Actually, this is what is known as a "movie", bpjk. So I guess the more pertinent question is "are they all capable actors?" Anything is possible in a movie...
See, people throw this bullshit argument out all the time, but it's not some universal excuse that makes everything OK. Cultivating suspension of disbelief is not a trivial task. When writing a decent script taking place in any sort of fantasy world, a careful balance must be struck between the made-up shit and the realistic. What makes such TV and movies good is a solid, believable character interaction, and an internally consistent plot. It may take place in a fictional world, but if it has humans in it, they better damn well act like humans. No amount of "hey, it's just a movie" erases the fact that no responsible human would ever put a starship under the command of a bunch of kids! You can put all sorts of whiz-bang outlandish gizmos in their hand that shoot this imaginary particle, or that made-up energy beam and I'll go for it. But ask me to accept that this is the well-defined Star Trek universe, only for some reason they briefly decided "youth == wisdom" during the period portrayed in the movie, and I'm gonna call bullshit.
Sure, there are plenty of people who will watch and accept any vapid trash you throw up on the screen, so long as it has explosions, boobies, and (most importantly) a twist ending. A lot of people watch Lost, Fringe, used to watch Alias, and actually went to see Mission Impossible 3. This just shows that there's a ready market to make a quick buck distracting folks for 47 minutes (or longer). Do you think any of those abysmal JJ Abrams stool samples will be selling heavily on [DVD|BluRay|*] in 20 years? Highly doubtful.
a Constitution class starship is 305 meters long. Let's just guess that it's 120 meters wide and an average of 20 meters thick. I know rabid trekkies will correct all this, but it's not important to be all that accurate. 305 x 120 x 20 = 732,000 cubic meters. That's 732 million liters, for those still reading. 732 million liters divided by 748 liters per second is 978,609 seconds to empty the ship to vacuum.
That's 11.3 days to empty the ship through a 10 cm diameter hole
A constitution class ship has neither an infinitely thin skin, nor is it 100% hollow, nor is it a perfect box. Your air volume calculation needs work.
How on earth can the entire command staff of the Enterprise be that young? They don't require people to have serious experience (time in the field) before they can get to positions of that much responsibility?
"Well, since it's a prequel and the ship itself is young, we were thinking that it might be cool to make the crew young too. You know, give it kind of a Star Trek Kids vibe. The 'kid' angle is great marketing. It appeals to a younger, hipper demographic. It worked great for Roseanne Barr, and people just went ga-ga for Spy Kids!"
If it were me in that office, I'd have the guy taken out and shot; but it's some moron Paramount executive--- probably the same guy who picked that no-talent hack JJ Abrams to direct--- so the pitch was probably greeted with great enthusiasm.
I could go on but I think everyone sees a pattern here. Making the first release of a product version 5.0 or some such nonsense works as well as most lies. The only way to maintain the lie is to tell more lies which then beget a need for still more lies. Eventually, it all unravels although current management may be under the impression that they can take the money and run before they're found out.
Unfortunately, a clever marketroid will have a single answer for questions of "What happened to versions 1 thru 4?"
"Those were incomplete, internal development version. Version 5 is the first commercial release."
Whichever tool marked the above post "flamebait" needs to have their sarcasm detector checked. Someone mod this clearly funny post "underrated" and give him his points back. Besides, it's always amusing when a post reaches "+5, Flamebait"
Do I own this Slashdot comment? Slashdot says I do
"Ownership" in that case means copyright.
what happens if Slashdot deletes it on me? I've lost something I own, and there's nothing I can do about it. That doesn't seem right.
It's not their problem if you're stupid enough to store the only copy of your valuable written insights in something as unsuited to the task as the slashcode system. Save to your local computer, fool.
Now, in the case of online virutual worlds, you didn't create that Godslayer of Hit Points sword your character carries. If you did, you'd have a local copy of the 3D vector file used to draw it. No, the GoHP sword is just an in-game milestone. It doesn't matter that it took you three years of 12 hour a day gaming to get your character's weapon byte set to that value; the "sword" still isn't yours. It's no more something someone can own than a high score on an Asteroids coin-op game is.
Ultimately, I think we'll see that virtual property is legally blessed to have real life monetary value, in much the same way that software is.
How is a token in a database somewhere "property"? It fits neither the definition of real property, nor even the hogwash definition of "intellectual property". Software is "owned" via copyright. Treadmilling in WoW doesn't give you copyright over an integer value in a database representing how much "gold" you have in-game. Such a thing may have value in its transferability, but only inasmuch as the operators of the virtual world permit the transfer of the value. If they want to prohibit transfers for meatspace profit, there's nothing you can do about it. Even in weird online worlds like Second Life, where you can actually create things (vs simply discovering things the content provider created), the value of your "ownership" of them is wholly dependent on that virtual world continuing to exist.
that is certainly debatable.... if we had a decent method to turn nuclear waste into usable fuel, would you still prefer we bury it?
Nuclear waste is usable fuel--- 95% unconsumed--- we just can't use it because of Carter's executive order banning breeder reactors and then Clinton's complete abandonment of the Integral Fast Reactor reprocessing research in 1994. 14 years later, we still have no plans for fuel reprocessing because idiot anti-proliferation folks don't know enough about the subject to realize that it takes a very specific type of breeder reactor design to create plutonium pure enough for nuclear weapons, and they unilaterally oppose every suggestion of reprocessing.
if we had a way to turn garbage into usable fuel, would you still prefer landfills?
There is, but with the exception of densely populated areas where hauling it off costs a small fortune, the energy you get out of it is almost always more expensive than the baseline cost of just burying it and purchasing other available energy.
at some point, we have to start being responsible about our waste products instead of just trying to hide them underground.
At some point you have to realize that CO2 isn't a potential energy source like "spent" fuel rods and landfill refuse, but it rather an energy sink which will require the expenditure of even more CO2 producing fuels to process it like this.
In other words, if you don't have a good grasp of the basic science, your high-horse platitudes are going to sound pretty dumb.
Can we please have a new Crackpot (or maybe Quackpot, or Snakepot, shit, I dunno) section on slashdot, specifically for these half-baked bullshit stories?
I think that'd be great, except it would require that the chimps/editors at slashdot actually be intelligent and/or diligent enough to spot bullshit science--- which history has demonstrated they are not.
If USA owes this foolish amount of money, but no-one dares to ask for it back because of the military and economic power
No, they don't ask for it back because it's financed through T-bills, which pay back over a predetermined period. They can't "ask for it back" any more than the bank can ask for the money you borrowed to buy your house back only 6 months into the mortgage term. Idiot.
Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."
Yes, because devoting the resources expended to fix the sign to eliminating the national debt would have solved the problem.
"The clock was put up by the late real estate mogul Seymour Durst in 1989 "
'cause you know, it's the Durst Institute that's responsible for the debt, not a bunch of irresponsible politicians...
Can't they focus the research on something more important than baldness?
Because it's not a simple matter of reaching a certain quantity of "man-months" applied to (for example) cure cancer. Our level of technological advancement simply isn't to the point where a Mongol Hordes approach is going to be effective. In most cases, we don't even know what we need to learn before we figure out which way to look for a cure for (x). Who knows, perhaps a technique for combating baldness may hold the key to curing diabetes.
The classic answer to all this is, "it takes 9 months to make a baby no matter how many women you assign to the task"
You're an idiot. Gold is just as much an arbitrary standard of value as any fiat currency. The only thing guaranteeing gold has any value is it's relatively fixed supply. This supply inflexibility is also what makes the gold standard a catastrophically bad currency basis, as it cannot support an expanding marketplace. There's nothing magic about a piece of gold locked in a vault that makes a piece of paper marked "$100 gold certificate" safer than one marked "$100 federal reserve note". I prime example is Spain during the 1500's. A tremendous amount of gold and silver poured into the country from the new world, but instead of cementing Spain as the richest nation in Europe, it basically just caused murderous inflation, which left Spain impoverished. If you want a complex economy that's relatively immune to the chaotic boom-to-bust cycle of a true laissez-faire system, then you need an adjustable currency.
I consider myself a libertarian, but I sometimes think you [gold standard|anarcho-capitalist|*] loons are as bad as the "we should all live on subsistence communes, growing our own food and riding bicycles" enviro-nuts. Leveraged credit built pretty much everything we have in the modern world. You think there'd be all those taiwanese [laptop|cell phone|*] factories if you had to save up enough gold bars to build one? Everything devolves to the financial fiction of "market value" anyway. Tying a small fraction of it to a static commodity just because it makes you "feel better" is asinine.
You're absolutely right about that. Last year, my wife and I were looking at a house, and I was rather amazed at just how hard the agent was pushing to make a sale, going so far as to say, "you really want to look at buying now, because come summertime the prices are going to start going up". We ended up passing on the house and are still renting, and I suspect we will have saved quite a bit of money by the time we do purchase a home. I just couldn't see any way that home prices could have been sustained given the average income for our area.
We're in the process of buying a house right now. 1-2 years ago, when everyone else we know was saying "buy now while it's still possible", we were saving our money, eating baloney sandwiches and driving 10+ year old cars. Now we have 20% down on a decent house at a short-sale price, while they are looking at murderous payments on their interest-only loans on mediocre houses they paid twice as much for--- and can't get out of without going back to the squalor of apartment life.
I think I'd file it under "layered scare tactics" -- people will often give stuff away when they *think* YOU BELIEVE you can hear them thinking, that they'd never let on to if they knew damn well that you ALSO know it's bullshit.
So... pretend to believe in it, and watch the reactions of people who know better but think *they* are leading YOU down the garden path.
Well, I don't know if that's how it's used, but that's how *I* would use it.
Yeah, you're probably on to something there. And I suppose good security theater would actually help. But of course we know that a lot of them believe in polygraphy, because if they didn't, and knew it was all crap, then no one would "get in trouble" for "failing" a polygraph. Unfortunately, people get refused initial clearances or have their clearances revoked because of what some deluded jackass thinks he sees in a pattern of squiggles on paper.
I think it would be interesting to see what the algorithm does to somebody like Halle Berry or Jessica Alba. What happens when you try to beautify somebody who might already be considered perfect-looking?
Probably almost nothing happens, or if it does, it results an a different generically pleasing set of proportions.
What happens if you try the algorithm on somebody who is actually in the algorithm's database?
Sheesh, I can answer that just from the/. article. It finds the closest match in the database, so it would likely find them, and then do almost nothing.
If you honestly believe people are pirating games, movies, and music as a form of "civil disobedience" to stick it to the man, I don't know what to say. It's the same tired cultural revolution argument that's been trotted out for over a decade. The simpler truth is that human beings are selfish by nature, and if there's an easy way to get something for free without repercussion, they'll latch onto it and justify it any number of ways.
There's nothing that says civil disobedience has to be purely protest, or result in punishment, or not be initially motivated by selfishness. Ferdinand Marcos was ousted as president of the Philippines by mass civil disobedience in the form of thousands of people simply not showing up for work.
What? Do you mean there's really no such classified level as "Burn Before Reading" ??!;)
Ja, dunno 'bout that, but I certainly think there oughtta be a classification level of "SUICIDE BEFORE READING" for certain reports to specific upper-level leaders...
I see the problem. Everyone here is only familiar with peer to peer networking and therefore only with P2P security. No one does Netware anymore, so they're not aware of the top-down, compartmentalized security model. At best they can only visualize the *NIX model, which is more permissive about sideways access than Netware is.
There, that should explain it well enough.;)
Heh. That's a GREAT analogy. I'm going to have to remember that one.
Though the more I actually think about it the more obvious it appears that you must, in fact, work for some ULTRA SUPER SECRET government department determined to make sure the rest of the world doesn't believe you exist.. My reasoning: that any normal person would have just started shouting at all the ultra conspiracy nutjobs (yes UCNJ's are a higher form CNJ) - your patience suggests professional training. Were you in the army?
Heh. Yeah, I was in the Army for a good many years. In fact, I was trained as a Human Intelligence Collector, so that probably explains my patience dealing with dense folks who need things explained five times. Have you ever tried to get a Pashtun to tell you (through an interpreter!) where his neighbor has buried a truckload of volatile old soviet artillery shells? I don't recommend it. No, I sure wish I was part of something interesting. The sad fact is, there was probably no one more in the dark than me. I was just a tool, pressed into service for a job I wasn't well trained for simply because manpower was short. I wish I could say I was good at my job, but really, I didn't see enough Method to the Madness to know what would constitute "a good job". I did my time humping a ruck up and down the ridges and gullies, ducking the occasional bullet, then came home and swore to enjoy my life of quiet desperation.
Conspiracy theorists tend to suck me into explaining how the government works, because they always seem to think there's some exceptional degree of competence in the [military | covert ops | government intelligence community] that magically keeps the conspiracy machine well-oiled and running, despite evidence that "mundane" government agencies like FEMA can't find their ass with both hands and a funnel. Really, the ENTIRE GOVERNMENT is like FEMA after Katrina. In some ways that's a scarier thought than all the mind-control and UFO fantasies. Unfortunately, it's also true.
The article does sound rather garish, but considering systems within systems, parallel to systems, and funky classifications invented by paranoid department heads and Dick Cheney coming up with his own stamps with his own classifications of, "Shhh. Don't Tell Anyone" I find it hard to believe that things are nearly so well-ordered as you portray.
Well ordered? Not even! There are so many different overlapping "compartments" with so many incongruous clearance requirements that getting clearance to do any sort of higher level work is often impossible. Classic example: My father worked for a defense contractor as head of a program. A couple years after he retired, they asked him to come back as a contractor to help them out for a couple months. His application for reinstatement of security clearance was rejected because he had spent 6 months in Europe that year and had visited some former eastern bloc countries. The fact that all of the information he was requesting clearance for was stuff he had already seen--- much of it he personally generated--- was irrelevant. The byzantine clearance rules forbade it.
No, the system is definitely screwed up. It just isn't screwed up at the basic level of classifications. That's very simple. All I'm trying to point out is that if people are looking for covert crap, they're looking in the wrong place if they're looking "above top secret".
Do you have any odd memory gaps or personality quirks which you didn't have before you entered the service?
Yeah, I have blackouts associated with many of the times I went out drinking, and I now find I duck when I hear anything that sounds like a gunshot.
Even if there has been zero improvement over the mind control systems used in the Seventies, then chances are you wouldn't even suspect a violation.
After all. .,
See, they don't need to bother with covert mind control. All the mind control in the military is very overt and ham-fisted.
is posting in widely read public forums to boast about credentials an encouraged activity for a HUMINT Collector?
No, but I don't ever expect to work in the field again, so I say "fuck it". I had access to very little of strategic value. Most of what I did involved highly perishable tactical information (they're over yon hill!). Notice I do not share anything beyond what I did in general, and which country I did it in. And I would hardly call it "boasting", as every 18 year old with a 96-97-98 MOS gets a TOP SECRET security clearance. It's nothing special.
You're fishy as hell regardless of what your real story happens to be, and if you are what you say you are, then you're probably a lot further gone than you realize. You have my sincere condolences if that's the case.
Nutjobs! I am fairly fucked up, but it dint take no mind control rays to do it. I'm not sure what you find "fishy" about some dumbass grunt/bureaucrat whose job it was to interview people in the field, write down what they say, and classify the crap out of the reports so some jerkoff in Kabul could toss it in a file cabinet. I don't know much, but I do know the agony of dealing with classified data. There are a shitload of losers like me out there. It's not a very interesting job. Most classified work is classified for no particular reason other than Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
"The idea that there's some super-secret classification level above top secret is idiocy spouted by moron UFO conspiracy nutjobs who can't even consult Wikipedia for a simple overview of the classification system."
Well, if that's what it says in Wikipedia then it must be true.
The presence or possible presence of inaccurate information in Wikipedia does not automagically make everything in Wikipedia false. I have read the Wikipedia entry, and found it factually correct. This is part of my point. The classification system is so simple and transparent that even Wikipedia has it right.
There are no government documents that certain people with "Top Secret" clearance can't view. Period.
Hey nutjob, read the Wikipedia entry and see if you can grok the difference between classification and clearance, and also maybe grasp the concept of compartmentalization.
There is nothing "above" Top Secret, and therefore nothing exists there.
This is correct, nutjob. TOP SECRET is the highest tier of classification. Varying degrees of specific clearance are required for various programs and such within the tier, so having only a TOP SECRET clearance in general gives you access to very little.
And besides, the government wouldn't just make stuff up or try to imply something that wasn't true, even for security purposes! They are completely transparent.
Transparency of the classification system is important in order to maintain security. If documents are labeled with a classification tier that's "so high it's secret", how would someone without clearance know not to look at it and call security if it's accidentally left on their desk? Seriously, quit being a nutjob and read the rest of the posts here. Several of us have explained this already.
Nor would they come up with a silly name that implies an impossibility, and then had certain entities operate in these "impossibilities". It's just impossible, because it says in Wikipedia that... just... pffft, come on people! Just take off the tinfoil hats and move along.
Look, it's been explained in this discussion six ways from sunday how the system works and why. Even Wikipedia has the straight dope on it--- though if you like, you can wade through the tedious references or do a google search and read it straight from the government documents that outline it. But no, you don't care about any of that. If it's not some nutjob UFO "researcher" saying it, you think it's a conspiracy. Good work! You are officially a classic UFO nutjob!
Sorry, but I've got to ask, because I always wondered but never knew someone with a Top Secret clearance.
Why do they have things like Top Secret Poly (and other qualifiers) which use polygraphs, when the polygraph is a bullshit technology?
I've wondered the same thing myself. Specifically, I wonder why the intel community has such a hard on for polygrapy, when it's just security theater. Actually, I think I just answered my own question. So much of what's classified is completely worthless and doesn't need to be. People get into the whole "spy world" thing and just go nuts with it. Polygraphy just fits in with the secret agent fantasy.
Second, there is no caveat of "ULTRA" in the current collection, and no, there
are no "secret" caveats. There are classified SCIs and SAPs, but they are never
indicated by a single word, much less a meaningful word like "ULTRA".
You mean like the CIA's now-well-exposed and fairly well documented
MK-Ultra program,
wherein they dosed unaware and nonconsenting American citizens with LSD
(and other less well-known drugs)?
Nope, they'd certainly never use words like that......Again.
The only real question involves what they call it now; not whether
or not they still do crap like that.
Heh. Well yeah, MKULTRA is where all the nutjobs get the idea that ULTRA is a classification level, because of the meaning of the word. It was, in fact, just a program name. They did name secret projects like that back in the day, but it was soon realized that doing so only draws attention to them. The current protocol is to use meaningless code words. ULTRA would be considered too "loaded" to attach to anything secret.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this is what is known as a "movie", bpjk. So I guess the more pertinent question is "are they all capable actors?" Anything is possible in a movie...
See, people throw this bullshit argument out all the time, but it's not some universal excuse that makes everything OK. Cultivating suspension of disbelief is not a trivial task. When writing a decent script taking place in any sort of fantasy world, a careful balance must be struck between the made-up shit and the realistic. What makes such TV and movies good is a solid, believable character interaction, and an internally consistent plot. It may take place in a fictional world, but if it has humans in it, they better damn well act like humans. No amount of "hey, it's just a movie" erases the fact that no responsible human would ever put a starship under the command of a bunch of kids! You can put all sorts of whiz-bang outlandish gizmos in their hand that shoot this imaginary particle, or that made-up energy beam and I'll go for it. But ask me to accept that this is the well-defined Star Trek universe, only for some reason they briefly decided "youth == wisdom" during the period portrayed in the movie, and I'm gonna call bullshit.
Sure, there are plenty of people who will watch and accept any vapid trash you throw up on the screen, so long as it has explosions, boobies, and (most importantly) a twist ending. A lot of people watch Lost, Fringe, used to watch Alias, and actually went to see Mission Impossible 3. This just shows that there's a ready market to make a quick buck distracting folks for 47 minutes (or longer). Do you think any of those abysmal JJ Abrams stool samples will be selling heavily on [DVD|BluRay|*] in 20 years? Highly doubtful.
a Constitution class starship is 305 meters long. Let's just guess that it's 120 meters wide and an average of 20 meters thick. I know rabid trekkies will correct all this, but it's not important to be all that accurate. 305 x 120 x 20 = 732,000 cubic meters. That's 732 million liters, for those still reading. 732 million liters divided by 748 liters per second is 978,609 seconds to empty the ship to vacuum.
That's 11.3 days to empty the ship through a 10 cm diameter hole
A constitution class ship has neither an infinitely thin skin, nor is it 100% hollow, nor is it a perfect box. Your air volume calculation needs work.
How on earth can the entire command staff of the Enterprise be that young? They don't require people to have serious experience (time in the field) before they can get to positions of that much responsibility?
"Well, since it's a prequel and the ship itself is young, we were thinking that it might be cool to make the crew young too. You know, give it kind of a Star Trek Kids vibe. The 'kid' angle is great marketing. It appeals to a younger, hipper demographic. It worked great for Roseanne Barr, and people just went ga-ga for Spy Kids!"
If it were me in that office, I'd have the guy taken out and shot; but it's some moron Paramount executive--- probably the same guy who picked that no-talent hack JJ Abrams to direct--- so the pitch was probably greeted with great enthusiasm.
I could go on but I think everyone sees a pattern here. Making the first release of a product version 5.0 or some such nonsense works as well as most lies. The only way to maintain the lie is to tell more lies which then beget a need for still more lies. Eventually, it all unravels although current management may be under the impression that they can take the money and run before they're found out.
Unfortunately, a clever marketroid will have a single answer for questions of "What happened to versions 1 thru 4?"
"Those were incomplete, internal development version. Version 5 is the first commercial release."
Whichever tool marked the above post "flamebait" needs to have their sarcasm detector checked. Someone mod this clearly funny post "underrated" and give him his points back. Besides, it's always amusing when a post reaches "+5, Flamebait"
Do I own this Slashdot comment? Slashdot says I do
"Ownership" in that case means copyright.
what happens if Slashdot deletes it on me? I've lost something I own, and there's nothing I can do about it. That doesn't seem right.
It's not their problem if you're stupid enough to store the only copy of your valuable written insights in something as unsuited to the task as the slashcode system. Save to your local computer, fool.
Now, in the case of online virutual worlds, you didn't create that Godslayer of Hit Points sword your character carries. If you did, you'd have a local copy of the 3D vector file used to draw it. No, the GoHP sword is just an in-game milestone. It doesn't matter that it took you three years of 12 hour a day gaming to get your character's weapon byte set to that value; the "sword" still isn't yours. It's no more something someone can own than a high score on an Asteroids coin-op game is.
Ultimately, I think we'll see that virtual property is legally blessed to have real life monetary value, in much the same way that software is.
How is a token in a database somewhere "property"? It fits neither the definition of real property, nor even the hogwash definition of "intellectual property". Software is "owned" via copyright. Treadmilling in WoW doesn't give you copyright over an integer value in a database representing how much "gold" you have in-game. Such a thing may have value in its transferability, but only inasmuch as the operators of the virtual world permit the transfer of the value. If they want to prohibit transfers for meatspace profit, there's nothing you can do about it. Even in weird online worlds like Second Life, where you can actually create things (vs simply discovering things the content provider created), the value of your "ownership" of them is wholly dependent on that virtual world continuing to exist.
that is certainly debatable.... if we had a decent method to turn nuclear waste into usable fuel, would you still prefer we bury it?
Nuclear waste is usable fuel--- 95% unconsumed--- we just can't use it because of Carter's executive order banning breeder reactors and then Clinton's complete abandonment of the Integral Fast Reactor reprocessing research in 1994. 14 years later, we still have no plans for fuel reprocessing because idiot anti-proliferation folks don't know enough about the subject to realize that it takes a very specific type of breeder reactor design to create plutonium pure enough for nuclear weapons, and they unilaterally oppose every suggestion of reprocessing.
if we had a way to turn garbage into usable fuel, would you still prefer landfills?
There is, but with the exception of densely populated areas where hauling it off costs a small fortune, the energy you get out of it is almost always more expensive than the baseline cost of just burying it and purchasing other available energy.
at some point, we have to start being responsible about our waste products instead of just trying to hide them underground.
At some point you have to realize that CO2 isn't a potential energy source like "spent" fuel rods and landfill refuse, but it rather an energy sink which will require the expenditure of even more CO2 producing fuels to process it like this.
In other words, if you don't have a good grasp of the basic science, your high-horse platitudes are going to sound pretty dumb.
Can we please have a new Crackpot (or maybe Quackpot, or Snakepot, shit, I dunno) section on slashdot, specifically for these half-baked bullshit stories?
I think that'd be great, except it would require that the chimps/editors at slashdot actually be intelligent and/or diligent enough to spot bullshit science--- which history has demonstrated they are not.
Exception at line ("Then keep chopping it down every two years"): Attempt to chop down an already chopped-down tree.
Willow trees will grow back after being chopped down, as anyone who's ever tried to get one out of their yard can tell you.
If USA owes this foolish amount of money, but no-one dares to ask for it back because of the military and economic power
No, they don't ask for it back because it's financed through T-bills, which pay back over a predetermined period. They can't "ask for it back" any more than the bank can ask for the money you borrowed to buy your house back only 6 months into the mortgage term. Idiot.
Adds reader MarkusQ, "I know Dick Cheney has assured us that 'Deficits don't matter' but I can't help wondering if we should be fixing the problem rather than the sign."
Yes, because devoting the resources expended to fix the sign to eliminating the national debt would have solved the problem.
"The clock was put up by the late real estate mogul Seymour Durst in 1989 "
'cause you know, it's the Durst Institute that's responsible for the debt, not a bunch of irresponsible politicians...
Can't they focus the research on something more important than baldness?
Because it's not a simple matter of reaching a certain quantity of "man-months" applied to (for example) cure cancer. Our level of technological advancement simply isn't to the point where a Mongol Hordes approach is going to be effective. In most cases, we don't even know what we need to learn before we figure out which way to look for a cure for (x). Who knows, perhaps a technique for combating baldness may hold the key to curing diabetes.
The classic answer to all this is, "it takes 9 months to make a baby no matter how many women you assign to the task"
You NEED the gold standard. Period.
You're an idiot. Gold is just as much an arbitrary standard of value as any fiat currency. The only thing guaranteeing gold has any value is it's relatively fixed supply. This supply inflexibility is also what makes the gold standard a catastrophically bad currency basis, as it cannot support an expanding marketplace. There's nothing magic about a piece of gold locked in a vault that makes a piece of paper marked "$100 gold certificate" safer than one marked "$100 federal reserve note". I prime example is Spain during the 1500's. A tremendous amount of gold and silver poured into the country from the new world, but instead of cementing Spain as the richest nation in Europe, it basically just caused murderous inflation, which left Spain impoverished. If you want a complex economy that's relatively immune to the chaotic boom-to-bust cycle of a true laissez-faire system, then you need an adjustable currency.
I consider myself a libertarian, but I sometimes think you [gold standard|anarcho-capitalist|*] loons are as bad as the "we should all live on subsistence communes, growing our own food and riding bicycles" enviro-nuts. Leveraged credit built pretty much everything we have in the modern world. You think there'd be all those taiwanese [laptop|cell phone|*] factories if you had to save up enough gold bars to build one? Everything devolves to the financial fiction of "market value" anyway. Tying a small fraction of it to a static commodity just because it makes you "feel better" is asinine.
You're absolutely right about that. Last year, my wife and I were looking at a house, and I was rather amazed at just how hard the agent was pushing to make a sale, going so far as to say, "you really want to look at buying now, because come summertime the prices are going to start going up". We ended up passing on the house and are still renting, and I suspect we will have saved quite a bit of money by the time we do purchase a home. I just couldn't see any way that home prices could have been sustained given the average income for our area.
We're in the process of buying a house right now. 1-2 years ago, when everyone else we know was saying "buy now while it's still possible", we were saving our money, eating baloney sandwiches and driving 10+ year old cars. Now we have 20% down on a decent house at a short-sale price, while they are looking at murderous payments on their interest-only loans on mediocre houses they paid twice as much for--- and can't get out of without going back to the squalor of apartment life.
"Are you telling me you made a bet with Broadman that The Broken Drum wouldn't catch fire?"
"Yes, it's called in-sewer-ants"
I think I'd file it under "layered scare tactics" -- people will often give stuff away when they *think* YOU BELIEVE you can hear them thinking, that they'd never let on to if they knew damn well that you ALSO know it's bullshit.
So... pretend to believe in it, and watch the reactions of people who know better but think *they* are leading YOU down the garden path.
Well, I don't know if that's how it's used, but that's how *I* would use it.
Yeah, you're probably on to something there. And I suppose good security theater would actually help. But of course we know that a lot of them believe in polygraphy, because if they didn't, and knew it was all crap, then no one would "get in trouble" for "failing" a polygraph. Unfortunately, people get refused initial clearances or have their clearances revoked because of what some deluded jackass thinks he sees in a pattern of squiggles on paper.
I think it would be interesting to see what the algorithm does to somebody like Halle Berry or Jessica Alba. What happens when you try to beautify somebody who might already be considered perfect-looking?
Probably almost nothing happens, or if it does, it results an a different generically pleasing set of proportions.
What happens if you try the algorithm on somebody who is actually in the algorithm's database?
Sheesh, I can answer that just from the /. article. It finds the closest match in the database, so it would likely find them, and then do almost nothing.
If you honestly believe people are pirating games, movies, and music as a form of "civil disobedience" to stick it to the man, I don't know what to say. It's the same tired cultural revolution argument that's been trotted out for over a decade. The simpler truth is that human beings are selfish by nature, and if there's an easy way to get something for free without repercussion, they'll latch onto it and justify it any number of ways.
There's nothing that says civil disobedience has to be purely protest, or result in punishment, or not be initially motivated by selfishness. Ferdinand Marcos was ousted as president of the Philippines by mass civil disobedience in the form of thousands of people simply not showing up for work.
What? Do you mean there's really no such classified level as "Burn Before Reading" ??! ;)
Ja, dunno 'bout that, but I certainly think there oughtta be a classification level of "SUICIDE BEFORE READING" for certain reports to specific upper-level leaders...
I see the problem. Everyone here is only familiar with peer to peer networking and therefore only with P2P security. No one does Netware anymore, so they're not aware of the top-down, compartmentalized security model. At best they can only visualize the *NIX model, which is more permissive about sideways access than Netware is.
There, that should explain it well enough. ;)
Heh. That's a GREAT analogy. I'm going to have to remember that one.
Though the more I actually think about it the more obvious it appears that you must, in fact, work for some ULTRA SUPER SECRET government department determined to make sure the rest of the world doesn't believe you exist.. My reasoning: that any normal person would have just started shouting at all the ultra conspiracy nutjobs (yes UCNJ's are a higher form CNJ) - your patience suggests professional training. Were you in the army?
Heh. Yeah, I was in the Army for a good many years. In fact, I was trained as a Human Intelligence Collector, so that probably explains my patience dealing with dense folks who need things explained five times. Have you ever tried to get a Pashtun to tell you (through an interpreter!) where his neighbor has buried a truckload of volatile old soviet artillery shells? I don't recommend it. No, I sure wish I was part of something interesting. The sad fact is, there was probably no one more in the dark than me. I was just a tool, pressed into service for a job I wasn't well trained for simply because manpower was short. I wish I could say I was good at my job, but really, I didn't see enough Method to the Madness to know what would constitute "a good job". I did my time humping a ruck up and down the ridges and gullies, ducking the occasional bullet, then came home and swore to enjoy my life of quiet desperation.
Conspiracy theorists tend to suck me into explaining how the government works, because they always seem to think there's some exceptional degree of competence in the [military | covert ops | government intelligence community] that magically keeps the conspiracy machine well-oiled and running, despite evidence that "mundane" government agencies like FEMA can't find their ass with both hands and a funnel. Really, the ENTIRE GOVERNMENT is like FEMA after Katrina. In some ways that's a scarier thought than all the mind-control and UFO fantasies. Unfortunately, it's also true.
The article does sound rather garish, but considering systems within systems, parallel to systems, and funky classifications invented by paranoid department heads and Dick Cheney coming up with his own stamps with his own classifications of, "Shhh. Don't Tell Anyone" I find it hard to believe that things are nearly so well-ordered as you portray.
Well ordered? Not even! There are so many different overlapping "compartments" with so many incongruous clearance requirements that getting clearance to do any sort of higher level work is often impossible. Classic example: My father worked for a defense contractor as head of a program. A couple years after he retired, they asked him to come back as a contractor to help them out for a couple months. His application for reinstatement of security clearance was rejected because he had spent 6 months in Europe that year and had visited some former eastern bloc countries. The fact that all of the information he was requesting clearance for was stuff he had already seen--- much of it he personally generated--- was irrelevant. The byzantine clearance rules forbade it.
No, the system is definitely screwed up. It just isn't screwed up at the basic level of classifications. That's very simple. All I'm trying to point out is that if people are looking for covert crap, they're looking in the wrong place if they're looking "above top secret".
Do you have any odd memory gaps or personality quirks which you didn't have before you entered the service?
Yeah, I have blackouts associated with many of the times I went out drinking, and I now find I duck when I hear anything that sounds like a gunshot.
Even if there has been zero improvement over the mind control systems used in the Seventies, then chances are you wouldn't even suspect a violation.
After all. . ,
See, they don't need to bother with covert mind control. All the mind control in the military is very overt and ham-fisted.
is posting in widely read public forums to boast about credentials an encouraged activity for a HUMINT Collector?
No, but I don't ever expect to work in the field again, so I say "fuck it". I had access to very little of strategic value. Most of what I did involved highly perishable tactical information (they're over yon hill!). Notice I do not share anything beyond what I did in general, and which country I did it in. And I would hardly call it "boasting", as every 18 year old with a 96-97-98 MOS gets a TOP SECRET security clearance. It's nothing special.
You're fishy as hell regardless of what your real story happens to be, and if you are what you say you are, then you're probably a lot further gone than you realize. You have my sincere condolences if that's the case.
Nutjobs! I am fairly fucked up, but it dint take no mind control rays to do it. I'm not sure what you find "fishy" about some dumbass grunt/bureaucrat whose job it was to interview people in the field, write down what they say, and classify the crap out of the reports so some jerkoff in Kabul could toss it in a file cabinet. I don't know much, but I do know the agony of dealing with classified data. There are a shitload of losers like me out there. It's not a very interesting job. Most classified work is classified for no particular reason other than Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
"The idea that there's some super-secret classification level above top secret is idiocy spouted by moron UFO conspiracy nutjobs who can't even consult Wikipedia for a simple overview of the classification system." Well, if that's what it says in Wikipedia then it must be true.
The presence or possible presence of inaccurate information in Wikipedia does not automagically make everything in Wikipedia false. I have read the Wikipedia entry, and found it factually correct. This is part of my point. The classification system is so simple and transparent that even Wikipedia has it right.
There are no government documents that certain people with "Top Secret" clearance can't view. Period.
Hey nutjob, read the Wikipedia entry and see if you can grok the difference between classification and clearance, and also maybe grasp the concept of compartmentalization.
There is nothing "above" Top Secret, and therefore nothing exists there.
This is correct, nutjob. TOP SECRET is the highest tier of classification. Varying degrees of specific clearance are required for various programs and such within the tier, so having only a TOP SECRET clearance in general gives you access to very little.
And besides, the government wouldn't just make stuff up or try to imply something that wasn't true, even for security purposes! They are completely transparent.
Transparency of the classification system is important in order to maintain security. If documents are labeled with a classification tier that's "so high it's secret", how would someone without clearance know not to look at it and call security if it's accidentally left on their desk? Seriously, quit being a nutjob and read the rest of the posts here. Several of us have explained this already.
Nor would they come up with a silly name that implies an impossibility, and then had certain entities operate in these "impossibilities". It's just impossible, because it says in Wikipedia that... just... pffft, come on people! Just take off the tinfoil hats and move along.
Look, it's been explained in this discussion six ways from sunday how the system works and why. Even Wikipedia has the straight dope on it--- though if you like, you can wade through the tedious references or do a google search and read it straight from the government documents that outline it. But no, you don't care about any of that. If it's not some nutjob UFO "researcher" saying it, you think it's a conspiracy. Good work! You are officially a classic UFO nutjob!
Crazy nutjobs.
Yes, you are!
Sorry, but I've got to ask, because I always wondered but never knew someone with a Top Secret clearance.
Why do they have things like Top Secret Poly (and other qualifiers) which use polygraphs, when the polygraph is a bullshit technology?
I've wondered the same thing myself. Specifically, I wonder why the intel community has such a hard on for polygrapy, when it's just security theater. Actually, I think I just answered my own question. So much of what's classified is completely worthless and doesn't need to be. People get into the whole "spy world" thing and just go nuts with it. Polygraphy just fits in with the secret agent fantasy.
Second, there is no caveat of "ULTRA" in the current collection, and no, there are no "secret" caveats. There are classified SCIs and SAPs, but they are never indicated by a single word, much less a meaningful word like "ULTRA". You mean like the CIA's now-well-exposed and fairly well documented MK-Ultra program, wherein they dosed unaware and nonconsenting American citizens with LSD (and other less well-known drugs)? Nope, they'd certainly never use words like that... ...Again.
The only real question involves what they call it now; not whether
or not they still do crap like that.
Heh. Well yeah, MKULTRA is where all the nutjobs get the idea that ULTRA is a classification level, because of the meaning of the word. It was, in fact, just a program name. They did name secret projects like that back in the day, but it was soon realized that doing so only draws attention to them. The current protocol is to use meaningless code words. ULTRA would be considered too "loaded" to attach to anything secret.