Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
Obviously we're not in such a state yet. I was just taking the opportunity to do what everyone else was and speculate about the possibilities for this technology.
Northern Alliance drones ?
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So the Afghanis fighting against the Taliban were remote controlled drones guided by Quake hardened veterans of the Pentagon's elite clans?
I don't think so.
Maybe Jon has been watching a different CNN from me - but from what I recall there were soldiers busy fighting and dying against the Taliban long before the American's arrived to "save the day" john-wayne style for the gawking eye of the camera.
If anything the lesson of the war against Iraq in the early 90's was that you can't win a ground war by the air. The western allied nations pounded Iraqi ground positions for months before moving in on the ground - and they still had to fight Iraqis on the ground. They didn't run away, they were still there.
Afghanistan was not a vacuum of empty space with nothing but the Taliban and American jets. Afghanis themselves were fighting and dying in order to overthrow the Taliban control - this war was won on the ground not in the air. Certainly the American and British bombardment did a lot to weaken the Taliban and enabled the Northern Alliance to make critical breaks in the Taliban lines that they had not been able to up until that point, but lets not imagine for a moment that this war was won by laser guided bombs and cruise missiles alone. That would be naive to an unbelievable degree.
When you have people on the ground, occupying space, you cannnot remove them unless you go in and physically do so. No matter how many bombs you drop, how accurately you pinpoint your missiles, how many satellite and drone recon photos you take - it still requires people on the ground with guns to take and hold territory for a nation to be conquered.
The fact that America achieved her objectives with little loss of American life is meaningless in this context for a few simple reasons. American objectives were simply to eliminate the Taliban & Al Quaeda's abilities to carry out terrorism. Not neccessarily to "liberate" the Afghani people. It happened that in this instance this goal dove-tailed nicely with the goals of certain Afghani parties whose ambitions were to remove the Taliban from power and institute a new state - so supporting those forces in achieving their goals was the simplest and most effective way of achieving the American goals.
Mostly however it was because America was fighting by proxy. There was little need for large numbers of ground troops to be deployed because the local forces were already in place and familiar with the landscape and the methods of fighting in this region. Also the political consequences both at home and in the eyes of other Muslim nations of a large-scale American invasion were prohibitive. So using somebody else to do the grunt-work of the war made both good political and military sense.
To make up a story in which America won the war by itself with nothing by high-tech gadgets is absurd and meaningless. Any conclusions drawn from such a situation are useless in both a military and political framework.
Re:Unfortunately, an end to wars
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Actually with the advent of more and more innovative "less than lethal" weapons; everything from teargas and rubber bullets to tranquilizers, sticky-spray and bolo-net guns.
We may see the arrival of a technocracy who can effectively ignore the political demands of the masses because any violent unrest can be subdued without the massive loss of life and its consequent political fallout.
In past times one has been forced to negotiate with mobs, or unleash violence upon them which brings your image low in the opinion of the greater population. However if you simply spray a mob or a military enemy with a sleeping gas, and they all wake up in prison, the general population is less offended and you suffer no political fallout.
How often do you read line-by-line whats in a makefile when you get some piece of code you want to use?
Personally I don't, and I think that we as a community are much too lax about this sort of thing - we need some better conventions about what goes into scripts like this and why - or we need other accounts that have pseudo-root status for things like installing files. Just a thought.
Yes, it destroyed everything but the frogs, salamanders, and other very precarious fragile life forms which have existed pretty much unchanged for millions of years before this impact. That is just one of the many problems with this giant space-rock theory.
Now I'm not saying that this theory isn't very convincing, but its going to be a long time before we truly understand the nature of what happened during this massive impact. I'm not doubting that a massive metor / asteroid hit the earth and caused catastrophic environmental fallout, but the facts are far from convincing.
Frogs and salamanders and other small amphibians like these are very delicate fragile creatures which are very easily affected by even small changes in their habitats. They breathe and drink through their skin, and so absorb pretty much anything thats in the air and water. They are also very sensitive to light & heat conditions. If a massive environmental disaster occured that was so devastating that it wiped out thousands of species, including very large robust reptiles like dinosaurs, why did it not wipe out the many frog & reptile populations that have continued pretty much unchanged since that time.
Understanding the consequences of a massive explosion / impact of this sort is very important to us. We should understand thoroughly the consequences and the survival strategies that are important in a post-nuclear / post-asteroid fallout situation. The dillemma of the frogs is just one of the massively understated holes in our knowledge about such disasters, and the verdict on what really did kill the dinosaurs is far from conclusive at this point - despite what the popular media likes to portray.
Giant space rocks hitting the earth and causing massive fallout is a great story, and the media loves to play it up. It satisfies our thirst for biblical-type plague stories and apocalyptic premonitions, but as far as the science goes, its anything but conclusive. Certainly this meteor impact did happen at the same time as the beginning of the end of the dinosaurs, but we must remember that despite what you may remember seeing in Disney's Fantasia, they didn't all just drop dead in a matter of one symphony movement. Their extinction happened over a long period ( although geologically it might look quick ), and we are very far from understanding the ecological and environmental changes that came out of it.
It was called a Nintendo Power-Glove.
I've also seen schematics & drivers so that you can connect your power glove to a serial port & use it as a mouse replacement.
I can get a warning when I enter or leave an ssl session if I want it.
I can get a warning when I accept cookies if I want it.
I can even get a warning when I submit a form if I want it.
All of these are fairly trivial run-of-the-mill type web actions, but something as annoying & intrusive as creating pop-ups and altering my browsers history list cannot be disabled. When oh when are we going to see the ability to disable pop-ups & other intrusive/obnoxious script actions like this?
Or even more handy for them. If they manage to make strong crypto illegal ( or non-escrowed crypto ), than they don't even need to bother with key escrow, just scan for instances of non-escrowed crypto and start laying charges. Who cares if you can even read whats being said if the act of using cryptographic software itself is an act of terrorism.
An interesting little factoid for those of you interested in such stuff:
Aside from developping better steel than the rest of the world, the Arabs also developped the technique of pouring molten steel into a mould to cast blades and other items out of steel. This produced much better quality swords than europeans who were using only the old "heat up a chunk of metal and pound it with a hammer" technique - because it doesn't induce all the metal fatigue of pounding, or something like that.
Anyway, the latin word caliber was a latinized form of the arabic name for the moulds used ( yes this is where we get our word 'caliber' to describe the size of bullets ). So a sword which was taken out of such a mould would be ex caliber ( out of a caliber ), hence the name of King Arthur's famous sword excaliber and why it was so much more powerful than all the other swords of the time.
The reason for implementing this is that police officers were complaining that they just couldn't manage to get a good look at ALL the women on the beach without these.
Cloning Dolly required 277 attempts. And it carries risks. Hill, who has cloned cattle, said the cloned calves are often sick and abnormally large.
[...] he will give you a dead baby, a defective baby or a deformed baby [...]
So if you've lost a child, you need not be racked with grief. Instead you can pay lots of money to have your child returned to you defective, deformed, sick and abnormally large, with a tin-foil hat. Now that's progress!
That's not the point I'm trying to make. According to the "sources" who were talking about the NSA's fiber optic snooping they had developped a technique to circumvent this. I'm no expert on optics tech, so I really can't comment on how viable that is.
But, given that they have got some technique that can read information being sent and not leave this "echo", the quantum testing method should still be able to positively identify that someone is siphoning out photons, or intercepting and replacing them.
But how the hell are you supposed to do this via a satellite? I find it simply incomprehensible that a single photon could be successfully bounced off of a satellite and detected when it hit the Earth. Or even successfully shot between two points on the Earth. And if you can manage to send single photons between two points, why not just send plaintext? Sure, someone might tap a fiber without your knowledge. But "tapping" open space without anyone noticing?
"Tapping open space" as you call it is the easiest thing to do. All you need is a telescope. You can't watch everyone who has a telescope - that's absurd. Think of how much opportunity there is for refraction off the atmosphere and reflection off the satellite - if you sent plaintext anyone with a telescope could read what you're saying.
And besides - this isn't about message transmission, its about key exchange. You only need a short burst of a fraction of a second to send enough photons to make up an encryption key longer than any cryptosystem in existance could need.
No, you're mistaken. The article on counterpane ( here for those of you who see a broken link ) is not about quantum cryptography, but merely about choosing a random place within a random stream of data to begin a key.
Basically you transmit a very long sequence of bits, and agree at a point beforehand to select out a given subset of this as a key. It all hinges upon an agreement of exactly what subset of the bits to use, and that an intermediate party does not know that subset.
The issue on a key exchange server onboard a satellite using quantum crypto is quite different. It involves setting and then measuring properties of individual photons of light, much more complexe than the system in the counterpane article.
But what is the practical usefulness of this outside of the military?
The trouble that occurs to me is that if you're using the tech onboard a satellite to handle key exchange you have to trust the people who admin the satellites. That's fine if you're the pentagon or some big corp. which can buy its own satellite, but its true that doesn't help the little guy.
I'm not an expert on optics tech. but I think if photons can be sent down a glass fiber reliably they should also be able to be bounced off a satellite reliably. I mean bouced off its reflective surface, not transmitted to any gear on board.
Anyone ever seen or heard some amature astronomy geeks finding lunar lander remains and bouncing lasers off the reflective foil for fun? Well imagine that with a few hundred dollars in amateur astronomy gear you could set up a completely secure key exchange by bouncy a laser off floating space junk to your buddy half-way round the world ( of course curvature of the earth comes into play for lines of site to whatever satellite you choose ).
No, not the message, just the key. You transmit the key via a direct beam of light, test the individual photons, and compare the results of your tests with the sender ( this can even be done in the clear if you're careful about what data you send ).
Once you've compared the test results, you can positively identify what photons have and have not been tampered with along the way - you pull out only those which have not been tampered with and use their values to build a key.
This gives you a secure key exchange protocol that guarantees the key has not been intercepted or compromised. Then you can engage in encrypted communications on ANY other medium.
So this technique would allow you to know whether anyone was intercepting photons as they passed through a given medium. Has anyone thought of using this technique to positively identify whether anyone is really tapping underwater fiber optics like
this old article suggested.
It would be funny if the latest thing in crypto was able to catch the NSA with their pants down.
A few little tricks I've picked up for finding good passwords:
If you've ever played the "guess that vanity licence plate" game, this is an automatic way to come up with good passwords. You take a phrase or expression you know you can remember and obfuscate it as you might if you wanted that same phrase on a vanity licence plate but need to squash out characters so it will fit. For example, you might take the phrase "rose garden" - you could write it out as "rOzgRdN" ( where password is case sensitive of course ) so that when you read it you pronounce the upper case letters as the name of the letter and the lower case as the sound the letter makes. Of course 1337-ifying your passwords has a similar effect.
Of course the nice thing about this is you can keep all your goofy old passwords - family names, celebrities and ego-boosting cliches, just make them difficult for a password cracker to grab out of lists of plain-text.
Another trick that I've always liked is to use chess notation. Think of any move in a game of chess, one that you can remember easily and write it out using one of the conventional chess notations. For example the move "white queen captures kings rook 3" would be "wQxKr3".
"Ok men, we're moving in on the enemy positions in a few hours, and I repeat what I've said before, I don't want any of you shooting people who are trying to surrender."
Gomer:
"But Cap'n, I don't speak no Eye-Rack-EE"
Capt:
"You don't need to son, just stick this fish in your ear"
If I had a room of people who all wrote the title of their favourite book onto a paper and put it into a file folder. By your argument you'd say that the company which made the file folder would have the right to take all that paper and lock it up somewhere outside the room and charge those same people to have access to their list of favourite books.
... also believe that people are entitled (as in the God-given right sense of the word) to retirement benefits and medical coverage as well, so perhaps this is a loaded question.
Now there's a very American-centric point of view if I've ever heard one. The USA is the ONLY ( I repeat ONLY ) first world nation that does not have medical care supplied for its citizens by the government. I don't really care whether or not you want to quibble over whether this is a God given right or not, but I think that any country which has the money to afford such a program, it is the citizen's right to demand it of the government. After all the government's money is by definition the citizens' money. Only in the somewhat odd-ball ( if you'll excuse the phrase ) American way of thought does being a wealthy powerful first world nation go hand in hand with denying such basic services to its citizens.
... the CD title and the track names are themselves copyrighted material, owned by the copyright holder...
Yes, but there is a distinct difference ( which exists in the copyright laws themselves ) between infringement of a copyright by illegal copying and reference to a work. Referencing works is a protected right of the public, and must be. Think how absurd it would be if someone needed permission of corporate lawyers to publish an analysis of popular music, or any work which requires making reference to other works - this would bring academia to a grinding halt. Likewise a database of CD titles and track names is a reference work. It makes reference to existing works, it does not copy them. Therefore it makes no infringement upons the "copy rights" of those people who created / own the works.
Only in a country where infanticide is condoned in the interest of "women's choice" would we be having an argument like this.
Now there's some serious trolling if I ever heard it. How 'bout I counter with a little trolling of my own. Only in a country of @$$ backwards religious fanatics and pinheaded rednecks would you ever hear arguments like this which put the rights of a handful of people to make a few bucks above the general rights of hundreds of millions of people to general knowledge.
Well the E-Gold seems a bit more reliable, but the description of GoldMoney: A bahamas based company that contracts a South-African company to run webservers on the British channel island of Jersey?
Does that sound like a fly-by-night company or what?
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously we're not in such a state yet. I was just taking the opportunity to do what everyone else was and speculate about the possibilities for this technology.
So the Afghanis fighting against the Taliban were remote controlled drones guided by Quake hardened veterans of the Pentagon's elite clans?
I don't think so.
Maybe Jon has been watching a different CNN from me - but from what I recall there were soldiers busy fighting and dying against the Taliban long before the American's arrived to "save the day" john-wayne style for the gawking eye of the camera.
If anything the lesson of the war against Iraq in the early 90's was that you can't win a ground war by the air. The western allied nations pounded Iraqi ground positions for months before moving in on the ground - and they still had to fight Iraqis on the ground. They didn't run away, they were still there.
Afghanistan was not a vacuum of empty space with nothing but the Taliban and American jets. Afghanis themselves were fighting and dying in order to overthrow the Taliban control - this war was won on the ground not in the air. Certainly the American and British bombardment did a lot to weaken the Taliban and enabled the Northern Alliance to make critical breaks in the Taliban lines that they had not been able to up until that point, but lets not imagine for a moment that this war was won by laser guided bombs and cruise missiles alone. That would be naive to an unbelievable degree.
When you have people on the ground, occupying space, you cannnot remove them unless you go in and physically do so. No matter how many bombs you drop, how accurately you pinpoint your missiles, how many satellite and drone recon photos you take - it still requires people on the ground with guns to take and hold territory for a nation to be conquered.
The fact that America achieved her objectives with little loss of American life is meaningless in this context for a few simple reasons. American objectives were simply to eliminate the Taliban & Al Quaeda's abilities to carry out terrorism. Not neccessarily to "liberate" the Afghani people. It happened that in this instance this goal dove-tailed nicely with the goals of certain Afghani parties whose ambitions were to remove the Taliban from power and institute a new state - so supporting those forces in achieving their goals was the simplest and most effective way of achieving the American goals.
Mostly however it was because America was fighting by proxy. There was little need for large numbers of ground troops to be deployed because the local forces were already in place and familiar with the landscape and the methods of fighting in this region. Also the political consequences both at home and in the eyes of other Muslim nations of a large-scale American invasion were prohibitive. So using somebody else to do the grunt-work of the war made both good political and military sense.
To make up a story in which America won the war by itself with nothing by high-tech gadgets is absurd and meaningless. Any conclusions drawn from such a situation are useless in both a military and political framework.
Actually with the advent of more and more innovative "less than lethal" weapons; everything from teargas and rubber bullets to tranquilizers, sticky-spray and bolo-net guns.
We may see the arrival of a technocracy who can effectively ignore the political demands of the masses because any violent unrest can be subdued without the massive loss of life and its consequent political fallout.
In past times one has been forced to negotiate with mobs, or unleash violence upon them which brings your image low in the opinion of the greater population. However if you simply spray a mob or a military enemy with a sleeping gas, and they all wake up in prison, the general population is less offended and you suffer no political fallout.
$./configure
$./make
$su
Password:
$make install
How often do you read line-by-line whats in a makefile when you get some piece of code you want to use?
Personally I don't, and I think that we as a community are much too lax about this sort of thing - we need some better conventions about what goes into scripts like this and why - or we need other accounts that have pseudo-root status for things like installing files. Just a thought.
Now I'm not saying that this theory isn't very convincing, but its going to be a long time before we truly understand the nature of what happened during this massive impact. I'm not doubting that a massive metor / asteroid hit the earth and caused catastrophic environmental fallout, but the facts are far from convincing.
Frogs and salamanders and other small amphibians like these are very delicate fragile creatures which are very easily affected by even small changes in their habitats. They breathe and drink through their skin, and so absorb pretty much anything thats in the air and water. They are also very sensitive to light & heat conditions. If a massive environmental disaster occured that was so devastating that it wiped out thousands of species, including very large robust reptiles like dinosaurs, why did it not wipe out the many frog & reptile populations that have continued pretty much unchanged since that time.
Understanding the consequences of a massive explosion / impact of this sort is very important to us. We should understand thoroughly the consequences and the survival strategies that are important in a post-nuclear / post-asteroid fallout situation. The dillemma of the frogs is just one of the massively understated holes in our knowledge about such disasters, and the verdict on what really did kill the dinosaurs is far from conclusive at this point - despite what the popular media likes to portray.
Giant space rocks hitting the earth and causing massive fallout is a great story, and the media loves to play it up. It satisfies our thirst for biblical-type plague stories and apocalyptic premonitions, but as far as the science goes, its anything but conclusive. Certainly this meteor impact did happen at the same time as the beginning of the end of the dinosaurs, but we must remember that despite what you may remember seeing in Disney's Fantasia, they didn't all just drop dead in a matter of one symphony movement. Their extinction happened over a long period ( although geologically it might look quick ), and we are very far from understanding the ecological and environmental changes that came out of it.
It was called a Nintendo Power-Glove.
I've also seen schematics & drivers so that you can connect your power glove to a serial port & use it as a mouse replacement.
right on!
I was going to put 0.9.4 on soon, but now I guess i'll do it immediately.
I can get a warning when I enter or leave an ssl session if I want it.
I can get a warning when I accept cookies if I want it.
I can even get a warning when I submit a form if I want it.
All of these are fairly trivial run-of-the-mill type web actions, but something as annoying & intrusive as creating pop-ups and altering my browsers history list cannot be disabled. When oh when are we going to see the ability to disable pop-ups & other intrusive/obnoxious script actions like this?
Or even more handy for them. If they manage to make strong crypto illegal ( or non-escrowed crypto ), than they don't even need to bother with key escrow, just scan for instances of non-escrowed crypto and start laying charges. Who cares if you can even read whats being said if the act of using cryptographic software itself is an act of terrorism.
I see - interesting, thanks =)
Aside from developping better steel than the rest of the world, the Arabs also developped the technique of pouring molten steel into a mould to cast blades and other items out of steel. This produced much better quality swords than europeans who were using only the old "heat up a chunk of metal and pound it with a hammer" technique - because it doesn't induce all the metal fatigue of pounding, or something like that.
Anyway, the latin word caliber was a latinized form of the arabic name for the moulds used ( yes this is where we get our word 'caliber' to describe the size of bullets ). So a sword which was taken out of such a mould would be ex caliber ( out of a caliber ), hence the name of King Arthur's famous sword excaliber and why it was so much more powerful than all the other swords of the time.
Ask not what your country ... can do ... for you but what
what
what
what
what
what
you can do for for your country.
The reason for implementing this is that police officers were complaining that they just couldn't manage to get a good look at ALL the women on the beach without these.
[...] he will give you a dead baby, a defective baby or a deformed baby [...]
So if you've lost a child, you need not be racked with grief. Instead you can pay lots of money to have your child returned to you defective, deformed, sick and abnormally large, with a tin-foil hat. Now that's progress!
But, given that they have got some technique that can read information being sent and not leave this "echo", the quantum testing method should still be able to positively identify that someone is siphoning out photons, or intercepting and replacing them.
"Tapping open space" as you call it is the easiest thing to do. All you need is a telescope. You can't watch everyone who has a telescope - that's absurd. Think of how much opportunity there is for refraction off the atmosphere and reflection off the satellite - if you sent plaintext anyone with a telescope could read what you're saying.
And besides - this isn't about message transmission, its about key exchange. You only need a short burst of a fraction of a second to send enough photons to make up an encryption key longer than any cryptosystem in existance could need.
Basically you transmit a very long sequence of bits, and agree at a point beforehand to select out a given subset of this as a key. It all hinges upon an agreement of exactly what subset of the bits to use, and that an intermediate party does not know that subset.
The issue on a key exchange server onboard a satellite using quantum crypto is quite different. It involves setting and then measuring properties of individual photons of light, much more complexe than the system in the counterpane article.
The trouble that occurs to me is that if you're using the tech onboard a satellite to handle key exchange you have to trust the people who admin the satellites. That's fine if you're the pentagon or some big corp. which can buy its own satellite, but its true that doesn't help the little guy.
I'm not an expert on optics tech. but I think if photons can be sent down a glass fiber reliably they should also be able to be bounced off a satellite reliably. I mean bouced off its reflective surface, not transmitted to any gear on board.
Anyone ever seen or heard some amature astronomy geeks finding lunar lander remains and bouncing lasers off the reflective foil for fun? Well imagine that with a few hundred dollars in amateur astronomy gear you could set up a completely secure key exchange by bouncy a laser off floating space junk to your buddy half-way round the world ( of course curvature of the earth comes into play for lines of site to whatever satellite you choose ).
Once you've compared the test results, you can positively identify what photons have and have not been tampered with along the way - you pull out only those which have not been tampered with and use their values to build a key.
This gives you a secure key exchange protocol that guarantees the key has not been intercepted or compromised. Then you can engage in encrypted communications on ANY other medium.
It would be funny if the latest thing in crypto was able to catch the NSA with their pants down.
If you've ever played the "guess that vanity licence plate" game, this is an automatic way to come up with good passwords. You take a phrase or expression you know you can remember and obfuscate it as you might if you wanted that same phrase on a vanity licence plate but need to squash out characters so it will fit. For example, you might take the phrase "rose garden" - you could write it out as "rOzgRdN" ( where password is case sensitive of course ) so that when you read it you pronounce the upper case letters as the name of the letter and the lower case as the sound the letter makes. Of course 1337-ifying your passwords has a similar effect.
Of course the nice thing about this is you can keep all your goofy old passwords - family names, celebrities and ego-boosting cliches, just make them difficult for a password cracker to grab out of lists of plain-text.
Another trick that I've always liked is to use chess notation. Think of any move in a game of chess, one that you can remember easily and write it out using one of the conventional chess notations. For example the move "white queen captures kings rook 3" would be "wQxKr3".
"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers"
- Princess Laia to evil Commander Guy from first Star wars
Capt:
Now there's a very American-centric point of view if I've ever heard one. The USA is the ONLY ( I repeat ONLY ) first world nation that does not have medical care supplied for its citizens by the government. I don't really care whether or not you want to quibble over whether this is a God given right or not, but I think that any country which has the money to afford such a program, it is the citizen's right to demand it of the government. After all the government's money is by definition the citizens' money. Only in the somewhat odd-ball ( if you'll excuse the phrase ) American way of thought does being a wealthy powerful first world nation go hand in hand with denying such basic services to its citizens.
Yes, but there is a distinct difference ( which exists in the copyright laws themselves ) between infringement of a copyright by illegal copying and reference to a work. Referencing works is a protected right of the public, and must be. Think how absurd it would be if someone needed permission of corporate lawyers to publish an analysis of popular music, or any work which requires making reference to other works - this would bring academia to a grinding halt. Likewise a database of CD titles and track names is a reference work. It makes reference to existing works, it does not copy them. Therefore it makes no infringement upons the "copy rights" of those people who created / own the works.
Only in a country where infanticide is condoned in the interest of "women's choice" would we be having an argument like this.
Now there's some serious trolling if I ever heard it. How 'bout I counter with a little trolling of my own. Only in a country of @$$ backwards religious fanatics and pinheaded rednecks would you ever hear arguments like this which put the rights of a handful of people to make a few bucks above the general rights of hundreds of millions of people to general knowledge.
Does that sound like a fly-by-night company or what?