there is an interesting book, 'Killing the Cranes', by Edward Girardet that describes the hyper-hospitality of the native Afghans. He contrasts it with the foreign fighters like Bin Ladin, who came to Afghanistan for jihad, and wouldn't shake his hand.
Another problem is that during the Soviet invasion, 2 million Afghans became refugees in Pakistan, living in tent cities with out links to their traditional village life. The ISI, the Saudi Mukhabarat, and the Taliban and Al Qaeda set up madrassas to brainwash vast numbers of youth to be like them - extremists. The USA of course gave them money mainly for bombs and missiles. There is a funny passage where Charlie Wilson cusses out Girardet for doing an investigation of the USAID school programs in the Soviet war days, and finding that a bunch of the schools were never built, had no teachers, etc etc etc. a lot of the money was just stolen / skimmed by corrupt officials. The donors like Wilson didn't bother to investigate very closely.
and now, some of the traditional hospitality has been replaced by extremism in some places in the country.
i dont recall an uniforms being used during the triangle trade of the 1600s-1800s. our own american version of 'mass atrocity'.
but i must admire the 'sciencey types' in their foray into social analysis. imho government can be treated somewhat like a science, like Aristotle tried to do in 'the politics', and data gathered and analyzed just like say, astronomy. the lack of experiment doesnt necessarily preclude the development and testing of theories.
essentailly, people like Soufan, O'Neill, and others were on the track of al Qaeda in the 1990s and could probably have stopped at least part of 9/11 from happening, if they hadn't been blocked by the dysfunctional bureaucracy.
"I get up, and nothing gets me down.
You got it tough, I’ve seen the toughest soul around
And I know, just how it feels.
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real
Oh can't you see me standing here,
I've got my back against the record machine, I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Oh can't you see what I mean ?
Might as well jump. Jump !
Might as well jump.
Go ahead, jump. Jump !
Go ahead, jump. "
-- robot Van Halen Robot Eddie Van Halen Robot Alex Van Halen Robot Michael Anthony Robot David Lee Roth
was the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The law is incredibly vague, and thats the only thing they could get him on. They couldnt get him on 'espionage', because he didnt commit espionage. they couldnt get him for 'false statements to the FBI', because he didnt make any. they couldnt get him for 'obstruction of justice', because he didnt obstruct justice. The only thing they could get him for was improperly accessing information on a govt computer. Which basically could be used arbitrarily against almost anyone in the government who does their day to day job because of the vagueness of the law and the reality of how computer systems work in government. Millions of govt contractors and employees unknowingly violate this law all the time. Ever shared a password with someone because your access hadn't been granted yet, but you had to get a job done anyways, and your boss let you use theirs for a few days? Yeah, thats against the law.
You should read the act some time (google it at cornell). The first part, the 'Computer Espionage Act', is essentially the ordinary anti-spy Espionage Act rewritten to include not only 'defense information' but 'foreign relations' information. . . this law is one of the reasons they could claim Bradley Manning violated the law for leaking innocuous state department emails about things like Icelandic Bank Fraud (the reykjavic 13 memo for example).
this is not about 'anti hacking'. well, its intent might be. but the real effect will be an arbitrary hammer to smash against people the government doesnt like. who doesnt the government like? people pointing out its flaws. thats who.
maybe we could start actually prosecuting people for war crimes?
it seems like you can kill millions of people and get away with it, but if your advertising is misleading, oh my god, the consumer watchdogs will sue you.
maybe if someone could figure out you can 'consume' warfare, then maybe we could have a 'consumers reports' test.
i am not sure what the 'product' is here though. freedom? government itself?
in the US would be arrested under this bullshit law? free speech means you can shit all over anyone you want to, any time. its part of why we split from the Uk, so that the government would stop murdering people as 'enemies of the state' simply because they mouthed off at some official who was a corrupt jackass.
the UK is a racist country run by old white men.
the US has freedom of speech and a black president.
We even had a black man run one of our shitty banks that collapsed (Bank of America).
are not impressed. i mean, these fucking UK govt assholes want to 'save the world from racism', but when it comes to their foreign policy, they have no problem keeping the system in place where dictatorial asswipes control vast swaths of the planet for the benefit of a few hedge funds and investment banks . its incredibly racist.
in the UK. just ask Lipstadt, she had to spend millions of dollars in court to defend herself against a lunatic named David Irving, a "historian" who thinks that Hitler was not involved in Krystallnacht.
in Australia, we have the first defamation case over the internet against a US financial journal for pointing out that Joseph Gutnick is really not a very nice person, and in fact does many many naughty, naughty things.
by James Bamford, then go watch the PBS Frontline special ("Spy Factory") online, it's free.
there are interviews with an FBI agent "on loan" to CIA working in CIA's Alec Station, who knew that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi (Nawaf) had US Visas. He tried to tell FBI HQ, and the CIA told him not to. Ordered him not to.
you are correct to say that it 'doesnt end up where it needs to go'... but WHY didn't it end up where it needed to go?
"It's ultimately a social networking problem"
that contradicts the evidence from the Alec Station situation. the CIA --actively prevented the FBI from knowning there were two terrorists in the US--. Why did this happen?
We don't even know. Only recently, last year, did we find out the identities of the CIA managers of Alec Station - ten years after 9/11. Ten Years. It wasn't Congress and it wasn't even ordinary journalists who uncovered it, --- it was two guys in trucker hats who make independent documentaries.
One of the main FBI men, John O'Neill, who was an expert on al qaeda and terror, was fired just before 9/11, because he did not fit into the bureaucracy properly. He was not a 'insane maverick', he was a highly competent professional agent. He was also hot on the heels of the terrorists just before he got fired. His mentee, Ali Soufan, has written an incredible book about their investigation of the Cole Bombing, and Soufans work after 9/11 to round up Al Qaeda leaders and interrogate them. O'Neill was basically fired, and Soufan was ridiculed for his agreeing to testify about the incompetence and stupidity of CIA interrogators (torturers) who interfered with his investigations after 9/11.
When experts with high levels of competence like Soufan and O'Neill are disregarded and punished by the system in favor of incompetent sycophants, this is not a 'social networking problem'.
none of the CIA people have been held accountable. Some of them were promoted. Bush people blame it all on Clinton, Clinton people blame it all on Bush. Nobody wants to get to the bottom of what really happened. I myself can't even bring myself to write a wikipedia article about the Alec Station people who did this screwup, it just is too mind boggling to contemplate, and their identities are technically classified anyways, even though they have been figured out by the blogosphere.
All of this has nothing to do with a 'social networking problem'. it is about corruption and turf battles between politicians who lack ethics and morality.
(and no, i am not a 9/11 conspiracy nut. i have never seen even a shred of evidence that would convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was an 'inside job').
Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
At the end of the early British war
The young land started growing
The young blood started flowing
But I ain't marchin' anymore
For I've killed my share of Indians
In a thousand different fights
I was there at the Little Big Horn
I heard many men lying I saw many more dying
But I ain't marchin' anymore
chorus)
It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all
For I stole California from the Mexican land
Fought in the bloody Civil War
Yes I even killed my brothers
And so many others But I ain't marchin' anymore
For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain't marchin' anymore
(chorus)
For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky
Set off the mighty mushroom roar
When I saw the cities burning I knew that I was learning
That I ain't marchin' anymore
Now the labor leader's screamin'
when they close the missile plants,
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore,
Call it "Peace" or call it "Treason,"
Call it "Love" or call it "Reason,"
But I ain't marchin' any more,
No I ain't marchin' any more
Vendetta Online - been around for years, and they are a 'real' flight simulator / space combat game. it has a steady user base, but a tiny one. you can maybe argue that its because of the nature of the development team/company.
but i am not sure. there might be something inherently 'non-popular' about flight-sim games, that means you cant have one thats a big MMO.
Other examples:
Warbirds, the WWII online combat sim. Amazing flight sim, but tiny user base.
Tanki Onlin - a tank game. very popular, but again, not huge blockbuster. and there is no 'mmo' to it. its all twitch battles in 'battle rooms'.
compare this to popular MMOs... which are largely driven by luck-based and stats-based combat, grafted onto pseudo stories and nice visuals. you don't have to contemplate or learn complex 3 dimensional maneuvers, nor do you have to execute them repeatedly with split second timing, in order to 'win' in these games.
instead, you have to memorize spells and attack patterns, but you don't have to do anything, sort of, 'performance oriented'.
flight sim combat is like playing the piano or something. ..big learning curve. but MMO combat is more like playing 'guitar hero' on super easy level. you barely even have to have any rythm or sense of tone to play it.
i mean, they could have a special edition just for tech hoarders. you know who you are. you have a set of 3.5 floppies that you have been 'meaning to transfer to CD' for about 15 years now. and an old sparc station with no network card, and a sparc network card that's the wrong kind that you were going to see if you could hack a driver for, then there's the silicon graphics indigo that is missing a power button... about 135 old cables of various sorts for equipment that hasn't been manufactured since 1987, etc etc etc.
Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Analog Devices, Xilinx, Altera, IBM, nVidia, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ratheon, General Dynamics, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Apple.
don't forget starbucks, wal-mart, target, kfc, pizza hut, and other wonderful american industrial behemoths that employ most of the workers in the economy.
the uighurs, and a few other minor exceptions, yeah. the chinese communist party doesn't tell anyone what to do.
some people will complain, especially americans, who keep brining up this old 'korean war' thing, where chinese troops were killing UN troops who were trying to drive out a horrible dictator who murdered hundreds of thousands of people. but hey. there are whiners in every bunch.
Slashdot Mirror
im glad we have that ironed out, so that conservatives can stop conflating them.
as a conservative republican, i am glad to see that the US government is embracing the free enterprise system of capitalism.
the chinese communist party is clearly our ally in this movement towards freedom.
the labor unions? not so much. buncha commies.
s as much money? please tell me what social benefit Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch provide to society versus a couple of failed solar power companies.
then of course we subsidize shitty contractors like Halliburton in our never ending wars.
there is an interesting book, 'Killing the Cranes', by Edward Girardet that describes the hyper-hospitality of the native Afghans. He contrasts it with the foreign fighters like Bin Ladin, who came to Afghanistan for jihad, and wouldn't shake his hand.
Another problem is that during the Soviet invasion, 2 million Afghans became refugees in Pakistan, living in tent cities with out links to their traditional village life. The ISI, the Saudi Mukhabarat, and the Taliban and Al Qaeda set up madrassas to brainwash vast numbers of youth to be like them - extremists. The USA of course gave them money mainly for bombs and missiles. There is a funny passage where Charlie Wilson cusses out Girardet for doing an investigation of the USAID school programs in the Soviet war days, and finding that a bunch of the schools were never built, had no teachers, etc etc etc. a lot of the money was just stolen / skimmed by corrupt officials. The donors like Wilson didn't bother to investigate very closely.
and now, some of the traditional hospitality has been replaced by extremism in some places in the country.
i dont recall an uniforms being used during the triangle trade of the 1600s-1800s. our own american version of 'mass atrocity'.
but i must admire the 'sciencey types' in their foray into social analysis. imho government can be treated somewhat like a science, like Aristotle tried to do in 'the politics', and data gathered and analyzed just like say, astronomy. the lack of experiment doesnt necessarily preclude the development and testing of theories.
of what the FBI could be, if we wanted it.
highly competent, highly educated, highly effective, highly efficient.
essentailly, people like Soufan, O'Neill, and others were on the track of al Qaeda in the 1990s and could probably have stopped at least part of 9/11 from happening, if they hadn't been blocked by the dysfunctional bureaucracy.
"I get up, and nothing gets me down.
You got it tough, I’ve seen the toughest soul around
And I know, just how it feels.
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real
Oh can't you see me standing here,
I've got my back against the record machine, I ain't the worst that you've seen.
Oh can't you see what I mean ?
Might as well jump. Jump !
Might as well jump.
Go ahead, jump. Jump !
Go ahead, jump.
"
-- robot Van Halen
Robot Eddie Van Halen
Robot Alex Van Halen
Robot Michael Anthony
Robot David Lee Roth
back home, and they arent much bigger than a receiver, an electric motor, and some spring mechanism.
was the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. The law is incredibly vague, and thats the only thing they could get him on. They couldnt get him on 'espionage', because he didnt commit espionage. they couldnt get him for 'false statements to the FBI', because he didnt make any. they couldnt get him for 'obstruction of justice', because he didnt obstruct justice. The only thing they could get him for was improperly accessing information on a govt computer. Which basically could be used arbitrarily against almost anyone in the government who does their day to day job because of the vagueness of the law and the reality of how computer systems work in government. Millions of govt contractors and employees unknowingly violate this law all the time. Ever shared a password with someone because your access hadn't been granted yet, but you had to get a job done anyways, and your boss let you use theirs for a few days? Yeah, thats against the law.
You should read the act some time (google it at cornell). The first part, the 'Computer Espionage Act', is essentially the ordinary anti-spy Espionage Act rewritten to include not only 'defense information' but 'foreign relations' information. . . this law is one of the reasons they could claim Bradley Manning violated the law for leaking innocuous state department emails about things like Icelandic Bank Fraud (the reykjavic 13 memo for example).
this is not about 'anti hacking'. well, its intent might be. but the real effect will be an arbitrary hammer to smash against people the government doesnt like. who doesnt the government like? people pointing out its flaws. thats who.
maybe we could start actually prosecuting people for war crimes?
it seems like you can kill millions of people and get away with it, but if your advertising is misleading, oh my god, the consumer watchdogs will sue you.
maybe if someone could figure out you can 'consume' warfare, then maybe we could have a 'consumers reports' test.
i am not sure what the 'product' is here though. freedom? government itself?
oh well. whatever. in the UK i guess i would be arrested for 'slander and libel'.
in the US would be arrested under this bullshit law? free speech means you can shit all over anyone you want to, any time. its part of why we split from the Uk, so that the government would stop murdering people as 'enemies of the state' simply because they mouthed off at some official who was a corrupt jackass.
the UK is a racist country run by old white men.
the US has freedom of speech and a black president.
We even had a black man run one of our shitty banks that collapsed (Bank of America).
are not impressed. i mean, these fucking UK govt assholes want to 'save the world from racism', but when it comes to their foreign policy, they have no problem keeping the system in place where dictatorial asswipes control vast swaths of the planet for the benefit of a few hedge funds and investment banks . its incredibly racist.
in the UK. just ask Lipstadt, she had to spend millions of dollars in court to defend herself against a lunatic named David Irving, a "historian" who thinks that Hitler was not involved in Krystallnacht.
in Australia, we have the first defamation case over the internet against a US financial journal for pointing out that Joseph Gutnick is really not a very nice person, and in fact does many many naughty, naughty things.
hint; 1. they arent. some of them might have degrees higher than yours.
go to an apple store. ask how many EEs are working there.
by James Bamford, then go watch the PBS Frontline special ("Spy Factory") online, it's free.
there are interviews with an FBI agent "on loan" to CIA working in CIA's Alec Station, who knew that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi (Nawaf) had US Visas. He tried to tell FBI HQ, and the CIA told him not to. Ordered him not to.
you are correct to say that it 'doesnt end up where it needs to go'... but WHY didn't it end up where it needed to go?
"It's ultimately a social networking problem"
that contradicts the evidence from the Alec Station situation. the CIA --actively prevented the FBI from knowning there were two terrorists in the US--. Why did this happen?
We don't even know. Only recently, last year, did we find out the identities of the CIA managers of Alec Station - ten years after 9/11. Ten Years. It wasn't Congress and it wasn't even ordinary journalists who uncovered it, --- it was two guys in trucker hats who make independent documentaries.
One of the main FBI men, John O'Neill, who was an expert on al qaeda and terror, was fired just before 9/11, because he did not fit into the bureaucracy properly. He was not a 'insane maverick', he was a highly competent professional agent. He was also hot on the heels of the terrorists just before he got fired. His mentee, Ali Soufan, has written an incredible book about their investigation of the Cole Bombing, and Soufans work after 9/11 to round up Al Qaeda leaders and interrogate them. O'Neill was basically fired, and Soufan was ridiculed for his agreeing to testify about the incompetence and stupidity of CIA interrogators (torturers) who interfered with his investigations after 9/11.
When experts with high levels of competence like Soufan and O'Neill are disregarded and punished by the system in favor of incompetent sycophants, this is not a 'social networking problem'.
none of the CIA people have been held accountable. Some of them were promoted. Bush people blame it all on Clinton, Clinton people blame it all on Bush. Nobody wants to get to the bottom of what really happened. I myself can't even bring myself to write a wikipedia article about the Alec Station people who did this screwup, it just is too mind boggling to contemplate, and their identities are technically classified anyways, even though they have been figured out by the blogosphere.
All of this has nothing to do with a 'social networking problem'. it is about corruption and turf battles between politicians who lack ethics and morality.
(and no, i am not a 9/11 conspiracy nut. i have never seen even a shred of evidence that would convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was an 'inside job').
i would hate to point out to ayn rand that capitalist systems do this just as well as communist systems.
Oh I marched to the battle of New Orleans
At the end of the early British war
The young land started growing
The young blood started flowing
But I ain't marchin' anymore
For I've killed my share of Indians
In a thousand different fights
I was there at the Little Big Horn
I heard many men lying I saw many more dying
But I ain't marchin' anymore
chorus)
It's always the old to lead us to the war
It's always the young to fall
Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun
Tell me is it worth it all
For I stole California from the Mexican land
Fought in the bloody Civil War
Yes I even killed my brothers
And so many others But I ain't marchin' anymore
For I marched to the battles of the German trench
In a war that was bound to end all wars
Oh I must have killed a million men
And now they want me back again
But I ain't marchin' anymore
(chorus)
For I flew the final mission in the Japanese sky
Set off the mighty mushroom roar
When I saw the cities burning I knew that I was learning
That I ain't marchin' anymore
Now the labor leader's screamin'
when they close the missile plants,
United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore,
Call it "Peace" or call it "Treason,"
Call it "Love" or call it "Reason,"
But I ain't marchin' any more,
No I ain't marchin' any more
-- phil ochs
Vendetta Online - been around for years, and they are a 'real' flight simulator / space combat game. it has a steady user base, but a tiny one. you can maybe argue that its because of the nature of the development team/company.
but i am not sure. there might be something inherently 'non-popular' about flight-sim games, that means you cant have one thats a big MMO.
Other examples:
Warbirds, the WWII online combat sim. Amazing flight sim, but tiny user base.
Tanki Onlin - a tank game. very popular, but again, not huge blockbuster. and there is no 'mmo' to it. its all twitch battles in 'battle rooms'.
compare this to popular MMOs... which are largely driven by luck-based and stats-based combat, grafted onto pseudo stories and nice visuals. you don't have to contemplate or learn complex 3 dimensional maneuvers, nor do you have to execute them repeatedly with split second timing, in order to 'win' in these games.
instead, you have to memorize spells and attack patterns, but you don't have to do anything, sort of, 'performance oriented'.
flight sim combat is like playing the piano or something. . .big learning curve. but MMO combat is more like playing 'guitar hero' on super easy level. you barely even have to have any rythm or sense of tone to play it.
i mean, they could have a special edition just for tech hoarders. you know who you are. you have a set of 3.5 floppies that you have been 'meaning to transfer to CD' for about 15 years now. and an old sparc station with no network card, and a sparc network card that's the wrong kind that you were going to see if you could hack a driver for, then there's the silicon graphics indigo that is missing a power button... about 135 old cables of various sorts for equipment that hasn't been manufactured since 1987, etc etc etc.
for the thing, then the developers could afford their own server and wouldn't have to put it on bizarre file websites.
you realize that at least half of 'cosmos' would be impossible without liberal arts, like history, philosophy, languages, anthropology, etc?
Intel, AMD, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Analog Devices, Xilinx, Altera, IBM, nVidia, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Ratheon, General Dynamics, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Apple.
don't forget starbucks, wal-mart, target, kfc, pizza hut, and other wonderful american industrial behemoths that employ most of the workers in the economy.
the uighurs, and a few other minor exceptions, yeah. the chinese communist party doesn't tell anyone what to do.
some people will complain, especially americans, who keep brining up this old 'korean war' thing, where chinese troops were killing UN troops who were trying to drive out a horrible dictator who murdered hundreds of thousands of people. but hey. there are whiners in every bunch.
we kept selling weapons to iran. it was called 'the iran contra affair'.