The answer to the digital storage question has always been the same: "who cares"
not in the flip teenager attitude way meaning that no one does, but in the "those who care will copy it" way. It is a decidedly social, non-technical answer to the issue.
Preserving digital content will happen by those people an orgs who want to keep copies of it, because someone cares enough to use it periodically. Overall, the median rate of use (making a copy) has to be shorter than the median decay rate for the system storing the content. If this is the case, the media survives, if not, it dies.
If no one cares enough to use and copy the digital content, then people will lose it.
I don't see where the "problem" is. We keep that which people are interested in paying to archive because it is accessed regularly, and the rest will be lost.
I really want automakers to announce simple autodrive systems for cars.
I see the first place this will work is in the 0-10 MPH creeping behind another car system. No steering, just holding a constant speed (not stopping if possible) and not crashing into the car in front of you. Go > 10MPH, turns off. Turn the steering wheel, turns off. Hit the brake, it turns off. But, sit there for 40 minutes in traffic, creeping along and it works like cruise control. Why don't we have this yet???
My intuition tells me that if everyone drove this way: working hard not to stop, but going slow enough not to crash to the next guy in front -- then the traffic jams would undo much more quickly. In fact, if even a low percent of drivers drove this way it would clear up the jams more quickly. The rolling stop waves that roll back through the chain of cars keeps the jam togteher. If even 20-30% of the cars never stop (creep slowly betweeen the waves) then the whole jam would start to move fast enough to disperse. I have no modelling or math proof of this, just a gut understanding of how could work.
Will this revolution be televised? Maybe youtubed?
I'd like to see projects like this trickle into the anemic science materials at the highschool level and make learning science fun. Hopefully they contribute their materials to one/some of the several open coursework sites.
from: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529
Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called Terminator or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits suicide after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed. While I don't agree with "Control by private seed companies is total. " - patenting and releasing GMO seeds for plants that intentionally die seems deeply wrong on many levels.
How much more do humans need to innovate on ways to kill each other?
The more efficient the methods, the more distant the human cost - all lead to more killing and more government control, not less. How much more war do we need? Maybe when all the "bad" people are killed then the "good" ones left can get around to creating peace. The direct fruits of this research are more effective killing machines, really useful only in killing other humans. There may be other upsides to autonomous vehicles, but that is not what DARPA is about.
When does the global population start to work together to create a world that is peaceful? Will it ever happen? Will it happen in our lifetime? Why are people not pushing THESE questions?
I don't want my grandkids living in a world with autonomous machines toting guns and killing people. That's completely absurd - yet here we are, building it! What we have now is bad enough.
The US has shown that no rules of law, no standards of ethics will hold up against the tyranny of powerful people willing to break them. Why would anyone want governments to wield even more power over people? Guess what - the right to form a militia and protect yourself against government aggression doesn't mean shit when the central authority uses unmanned tanks against you because you don't fall in line, pay your taxes, work your job, and stay in your place. Better pray to god^H^H^H er. . . the president that she lets you live the life you want. No person is going to falter, no one is going to ask, "hey does this make sense?" when the servo and an AI script decide when you are a threat because you shot at the machine.
Most of the discussion on this list is sickening to me. People here are talking about killing people like sweeping floors or serving coffee - completely abstracted from the horror that a real war would be. Just wait until the Chinese start making robots to sweep through the street, packing heat and rounding up US-ians for internment camps. Maybe THEN people will finally say, "Hey, maybe we should work on making peace instead of war!" All the while you're maching down to a camp.
Some of these questions I ask rhetorically, but I'm serious with the point. No more wars. We're had enough.
What would be more helpful is if someone set up a distributed, fully automated IP address blacklist system and web servers and intrusion software could simply log IP address "hate" a-al a system like this http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/
I'd love to be able to get a daily list of IP addresses that have been community-logged with reputations as having "bad behavior" (like worm propigation, scanning for website or ssh weaknesses, DOS attacks, open relays, etc) to feed to a firewalls, ssh and web server, etc. and drop their connection attempts to the floor. Efforts like this for spam and email have been fairly successful when done well, albeit sometimes controversial.
Such a project would be incredibly difficult to maintain, because crackers and others would attack it directly - yet could have a lot of value in stopping rouge behavior online.
No, "I" do not "deserve" to be "fouled-up". There is nothing wrong with ad-hoc analysis.
Furthermore, how is it possible to honor a format? That makes no sense to me. Shall we give the format high rank, respect and dignity?
The format of an IPaddress is specific enough that most times if you see a 4 number set with periods in it, an the values are 0-255, then you can assume it is an IPaddress - in any text. These version numbers break that assumption. It is extremely convenient to strip out IPaddresses out of any text, including structured log files. All sorts of fun statistics and feedback are possible on the command line piping inputs and outputs and creating counts and graphs of locations, frequencies, and such. Yes, this is done ad-hoc. Yes, you might judge it as "half-assed". Usually these are questions that are infrequent - so writing systems that handle corner cases is not worth the time. I posted this message because scripts to identify IPaddresses fails when there are examples of number strings that look like addresses but are not, regardless of the structure of the input source.
Can you explain why you would try to undercut that point by taking one counter-example and asserting that my technique must be flawed?
You sound knowled-e-geable in parsing test. I would love it if you would post a script, runnable in Perl, Python, or Ruby that will parse input text lines from STDIN and spit out IPAddresses to STDOUT, and spit out ALL the IPaddresses (1.0 recall) and as few (or none) of version numbers from software as possible (high precision). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_Recall
Here is the one I've been using since 1998 http://pastie.caboo.se/124182 that now stumbles regualarly on Friefox version numbers.
Do not use revision numbers on your software that look like IP addresses. ESPECIALLY please don't use them in the user agent string so that these numbers appear in web log files. Such numbers muck up many things.
Use dashes, parentheses, brackets, underscores, r.10, or ANYTHING except 4 numbers in value range [0-255] separated by 3 periods. There is no way to tell them apart from an ip address. Then we have to write blacklists, manually scan for errors, adjust counts, grep through log files with filters for the front of the line, etc etc etc. Bleachk!
Purpose of this Form The U.S. Government conducts background investigations to establish that applicants or incumbents either employed by the Government or working for the Government under contract, are suitable for the job. Information from this form is used primarily as the basis for this investigation. Complete this form only after a conditional offer of employment has been made. Giving us the information we ask for is voluntary. However, we may not be able to complete your investigation, or complete it in a timely manner, if you dont give us each item of information we request. This may affect your placement or employment prospects.
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Reporting him to management doesn't seem like a good career move.
Not only is is a bad career move, it's a quick and sure way to get a rep so everyone avoids you. Report to your boss, bring your concerns up the chain. Start by: Doing it in writing, honestly, privately and directly to the person responsible.
And regardlesss- A few books? Have you read the bible? It tells Christians kill people, too. Woop de doo.
Given that the US has brought the Muslim war directly to the brink of a regional war, it is not surpising some of these people are angry. It is also not surprising that some write books with messages of hate.
How many Muslims do you know? I have known quite a few Muslim families, and 100% were not killing anyone.
I don't have familiarity with the Times, but it seems a balanced article, and does not support your conclusion they are creating "illusions to scare people and spread hatred." Papers sell more with controversy. The worst one could claim is they are taking a biased view with some facts and making it seem like a pattern. I wonder how many books there were that were not hate related in the stores and mosques they checked?
0. You need to go learn a lot more about physics, radioactivity, power generation, the biological effects of radiation, logic, risk assessment, and terrorism before continuing to make assertions that are based on false assumptions.
Here are a few corrections to your thinking:
1 - It is not possible, even with super efficient technology solutions, to generate power density level high enough for industrial purposes from solar or wind power. Making cars and cranes from solar panels simply will not work. Cf. statement 0.
2 - Your imagination regarding the safety of nuclear power and the rational conclusions about the safety of such systems based on the historical record and the facts are not congruous.
3 - The rational process of assessing risk and making choices about how to safely run a society is not a democratic process, and it should depend in no way on assuaging the fears of individuals, or the assertions from the lay public.
Al Qaeda? Show me Al Qaeda. Not the US-Government spun version - but actually who they are.
Yes, I do not think Al Quaeda constitutes a horde. I'm willing to be proven wrong by independently verifiable facts.
To get into the question of murder, one has to dig deeply in international policy and the Geneva Convention - which are not very sane or moral. The Geneva Convention says that if you're a big country, you can divide your people up into fighting and non-fighting groups - and when the fighting groups kill people, it's not murder. That system only works for the big countries, and the smaller groups don't buy it. Death is death, killing is killing.
If you want to go down the line of "morality" and talk about who has killed whom, the US loses that argument quickly. Do you think what the US has done in Iraq is sane?
The military commissions act makes it possible for the US government to designate ANY PERSON an enemy combatant for terrorists acts or (more importantly) aiding or interacting with any other person who acts against the interests of the US. SIC. Once designated, that person basically loses their rights, and enters a kangaroo court system that can include secret evidence, prosecutors talking privately with the judge, sealed testimony from anonymous accusers, etc etc etc. A big black fuck-you box.
You wrote: If I can think of it so can any asshole with the funds and the determination to pull it off. And one of the assholes will get lucky.
This is the core fallacy of fear mongering: Taking a rare or non-existent threat and treating it as credible. It turns out there are thousands of really cheap ways for small groups to cripple modern society. Criminals are really good at coming up with them, and so are think tanks the government pays to research such things. Guess what: there is no way to prevent them! But - amazingly, none of these scenarios are happening. There is a lot more to it than "I can think of it so it must be scary."
I believe radioactivity is a great way to generate electricity. The French figured this out long ago, and have the safest and cleanest energy on the planet. If engineered and maintained well, nuclear plants are safer and more environmentally friendly than any other mass power generation system.
It seems to me there are enormous, global industries working on "better ways to make electricity" that you refer to - so please enlighten us all, what are these ways you refer to? How should human society safely and efficiently produce power for all 6 Billion of us?
Perhaps, the US might start working on ways to have fewer (asshole) people in the world angry at them and wanting to blow up their cities with dirty bombs? That might be a good place to start.
Ahh, the ubiquitous 9/11 homage. Within MINUTES! A bit off topic, but OK...
Specific to your point, who did paid them? Really. Go find out. Please, post it here - becuase to date, no one has tracked it down, at least that I have found. The non money trail is a big gaping hole in the investigation that didn't happen.
More to the point, who gives a shit? Let's put things into perspective:
2.4 Million people die in the US every year. 120K die in accidents 600K die of heart disease 10 times as many people die, every single year from Septicemia. Ever hear of it?
Let's not even start with numbers of civilian deaths at the hands of US troops abroad, before and after 9/11.
Fasts: There are crazy people. Carzy people will kill other people. You can't stop the crazy people without becoming a totalitarian police state and taking away freedoms from everyone.
9/11 was a big deal, mostly becuase it was blown way way out of proportion. It was like 20 people. Hardly a hoarde. Hardly even a blip in the mortality of the US. It was the media and opportunistic politicians that made 9/11.
What those people did on 9/11 is exactly why fear mongering about nuclear material is so ridiculous. They did a low-tech thing, designed as a symbol, and over the next 6 years US citizens did all the rest. The vast majority of the damage caused to the US after 9/11 and because of the "9/11 mentality" happened because of Americans who were susceptible to fear and control - NOT from those people who flew the planes.
You ought to go actually read the military commisions act. See what the US has come to.
Then think hard about infant mortality in the US and compare what happens with dying infants each year to the 9/11 attack.
It is exactly this attitude that has Americans cowering in their homes while their country is being raped from inside.
Why exactly should "we" hope that these are not mainstream? Becuase "we" fear that there are all those "evil" people out there (somehwere?) to get us and try and kill us? That attitude is fabricated crap, generated from the kind of attitude present in text like this. What exactly do you mean by "high level mischief"? Please explain. Are YOU implying some specific person would/will take out the radioactive material and use it to harm people? That's a catchy implication, but not real. Who? Show me all these boogymen. Show me there are hoardes of people out there sharpening their knives to destroy civilized society. It's a bullshit lie. To me, flippant fear mongering like that is most of the problem here, not some boogyman called from thin air to support the fear-based attitude you're spreading.
Given that only 1 nation has ever used nuclear weapons in a wartime aggressive attack, most of what is going on with nuclear weapons is about threats, not about usage. "I'll use it if you do..."
When you're 30-100 times the size of your opponent, having a nice, methodical system of locks and approvals by which you decide and release your forces works fine. You can spare the bombs when you have 3000 and you spend 600 Billion a year on the military.
When you're the little guy with a nuke or two, or like Pakistan with 8 tests, nuclear since 1998, and maybe 30-50 weapons - you need to have the threat that you'll use them very real. You need the idea that some mad general might fly off and send the nukes off a-bombing for the threat of using them to remain credible.
60 seconds 60 minutes 24 hours AM/PM, leap years, leap seconds, EST, EDT, GMT
basically it is a system that evolved collectively from a bunch disparate, non-reasoned decisions.
(NB, the date system is even worse. 7, 28,29,30,or 31 days)
instead of arguing over how to fix a broken system, design one that makes sense, and get people to start using it.
I'm not an expert in such things, but there are many who are.
Here's what I think:
Frankly, seconds are too short for people to do anything with, so we don't use them - they are dropped. Minutes are too short to schedule a meeting - so people fudge them, and come 5-10 mintues late.
I think we should have 10 major units in the day (0-9), and within each 1/10-of-a-day block, you have 20 7.2-minute blocks, (A-T), reserving later letters for corrections at various times of the year (yes, a totally english-centric view). Smallest increment would be 1/100th of the 7.2 minute block (00-99), or about 4.32 seconds, which would still be dropped usually.
Benefits: This would allow you to specify useful times through the day with only 2 characters (like 5G). You could specify exact times with 4 characters: (3R19) (8U21) etc. (instead of 9 now) Consulting time would be billed in 6-minute blocks (as most people do now anyway). The primary useful unit would be 6 minutes, not 1 minute - a block that conforms better to human norms. People would be less stressed about being on time, given the units are longer. Get rid of AM and PM and the choice if people use AM/PM or 24h times. If we align at midnight like we do now, daylight hours are in a friendly, linear block of numbers like 3-7.
And as I said, I'm not an expert- I came up with this off the top of my head. Others could probably do better than this even. One would have to fix the verbal communication of single letters which is always error-prone. breakfast at 3B and 3P are like 2 hours apart but sound pretty close.
when the leaders of your country are blatant criminals, and jack-booted gov't thugs carry people off without warrants to detention centers that explicitly protect those who torture -- polite discussion is over.
The US spends almost 60% of all global military spending, not counting the 2 undeclared wars, Iraq and Afganistan. That is $623 Billion out of a total of about $1.1 Trillion. The Iraq war is estimated to cost over 1.2 Trillion(ish), with about 500B spent so far. Those are direct costs - cash spent, and does not count indirect costs or opportunity costs or the human toll.
For me, I'm done keeping quiet. I'm done being polite. I'm done hoping that these wrongs will be corrected, eventually. I bring up the reality of what is happening in the US in common discussions with people. It makes people uncomfortable, as it should. Criminals are running the show, and no one has or will step to stop them. Now that the US has installed a chief lawman that is covering up past crimes, there is no more room for polite waiting and hoping things get better legally.
in big bold letters in the presentation they have typed as their first conclusion: "NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG"
which follows the line "WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING:"
a technique used extenisvely on FAUX's O'Reily factor and other far right wacko dishonest outlets. Kudos for these folks for using it so well. By so forcefully NOT stating something, it is exactly the poosibility they want us to consider.
Rowling and her lawyers don't "own" the harry potter universe. There is no legal vehicle for owning whole concepts - save patents which restrict the practice to specific claims. She has copyright and trademarks and other legal rights defined by states who have (until recently) the monopoly on military force to enforce it. Copyright does not apply here, unless she is pressing the fair use limits which on my read of the site, this is clearly within a reasonable legal scope. In no place have I seen diligent enforcement of trademarks on the content I read in the site, so I assume the book will not violate her trademarks.
So, the premise of the lawsuit is flawed, and will most likely fail. ironically, the effect is exactly opposite to the seemingly intended result - stopping the book. Rowling's dogs have given a bunch of free press for the effort and the book will have much better sales as a result.
Logical arguements have almost no effect on how money is distributed: federal money, internal funds in a company, or personal wealth spread broadly across society.
Slashdot Mirror
LegalTorrents, pushing in the same direction, is conducting a private beta now and will launch an open site soon.
The answer to the digital storage question has always been the same: "who cares"
not in the flip teenager attitude way meaning that no one does, but in the "those who care will copy it" way. It is a decidedly social, non-technical answer to the issue.
Preserving digital content will happen by those people an orgs who want to keep copies of it, because someone cares enough to use it periodically. Overall, the median rate of use (making a copy) has to be shorter than the median decay rate for the system storing the content. If this is the case, the media survives, if not, it dies.
If no one cares enough to use and copy the digital content, then people will lose it.
I don't see where the "problem" is. We keep that which people are interested in paying to archive because it is accessed regularly, and the rest will be lost.
I really want automakers to announce simple autodrive systems for cars.
I see the first place this will work is in the 0-10 MPH creeping behind another car system. No steering, just holding a constant speed (not stopping if possible) and not crashing into the car in front of you. Go > 10MPH, turns off. Turn the steering wheel, turns off. Hit the brake, it turns off. But, sit there for 40 minutes in traffic, creeping along and it works like cruise control. Why don't we have this yet???
My intuition tells me that if everyone drove this way: working hard not to stop, but going slow enough not to crash to the next guy in front -- then the traffic jams would undo much more quickly. In fact, if even a low percent of drivers drove this way it would clear up the jams more quickly. The rolling stop waves that roll back through the chain of cars keeps the jam togteher. If even 20-30% of the cars never stop (creep slowly betweeen the waves) then the whole jam would start to move fast enough to disperse. I have no modelling or math proof of this, just a gut understanding of how could work.
Will this revolution be televised? Maybe youtubed?
I'd like to see projects like this trickle into the anemic science materials at the highschool level and make learning science fun. Hopefully they contribute their materials to one/some of the several open coursework sites.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=7529 Since early in 2007 Monsanto holds world patent rights together with the United States Government for plant so-called Terminator or Genetic Use Restriction Technology (GURT). Terminator is an ominous technology by which a patented commercial seed commits suicide after one harvest. Control by private seed companies is total. Such control and power over the food chain has never before in the history of mankind existed. While I don't agree with "Control by private seed companies is total. " - patenting and releasing GMO seeds for plants that intentionally die seems deeply wrong on many levels.
How much more do humans need to innovate on ways to kill each other?
The more efficient the methods, the more distant the human cost - all lead to more killing and more government control, not less. How much more war do we need? Maybe when all the "bad" people are killed then the "good" ones left can get around to creating peace. The direct fruits of this research are more effective killing machines, really useful only in killing other humans. There may be other upsides to autonomous vehicles, but that is not what DARPA is about.
When does the global population start to work together to create a world that is peaceful? Will it ever happen? Will it happen in our lifetime? Why are people not pushing THESE questions?
I don't want my grandkids living in a world with autonomous machines toting guns and killing people. That's completely absurd - yet here we are, building it! What we have now is bad enough.
The US has shown that no rules of law, no standards of ethics will hold up against the tyranny of powerful people willing to break them. Why would anyone want governments to wield even more power over people? Guess what - the right to form a militia and protect yourself against government aggression doesn't mean shit when the central authority uses unmanned tanks against you because you don't fall in line, pay your taxes, work your job, and stay in your place. Better pray to god^H^H^H er. . . the president that she lets you live the life you want. No person is going to falter, no one is going to ask, "hey does this make sense?" when the servo and an AI script decide when you are a threat because you shot at the machine.
Most of the discussion on this list is sickening to me. People here are talking about killing people like sweeping floors or serving coffee - completely abstracted from the horror that a real war would be. Just wait until the Chinese start making robots to sweep through the street, packing heat and rounding up US-ians for internment camps. Maybe THEN people will finally say, "Hey, maybe we should work on making peace instead of war!" All the while you're maching down to a camp.
Some of these questions I ask rhetorically, but I'm serious with the point. No more wars. We're had enough.
What would be more helpful is if someone set up a distributed, fully automated IP address blacklist system and web servers and intrusion software could simply log IP address "hate" a-al a system like this http://savingtheinternetwithhate.com/
I'd love to be able to get a daily list of IP addresses that have been community-logged with reputations as having "bad behavior" (like worm propigation, scanning for website or ssh weaknesses, DOS attacks, open relays, etc) to feed to a firewalls, ssh and web server, etc. and drop their connection attempts to the floor. Efforts like this for spam and email have been fairly successful when done well, albeit sometimes controversial.
Such a project would be incredibly difficult to maintain, because crackers and others would attack it directly - yet could have a lot of value in stopping rouge behavior online.
No, "I" do not "deserve" to be "fouled-up". There is nothing wrong with ad-hoc analysis.
Furthermore, how is it possible to honor a format? That makes no sense to me. Shall we give the format high rank, respect and dignity?
The format of an IPaddress is specific enough that most times if you see a 4 number set with periods in it, an the values are 0-255, then you can assume it is an IPaddress - in any text. These version numbers break that assumption. It is extremely convenient to strip out IPaddresses out of any text, including structured log files. All sorts of fun statistics and feedback are possible on the command line piping inputs and outputs and creating counts and graphs of locations, frequencies, and such. Yes, this is done ad-hoc. Yes, you might judge it as "half-assed". Usually these are questions that are infrequent - so writing systems that handle corner cases is not worth the time. I posted this message because scripts to identify IPaddresses fails when there are examples of number strings that look like addresses but are not, regardless of the structure of the input source.
Can you explain why you would try to undercut that point by taking one counter-example and asserting that my technique must be flawed?
You sound knowled-e-geable in parsing test. I would love it if you would post a script, runnable in Perl, Python, or Ruby that will parse input text lines from STDIN and spit out IPAddresses to STDOUT, and spit out ALL the IPaddresses (1.0 recall) and as few (or none) of version numbers from software as possible (high precision).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_Recall
Here is the one I've been using since 1998
http://pastie.caboo.se/124182
that now stumbles regualarly on Friefox version numbers.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
Do not use revision numbers on your software that look like IP addresses. ESPECIALLY please don't use them in the user agent string so that these numbers appear in web log files. Such numbers muck up many things.
Use dashes, parentheses, brackets, underscores, r.10, or ANYTHING except 4 numbers in value range [0-255] separated by 3 periods. There is no way to tell them apart from an ip address. Then we have to write blacklists, manually scan for errors, adjust counts, grep through log files with filters for the front of the line, etc etc etc. Bleachk!
Decide for yourself what this is all about. The intent of the process becomes clearer when you read the form in question.
http://www.opm.gov/forms/pdf_fill/SF85.pdf
INSTRUCTIONS
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and parts 5, 731, and 736 of Title 5, Code of Federal Regulations.
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Background investigations are conducted using your responses on this
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Reporting him to management doesn't seem like a good career move.
Not only is is a bad career move, it's a quick and sure way to get a rep so everyone avoids you. Report to your boss, bring your concerns up the chain. Start by: Doing it in writing, honestly, privately and directly to the person responsible.
Your quote is not an answer to what I wrote.
And regardlesss- A few books? Have you read the bible? It tells Christians kill people, too. Woop de doo.
Given that the US has brought the Muslim war directly to the brink of a regional war, it is not surpising some of these people are angry. It is also not surprising that some write books with messages of hate.
How many Muslims do you know? I have known quite a few Muslim families, and 100% were not killing anyone.
I don't have familiarity with the Times, but it seems a balanced article, and does not support your conclusion they are creating "illusions to scare people and spread hatred." Papers sell more with controversy. The worst one could claim is they are taking a biased view with some facts and making it seem like a pattern. I wonder how many books there were that were not hate related in the stores and mosques they checked?
0. You need to go learn a lot more about physics, radioactivity, power generation, the biological effects of radiation, logic, risk assessment, and terrorism before continuing to make assertions that are based on false assumptions.
Here are a few corrections to your thinking:
1 - It is not possible, even with super efficient technology solutions, to generate power density level high enough for industrial purposes from solar or wind power. Making cars and cranes from solar panels simply will not work. Cf. statement 0.
2 - Your imagination regarding the safety of nuclear power and the rational conclusions about the safety of such systems based on the historical record and the facts are not congruous.
3 - The rational process of assessing risk and making choices about how to safely run a society is not a democratic process, and it should depend in no way on assuaging the fears of individuals, or the assertions from the lay public.
Al Qaeda? Show me Al Qaeda. Not the US-Government spun version - but actually who they are.
Yes, I do not think Al Quaeda constitutes a horde. I'm willing to be proven wrong by independently verifiable facts.
To get into the question of murder, one has to dig deeply in international policy and the Geneva Convention - which are not very sane or moral. The Geneva Convention says that if you're a big country, you can divide your people up into fighting and non-fighting groups - and when the fighting groups kill people, it's not murder. That system only works for the big countries, and the smaller groups don't buy it. Death is death, killing is killing.
If you want to go down the line of "morality" and talk about who has killed whom, the US loses that argument quickly. Do you think what the US has done in Iraq is sane?
The military commissions act makes it possible for the US government to designate ANY PERSON an enemy combatant for terrorists acts or (more importantly) aiding or interacting with any other person who acts against the interests of the US. SIC. Once designated, that person basically loses their rights, and enters a kangaroo court system that can include secret evidence, prosecutors talking privately with the judge, sealed testimony from anonymous accusers, etc etc etc. A big black fuck-you box.
As I said, you have to go read it, carefully.
Please don't patronize, it's unattractive.
You wrote: If I can think of it so can any asshole with the funds and the determination to pull it off. And one of the assholes will get lucky.
This is the core fallacy of fear mongering: Taking a rare or non-existent threat and treating it as credible. It turns out there are thousands of really cheap ways for small groups to cripple modern society. Criminals are really good at coming up with them, and so are think tanks the government pays to research such things. Guess what: there is no way to prevent them! But - amazingly, none of these scenarios are happening. There is a lot more to it than "I can think of it so it must be scary."
I believe radioactivity is a great way to generate electricity. The French figured this out long ago, and have the safest and cleanest energy on the planet. If engineered and maintained well, nuclear plants are safer and more environmentally friendly than any other mass power generation system.
It seems to me there are enormous, global industries working on "better ways to make electricity" that you refer to - so please enlighten us all, what are these ways you refer to? How should human society safely and efficiently produce power for all 6 Billion of us?
Perhaps, the US might start working on ways to have fewer (asshole) people in the world angry at them and wanting to blow up their cities with dirty bombs? That might be a good place to start.
Ahh, the ubiquitous 9/11 homage. Within MINUTES! A bit off topic, but OK...
Specific to your point, who did paid them? Really. Go find out. Please, post it here - becuase to date, no one has tracked it down, at least that I have found. The non money trail is a big gaping hole in the investigation that didn't happen.
More to the point, who gives a shit? Let's put things into perspective:
2.4 Million people die in the US every year.
120K die in accidents
600K die of heart disease
10 times as many people die, every single year from Septicemia. Ever hear of it?
Let's not even start with numbers of civilian deaths at the hands of US troops abroad, before and after 9/11.
Fasts:
There are crazy people.
Carzy people will kill other people.
You can't stop the crazy people without becoming a totalitarian police state and taking away freedoms from everyone.
9/11 was a big deal, mostly becuase it was blown way way out of proportion. It was like 20 people. Hardly a hoarde. Hardly even a blip in the mortality of the US. It was the media and opportunistic politicians that made 9/11.
What those people did on 9/11 is exactly why fear mongering about nuclear material is so ridiculous. They did a low-tech thing, designed as a symbol, and over the next 6 years US citizens did all the rest. The vast majority of the damage caused to the US after 9/11 and because of the "9/11 mentality" happened because of Americans who were susceptible to fear and control - NOT from those people who flew the planes.
You ought to go actually read the military commisions act. See what the US has come to.
Then think hard about infant mortality in the US and compare what happens with dying infants each year to the 9/11 attack.
I call "Fear mongering crap."
It is exactly this attitude that has Americans cowering in their homes while their country is being raped from inside.
Why exactly should "we" hope that these are not mainstream? Becuase "we" fear that there are all those "evil" people out there (somehwere?) to get us and try and kill us? That attitude is fabricated crap, generated from the kind of attitude present in text like this. What exactly do you mean by "high level mischief"? Please explain. Are YOU implying some specific person would/will take out the radioactive material and use it to harm people? That's a catchy implication, but not real. Who? Show me all these boogymen. Show me there are hoardes of people out there sharpening their knives to destroy civilized society. It's a bullshit lie. To me, flippant fear mongering like that is most of the problem here, not some boogyman called from thin air to support the fear-based attitude you're spreading.
Given that only 1 nation has ever used nuclear weapons in a wartime aggressive attack, most of what is going on with nuclear weapons is about threats, not about usage. "I'll use it if you do ..."
When you're 30-100 times the size of your opponent, having a nice, methodical system of locks and approvals by which you decide and release your forces works fine. You can spare the bombs when you have 3000 and you spend 600 Billion a year on the military.
When you're the little guy with a nuke or two, or like Pakistan with 8 tests, nuclear since 1998, and maybe 30-50 weapons - you need to have the threat that you'll use them very real. You need the idea that some mad general might fly off and send the nukes off a-bombing for the threat of using them to remain credible.
Our time system is completely screwy -
60 seconds
60 minutes
24 hours
AM/PM, leap years, leap seconds, EST, EDT, GMT
basically it is a system that evolved collectively from a bunch disparate, non-reasoned decisions.
(NB, the date system is even worse. 7, 28,29,30,or 31 days)
instead of arguing over how to fix a broken system, design one that makes sense, and get people to start using it.
I'm not an expert in such things, but there are many who are.
Here's what I think:
Frankly, seconds are too short for people to do anything with, so we don't use them - they are dropped.
Minutes are too short to schedule a meeting - so people fudge them, and come 5-10 mintues late.
I think we should have 10 major units in the day (0-9), and within each 1/10-of-a-day block, you have 20 7.2-minute blocks, (A-T), reserving later letters for corrections at various times of the year (yes, a totally english-centric view). Smallest increment would be 1/100th of the 7.2 minute block (00-99), or about 4.32 seconds, which would still be dropped usually.
Benefits:
This would allow you to specify useful times through the day with only 2 characters (like 5G).
You could specify exact times with 4 characters: (3R19) (8U21) etc. (instead of 9 now)
Consulting time would be billed in 6-minute blocks (as most people do now anyway).
The primary useful unit would be 6 minutes, not 1 minute - a block that conforms better to human norms.
People would be less stressed about being on time, given the units are longer.
Get rid of AM and PM and the choice if people use AM/PM or 24h times.
If we align at midnight like we do now, daylight hours are in a friendly, linear block of numbers like 3-7.
And as I said, I'm not an expert- I came up with this off the top of my head. Others could probably do better than this even. One would have to fix the verbal communication of single letters which is always error-prone. breakfast at 3B and 3P are like 2 hours apart but sound pretty close.
"that's just business"
when the leaders of your country are blatant criminals, and jack-booted gov't thugs carry people off without warrants to detention centers that explicitly protect those who torture -- polite discussion is over.
this is absurd: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=352789&cid=21263533
anyone in the US who is not talking about this is asleep
The amount of resources the US spends on the military is obscene, IMHO.
/. post earlier this month
As I referenced in my
( here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=352789&cid=21263533 )
The US spends almost 60% of all global military spending, not counting the 2 undeclared wars, Iraq and Afganistan. That is $623 Billion out of a total of about $1.1 Trillion. The Iraq war is estimated to cost over 1.2 Trillion(ish), with about 500B spent so far. Those are direct costs - cash spent, and does not count indirect costs or opportunity costs or the human toll.
Some details can be found here:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/spending.htm
and here
For me, I'm done keeping quiet. I'm done being polite. I'm done hoping that these wrongs will be corrected, eventually. I bring up the reality of what is happening in the US in common discussions with people. It makes people uncomfortable, as it should. Criminals are running the show, and no one has or will step to stop them. Now that the US has installed a chief lawman that is covering up past crimes, there is no more room for polite waiting and hoping things get better legally.
in big bold letters in the presentation they have typed as their first conclusion:
"NIST intentionally put a back door in this PRNG"
which follows the line
"WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING:"
a technique used extenisvely on FAUX's O'Reily factor and other far right wacko dishonest outlets. Kudos for these folks for using it so well. By so forcefully NOT stating something, it is exactly the poosibility they want us to consider.
Rowling and her lawyers don't "own" the harry potter universe. There is no legal vehicle for owning whole concepts - save patents which restrict the practice to specific claims. She has copyright and trademarks and other legal rights defined by states who have (until recently) the monopoly on military force to enforce it. Copyright does not apply here, unless she is pressing the fair use limits which on my read of the site, this is clearly within a reasonable legal scope. In no place have I seen diligent enforcement of trademarks on the content I read in the site, so I assume the book will not violate her trademarks.
So, the premise of the lawsuit is flawed, and will most likely fail. ironically, the effect is exactly opposite to the seemingly intended result - stopping the book. Rowling's dogs have given a bunch of free press for the effort and the book will have much better sales as a result.
Balance.
Logical arguements have almost no effect on how money is distributed: federal money, internal funds in a company, or personal wealth spread broadly across society.