Many people are too poor or technically inept to manage their own digital medical record. Even those who could might be too incapacitated during a medical emergency to facilitate getting their record to the right people. And even if you're lucid, it's almost impossible to manage the vast numbers of doctors, nurses, clerks, and specialists who might need to see different aspects of your file.
I think A) centralized storage solutions like Google's are a good idea, as long as B) your data travels with a personally specified, machine readable policy that every recipient is (legally) required to follow.
But when the system architecture of the day changes (say, from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing), your 100% accurate pointer code will work 0% of the time. The theoretical computer scientist will then hire a new coder (super-cheap and fresh out of schooling on current architecture) to fix the implementation of her still-correct algorithm. Or they wrote it in Java and let Sun do the updating for them.
Don't get me wrong, I think systems classes are essential for understanding how layers of abstraction provide us environments where we can get real work done. But asking your university to give you vocational training in particular low-level tools is praying for obsolescence. Concentrate on teaching kids C (or, god forbid, ADA), and you'll see even more complaints of outsourcing and low job security in the future. In the long run, the economy simply can't support very many people whose specialty is boilerplate low level code that SHOULD be abstracted away in most circumstances.
Everyone's so positive this choice is morally compromised. Do you honestly think Google pulling out of China would have improved censorship problems for people living there? No, it would simply leave the market wide open for engines like Baidu, who with a Chinese HQ and friends in the Party can be much more easily (and quietly) manipulated. Doing No Evil is more complicated than knee-jerk "don't touch that dirty spot" reactions, which is why shortsighted idealogical proposals like the one that was put forward SHOULD be voted down.
And all this whining about profit motive?? Tech is one of the few sectors where companies can reasonably align their profit motive with producing value for the consumer. None of Google's products are coercive, the way, say MSFT's are. They've set up their business model so that almost every buck they make is because they made someone's life a small amount easier -- and rarely at anyone else's expense. It's some of the cleanest money around.
The problem with Birch's scheme is that individuals are incentivized to lie about what they want in order to get more money from the group. In the example given where Charles is willing to subsidize a trip to Chinese food, you could extract extra money from him by pretending it's a huge disappointment to you.
For a strategyproof scheme, check out the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. Basically, everyone gives weighted votes about something, and the winners of the tally pay a penalty equal to the imposition they caused the rest of the people. Only trouble is, this penalty has to be completely discarded to prevent hyjinx...
Well that's just an alarmist fantasy -- there's well documented evidence that dumping nukes into into the Mariannes is a great way to meet new friends, as long as Ed Harris is available to accompany them.
> Now if RFID tags had RSA or something built in, it would be a different story. But they don't.
Not exactly true. Even the passive tags can have on-board logic, and there are a number of crypto solutions proposed given the processing constraints. Yes, including one by RSA .
I don't know enough about climatology to know whether or not Dr. Lindzen has a point, but this letter does nothing at all to sway my opinion. This kind of wimpering is a species of "publishing in the press": complaining to a bunch of unqualified readers that you're not being listened to after your work is panned by a comittee of people who are knowledgable in your field.
Journals like Nature and Science are under tremendous scrutiny regarding their handling of politicized cases like these, making it hard for me to believe that they would blatantly place artificial obstructions to Dr. Lindzen's rejoining his critics. Dr. Lindzen leaves details suspiciously light regarding the reasons for their delay, prompting me to wonder if they aren't more legitimate than he implies. His other accusations -- that one scientist criticized another as a shill, and that another scientist lost his funding in a way that might have been related to his work against the notion of global warming -- are thin-skinned and similarly without detail.
Overall, it's the worst kind of doublespeak to claim that speech questioning global warming is being suppressed at a time when taxpayer-funded studies that do support global warming are being castrated with line-by-line edits from non-scientist bureaucrats in the executive branch. The poor, oppressed dissenting climatologists who don't get to eat lunch with the other academics should be thankful for this: In the history of people with unpopular ideas, they among the lucky few whose handful of supporters happens to include the energy, manufacturing, chemical and automotive industries, as well as certain heads of state. Cry me a river.
Amen -- you shouldn't worry too much about the title. If you have equal ownership, think of yourself as an equal member of a board which has the ultimate say about the company's decisions. The CEO is an employee hired by the board to achieve the goals it sets out, and he's accountable to the board in the end.
If the issue is the awesomeness of your business cards, you could print yours as "Owner and CTO, X Corp." or "Principle and CTO, X Corp."
There is a limit to what you can outsource, and if you have any kind of sense there is also a limit to what you should want to outsource for all sorts of resons ranging from security to limiting knowledge transfer to potential future competitors. Of course greed has a way of disabling people's Common Sense Processing Unit, especially in managers.
If you're saying there's some bumpy times ahead for companies trying to figure out how to outsource effeciently, I'm right with you. Maybe those bumpy times will carry IT demand at a reasonable level through your career. But what about a kid just going into an IT focused degree? You better believe I'd tell him to learn management: when the rest of the world is coding, he'd be better off in charge instead in the exact same market. Asking people to stick it out in IT on the principle that the US should keep some coders is like asking someone to work in a textile factory so that we won't be dependent on foreign textiles. It's good, rational advice for someone you don't like.
I pretty much agree with your breakdown of the situation.
But before we equivocate totally between the world's assholes, let's point out that the dogmatic Christians are not, at this point in time, getting gang-beaten on the back roads of Kansas for their loud-mouthed beliefs. Apparently dogmatic atheists are, which is pretty shocking and apalling.
What would Jesus do? Beat the snot out of the guy and run, apparently?
Burning is the crudest possible use of petroleum. Petroleum based materials exploit the complex molecules left in hydrocarbons by life processes in a much more important way: as structural features. It costs orders of magnitude more energy to synthetically create that kind of structure than we can generate by burning it to release that bond-energy. However, today's energy is considered more valuable than tomorrow's plastic, so we just blow the stuff up.
I agree that petroleum will be exhausted, regardless of alternatives. But hopefully finding new energy sources will let us use it in much more far-sighted ways. This should be right up there in the benefits list, alongside environmental advantages and the opening of foreign policy options.
Right on. Closed-source software often carries the *impression* of professionalism: there's a lot of pressure to look polished at demo-time. But there's no pressure for the underlying architecture to be done to a professional standard, meaning that many products reveal their flaws months after release in the form of security problems and deeper, more frustrating bugs.
Similar forces affect conceptual integrity. Engineers in a closed shop can work around design inconsistencies with janky adaptive measures, because they can talk to each other. Open source projects fail pathetically if they don't keep design integrity, because programmers dispersed over many continents are extremely dependent on design decisions to communicate with one another.
Any by the way, what was the poster smoking when suggesting this article was cogently argued? A decent vocabulary and grammatical precision do not cogency make. This guy recycled ancient fears about "hacker culture", mixing in a few plattitudes about the "legendary robustness of Linux" and taking digs at MS to semi-appease the OSS community he's attacking. The most interesting concept in his paper -- exploring OSS's indirect effects on the "software ecosystem" -- is something he doesn't even go into, instead focusing on problems with OSS which are independent of the rest of the world.
Yes, yes! This way, you can double your development time and bugs as you get your apps to talk to each other.
And then toss on another 50% re-implementing object structures in each language.
And get ready for your performance to suffer by doing a lot more inter-process communication through the OS than you really have to.
And virtually ensure terf wars between developers in different languages with slightly different ideas of the most elegant solution.
Yeah, an individual developer should have a lot of languages under his belt. It stretches your mind, enables you to give good advice about choice, and gives you security by making you useful in a lot of situations. But a project itself should be well organized. KISS.
(BTW, I'd rather have a programmer who knows 2 languages well than a self-described hacker who can program something badly in everything from Perl to PostScript).
Most projects can gain a lot from a little bit of tool mixing -- for example, a rapid prototyping language for frequently changing parts of the app, and performance oriented language for the back end. Pick ones with well designed and well tested partnerships. A great example is python and java through jython. (Does anyone else know some really good partnerships?)
Sorry to flame -- I'm sure you're a good developer, but this felt like a classic case of a surprising answer that sounds deep but is actually quite bad.
haha -- And in the long run, even the tidal energy resevoir will get used up. The earth's rotation will slowly synchronize with the moon's orbit. Days will get longer, coastal ecosystems will be disrupted, and the moon will always be above the same point on earth. We should clearly stick to burning all the complex organics we can dig up to make energy...
You're assuming that the current rate of economic growth is sustainable: countries can keep increasing their population and industrial output at 1-8% a year indefinitely. This is the "optimism" that ruined the "new economy". If you dip too far into capital to acheive your growth, you can have the illusion of healthy production followed by a violent crash. The contention brought by scientific environmentalists is that we are dipping into environmental capital -- the resources and services provided by the ecosystem -- to acheive growth that cannot actually be sustained.
Even without considering environmental degredation, that kind of smugness about economic growth is a bad idea Even in the most stable parts of the world, its a rare generation that goes by without major sorting events (world wars, the great depression, etc.) that redistribute capital and upset those kinds of economic assumptions. If you think things are going to just going to get better forever, prove it.
Paper's not automatically safe. Physical security is a joke at most precincts, and will continue to be until there is a TON more money spent. Doctoring paper ballots while counting them is easy. Counting paper ballots is error prone. Interpreting voter intent on a paper ballot is difficult even when people are trying honestly to do so.
This needs to be viewed with a cost-benefit analysis, not just one dominating fear.
This isn't about two agents doing their job, it's an about an agency setting its priorities, and about legislators placing the proper restraints on a new and untested security agency. Your rhetoric about the poor hardworking agents is irrelevant.
My question for someone who knows is: even if this was a legitimate trademark infringement, why wasn't this a job for a lawsuit? A court injunction to stop selling something is one thing, but just sending out a couple of agents whose professional opinion is that you might be breaking trademark? Hell, is there a phone number I can call to get homeland security agents to order my competitors around without proving anything to a judge?
In the slides, it's pretty clear that office temperature increased throughout the day on average, while errors decreased throughout the day. How do they know this isn't more about awakeness than than temperature?
Large scale data collection in the field is great, but you gotta make up for in analysis all the precautions you didn't take during experimental design....
A token coalition whose members A) are extremely dependent on US policy, and B) whose leaders actively ignored the sentiments of their constituants in order to join the battle, may meet some technical definition of "multilateral". However, it does not have the strategic, diplomatic, or moral advantages that the term implies.
2. WMD was not the only reason given for the attack on Iraq (read the actual transcript of the State of the Union address instead of your DNC talking points).
You mean this one? I count 14 paragraphs about WMDs, 1 about how Hussein defines evil, 1 telling the Iraquis they'll be liberated (as an effect -- not a justification), and maybe another 2 about how this is one way of seeking peace. I'm not sure what you were trying to point out here. WMDs were quite clearly the reason given, with some beneficial side effects given and a context in an overall goal (peace!) added on.
3. Iraq is a battle in the war. The war is on terror.
What are the political objectives of this war? What's the endgame -- how does it look when it's over? Which strategic objectives did this "battle" in Iraq meet?
4. Anyone who still doesn't think AL Qaeda and Iraq have links after the beheading of a kidnapped American and the Jordanian bomb plot is self-delusional.
Everyone knows there are terrorists in Iraq now. The question is, which ones were there before? Are there more or less than there were?
5. The patriotism Mill describes is the degraded patriotism of the man who cries out that it is the patriotic duty not to fight, no matter the cause.
I don't see how that has anything to do with patriotism. There's a lot of aspects to loving and supporting one's country other than fighting for it. Hell, Gandhi helped win independence for India by expressing exactly the sentiment Mill is talking about. But as long as you're bringing it up, I don't see anyone saying we should never fight, no matter the cause. I think there's plenty of situations where it's right to defend your country. But a lot of patriots agree that Iraq wasn't one of those.
6. It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. -Winston Churchill
Ooooh! Snap! Looks like someone's got a quote dictionary, and he's not afraid of whipping it out. Well I guess John Stuart Mill can spout fascist crap and Winston Churchill can make nursery school insults as well as the rest of 'em.
I personally believe that if we can't make it back to the Moon and establish a base there that we will NEVER get to Mars.
The moon needs to be the proving ground for the technology needed to get to Mars.
Obviously, many of the challenges involved reaching Mars are enormously different from those reaching the moon. Huge differences of distance, gravity, atmosphere, etc. A small subset of obstacles will be shared between both missions. Setting your sights low is a good way to get there.
If you really want NASA to succeed it needs long range plans like Bush's proposal. AND it needs the opposition party not to fight them. The timelines for going to Mars are so long that political machinations need to be kept out of the equation or Mars exploration just becomes something to kill off the next time the opposition party takes office.
The whole point of an opposition party is to refine and improve a plan by poking holes in the original. They should never shut up, especially when the administration is doing something "really really important". As far as fears that the whole thing will get cancelled... well, despite what he would have you believe, there is a difference between completely supporting every aspect of the President's plan and being completely against it.
As a scientist, were you planning on providing any footnotes, citations, or maybe even anecdotal details to elaborate on that giant fart of rhetoric? I'm not even disagreeing, but sheesh man -- it's deplorable that someone can get up to +5 insightful by just making a bunch of unsupported iconoclastic statements in a row.
As little as possible of law should be based on intent; it's too difficult to prove. The most anyone can say is "If I had done those things, it would have been because my intentions were."
Why hasn't this thread been ripped up by security professionals yet?
If you're going to call your obscure protocol security, you have to subject it to the same rigid cryptanalysis that you subject an encryption key to. How did you create your protocol, and who did you let know about it? Is it discoverable by replay, or man in the middle attacks? Etc.
Other threads have discussed how the protocol fails these tests. Sniffing creates a huge problem unless you vary your key, in which case you're really using some other encryption protocol. As far as noone knowing about it... well, would you use a 40-bit encryption key if the first 20-bits were already posted to slashdot? Depends what you're doing and who you're trying to protect from.
You're technically right about the English definition of obscurity, but there's a good reason to make the distinction from security. We discuss protocols and keys seperately because we understand that part of our authentication process will be easily observable from the outside (the protocol) and part of it is a secret we intend to keep anyway (the key).
Again, points well taken. But I think the PATRIOT legislation was something of a special case because it altered the fundamental rights of the public. If we want a measure of isolation to let our representatives deliberate on tariffs and foreign policy and budget issues, I'm all for it. But if something deeply alters the way the government interacts with its citizens, I think it requires an ear to the public. That has more to do with my feelings about consensuality and legitimacy in government than about democracy in particular.
Of course, that's exactly what the circuit court reacted to and prevented. Which, as you pointed out, indicates the robustness of the system as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people are too poor or technically inept to manage their own digital medical record. Even those who could might be too incapacitated during a medical emergency to facilitate getting their record to the right people. And even if you're lucid, it's almost impossible to manage the vast numbers of doctors, nurses, clerks, and specialists who might need to see different aspects of your file.
I think A) centralized storage solutions like Google's are a good idea, as long as B) your data travels with a personally specified, machine readable policy that every recipient is (legally) required to follow.
But when the system architecture of the day changes (say, from 32-bit to 64-bit addressing), your 100% accurate pointer code will work 0% of the time. The theoretical computer scientist will then hire a new coder (super-cheap and fresh out of schooling on current architecture) to fix the implementation of her still-correct algorithm. Or they wrote it in Java and let Sun do the updating for them.
Don't get me wrong, I think systems classes are essential for understanding how layers of abstraction provide us environments where we can get real work done. But asking your university to give you vocational training in particular low-level tools is praying for obsolescence. Concentrate on teaching kids C (or, god forbid, ADA), and you'll see even more complaints of outsourcing and low job security in the future. In the long run, the economy simply can't support very many people whose specialty is boilerplate low level code that SHOULD be abstracted away in most circumstances.
Everyone's so positive this choice is morally compromised. Do you honestly think Google pulling out of China would have improved censorship problems for people living there? No, it would simply leave the market wide open for engines like Baidu, who with a Chinese HQ and friends in the Party can be much more easily (and quietly) manipulated. Doing No Evil is more complicated than knee-jerk "don't touch that dirty spot" reactions, which is why shortsighted idealogical proposals like the one that was put forward SHOULD be voted down.
And all this whining about profit motive?? Tech is one of the few sectors where companies can reasonably align their profit motive with producing value for the consumer. None of Google's products are coercive, the way, say MSFT's are. They've set up their business model so that almost every buck they make is because they made someone's life a small amount easier -- and rarely at anyone else's expense. It's some of the cleanest money around.
The problem with Birch's scheme is that individuals are incentivized to lie about what they want in order to get more money from the group. In the example given where Charles is willing to subsidize a trip to Chinese food, you could extract extra money from him by pretending it's a huge disappointment to you.
For a strategyproof scheme, check out the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. Basically, everyone gives weighted votes about something, and the winners of the tally pay a penalty equal to the imposition they caused the rest of the people. Only trouble is, this penalty has to be completely discarded to prevent hyjinx...
Well that's just an alarmist fantasy -- there's well documented evidence that dumping nukes into into the Mariannes is a great way to meet new friends, as long as Ed Harris is available to accompany them.
> Now if RFID tags had RSA or something built in, it would be a different story. But they don't.
Not exactly true. Even the passive tags can have on-board logic, and there are a number of crypto solutions proposed given the processing constraints. Yes, including one by RSA .
I don't know enough about climatology to know whether or not Dr. Lindzen has a point, but this letter does nothing at all to sway my opinion. This kind of wimpering is a species of "publishing in the press": complaining to a bunch of unqualified readers that you're not being listened to after your work is panned by a comittee of people who are knowledgable in your field.
Journals like Nature and Science are under tremendous scrutiny regarding their handling of politicized cases like these, making it hard for me to believe that they would blatantly place artificial obstructions to Dr. Lindzen's rejoining his critics. Dr. Lindzen leaves details suspiciously light regarding the reasons for their delay, prompting me to wonder if they aren't more legitimate than he implies. His other accusations -- that one scientist criticized another as a shill, and that another scientist lost his funding in a way that might have been related to his work against the notion of global warming -- are thin-skinned and similarly without detail.
Overall, it's the worst kind of doublespeak to claim that speech questioning global warming is being suppressed at a time when taxpayer-funded studies that do support global warming are being castrated with line-by-line edits from non-scientist bureaucrats in the executive branch. The poor, oppressed dissenting climatologists who don't get to eat lunch with the other academics should be thankful for this: In the history of people with unpopular ideas, they among the lucky few whose handful of supporters happens to include the energy, manufacturing, chemical and automotive industries, as well as certain heads of state. Cry me a river.
Amen -- you shouldn't worry too much about the title. If you have equal ownership, think of yourself as an equal member of a board which has the ultimate say about the company's decisions. The CEO is an employee hired by the board to achieve the goals it sets out, and he's accountable to the board in the end.
If the issue is the awesomeness of your business cards, you could print yours as "Owner and CTO, X Corp." or "Principle and CTO, X Corp."
If you're saying there's some bumpy times ahead for companies trying to figure out how to outsource effeciently, I'm right with you. Maybe those bumpy times will carry IT demand at a reasonable level through your career. But what about a kid just going into an IT focused degree? You better believe I'd tell him to learn management: when the rest of the world is coding, he'd be better off in charge instead in the exact same market. Asking people to stick it out in IT on the principle that the US should keep some coders is like asking someone to work in a textile factory so that we won't be dependent on foreign textiles. It's good, rational advice for someone you don't like.
I pretty much agree with your breakdown of the situation.
But before we equivocate totally between the world's assholes, let's point out that the dogmatic Christians are not, at this point in time, getting gang-beaten on the back roads of Kansas for their loud-mouthed beliefs. Apparently dogmatic atheists are, which is pretty shocking and apalling.
What would Jesus do? Beat the snot out of the guy and run, apparently?
Burning is the crudest possible use of petroleum. Petroleum based materials exploit the complex molecules left in hydrocarbons by life processes in a much more important way: as structural features. It costs orders of magnitude more energy to synthetically create that kind of structure than we can generate by burning it to release that bond-energy. However, today's energy is considered more valuable than tomorrow's plastic, so we just blow the stuff up.
I agree that petroleum will be exhausted, regardless of alternatives. But hopefully finding new energy sources will let us use it in much more far-sighted ways. This should be right up there in the benefits list, alongside environmental advantages and the opening of foreign policy options.
Right on. Closed-source software often carries the *impression* of professionalism: there's a lot of pressure to look polished at demo-time. But there's no pressure for the underlying architecture to be done to a professional standard, meaning that many products reveal their flaws months after release in the form of security problems and deeper, more frustrating bugs.
Similar forces affect conceptual integrity. Engineers in a closed shop can work around design inconsistencies with janky adaptive measures, because they can talk to each other. Open source projects fail pathetically if they don't keep design integrity, because programmers dispersed over many continents are extremely dependent on design decisions to communicate with one another.
Any by the way, what was the poster smoking when suggesting this article was cogently argued? A decent vocabulary and grammatical precision do not cogency make. This guy recycled ancient fears about "hacker culture", mixing in a few plattitudes about the "legendary robustness of Linux" and taking digs at MS to semi-appease the OSS community he's attacking. The most interesting concept in his paper -- exploring OSS's indirect effects on the "software ecosystem" -- is something he doesn't even go into, instead focusing on problems with OSS which are independent of the rest of the world.
Bullocks.
Yes, yes! This way, you can double your development time and bugs as you get your apps to talk to each other.
And then toss on another 50% re-implementing object structures in each language.
And get ready for your performance to suffer by doing a lot more inter-process communication through the OS than you really have to.
And virtually ensure terf wars between developers in different languages with slightly different ideas of the most elegant solution.
Yeah, an individual developer should have a lot of languages under his belt. It stretches your mind, enables you to give good advice about choice, and gives you security by making you useful in a lot of situations. But a project itself should be well organized. KISS.
(BTW, I'd rather have a programmer who knows 2 languages well than a self-described hacker who can program something badly in everything from Perl to PostScript).
Most projects can gain a lot from a little bit of tool mixing -- for example, a rapid prototyping language for frequently changing parts of the app, and performance oriented language for the back end. Pick ones with well designed and well tested partnerships. A great example is python and java through jython. (Does anyone else know some really good partnerships?)
Sorry to flame -- I'm sure you're a good developer, but this felt like a classic case of a surprising answer that sounds deep but is actually quite bad.
Speaking of which, here's the BBC story:
Come and get it!
haha -- And in the long run, even the tidal energy resevoir will get used up. The earth's rotation will slowly synchronize with the moon's orbit. Days will get longer, coastal ecosystems will be disrupted, and the moon will always be above the same point on earth. We should clearly stick to burning all the complex organics we can dig up to make energy...
Even without considering environmental degredation, that kind of smugness about economic growth is a bad idea Even in the most stable parts of the world, its a rare generation that goes by without major sorting events (world wars, the great depression, etc.) that redistribute capital and upset those kinds of economic assumptions. If you think things are going to just going to get better forever, prove it.
Paper's not automatically safe. Physical security is a joke at most precincts, and will continue to be until there is a TON more money spent. Doctoring paper ballots while counting them is easy. Counting paper ballots is error prone. Interpreting voter intent on a paper ballot is difficult even when people are trying honestly to do so.
This needs to be viewed with a cost-benefit analysis, not just one dominating fear.
This isn't about two agents doing their job, it's an about an agency setting its priorities, and about legislators placing the proper restraints on a new and untested security agency. Your rhetoric about the poor hardworking agents is irrelevant.
My question for someone who knows is: even if this was a legitimate trademark infringement, why wasn't this a job for a lawsuit? A court injunction to stop selling something is one thing, but just sending out a couple of agents whose professional opinion is that you might be breaking trademark? Hell, is there a phone number I can call to get homeland security agents to order my competitors around without proving anything to a judge?
In the slides, it's pretty clear that office temperature increased throughout the day on average, while errors decreased throughout the day. How do they know this isn't more about awakeness than than temperature?
Large scale data collection in the field is great, but you gotta make up for in analysis all the precautions you didn't take during experimental design....
1. No U.N. does not equal unilateral.
A token coalition whose members A) are extremely dependent on US policy, and B) whose leaders actively ignored the sentiments of their constituants in order to join the battle, may meet some technical definition of "multilateral". However, it does not have the strategic, diplomatic, or moral advantages that the term implies.
2. WMD was not the only reason given for the attack on Iraq (read the actual transcript of the State of the Union address instead of your DNC talking points).
You mean this one? I count 14 paragraphs about WMDs, 1 about how Hussein defines evil, 1 telling the Iraquis they'll be liberated (as an effect -- not a justification), and maybe another 2 about how this is one way of seeking peace. I'm not sure what you were trying to point out here. WMDs were quite clearly the reason given, with some beneficial side effects given and a context in an overall goal (peace!) added on.
3. Iraq is a battle in the war. The war is on terror.
What are the political objectives of this war? What's the endgame -- how does it look when it's over? Which strategic objectives did this "battle" in Iraq meet?
4. Anyone who still doesn't think AL Qaeda and Iraq have links after the beheading of a kidnapped American and the Jordanian bomb plot is self-delusional.
Everyone knows there are terrorists in Iraq now. The question is, which ones were there before? Are there more or less than there were?
5. The patriotism Mill describes is the degraded patriotism of the man who cries out that it is the patriotic duty not to fight, no matter the cause.
I don't see how that has anything to do with patriotism. There's a lot of aspects to loving and supporting one's country other than fighting for it. Hell, Gandhi helped win independence for India by expressing exactly the sentiment Mill is talking about. But as long as you're bringing it up, I don't see anyone saying we should never fight, no matter the cause. I think there's plenty of situations where it's right to defend your country. But a lot of patriots agree that Iraq wasn't one of those.
6. It is better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. -Winston Churchill
Ooooh! Snap! Looks like someone's got a quote dictionary, and he's not afraid of whipping it out. Well I guess John Stuart Mill can spout fascist crap and Winston Churchill can make nursery school insults as well as the rest of 'em.
Obviously, many of the challenges involved reaching Mars are enormously different from those reaching the moon. Huge differences of distance, gravity, atmosphere, etc. A small subset of obstacles will be shared between both missions. Setting your sights low is a good way to get there.
The whole point of an opposition party is to refine and improve a plan by poking holes in the original. They should never shut up, especially when the administration is doing something "really really important". As far as fears that the whole thing will get cancelled... well, despite what he would have you believe, there is a difference between completely supporting every aspect of the President's plan and being completely against it.
As a scientist, were you planning on providing any footnotes, citations, or maybe even anecdotal details to elaborate on that giant fart of rhetoric? I'm not even disagreeing, but sheesh man -- it's deplorable that someone can get up to +5 insightful by just making a bunch of unsupported iconoclastic statements in a row.
As little as possible of law should be based on intent; it's too difficult to prove. The most anyone can say is "If I had done those things, it would have been because my intentions were ."
If you're going to call your obscure protocol security, you have to subject it to the same rigid cryptanalysis that you subject an encryption key to. How did you create your protocol, and who did you let know about it? Is it discoverable by replay, or man in the middle attacks? Etc.
Other threads have discussed how the protocol fails these tests. Sniffing creates a huge problem unless you vary your key, in which case you're really using some other encryption protocol. As far as noone knowing about it... well, would you use a 40-bit encryption key if the first 20-bits were already posted to slashdot? Depends what you're doing and who you're trying to protect from.
You're technically right about the English definition of obscurity, but there's a good reason to make the distinction from security. We discuss protocols and keys seperately because we understand that part of our authentication process will be easily observable from the outside (the protocol) and part of it is a secret we intend to keep anyway (the key).
Of course, that's exactly what the circuit court reacted to and prevented. Which, as you pointed out, indicates the robustness of the system as a whole.