On the West Coast, they're starting to irritate the dock workers and truckers, too, by attempting to shut down the ports. There is such a thing as taking a point too far, and I think that while OWS had majority sympathy for the first few weeks, they pushed it too far and now many people just want them to shut up.
He was probably not cited because the pedestrian was jaywalking and shouldn't have been in the street in the first place. Police will often skip a citation for an otherwise minor offense if a situation was truly accidental and it looks like the driver has learned a lesson from it. They reason that there's little point of tacking a $150 citation on top of the stress of seeing someone getting hit if one knows one was partially at fault.
I'm not unaware of the issues of pedestrians getting hit. The son of a close family friend spent a month in the hospital and almost a year in physical therapy after he was hit by a car. But I don't let the emotional impact of that get to me. It's better to ask what has been done that is working so well to reduce the death rates and see if it can be reasonably expanded. It may be that cars better designed to handle pedestrian impacts are a prime reason, and the natural growth of them as a percentage of the national fleet will result in fewer deaths. It may be that people are simply becoming more aware of the presence of pedestrians, in which case, education efforts can be expanded. But the key is reasonableness; turning traffic enforcement into oppression is not the answer.
Making it too easy to punish someone for a meaningless transgression invites abuse. Most of the basic rules of the road are well-known, but what about those that aren't? For example, say you and some friends are heading out on a road trip in three cars. What's the minimum distance you must maintain between the vehicles while in motion? The answer is 100 feet, but that's according to California Vehicle Code 21705 covering caravans. Some states don't have such laws, and some have different numbers. Automated enforcement removes the discretion that a ticketing officer would have when seeing that an out-of-state driver has broken some minor law like that. The officer would have the option of warning the driver to not repeat the action in the future. An automated system could have a warning mechanism, but the out-of-state driver might not see it for days or even weeks and continue breaking that law.
Automated speed sensors present problems, too. Suppose the speed limit is 65. Do you get a citation for going 66?
Even cameras with staff that watch traffic remotely could be a problem. A cop having a bad day and hitting everyone he sees for minor infractions might be able to cite about four people an hour. Someone filling out a quick computer form at a central location and using a good camera system could probably hit 20 people an hour, just because he can. Subjectivity can come into play, too. What constitutes an unsafe lane change? What's a safe following distance? Neither of these are strictly encoded in California law, leaving it up to the observing officer.
I know that you didn't look at the link I provided, or at least didn't look at it closely, because your numbers are still low. The number of pedestrians killed stood at about 4100 in 2009, but that's still decreased from the 4900 in 2005, a 16% drop and a hell of a lot better than the 8100 killed in 1980. If you did and simply have more recent numbers, then they prove my point even more strongly because that would be a decrease of nearly 40% since 2005.
I'm not trying to minimize the deaths, but you can't get perfect safety. You can improve safety, but you grow ever more controlling when you do. This is good to an extent, but every additional power provides another opportunity for abuse. That would seem to be something that would ring true to you, given your closing sentence in the last post.
I believe there was another study that looked at long driving without distractions--no phones, no passengers, and no radio. Ultimately, the lack of distractions led to higher incidence of highway hypnosis.
There's a balance between no distractions and heavy distractions that allows for safe driving.
Generally speaking, yes, the one accident is preferable to the other, but an increased collision rate is still a strong possibility, and I brought it up in a general sense. Still, they're not perfect, and don't always reduce fatalities. A study released earlier this year showed that most large cities that use them saw a decrease in fatal crashes credited with saving about 159 lives over a five-year period, but a few saw an increase. Bakersfield, CA, had a 35% increase in such crashes. But it's a complex question, as the city of Anaheim, CA, saw a 29% decrease despite no cameras. (Anaheim voters also recently approved a law banning red light cameras from the city.)
The extended yellow and all-red light solutions have been studied and found to decrease the overall collision rate at intersections more than red light cameras, use of which as I have mentioned can result in an increase in collisions. Yes, there will be those who push the limits more on longer yellow lights, but most people will not do so. A longer yellow gives a greater warning time for the upcoming red, causing people to react further back of the collision. Combine it with an all-red pause and you get an even greater margin of safety. You can't completely account for people doing things like racing or being distracted by phone, radio, children, lady in red, or whatever else might catch their attention and end up in them barreling through a red light that's been red for the last 30 seconds.
Law enforcement should have to put forth a reasonable effort in their enforcement activities. Ideas like mandatory GPS tracking speeds and high-resolution traffic cameras looking for offenders start with good intentions, but it risks causing drivers to walk on eggshells all the time, and that kind of permanent stress and distraction can cause more problems than it solves.
A few years ago, you would have been right that numbers were basically flat, but at around the 43,000 mark, which held from around 1985 through 2005. After that, they started declining.
The CDC's numbers go through 2009 and cite a higher number of 33,800 for that year, but it's been trending downward consistently for decades. Deaths decreased about 9.7% from the prior year's 37,400, which itself was a decline of 9.3% from 2007. In fact, the last time deaths went up was in 2005 when they reached 43,500. By 2009, annual traffic deaths had dropped by nearly 29%. That's a pretty good rate for four years.
The most common automated traffic law enforcement is the red light camera, but several studies have said that it either does not change the accident rate or increases the accident rate at intersections where one is installed. The accident types change from T-bones to rear-end, but they still occur. A more effective and less-costly method of reducing intersection collisions due to red light runners is to extend yellow lights by a second or so and/or set the lights to all be red for a second or two between cycles. The same law is in effect and can be enforced when police see it, and costs to the municipality are lowered. So is revenue, but that's not what law enforcement is supposed to be about.
SWAT teams don't sit idle. In bigger cities, they train regularly, and in smaller cities, as in the case that I mentioned, they make up part of the regular police force and are called in from those duties when their skills are needed.
Drones are another question, and their use is highly disconcerting to me. Law enforcement should have to put forth a reasonable effort, and automated techniques like drones and license plate readers make it too easy to find stupid, trivial things to punish.
Part of the reason that they're more common is that some of the criminal element that honed its own methods in much more brutal streets has been moving out into those areas.
A friend used to be married to a member of the Madill, OK, police department. For some years, he handled about what you'd expect a police department for a town of 4000 to handle: traffic stops, domestic violence, bar fights, the rare burglary or car theft (people still keep their keys in the car out there), and once in a great while a murder. Their busiest recent year was 2006 with fewer than 200 serious crimes.
But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they started getting an influx of drug elements. Sales weren't much of an issue, but manufacturing of meth for sale in OKC and Dallas was becoming a problem, especially since those manufacturing were even more heavily armed than is normal for the area. Even before 9/11, a few of the force had begun SWAT training and were evaluating what SMGs and armor to purchase. But SWAT training is more than just how to shoot straight. It involves learning negotiation, how to overwhelm a suspect (or suspects) without firing a shot, and stress management should the trigger need to be pulled so that shots are placed as accurately as possible. A lot of SWAT deployments don't involve forced entry because the suspect knows that he's not going to win and often gives up.
Just because they're not in a big city doesn't mean that they don't have problems better handled by SWAT than by general officers.
SWAT teams are often called in when a suspect has threatened violence, and especially when violence is threatened against (presumably) armed law enforcement personnel, as it indicates even less fear about using it. Just because the suspects did not appear armed from the air does not necessarily mean that they couldn't have retrieved weapons rapidly from a vehicle or structure, or that they were not carrying concealed weapons.
They were absolutely critical. Once the Hind started serious deployment, the mujaheddin were getting ripped apart because the Hind was much better at nap-of-the-earth flight and thus surprise attacks, and the Afghan rebels had to get something to knock them down. The US was eager to not only slow the Soviet advance but also to get parts from downed aircraft, and would reward those who came up with more salvage with more weapons. The missiles' effectiveness caused Hind pilots to learn to make their birds perform maneuvers that the designers never imagined, and in doing so earned the healthy respect (at least on the battlefield) of mujaheddin warriors. Engineers at Mil and other places started coming up with modifications to try to neutralize the advantages the Afghans now had, much like the US had to do with its various weapon systems in Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan.
The difference was that while the recent wars have perhaps dented the US economy, the Soviet economy was already shaky and the tactics and strategy did not evolve fast enough from a military or political standpoint to slow the losses to a level where it could be sustained, let alone won. Soviet popular opinion was also very much against the war (and had been for years), and contrary to popular belief about the USSR at the time, they could not simply round up a bunch of people and force them to fight. They tried to find a way to save face and end the war at the same time, but ultimately, the losses were too daunting and they had to retreat.
Looking back on some of the articles, the statements that the Soviets made sound a lot like those the US is making. The commanding officer, Lt. Gen. Gromov, made public pronouncements on how Soviet forces were turning over security to the government, slowly drawing down forces in anticipation of leaving the country capable of handling its own defenses. Over the course of a couple of years, the drawdown of 115,000 troops was completed, with Gromov the last to walk across the bridge leading out of the country. One can only hope that more stability comes out of it ca. 2014 than 1989.
Some of the mujaheddin were trained by the ISI. Many simply showed up to fight, bringing with them whatever skills they had. These skills included fighting, communications, intelligence, and even training, as many of them were former military from around the Muslim world. They were a very capable guerrilla force, though fragmented and at times warring with each other. Those occasional squabbles turned into much larger battles once the Soviets left, and it was not until the Taliban arrived that the various factions would only begin to reunify once more, for one side or the other (though some, such as Dostum, would try to play the two sides against each other to hedge their own bets for survival).
Bin Laden wasn't trained by the CIA. (In fact, very little of the mujaheddin was trained by the CIA, as the CIA mostly provided intelligence, weapons, and funding.) It's been pretty well established that he brought his own funding and later relied on funding from places like Saudi Arabia. With very few exceptions, he neither trusted Western powers nor did he want their assistance, believing that to do so was to accept help from heathens. Interviews with him by those outside of Muslim circles were rare but telling in how they were approached and conducted.
The mujaheddin was a complex network of resistance forces, and bin Laden was but one very small part of it.
NIST published SP800-145 (PDF warning) in October with their definition of cloud computing:
Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. This cloud model is composed of five essential characteristics, three service models, and four deployment models.
There is an expanded section covering an additional 1.5 pages describing:
Essential characteristics
On-demand self-service
Broad network access
Resource pooling
Rapid elasticity
Measured service
Service models
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
Deployment models
Private cloud
Community cloud
Public cloud
Hybrid cloud
OK, so it's not the best-formatted list (I blame Slashdot), but it makes the point. The document is short and abstract, but it at least tries to give a coherent response.
You're welcome. I came across the ethical issues surrounding the use of the data sometime in the late 1980s and have been somewhat fascinated with the implications since then. Do you deem it tainted due to the torture and reject its use, thus removing the reward for others to follow the same path? Or do you use it in spite of the torture and perhaps give some meaning to what the subjects were forced to experience? We seem to have followed a middle path, accepting the data from the era where it was properly documented but deeming all similar follow-up work to be ethically invalid and therefore useless to modern science. I don't know that there's a better path to follow.
It's still a crime. That's why it's gray-hat, not black-hat. If it's a crime but done with good intentions, it falls into gray-hat territory.
Besides, in some jurisdictions, trespassing onto certain types of property (like nuclear power plants) is much more serious than trespassing on a neighbor's lawn. The plant operator should be taken to task for having such lax security, but the protesters were breaking the law.
They didn't state it on the banners, but they do state it here.
Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean. There is no such thing as a "safe" dose of radiation and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn't mean it's "clean."
Take action right now and tell the President that taxpayers should not take on the risk of building new nuclear plants.
If a meltdown were to occur, the accident could kill and injure tens of thousands of people, leaving large regions uninhabitable. And, more than 50 years after splitting the first atom, science has yet to devise a method for adequately handling long lived radioactive wastes.
For years nuclear plants have been leaking radioactive waste from underground pipes and radioactive waste pools into the ground water at sites across the nation.
In addition to being extremely dangerous, the continued greenwashing of nuclear power from industry-backed lobbyists diverts investments away from clean, renewable sources of energy. In contrast to nuclear power, renewable energy is both clean and safe. Technically accessible renewable energy sources are capable of producing six times more energy than current global demand.
This is gray-hat, not white-hat. White-hat is done legally, whereas Greenpeace almost certainly broke laws against trespassing here, even if their intentions were good.
Not at all. I never specified any exact maximum altitude for either plane. Here's what I said:
[The U-2 is] also known to fly higher than the SR-71, which is believed to have reached 85,000 to 90,000 feet (or more) on occasion.
Ordered differently, the SR-71 is believed to have reached 85,000 to 90,000 feet (or more) on occasion. The U-2 is known to fly higher than the SR-71.
To expand on the point, some publications suggest a capability for 100,000 feet for the SR-71, though I think that's pushing it because even at Mach 3+, it's hard to get enough oxygen into the engines. It's easier to believe that the simpler, subsonic U-2 (or at least some variants of it) has a 100,000-foot capability, maybe 105,000 to 110,000 feet. Later versions of the U-2, though, may have a lower maximum altitude because the engines got heavier as the power increased to handle the heavier payloads, and the difference between stall speed and max speed at those altitudes is never very wide.
The publicly-acknowledged service ceiling is not the same as the actual maximum altitude. A number of other sources place the maximum altitude at 90,000 feet or higher.
The U-2 as heavily used in Desert Shield and in the lead-up to Iraqi Freedom. It has a loiter ability that the SR-71 (and probably any other manned, high-speed recon aircraft) lacked due to its speed. It's also known to fly higher than the SR-71, which is believed to have reached 85,000 to 90,000 feet (or more) on occasion.
If they had an S-400, yes. Russia is hesitant about supplying them to most countries. Even its own backyard allies like Belarus aren't trusted with them. Russia recently canceled an order from Iran for an older S-300 system, and even China doesn't get full documentation on the system despite being one of the bigger customers.
This also isn't the first time that they've shot down a drone. I imagine that they make a big deal about this in part because they can't do much about U-2 overflights, and in part because it validates the government's rhetoric about how the whole world (except maybe Syria) is out to get Iran. Shooting down a drone is not terribly difficult.
I don't think it's direct ageism. I think there's a valid perception that older workers don't keep up. I work at a data center where the average of the technical staff is probably around 40. I know at least one who voluntarily left for another job and a few later was let go, allegedly because his claimed skills didn't pan out. I look at the rest of the staff and I see many of them cowering in their niches, whether that's basic switching and routing, Active Directory, or applications that don't have widespread use outside of certain environments. Some of them are one transition project away from unemployment.
One guy is in his 50s and still doing largely desktop work. Another guy had two years to set up a simple concept wireless installation of a controller and three APs modeled largely after an existing installation (primarily just different subnets). I had set up the original installation (larger controller but same software and principles), showed him the basics, and let him know to ask questions when he needed help. He would from time to time when pressed by management, but for whatever reason apparently never opened the manual to get answers. Finally, a recent project required that wireless gear in short order, and he got indignant that I did in two days what he couldn't (or at least didn't) do in two years.
I'm 37 and working on learning as much as I can where I am and taking advantage of training paid for by the company to pick up skills that may not directly apply to what I'm doing but will broaden my skill base. I've got the next three courses picked out and I'm trying to figure out what college classes might be useful to supplement them. In the IT industry, once you stop learning, you start filling out your own pink slip.
In some countries, that is more plausible. But in Asia and Africa, where the growth of AIDS is much more prevalent and distrust of drug companies even higher than it is in some Western countries, it's proven to be nearly impossible. There's even a widespread belief in Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure a man of AIDS. This results in a great deal of rape, and when a man is not cured, he often believes that the woman (or very often the young girl) that he raped was not a true virgin and goes looking for one who is. This leads to even greater spread of HIV and often results in an infected child. Witch doctors also tell infected people that they will be cured if they kill or rape an albino.
It doesn't help that idiots in power like Thabo Mbeki (whose AIDS denialism led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands) and Jacob Zuma (who publicly claimed in a rape trial that he showered after sexual activities with an HIV-positive woman to reduce the chances of infection) spread misinformation. Aside from Mbeki's policy to stop or limit access to antiretroviral drugs (which he claimed caused AIDS) to South Africans, his message led others to voluntarily stop taking their drugs. Similar issues are hampering treatments of all kinds of diseases in parts of Nigeria where clerics are claiming that vaccinations and other treatments are tools of genocide by white people trying to reclaim African colonies.
A combination of medical methods (including drugs and perhaps gene therapy and a vaccine, should either ever pan out) and education will be needed to end the spread of AIDS.
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On the West Coast, they're starting to irritate the dock workers and truckers, too, by attempting to shut down the ports. There is such a thing as taking a point too far, and I think that while OWS had majority sympathy for the first few weeks, they pushed it too far and now many people just want them to shut up.
He was probably not cited because the pedestrian was jaywalking and shouldn't have been in the street in the first place. Police will often skip a citation for an otherwise minor offense if a situation was truly accidental and it looks like the driver has learned a lesson from it. They reason that there's little point of tacking a $150 citation on top of the stress of seeing someone getting hit if one knows one was partially at fault.
I'm not unaware of the issues of pedestrians getting hit. The son of a close family friend spent a month in the hospital and almost a year in physical therapy after he was hit by a car. But I don't let the emotional impact of that get to me. It's better to ask what has been done that is working so well to reduce the death rates and see if it can be reasonably expanded. It may be that cars better designed to handle pedestrian impacts are a prime reason, and the natural growth of them as a percentage of the national fleet will result in fewer deaths. It may be that people are simply becoming more aware of the presence of pedestrians, in which case, education efforts can be expanded. But the key is reasonableness; turning traffic enforcement into oppression is not the answer.
Making it too easy to punish someone for a meaningless transgression invites abuse. Most of the basic rules of the road are well-known, but what about those that aren't? For example, say you and some friends are heading out on a road trip in three cars. What's the minimum distance you must maintain between the vehicles while in motion? The answer is 100 feet, but that's according to California Vehicle Code 21705 covering caravans. Some states don't have such laws, and some have different numbers. Automated enforcement removes the discretion that a ticketing officer would have when seeing that an out-of-state driver has broken some minor law like that. The officer would have the option of warning the driver to not repeat the action in the future. An automated system could have a warning mechanism, but the out-of-state driver might not see it for days or even weeks and continue breaking that law.
Automated speed sensors present problems, too. Suppose the speed limit is 65. Do you get a citation for going 66?
Even cameras with staff that watch traffic remotely could be a problem. A cop having a bad day and hitting everyone he sees for minor infractions might be able to cite about four people an hour. Someone filling out a quick computer form at a central location and using a good camera system could probably hit 20 people an hour, just because he can. Subjectivity can come into play, too. What constitutes an unsafe lane change? What's a safe following distance? Neither of these are strictly encoded in California law, leaving it up to the observing officer.
I know that you didn't look at the link I provided, or at least didn't look at it closely, because your numbers are still low. The number of pedestrians killed stood at about 4100 in 2009, but that's still decreased from the 4900 in 2005, a 16% drop and a hell of a lot better than the 8100 killed in 1980. If you did and simply have more recent numbers, then they prove my point even more strongly because that would be a decrease of nearly 40% since 2005.
I'm not trying to minimize the deaths, but you can't get perfect safety. You can improve safety, but you grow ever more controlling when you do. This is good to an extent, but every additional power provides another opportunity for abuse. That would seem to be something that would ring true to you, given your closing sentence in the last post.
I believe there was another study that looked at long driving without distractions--no phones, no passengers, and no radio. Ultimately, the lack of distractions led to higher incidence of highway hypnosis.
There's a balance between no distractions and heavy distractions that allows for safe driving.
Generally speaking, yes, the one accident is preferable to the other, but an increased collision rate is still a strong possibility, and I brought it up in a general sense. Still, they're not perfect, and don't always reduce fatalities. A study released earlier this year showed that most large cities that use them saw a decrease in fatal crashes credited with saving about 159 lives over a five-year period, but a few saw an increase. Bakersfield, CA, had a 35% increase in such crashes. But it's a complex question, as the city of Anaheim, CA, saw a 29% decrease despite no cameras. (Anaheim voters also recently approved a law banning red light cameras from the city.)
The extended yellow and all-red light solutions have been studied and found to decrease the overall collision rate at intersections more than red light cameras, use of which as I have mentioned can result in an increase in collisions. Yes, there will be those who push the limits more on longer yellow lights, but most people will not do so. A longer yellow gives a greater warning time for the upcoming red, causing people to react further back of the collision. Combine it with an all-red pause and you get an even greater margin of safety. You can't completely account for people doing things like racing or being distracted by phone, radio, children, lady in red, or whatever else might catch their attention and end up in them barreling through a red light that's been red for the last 30 seconds.
Law enforcement should have to put forth a reasonable effort in their enforcement activities. Ideas like mandatory GPS tracking speeds and high-resolution traffic cameras looking for offenders start with good intentions, but it risks causing drivers to walk on eggshells all the time, and that kind of permanent stress and distraction can cause more problems than it solves.
A few years ago, you would have been right that numbers were basically flat, but at around the 43,000 mark, which held from around 1985 through 2005. After that, they started declining.
The CDC's numbers go through 2009 and cite a higher number of 33,800 for that year, but it's been trending downward consistently for decades. Deaths decreased about 9.7% from the prior year's 37,400, which itself was a decline of 9.3% from 2007. In fact, the last time deaths went up was in 2005 when they reached 43,500. By 2009, annual traffic deaths had dropped by nearly 29%. That's a pretty good rate for four years.
http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.xls
The most common automated traffic law enforcement is the red light camera, but several studies have said that it either does not change the accident rate or increases the accident rate at intersections where one is installed. The accident types change from T-bones to rear-end, but they still occur. A more effective and less-costly method of reducing intersection collisions due to red light runners is to extend yellow lights by a second or so and/or set the lights to all be red for a second or two between cycles. The same law is in effect and can be enforced when police see it, and costs to the municipality are lowered. So is revenue, but that's not what law enforcement is supposed to be about.
SWAT teams don't sit idle. In bigger cities, they train regularly, and in smaller cities, as in the case that I mentioned, they make up part of the regular police force and are called in from those duties when their skills are needed.
Drones are another question, and their use is highly disconcerting to me. Law enforcement should have to put forth a reasonable effort, and automated techniques like drones and license plate readers make it too easy to find stupid, trivial things to punish.
Part of the reason that they're more common is that some of the criminal element that honed its own methods in much more brutal streets has been moving out into those areas.
A friend used to be married to a member of the Madill, OK, police department. For some years, he handled about what you'd expect a police department for a town of 4000 to handle: traffic stops, domestic violence, bar fights, the rare burglary or car theft (people still keep their keys in the car out there), and once in a great while a murder. Their busiest recent year was 2006 with fewer than 200 serious crimes.
But in the late 1990s and early 2000s, they started getting an influx of drug elements. Sales weren't much of an issue, but manufacturing of meth for sale in OKC and Dallas was becoming a problem, especially since those manufacturing were even more heavily armed than is normal for the area. Even before 9/11, a few of the force had begun SWAT training and were evaluating what SMGs and armor to purchase. But SWAT training is more than just how to shoot straight. It involves learning negotiation, how to overwhelm a suspect (or suspects) without firing a shot, and stress management should the trigger need to be pulled so that shots are placed as accurately as possible. A lot of SWAT deployments don't involve forced entry because the suspect knows that he's not going to win and often gives up.
Just because they're not in a big city doesn't mean that they don't have problems better handled by SWAT than by general officers.
SWAT teams are often called in when a suspect has threatened violence, and especially when violence is threatened against (presumably) armed law enforcement personnel, as it indicates even less fear about using it. Just because the suspects did not appear armed from the air does not necessarily mean that they couldn't have retrieved weapons rapidly from a vehicle or structure, or that they were not carrying concealed weapons.
They were absolutely critical. Once the Hind started serious deployment, the mujaheddin were getting ripped apart because the Hind was much better at nap-of-the-earth flight and thus surprise attacks, and the Afghan rebels had to get something to knock them down. The US was eager to not only slow the Soviet advance but also to get parts from downed aircraft, and would reward those who came up with more salvage with more weapons. The missiles' effectiveness caused Hind pilots to learn to make their birds perform maneuvers that the designers never imagined, and in doing so earned the healthy respect (at least on the battlefield) of mujaheddin warriors. Engineers at Mil and other places started coming up with modifications to try to neutralize the advantages the Afghans now had, much like the US had to do with its various weapon systems in Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan.
The difference was that while the recent wars have perhaps dented the US economy, the Soviet economy was already shaky and the tactics and strategy did not evolve fast enough from a military or political standpoint to slow the losses to a level where it could be sustained, let alone won. Soviet popular opinion was also very much against the war (and had been for years), and contrary to popular belief about the USSR at the time, they could not simply round up a bunch of people and force them to fight. They tried to find a way to save face and end the war at the same time, but ultimately, the losses were too daunting and they had to retreat.
Looking back on some of the articles, the statements that the Soviets made sound a lot like those the US is making. The commanding officer, Lt. Gen. Gromov, made public pronouncements on how Soviet forces were turning over security to the government, slowly drawing down forces in anticipation of leaving the country capable of handling its own defenses. Over the course of a couple of years, the drawdown of 115,000 troops was completed, with Gromov the last to walk across the bridge leading out of the country. One can only hope that more stability comes out of it ca. 2014 than 1989.
Some of the mujaheddin were trained by the ISI. Many simply showed up to fight, bringing with them whatever skills they had. These skills included fighting, communications, intelligence, and even training, as many of them were former military from around the Muslim world. They were a very capable guerrilla force, though fragmented and at times warring with each other. Those occasional squabbles turned into much larger battles once the Soviets left, and it was not until the Taliban arrived that the various factions would only begin to reunify once more, for one side or the other (though some, such as Dostum, would try to play the two sides against each other to hedge their own bets for survival).
Bin Laden wasn't trained by the CIA. (In fact, very little of the mujaheddin was trained by the CIA, as the CIA mostly provided intelligence, weapons, and funding.) It's been pretty well established that he brought his own funding and later relied on funding from places like Saudi Arabia. With very few exceptions, he neither trusted Western powers nor did he want their assistance, believing that to do so was to accept help from heathens. Interviews with him by those outside of Muslim circles were rare but telling in how they were approached and conducted.
The mujaheddin was a complex network of resistance forces, and bin Laden was but one very small part of it.
NIST published SP800-145 (PDF warning) in October with their definition of cloud computing:
There is an expanded section covering an additional 1.5 pages describing:
OK, so it's not the best-formatted list (I blame Slashdot), but it makes the point. The document is short and abstract, but it at least tries to give a coherent response.
You're welcome. I came across the ethical issues surrounding the use of the data sometime in the late 1980s and have been somewhat fascinated with the implications since then. Do you deem it tainted due to the torture and reject its use, thus removing the reward for others to follow the same path? Or do you use it in spite of the torture and perhaps give some meaning to what the subjects were forced to experience? We seem to have followed a middle path, accepting the data from the era where it was properly documented but deeming all similar follow-up work to be ethically invalid and therefore useless to modern science. I don't know that there's a better path to follow.
It's still a crime. That's why it's gray-hat, not black-hat. If it's a crime but done with good intentions, it falls into gray-hat territory.
Besides, in some jurisdictions, trespassing onto certain types of property (like nuclear power plants) is much more serious than trespassing on a neighbor's lawn. The plant operator should be taken to task for having such lax security, but the protesters were breaking the law.
They didn't state it on the banners, but they do state it here.
This is gray-hat, not white-hat. White-hat is done legally, whereas Greenpeace almost certainly broke laws against trespassing here, even if their intentions were good.
Not at all. I never specified any exact maximum altitude for either plane. Here's what I said:
Ordered differently, the SR-71 is believed to have reached 85,000 to 90,000 feet (or more) on occasion. The U-2 is known to fly higher than the SR-71.
To expand on the point, some publications suggest a capability for 100,000 feet for the SR-71, though I think that's pushing it because even at Mach 3+, it's hard to get enough oxygen into the engines. It's easier to believe that the simpler, subsonic U-2 (or at least some variants of it) has a 100,000-foot capability, maybe 105,000 to 110,000 feet. Later versions of the U-2, though, may have a lower maximum altitude because the engines got heavier as the power increased to handle the heavier payloads, and the difference between stall speed and max speed at those altitudes is never very wide.
The publicly-acknowledged service ceiling is not the same as the actual maximum altitude. A number of other sources place the maximum altitude at 90,000 feet or higher.
The U-2 as heavily used in Desert Shield and in the lead-up to Iraqi Freedom. It has a loiter ability that the SR-71 (and probably any other manned, high-speed recon aircraft) lacked due to its speed. It's also known to fly higher than the SR-71, which is believed to have reached 85,000 to 90,000 feet (or more) on occasion.
If they had an S-400, yes. Russia is hesitant about supplying them to most countries. Even its own backyard allies like Belarus aren't trusted with them. Russia recently canceled an order from Iran for an older S-300 system, and even China doesn't get full documentation on the system despite being one of the bigger customers.
This also isn't the first time that they've shot down a drone. I imagine that they make a big deal about this in part because they can't do much about U-2 overflights, and in part because it validates the government's rhetoric about how the whole world (except maybe Syria) is out to get Iran. Shooting down a drone is not terribly difficult.
I don't think it's direct ageism. I think there's a valid perception that older workers don't keep up. I work at a data center where the average of the technical staff is probably around 40. I know at least one who voluntarily left for another job and a few later was let go, allegedly because his claimed skills didn't pan out. I look at the rest of the staff and I see many of them cowering in their niches, whether that's basic switching and routing, Active Directory, or applications that don't have widespread use outside of certain environments. Some of them are one transition project away from unemployment.
One guy is in his 50s and still doing largely desktop work. Another guy had two years to set up a simple concept wireless installation of a controller and three APs modeled largely after an existing installation (primarily just different subnets). I had set up the original installation (larger controller but same software and principles), showed him the basics, and let him know to ask questions when he needed help. He would from time to time when pressed by management, but for whatever reason apparently never opened the manual to get answers. Finally, a recent project required that wireless gear in short order, and he got indignant that I did in two days what he couldn't (or at least didn't) do in two years.
I'm 37 and working on learning as much as I can where I am and taking advantage of training paid for by the company to pick up skills that may not directly apply to what I'm doing but will broaden my skill base. I've got the next three courses picked out and I'm trying to figure out what college classes might be useful to supplement them. In the IT industry, once you stop learning, you start filling out your own pink slip.
In some countries, that is more plausible. But in Asia and Africa, where the growth of AIDS is much more prevalent and distrust of drug companies even higher than it is in some Western countries, it's proven to be nearly impossible. There's even a widespread belief in Africa that having sex with a virgin will cure a man of AIDS. This results in a great deal of rape, and when a man is not cured, he often believes that the woman (or very often the young girl) that he raped was not a true virgin and goes looking for one who is. This leads to even greater spread of HIV and often results in an infected child. Witch doctors also tell infected people that they will be cured if they kill or rape an albino.
It doesn't help that idiots in power like Thabo Mbeki (whose AIDS denialism led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands) and Jacob Zuma (who publicly claimed in a rape trial that he showered after sexual activities with an HIV-positive woman to reduce the chances of infection) spread misinformation. Aside from Mbeki's policy to stop or limit access to antiretroviral drugs (which he claimed caused AIDS) to South Africans, his message led others to voluntarily stop taking their drugs. Similar issues are hampering treatments of all kinds of diseases in parts of Nigeria where clerics are claiming that vaccinations and other treatments are tools of genocide by white people trying to reclaim African colonies.
A combination of medical methods (including drugs and perhaps gene therapy and a vaccine, should either ever pan out) and education will be needed to end the spread of AIDS.
When it's given to the infected mothers, it could make a significant difference.