>we are engaging most of the enemy (terrorists) in that fight and we have not been attacked on US Soil.
The attacks have happened in Spain and Britain instead. Both had troops in Iraq. Fighting in Iraq does not prevent terrorist attacks.
It was one of our allies who acknowledged that the current President is "the best recruiting sergeant ever for al-Qaida".
bin Laden's second in command, Zawahiri, publicly thanked God for the situation in Iraq.
AQ strategist Yusuf al-Ayeri published a book arguing that the best thing that could possibly happen for the bin Ladenists would be a US invasion of Iraq.
But the people who founded the US were terrified of having one. The Federalist Papers try to reassure people who opposed the Constitution because it might permit a standing army. Their fears are why the Constitution restricts military appropriations to a two-year term and leaves raising armies in the hands of Congress, not the executive.
The way things used to work was that when an army was needed, civilians with their own weapons would enter service as an amateur army, in both senses of the word. They didn't do that well compared to regulars, even then. Mark Twain wrote about someone's face being "as blank as the target after a militia shooting-match". But it is hard to tyrannize the people if they are your armed forces.
>In order for this to work, you'd have to credibly threaten or capture a loved one.
The old recipe for recruiting a spy was MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. If organized crime really is troling computer students, they could use at least three of those, and maybe even ideology ("stick it to the greedy corporate exploiters and their fascist tools in government", or something like that).
The other problem is, what's a CS degree going to do for a blackhat?
Put them through drama school and psychology if you want to raise a crop of social engineers, use an apprenticeship system if you need vulnerability finders, but CS? There are only a few problems in the criminal world (robust scalable botnet control, untracable communications) that are computer science problems. And there can't be room for many people to work on those.
The article was way too light on any of the specifics that would have inclined me to trust it.
If you refuse to believe the results of the Johns Hopkins survey, check this out from their methodology section: "... many roads were not under the control of the Government of Iraq or coalition forces".
But that was 2004, you might argue, and doesn't take into account progress since then.
Savor, then, the implications of the fact that the head of government there met President Bush in *Jordan*. Needing to move to a foreign country to host a visiting dignitary is not "normal".
To keep the numbers in perspective, divide them into Iraq's population, CIA estimate 26 million. 300 dead in Iraq is the same fraction of population there that 9/11 was in the US. They've had 200 killed in a single incident, and the minimum figure from iraqbodycount.net is 49,642: 15 9/lls in absolute terms and 150 proportionally.
May you and all you care about be spared such normalcy.
"Considering the northerly location of Iceland, its climate is much milder than might be expected, especially in winter. The mean annual temperature for Reykjavík is 5 C, the average January temperature being -0.4 C and July 11.2 C" says travelnet.is
And after you get finished profiling Tamils (world leaders in suicide bombings), Sikhs, Chechens, Nepalis, Peruvians, Germans, Irish, and Americans (remember how many terrorist groups there have been in the US) you might as well be doing universal screening.
One other problem is the base rate fallacy (look it up).
The conclusive problem is the fact that our enemies are adaptable. If they see dark-skinned people getting screened, or people getting yanked off airplanes for praying, then they'll simply send the John Walker Lindh types.
>just realistic
There's nothing realistic about wasting screening resources on Muslim non-terrorists when those resources could have gone to detecting terrorist non-Muslims.
>The fact is that ALL of the 9/11 terrorists were radical Muslims.
If you want to protect airplanes you reinforce the cockpit doors and fly air marshals. If you want to stop terrorists you infiltrate them. If you want to shove people around to make yourself feel important or to exercise poorly rationalized bigotry, you profile.
One pressure group is running a petition drive to ask the new Congressional leadership to require paper legally, rather than having us trust the wisdom and honesty of government agencies: http://www.democracyforamerica.com/paperballots
Chaum's peel-off ballot gives you a ticket to take home that doesn't show how you voted but does enable you to track that your vote got counted and got counted correctly.
There's no reason to believe he even might endanger any airplane that he boards. There's not even the thread of suspicion you'd get from guilt by association. There's no allegation that he has violent tendencies or has threatened violence.
He's there because the no-fly list is a tool for control and coercion at the whim of the authorities without the restraint of statute or jury.
Businesses decide what to do based on "discounted cash flow analysis". Think compound interest in reverse. Only the most predictable of industries will invest money because of a possible income stream 20 years in the future.
In other words, a copyright term of 70 years, 90 years or whatnot is no more of an incentive to a business than a term limited to 28 years after renewals.
An individual might see things differently, which means the current system of longer copyrights for corporate holders is completely backwards from an incentive point of view. It would be fairer to have life or life plus one generation for an individual, 20 years for a corporation or assignee.
Sooner or later it hits something or decays, at which point you get charged particles which you can study by seeing how much a magnet bends them. And even a neutral particle can have plenty of effect: your eyes are electronic detectors for neutral photons, after all.
and that "children" is a pretty wide range of ages and abilities.
An adult on 17-year-old with mature critical thinking skills isn't going to be screwed up by a Holocaust denial site. An eight-year-old? You'd better have spent a lot of effort getting that eight-year-old to be skeptical, the effort might not work, and what school is going to train their students to question bad reasoning and arguments from authority? They'd put themselves out of business.
Anyone who gets their ideas about sex from mainstream porn will wind up seriously off the mark. Real women are based on carbon compounds, not silicon compounds(*). Real lovemaking has little in common with porn film activities. And I bet you wouldn't have to be on porn sites for long to find something genuinely contemptuous toward women. A line is crossed when the site starts calling them "bitches".
(*) Silicones, with an e, are silicon compounds. Specifically they're a chain of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms with alkyl side groups.
>hydrogen transports just as easily as oil via the same infrastruture.
Hydrogen will leak through every seam in existing pipelines and sometimes straight through the walls. It's hard enough to build methane-tight plumbing and hydrogen is a much smaller molectule. I've seen estimates that a hydrogen economy would require pipeline upgrades in the hundreds of billions.
>Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself.
Maybe not a priori, but what if (oh so hypothetically) the enormously wealthy could influence legislation that hurt their competitors, or could squeeze out new businesses from the marketplace?
Remember, there was a time when you could acquire wealth by designing and shipping office productivity software.
Want to start an online gambling company? You're the victim of legislation purchased by offline gambling companies.
The top 1% is three million people. That's plastic surgeons, corporate lawyers, car dealers and the like. Many of those people think of themselves as upper middle class.
The "tax breaks for the rich" during this administration are aimed at centimillionaires. Proof: when the estate tax repeal was being rammed through, a compromise that came up was to raise the threshold to $100 million. This would have left all small businesses and family farms completely exempt from estate tax. Ditto most medium businesses.
The machine running the country rejected that amendment. The *only* reason to do that was to give a tax exemption to people with assets over $100 million.
Slashdot Mirror
>we are engaging most of the enemy (terrorists) in that fight and we have not been attacked on US Soil.
The attacks have happened in Spain and Britain instead. Both had troops in Iraq. Fighting in Iraq does not prevent terrorist attacks.
It was one of our allies who acknowledged that the current President is "the best recruiting sergeant ever for al-Qaida".
bin Laden's second in command, Zawahiri, publicly thanked God for the situation in Iraq.
AQ strategist Yusuf al-Ayeri published a book arguing that the best thing that could possibly happen for the bin Ladenists would be a US invasion of Iraq.
What's the cause-and-effect link in current US history between private ownership of light weapons and prevention of fascism?
But the people who founded the US were terrified of having one. The Federalist Papers try to reassure people who opposed the Constitution because it might permit a standing army. Their fears are why the Constitution restricts military appropriations to a two-year term and leaves raising armies in the hands of Congress, not the executive.
The way things used to work was that when an army was needed, civilians with their own weapons would enter service as an amateur army, in both senses of the word. They didn't do that well compared to regulars, even then. Mark Twain wrote about someone's face being "as blank as the target after a militia shooting-match". But it is hard to tyrannize the people if they are your armed forces.
>In order for this to work, you'd have to credibly threaten or capture a loved one.
The old recipe for recruiting a spy was MICE: Money, Ideology, Compromise, Ego. If organized crime really is troling computer students, they could use at least three of those, and maybe even ideology ("stick it to the greedy corporate exploiters and their fascist tools in government", or something like that).
The other problem is, what's a CS degree going to do for a blackhat?
Put them through drama school and psychology if you want to raise a crop of social engineers, use an apprenticeship system if you need vulnerability finders, but CS? There are only a few problems in the criminal world (robust scalable botnet control, untracable communications) that are computer science problems. And there can't be room for many people to work on those.
The article was way too light on any of the specifics that would have inclined me to trust it.
>lacking the ability to run complex simulations on a car design
Finite element analysis is not out of reach today.
>who would mass-manufacture such a vehicle?
China. Both for export and for domestic use.
Indeed, most radars are still lower than that. The W band is home to some cloud-studying radars and not much else.
Conservative figures at iraqbodycount.net.
If you refuse to believe the results of the Johns Hopkins survey, check this out from their methodology section: "... many roads were not under the control of the Government of Iraq or coalition forces".
But that was 2004, you might argue, and doesn't take into account progress since then.
Savor, then, the implications of the fact that the head of government there met President Bush in *Jordan*. Needing to move to a foreign country to host a visiting dignitary is not "normal".
To keep the numbers in perspective, divide them into Iraq's population, CIA estimate 26 million. 300 dead in Iraq is the same fraction of population there that 9/11 was in the US. They've had 200 killed in a single incident, and the minimum figure from iraqbodycount.net is 49,642: 15 9/lls in absolute terms and 150 proportionally.
May you and all you care about be spared such normalcy.
"Considering the northerly location of Iceland, its climate is much milder than might be expected, especially in winter. The mean annual temperature for Reykjavík is 5 C, the average January temperature being -0.4 C and July 11.2 C"
says travelnet.is
>Obviously looking at an actual live video feed in the iraqi capital will reveal a quite normal life
People are resilient, but check what is happening at the city morgue, Riverbend's blog, or even the official statistics on violent incidents.
your network is just as down whether the outage came from an error or from malice. Change control is imperative no matter what.
Background checks won't prevent screwups, and they won't prevent the employee from developing a drug problem after you hire him/her.
And after you get finished profiling Tamils (world leaders in suicide bombings), Sikhs, Chechens, Nepalis, Peruvians, Germans, Irish, and Americans (remember how many terrorist groups there have been in the US) you might as well be doing universal screening.
One other problem is the base rate fallacy (look it up).
The conclusive problem is the fact that our enemies are adaptable. If they see dark-skinned people getting screened, or people getting yanked off airplanes for praying, then they'll simply send the John Walker Lindh types.
>just realistic
There's nothing realistic about wasting screening resources on Muslim non-terrorists when those resources could have gone to detecting terrorist non-Muslims.
>The fact is that ALL of the 9/11 terrorists were radical Muslims.
Since you're willing to make policy on a single data point, here's another single data point. The most recent hijacking attempt I found in Google News was an Eritrean hijacking a plane to Israel where he planned to seek political asylum.
If you want to protect airplanes you reinforce the cockpit doors and fly air marshals. If you want to stop terrorists you infiltrate them. If you want to shove people around to make yourself feel important or to exercise poorly rationalized bigotry, you profile.
Massive investigations and threats of jail time if you don't help them cover up how ineffective their screening is.
One pressure group is running a petition drive to ask the new Congressional leadership to require paper legally, rather than having us trust the wisdom and honesty of government agencies:
http://www.democracyforamerica.com/paperballots
Alternative hypothesis: they're waiting for the spotlight to move away from e-voting machines so they won't get caught.
Chaum's peel-off ballot gives you a ticket to take home that doesn't show how you voted but does enable you to track that your vote got counted and got counted correctly.
There's no reason to believe he even might endanger any airplane that he boards. There's not even the thread of suspicion you'd get from guilt by association. There's no allegation that he has violent tendencies or has threatened violence.
He's there because the no-fly list is a tool for control and coercion at the whim of the authorities without the restraint of statute or jury.
This though is worth exploring some more.
Businesses decide what to do based on "discounted cash flow analysis". Think compound interest in reverse. Only the most predictable of industries will invest money because of a possible income stream 20 years in the future.
In other words, a copyright term of 70 years, 90 years or whatnot is no more of an incentive to a business than a term limited to 28 years after renewals.
An individual might see things differently, which means the current system of longer copyrights for corporate holders is completely backwards from an incentive point of view. It would be fairer to have life or life plus one generation for an individual, 20 years for a corporation or assignee.
"Let's say 70% of [research] sees the light of day . . . that's a good payback."
Quoted in a Wall Street Journal article.
Sooner or later it hits something or decays, at which point you get charged particles which you can study by seeing how much a magnet bends them. And even a neutral particle can have plenty of effect: your eyes are electronic detectors for neutral photons, after all.
and that "children" is a pretty wide range of ages and abilities.
An adult on 17-year-old with mature critical thinking skills isn't going to be screwed up by a Holocaust denial site. An eight-year-old? You'd better have spent a lot of effort getting that eight-year-old to be skeptical, the effort might not work, and what school is going to train their students to question bad reasoning and arguments from authority? They'd put themselves out of business.
Anyone who gets their ideas about sex from mainstream porn will wind up seriously off the mark. Real women are based on carbon compounds, not silicon compounds(*). Real lovemaking has little in common with porn film activities. And I bet you wouldn't have to be on porn sites for long to find something genuinely contemptuous toward women. A line is crossed when the site starts calling them "bitches".
(*) Silicones, with an e, are silicon compounds. Specifically they're a chain of alternating silicon and oxygen atoms with alkyl side groups.
You're not a public institution, which is what this law covers.
>hydrogen transports just as easily as oil via the same infrastruture.
Hydrogen will leak through every seam in existing pipelines and sometimes straight through the walls. It's hard enough to build methane-tight plumbing and hydrogen is a much smaller molectule. I've seen estimates that a hydrogen economy would require pipeline upgrades in the hundreds of billions.
>Just because there are enormously wealthy people doesn't mean you're prevented from acquiring wealth yourself.
Maybe not a priori, but what if (oh so hypothetically) the enormously wealthy could influence legislation that hurt their competitors, or could squeeze out new businesses from the marketplace?
Remember, there was a time when you could acquire wealth by designing and shipping office productivity software.
Want to start an online gambling company? You're the victim of legislation purchased by offline gambling companies.
In 1906 the poor could work themselves out of poverty, even if they sometimes needed a union to do it.
Today, well, read Nickel and Dimed to see what things look like at the bottom of the income scale.
The top 1% is three million people. That's plastic surgeons, corporate lawyers, car dealers and the like. Many of those people think of themselves as upper middle class.
The "tax breaks for the rich" during this administration are aimed at centimillionaires. Proof: when the estate tax repeal was being rammed through, a compromise that came up was to raise the threshold to $100 million. This would have left all small businesses and family farms completely exempt from estate tax. Ditto most medium businesses.
The machine running the country rejected that amendment. The *only* reason to do that was to give a tax exemption to people with assets over $100 million.