Let's see... my house + car has more locks than computers. Assume roughly equal numbers on average. There are hundreds of thousands of compromised "digital control systems" but, though physical locks get compromised all the time, it doesn't really happen all that often in the big scheme of things. So the analogy is bad how? Is it not patently obvious? The mechanical lock on a house or car can be defeated by force alone. Not so an electronic autopilot. It's that simple.
Assuming something to be possible may be a potential logical fallacy, but in the real world it's a whole lot safer assumption than that something is impossible. Assuming anything out of thin air and poor reasoning ability is pointless. Basically, he's talking out his ass and asking us to take it seriously. It's as much a waste of time as trying to counter the argument "the world may end tomorrow, so why should I do anything?"
yes. The analogy holds, access control systems can be defeated by a sufficiently motivated and intelligent person. Nice handwave. It's easy to make assertions that magically assume their own validity. Unless you can demonstrate, with even just a little bit of plausibility, given what we already know of the system and existing systems like it, how such a system could reasonably be bypassed from the cockpit of a moving plane, you're just jumping off the bed claiming you can fly.
the only logical fallacy is yours, assuming a system could be built that can't be defeated. That's not a Logical Fallacy. Besides, I don't claim it's invincible. I only claim that ad hoc buggering of the system while in flight is probably not going to be possible given the resources generally available to X number of hijackers armed with what they could sneak through security. To put it bluntly, your car key/car alarm analogy does not hold because the system is not something you can "fix" with a hammer.
History shows your point of view to be very ignorant of reality indeed. No it doesn't. Fallacy of Hasty Generalization. There are plenty of examples of systems that are basically invincible. Many cells in various prisons' Death Rows, for example. There is simply no way in or out without help. Sure, one could concoct a scenario involving mole-agent insiders back-dooring the system and other such crap, but we're unlikely to see that from the likes of a movement that draws almost entirely from the poor and uneducated.
Yes, because the control signal certainly won't be scrambled with any sort of public-key encryption, will transmit on one well-publicized frequency, and the autopilot won't need to be activated from the cockpit to cede control to the ground.
Also, Americans are even bigger pussies now than they were then. Remember how the president managed to scare a significant portion of the nation into supporting war with Iraq without even needing fake evidence of WMDs? Ah yes, political sophistication and physical bravery in the face of a man armed with a non-projectile hand weapon are exactly analogous.
Our president's intentions to take down Saddam after 9/11 don't change the fact that we, America and probably most of the first world, are pussies. Have you ever been in a fight? I've never been in a fight. I was a gigantic asshole for the last two years high school and never found myself in the slightest danger of receiving even a single punch. Good thing we don't fill our military with random, untrained, high school students, then. Not punching an asshole is a sign of tolerance, not cowardice. The military appeals to the brave, and rejects most of the rest. The US Army soldiers I served with were plenty brave. Marines I knew even more so (brave to a fault, even picking fights where none were before). By the way you seem to think that throwing a punch is the "bravest" way to deal with some guy who's merely being a jerk, I think you might make a good Marine.
However *every year* more than 5 times that die as a result of drunk driving. If a small fraction of the money spent on 9/11 related fear was spent on automobile safety and measures to remove drunk drivers from the roads, the payback on life saved per dollar would be huge. Drunk driving is a multi-faceted, highly distributed problem. You might as well have prefaced your query with that same, cliched phrase "if we can land a man on the moon...", for as comparable as the problems are.
"One passenger dies every minute until the door is unlocked".
Duh.
With the new system:
"One passenger dies every minute until the fancy auto-pilot is turned off".
Another duh.
Any questions, Einstein? Yeah one question: how long before 300 people on a plane being executed one a minute does it take for the remaining passengers to figure out that the best odds (in either case) lie with using laptops, coffee pots, and even fists to beat the living crap out of a hopelessly outnumbered handful of hijackers who aren't going to get their way?
I know, this sounds like algebra, not your strong suit.
Lemmee see... USB changeable, dual bands, 30 ft radius (well, the whole inside the metal tube of the plane), and looks like cigarettes. 1) good luck getting a sophisticated transceiver on board a plane disguised as anything, much less a pack of smokes; and 2) last I checked, the antennas were mounted on the outside of the plane.
Wouldn't a creative technology terrorist comprimise and activate this system and force a jetliner to land on the Whitehouse? The pilots can't override it and no need to get any hijackers on board at the time of flight. A) the system cannot be activated from the ground, the pilot must manually cede control; and B) creativity gets you an 'A' in high-school art class. Compromising an undoubtedly closed, encrypted, distributed, and heavily guarded control system requires more than "creativity". Arguing "what if they find a way, and crash the plane" is an utter waste of time, representing arguably two of the worst logical fallacies: Begging the Question and Appeal to Consequences. Present a logical argument rather than typical TV-grade claptrap.
So instead of being physically on a plane, the new attack vector will be the remote control station.
Good Work. Sure, because the remote control station will be a storefront shop in a mini-mall in New Jersey guarded by a sleepy rent-a-cop and a fake CCTV unit; not a series of converted concrete control bunkers on military bases, left over from the cold war, configured for such a network, and already in the possession of the US Government.
Nice thinkin' Tex. We'll have you in the White House in no time!
they'll be trying to compromise this system to remotely hijack hundereds or thousands of planes from the comfort of their living room. That's a scary thought. Besides the obvious fact that you're an idiot, what makes you think this system will be available to hack from their living rooms? Is the FAA going to pipe the control system over the open Internet? Is every engineer working on the problem so thickheaded that they didn't think of the flaw you did? Oh, they do stuff like that all the time on 24, that's right.
I remember when Slashdot had a higher ratio of [people capable of simple reason] to [slackjaw dopes incapable of thinking beyond a single degree of complexity]. The class of bad assertions was much higher and much more entertaining.
Wait, didn't you even read the summary? They already thought of this: it's tamper-proof! If you make it operate independent of anything inside the cockpit, controlled entirely via black boxes accessible only from outside the aircraft, I think it pretty much fits the definition. There's no effective way to access an external avionics bay while in flight. 500kts airspeed sees to it.
As for tampering with it on the ground, if 500,000 DirecTV hackers can't hack Rupert Murdoch's P4/P5 smartcard after years of trying, it's highly unlikely a small band of fanatics could muster the resources to do something similar to the navigation black boxes on the ground.
So, the pilot flips a switch, and the autopilot takes over, and takes the plane to.... where, exactly? Modern navigation systems are amazingly advanced things. I can, with the press of a button, have the $250 handheld GPS unit in my car direct me to the nearest gas station. I don't have to program a list of them in and then decide which one will be "closest" for this road trip. You can safely assume that the aircraft will be flown to the nearest convenient runway from a list of appropriate ones pre-stored on the aircraft itself!
Didn't Slashdot used to be mostly nerds, who understand that computers (and things containing computers, like nav systems) have advanced beyond what we had in the 1950's?
and cars won't start unless a key is inserted and turned in the ignition or the button on the remote is pressed.
don't BTFA just because you RTFA Are you seriously comparing a mechanical lockout device that can be defeated with a hammer to a digital control system that locks out local control? Tell me, Master of Analogy, what are the terrorists going to pound on with a hammer to defeat this lockout? Note that "I don't know how it works, but I assume it to be possible" is the logical fallacy of Argument from Ignorance.
But you know what: we voted in a new House and Senate who will hopefully change America back to the way I think it should be. How's that for an honest statement. Heh. Won't happen. They're all the same. Search your feelings, you know it to be true. How much of guardian of freedom was congress between 1954 and 1994? They all suck. We're doomed.
If the code is as free as it is supposed to be, the issue of who's "work" it is should be irrelevant. If the GPL code is so good, there should be no way I could use it in a for-profit project since I couldn't add any value to it. The GPL restricts people with a good idea (and not me personally) from building something worthwhile on a larger body of work by removing the profit motive. Really, that may be the only way a small shop can afford to open up. You need to educate yourself on the purpose of the GPL, I think. "Profit" has fuck-all to do with it. The GPL is about enriching the commons, not small shops becoming successful. GPL is not the same as Public Domain. People deriving proprietary software from his public domain original source is what prompted Stallman to come up with the GPL in the first place.
Besides, you can still secure private licensing agreements with the authors and make proprietary software--- but oh, that's right: your small startup can only make a profit if everyone gives them "free beer" to sell....
So, what do you have to do in order to be considered a journalist in France?
Surrender?
Like this? Yeah... you know, if you actually look at the history of Vietnam, we were on the wrong side. Ho Chi Minh was our ally against the Japanese in WW2. While he claimed to be a communist, he was definitely one of the "early" type, with more in common with western revolutionaries than the later Stalinists. if you read his writings, look at his upbringing, you see a definite "commie of convenience". He was a patriot. A nationalist. He really didn't give a crap which superpower gave his side aid in Vietnam's war of independence. All he wanted was to keep out the colonialist puppet government that ruled them before WW2, ran when the Japanese came, then came back and demanded their plantation colony after he and his countrymen had spent the better part of the decade harassing the Japanese alone. From 1945 to 1954 Ho Chi Minh fought the colonialists, eventually defeating them at Dien Bien Phu and forcing them to withdraw and split the country into north and south, pending free elections and reunification.
Those colonialists were the French. The only reason Ho Chi Minh "went full commie" was that the French demanded we back their colonial authority in Vietnam, on threat of withdrawing from the newly formed NATO. So really, the loss of the Vietnam war can be traced directly to backing the shitheel French whining over their rubber plantations. If Truman had had the balls to tell France to go piss up a rope and recognize that not all communism was the result of evil Soviet puppetry, things might have turned out quit a lot better.
but please don't confuse them with actual evidence. It is a TV show mostly about making stuff blow up. I know from personal experience that bullets do not "disintegrate" on contact with water from normal firearms. You can watch incendiary rounds as they go through the water (although they are probably subsonic). I had a friend accidentally shoot himself in the foot with a.22 when he fell through the ice on a pond and the bullet certainly went through quite a bit of water. I once saw a jackass shoot a carp with a shotgun, while it was under about 24 inches of water, and the rounds certainly reached it. Your anecdotal experiences are even less scientifically rigorous than those of Mythbusters. Was his foot more than 9-12 inches underwater? Does a shotgun shoot jacketed bullets or does it shoot round pellets? Do you know that incendiary ammunition doesn't leave a light trail, that what you're describing is tracer ammunition? Frankly, your reading comprehension and lack of technical knowledge makes me doubt your expertise.
If you don't minds a little heft in your shoulder arm, the late-model BAR is a nice choice for laying down some covering fire.:-) Sure, so long as you don't need more than 2-4 seconds of cover fire. 20 round mag? How turn-of-the-century!
(personally I think its a shame our boys in the sandbox are stuck with the M16 when there are better calibers and platforms available... FN-FAL is my choice...) The two years I spent in Afghanistan, I thanked my lucky stars that you "stopping power" nuts didn't get your way. 5.56mm has plenty-nuff kill-kill in it. We're not hunting deer or bear. We don't need a 12 pound, three-and-a-half foot, 20 round mag monster weighing us down, getting caught trying to exit vehicles, and reducing our ammo count while increasing its weight. 99.999% of the time we aren't shooting at people. Face it,.30-cal went the way of the dinosaur FORTY YEARS AGO--- it ain't comin' back to the rank and file. The M-16 works for what we use it for.
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the only logical fallacy is yours, assuming a system could be built that can't be defeated. That's not a Logical Fallacy. Besides, I don't claim it's invincible. I only claim that ad hoc buggering of the system while in flight is probably not going to be possible given the resources generally available to X number of hijackers armed with what they could sneak through security. To put it bluntly, your car key/car alarm analogy does not hold because the system is not something you can "fix" with a hammer.
History shows your point of view to be very ignorant of reality indeed. No it doesn't. Fallacy of Hasty Generalization. There are plenty of examples of systems that are basically invincible. Many cells in various prisons' Death Rows, for example. There is simply no way in or out without help. Sure, one could concoct a scenario involving mole-agent insiders back-dooring the system and other such crap, but we're unlikely to see that from the likes of a movement that draws almost entirely from the poor and uneducated.
Yes, because the control signal certainly won't be scrambled with any sort of public-key encryption, will transmit on one well-publicized frequency, and the autopilot won't need to be activated from the cockpit to cede control to the ground.
Who modded this nimrod "insightful"?
"Loose Change" doesn't even know that steel doesn't have to be melted to lose strength. Why would anyone take that tripe seriously?
Brilliance! Sheer brilliance!
However *every year* more than 5 times that die as a result of drunk driving. If a small fraction of the money spent on 9/11 related fear was spent on automobile safety and measures to remove drunk drivers from the roads, the payback on life saved per dollar would be huge. Drunk driving is a multi-faceted, highly distributed problem. You might as well have prefaced your query with that same, cliched phrase "if we can land a man on the moon...", for as comparable as the problems are.
"One passenger dies every minute until the door is unlocked".
Duh.
With the new system:
"One passenger dies every minute until the fancy auto-pilot is turned off".
Another duh.
Any questions, Einstein? Yeah one question: how long before 300 people on a plane being executed one a minute does it take for the remaining passengers to figure out that the best odds (in either case) lie with using laptops, coffee pots, and even fists to beat the living crap out of a hopelessly outnumbered handful of hijackers who aren't going to get their way?
I know, this sounds like algebra, not your strong suit.
Good Work. Sure, because the remote control station will be a storefront shop in a mini-mall in New Jersey guarded by a sleepy rent-a-cop and a fake CCTV unit; not a series of converted concrete control bunkers on military bases, left over from the cold war, configured for such a network, and already in the possession of the US Government.
Nice thinkin' Tex. We'll have you in the White House in no time!
I remember when Slashdot had a higher ratio of [people capable of simple reason] to [slackjaw dopes incapable of thinking beyond a single degree of complexity]. The class of bad assertions was much higher and much more entertaining.
As for tampering with it on the ground, if 500,000 DirecTV hackers can't hack Rupert Murdoch's P4/P5 smartcard after years of trying, it's highly unlikely a small band of fanatics could muster the resources to do something similar to the navigation black boxes on the ground.
Didn't Slashdot used to be mostly nerds, who understand that computers (and things containing computers, like nav systems) have advanced beyond what we had in the 1950's?
That one's funny, but even funnier is the other, "we're totally serious about this, eh", Captain Canada.
Not to mention Infinite Hour: Earth, which I experienced recently in the form of a mandatory Lead Paint Safety class...
Besides, you can still secure private licensing agreements with the authors and make proprietary software--- but oh, that's right: your small startup can only make a profit if everyone gives them "free beer" to sell....
Like this? Yeah... you know, if you actually look at the history of Vietnam, we were on the wrong side. Ho Chi Minh was our ally against the Japanese in WW2. While he claimed to be a communist, he was definitely one of the "early" type, with more in common with western revolutionaries than the later Stalinists. if you read his writings, look at his upbringing, you see a definite "commie of convenience". He was a patriot. A nationalist. He really didn't give a crap which superpower gave his side aid in Vietnam's war of independence. All he wanted was to keep out the colonialist puppet government that ruled them before WW2, ran when the Japanese came, then came back and demanded their plantation colony after he and his countrymen had spent the better part of the decade harassing the Japanese alone. From 1945 to 1954 Ho Chi Minh fought the colonialists, eventually defeating them at Dien Bien Phu and forcing them to withdraw and split the country into north and south, pending free elections and reunification.
Those colonialists were the French. The only reason Ho Chi Minh "went full commie" was that the French demanded we back their colonial authority in Vietnam, on threat of withdrawing from the newly formed NATO. So really, the loss of the Vietnam war can be traced directly to backing the shitheel French whining over their rubber plantations. If Truman had had the balls to tell France to go piss up a rope and recognize that not all communism was the result of evil Soviet puppetry, things might have turned out quit a lot better.
yes. they fire a round propelled by only enough powder to push it through the barrel reliably.
See? Just like a marine. Brawn over brains. Wouldn't a witty comeback have been better?