Some were certainly considered but prohibited by law. Due to crypto export restrictions, it wasn't until the limits on Open Source were loosened that X was legally permitted to have any kind of meaningful security. The non-export version still had to talk to the exportable edition, after all.
Yes, X was (and is) incredibly sloppy by today's standards and yes a lot of that was due to poor decisions in the days of X10. (Yes, boundaries are a decision. MIT could have chosen any sort of access control list system they wanted, with yet another library handling it. You could have then substituted whatever you wanted, so long as the API remained the same. Pretty much futureproof, no significant extra coding, easier to maintain than what they actually did.)
The coding flaws - of which there were many - were often detectable by tools as ancient as lint.
But you must also remember, X10 and X11 were never intended as products. They were reference implementations of a protocol, not finished products intended for actual use. The different vendors were always "supposed" to provide their own.
World War 1 is an excellent example of degeneracy. But let's face it, there is a level of honesty in charging machine guns and gassing enemy trenches. A depraved honesty, but honesty nonetheless.
Blackwater vehicles machine-gunning civilian populations for the hell of it, drones launching missiles at kids going to peace conferences - this lacks even the honesty.
Even earlier, the Charge of the Light Brigade was supposedly described as "magnificent, but it isn't war". I suppose the same could really be said of the Dambuster raid. There was nothing magnificent about Tora Bora, or the use of large radius, indiscriminate incendiaries earlier. Nor the use of cluster bombs colour coded to look like food drops.
The deliberate bombing of air raid shelters in Iraq was arguably worse than the Nazi bombings of London in the Blitz. The Nazis had no capacity to aim and seem to have been relatively indiscriminate. Bad enough to be a war crime and unacceptable to any civilized people. Firing laser-targeted missiles knowingly at civilian shelters, that goes from mere grotesquely savage incompetence to willful mass murder. To me, there is no question that having the capacity to do less harm but using it to inflict more is the greater evil and the more degenerate.
As it stands, I only get replies from bots and eharmony has scientifically proven that nobody on the face of the planet is compatible with me. Yes, I am serious. Yes, this is the main reason I brew very strong, very high quality mead. Inside work, I'm a meaningless drone in a stagnant occupation. Outside of work, the only company I keep is a three gallon jar. It's not a good conversationalist but it has a greater capacity for thought than my co-workers, which is something.
The older I get, the more I realize that Marvin, the Paranoid Android, was an optimist.
Not quite. The tools would be invented by someone, eventually. And that someone will have just the same accountability issues as the NSA. So you are guaranteed tools of this power being used by some megalomaniac or diabolical mastermind. So they cannot be factors in the equation.
The first question is how to upgrade security to the point that no such tool can ever work. Future tools, who knows, but this grade of attack must be permanently beyond anyone's capability.
I can picture ways of making it very, very hard - at a price - but a total solution is going to be a challenge.
Killing a bunch of wageslave (or just regular slave) engineers in the process. When the innocent become expendable, no matter how valid the cause, when murder and terror become alternatives to diplomacy, the aggressor is not fit even to be spat upon. You know why William Gibson's Neuromancer was so wrong? Technology is progressing far faster, sure, but that's normal in sci-fi. No, William Gibson's mistake was in not foreseeing how degenerate humanity can get.
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
You are correct about the list of suspects. Though it needn't be anti-American beliefs. Timothy McVeigh doubtless sincerely believed he was the one being pro-America.
And, yes, one or two nutters will generate next to no footprint. Given that the NSA tracks everything, footprints smaller than regular social circles (which will be dozens of people) will likely be drowned out in the noise. Six or so people playing Wild West with military surplus hardware is probably about the upper limit, both of what cannot be seen by seeing everything and what can hold together through the drugs and whiskey.
That would be enough to cause concern. Not a vast amount. Survivalists are the most dangerous breed of pro-American, at the individual level, but can barely cooperate with themselves. Those able to cooperate are political or religious fruitcakes, which automatically means their intellectual prowess rivals that of a delinquent teenage hedgehog.
True, but they exist in a full information game. One side or the other, if they follow a perfect strategy, will always win, no matter what the other side does. This is ONLY true for one side. For purists, I'll rephrase: one side will always win or draw, which is equal to saying that zero or or one sides can guarantee a win.
It is my ambition, or rather one of mine, to prove that material science favours the builders, that it is theoretically possible to build something that cannot be damaged or destroyed by the application of external momentum or energy.
Spares should be precisely what there's a lot of. To deal with actual, meaningful contingencies (trees taking out power lines, trucks driving into power lines, drunk Air Force commanders ordering live-fire practice on power lines, etc) there should be zero points of failure. Anywhere.
If a meteorite of the kind that lit up Russia early in the year, or the kind that lit up California the year before, hit a substation, no amount of armour will prevent serious damage. The CA one, discussed here as I recall, was the size of a minibus. The fragments that reached the surface - and reports say there were many - were certainly far more dangerous to a transformer than a few grams of lead.
You have to assume such a strike is inevitable. Prevention is impossible. Shielding would be stupid. That leaves option number 3 - make it not matter. It's cheap, easy, effective against any type of outage and provided you have decent routing protocols operating over a bidirectional mesh topology, resilience increases anywhere from superlinearly to exponentially.
Then what? Then you don't care if it's a meteorite, an airliner falling out the sky, an army tank driver on speedballs or Bob Bobkins, the brother and first cousin of Joe Bobkins, out hunting things that'll stay still long enough for him to point his rocket launcher. It. Just. Won't. Matter. Worth. A. Damn. The flicker of your LED house lights will barely register with even super-sensitivities. The routing protocols would have established new pathways to all destinations in microseconds, with the decisions being implemented a millisecond or two later. Nobody would notice and nobody would care.
There's an expense to redundancy, just as there is an expense to not having bridges fall in rivers. But it's a very small expense. The outages from the ice storms and rain storms? Those are big expenses. Big RECURRING expenses. With redundancy alone, due to the statistical nature of line loss, you could get extremely close to zero outage for anyone. Ever. Redundancy (down to as small a scale as practical), smarter placement of utilities (ie: not on thin poles in ice storm prone areas) and better material choices (aluminium cables?!) combined could guarantee the system would survive uninterrupted anything short of a nuclear bomb.
(You could design a complete infrastructure on a national scale that actually could withstand a full-blown nuclear war, but a lack of users would make it pointless. Unless we have developed AI by then. In which case, they and The Machines they'd need to maintain the system could endure pretty much indefinitely.)
If so, it might backfire. The NSA weren't able to prevent the attack, and if law enforcement are baffled then clearly the NSA have nothing that can identify the attackers. One genuine attack and one possible attack, nothing the existing system could do before, during or after. Fifty claims about things the NSA freely admit were fiction - well, those remain fiction.
Fifty claims that can be legitimately called false positives and one, maybe two false negatives. If you were running a company and one of your employees screwed up major decisions 51-52 times in succession, you'd probably fire them. From a canon on the top floor.
In this case, I'd argue the intelligence services and crime units have proven themselves unfit for purpose, and that the power company is too negligent on providing robust, fault-tolerant services and should have their business license withdrawn.
We've known the US has crappy infrastructure since, well, as close to forever as matters in America.
Attacks on a power station or substation would be immaterial if the grid was a grid, redundancy was built into the system, and getting things done was a higher priority than ego strokes and profit margins. (Yeah, heresy, I know.)
The moment you deliberately create single points of failure is the moment you hand out invites to nutcases, lunatics, wannabe cowboys and the rest of the US security infrastructure*. The moment you make such violence nothing more than a public nuisance, something not even worth a writeup in the local paper, is the moment it stops being interesting for the fringe groups to do.
*Yes, the local crackhead with the M16 and armoured personnel carrier is the "militia" the Constitution speaketh of. They are part of the national defence system. Due to two major wars inflicting a massive drain on reserves and an exceptional loss of forces due to PTSD and injuries, said crackheads form an increasingly large part of the regular forces, police and intelligence services. Frankly, I'd be far more concerned about a coup from within than a bunch of moonshine-laden rednecks who have watched too many Dukes of Hazard episodes.
Of course, given the NSA can dictate terms to the President, Congress and Federal judges, the coup might have already happened. Would you notice if it had? Would you care?
Optical SETI is an active field of research. It doesn't get talked about as much as radio SETI, in part because it is only recently that optical interferometry arrays became possible, in part because optical telescope time is expensive and in part because the atmosphere limits the quality of data for optics. There are (very recent) developments in autocorrection that reduce atmospherics, but the reality is that until someone parks an optical SKA telescope in space, the quality of telescope data won't be sufficient.
I'm busy with Chuckie Egg in one window and Elite in another. I really need to write an OXP for Oolite that will let me play both in just one. Can't wait to use military beam lasers on that giant yellow rubber duck.
I would agree with this (it is very largely true) but material I put online in the 1988-1992 timeframe is definitely incomplete. Massive holes in what has been retained. Yes, I will be remembered, for a whole, despite the best efforts of those who know me, but those gaps mean the Internet has forgotten.
Has it forgotten whole people? Entirely possible. If someone less wildly and eccentrically prolific in posting over those same years encountered the same gaps, they may have vanished entirely.
Could that happen today? Less likely. Archives are better and more numerous. Storage is cheaper, as is bandwidth. But one only has to look at the typical tweets and fanfiction.net contributions to realize that although more is transmitted, less is said. The total information per unit time added to the Internet may turn out to be constant.
Back in the stickshift era, Netflix directors drove the interstates/motorways at the proper speed. In first gear. Then parked by slamming directly into reverse. After all, you're supposed to burn things out, right?
Anyone checked the suicide rate of ex-Netflix employees? My guess is that it's above national average. Considerably above. Once an employee has been burned through and is no longer A lister because they're mentally shot, why would anyone else hire them? Their experience means they'll need to be paid more than the graduates who are more functional and more able. Not a good bargain. And the experience is worth nothing because web programmers are a dime a dozen and recommendation algorithms are common.
Work experience should always add value, but in this modern culture, who wants to help another company? The best short-term returns are from squeezing minds till they're dry, then throwing away the rinds. Why would companies worry about the long-term? Not on the balance sheet. As for helping others... that's..... Socialist thinking! Even when there's no competition. All for one and one for me.
Nobody knows what would piss off the wrong people to that extent. The CIA apparently had "rogue" missions being launched by "enthused" controllers. We don't know if that's true, but since I am defining the scope of ignorance, anything we can rationally say we are ignorant of is in scope. In this case, we can rationally say that the best information we have makes it possible that upsetting relatively low-level employees of any security agency may be sufficient to warrant (in their eyes) a visit.
I dispute the conclusion that you should avoid saying X, Y or Z, because avoiding the elephant in the room (or the penguin on the television) may be precisely what upsets them. It would be considered suspicious by some and if those some are amongst the controllers, not mentioning things could also get you a visit.
Hell, we know Rumsfeld held prayer sessions as head of the DoD and is alleged to have held strange superstitions about cats. If someone that bizarre could become head of a department, someone just as bizarre could be involved in CIA operations. There is a finite, non-zero probability that being an Odinist or a crazy cat lady could also attract CIA attention.
The fact is, if you are breathing (or not breathing but still functioning), you will upset someone. There is nothing you can do to avoid it, there will almost always be nothing you can do to defend against it (sorry, that's just how it is), so the old advice still holds true. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.
Very true. Instill an element of fear in someone who you know will talk about it, creating an element of fear over the wider community. PsyOps. Which we know governments practice.
The Russians know no more than the rest of us - Snowden has made it clear he gave all documents to others, and this is extremely believable. It makes it pointless to limit damage - or even establishing what damage there is to be limited - by capturing or killing him.
Standards have never been as high as I'd like - typos and grammatical errors abound in articles - but noospeek is definitely a new low. I would suggest sacking the current editors and replacing them with Grumpy Cat and Happy Cat.
Actually, archaeology shows that only some societies are greedy. It happens that those are the societies that dominate, but that is a consequence of short term gains being militarily better than long term gains, in early history. You were very vulnerable back then and even small losses had large impacts.
Ultimately, though, it means that humans are not compelled to be a bunch of arrogant twits. At the very worst, some societies may have a genetic propensity for it, but that dictates nothing. Even if it did, sending the right-wingers to Mars (or, better, Venus) and using gene therapy or eugenics to reduce (not eliminate, that would be bad) violent tendencies should be sufficient.
The Pledge is an affront to all that school stands for. Unthinking obedience simply isn't compatible with intellectual growth or rational questioning. Obedience to a nation is also incompatible with the international semi-borderless worlds of science and art. Neither paints nor positrons have any respect for local laws or political boundaries. Boundaries exist to maximize the benefits within and minimize contagion from flawed systems, the notion of "loyalty" to any standard is relatively modern as society goes and has been a failure from start to, well, it hasn't finished yet but it's time for philosophers to stop poking at their navels and start thinking about metanations and paranations, how to draw on what has always worked (cooperation across strengths) to derive a notion that is functional, rational, sane and likely to (as an early Megadeth noted) work this time.
Not really. The NSA costs more to run than the national debt. Closing it would be one of the most cost-effective ways to save the nation from bankruptcy. Not that the US is anywhere near close. It will be, if it continues to not spend on the arts and sciences, but economies can remain entirely stable when running 110% of GDP, at least for a few years. Nations aren't like personal bank accounts and you cannot run economies as if they were private budgets.
At this point, the NSA has cost the economy not only its own expenses but billions in international trade (plus interest spanning decades), but can produce no evidence of any benefits. Skipjack is broken, as was SHA-0 (the NSA version of the algorithm). Cryptologists ignored Skipjack once it was determined to be faulty and spent a fair bit of time fixing SHA. These are additional costs, created almost certainly as a result of deliberate breakage by the NSA (it's either that or they're incompetent, take your pick).
When you have something very expensive with no direct or indirect return, you generally term it a failure. When something fails on that scale when your economy has been crippled by neocons and kept defunct by Tea Partiers, the sound fiscal move is to cut losses. When a ship is struggling to stay afloat, you dump the deadweight. The NSA is deadweight until or unless it can show value for money.
There was a time in England when you paid fire fighters insurance. They marked the houses that had paid. Houses that didn't pay - well, picture two Mafia heavies sauntering up the driveway, making comments about how combustible things are and what a pity it would be if an accident were to.... happen. (Terry Pratchett made a reference to this in his books because it is such a sick, evil and yet utterly predictable outcome.)
The service became one of the first truly national services because organized crime syndicates, even firefighting ones, are not approved of.
Slashdot Mirror
Some were certainly considered but prohibited by law. Due to crypto export restrictions, it wasn't until the limits on Open Source were loosened that X was legally permitted to have any kind of meaningful security. The non-export version still had to talk to the exportable edition, after all.
Yes, X was (and is) incredibly sloppy by today's standards and yes a lot of that was due to poor decisions in the days of X10. (Yes, boundaries are a decision. MIT could have chosen any sort of access control list system they wanted, with yet another library handling it. You could have then substituted whatever you wanted, so long as the API remained the same. Pretty much futureproof, no significant extra coding, easier to maintain than what they actually did.)
The coding flaws - of which there were many - were often detectable by tools as ancient as lint.
But you must also remember, X10 and X11 were never intended as products. They were reference implementations of a protocol, not finished products intended for actual use. The different vendors were always "supposed" to provide their own.
World War 1 is an excellent example of degeneracy. But let's face it, there is a level of honesty in charging machine guns and gassing enemy trenches. A depraved honesty, but honesty nonetheless.
Blackwater vehicles machine-gunning civilian populations for the hell of it, drones launching missiles at kids going to peace conferences - this lacks even the honesty.
Even earlier, the Charge of the Light Brigade was supposedly described as "magnificent, but it isn't war". I suppose the same could really be said of the Dambuster raid. There was nothing magnificent about Tora Bora, or the use of large radius, indiscriminate incendiaries earlier. Nor the use of cluster bombs colour coded to look like food drops.
The deliberate bombing of air raid shelters in Iraq was arguably worse than the Nazi bombings of London in the Blitz. The Nazis had no capacity to aim and seem to have been relatively indiscriminate. Bad enough to be a war crime and unacceptable to any civilized people. Firing laser-targeted missiles knowingly at civilian shelters, that goes from mere grotesquely savage incompetence to willful mass murder. To me, there is no question that having the capacity to do less harm but using it to inflict more is the greater evil and the more degenerate.
As it stands, I only get replies from bots and eharmony has scientifically proven that nobody on the face of the planet is compatible with me. Yes, I am serious. Yes, this is the main reason I brew very strong, very high quality mead. Inside work, I'm a meaningless drone in a stagnant occupation. Outside of work, the only company I keep is a three gallon jar. It's not a good conversationalist but it has a greater capacity for thought than my co-workers, which is something.
The older I get, the more I realize that Marvin, the Paranoid Android, was an optimist.
Not quite. The tools would be invented by someone, eventually. And that someone will have just the same accountability issues as the NSA. So you are guaranteed tools of this power being used by some megalomaniac or diabolical mastermind. So they cannot be factors in the equation.
The first question is how to upgrade security to the point that no such tool can ever work. Future tools, who knows, but this grade of attack must be permanently beyond anyone's capability.
I can picture ways of making it very, very hard - at a price - but a total solution is going to be a challenge.
Killing a bunch of wageslave (or just regular slave) engineers in the process. When the innocent become expendable, no matter how valid the cause, when murder and terror become alternatives to diplomacy, the aggressor is not fit even to be spat upon. You know why William Gibson's Neuromancer was so wrong? Technology is progressing far faster, sure, but that's normal in sci-fi. No, William Gibson's mistake was in not foreseeing how degenerate humanity can get.
If efficiency was cool, Linux would have been developed in the 1960s, all airlines would be blended-wing, with waveriders being next year, minimum gas mileage for new cars would be 100 mpg at 100 mph, fast food would be fast (and healthy), the Tea Party would be banned by law, teenagers would have memorized everything published on the Blue Zones and ebooks would be in LuaLaTeX format, not a subset of HTML.
You are correct about the list of suspects. Though it needn't be anti-American beliefs. Timothy McVeigh doubtless sincerely believed he was the one being pro-America.
And, yes, one or two nutters will generate next to no footprint. Given that the NSA tracks everything, footprints smaller than regular social circles (which will be dozens of people) will likely be drowned out in the noise. Six or so people playing Wild West with military surplus hardware is probably about the upper limit, both of what cannot be seen by seeing everything and what can hold together through the drugs and whiskey.
That would be enough to cause concern. Not a vast amount. Survivalists are the most dangerous breed of pro-American, at the individual level, but can barely cooperate with themselves. Those able to cooperate are political or religious fruitcakes, which automatically means their intellectual prowess rivals that of a delinquent teenage hedgehog.
True, but they exist in a full information game. One side or the other, if they follow a perfect strategy, will always win, no matter what the other side does. This is ONLY true for one side. For purists, I'll rephrase: one side will always win or draw, which is equal to saying that zero or or one sides can guarantee a win.
It is my ambition, or rather one of mine, to prove that material science favours the builders, that it is theoretically possible to build something that cannot be damaged or destroyed by the application of external momentum or energy.
Spares should be precisely what there's a lot of. To deal with actual, meaningful contingencies (trees taking out power lines, trucks driving into power lines, drunk Air Force commanders ordering live-fire practice on power lines, etc) there should be zero points of failure. Anywhere.
If a meteorite of the kind that lit up Russia early in the year, or the kind that lit up California the year before, hit a substation, no amount of armour will prevent serious damage. The CA one, discussed here as I recall, was the size of a minibus. The fragments that reached the surface - and reports say there were many - were certainly far more dangerous to a transformer than a few grams of lead.
You have to assume such a strike is inevitable. Prevention is impossible. Shielding would be stupid. That leaves option number 3 - make it not matter. It's cheap, easy, effective against any type of outage and provided you have decent routing protocols operating over a bidirectional mesh topology, resilience increases anywhere from superlinearly to exponentially.
Then what? Then you don't care if it's a meteorite, an airliner falling out the sky, an army tank driver on speedballs or Bob Bobkins, the brother and first cousin of Joe Bobkins, out hunting things that'll stay still long enough for him to point his rocket launcher. It. Just. Won't. Matter. Worth. A. Damn. The flicker of your LED house lights will barely register with even super-sensitivities. The routing protocols would have established new pathways to all destinations in microseconds, with the decisions being implemented a millisecond or two later. Nobody would notice and nobody would care.
There's an expense to redundancy, just as there is an expense to not having bridges fall in rivers. But it's a very small expense. The outages from the ice storms and rain storms? Those are big expenses. Big RECURRING expenses. With redundancy alone, due to the statistical nature of line loss, you could get extremely close to zero outage for anyone. Ever. Redundancy (down to as small a scale as practical), smarter placement of utilities (ie: not on thin poles in ice storm prone areas) and better material choices (aluminium cables?!) combined could guarantee the system would survive uninterrupted anything short of a nuclear bomb.
(You could design a complete infrastructure on a national scale that actually could withstand a full-blown nuclear war, but a lack of users would make it pointless. Unless we have developed AI by then. In which case, they and The Machines they'd need to maintain the system could endure pretty much indefinitely.)
If so, it might backfire. The NSA weren't able to prevent the attack, and if law enforcement are baffled then clearly the NSA have nothing that can identify the attackers. One genuine attack and one possible attack, nothing the existing system could do before, during or after. Fifty claims about things the NSA freely admit were fiction - well, those remain fiction.
Fifty claims that can be legitimately called false positives and one, maybe two false negatives. If you were running a company and one of your employees screwed up major decisions 51-52 times in succession, you'd probably fire them. From a canon on the top floor.
In this case, I'd argue the intelligence services and crime units have proven themselves unfit for purpose, and that the power company is too negligent on providing robust, fault-tolerant services and should have their business license withdrawn.
Scented or unscented? Basic or self-relighting? With or without wax skulls carved on the outside?
These are important decisions!
We've known the US has crappy infrastructure since, well, as close to forever as matters in America.
Attacks on a power station or substation would be immaterial if the grid was a grid, redundancy was built into the system, and getting things done was a higher priority than ego strokes and profit margins. (Yeah, heresy, I know.)
The moment you deliberately create single points of failure is the moment you hand out invites to nutcases, lunatics, wannabe cowboys and the rest of the US security infrastructure*. The moment you make such violence nothing more than a public nuisance, something not even worth a writeup in the local paper, is the moment it stops being interesting for the fringe groups to do.
*Yes, the local crackhead with the M16 and armoured personnel carrier is the "militia" the Constitution speaketh of. They are part of the national defence system. Due to two major wars inflicting a massive drain on reserves and an exceptional loss of forces due to PTSD and injuries, said crackheads form an increasingly large part of the regular forces, police and intelligence services. Frankly, I'd be far more concerned about a coup from within than a bunch of moonshine-laden rednecks who have watched too many Dukes of Hazard episodes.
Of course, given the NSA can dictate terms to the President, Congress and Federal judges, the coup might have already happened. Would you notice if it had? Would you care?
Optical SETI is an active field of research. It doesn't get talked about as much as radio SETI, in part because it is only recently that optical interferometry arrays became possible, in part because optical telescope time is expensive and in part because the atmosphere limits the quality of data for optics. There are (very recent) developments in autocorrection that reduce atmospherics, but the reality is that until someone parks an optical SKA telescope in space, the quality of telescope data won't be sufficient.
I'm busy with Chuckie Egg in one window and Elite in another. I really need to write an OXP for Oolite that will let me play both in just one. Can't wait to use military beam lasers on that giant yellow rubber duck.
Since Twitter, Facebook and the NSA don't store anything with a known value to anyone, all three should be wiped immediately.
I would agree with this (it is very largely true) but material I put online in the 1988-1992 timeframe is definitely incomplete. Massive holes in what has been retained. Yes, I will be remembered, for a whole, despite the best efforts of those who know me, but those gaps mean the Internet has forgotten.
Has it forgotten whole people? Entirely possible. If someone less wildly and eccentrically prolific in posting over those same years encountered the same gaps, they may have vanished entirely.
Could that happen today? Less likely. Archives are better and more numerous. Storage is cheaper, as is bandwidth. But one only has to look at the typical tweets and fanfiction.net contributions to realize that although more is transmitted, less is said. The total information per unit time added to the Internet may turn out to be constant.
Back in the stickshift era, Netflix directors drove the interstates/motorways at the proper speed. In first gear. Then parked by slamming directly into reverse. After all, you're supposed to burn things out, right?
Anyone checked the suicide rate of ex-Netflix employees? My guess is that it's above national average. Considerably above. Once an employee has been burned through and is no longer A lister because they're mentally shot, why would anyone else hire them? Their experience means they'll need to be paid more than the graduates who are more functional and more able. Not a good bargain. And the experience is worth nothing because web programmers are a dime a dozen and recommendation algorithms are common.
Work experience should always add value, but in this modern culture, who wants to help another company? The best short-term returns are from squeezing minds till they're dry, then throwing away the rinds. Why would companies worry about the long-term? Not on the balance sheet. As for helping others... that's..... Socialist thinking! Even when there's no competition. All for one and one for me.
Nobody knows what would piss off the wrong people to that extent. The CIA apparently had "rogue" missions being launched by "enthused" controllers. We don't know if that's true, but since I am defining the scope of ignorance, anything we can rationally say we are ignorant of is in scope. In this case, we can rationally say that the best information we have makes it possible that upsetting relatively low-level employees of any security agency may be sufficient to warrant (in their eyes) a visit.
I dispute the conclusion that you should avoid saying X, Y or Z, because avoiding the elephant in the room (or the penguin on the television) may be precisely what upsets them. It would be considered suspicious by some and if those some are amongst the controllers, not mentioning things could also get you a visit.
Hell, we know Rumsfeld held prayer sessions as head of the DoD and is alleged to have held strange superstitions about cats. If someone that bizarre could become head of a department, someone just as bizarre could be involved in CIA operations. There is a finite, non-zero probability that being an Odinist or a crazy cat lady could also attract CIA attention.
The fact is, if you are breathing (or not breathing but still functioning), you will upset someone. There is nothing you can do to avoid it, there will almost always be nothing you can do to defend against it (sorry, that's just how it is), so the old advice still holds true. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may die.
Very true. Instill an element of fear in someone who you know will talk about it, creating an element of fear over the wider community. PsyOps. Which we know governments practice.
The Russians know no more than the rest of us - Snowden has made it clear he gave all documents to others, and this is extremely believable. It makes it pointless to limit damage - or even establishing what damage there is to be limited - by capturing or killing him.
Standards have never been as high as I'd like - typos and grammatical errors abound in articles - but noospeek is definitely a new low. I would suggest sacking the current editors and replacing them with Grumpy Cat and Happy Cat.
It is not only valid but required, so although your thoughts are appreciated, they are nonetheless wrong.
Actually, archaeology shows that only some societies are greedy. It happens that those are the societies that dominate, but that is a consequence of short term gains being militarily better than long term gains, in early history. You were very vulnerable back then and even small losses had large impacts.
Ultimately, though, it means that humans are not compelled to be a bunch of arrogant twits. At the very worst, some societies may have a genetic propensity for it, but that dictates nothing. Even if it did, sending the right-wingers to Mars (or, better, Venus) and using gene therapy or eugenics to reduce (not eliminate, that would be bad) violent tendencies should be sufficient.
The Pledge is an affront to all that school stands for. Unthinking obedience simply isn't compatible with intellectual growth or rational questioning. Obedience to a nation is also incompatible with the international semi-borderless worlds of science and art. Neither paints nor positrons have any respect for local laws or political boundaries. Boundaries exist to maximize the benefits within and minimize contagion from flawed systems, the notion of "loyalty" to any standard is relatively modern as society goes and has been a failure from start to, well, it hasn't finished yet but it's time for philosophers to stop poking at their navels and start thinking about metanations and paranations, how to draw on what has always worked (cooperation across strengths) to derive a notion that is functional, rational, sane and likely to (as an early Megadeth noted) work this time.
Not really. The NSA costs more to run than the national debt. Closing it would be one of the most cost-effective ways to save the nation from bankruptcy. Not that the US is anywhere near close. It will be, if it continues to not spend on the arts and sciences, but economies can remain entirely stable when running 110% of GDP, at least for a few years. Nations aren't like personal bank accounts and you cannot run economies as if they were private budgets.
At this point, the NSA has cost the economy not only its own expenses but billions in international trade (plus interest spanning decades), but can produce no evidence of any benefits. Skipjack is broken, as was SHA-0 (the NSA version of the algorithm). Cryptologists ignored Skipjack once it was determined to be faulty and spent a fair bit of time fixing SHA. These are additional costs, created almost certainly as a result of deliberate breakage by the NSA (it's either that or they're incompetent, take your pick).
When you have something very expensive with no direct or indirect return, you generally term it a failure. When something fails on that scale when your economy has been crippled by neocons and kept defunct by Tea Partiers, the sound fiscal move is to cut losses. When a ship is struggling to stay afloat, you dump the deadweight. The NSA is deadweight until or unless it can show value for money.
There was a time in England when you paid fire fighters insurance. They marked the houses that had paid. Houses that didn't pay - well, picture two Mafia heavies sauntering up the driveway, making comments about how combustible things are and what a pity it would be if an accident were to.... happen. (Terry Pratchett made a reference to this in his books because it is such a sick, evil and yet utterly predictable outcome.)
The service became one of the first truly national services because organized crime syndicates, even firefighting ones, are not approved of.