Oh, I think people get it. I think Heinlein fans are just annoyed that they gave the movie to Verhoeven in the first place. Obviously it's not going to be an anywhere near faithful adaptation of the book, because that's exactly what you'd expect from a guy like Verhoeven: a cartoonish farce intended to mock the original author's politics. Sure, the movie's amusing in its own right, but it's an outright dismissal of the actual theme of the original novel. But you know, it's safe to pick on a dead guy (particularly one whose politics you and your studio friends disagree with), and it's not like they have any respect for science fiction fans anyway. As far as it being substantive commentary on Heinlein's "fascist" ideas, I think it's pretty weak. It cherry-picks the easy stuff and ignores anything too difficult to address with a cheesy one-liner or a faux-news report.
Asimov was fed up of the same old man-build-robot, robot-attacks-man theme, and said we wouldn't be stupid enough to do this.
Heh. you apparently understand the first half of his point. The second half goes something like "...we wouldn't be stupid enough to do this; instead, we'd probably do something even more stupid". The entire series of stories was one case after another of how something as seemingly prudent as the 3 laws can blow up in your face. Asimov wasn't so much fed up with the old "killer robot" theme as he was doing it one better.
You make a move from city A to City B and they pay you $700 advance and $300 on arrival for a total of $1000 when all is said and done. You make another move of the same distance with the same weight (the two factors that affect how much they pay you) and they give you an advance for $700. When it comes time to get the additional $300 they say nope it only costs $300 and you now owe us $400. Pay us now or we keep your taxes plus a % for our trouble.
Heh. Also worth noting is that if choose to avoid this by having them ship your stuff, you gotta be prepared to lose one or more boxes (presumably randomly selected based on the estimated value of the contents). I lost 2 CD players, a VCR, and varying portions of my CD collection at various times. Didn't seem to matter if I was a private shipping 5 boxes (one lost), or a sergeant shipping 20 boxes (3 lost). There's just no way to win.
Maybe Eric should actually get to work and code instead - if he had done so a year ago, chances are that by now, there would be a good configuration system for CUPS.
After all, it *is* one of the much-touted advantages of FOSS that you actually can scratch your metaphorical itches instead of having to wait for the vendor to do it.
This line of thinking is only acccurate in a theoretical sense. Unfortunately, it assumes that all people are roughly equal in competence with regard to a given task. One of the most important parts of getting a job done is arranging to have it done by someone who can do the job. No amount of enthusiasm or hard work is going to allow (say) a ditch digger to write an improved print manager interface until he's invested some minimum amount of time learning all the basic precursor stuff. Perhaps this is why MS spokesholes compare FOSS to communism. The quaint notion that all work is somehow of equal value whether it's done by a master or a novice sounds like something Karl Marx would say.
Wouldn't a better benchmark be to compare a dual core setup to a similarly configured dual processor workstation?
If you're not going to RTFA, why do you think you're qualified to discuss what they did and did not benchmark? They did compare dual core and dual processor setups as well. They also discussed the relative advantages of both.
"...work for almost nothing in exchange for having no taxes, no expenses and no home to maintane."
Gee, you just described the US Military...
Ha ha. Not really. Military personnel pay all the same payroll taxes everyone else does. No expenses? Maybe not rent nor (in theory) grocery bill, but everything else comes out of your meager salary (which is very low because you have no rent/food to pay for). The home maintenance expenses I'll grant you, but only in the case of single, childless service members. Any married service member can tell you the the pain of trying to make ends meet on the laughable extra money they give you under "housing allowance" and "separate rations". So, nice attempt at humor, but ya' really gotta have an element of truth to it for it to be funny.
Why would they even post this story if it was only about activating your card?
From the damn/. blurb: "When the owner receives a new card, he or she speaks a password into the sensor on the card. If the voiceprint matches, the card is activated.""
Why? To prevent identity theft, rather than pickpocketing. A lost or stolen card can be deactivated with one phone call. Someone getting a card in your name and having it sento to their PO box isn't going to ring any bells till after they've run up a few thousand dollars in charges.
Even if they don't have backups it should be easy to get most of the info. Just send an email to their customers:
Dear valued Ameritrade customer:
Due to computers errors, we may have lost some of your informations. Please go to the following web site and verify your informations. Please do so as soon as possible or your account may be suspended. Thank you.
Here's a touchy subject. (No trolling, really, trying to make a counter example).
Is it better not to have slavery? Or to have slavery and abide by the law, and treat your slaves as nice as you can? I'd vote that the first one is the more socially responsible one.
Yeah, this is a bit of a stretch comparison, but the point I'm trying to make is that Google could have made a stand to say, "what you, China, is doing is wrong, and we will "do no evil." Instead, they accept the check and say, "we'll do what we can."
Your counter example is poorly chosen. It should be more along the lines of:
"Is it better to deal with slave owners to afford their slaves with some limited freedoms, or to refuse to deal with them entirely unless they free their slaves?"
China doesn't give a rat's ass what Google thinks of its censorship policy, so taking the moral high ground is essentially unproductive posturing. The real question is is it better to make a purely symbolic all-or-nothing stand on principle, or to do as much good as you can with the limited options available?
Although it's funny -- and ironic and sarcastic -- this post sadly deserves something more than "funny".
No it doesn't. It has no relation to reality. Patents don't inhibit end users, onlt manufacturers. It may be funny, but in order to rate an insightful or interesting mod it'd actually have to make a cogent point.
But I don't think any branch of the military could really create an effective unit of "electronic warriors".
You're kidding, right? The military pioneered electronic warfare. This specific "hacking" is not so different from what military intelligence units have been doing for decades. I myself was in communications intelligence in the army fifteen years ago, and even then we were doing similar stuff.
The top down nature of the chain of command, the slow and lumbering reaction to change, and the strict discipline just doesn't mesh well with the hacker environment.
Actually, I think it just doesn't mesh with some hackers. There are plenty out there who are fine with it. Besides, the military isn't as inflexible as you seem to think it is.
I can't imagine your typical hacker getting his head shaved and going through basic training with drill sergeants screaming at them is going to find the military the type of environment where his or her talents and creativity could be used.
Fully one third of the guys in my basic training platoon were going into communications intelligence like I was. Your imagination is not reflecting the reality I experienced.
What I'd like to see is the U.S. considering physical combat and information warfare two separate things; one handled by the traditional armed services and the other handled by something new
That's a stupid idea, particularly when the "hacking" requires things like sneaking behind enemy lines and making a "man in the middle" attack on a fiber optic line. They aren't talking about "teh IntarWeb" when they say they're training hackers. They're talking about the larger arena of wired and wireless digital communications. The most serious hacking will probably end up being done by Special Forces teams. A bunch of lazy slobs in Spock ears living with their parents aren't suited to the task.
What I've seen of hackers (both white and black hat) doesn't lead me to think they would do well in a military envornment. Does anyone know if there has been much problems with keeping the unit discipline?
I doubt there's been any problem. The military has a LOT of hacker type guys. I was part of a Commodore 64 game cracking group in the army back in '87-'88, and all of us were war game/RPG/computer nerds. You don't see many guys like that in 11B (infantry), but when you get into the 97 and 98 class of Military Occupational Specialty (military intelligence) all of a sudden you're surrounded by the same kind of guys who ran the film projector and got picked on by jocks in high school. You see, the slovenly, lazy, anti-authoritarian blobs who live in their mother's basement are only a small subset of hacker types. There are enough energetic, enthusiastic, squared-away young poindexters to fill the military's needs.
I'm not just talking about the physical fitness stuff, I mean that most hackers seem to want to "screw with the system" a little.
Heh. You think people in the military don't "screw with the system"? Getting It Done in the military frequently involves a LOT of "creative rule following".
Maybe it comes from the same urge to reverse-engineer stuff, but the hackers I've seen tend to dislike bueracracy and "keeping your head down" to not stick out, which are things the military seems to have a lot of.
People like that excel in the military. The best way to get ahead is to be able to game the system and get the bureaucracy to work in your favor. As for "keeping your head down", I must say that nearly every geek-hacker type I've met was fairly quiet and unobtrusive.
I wonder if the military is recruiting hackers directly, or training their own people to be hackers?
Train their own. They ALWAYS train their own. The very last thing they want is a bunch of self-styled know-it-all's not paying attention during training. With the exception of things like foreign language training, the military very much prefers "clean slate" types. Not a chance in hell that they'd specifically look for hackers and try to recruit them.
One has to wonder if someday some nut case with a used Soviet sub and a few cruise missiles will take out a few choice targets in New York or LA just to get our attention.
I think they're banking on the fact that it would take several dozen nutcases to actually operate such a submarine, and that it would take several months of work to get any of those old Russian subs seaworthy. This would provide quite a number of opportunities to (ahem) "intervene" before it came down to needing any significant ASW assets.
Quite honestly, I've never heard somebody call "Housing and Urban Development" hud. HUD is Heads Up Display. Wouldn't you be confused if someone came up to you and said "Yeah, there's so much new HUD going on around here these days."
I think you only hear it in reference to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Likewise, "HUD" in that sense is really only used "inside the beltway" and by commentators on federal government stuff (yawn).
Pure poppycock, IMHO. Most armies infrastructures are old enough that they have backup programs. The idea that a hacker could shut down an entire air-defence grid raises eyebrows, as most likely that air-defence grid was designed before the advent of computer networks - and military leaders are wary of trusting so much equipment.
I would say it's only mostly poppycock, really. Integrated fire control systems are very complicated. Getting a centralized radar system to effectively communicate with a half dozen SAM or AAA batteries has been the biggest nightmare of air defense system engineers for decades. The cheapest thing to upgrade on an air defense artillery system is the control hardware and software. The Chinese have been aggressively modernizing variations on a lot of older soviet designs with modern electronics. Heck, Iraq had a sophisticated air defense system linked by fiber optics (made mostly of US-made parts assembled by the Chinese). Of course, the poppycock aspect is that these types of networks are usually closed, hard-wired systems and (as you mentioned) wise commanders train their troops to operate such things manually. In the case of Iraq's IAD network, no amount of hacking would be as effective as a few properly aimed HARMs.
Right now I can completely rewire my office and home for $5k with state of the art, high end network components and have it done in less than a week. I can't get close to those speeds with my net connection for 4x that price ($20k/year).
You say that like there's no difference between a LAN and a WAN. The reason your LAN setup is so much cheaper is that none of your cable runs are THREE MILES LONG. You think teh intarweb runs over 100BTX Ethernet cable everywhere?
Do you really think the maintenance of a few hundred wifi stations is THAT much more complicated than maintenance of 10,000 light poles?
A light pole consists of a lamp and a photocell connected to a power line. Maintenance and repair for such a system requires checking three things: power on? bulb out? photocell working? You'd have to be an idiot to suggest that maintaining a network of light poles is anywhere near as hard as keeping a WiFI network working, even at a 1-to-100 difference in scale. I'm not even going to get into the comparison to CONCRETE ROADWAYS. Honestly, this sounds like one of those stupid "if they can put a man on the moon..." things.
I think the main reason there's not widespread adoption of those fluorescent bulbs is that people don't think in the long-term. In the short term, a pack of walmart brand bulbs costs 75 cents and there's 4 of them, great! Or hell, splurge and get the $1.50 GE bulbs or whatever. Those crazy fluorescents are like $7.00-$12.00 for a two-pack.
Many people don't buy those fluorescents because they can't stand the sickly green hue it gives everything. My girlfriend spends a shitload on full-spectrum incandescents because she doesn't like the limited spectrum of even the regular ones.
However, as with all things, you can get flourescent tubes which have a really warming glow, and the halogen bulbs in my room have a much cleaner light than ordinary bulbs.
Additionally, they don't have mains flicker. When I went to the US the flicker from flourescent tubes drove me insane (in the UK they flicker at 50Hz, what is it in the states?).
It's 60Hz in the US. The flicker you were seeing was most likely due to old, nearly dead ballasts and/or tubes. The light actually flickers at 120Hz (AC, ya know) but the phosphorescence usually is strong enough to last through most of the "dark" part. When they get old and start to crap out, the peaks are lower and the troughs between get longer.
If you use this tool... there are those who would assert you are not holding up your end of a "social contract" between yourself and the Web site that you are browsing
Those who assert that are wrong. Advertising is already an exploitation of social contract. In most societies, it is considered impolite to ignore someone who's talking to you. Likewise, it's considered impolite to unduly impose upon this customary attention and badger people with inconsequentialities. Advertising straddles the line between honest, reasonable communication and badgering. Further, being that it's purely commercial in nature gives it lower status than regular person to person communication. If I find the advertising distasteful or irritating, then I am under no societal obligation to continue to interact with it. "Social contract" is really about people, not business.
what you're talking about is collusion, and very very very illegal.
No, not when there's an overt partnership. It's only collusion if they are competitors who "unofficially" decide that they're going to keep prices artificially high. It's not collusion if the two are actually in business together.
If I break the window to your car, hotwire it, and then leave it in the middle of downtown so that anyone else can drive it, too, I'm taking something prohibitive and making it free, but that doesn't make it right.
Please, this tortured analogy comes up evry time. There are fundamental differences between real property and "intellectual" property. The two are not comparable. The former is diminished by sharing, while the latter is not. The former is covered by laws about real property while the latter is covered by (in this case) copyright law, which has no relation whatsoever to real property law. So leave your analogies about stolen cars, walking into my living room, and transferring money from my bank account to yours, because THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.
I suppose you have no problem with the massive liberal left bias of the media and TV though, do you? Since you obviously missed it, TV content outside of FOX is vastly tilted towards the left.
It doesn't look tilted to the left if you're already on the left. The reason it looks so right-slanted in the first place is that there's nothing much to the left of them except grumpy soviet-era communists, and they often leftists consider themselves "centrists". To me (as a small-L libertarian), the media looks like it's tilted towards Authoritarianism, with a (to me irrelevant) wide array of left-to-right positions on which particular liberties they want curtailed. It's really a pointless argument to pursue, because everyone has a tendency to see themselves as being more "centrist" than they actually are, and from their point of view things will always seem to slant the other direction.
You know, I think the CEO has it right actually, and Moore has it wrong. HP Labs' new crossbar switch technology looks set to extend Moore's law out to near infinity.
First, Moore's Law is about transistor density. If you use these nano-crossbar thingies instead of transistors, Moore's Law no longer applies. Second, even if you allow that crossbar nano-whatsits are the equivalent of transistors in terms of Moore's Law, it still can't extend out to "near infinity", as there is an easily calculable finite limit to how small you can make a mechanical device.
It invites people to "warfly" now. Fly around remote areas, pretend to be oblivious, and see if you get "flashed", and then post your GPS coords on the internet. Then, do it again from a different direction. Pin down the area where you've been "flashed". What someone wants people to not fly over will get boxed in soon enough, and will warrant closer on-ground inspection.
News flash, Einstein. First, there are no "secret" no-fly zones. They're all clearly marked on aviation maps. Second, if they implement this system, they aren't going to be so daft as to only deploy it around the "secret bases" in the no-fly zones, they're going to deploy it around the entire area so as not to give anything away. Honestly, do you really think that you are more intelligent than several dozen DoD eggheads?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, I think people get it. I think Heinlein fans are just annoyed that they gave the movie to Verhoeven in the first place. Obviously it's not going to be an anywhere near faithful adaptation of the book, because that's exactly what you'd expect from a guy like Verhoeven: a cartoonish farce intended to mock the original author's politics. Sure, the movie's amusing in its own right, but it's an outright dismissal of the actual theme of the original novel. But you know, it's safe to pick on a dead guy (particularly one whose politics you and your studio friends disagree with), and it's not like they have any respect for science fiction fans anyway. As far as it being substantive commentary on Heinlein's "fascist" ideas, I think it's pretty weak. It cherry-picks the easy stuff and ignores anything too difficult to address with a cheesy one-liner or a faux-news report.
Heh. you apparently understand the first half of his point. The second half goes something like "...we wouldn't be stupid enough to do this; instead, we'd probably do something even more stupid". The entire series of stories was one case after another of how something as seemingly prudent as the 3 laws can blow up in your face. Asimov wasn't so much fed up with the old "killer robot" theme as he was doing it one better.
Heh. Also worth noting is that if choose to avoid this by having them ship your stuff, you gotta be prepared to lose one or more boxes (presumably randomly selected based on the estimated value of the contents). I lost 2 CD players, a VCR, and varying portions of my CD collection at various times. Didn't seem to matter if I was a private shipping 5 boxes (one lost), or a sergeant shipping 20 boxes (3 lost). There's just no way to win.
This line of thinking is only acccurate in a theoretical sense. Unfortunately, it assumes that all people are roughly equal in competence with regard to a given task. One of the most important parts of getting a job done is arranging to have it done by someone who can do the job. No amount of enthusiasm or hard work is going to allow (say) a ditch digger to write an improved print manager interface until he's invested some minimum amount of time learning all the basic precursor stuff. Perhaps this is why MS spokesholes compare FOSS to communism. The quaint notion that all work is somehow of equal value whether it's done by a master or a novice sounds like something Karl Marx would say.
If you're not going to RTFA, why do you think you're qualified to discuss what they did and did not benchmark? They did compare dual core and dual processor setups as well. They also discussed the relative advantages of both.
Gee, you just described the US Military...
Ha ha. Not really. Military personnel pay all the same payroll taxes everyone else does. No expenses? Maybe not rent nor (in theory) grocery bill, but everything else comes out of your meager salary (which is very low because you have no rent/food to pay for). The home maintenance expenses I'll grant you, but only in the case of single, childless service members. Any married service member can tell you the the pain of trying to make ends meet on the laughable extra money they give you under "housing allowance" and "separate rations". So, nice attempt at humor, but ya' really gotta have an element of truth to it for it to be funny.
From the damn /. blurb: "When the owner receives a new card, he or she speaks a password into the sensor on the card. If the voiceprint matches, the card is activated.""
Why? To prevent identity theft, rather than pickpocketing. A lost or stolen card can be deactivated with one phone call. Someone getting a card in your name and having it sento to their PO box isn't going to ring any bells till after they've run up a few thousand dollars in charges.
Did you mention 'tards'?
Yes, 'tard.
Dear valued Ameritrade customer:
Due to computers errors, we may have lost some of your informations. Please go to the following web site and verify your informations. Please do so as soon as possible or your account may be suspended. Thank you.
http:/256.123.321.201/Ameritrade.html
Your counter example is poorly chosen. It should be more along the lines of:
"Is it better to deal with slave owners to afford their slaves with some limited freedoms, or to refuse to deal with them entirely unless they free their slaves?"
China doesn't give a rat's ass what Google thinks of its censorship policy, so taking the moral high ground is essentially unproductive posturing. The real question is is it better to make a purely symbolic all-or-nothing stand on principle, or to do as much good as you can with the limited options available?
No it doesn't. It has no relation to reality. Patents don't inhibit end users, onlt manufacturers. It may be funny, but in order to rate an insightful or interesting mod it'd actually have to make a cogent point.
You're kidding, right? The military pioneered electronic warfare. This specific "hacking" is not so different from what military intelligence units have been doing for decades. I myself was in communications intelligence in the army fifteen years ago, and even then we were doing similar stuff.
The top down nature of the chain of command, the slow and lumbering reaction to change, and the strict discipline just doesn't mesh well with the hacker environment.
Actually, I think it just doesn't mesh with some hackers. There are plenty out there who are fine with it. Besides, the military isn't as inflexible as you seem to think it is.
I can't imagine your typical hacker getting his head shaved and going through basic training with drill sergeants screaming at them is going to find the military the type of environment where his or her talents and creativity could be used.
Fully one third of the guys in my basic training platoon were going into communications intelligence like I was. Your imagination is not reflecting the reality I experienced.
What I'd like to see is the U.S. considering physical combat and information warfare two separate things; one handled by the traditional armed services and the other handled by something new
That's a stupid idea, particularly when the "hacking" requires things like sneaking behind enemy lines and making a "man in the middle" attack on a fiber optic line. They aren't talking about "teh IntarWeb" when they say they're training hackers. They're talking about the larger arena of wired and wireless digital communications. The most serious hacking will probably end up being done by Special Forces teams. A bunch of lazy slobs in Spock ears living with their parents aren't suited to the task.
I doubt there's been any problem. The military has a LOT of hacker type guys. I was part of a Commodore 64 game cracking group in the army back in '87-'88, and all of us were war game/RPG/computer nerds. You don't see many guys like that in 11B (infantry), but when you get into the 97 and 98 class of Military Occupational Specialty (military intelligence) all of a sudden you're surrounded by the same kind of guys who ran the film projector and got picked on by jocks in high school. You see, the slovenly, lazy, anti-authoritarian blobs who live in their mother's basement are only a small subset of hacker types. There are enough energetic, enthusiastic, squared-away young poindexters to fill the military's needs.
I'm not just talking about the physical fitness stuff, I mean that most hackers seem to want to "screw with the system" a little.
Heh. You think people in the military don't "screw with the system"? Getting It Done in the military frequently involves a LOT of "creative rule following".
Maybe it comes from the same urge to reverse-engineer stuff, but the hackers I've seen tend to dislike bueracracy and "keeping your head down" to not stick out, which are things the military seems to have a lot of.
People like that excel in the military. The best way to get ahead is to be able to game the system and get the bureaucracy to work in your favor. As for "keeping your head down", I must say that nearly every geek-hacker type I've met was fairly quiet and unobtrusive.
I wonder if the military is recruiting hackers directly, or training their own people to be hackers?
Train their own. They ALWAYS train their own. The very last thing they want is a bunch of self-styled know-it-all's not paying attention during training. With the exception of things like foreign language training, the military very much prefers "clean slate" types. Not a chance in hell that they'd specifically look for hackers and try to recruit them.
I think they're banking on the fact that it would take several dozen nutcases to actually operate such a submarine, and that it would take several months of work to get any of those old Russian subs seaworthy. This would provide quite a number of opportunities to (ahem) "intervene" before it came down to needing any significant ASW assets.
I think you only hear it in reference to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Likewise, "HUD" in that sense is really only used "inside the beltway" and by commentators on federal government stuff (yawn).
I would say it's only mostly poppycock, really. Integrated fire control systems are very complicated. Getting a centralized radar system to effectively communicate with a half dozen SAM or AAA batteries has been the biggest nightmare of air defense system engineers for decades. The cheapest thing to upgrade on an air defense artillery system is the control hardware and software. The Chinese have been aggressively modernizing variations on a lot of older soviet designs with modern electronics. Heck, Iraq had a sophisticated air defense system linked by fiber optics (made mostly of US-made parts assembled by the Chinese). Of course, the poppycock aspect is that these types of networks are usually closed, hard-wired systems and (as you mentioned) wise commanders train their troops to operate such things manually. In the case of Iraq's IAD network, no amount of hacking would be as effective as a few properly aimed HARMs.
You say that like there's no difference between a LAN and a WAN. The reason your LAN setup is so much cheaper is that none of your cable runs are THREE MILES LONG. You think teh intarweb runs over 100BTX Ethernet cable everywhere?
A light pole consists of a lamp and a photocell connected to a power line. Maintenance and repair for such a system requires checking three things: power on? bulb out? photocell working? You'd have to be an idiot to suggest that maintaining a network of light poles is anywhere near as hard as keeping a WiFI network working, even at a 1-to-100 difference in scale. I'm not even going to get into the comparison to CONCRETE ROADWAYS. Honestly, this sounds like one of those stupid "if they can put a man on the moon..." things.
Many people don't buy those fluorescents because they can't stand the sickly green hue it gives everything. My girlfriend spends a shitload on full-spectrum incandescents because she doesn't like the limited spectrum of even the regular ones.
It's 60Hz in the US. The flicker you were seeing was most likely due to old, nearly dead ballasts and/or tubes. The light actually flickers at 120Hz (AC, ya know) but the phosphorescence usually is strong enough to last through most of the "dark" part. When they get old and start to crap out, the peaks are lower and the troughs between get longer.
Those who assert that are wrong. Advertising is already an exploitation of social contract. In most societies, it is considered impolite to ignore someone who's talking to you. Likewise, it's considered impolite to unduly impose upon this customary attention and badger people with inconsequentialities. Advertising straddles the line between honest, reasonable communication and badgering. Further, being that it's purely commercial in nature gives it lower status than regular person to person communication. If I find the advertising distasteful or irritating, then I am under no societal obligation to continue to interact with it. "Social contract" is really about people, not business.
No, not when there's an overt partnership. It's only collusion if they are competitors who "unofficially" decide that they're going to keep prices artificially high. It's not collusion if the two are actually in business together.
Please, this tortured analogy comes up evry time. There are fundamental differences between real property and "intellectual" property. The two are not comparable. The former is diminished by sharing, while the latter is not. The former is covered by laws about real property while the latter is covered by (in this case) copyright law, which has no relation whatsoever to real property law. So leave your analogies about stolen cars, walking into my living room, and transferring money from my bank account to yours, because THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING.
It doesn't look tilted to the left if you're already on the left. The reason it looks so right-slanted in the first place is that there's nothing much to the left of them except grumpy soviet-era communists, and they often leftists consider themselves "centrists". To me (as a small-L libertarian), the media looks like it's tilted towards Authoritarianism, with a (to me irrelevant) wide array of left-to-right positions on which particular liberties they want curtailed. It's really a pointless argument to pursue, because everyone has a tendency to see themselves as being more "centrist" than they actually are, and from their point of view things will always seem to slant the other direction.
First, Moore's Law is about transistor density. If you use these nano-crossbar thingies instead of transistors, Moore's Law no longer applies. Second, even if you allow that crossbar nano-whatsits are the equivalent of transistors in terms of Moore's Law, it still can't extend out to "near infinity", as there is an easily calculable finite limit to how small you can make a mechanical device.
News flash, Einstein. First, there are no "secret" no-fly zones. They're all clearly marked on aviation maps. Second, if they implement this system, they aren't going to be so daft as to only deploy it around the "secret bases" in the no-fly zones, they're going to deploy it around the entire area so as not to give anything away. Honestly, do you really think that you are more intelligent than several dozen DoD eggheads?