All access is limited to a "Need to Know" basis. All of it. even lower classifications aren't available unless there is a Need to Know.
Two words: Gary McKinnon.
"All access is limited" is so ambiguous as to be almost meaningless. Do you mean "Actually no one, no matter how skilful and unscrupulous, can possibly gain access"? Or "Some bunch of military dimbulbs sitting around a table have decreed that access shall be limited"?
Not necessarily. Airliners in which I have flown commonly go no higher than 36,000 feet - occasionally perhaps 40,000 feet. The tops of thunderstorms often reach 55,000 feet and can be even higher. One extreme case reached about 70,000 feet. Moreover, it is necessary to fly well above the tops of the visible clouds, as bad things can happen up to a mile higher. Check out, for instance, http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/152684/
So pilots almost always opt to fly around storms instead.
It's an avoidable business expense. As most airlines are either bankrupt or teetering on the edge, they don't spend a red cent more than they absolutely have to.
You're going to need to define "catastrophic" inflation, because we certainly have paper money systems that are more than a century old and still working. The US dollar alone is 228 years old, and the Great British Pound is approaching 300 years old. Have they had inflation over time? Yes, in fact that's considered normal and healthy for a currency. Have they had periods of increased inflation, yes, but never so bad as to wipe out people's savings like with some other currencies (examples include the German Mark after WW1 and the Ruble after the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union).
The US dollar and the pound sterling have experienced what I would consider seriously harmful inflation. In the last 100 years, each of them has lost almost all its value. It's notoriously hard to arrive at a fair comparison, but if you stick to things like loaves of bread, bottles of wine, horses, clothes, houses, etc. one pound today is worth something like a penny in 1913 - a fall in value of about 99.6 percent. I consider that catastrophic for individuals, and over time for institutions too.
To zoom in on more recent time spans, since I got married in 1976 the value of the pound has fallen by at least 90 percent - a great deal more for some items. This is even worse for people on fixed incomes (such as pensioners) because current government policy is to reduce interests almost to zero. It was in fact Lenin who said, "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation"; yet one could suppose that was the policy of present-day democratic governments in the USA, UK, and many other Western nations.
Of course inflation appeals so much to rulers because it lets them borrow money and pay back only a fraction of it. The great majority of citizens have always remained blithely ignorant of inflation, or grossly underestimated its effects. They are aided in this by official government figures that also grossly underestimate inflation, by a variety of clever tricks.
"Neanderthals may not have been able to coordinate such a large social group as modern humans".
It is quite possible that modern humans are not able to coordinate as large social groups as they now have to. No system of government or economic management has yet been proven over a long enough period to engender confidence. For example, no system of paper money has ever lasted more than a century or so without undergoing catastrophic inflation. We are just about getting to the critical point - and it shows.
Neither have we been able to find a system of government that can handle billions of people fairly, safely, and sustainably. A visiting Martian would perhaps be puzzled by the complete absence of any attempt to research, let alone safeguard, the future security of the human race. Instead, everywhere we see businesspeople frantically enriching themselves while politicians plot their strategies to gain or retain power. Very few, if any, think more than five years ahead.
According to an old story, during Nixon's visit to China in 1972 someone asked Zhou Enlai what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution. "Too early to say," he is supposed to have replied, thus giving a fine example of long-term thinking. It's now thought he was referring to the disturbances going on in France at the time, not in 1789, but it's still a nice story. Just so, it's far too early to tell whether modern man has really done much better than the Neanderthals. Indeed, we may turn out to have done much worse, if we pull much of our ecosystem down with us.
So I guess Ada has its "community" of "dudes with crew cuts, clean shaven, and with pocket protectors working for Defense contractors", does Ada have any "street cred" with the academic "software theorem proof" or "software reliability" communities?
"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors". - C.A.R. Hoare, "Hints on Programming Language Design", 1973
MS should not have to give users a choice in software.
If MS did not have a virtual monopoly in PC operating systems, it wouldn't matter very much. Since it does, however, its energetic and long-standing attempts to make the average, non-technical user forget that there are other browsers is culpable.
At one point in United States v. Microsoft, one of MS' highly-paid lawyers told the court with a straight face that IE was an organic part of the Windows operating system, and as such could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.
Simultaneously, I imagine, his colleagues were burning up the lines to Redmond warning the engineering managers to start work on *making* IE an organic part of the Windows operating system that could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.
But they made a lot of money in the past through this domination. Basically, you're saying they should more or less get away with it because it no longer matters.
Precisely! When United States v. Microsoft was decided in 2000, instead of breaking up the company or forcing it to publish its source code - as had widely been speculated - the DoJ was satisfied with Microsoft promising not to do it again.
Imagine if the accused in a murder trial were to propose such an outcome. "Don't punish me for this murder, and I promise I shan't do it again in future (at least I won't murder the same guy again)".
Netscape was *already dead*. Promising not to kill it again was a fairly easy commitment to make.
No credible scientist can give results more than a week our that are meaningful.
If you want to have any credibility yourself, you should think through what you write more carefully. To take just one example, celestial mechanics often allows scientists to predict quite accurately millions of years ahead. It's probably possible to predict the future development of a given star for a billion or two years - assuming it has that long to live. Other scientists, more ambitiously still, predict the likely time till the heat death of the universe.
The best analogy I can think of is medical malpractice.
If you are a professional, and lives are riding on your advice, you shouldn't expect to screw up and get away with it.
No one "expects to screw up". Medicine and surgery, like all practical skills, are inexact. A doctor or a surgeon studies the patient, and makes his best attempt at a diagnosis. Then he makes his best attempt at treatment. If he is good, he will usually be right. Unless he is God, he will sometimes be wrong.
The attitude that I think I see in the quoted text - "you shouldn't expect to screw up and get away with it" - seems to me to combine unwarranted vengefulness with lack of foresight. Isn't it true that medical services in the USA, for instance, are made far more expensive than they have to be - partly because of the massive insurance all medical professionals need to take out in case they are sued?
They run a pretend democracy that still have at least half of the population keep the current set of fear-driven, fear-mongering elite in charge, They simply cannot be persuaded to not fund and otherwise stimulate all sorts of terror groups that do all sorts of stupid and dangerous shiat [sic] all over the world.
A very accurate (though ungrammatical) description of the USA. Thank you!
If you want to fight the US, you can do so without fear of nuclear retaliation, provided you don't engage in NBC warfare against them..
The way Saddam Hussein did? The way Iran is threatening to? When one side is determined to get its retaliation in first, and really doesn't care if it makes mistakes and kills a few hundred thousand bystanders, there are no guarantees of safety. In fact, there is no safety.
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first". - Thomas Jefferson
Julian himself is an arrogant fool. Did he ACTUALLY think he'd get away with releasing truckloads of U.S. intelligence info? And when it was pointed out to him that he may well have killed people who were working with us, he said that anyone working with the U.S. deserved to die (yeah, he did. it was in an interview broadcast by the BBC).
An exact quote, preferably with a source, would be preferable. Then we would have some idea what it was, exactly, that Assange said.
Maybe it was something like, "Anyone who participates in what the Nuremberg Tribunal described as the supreme war crime - unprovoked aggressive war - deserves to die". After all, the USA and its allies hanged a lot of Germans and Japanese for exactly that crime. And if they shot them before they had a chance of a trial, no one shed any tears.
"The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression
It's a reckless, amoral organization, that doesn't care who it hurts, doesn't care if it gets blood on its hand [sic]
Yes, that is true of the US Federal Government. That is what you meant, isn't it?
and could care less about the fate of the people who supply its documents.
Now maybe you are referring to Wikileaks. But your argument is disingenuous in the extreme. Ever hear the story about the mice who decided to bell the cat? A wonderful idea in principle, as then they would always know when the cat was approaching. Only one small practical problem: who gets the honour of actually belling the cat? Knowing that the odds of dying horribly are very high. My name for someone who deliberately volunteers for a mission like this is "hero". The fate of the people who supply the documents is altogether, and solely, the responsibility of those who inflict that fate. Your government.
Remember what Benjamin Franklin said, back when there was some hope that the USA would actually become a free country? "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". Well, Bradley Manning refused to give up his liberty in order to obtain safety - and now he is being punished for it. Assange has laid his life and liberty on the line, and he may very well be next.
What the world needs, and still has plenty of, are people of good moral character, who will fight for what's right, who will take stands, and who will take risks. I have way more respect for the three young women of Pussy Riot and what they have accomplished than anything Wikileaks has done.
I'll assume you are misinformed, rather than anarchically vicious. Read this, and say that again:
Slashdot Mirror
All access is limited to a "Need to Know" basis. All of it. even lower classifications aren't available unless there is a Need to Know.
Two words: Gary McKinnon.
"All access is limited" is so ambiguous as to be almost meaningless. Do you mean "Actually no one, no matter how skilful and unscrupulous, can possibly gain access"? Or "Some bunch of military dimbulbs sitting around a table have decreed that access shall be limited"?
Don't most planes fly above the storms?
Not necessarily. Airliners in which I have flown commonly go no higher than 36,000 feet - occasionally perhaps 40,000 feet. The tops of thunderstorms often reach 55,000 feet and can be even higher. One extreme case reached about 70,000 feet. Moreover, it is necessary to fly well above the tops of the visible clouds, as bad things can happen up to a mile higher. Check out, for instance, http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/152684/
So pilots almost always opt to fly around storms instead.
If they do not carry dosimeters, why not?
It's an avoidable business expense. As most airlines are either bankrupt or teetering on the edge, they don't spend a red cent more than they absolutely have to.
You're going to need to define "catastrophic" inflation, because we certainly have paper money systems that are more than a century old and still working. The US dollar alone is 228 years old, and the Great British Pound is approaching 300 years old. Have they had inflation over time? Yes, in fact that's considered normal and healthy for a currency. Have they had periods of increased inflation, yes, but never so bad as to wipe out people's savings like with some other currencies (examples include the German Mark after WW1 and the Ruble after the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union).
The US dollar and the pound sterling have experienced what I would consider seriously harmful inflation. In the last 100 years, each of them has lost almost all its value. It's notoriously hard to arrive at a fair comparison, but if you stick to things like loaves of bread, bottles of wine, horses, clothes, houses, etc. one pound today is worth something like a penny in 1913 - a fall in value of about 99.6 percent. I consider that catastrophic for individuals, and over time for institutions too.
To zoom in on more recent time spans, since I got married in 1976 the value of the pound has fallen by at least 90 percent - a great deal more for some items. This is even worse for people on fixed incomes (such as pensioners) because current government policy is to reduce interests almost to zero. It was in fact Lenin who said, "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation"; yet one could suppose that was the policy of present-day democratic governments in the USA, UK, and many other Western nations.
Of course inflation appeals so much to rulers because it lets them borrow money and pay back only a fraction of it. The great majority of citizens have always remained blithely ignorant of inflation, or grossly underestimated its effects. They are aided in this by official government figures that also grossly underestimate inflation, by a variety of clever tricks.
"Neanderthals may not have been able to coordinate such a large social group as modern humans".
It is quite possible that modern humans are not able to coordinate as large social groups as they now have to. No system of government or economic management has yet been proven over a long enough period to engender confidence. For example, no system of paper money has ever lasted more than a century or so without undergoing catastrophic inflation. We are just about getting to the critical point - and it shows.
Neither have we been able to find a system of government that can handle billions of people fairly, safely, and sustainably. A visiting Martian would perhaps be puzzled by the complete absence of any attempt to research, let alone safeguard, the future security of the human race. Instead, everywhere we see businesspeople frantically enriching themselves while politicians plot their strategies to gain or retain power. Very few, if any, think more than five years ahead.
According to an old story, during Nixon's visit to China in 1972 someone asked Zhou Enlai what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution. "Too early to say," he is supposed to have replied, thus giving a fine example of long-term thinking. It's now thought he was referring to the disturbances going on in France at the time, not in 1789, but it's still a nice story. Just so, it's far too early to tell whether modern man has really done much better than the Neanderthals. Indeed, we may turn out to have done much worse, if we pull much of our ecosystem down with us.
I just realized I never use Caps Lock anymore. I don't even know when was the last time I used it, but it was long ago.
Same here - intentionally anyway. Unfortunately, every now and then I discover that I've been using it unintentionally.
It's the main reason I occasionally consider learning to touch type...
So I guess Ada has its "community" of "dudes with crew cuts, clean shaven, and with pocket protectors working for Defense contractors", does Ada have any "street cred" with the academic "software theorem proof" or "software reliability" communities?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARK_(programming_language)
"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors".
- C.A.R. Hoare, "Hints on Programming Language Design", 1973
MS should not have to give users a choice in software.
If MS did not have a virtual monopoly in PC operating systems, it wouldn't matter very much. Since it does, however, its energetic and long-standing attempts to make the average, non-technical user forget that there are other browsers is culpable.
At one point in United States v. Microsoft, one of MS' highly-paid lawyers told the court with a straight face that IE was an organic part of the Windows operating system, and as such could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.
Simultaneously, I imagine, his colleagues were burning up the lines to Redmond warning the engineering managers to start work on *making* IE an organic part of the Windows operating system that could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.
But they made a lot of money in the past through this domination. Basically, you're saying they should more or less get away with it because it no longer matters.
Precisely! When United States v. Microsoft was decided in 2000, instead of breaking up the company or forcing it to publish its source code - as had widely been speculated - the DoJ was satisfied with Microsoft promising not to do it again.
Imagine if the accused in a murder trial were to propose such an outcome. "Don't punish me for this murder, and I promise I shan't do it again in future (at least I won't murder the same guy again)".
Netscape was *already dead*. Promising not to kill it again was a fairly easy commitment to make.
I doubt you need 250GB of data on your phone per month, or even per year.
I doubt most people need a phone at all.
So what?
No credible scientist can give results more than a week our that are meaningful.
If you want to have any credibility yourself, you should think through what you write more carefully. To take just one example, celestial mechanics often allows scientists to predict quite accurately millions of years ahead. It's probably possible to predict the future development of a given star for a billion or two years - assuming it has that long to live. Other scientists, more ambitiously still, predict the likely time till the heat death of the universe.
The best analogy I can think of is medical malpractice.
If you are a professional, and lives are riding on your advice, you shouldn't expect to screw up and get away with it.
No one "expects to screw up". Medicine and surgery, like all practical skills, are inexact. A doctor or a surgeon studies the patient, and makes his best attempt at a diagnosis. Then he makes his best attempt at treatment. If he is good, he will usually be right. Unless he is God, he will sometimes be wrong.
The attitude that I think I see in the quoted text - "you shouldn't expect to screw up and get away with it" - seems to me to combine unwarranted vengefulness with lack of foresight. Isn't it true that medical services in the USA, for instance, are made far more expensive than they have to be - partly because of the massive insurance all medical professionals need to take out in case they are sued?
The lesson is to not ever go to italy at all, ever, no matter who you are. They have a judicial system that produces results that are clearly insane.
Although, come to think of it... would you care to name a country where no insane miscarriages of justice have ever happened?
The law is an ass, no matter which language it speaks.
It's a net made of nurv fibre, obviously.
They run a pretend democracy that still have at least half of the population keep the current set of fear-driven, fear-mongering elite in charge, They simply cannot be persuaded to not fund and otherwise stimulate all sorts of terror groups that do all sorts of stupid and dangerous shiat [sic] all over the world.
A very accurate (though ungrammatical) description of the USA. Thank you!
It wouldn't be the first time that a country has started a war to take pressure off a domestic situation.
Yes, that probably is what Obama and Netanyahu are trying to do.
If you want to fight the US, you can do so without fear of nuclear retaliation, provided you don't engage in NBC warfare against them..
The way Saddam Hussein did? The way Iran is threatening to? When one side is determined to get its retaliation in first, and really doesn't care if it makes mistakes and kills a few hundred thousand bystanders, there are no guarantees of safety. In fact, there is no safety.
This article is very well worth reading:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/308269/#
"The two enemies of the people are criminals and government, so let us tie the second down with the chains of the Constitution so the second will not become the legalized version of the first".
- Thomas Jefferson
Yep, Assange's claims that the Americans are out to get him are ludicrous, and I think he knows that.
Au contraire: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
Julian himself is an arrogant fool. Did he ACTUALLY think he'd get away with releasing truckloads of U.S. intelligence info? And when it was pointed out to him that he may well have killed people who were working with us, he said that anyone working with the U.S. deserved to die (yeah, he did. it was in an interview broadcast by the BBC).
An exact quote, preferably with a source, would be preferable. Then we would have some idea what it was, exactly, that Assange said.
Maybe it was something like, "Anyone who participates in what the Nuremberg Tribunal described as the supreme war crime - unprovoked aggressive war - deserves to die". After all, the USA and its allies hanged a lot of Germans and Japanese for exactly that crime. And if they shot them before they had a chance of a trial, no one shed any tears.
"The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, called the waging of aggressive war "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_aggression
But Julian Assange is still a sack of shit.
So now we know your opinion about that. Do you have any facts with which to support your dismissive condemnation?
It's a reckless, amoral organization, that doesn't care who it hurts, doesn't care if it gets blood on its hand [sic]
Yes, that is true of the US Federal Government. That is what you meant, isn't it?
and could care less about the fate of the people who supply its documents.
Now maybe you are referring to Wikileaks. But your argument is disingenuous in the extreme. Ever hear the story about the mice who decided to bell the cat? A wonderful idea in principle, as then they would always know when the cat was approaching. Only one small practical problem: who gets the honour of actually belling the cat? Knowing that the odds of dying horribly are very high. My name for someone who deliberately volunteers for a mission like this is "hero". The fate of the people who supply the documents is altogether, and solely, the responsibility of those who inflict that fate. Your government.
Remember what Benjamin Franklin said, back when there was some hope that the USA would actually become a free country? "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". Well, Bradley Manning refused to give up his liberty in order to obtain safety - and now he is being punished for it. Assange has laid his life and liberty on the line, and he may very well be next.
What the world needs, and still has plenty of, are people of good moral character, who will fight for what's right, who will take stands, and who will take risks.
I have way more respect for the three young women of Pussy Riot and what they have accomplished than anything Wikileaks has done.
I'll assume you are misinformed, rather than anarchically vicious. Read this, and say that again:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/23/the-secret-history-of-pussy-riot/
Your point of view typically comes from the extreme left wing which is responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths..
As it happens, I am a libertarian conservative.