>Let's either win this damn thing or get the hell out of it.
Which would require deciding who we're fighting. The Kurds, the Sunnis, and two factions of Shi'a all have their own militias and are mutually hostile. The Johns Hopkins casualty study said two Iraqis are dying from internal violence for every one that dies at our hands.
When the British made Iraq, they put two Siamese cats and a dog into a canvas bag. We've now jumped into the canvas bag ourselves and are in the middle of a catfight. The closest thing to winning might be a Bosnia situation where we drag people kicking and screaming to a peace deal and then enforce it.
>The military wanted this fight just as badly as the Bush administration did.
The Army War College warned against it, General Newbold opposed it, General Shinseki didn't want to do it with that few troops, General Cordingley opposed it in public, and General Zinni of Central COmmand said it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time before the invasion.
Don't try to talk ROI. You'll be talking to finance people who will see instantly that there's not enough data about quantitative risks to back up what you're saying.
Instead, calculate the cost of a breach. Then walk up the chain of command with the message "Like any risk, we can avoid it, mitigate it, transfer it to an insurance company, or accept it. If you do nothing you're accepting it. If you accept it then on the day a breach happens you will spend eleventy thousand dollars of company money. Do you have signing authority for eleventy thousand? If yes, here's the cost of a couple of mitigation options, and you're the boss. If no, you understand that I'm only going over your head because the decision has to be made at that level."
IP addresses can be spoofed, but you can get a vague idea about time zone if the attacks are manual instead of being automated. If you get an old-school intruder who leaves taunts behind, you can make guesses from the style and grammar: my wife used to be able to pinpoint a student's native language based on how they wrote English.
>patent law reform will only come from the judiciary
Patent law is set by Congress.
Imagine your Linux user group showing up every two years to man the phones and install the computers at the campaign of the most friendly candidate. You will get attention like someone with a huge check would get attention. If you're in South Dakota where there are only 425,000 registered voters only a fraction of which turn out, you'll have enough power that your Senators will be oddly passionate about eliminating algorithm patents.
>He never should have discussed client notification with them.
Yes, he should have, but in the form "I strongly recommend that you ask corporate counsel whether laws X, Y and Q apply. If they do you will have to notify your clients. The facts and the unknowns that counsel will need to review include A, B, and E".
I don't keep my clients in the dark about things that might hurt them. I also don't exceed my expertise by playing lawyer.
Notifying the world on his own initiative would be a breach of professional ethics, only justifiable if there's some consideration more important than professional ethics (imagine this happening to the records at a battered women's shelter, for example).
>suburbia developments that are designed to make trees impossible
Would you please drive over to my suburban house and help rake the leaves from all the impossible trees? I could use help cleaning the gutters as well.
>there is a history of global temperature change. How is this any different?
It's different because we're now trying to raise enough crops to feed six billion humans, many of them living near seacoasts within a few meters of sea level. The Little Ice Age and the high sea levels of 40 million years ago were both natural, but either one today would be a disaster on the scale of World War II or worse.
>there should be more research into our contribution to raising the earths temperature before we start making it colder
Nobody's about to launch it: as Picard said, "...it is always best to have more than one option."
>The magnetic axis wobbles all over the place and even reverses, but I've never heard even the remotest suggestion that it has ever been anything other than a very simple axis. The Earth's core generates a magnetic field as a result of (a) being molten, and (b) rotating, so is probably produced by circulatory currents within that core.
This gets interesting.
There is a quadrupole moment, and it can exceed the dipole moment just before a pole reversal.
The assumption all along was that the magnetic field was fairly simple (on pretty much the grounds you mentioned)and that therefore you could use a rock's magnetization to prove that it came from near the equator. What happened with this paper was that he produced evidence backing up the assumption.
BTW, even in geology 600 million years is long enough for interesting things to happen. Go back that far and Gondwanaland hadn't even formed yet. 200 million years ago it hadn't broken up. Climate can change faster than continents could drift: I'm typing from a place that was under thousands of feet of ice when Christanity and Islam were founded. 50 million years ago we weren't having ice ages at all.
DDT is still in use for malaria control in tropical countries. These days it's more likely to be used indoors and less likely to be part of a massive, resistance-inducing (spraying was already getting less popular due to ineffectiveness even before the publication of "Silent Spring"), corruption-prone spraying campaign.
Without a ban, there is still the issue of whether aid agencies apply pressure. USAID does prefer insecticide-treated netting over area-wide application, but that's a very different thing from "completely banned".
The factual criticism of environmentalists over this is that at the 2001 Stockholm Convention they did *try* to eliminate the public health exception. They don't deserve to get off the hook for that just because they failed.
>increased the fuel econemy rating for a good portion of vehicles on the road.
Why not raise it across the board? Googling for "CAFE mpg 2000" and "CAFE mpg 2006" is revealing.
>The fact is that bush hasn't run away from environmental issues at all.
Correct. The "Healthy Forests Initiative" is hardly running away from an issue. Neither is the "Clear Skies Act", which if Wikipedia has their facts straight
* Allows 42 million more tons of pollution emitted than the EPA proposal.
* Weakens controls on mercury pollution levels compared to what would be achieved by enforcing the Clean Air Act stringently.
* Weakens the current cap on nitrogen oxide pollution levels from 1.25 million tons to 2.1 million tons, allowing 68 % more NOx pollution.
* Delays the improvement of sulfur dioxide (SO2) pollution levels compared to the Clean Air Act requirements.
* Delays enforcement of smog-and-soot pollution standards until 2015.
* Exempts major stationary emissions sources from installing modern pollution control as required under New Source Review when making major capacity upgrades or renovations.
The endless attempts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge are not "running away", either.
November 2004, changed the standard for allowing sewage to be dumped without complete treatment from "emergency" to any time it rains.
May 2002, tore up existing standards to allow Appalachian coal miners to bury mountain streams in waste.
Bush is not running away from the environment, he's making a frontal attack on it.
>No, I disagree that that system works (again, I haven't RTFA
It's auditable, unlike certain other systems that have actually made it to the field. Machines that cheat can be detected.
The real problem is the one shown by the discussion in this thread. Even career computer people (both the posters and the moderators) can't understand what the security properties are. Understanding how the security properties are met requires some crypto knowledge which is not common among the electorate.
It looks like this system cannot meet the human interface requirement of being understandable enough, to enough people, to have the credibility to make people accept its results.
Shamir's three-ballot system, in contrast, includes no crypto and anyone with a high school education should be able to understand it, but I shudder at the thought of explaining it well enough to reach the bottom decile of the electorate.
>if you typically go to the New York Times and ESPN and the National Georgraphic and Nick.com these exploits will never affect you.
Unless the site is compromised by an attacker, or carries ads from an inadequately screened advertiser, or unless the advertiser has been 0wned.
>Also if you're running a mail program that's been updated since Clinton was President you can't be attacked through HTML e-mail since they all block scripting and ActiveX in mail by default.
That still leaves the attack vector of malicious image files. Most recently that would mean the WMF exploits, but prior to that there have been exploitable bugs in JPEG and PNG parsers. I recommend against HMTL email in any event because of the risk of being tracked by web bugs. HTML email is, pardon the technical security industry jargon, an "abomination unto the Lord".
>And in what other religions do such great numbers of suicide bombers occur?
The world leaders in suicide bombings are the Tamil Tigers.
>Just why are those Sunnis and Shi'a killing one another in such a focused fashion?
Revenge for the Saddam regime motivated the Shi'a, fear of being the new victims (and of missing out on the oil) motivates the Sunni, and both know they have a once in a lifetime chance to lay claim to territory and power now that the Americans deleted the country's operating system. Going back a bit further, the Shi'a carefully commemorate grievances from over 1300 years ago, and Sunni are appalled by some features of Shiite doctrine.
>None of the Benedictine nuns nor Jesuit brothers ever suggested I suicide for Christ.....
Christians teach that actively seeking out martyrdom is vanity, but it's probably happened. Suicide bombing does not fit well into orthodox Islam, either, which has an explicit written prohibition against suicide (it's only implicit in Christianity). People who blow themselves up shock normal Muslims, are condemned by most clerics, but do get support from a non-negligible movement. Saudi money has spread what would normally have been a splinter sect into a worldwide phenomenon.
>I will say this, though - If I'm wrong, and you find some nuance in the document I missed, please post and inform me.
Firefox isn't opening the link at regulations.gov, so let's take a look at the GPO web site. "Under both options, the carrier will not permit the boarding of a passenger unless the passenger has been cleared by CBP." Shortly thereafter, discussing ships, they explain the purpose is "to prevent vessel departures with a high-risk passenger or crew member onboard." I can't read those as anything but a requirement for government clearance before someone can leave the country by common carrier.
You're quite right to insist on primary sources as opposed to commentary by people with agendas.
>Now, this rule makes it that your passport is checked leaving and entering. It's a small but important difference.
It's not your passport that would be checked under this rule. Valid passport, no valid passport, or diplomatic credentials from the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the airline or cruise ship won't be allowed to carry you unless the government gives a thumbs up.
>any such proposal would have to pass both the House and the Senate, and somehow I just can't see that happening.
The agency that sets the regulations already has statutory power to make regulations. This is them saying "We're about to make a change in our administrative policies". Look up "administrative law" for more background.
Oh, and look at what the House and Senate have been passing lately.
The exact link you cite contains the sentence "Under both options, the carrier will not permit the boarding of a passenger unless the passenger has been cleared by CBP."
>Where was the outrage then, where was the irate Slashdot article then?
Have you ever noticed that Slashdot sometimes doesn't pick up stories immediately, and that a lot of people don't regularly read the Federal Register?
Slashdot Mirror
>Let's either win this damn thing or get the hell out of it.
Which would require deciding who we're fighting. The Kurds, the Sunnis, and two factions of Shi'a all have their own militias and are mutually hostile. The Johns Hopkins casualty study said two Iraqis are dying from internal violence for every one that dies at our hands.
When the British made Iraq, they put two Siamese cats and a dog into a canvas bag. We've now jumped into the canvas bag ourselves and are in the middle of a catfight. The closest thing to winning might be a Bosnia situation where we drag people kicking and screaming to a peace deal and then enforce it.
>The military wanted this fight just as badly as the Bush administration did.
The Army War College warned against it, General Newbold opposed it, General Shinseki didn't want to do it with that few troops, General Cordingley opposed it in public, and General Zinni of Central COmmand said it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time before the invasion.
Don't try to talk ROI. You'll be talking to finance people who will see instantly that there's not enough data about quantitative risks to back up what you're saying.
Instead, calculate the cost of a breach. Then walk up the chain of command with the message "Like any risk, we can avoid it, mitigate it, transfer it to an insurance company, or accept it. If you do nothing you're accepting it. If you accept it then on the day a breach happens you will spend eleventy thousand dollars of company money. Do you have signing authority for eleventy thousand? If yes, here's the cost of a couple of mitigation options, and you're the boss. If no, you understand that I'm only going over your head because the decision has to be made at that level."
IP addresses can be spoofed, but you can get a vague idea about time zone if the attacks are manual instead of being automated. If you get an old-school intruder who leaves taunts behind, you can make guesses from the style and grammar: my wife used to be able to pinpoint a student's native language based on how they wrote English.
And ATMS can't be opened with a minibar key.
>One is indistinguishable from the other. I'm getting a lot of finger pointing and name calling but no ideas, solutions, etc.
Maybe there's a place online that has excerpts from The Plan: Big Ideas for America, the Democrats's ideas and proposed solutions.
Indistinguishable? Look at the voting breakdown on the Abu Ghraib Legalization Act.
See this resignation letter form a lifelong Republican who has a shelf full of thank-yous from the Bushes
>patent law reform will only come from the judiciary
Patent law is set by Congress.
Imagine your Linux user group showing up every two years to man the phones and install the computers at the campaign of the most friendly candidate. You will get attention like someone with a huge check would get attention. If you're in South Dakota where there are only 425,000 registered voters only a fraction of which turn out, you'll have enough power that your Senators will be oddly passionate about eliminating algorithm patents.
Or a USB or Ethernet jack to attach to a laptop.
>He never should have discussed client notification with them.
Yes, he should have, but in the form "I strongly recommend that you ask corporate counsel whether laws X, Y and Q apply. If they do you will have to notify your clients. The facts and the unknowns that counsel will need to review include A, B, and E".
I don't keep my clients in the dark about things that might hurt them. I also don't exceed my expertise by playing lawyer.
Notifying the world on his own initiative would be a breach of professional ethics, only justifiable if there's some consideration more important than professional ethics (imagine this happening to the records at a battered women's shelter, for example).
>suburbia developments that are designed to make trees impossible
Would you please drive over to my suburban house and help rake the leaves from all the impossible trees? I could use help cleaning the gutters as well.
>there is a history of global temperature change. How is this any different?
It's different because we're now trying to raise enough crops to feed six billion humans, many of them living near seacoasts within a few meters of sea level. The Little Ice Age and the high sea levels of 40 million years ago were both natural, but either one today would be a disaster on the scale of World War II or worse.
>there should be more research into our contribution to raising the earths temperature before we start making it colder
Nobody's about to launch it: as Picard said, "...it is always best to have more than one option."
He created his own, the Saddam Cruel OS, which was later sold to a US company which abbreviated the name.
>The magnetic axis wobbles all over the place and even reverses, but I've never heard even the remotest suggestion that it has ever been anything other than a very simple axis. The Earth's core generates a magnetic field as a result of (a) being molten, and (b) rotating, so is probably produced by circulatory currents within that core.
This gets interesting.
There is a quadrupole moment, and it can exceed the dipole moment just before a pole reversal.
The assumption all along was that the magnetic field was fairly simple (on pretty much the grounds you mentioned)and that therefore you could use a rock's magnetization to prove that it came from near the equator. What happened with this paper was that he produced evidence backing up the assumption.
BTW, even in geology 600 million years is long enough for interesting things to happen. Go back that far and Gondwanaland hadn't even formed yet. 200 million years ago it hadn't broken up. Climate can change faster than continents could drift: I'm typing from a place that was under thousands of feet of ice when Christanity and Islam were founded. 50 million years ago we weren't having ice ages at all.
DDT is still in use for malaria control in tropical countries. These days it's more likely to be used indoors and less likely to be part of a massive, resistance-inducing (spraying was already getting less popular due to ineffectiveness even before the publication of "Silent Spring"), corruption-prone spraying campaign.
Without a ban, there is still the issue of whether aid agencies apply pressure. USAID does prefer insecticide-treated netting over area-wide application, but that's a very different thing from "completely banned".
The factual criticism of environmentalists over this is that at the 2001 Stockholm Convention they did *try* to eliminate the public health exception. They don't deserve to get off the hook for that just because they failed.
Why not raise it across the board? Googling for "CAFE mpg 2000" and "CAFE mpg 2006" is revealing.
>The fact is that bush hasn't run away from environmental issues at all.
Correct. The "Healthy Forests Initiative" is hardly running away from an issue. Neither is the "Clear Skies Act", which if Wikipedia has their facts straight
The endless attempts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife refuge are not "running away", either.
November 2004, changed the standard for allowing sewage to be dumped without complete treatment from "emergency" to any time it rains.
May 2002, tore up existing standards to allow Appalachian coal miners to bury mountain streams in waste.
Bush is not running away from the environment, he's making a frontal attack on it.
>No, I disagree that that system works (again, I haven't RTFA
It's auditable, unlike certain other systems that have actually made it to the field. Machines that cheat can be detected.
The real problem is the one shown by the discussion in this thread. Even career computer people (both the posters and the moderators) can't understand what the security properties are. Understanding how the security properties are met requires some crypto knowledge which is not common among the electorate.
It looks like this system cannot meet the human interface requirement of being understandable enough, to enough people, to have the credibility to make people accept its results.
Shamir's three-ballot system, in contrast, includes no crypto and anyone with a high school education should be able to understand it, but I shudder at the thought of explaining it well enough to reach the bottom decile of the electorate.
Captain James Kirk, "The Conscience of the King":
"No. But they may rest easier."
>if you typically go to the New York Times and ESPN and the National Georgraphic and Nick.com these exploits will never affect you.
Unless the site is compromised by an attacker, or carries ads from an inadequately screened advertiser, or unless the advertiser has been 0wned.
>Also if you're running a mail program that's been updated since Clinton was President you can't be attacked through HTML e-mail since they all block scripting and ActiveX in mail by default.
That still leaves the attack vector of malicious image files. Most recently that would mean the WMF exploits, but prior to that there have been exploitable bugs in JPEG and PNG parsers. I recommend against HMTL email in any event because of the risk of being tracked by web bugs. HTML email is, pardon the technical security industry jargon, an "abomination unto the Lord".
>And in what other religions do such great numbers of suicide bombers occur?
The world leaders in suicide bombings are the Tamil Tigers.
>Just why are those Sunnis and Shi'a killing one another in such a focused fashion?
Revenge for the Saddam regime motivated the Shi'a, fear of being the new victims (and of missing out on the oil) motivates the Sunni, and both know they have a once in a lifetime chance to lay claim to territory and power now that the Americans deleted the country's operating system. Going back a bit further, the Shi'a carefully commemorate grievances from over 1300 years ago, and Sunni are appalled by some features of Shiite doctrine.
>None of the Benedictine nuns nor Jesuit brothers ever suggested I suicide for Christ.....
Christians teach that actively seeking out martyrdom is vanity, but it's probably happened. Suicide bombing does not fit well into orthodox Islam, either, which has an explicit written prohibition against suicide (it's only implicit in Christianity). People who blow themselves up shock normal Muslims, are condemned by most clerics, but do get support from a non-negligible movement. Saudi money has spread what would normally have been a splinter sect into a worldwide phenomenon.
Check out the South's "National Security Law", especially Article 7, and how it's enforced.
>I will say this, though - If I'm wrong, and you find some nuance in the document I missed, please post and inform me.
Firefox isn't opening the link at regulations.gov, so let's take a look at the GPO web site. "Under both options, the carrier will not permit the boarding of a passenger unless the passenger has been cleared by CBP." Shortly thereafter, discussing ships, they explain the purpose is "to prevent vessel departures with a high-risk passenger or crew member onboard." I can't read those as anything but a requirement for government clearance before someone can leave the country by common carrier.
You're quite right to insist on primary sources as opposed to commentary by people with agendas.
>Now, this rule makes it that your passport is checked leaving and entering. It's a small but important difference.
It's not your passport that would be checked under this rule. Valid passport, no valid passport, or diplomatic credentials from the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the airline or cruise ship won't be allowed to carry you unless the government gives a thumbs up.
>any such proposal would have to pass both the House and the Senate, and somehow I just can't see that happening.
The agency that sets the regulations already has statutory power to make regulations. This is them saying "We're about to make a change in our administrative policies". Look up "administrative law" for more background.
Oh, and look at what the House and Senate have been passing lately.
The exact link you cite contains the sentence "Under both options, the carrier will not permit the
boarding of a passenger unless the passenger has been cleared by CBP."
>Where was the outrage then, where was the irate Slashdot article then?
Have you ever noticed that Slashdot sometimes doesn't pick up stories immediately, and that a lot of people don't regularly read the Federal Register?