I would rather we start funding them like schools. I would also suggest that we suffer from a quantity vs. quality problem that the quotas in places like California, while good-intentioned, are worsening. Higher education needs to be cheap and available, but highly selective. While I'm being idealistic, I might as well also mention that we need to stop requiring college degrees for basically any middle class job. We've saturated the job market with highly educated people, while simultaneously diminishing the quality of that education. So now, as a society, we're paying inordinate sums for lowest common denominator education, that a large proportion of people don't need and won't ever use.
Thank you for getting it. Now how the hell do we get the people who attended Beer U for 6 years to get it?
I don't have cable, so I searched for the bing commerical on youtube. I watched it, it seemed like useless fluff that's not going to convince anyone to try anything because they never actually said what their search engine did differently from google, except that it was better
You remind me of me. Just know that "Bing" is MS marketing, and large companies do not even try to market to people like us.
Was there a problem with the tech? So was there a problem? Did I miss something
The answer to all of your questions: "yes".
Unfortunately I'm a bit too lazy to dig up the references and specific projects for you right now, but if you do some searching you'll find that this method is still a prototype with problems. Last I saw, it was also only a functional prototype on a very large scale, and the temperatures, engineering, and monitoring involved would place it out of limits of residential applications.
I'd encourage you to seek out National Geographic's Man Made: Solar Quest. They covered all the major competing technologies fairly well, and took great care to explain the challenges still facing them.
When was the last time the Chinese waged a war of aggression?
2009, considering they're still occupying a certain country and suppressing its people. Or you could include their direct support of a state sponsor of terror, to include very probably assisting them in developing a nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program.
When was the last time the Chinese called for an end to the western way of life? Salafi jihadist Arab's have done both quite a bit of late.
America has fundamental Christians who want to end the Salafi way of life. Moderate Arabs are no worse than moderate Christians because neither group literally interprets bronze-age mythology as the end-all be-all to morality. Fundamentalists in nearly every religion want to end the "American" way of life because the American way of life includes freedom of religion and a separation between church and state.
Just consider the case where China would say "we will not lend any more money and we will not renew any of the current loans (i.e. we want our money back as soon as the agreement allows it)". That would create very serious problems for the US. Of course, at the moment it's not in China's best interests either because the US is a good customer, but that could change. It also means it's now in the US' best interests to be a good customer.
Congratulations, you just exposed the entire western world's secret plan to avoid a war with China and turn them into trading partners instead.
Dumping it all at once for a one-shot profit would be stupid. Nope, you dole it out at a competitive price, and fund the country for years to come.
Unfortunately, $50-100 Billion is barely enough to support a dozen senators' pet projects, and not nearly enough to fund our country. It would, however, be enough to make serious improvements.
All of that really doesn't matter, though. "Rare earth" isn't a misnomer - we've not got much of these metals, and we're going to need to get more outside of Earth eventually.
Normally, when purchasing coffee "to go" from a restaurant, I'm actually looking to drink it 20-30 minutes later. Boiling hot coffee remains drinkably hot a half-hour later, which suits me just fine.
It's called a thermos. If you want it to still be hot 30 minutes later, slow down its cooling instead of making it so scalding hot that contact instantly causes third degree burns. This should be common sense.
Additionally, McDonald's own research showed that most customers drink their coffee immediately.
While I agree that our society has too many warning labels and required safety measures, you guys are picking the wrong case to rally around. The McDonald's hot coffee suit is one of the most clear-cut personal injury suits I've seen.
Not responding to your sorry troll ass, but leaving a reply for all the people who may actually agree with you. In addition to being too hot for your crotch, 180-190F is too hot for your mouth and will produce third degree burns nearly instantly. 150-160F would be a fairly reasonable temperature for HOT coffee.
The addition of "the coffee manufacturer has stated that such a high temperature is not ideal for the coffee's taste" is meant to pre-empt the argument that it's kept this hot for flavor/taste. There is no legitimate reason to keep coffee this hot, and that's why the court sided with the lady with serious third degree burns on her crotch, multiple skin grafts, and permanent disfigurement.
utter bullshit. courts take into account "attitudes" into consideration only to determine the penalty associated to a crime, if they do at all.
Unless they're trying to prove intent... which is the difference between murder in the first and manslaughter.
but in determining if a.- a crime has been comitted and b.- the defendant has any criminal responsability over its comission, "attitude" is not taken into account in any normal legal system since more or less the late middle ages.
I don't know what world you're living in, but down here intent is considered in the majority of cases from shoplifting to murder. Example: A man mixes ammonia and bleach and the resulting gas kills his child. If he's a chemist, he's going to jail for a long time. If he's an illiterate recent immigrant and he obviously did not intend harm, he's probably not going to jail.
But think of the perks - total unaccountability, kidnapping people, torture, toppling democratic governments and installing dictators!
The operators do those things, not the agents or the analysts. Operators are not recruited with money, they are recruited with dirt ("You can rot in jail forever, or you can work for us"), and not at a job fair, but from the criminal court docket.
No, but it means spending on people in the field, rather than generating big hi-tech budgets with cool buzz-words, and your own personal fiefdom. Security takes second seat to "oh, shiny." Always has (just look at car designers resistance to incorporating safety features).
To go back to the GGGP's argument:
I mean, you can tap and analyze every cable satellite and radio transmission in the world and still be completely oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere.
You can spend billions on informants and operatives, but they'll all still be oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere. It's pretty damned hard to infiltrate homogeneous groups who speak rare and unique languages with impossible to reproduce accents and close-knit social communities where everyone knows everyone. I'd imagine it's also pretty difficult to turn ideologically-motivated people into informants.
If you follow the common notion in this thread that SIGINT is just "ooh, shiny" for politicians, I really don't know what to say. Clearly decision makers in the know feel SIGINT's results justify SIGINT's budgets. I would say that, if anything, HUMINT has been the disastrous intelligence let-down of the decade. But what do I know? I don't sit on the intelligence committee.
MS Office 08 already exists for Mac and it's not too bad. I prefer the windows version (Office 07), but I keep a copy installed because I still can't stand any of the other office suites.
I don't play WoW, but luckily Adobe Lightroom works on both Windows and OSX, and the license allows me to use it on both my desktop and laptop. Best software purchase I've ever made.
It takes about 8 minutes for the shuttle to reach orbit. With 125 launches, that's less than 17 hours of real-world testing. Aside from single-launch vehicles, the shuttle probably has the *least* amount of "proven technology" of any product currently in use anywhere in the world.
By that standard, nuclear weapons are, perhaps, the most unproven technology in existence. I'd seriously doubt if they had a full millisecond of real world testing.
It's not going anywhere and more to the point, it really can't. If they added a scaffolding and enough drive to travel to some other celestial body, then it would be a spaceship.
Space dinghy? Perhaps SS Minnow would be more appropriate.
I don't mean to argue any merits, as it's just an opinion. My main point was that while I greatly enjoy Colbert's influence and ability to have huge numbers of people do this sort of thing, I hope that there's a line drawn somewhere. A bridge is one thing, but an ISS module is another. Give it a good name. It's not about having enjoyed Firefly, or any other Sci-Fi TV show, it's about being interested in the space program since childhood.
It's a [human] waste recovery module. I don't want it named after Serenity, Sagan, Heinlein, or Enterprise. I loved Serenity and I think it'd be a great name for NASA's manned missions to mars, but if they named a waste recovery module after Serenity I'd probably be protesting and organizing a letter writing campaign. If I have a choice between Serenity, Xenu (damned scientologists), and Colbert... I go with Colbert. We can call the mid-stage recycled waste "Xenu", though.
I guess I'm leading up to, why let the public pick at all? We'll just end up with the Butthead Memorial Auditorium. Nasa is stocked with nerds, they can be trusted to do the right thing. If NASA wants to bring back the public's interest, they should do it by acts that capture the public's interest, not passing amusement. How about a moon base already?
Stop for a minute, and think about it. You probably wouldn't have heard about this if Colbert didn't bring it up on his show and get hundreds of thousands to vote for him... which caused it to become a mainstream news item, which led to politicians weighing in the matter, which led to even more news coverage... and us talking about it here. NASA has been quietly naming things for a very, very long time. When is the last time the discussion about a name of a module/node was a mainstream news item?
I really hate to throw buzzwords around, but think about "Web 2.0". Let the peanut gallery have some say in what's going on, get their feedback (voting), and get them involved... allow some controversy and debate. Is there really any chance that so many Americans would know or care the NASA was putting a waste recovery module on the ISS? I think you already know the answer. This is probably the most popular coverage since the last disaster. And I think that's a good thing.
Seriously, though even if your voice recognition software just looked for digits and then passed off segments of conversation that included a long string of digits to a human for further analysis. You'd get a lot of false positives (phone numbers, etc) but you'd at least exclude most casual conversations. If you want to data mine more accurately, just look for exactly 16 digits given over N seconds and make sure they form a valid CC with check digit, etc.
And the point of all of this is to get a bunch of silly credit card numbers? You REALLY think this would be a profitable attack? It's not exactly "trivial" to run a huge mass of voice through voice recognition with a high enough accuracy to make this useful. Then after that, you end up with a bunch of credit card numbers, and not necessarily a name or expiration date... when there are already a ton of credit card numbers out there that are never used for fraud.
No, attacks like this are far more useful for targeted attacks. If you know Senator Kennedy uses Skype, and you know a way to get him to click on a malicious site (perhaps a specific attack on his system and editing the hosts file to force google.com to redirect to your server that mirrors google.com and adds an attack in), then you may have a chance of eventually intercepting some sort of highly valuable information... like a senator making appointments with fetish sex providers, secret gay lovers, etc. Now a digital copy of that kind of conversation could be worth millions... in blackmail or in sales to fox news/hustler/playboy/media outlets.
Read my post again. Do you find the word "torture" in there, anywhere?
Yes.
Not all torture is alike, and not all our respect for our marines' conduct stems from their lack of engaging in such barbarism as physical torture. Forcing a man -actually forcing him - to repeatedly watch a movie is far worse than forcing him to stand naked in the snow
If you were not trying to imply that this is torture, or if you have changed your mind on the subject, then I think you'll find we have a lot of common ground.
I think the US has done a miserable job lately of being the shining beacon of freedom, liberty, and justice. I feel both political parties have been actively eroding different aspects of freedom, liberty, and justice for decades. Frankly, we were never really a very good beacon by modern standards, and it would be intellectually dishonest to claim that we really deserve the title right now. 1% of the adult population is currently in prison, most of them on nonviolent drug-related charges. Powerful men who stole billions are going unpunished. We have a system actively designed to protect the wealthy and large corporations from the poor and small businesses. That being said, I still think many view America as the leader of the free world, and we should try harder to live up to the title.
But that's not really what I was talking about, or responding to. I felt you, and many others in this thread, were watering down the term "torture" so you could use its emotional power in these situations. That's what I disagree with and feel to be intentionally misleading. I know that it's semantics, but semantics do matter, particularly when you're talking about such powerful, emotionally-charged words.
--
If you want to talk about the values this country was built upon, here's my stance on major/wedge issues:
state/church separation is vital
marijuana prohibition is even worse than alcohol prohibition (imagine if the US was fighting a global war to stop Germany from producing beer)
prison terms are excessively long for nearly all crimes, our "penal" system is quite clearly about punishment and needs to be reworked to accomplish rehabilitation.
abortion of a non-living/thinking/feeling fetus is a mother's decision, but I feel the father should have a say in the matter
if you're old enough to carry a rifle, you're old enough to have a beer when you come home from carrying a rifle for your country
our entitlement culture has gone too far, but the wealthy are far worse in this area than the poor
healthcare is right in between food and shelter on the list of things we shouldn't allow people to go without
Last I saw, NIPR was vital for weather to get their reports, airspace frequently had to be coordinated with multiple agencies on NIPR, NOTAMSs were checked on NIPR, government charge cards were issued/tracked/paid on NIPR, and logistics ordered a lot of vital things on... NIPR.
There are separate networks because you can't have classified information floating around on NIPR, not because NIPR isn't needed.
Uhhh, dude, there exists a utility for making such migrations gradual, it's called WINE, you might have heard about it. Seriously, set up a testing rig, and start tweaking WINE 'till it works OOTB for all the internal apps/scripts/etc (no pun intended).
Uhhh, dude, I've used wine, and codeweavers, and VMs, and lots of other goodies. I don't think you understand the magnitude of the DoD's IT infrastructure. We're probably talking at least a million PCs, tens of thousands of custom apps, databases, programs, interfaces, protocols, front ends... spread across hundreds (thousands?) of installations, supported by multiple separate IT organizations. And you would have all of this reworked to solve a problem that does not exist?
I like open source as much as the next guy, but the point still remains: Cost/Benefit = really expensive/very little return.
You're quite correct, the overuse of the term "torture" is flawed at best, malicious and counterproductive at worst. The difference between torture and unpleasantness is the degree of severity. Being tripped once is not torture. Being knocked to the floor, told to get up or you'll be killed, knocked to the floor again, then being told to get up or you'll be killed... that's a form of torture. Being waterboarded? That's arguably in the gray area in between. Pretty much anything that went on before 1600 in Europe, POWs in Japan, POWs in Korea, POWs in Vietnam, those are all quite clearly torture.
Torture is an extremely powerful word meant to convey extreme duress and needless suffering to such an extent that its use immediately conjures up images of somebody being disemboweled.
"Anti-torture" Crusaders, please don't dilute the meaning of "torture". It is counter-productive and it's not helping your cause - it's making us argue semantics like we are now instead of the policies. If you really need a word for it, you should find a new one that you can make yours. I'd like to suggest "systemic bullying", "making Baby Saddam cry", and "Bushing".
... I don't think you quite get it. Read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Now go re-read what the GP said. Then go find some articles on living conditions in prison, abuse by guards, and abuses by civilian police departments. Now re-read what he said and what you said, and ask yourself what difference that could make.
It doesn't matter if it's FBI agents, soldiers, sailors, marines, frat boys, federal prison guards, state prison guards, sworn police officers, or a group of psychologists. The psychology behind situations like this is extremely powerful, and people will do... what they have been doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I would rather we start funding them like schools. I would also suggest that we suffer from a quantity vs. quality problem that the quotas in places like California, while good-intentioned, are worsening. Higher education needs to be cheap and available, but highly selective. While I'm being idealistic, I might as well also mention that we need to stop requiring college degrees for basically any middle class job. We've saturated the job market with highly educated people, while simultaneously diminishing the quality of that education. So now, as a society, we're paying inordinate sums for lowest common denominator education, that a large proportion of people don't need and won't ever use.
Thank you for getting it. Now how the hell do we get the people who attended Beer U for 6 years to get it?
The impossible is far more likely than the improbable.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I don't have cable, so I searched for the bing commerical on youtube. I watched it, it seemed like useless fluff that's not going to convince anyone to try anything because they never actually said what their search engine did differently from google, except that it was better
You remind me of me. Just know that "Bing" is MS marketing, and large companies do not even try to market to people like us.
Was there a problem with the tech? So was there a problem? Did I miss something
The answer to all of your questions: "yes".
Unfortunately I'm a bit too lazy to dig up the references and specific projects for you right now, but if you do some searching you'll find that this method is still a prototype with problems. Last I saw, it was also only a functional prototype on a very large scale, and the temperatures, engineering, and monitoring involved would place it out of limits of residential applications.
I'd encourage you to seek out National Geographic's Man Made: Solar Quest. They covered all the major competing technologies fairly well, and took great care to explain the challenges still facing them.
When was the last time the Chinese waged a war of aggression?
2009, considering they're still occupying a certain country and suppressing its people. Or you could include their direct support of a state sponsor of terror, to include very probably assisting them in developing a nuclear weapons and ballistic missile program.
When was the last time the Chinese called for an end to the western way of life? Salafi jihadist Arab's have done both quite a bit of late.
America has fundamental Christians who want to end the Salafi way of life. Moderate Arabs are no worse than moderate Christians because neither group literally interprets bronze-age mythology as the end-all be-all to morality. Fundamentalists in nearly every religion want to end the "American" way of life because the American way of life includes freedom of religion and a separation between church and state.
Just consider the case where China would say "we will not lend any more money and we will not renew any of the current loans (i.e. we want our money back as soon as the agreement allows it)". That would create very serious problems for the US. Of course, at the moment it's not in China's best interests either because the US is a good customer, but that could change. It also means it's now in the US' best interests to be a good customer.
Congratulations, you just exposed the entire western world's secret plan to avoid a war with China and turn them into trading partners instead.
Dumping it all at once for a one-shot profit would be stupid. Nope, you dole it out at a competitive price, and fund the country for years to come.
Unfortunately, $50-100 Billion is barely enough to support a dozen senators' pet projects, and not nearly enough to fund our country. It would, however, be enough to make serious improvements.
All of that really doesn't matter, though. "Rare earth" isn't a misnomer - we've not got much of these metals, and we're going to need to get more outside of Earth eventually.
Not refuting your points, just curious about your use of this: "(t)he *IAAs". Other than "R", what can the "*" represent?
MPAA.
Thank you. It's a shame so few can see how rational this argument truly is.
That's all well and good, but I'd actually be more interested in an affordable way to convert plastic to biomass.
Normally, when purchasing coffee "to go" from a restaurant, I'm actually looking to drink it 20-30 minutes later. Boiling hot coffee remains drinkably hot a half-hour later, which suits me just fine.
It's called a thermos. If you want it to still be hot 30 minutes later, slow down its cooling instead of making it so scalding hot that contact instantly causes third degree burns. This should be common sense.
Additionally, McDonald's own research showed that most customers drink their coffee immediately.
While I agree that our society has too many warning labels and required safety measures, you guys are picking the wrong case to rally around. The McDonald's hot coffee suit is one of the most clear-cut personal injury suits I've seen.
Not responding to your sorry troll ass, but leaving a reply for all the people who may actually agree with you. In addition to being too hot for your crotch, 180-190F is too hot for your mouth and will produce third degree burns nearly instantly. 150-160F would be a fairly reasonable temperature for HOT coffee.
The addition of "the coffee manufacturer has stated that such a high temperature is not ideal for the coffee's taste" is meant to pre-empt the argument that it's kept this hot for flavor/taste. There is no legitimate reason to keep coffee this hot, and that's why the court sided with the lady with serious third degree burns on her crotch, multiple skin grafts, and permanent disfigurement.
utter bullshit. courts take into account "attitudes" into consideration only to determine the penalty associated to a crime, if they do at all.
Unless they're trying to prove intent... which is the difference between murder in the first and manslaughter.
but in determining if a.- a crime has been comitted and b.- the defendant has any criminal responsability over its comission, "attitude" is not taken into account in any normal legal system since more or less the late middle ages.
I don't know what world you're living in, but down here intent is considered in the majority of cases from shoplifting to murder. Example: A man mixes ammonia and bleach and the resulting gas kills his child. If he's a chemist, he's going to jail for a long time. If he's an illiterate recent immigrant and he obviously did not intend harm, he's probably not going to jail.
Intent matters.
The operators do those things, not the agents or the analysts. Operators are not recruited with money, they are recruited with dirt ("You can rot in jail forever, or you can work for us"), and not at a job fair, but from the criminal court docket.
[Citation Needed]
No, but it means spending on people in the field, rather than generating big hi-tech budgets with cool buzz-words, and your own personal fiefdom. Security takes second seat to "oh, shiny." Always has (just look at car designers resistance to incorporating safety features).
To go back to the GGGP's argument:
I mean, you can tap and analyze every cable satellite and radio transmission in the world and still be completely oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere.
You can spend billions on informants and operatives, but they'll all still be oblivious to a small group of people in a basement somewhere. It's pretty damned hard to infiltrate homogeneous groups who speak rare and unique languages with impossible to reproduce accents and close-knit social communities where everyone knows everyone. I'd imagine it's also pretty difficult to turn ideologically-motivated people into informants.
If you follow the common notion in this thread that SIGINT is just "ooh, shiny" for politicians, I really don't know what to say. Clearly decision makers in the know feel SIGINT's results justify SIGINT's budgets. I would say that, if anything, HUMINT has been the disastrous intelligence let-down of the decade. But what do I know? I don't sit on the intelligence committee.
MS Office 08 already exists for Mac and it's not too bad. I prefer the windows version (Office 07), but I keep a copy installed because I still can't stand any of the other office suites.
I don't play WoW, but luckily Adobe Lightroom works on both Windows and OSX, and the license allows me to use it on both my desktop and laptop. Best software purchase I've ever made.
It takes about 8 minutes for the shuttle to reach orbit. With 125 launches, that's less than 17 hours of real-world testing. Aside from single-launch vehicles, the shuttle probably has the *least* amount of "proven technology" of any product currently in use anywhere in the world.
By that standard, nuclear weapons are, perhaps, the most unproven technology in existence. I'd seriously doubt if they had a full millisecond of real world testing.
It's not going anywhere and more to the point, it really can't. If they added a scaffolding and enough drive to travel to some other celestial body, then it would be a spaceship.
Space dinghy? Perhaps SS Minnow would be more appropriate.
I don't mean to argue any merits, as it's just an opinion. My main point was that while I greatly enjoy Colbert's influence and ability to have huge numbers of people do this sort of thing, I hope that there's a line drawn somewhere. A bridge is one thing, but an ISS module is another. Give it a good name. It's not about having enjoyed Firefly, or any other Sci-Fi TV show, it's about being interested in the space program since childhood.
It's a [human] waste recovery module. I don't want it named after Serenity, Sagan, Heinlein, or Enterprise. I loved Serenity and I think it'd be a great name for NASA's manned missions to mars, but if they named a waste recovery module after Serenity I'd probably be protesting and organizing a letter writing campaign. If I have a choice between Serenity, Xenu (damned scientologists), and Colbert... I go with Colbert. We can call the mid-stage recycled waste "Xenu", though.
I guess I'm leading up to, why let the public pick at all? We'll just end up with the Butthead Memorial Auditorium. Nasa is stocked with nerds, they can be trusted to do the right thing. If NASA wants to bring back the public's interest, they should do it by acts that capture the public's interest, not passing amusement. How about a moon base already?
Stop for a minute, and think about it. You probably wouldn't have heard about this if Colbert didn't bring it up on his show and get hundreds of thousands to vote for him... which caused it to become a mainstream news item, which led to politicians weighing in the matter, which led to even more news coverage... and us talking about it here. NASA has been quietly naming things for a very, very long time. When is the last time the discussion about a name of a module/node was a mainstream news item?
I really hate to throw buzzwords around, but think about "Web 2.0". Let the peanut gallery have some say in what's going on, get their feedback (voting), and get them involved... allow some controversy and debate. Is there really any chance that so many Americans would know or care the NASA was putting a waste recovery module on the ISS? I think you already know the answer. This is probably the most popular coverage since the last disaster. And I think that's a good thing.
Seriously, though even if your voice recognition software just looked for digits and then passed off segments of conversation that included a long string of digits to a human for further analysis. You'd get a lot of false positives (phone numbers, etc) but you'd at least exclude most casual conversations. If you want to data mine more accurately, just look for exactly 16 digits given over N seconds and make sure they form a valid CC with check digit, etc.
And the point of all of this is to get a bunch of silly credit card numbers? You REALLY think this would be a profitable attack? It's not exactly "trivial" to run a huge mass of voice through voice recognition with a high enough accuracy to make this useful. Then after that, you end up with a bunch of credit card numbers, and not necessarily a name or expiration date... when there are already a ton of credit card numbers out there that are never used for fraud.
No, attacks like this are far more useful for targeted attacks. If you know Senator Kennedy uses Skype, and you know a way to get him to click on a malicious site (perhaps a specific attack on his system and editing the hosts file to force google.com to redirect to your server that mirrors google.com and adds an attack in), then you may have a chance of eventually intercepting some sort of highly valuable information... like a senator making appointments with fetish sex providers, secret gay lovers, etc. Now a digital copy of that kind of conversation could be worth millions... in blackmail or in sales to fox news/hustler/playboy/media outlets.
Read my post again. Do you find the word "torture" in there, anywhere?
Yes.
Not all torture is alike, and not all our respect for our marines' conduct stems from their lack of engaging in such barbarism as physical torture. Forcing a man -actually forcing him - to repeatedly watch a movie is far worse than forcing him to stand naked in the snow
If you were not trying to imply that this is torture, or if you have changed your mind on the subject, then I think you'll find we have a lot of common ground.
I think the US has done a miserable job lately of being the shining beacon of freedom, liberty, and justice. I feel both political parties have been actively eroding different aspects of freedom, liberty, and justice for decades. Frankly, we were never really a very good beacon by modern standards, and it would be intellectually dishonest to claim that we really deserve the title right now. 1% of the adult population is currently in prison, most of them on nonviolent drug-related charges. Powerful men who stole billions are going unpunished. We have a system actively designed to protect the wealthy and large corporations from the poor and small businesses. That being said, I still think many view America as the leader of the free world, and we should try harder to live up to the title.
But that's not really what I was talking about, or responding to. I felt you, and many others in this thread, were watering down the term "torture" so you could use its emotional power in these situations. That's what I disagree with and feel to be intentionally misleading. I know that it's semantics, but semantics do matter, particularly when you're talking about such powerful, emotionally-charged words.
--
If you want to talk about the values this country was built upon, here's my stance on major/wedge issues:
Last I saw, NIPR was vital for weather to get their reports, airspace frequently had to be coordinated with multiple agencies on NIPR, NOTAMSs were checked on NIPR, government charge cards were issued/tracked/paid on NIPR, and logistics ordered a lot of vital things on... NIPR.
There are separate networks because you can't have classified information floating around on NIPR, not because NIPR isn't needed.
Uhhh, dude, there exists a utility for making such migrations gradual, it's called WINE, you might have heard about it. Seriously, set up a testing rig, and start tweaking WINE 'till it works OOTB for all the internal apps/scripts/etc (no pun intended).
Uhhh, dude, I've used wine, and codeweavers, and VMs, and lots of other goodies. I don't think you understand the magnitude of the DoD's IT infrastructure. We're probably talking at least a million PCs, tens of thousands of custom apps, databases, programs, interfaces, protocols, front ends ... spread across hundreds (thousands?) of installations, supported by multiple separate IT organizations. And you would have all of this reworked to solve a problem that does not exist?
I like open source as much as the next guy, but the point still remains: Cost/Benefit = really expensive/very little return.
You're quite correct, the overuse of the term "torture" is flawed at best, malicious and counterproductive at worst. The difference between torture and unpleasantness is the degree of severity. Being tripped once is not torture. Being knocked to the floor, told to get up or you'll be killed, knocked to the floor again, then being told to get up or you'll be killed... that's a form of torture. Being waterboarded? That's arguably in the gray area in between. Pretty much anything that went on before 1600 in Europe, POWs in Japan, POWs in Korea, POWs in Vietnam, those are all quite clearly torture.
Torture is an extremely powerful word meant to convey extreme duress and needless suffering to such an extent that its use immediately conjures up images of somebody being disemboweled.
"Anti-torture" Crusaders, please don't dilute the meaning of "torture". It is counter-productive and it's not helping your cause - it's making us argue semantics like we are now instead of the policies. If you really need a word for it, you should find a new one that you can make yours. I'd like to suggest "systemic bullying", "making Baby Saddam cry", and "Bushing".
Isn't this a job for the military police?
... I don't think you quite get it. Read up on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Now go re-read what the GP said. Then go find some articles on living conditions in prison, abuse by guards, and abuses by civilian police departments. Now re-read what he said and what you said, and ask yourself what difference that could make.
It doesn't matter if it's FBI agents, soldiers, sailors, marines, frat boys, federal prison guards, state prison guards, sworn police officers, or a group of psychologists. The psychology behind situations like this is extremely powerful, and people will do... what they have been doing.