It's working for me in FireFox 0.8 (is that a redundant statement?). It crashed the first time I tried it, but that was probably because of the/. effect.
I agree with you about switching back to IE being a royal pain. Whenever I do it, I keep center-clicking on links and getting that scroll-cursor.
And how many of these are going to actually go to completion?
If we are not made aware of these missions, if we do not get excited about them, then funding will be easy to cut. Look at the possible reprieve that may be granted to the Hubble due to public outcry.
So a few of them may be cut for funding/political reasons... The history of space exploration has always been one of starry-eyed optimism bruised by the unfortunate realities of politics and engineering limitations. Without the vision and the optimism there is nothing.
Funding, politics, it's all horrible. No argument there, but it's also reality. In my view you may as well say: "Earth's gravity well--it's horrible."
If they design it right, all they need to design thoroughly are "long term" and "roving". The lab could be relatively simple at first. They can send more and better lab modules later. The rover would just go to the landing site, swap modules and continue on it's work.
"Long term rover" seems do-able today. Use the currentrover's platform and convert it to nuclear power.
(The thing that continually impresses me about the rover missions is that, regardless of how much great science the current rovers are doing, NASA seems to finally have a good system for getting probes to Mars. If I ran the world NASA would have Mars-Rovers coming out of factories and firing those things over to Mars twice a month. Every state university in the country would have its own rover it could order around.)
12-feet-long. Small in proportion
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X-43A Hits Mach 7
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· Score: 2, Informative
I think the X-43 is 12-feet-long. This quote:
"The unpiloted 12-foot-long vehicle, part aircraft and part spacecraft, will be dropped from a B-52,aircraft. It will be boosted to nearly 100,000 feet by a rocket..."
I think you are underestimating the size of the Pegasus rocket and B-52 bomber. I know I did. A quick google search found a page on the Pegasus rocket: it is 55.4 feet long and about 4 feet in diameter.
Clip of launch at BBC
on
NASA Tests X-43A
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· Score: 3, Informative
I found a clip of the launch at the BBC. I can't seem to figure out where NASA would be hiding the clip.
The BBC page is here. There's a link to the right of the photo at the top of the page.
Grenade: a much better solution. Or make the whole plane blow up.
The next issue is, can these fly fast enough to survive against a shotgun? And if so, how long before politicians/famous people are targetted with these? ("these" - the hypothetical assassination drones that could be built today, not the UAV mentioned in the article)
Although personal assassination drones could be said to already exist in the form of the Predator, the picture I saw accompanying the BBC article looks much more like a remote-control prop-plane than a personal assassination platform. For one thing, it looks too small to carry any particularly leathal weaponry. (maybe, maybe you could attach a.22 pistol underneath it, I can't think of anything else)
Just to make it clear, I'm actively not responding to you because you're an AC.
I can't say anything to ckaminski - I don't know enough about budgetting in DoD vs. NASA budgetting.
I agree with BiggerIsBetter's general sentiment, but don't feel I can add much.
I don't know if WTFRUDOINBiotch is disagreeing with me or making an observation. What I said about American 'cowboys' isn't really a defendable, scientific fact, so I don't know how to defend it if he disagrees with me, or if it's even worth defending in the first place.
But, You: completely I disagree with you, and would have a lot to say to you if you were able to hear it. But you're an AC; there's no point in talking to an AC.
A friend of mine used to make acoustic guitars out of lumber recovered from a 100+ year old shipwreck. The guitars went for a good price because the wood was apparently much better quality than could be found normally.
That guitar shop kept selling "shipwreck" guitars long after they ran out of the original wood. Not exactly the most ethical bunch...
Problem with long-term plans
on
The Wrong Stuff
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· Score: 2, Insightful
...I have taken the President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake.
There is absolutely no guarantee that, after scrapping the space-shuttle and the ISS, the current Vision will be fullfilled in a trip to Mars. As Mr. Weinberg sourly, and accurately, points out, the vast majority of the Mars exploration plan will be done after Bush's maximum term as president. There is a difficulty in saying what Bush's motives are regarding the space program. If he wants to scrap space exploration altogether, if he just wants to stop the hemorage that is the space-shuttle and the ISS, or if he really, truly hopes to get to Mars the first step is exactly the same for all three goals--kill the space-shuttle and the ISS.
Politically, the only option that makes any sense is to propose a better vision than the current one. No one wants to be a spoiler, so Bush had to come up with a compelling reason to kill those two programs. "They're just a waste of money" might be true, but if he doesn't have a good replacement for the space program, he's going to look like he doesn't have any Vision.
Regardless, it's a good thing the space-shuttle and ISS are getting phased out. In reality, it may not matter what Bush's Vision is, since he'll be gone before we get to Mars.
That dose of reality aside, here's to hoping that Bush figures out a way to make Americans On Mars as difficult to stop politically as the space-shuttle turned out to be.
I take it by your silence that you have been forced to admit that the post which I originally responded to is a hackneyed cliche, as I have been politely attempting to show you throughout our conversation. It's too bad a perfectly good discussion ended just because you can't bear the fact that you espouse an untenable position and might have to change your mind.
Thanks for the correction, I'll do more research on electricity deregulation problems.
In my admittedly amaturish worldview it seems that deregulation is generally the best solution, regulation is generally second-best (sometimes (e.g. public transit) the best solution), and that half-way point when a regulated industry is being deregulated is always the worst possible solution.
An alternative would be to do away with deregulation and go back to using the grid as it was designed.
It seems to me that such a change would result in building a lot more powerplants closer to cities. I'm not very excited about that, unless they were nuclear power plants, because of the amount of pollution generated by powerplants. I bet that nuclear powerplants wouldn't be built because of environmental and n.i.m.b.y. concerns.
If I'm jumping to the wrong conclusion, please correct me. I don't know much about the electrical system.
On the face of it, it is an inconsistant national philosophy that American soldiers are regularly expected to risk their lives, but space flights are held to a standard of 100% success. America is supposed to be a nation of cowboys. The "cowboy" image is much closer to that of an explorer than a soldier.
I think it's because space science is held to a perverted form of perfection, rather than because Americans as a people have become cowards. Every time an astronaut dies, the space program is shut down and there is an intense investigation. Inevitably, something is found that could have been done differently/better and prevented the accident. NASA is criticized and expected from then on to make no errors. It is an admirable goal, and has produced some amazing machines and science, but it stifles progress.
When space travel is so commonplace that it is no longer news, the astronauts will be allowed to take risks. But, until then, the engineers and scientists involved in space will be more concerned with not being the subject of one of those witch-hunts, rather than actually doing something. I am not criticizing the scientists of NASA; I think they are held to unrealistic expectations.
I wrote a post that was a thing of beauty. And once it was polished and perfect, I reduced it to its entropic bits by clicking "Preview" instead of "Submit" and closing the browser window like an imbecile. So, you get the following post instead...
In your opinion, the police powers I say are necessary to investigate terrorists are too great. The societal cost of giving the police the power to compile and keep secret lists of suspected terrorists is too high. When balanced against the cost of terrorism, the harm done by such police powers would outweigh whatever benefit they might cause.
But you tacitly agree here that allowing the police to compile and keep secret lists of suspects about more mundane crimes is an acceptable practice. This is because, as you agree, it is unjust, impractical and impossible to investigate a crime without a secret list of suspects.
You say there are other ways to track terrorists, but you do not mention any. The examples you do list do not support your assertion. "Tracking their money, tracking known members,...infiltration" all presuppose that a list of suspects exists. "Forensic work after any attack" is, as I explained in this post, the method used to compile a list of suspects. "Sane levels of measures to make attacks harder" has nothing to do with investigating criminals.
So, we are at an impasse. There is no way for the police to pursue terrorists without allowing them to compile and keep secret lists of suspects. But, you are unwilling to trust the government with such powers.
I am not trying to put words in your mouth. You are not advocating giving terrorists full immunity. You accept the necessity of allowing the police to investigate terrorist attacks. If a backpack explodes on a train tomorrow, you are okay with the police looking for the people who planned and executed the attack. If you, an innocent citizen, end up by justified police work on a secret list of suspects to a terrorist bombing, that is an unpleasant but acceptable price to pay to track down the murderers.
What you are categorically against is allowing the police to track down such terrorist attackers before they commit an attack. You are against the police attempting to investigate other people in the same organization that were not involved in the planning of an actual attack. Even though everyone in these organization is committed to planning and executing terrist attacks at some point in time. These people are so few, so hard to identify, that the price to society is too high.
This is exactly what the terrorists want. This sort of distinction allows them to establish cells in target countries. They are using you--taking advantage of your fear. Society needs to adapt to destroy them or they will win. This is Darwinism: they are viruses, and you are playing the part of the dodo.
And still, despite admitting that you will be taken advantage of, you fear the encroaching state more than allowing this form of criminal to exist unchecked. This fear is valid. Democracies are founded on two things: a fear of government, which allows voters to periodically review and overthrow the government. The other foundation, though, is an acknowledgment that some form government is practical necessity (for if it were not, then Anarchy would be preferable). I believe you are letting the fear of government get the better of you. You need to accept the uncomfortable compromise of practical necessity.
The reason, I think, that you need to accept this compromise of practicality is that the cost of letting terrorists thrive is much greater than you believe it to be. I can explain why this is, but that's another huge chunk of text.
historically states have done a lot more horrible things...than terrorists. Sure, states can be bad, but that's not the question at hand. The question is whether the democracies that are fighting terrorists can come up with a good security solution that will protect their citizens' rights and yet not be vulnerable to terrorism. Historically, democracies have not been nearly as bad a place to live in as Taliban-controlled-Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, states that were/are greatly influenced by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
I always liked the rule of law. This discussion is not about the rule of law, which I'm sure we both support. It is about how to go about enforcing the law. As I said before, law enforcement is a practical matter, with a lot of flaws. All we have been discussing is whether or not the Secret Lists that security forces keep are legitimate tools in just society. You agree that they are justified in the case of small crimes, but you are worried about the implications of using such lists to track down terrorists. (I am assuming) you are worried because a) it is possible that innocent people could be put on these lists with very little evidence, and b) these lists regarding terrorists could exist for a very long time and the innocent who are on such lists could be on them for a very long time.
I agree that both of these problems are worrisome, and if they cannot be adequately addressed, then the injustice of such lists would outweigh the benefit of their use, and the practice would need to be abandoned.
At what point do we determine when that point of injustice has been reached? You imply, either that such Lists are so flawed from the start that they should not be used to pursue suspected terrorists or that such Lists are good in theory, but current practice has shown that they are being used wrongly. (You may not mean this--I am assuming it from other things you have said.) Which do you believe?
More importantly, do you have a fix? I repeat that the choice of abandoning such a tool is an unacceptable choice. Without some sort of list of suspected terrorists, the terrorist organizations would go largely unpunished except for the few who might be caught after an attack. Abandoning such methods is equivalent to an unspoken surrender to terrorist organization, a surrender that will not go unnoticed. If the terrorists are allowed to continue without security to check them, they will grow as a cancer. They may never exceed the statistical number of deaths from prosaic sources such as car accidents and heart disease, but they will irrevokably ruin our society and remove freedoms we currently enjoy in our democracies. You believe life under the current police protection is, or borders on, intollerable. It is nothing compared to living under the rule of Islamic fundamentalists. If you don't have an alternate solution, than the current one, flawed though it may be, must continue.
You're an AC. Log in and take responsibility and I'll answer you.
This: Your argument that the alternative is to give up entirely seems ludicrous. The safety of humans has always been a matter of establishing a reasonable, but imperfect, level of security. This has, historically, in itself been sufficient. is a valid consideration, but your leap to justified helplessness is flawed, simplistic, and off-topic. There is a point of diminishing returns, but it has to be analyzed and determined, not just assumed.
This: Or an example of a case where focusing on an exaggerated threat has been anything other than counterproductive? is a poorly framed question. No one with sense is going to defend "focusing on exaggeration" as an efficient or productive policy.
But we aren't...talking about finding people after the crime, but rather tracking people someone thinks may someday commit a crime.
Here is the heart of the issue. The theory of information sharing about crimes isn't all that bad. The advantages seem to outweigh the costs. The secret lists of which we have been speaking are not so terrible and have an obvious, practical value. The real problem concerns this particular type of information: lists of suspected terrorists. You are right: these are not short-term lists of people who might have committed last week's crime; these are lists of people who could be watched and hounded for years in an attempt to disclose whether or not they are some sort of deep-cover sleeper agent.
The criminals being sought are those types: gang-members, gangsters and terrorists, that attempt to game the system. The theory of impartial, innocent-until-proven-guilty law inforcement has many flaws, and these groups attempt to exploit those flaws to gain immunity. In doing so, they can get away with evil or provoke more draconian counter-measures, and either way attempt to ruin the system of law for the innocent.
And that is the basis of your fear. You fear a growing police state more than you fear the threat of terrorism. You believe that the system of law is broken or will break if we attempt to change the rules to handle these gangs of thugs. You believe that, rather than fighting the evil of terrorism in this manner, we should either surrender completely or start from a different position, and come to a more ideal solution for policing the threat.
If you throw out the current system, you have two choices: design a different system or surrender to the marauders. The one thing you cannot do is say that the terrorists don't exist. They are coming soon to a railyard near you. Much nearer you than I, unfortunately for you, since you live closer to Europe.
If you know of a better solution than is currently being designed, than I would be interested to hear it. If you simply cannot abide living under the current one, you are of very little use in the current debate.
"What happens when a crime is committed? The police round up suspects. How do they get that list of suspects?"
One would hope that they start from the crime and compile the list, rather than starting from a list and trying to fit list members to the crime.
Regardless of their methodology for determining suspects, police have to eventually do what I originally said:
"At some point in the process of compiling the list, the police are going to have to match a collection of suspect-traits against their knowledge of the population at large and investigate any matches."
An honest police force will do just as you recommend and determine suspect-traits from evidence gathered investigating the crime. A dishonest police force will have a list of people they want to get regardless of the crime committed, for them, the suspect-traits are just list of names.
Either way, the police end up with a secret list of suspects that they need to investigate. Even with an honest police force this will happen. As I keep saying, the reason for a secret list is so that innocent suspects are not unduly harmed.
Your suggestion of wanted posters in the Post Office does not apply. Those posters are for a) people who have been convicted of a crime b) people who the police need to contact in connection with a crime who the police cannot find. That is not the same as the set of all people the police suspect of crimes.
It seems that the US security services had all the data they needed to prevent the 9/11 attacks, but (understandably) did not join the dots. Ie what they were lacking was analysis and imagination.
I think you missed the second part of my original post, which, looking back, is somewhat my fault for not being more clear. I was under the impression that one of the main reason the security services didn't put the dots together for 9/11 is that the FBI and the CIA were tracking the same guys but couldn't share any research (and didn't even know they were interested in the same people) because of attempts to protect Americans by making it illegal for the two agencies share information. There is a similar issue on a smaller scale in that the CIA doesn't want to open it's database to local police departments because it doesn't want to have local police paging through the database looking for dirt on the neighbors.
Because legal separation of powers prevented security services from connecting the dots, the Patriot Act was passed. This law, in addition to other things that people here don't like, allowed the FBI and CIA to share information and resources.
But that new interaction opens up another problem. How to share the right information without sharing too much. That's where the one-way hashing idea comes into play.
So, I don't think this is about gathering more data, but about using the data that's already gathered correctly. The Patriot Act was an attempt to free up the data, but it causes too much risk to the suspects. The issue at hand is how to protect the innocent and wrongly suspected, while sharing important information.
"A secret list in the police commissioner's desk" certainly sounds bad, but the reality is, you can't do police work without it. What happens when a crime is committed? The police round up suspects. How do they get that list of suspects? At some point in the process of compiling the list, the police are going to have to match a collection of suspect-traits against their knowledge of the population at large and investigate any matches. That is the reality of the secret list you describe. Or at least, what it should be in healthy societies. Admittedly, such lists are prone to abuse.
One other thing: this attempt to share information while protecting privacy may be too technically difficult to do. I think it's worth attempting, but it has to be done right.
The point of protecting the list from the private sector is because the people on the list are suspicious, but not guilty. Human nature is such that, if a person showed up on a public list of suspected terrorists their life would be ruined.
It's a question of degree. Many people on the government's list of 'suspicous characters' are going to be innocent. Their lives will be somewhat effected by police attention, but (if the system works) they will be shown to be innocent, and removed from the list after whatever inconveniences they have endured. The point is that this is relatively minor harm compared to the alternative of making the list publicly available. If the list was publicly available it would become a true blacklist, and the people put on the list would be in much worse shape. They would be shunned by the fearful, attacked by vigilantes, and taken advantage of by criminals.
Although they are susceptible to abuse, these lists of 'suspicious characters' exist, and have always existed. It's the only way the law can be efficient in protecting the innocent public. The recent changes like the Patriot Act attempt to make these lists available to people who need them (like other law enforcement agencies), while keeping them from the public eye for the reasons explained above.
There are many reasons why government lists of suspicious characters are bad. But, I do not see a practical way to avoid such lists.
There are many reasons that making the FBI and CIA lists of suspicous characters more accessible to outside inquiries is bad. But (I think) these would be technical flaws that could be handled by improving the rules of access. (This post explains why one-way hashing alone isn't the answer). I don't think that there is a fundamental reason why better (but not public) access to such lists would be bad.
If the original comment was supposed to be a joke, I am embarassed. But, although this doesn't exonerate me from the charge of possibly overreacting, I get the impression from myowntrueself's response that the original post was sincere.
Also, I think it's weird that some moderator on/. thinks that luddite pablum is considered "interesting". I still get to think that no matter how self-important my reaction to the original post was;-)
OK. Autonomous Fighting Machines are bad. I agree with you. Or, at least, I can't think of a reason they're good. (oh, here's one: I'd rather have coallition soldiers home and AFMs killing the terrorists, but that's such a pipe dream it's not worth going into.)
But, self-driving vehicles are good. And saying that a failed attempt at getting them working is *great* news is like chopping down a forest because you don't like one tree.
Sample cost/beneift analysis: Krugman at the NYTimes just wrote about this stat: 117 deaths/day on America's highways. That's 43,000 deaths/year. Let's assume that robotic cars reduce this number to 10% of it's current rate. That's 106 lives/day or 38,700 lives/year saved. Currently the only Iraq Body Count I could find (I don't have any reason to trust these numbers) puts the body count for the war at "over 10,000". So, after making lots of assumptions: robotic cars would save 3 times as many lives in America in a year as one war in Iraq would cost. Not too shabby. I can't substantively defend these numbers, since they're all vague, but it does show a reasonable expectation of benefit from this research. You are right about one thing--the political cost of America going to war is greatly reduced if actual American lives are not at risk.
To object to robotic vehicles is like saying nuclear power is bad because people who design power plants can figure out how to build bombs.
Or fire is bad because it can be used to burn down villages.
I think your fears are overblown. Should they be noted? Sure. But I say: don't stop the DARPA challenge just because of a Skynet nightmare.
This is *great* news! It means that autonomous fighting machines are still some way off.
This is a really weird sentiment to see on a technology website. I grant you that an autonomous fighting machine would be a bad thing to release on the world, but they'd still be a ways off even if some contestants passed the DARPA challenge. So many advances are necessary for an "autonomous fighting machine", that I think we can comfortably benefit from the development of robotic ATVs without worrying that they will someday rule the world.
Are you happy every time a chip design fails, because that postpones the inevitable rise of the "automous fighting machine"? Are you excited when you hear that Honda has to delay the release of ASIMO-2 because they can't get the hip-joints to work properly? Yet another set-back for the conquering strategy of the "autonomous fighting machine"!
It's also weird that someone else here thinks you're luddite comments are insightful.
You're better than I thought. I was cringing, thinking that you might say something snooty about the typo "get's" in the last post. Proofreading isn't my strong point.
I'm not pleased about the curtailment of domestic freedoms either. And if Bush is re-elected, I'm not very happy with Ashcroft getting another four years of power (on the other hand, I might not like his replacement either. I don't remember the last time Americans actually liked an attorney general. They only make news when they do something bad). I think Bush is doing well in foreign policy. Not perfect by a long stretch, but a damn site better than I thought he would do when I didn't vote for him last time.
The reasoning is sort of like this: A long period of time under Ashcroft's idea of good society would be stifiling. However, Bush has done so much against foreign states that use terrorists as a proxy army, that I think it might be possible to end the war on terror with another 4 years of his paranoid, hawkish team in control. At that point, the threat having passed, the war crowd, like Churchill after WWII, will be voted out. "Thank you for being the pit-bull when we needed one. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."
Kerry has to convince me that he will be as aggressive as Bush. He had to act anti-war to gut Dean's campaign, which (as you might guess from what I wrote above) didn't impress me very much. He's going to need to be very convincing. If he does convince me of that, then my vote will be based on things like domestic policy, which hasn't been Bush's strong suit. I'll probably also change the.sig again--make it non-political.
People post on this website all the time that they're afraid the current War on Terror will turn the U.S. into "1984". In a way, I can't argue that, because I don't have the time or ability to successfully refute that notion. If someone is paranoid enough to think there's a growing conspiracy to enslave the U.S. citizenry, I don't think I have the perspective to understand their position enough to refute that theory. On the other hand, if you're not paranoid, but you are just thinking that the War on Terror will be as bad on American rights as the War on Drugs, I can understand that and share your concern. I think it's a serious risk, but it's also a reversable condition, and I want to live to see the Patriot Act not get renewed.
Slashdot Mirror
It's working for me in FireFox 0.8 (is that a redundant statement?). It crashed the first time I tried it, but that was probably because of the /. effect.
I agree with you about switching back to IE being a royal pain. Whenever I do it, I keep center-clicking on links and getting that scroll-cursor.
And how many of these are going to actually go to completion?
If we are not made aware of these missions, if we do not get excited about them, then funding will be easy to cut. Look at the possible reprieve that may be granted to the Hubble due to public outcry.
So a few of them may be cut for funding/political reasons... The history of space exploration has always been one of starry-eyed optimism bruised by the unfortunate realities of politics and engineering limitations. Without the vision and the optimism there is nothing.
Funding, politics, it's all horrible.
No argument there, but it's also reality. In my view you may as well say: "Earth's gravity well--it's horrible."
If they design it right, all they need to design thoroughly are "long term" and "roving". The lab could be relatively simple at first. They can send more and better lab modules later. The rover would just go to the landing site, swap modules and continue on it's work.
"Long term rover" seems do-able today. Use the currentrover's platform and convert it to nuclear power.
(The thing that continually impresses me about the rover missions is that, regardless of how much great science the current rovers are doing, NASA seems to finally have a good system for getting probes to Mars. If I ran the world NASA would have Mars-Rovers coming out of factories and firing those things over to Mars twice a month. Every state university in the country would have its own rover it could order around.)
I think the X-43 is 12-feet-long. This quote:
"The unpiloted 12-foot-long vehicle, part aircraft and part spacecraft, will be dropped from a B-52,aircraft. It will be boosted to nearly 100,000 feet by a rocket..."
from this NASA page is one source.
I think you are underestimating the size of the Pegasus rocket and B-52 bomber. I know I did. A quick google search found a page on the Pegasus rocket: it is 55.4 feet long and about 4 feet in diameter.
I found a clip of the launch at the BBC. I can't seem to figure out where NASA would be hiding the clip.
The BBC page is here. There's a link to the right of the photo at the top of the page.
Grenade: a much better solution. Or make the whole plane blow up.
The next issue is, can these fly fast enough to survive against a shotgun? And if so, how long before politicians/famous people are targetted with these? ("these" - the hypothetical assassination drones that could be built today, not the UAV mentioned in the article)
Although personal assassination drones could be said to already exist in the form of the Predator, the picture I saw accompanying the BBC article looks much more like a remote-control prop-plane than a personal assassination platform. For one thing, it looks too small to carry any particularly leathal weaponry. (maybe, maybe you could attach a .22 pistol underneath it, I can't think of anything else)
Just to make it clear, I'm actively not responding to you because you're an AC.
I can't say anything to ckaminski - I don't know enough about budgetting in DoD vs. NASA budgetting.
I agree with BiggerIsBetter's general sentiment, but don't feel I can add much.
I don't know if WTFRUDOINBiotch is disagreeing with me or making an observation. What I said about American 'cowboys' isn't really a defendable, scientific fact, so I don't know how to defend it if he disagrees with me, or if it's even worth defending in the first place.
But, You: completely I disagree with you, and would have a lot to say to you if you were able to hear it. But you're an AC; there's no point in talking to an AC.
A friend of mine used to make acoustic guitars out of lumber recovered from a 100+ year old shipwreck. The guitars went for a good price because the wood was apparently much better quality than could be found normally.
That guitar shop kept selling "shipwreck" guitars long after they ran out of the original wood. Not exactly the most ethical bunch...
...I have taken the President's space initiative seriously. That may be a mistake.
There is absolutely no guarantee that, after scrapping the space-shuttle and the ISS, the current Vision will be fullfilled in a trip to Mars. As Mr. Weinberg sourly, and accurately, points out, the vast majority of the Mars exploration plan will be done after Bush's maximum term as president. There is a difficulty in saying what Bush's motives are regarding the space program. If he wants to scrap space exploration altogether, if he just wants to stop the hemorage that is the space-shuttle and the ISS, or if he really, truly hopes to get to Mars the first step is exactly the same for all three goals--kill the space-shuttle and the ISS.
Politically, the only option that makes any sense is to propose a better vision than the current one. No one wants to be a spoiler, so Bush had to come up with a compelling reason to kill those two programs. "They're just a waste of money" might be true, but if he doesn't have a good replacement for the space program, he's going to look like he doesn't have any Vision.
Regardless, it's a good thing the space-shuttle and ISS are getting phased out. In reality, it may not matter what Bush's Vision is, since he'll be gone before we get to Mars.
That dose of reality aside, here's to hoping that Bush figures out a way to make Americans On Mars as difficult to stop politically as the space-shuttle turned out to be.
I take it by your silence that you have been forced to admit that the post which I originally responded to is a hackneyed cliche, as I have been politely attempting to show you throughout our conversation. It's too bad a perfectly good discussion ended just because you can't bear the fact that you espouse an untenable position and might have to change your mind.
Thanks for the correction, I'll do more research on electricity deregulation problems.
In my admittedly amaturish worldview it seems that deregulation is generally the best solution, regulation is generally second-best (sometimes (e.g. public transit) the best solution), and that half-way point when a regulated industry is being deregulated is always the worst possible solution.
An alternative would be to do away with deregulation and go back to using the grid as it was designed.
It seems to me that such a change would result in building a lot more powerplants closer to cities. I'm not very excited about that, unless they were nuclear power plants, because of the amount of pollution generated by powerplants. I bet that nuclear powerplants wouldn't be built because of environmental and n.i.m.b.y. concerns.
If I'm jumping to the wrong conclusion, please correct me. I don't know much about the electrical system.
On the face of it, it is an inconsistant national philosophy that American soldiers are regularly expected to risk their lives, but space flights are held to a standard of 100% success. America is supposed to be a nation of cowboys. The "cowboy" image is much closer to that of an explorer than a soldier.
I think it's because space science is held to a perverted form of perfection, rather than because Americans as a people have become cowards. Every time an astronaut dies, the space program is shut down and there is an intense investigation. Inevitably, something is found that could have been done differently/better and prevented the accident. NASA is criticized and expected from then on to make no errors. It is an admirable goal, and has produced some amazing machines and science, but it stifles progress.
When space travel is so commonplace that it is no longer news, the astronauts will be allowed to take risks. But, until then, the engineers and scientists involved in space will be more concerned with not being the subject of one of those witch-hunts, rather than actually doing something. I am not criticizing the scientists of NASA; I think they are held to unrealistic expectations.
I wrote a post that was a thing of beauty. And once it was polished and perfect, I reduced it to its entropic bits by clicking "Preview" instead of "Submit" and closing the browser window like an imbecile. So, you get the following post instead...
In your opinion, the police powers I say are necessary to investigate terrorists are too great. The societal cost of giving the police the power to compile and keep secret lists of suspected terrorists is too high. When balanced against the cost of terrorism, the harm done by such police powers would outweigh whatever benefit they might cause.
But you tacitly agree here that allowing the police to compile and keep secret lists of suspects about more mundane crimes is an acceptable practice. This is because, as you agree, it is unjust, impractical and impossible to investigate a crime without a secret list of suspects.
You say there are other ways to track terrorists, but you do not mention any. The examples you do list do not support your assertion. "Tracking their money, tracking known members,...infiltration" all presuppose that a list of suspects exists. "Forensic work after any attack" is, as I explained in this post, the method used to compile a list of suspects. "Sane levels of measures to make attacks harder" has nothing to do with investigating criminals.
So, we are at an impasse. There is no way for the police to pursue terrorists without allowing them to compile and keep secret lists of suspects. But, you are unwilling to trust the government with such powers.
I am not trying to put words in your mouth. You are not advocating giving terrorists full immunity. You accept the necessity of allowing the police to investigate terrorist attacks. If a backpack explodes on a train tomorrow, you are okay with the police looking for the people who planned and executed the attack. If you, an innocent citizen, end up by justified police work on a secret list of suspects to a terrorist bombing, that is an unpleasant but acceptable price to pay to track down the murderers.
What you are categorically against is allowing the police to track down such terrorist attackers before they commit an attack. You are against the police attempting to investigate other people in the same organization that were not involved in the planning of an actual attack. Even though everyone in these organization is committed to planning and executing terrist attacks at some point in time. These people are so few, so hard to identify, that the price to society is too high.
This is exactly what the terrorists want. This sort of distinction allows them to establish cells in target countries. They are using you--taking advantage of your fear. Society needs to adapt to destroy them or they will win. This is Darwinism: they are viruses, and you are playing the part of the dodo.
And still, despite admitting that you will be taken advantage of, you fear the encroaching state more than allowing this form of criminal to exist unchecked. This fear is valid. Democracies are founded on two things: a fear of government, which allows voters to periodically review and overthrow the government. The other foundation, though, is an acknowledgment that some form government is practical necessity (for if it were not, then Anarchy would be preferable). I believe you are letting the fear of government get the better of you. You need to accept the uncomfortable compromise of practical necessity.
The reason, I think, that you need to accept this compromise of practicality is that the cost of letting terrorists thrive is much greater than you believe it to be. I can explain why this is, but that's another huge chunk of text.
historically states have done a lot more horrible things...than terrorists.
Sure, states can be bad, but that's not the question at hand. The question is whether the democracies that are fighting terrorists can come up with a good security solution that will protect their citizens' rights and yet not be vulnerable to terrorism. Historically, democracies have not been nearly as bad a place to live in as Taliban-controlled-Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia, states that were/are greatly influenced by Islamic fundamentalist terrorists.
I always liked the rule of law.
This discussion is not about the rule of law, which I'm sure we both support. It is about how to go about enforcing the law. As I said before, law enforcement is a practical matter, with a lot of flaws. All we have been discussing is whether or not the Secret Lists that security forces keep are legitimate tools in just society. You agree that they are justified in the case of small crimes, but you are worried about the implications of using such lists to track down terrorists. (I am assuming) you are worried because a) it is possible that innocent people could be put on these lists with very little evidence, and b) these lists regarding terrorists could exist for a very long time and the innocent who are on such lists could be on them for a very long time.
I agree that both of these problems are worrisome, and if they cannot be adequately addressed, then the injustice of such lists would outweigh the benefit of their use, and the practice would need to be abandoned.
At what point do we determine when that point of injustice has been reached? You imply, either that such Lists are so flawed from the start that they should not be used to pursue suspected terrorists or that such Lists are good in theory, but current practice has shown that they are being used wrongly. (You may not mean this--I am assuming it from other things you have said.) Which do you believe?
More importantly, do you have a fix? I repeat that the choice of abandoning such a tool is an unacceptable choice. Without some sort of list of suspected terrorists, the terrorist organizations would go largely unpunished except for the few who might be caught after an attack. Abandoning such methods is equivalent to an unspoken surrender to terrorist organization, a surrender that will not go unnoticed. If the terrorists are allowed to continue without security to check them, they will grow as a cancer. They may never exceed the statistical number of deaths from prosaic sources such as car accidents and heart disease, but they will irrevokably ruin our society and remove freedoms we currently enjoy in our democracies. You believe life under the current police protection is, or borders on, intollerable. It is nothing compared to living under the rule of Islamic fundamentalists. If you don't have an alternate solution, than the current one, flawed though it may be, must continue.
You're an AC. Log in and take responsibility and I'll answer you.
This:
Your argument that the alternative is to give up entirely seems ludicrous. The safety of humans has always been a matter of establishing a reasonable, but imperfect, level of security. This has, historically, in itself been sufficient.
is a valid consideration, but your leap to justified helplessness is flawed, simplistic, and off-topic. There is a point of diminishing returns, but it has to be analyzed and determined, not just assumed.
This:
Or an example of a case where focusing on an exaggerated threat has been anything other than counterproductive?
is a poorly framed question. No one with sense is going to defend "focusing on exaggeration" as an efficient or productive policy.
But we aren't...talking about finding people after the crime, but rather tracking people someone thinks may someday commit a crime.
Here is the heart of the issue. The theory of information sharing about crimes isn't all that bad. The advantages seem to outweigh the costs. The secret lists of which we have been speaking are not so terrible and have an obvious, practical value. The real problem concerns this particular type of information: lists of suspected terrorists. You are right: these are not short-term lists of people who might have committed last week's crime; these are lists of people who could be watched and hounded for years in an attempt to disclose whether or not they are some sort of deep-cover sleeper agent.
The criminals being sought are those types: gang-members, gangsters and terrorists, that attempt to game the system. The theory of impartial, innocent-until-proven-guilty law inforcement has many flaws, and these groups attempt to exploit those flaws to gain immunity. In doing so, they can get away with evil or provoke more draconian counter-measures, and either way attempt to ruin the system of law for the innocent.
And that is the basis of your fear. You fear a growing police state more than you fear the threat of terrorism. You believe that the system of law is broken or will break if we attempt to change the rules to handle these gangs of thugs. You believe that, rather than fighting the evil of terrorism in this manner, we should either surrender completely or start from a different position, and come to a more ideal solution for policing the threat.
If you throw out the current system, you have two choices: design a different system or surrender to the marauders. The one thing you cannot do is say that the terrorists don't exist. They are coming soon to a railyard near you. Much nearer you than I, unfortunately for you, since you live closer to Europe.
If you know of a better solution than is currently being designed, than I would be interested to hear it. If you simply cannot abide living under the current one, you are of very little use in the current debate.
"What happens when a crime is committed? The police round up suspects. How do they get that list of suspects?"
One would hope that they start from the crime and compile the list, rather than starting from a list and trying to fit list members to the crime.
Regardless of their methodology for determining suspects, police have to eventually do what I originally said:
"At some point in the process of compiling the list, the police are going to have to match a collection of suspect-traits against their knowledge of the population at large and investigate any matches."
An honest police force will do just as you recommend and determine suspect-traits from evidence gathered investigating the crime. A dishonest police force will have a list of people they want to get regardless of the crime committed, for them, the suspect-traits are just list of names.
Either way, the police end up with a secret list of suspects that they need to investigate. Even with an honest police force this will happen. As I keep saying, the reason for a secret list is so that innocent suspects are not unduly harmed.
Your suggestion of wanted posters in the Post Office does not apply. Those posters are for a) people who have been convicted of a crime b) people who the police need to contact in connection with a crime who the police cannot find. That is not the same as the set of all people the police suspect of crimes.
It seems that the US security services had all the data they needed to prevent the 9/11 attacks, but (understandably) did not join the dots. Ie what they were lacking was analysis and imagination.
I think you missed the second part of my original post, which, looking back, is somewhat my fault for not being more clear. I was under the impression that one of the main reason the security services didn't put the dots together for 9/11 is that the FBI and the CIA were tracking the same guys but couldn't share any research (and didn't even know they were interested in the same people) because of attempts to protect Americans by making it illegal for the two agencies share information. There is a similar issue on a smaller scale in that the CIA doesn't want to open it's database to local police departments because it doesn't want to have local police paging through the database looking for dirt on the neighbors.
Because legal separation of powers prevented security services from connecting the dots, the Patriot Act was passed. This law, in addition to other things that people here don't like, allowed the FBI and CIA to share information and resources.
But that new interaction opens up another problem. How to share the right information without sharing too much. That's where the one-way hashing idea comes into play.
So, I don't think this is about gathering more data, but about using the data that's already gathered correctly. The Patriot Act was an attempt to free up the data, but it causes too much risk to the suspects. The issue at hand is how to protect the innocent and wrongly suspected, while sharing important information.
"A secret list in the police commissioner's desk" certainly sounds bad, but the reality is, you can't do police work without it. What happens when a crime is committed? The police round up suspects. How do they get that list of suspects? At some point in the process of compiling the list, the police are going to have to match a collection of suspect-traits against their knowledge of the population at large and investigate any matches. That is the reality of the secret list you describe. Or at least, what it should be in healthy societies. Admittedly, such lists are prone to abuse.
One other thing: this attempt to share information while protecting privacy may be too technically difficult to do. I think it's worth attempting, but it has to be done right.
The point of protecting the list from the private sector is because the people on the list are suspicious, but not guilty. Human nature is such that, if a person showed up on a public list of suspected terrorists their life would be ruined.
It's a question of degree. Many people on the government's list of 'suspicous characters' are going to be innocent. Their lives will be somewhat effected by police attention, but (if the system works) they will be shown to be innocent, and removed from the list after whatever inconveniences they have endured. The point is that this is relatively minor harm compared to the alternative of making the list publicly available. If the list was publicly available it would become a true blacklist, and the people put on the list would be in much worse shape. They would be shunned by the fearful, attacked by vigilantes, and taken advantage of by criminals.
Although they are susceptible to abuse, these lists of 'suspicious characters' exist, and have always existed. It's the only way the law can be efficient in protecting the innocent public. The recent changes like the Patriot Act attempt to make these lists available to people who need them (like other law enforcement agencies), while keeping them from the public eye for the reasons explained above.
There are many reasons why government lists of suspicious characters are bad. But, I do not see a practical way to avoid such lists.
There are many reasons that making the FBI and CIA lists of suspicous characters more accessible to outside inquiries is bad. But (I think) these would be technical flaws that could be handled by improving the rules of access. (This post explains why one-way hashing alone isn't the answer). I don't think that there is a fundamental reason why better (but not public) access to such lists would be bad.
If the original comment was supposed to be a joke, I am embarassed. But, although this doesn't exonerate me from the charge of possibly overreacting, I get the impression from myowntrueself's response that the original post was sincere.
/. thinks that luddite pablum is considered "interesting". I still get to think that no matter how self-important my reaction to the original post was ;-)
Also, I think it's weird that some moderator on
OK. Autonomous Fighting Machines are bad. I agree with you. Or, at least, I can't think of a reason they're good. (oh, here's one: I'd rather have coallition soldiers home and AFMs killing the terrorists, but that's such a pipe dream it's not worth going into.)
But, self-driving vehicles are good. And saying that a failed attempt at getting them working is *great* news is like chopping down a forest because you don't like one tree.
Sample cost/beneift analysis: Krugman at the NYTimes just wrote about this stat: 117 deaths/day on America's highways. That's 43,000 deaths/year. Let's assume that robotic cars reduce this number to 10% of it's current rate. That's 106 lives/day or 38,700 lives/year saved. Currently the only Iraq Body Count I could find (I don't have any reason to trust these numbers) puts the body count for the war at "over 10,000". So, after making lots of assumptions: robotic cars would save 3 times as many lives in America in a year as one war in Iraq would cost. Not too shabby. I can't substantively defend these numbers, since they're all vague, but it does show a reasonable expectation of benefit from this research. You are right about one thing--the political cost of America going to war is greatly reduced if actual American lives are not at risk.
To object to robotic vehicles is like saying nuclear power is bad because people who design power plants can figure out how to build bombs.
Or fire is bad because it can be used to burn down villages.
I think your fears are overblown. Should they be noted? Sure. But I say: don't stop the DARPA challenge just because of a Skynet nightmare.
This is *great* news!
It means that autonomous fighting machines are still some way off.
This is a really weird sentiment to see on a technology website. I grant you that an autonomous fighting machine would be a bad thing to release on the world, but they'd still be a ways off even if some contestants passed the DARPA challenge. So many advances are necessary for an "autonomous fighting machine", that I think we can comfortably benefit from the development of robotic ATVs without worrying that they will someday rule the world.
Are you happy every time a chip design fails, because that postpones the inevitable rise of the "automous fighting machine"? Are you excited when you hear that Honda has to delay the release of ASIMO-2 because they can't get the hip-joints to work properly? Yet another set-back for the conquering strategy of the "autonomous fighting machine"!
It's also weird that someone else here thinks you're luddite comments are insightful.
You're better than I thought. I was cringing, thinking that you might say something snooty about the typo "get's" in the last post. Proofreading isn't my strong point.
.sig again--make it non-political.
I'm not pleased about the curtailment of domestic freedoms either. And if Bush is re-elected, I'm not very happy with Ashcroft getting another four years of power (on the other hand, I might not like his replacement either. I don't remember the last time Americans actually liked an attorney general. They only make news when they do something bad). I think Bush is doing well in foreign policy. Not perfect by a long stretch, but a damn site better than I thought he would do when I didn't vote for him last time.
The reasoning is sort of like this: A long period of time under Ashcroft's idea of good society would be stifiling. However, Bush has done so much against foreign states that use terrorists as a proxy army, that I think it might be possible to end the war on terror with another 4 years of his paranoid, hawkish team in control. At that point, the threat having passed, the war crowd, like Churchill after WWII, will be voted out. "Thank you for being the pit-bull when we needed one. Don't let the door hit you on the way out."
Kerry has to convince me that he will be as aggressive as Bush. He had to act anti-war to gut Dean's campaign, which (as you might guess from what I wrote above) didn't impress me very much. He's going to need to be very convincing. If he does convince me of that, then my vote will be based on things like domestic policy, which hasn't been Bush's strong suit. I'll probably also change the
People post on this website all the time that they're afraid the current War on Terror will turn the U.S. into "1984". In a way, I can't argue that, because I don't have the time or ability to successfully refute that notion. If someone is paranoid enough to think there's a growing conspiracy to enslave the U.S. citizenry, I don't think I have the perspective to understand their position enough to refute that theory. On the other hand, if you're not paranoid, but you are just thinking that the War on Terror will be as bad on American rights as the War on Drugs, I can understand that and share your concern. I think it's a serious risk, but it's also a reversable condition, and I want to live to see the Patriot Act not get renewed.