic and political presence, because their ability to weild all of these at the same time are limited.
It's a hard thing to become a superpower-class nation long enough to get that designation, and even harder to maintain that status -- ask the Soviet Union about that.
This is one of the reasons that I think we may need some new procedures in place, including a complete scrapping of every voter registration prior to the 2008 elections. Pick a point after which everyone must re-register -- sometime in 2007 would probably work well, since most states are on the even-numbered years for major elections. At that point, dump the old registrations and require new ones. This would give people probably 12-18 months to fill out a registration card, easily obtained for free by just about anyone, and probably shrink the listed pool to more realistic numbers. Rinse and repeat every... oh, maybe 20 years.
I'm sure it would also bring out more people trying to slip in some extras, but I'm sure something could be put in place to help catch this kind of fraud.
Partially. Sleazy characters can feed you information that on its own looks bad, but put in a particular context may not be quite so bad. Word that someone was "seen" with a woman other than his wife, with the recipient left to fill in via imagination, can completely ruin that person's reputation, when they're simply at the location by coincidence because they're both attending the same function.
Context is important, and has to be taken into account by any journalist.
Half of the article made sense, and the other half attempted to be be really cynical and sarcastic, but I think missed the mark. The "deep Astroturfing" comments came across to me as mocking the two sides' accusations of working for the two primary litigants.
There's something of a point, though, that zealots don't do good for either side. Microsoft zealots are just as bad as Linux zealots are just as bad as any other zealots. If you refuse to listen to anything about the other side, then you will be completely unable to support your own side properly.
He's actually right, to some extent. Go back further, and you'll find people like Walter Winchell, who, while bringing some really interesting stuff to light, also went out of their way to work with some really sleazy characters to get dirt on people that they didn't like, offended them, or otherwise were deemed worthy of public ridicule for their beliefs, actions, words, or other aspect, whether taken in context or not.
It never really went away. It was just relegated to the fringes of journalism.
Even CWShredder doesn't always work. It's a constant war between those two, and sometimes it's not possible to wait for the next version of Shredder to come out.
Have you tried spyware removal tools? Or even a anti-virus program? Alternatively, just vape all the browser helper objects (search the registry, you'll find them) which sounds like what your problem was all along.
You've not had to deal with CoolWebSearch, I think. Whoever does the programming on that little piece of hell knows how to make life difficult. It's so deeply embedded that there are a few programmers that spend much of their free time researching only how to remove CWS.
I know people -- experienced people -- who prefer to just reformat and reinstall. It's easier and faster than trying to argue with CWS.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of charging customers for opening the port, they could have a provision where you request in writing that the port be opened for your IP address. Upon finding that you have been spamming (intentionally or not), they disconnect you (for a minimum time, say, 24 hours) until you pay a reconnect fee. A second time results in a longer disconnect (a week, perhaps) and a higher fee. A third offense bars you from their network for a year.
Depends on who complains about construction happening without a permit. Usually, changes over a certain dollar amount have to be inspected, so unless you're buying off the building inspector, someone will know.
Even if we did, you couldn't afford to live here. :-\
Exterior use of lead foil may not be legal due to the chances of the lead seeping into the environment.
Only with your remaining eye, though.
I think the 48-hour DVDs failed more because people didn't like the idea of throwing away that much. Most people that I talked to said this almost immediately: "Think of how much additional trash there would be." The next thought was usually wondering about what happens if the seal breaks before you intend to open it, and then eventually they might get around to wondering about something related to security. A clever few figured it would be a cheap way to get the copies -- buy one of these legit, and then rip it/copy it.
Conventional wars of attrition aren't planned for by modern military planners (those running guerilla wars see things differently). While you're expending bombs taking out homes, your enemy is likely expending his bombs taking out your munitions factories. The advent of smart bombs and missiles has completely changed the way that war works, and the coming Small Diameter Bomb will allow even more changes. No more needing to use a 500-pound bomb to take out that annoying target sitting next to a hospital -- the SDB is much smaller at only 250 pounds, and can, like most bombs, be equipped for delayed detonation to improve internal damage and at the same time contain the blast further.
:) And since the SDB is going to be guided, that's a lot of targets to hit in one strike. The guidance system now is very similar to that of the JDAM, and the next revision of the system will include active seeking and target recognition, enabling striking of moving targets, and perhaps even open release to let them find their own targets on a busy battlefield.
This also means an increase in capacity -- standard loadouts that now carry perhaps six bombs will be able to carry a dozen, and extreme loadouts like what the F-15E can carry will improve even further. The B-1 will be able to carry 96 of these, and if the B-52 will be able to carry them... Well, that number will just be really scary.
Homes were considered fair game, especially when the planners were pissed off. Consider the infamous firebombing of Dresden which, in retrospect, probably should have gotten some Allied commanders fired, court-martialed, or brought up on war crimes. It was the deliberate targeting of civilians for no reason that could be militarily justified.
Homes were considered logistical targets, as you suggest, but Dresden was a pure vengeance raid.
Hmm. Owning roughly 90% of USA's debt and having the nukes to kneecap the debtor...
Your debt statement sounds as lame as the "they're buying everything!" anti-Japanese paranoia of the 80s. As much as you may have been going for the sarcastic exaggeration angle, you missed entirely because you overshot too much. Mainland China holds, as of March, $223.5B in Treasury notes, out of a bit over $1977B -- just about 11% of the foreign-held debt, and a mere 3% or so of the overall debt. They can create a nuisance with that, and that might be enough to destabilize Japan and other fragile Asian economies, upsetting China's economy.
China has only about two dozen warheads, and not all can reach the US. At any given time, I'm certain that an Ohio-class submarine is sitting off the coast of China with about 288 warheads, all of which can reach them. Flight time from China would be about 30-45 minutes; flight time from the boomer would be 20 minutes or less. Any Chinese government that launches on the US wouldn't even survive to hear about the initial strikes.
And two dozen warheads, even large ones, would not cripple the US. On launch detection, aircraft and ships would be moved from their locations with as much speed as could be mustered. Even if all of them struck, that leaves a mostly intact US military poised to do something China can't do and still win: cross the Pacific. I guarantee that any first strike on US soil by the Chinese would result in sign-ups to the military unseen since World War II.
On the topic of economic "destruction", the unilateral closing of all trade from China to the US would result in the sudden loss of a fifth of their exports, as opposed to about an eighth of US imports. While this would be tremendously problematic for the US, too, considering that China's economy is propped up artificially as it is, I dare say that China would have far more trouble than would the US.
But this is the very reason that we engage other nations in trade: the more trade involved between any two nations, the less likely they are to go to war. Because US and Chinese trade interests are so intertwined, there is little chance that they will go to war.
Actually, they did attempt to plan around certain things like hospitals, churches, and museums when planning raids. Nations at that time were, in some ways, more civilized, in that they usually didn't plant a hospital in the middle of a munitions factory.
Both the US and Russia (by way of the Soviet Union) have ASAT technology already, though I believe that treaties were signed to avoid use of these after the US had one successful test of its missile. That makes me wonder just how useful these satellites would be. They wouldn't be hard to find, or at least to extrapolate from launch monitoring (until they slowly move into alternate orbits by means of on-board thrusters).
:)
Yup...nuke 'em from orbit...that sure sounds like us.
They mean keeping their options open, and being at the forefront of technology.
'Rods of God'? Just when I think that the neoconservatives can't get any more arrogant, they serve up this gem. Way to go, guys.
I dunno. I'd call them Pennies from Heaven, but I'm not religious. Just because some guys in the Pentagon's R&D back office come up with a name like that doesn't mean that the Religious Police are forming up ranks.
Sounds like those Air Force boys have been watching too much Real Genius.
I was thinking Spies Like Us.
It's to enable them to legally deploy them. From TFA:
With little public debate, the Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars developing space weapons and preparing plans to deploy them.
I'm wondering if perhaps this isn't also the military wanting to show off a little and provide the public a glimpse of yesterday's technology, similar to what happened with the F-117 circa 1990. Maybe they want to show us what the Aurora really looks like.
Perhaps there's a timing and/or strength circuit, too, so that anything that takes a longer path and/or introduces extra resistance (I think that's the effect -- electrician I am not) will set it off, too.
They should be tracked for such time as they are on parole or probation. Release from jail is not always a completion of sentence.
Now, the extent of that tracking may be something to be debated. Right now, most of them just have to check in with their parole/probation officer on a particular schedule, and usually must let law enforcement conduct unannounced searches for contraband. Whether they should be tracked with more detail, such as with a GPS band or other similar instrument is worth discussing.
It will be interesting to see if the number of inmates begins to decline in the coming years as three-strikers begin to get released at the end of their sentences, or die in prison. Not sure if there will be quite as many of them going in, barring something like a new crack epidemic.
If it works to improve safety and reduce escapes, then it results in lower costs through greater public safety, lower prison hospital bills, and fewer lawsuits against the state over effects of prison violence.
Tracking the guards allows a display of where they all are, so as to identify gaps in the patrol structure. Knowing where they should be is helpful; knowing where they are exactly is even better. In addition, this may allow rapid action if several personnel are seeing congregating rapidly on one location (perhaps stopping a fight) just in case transmission is difficult or impossible due to circumstances.
While I certainly wouldn't call China undeveloped, it's most certainly not a superpower. A large economy doesn't make one a superpower alone, nor does possession of some nuclear warheads, or else India, Pakistan, and Israel would be considered superpowers. To be considered a superpower, a nation must have the ability to project its influence significantly beyond its borders, and I would argue that there is still only one nation that can do this through economic, political, diplomatic, and (if necessary) military means, and that is the United States.
This doesn't mean that other nations with significant economies cannot make themselves a real nuisance -- or worse -- on the world stage. However, those nations have more difficulty projecting themselves in other ways. For instance, China has a great deal of economic power, and has some diplomatic power in the form of its UN Security Council veto power, but has substantially less political power because there are few nations that really want to emulate China specifically, and even less military power because it has almost zero capacity to project military power much beyond its immediate neighborhood.
Other nations have different balances. India has some political power through its position as the world's largest democracy, although this is tempered somewhat by the touchy relations with its Muslim community and continued strains with Pakistan over Kashmir. It is a growing economic power, though less than China. India's military power is also rapidly growing, and its coming addition of the MiG-29 capable carrier Admiral Gorshkov, recently purchased from Russa, will provide it with a heavy naval strike capacity that its current Sea Harrier carriers lack, and put it into a class in which only the US, UK, and France currently exist. Yet it has far less diplomatic power than many of its neighbors due to a lack of a Security Council veto and due to strained relations with its neighbors.
Other nations have small militaries and economies, but wield disproportionate diplomatic and political power to their size because they are perceived as being above many of the squabbles and frays in which other nations involve themselves. But even nations like the UK aren't superpowers despite their influence over nations around the world, their powerful militaries, and strong diplomatic and political presence, because their ability to weild all of these at the same time are limited.
It's a hard thing to become a superpower-class nation long enough to get that designation, and even harder to maintain that status -- ask the Soviet Union about that.
This is one of the reasons that I think we may need some new procedures in place, including a complete scrapping of every voter registration prior to the 2008 elections. Pick a point after which everyone must re-register -- sometime in 2007 would probably work well, since most states are on the even-numbered years for major elections. At that point, dump the old registrations and require new ones. This would give people probably 12-18 months to fill out a registration card, easily obtained for free by just about anyone, and probably shrink the listed pool to more realistic numbers. Rinse and repeat every... oh, maybe 20 years.
I'm sure it would also bring out more people trying to slip in some extras, but I'm sure something could be put in place to help catch this kind of fraud.
Partially. Sleazy characters can feed you information that on its own looks bad, but put in a particular context may not be quite so bad. Word that someone was "seen" with a woman other than his wife, with the recipient left to fill in via imagination, can completely ruin that person's reputation, when they're simply at the location by coincidence because they're both attending the same function.
Context is important, and has to be taken into account by any journalist.
Half of the article made sense, and the other half attempted to be be really cynical and sarcastic, but I think missed the mark. The "deep Astroturfing" comments came across to me as mocking the two sides' accusations of working for the two primary litigants.
There's something of a point, though, that zealots don't do good for either side. Microsoft zealots are just as bad as Linux zealots are just as bad as any other zealots. If you refuse to listen to anything about the other side, then you will be completely unable to support your own side properly.
He's actually right, to some extent. Go back further, and you'll find people like Walter Winchell, who, while bringing some really interesting stuff to light, also went out of their way to work with some really sleazy characters to get dirt on people that they didn't like, offended them, or otherwise were deemed worthy of public ridicule for their beliefs, actions, words, or other aspect, whether taken in context or not.
It never really went away. It was just relegated to the fringes of journalism.
Even CWShredder doesn't always work. It's a constant war between those two, and sometimes it's not possible to wait for the next version of Shredder to come out.
Have you tried spyware removal tools? Or even a anti-virus program? Alternatively, just vape all the browser helper objects (search the registry, you'll find them) which sounds like what your problem was all along.
You've not had to deal with CoolWebSearch, I think. Whoever does the programming on that little piece of hell knows how to make life difficult. It's so deeply embedded that there are a few programmers that spend much of their free time researching only how to remove CWS.
I know people -- experienced people -- who prefer to just reformat and reinstall. It's easier and faster than trying to argue with CWS.
Technological issues. Unless and until someone can demonstrate carbon nanotube-based cables, even Congress won't buy into it.