The recent rulings have been that laptop searches are unconstitutional. The courts have said this is so because a ) laptops and phones contain highly personal information, much more so that suitcases normally do, and b) customs is to be searching for things like products being smuggled in, or drugs. Hard drives can't contain drugs and wouldn't contain smuggled products. Two recent examples include:
I sure hope neither Fiorina or Trump gets the nomination. And Biden rather than Sanders or Clinton. Dr. Carson seems like a far more capable and thoughtful person. Cruz knows what he's talking about and has actually produced full workable legislation like a federal budget, whereas the other candidates only produced sound bites. There are several options better than Fiorina and Trump.
This particular judge invited defendants to file to have the troll pay their fees. That puts this troll, who is 10% of the problem, out of business.
It wouldn't take too many cases in which Intellectual Ventures has to pay the people they sue before IV would run out of money and be gone. They are responsible for around 30% of the trolling.
Four companies file 90% of the patent cases. Of the remaining 10%, many are legitimate disputes, so well over 90% of the trolling is those four entities. Put those four out of business and you've pretty much solved the problem of patent trolls. (And by making it costly for those four, others will be discouraged from attempting it).
It seems likely that the developer account would be registered in the developer's name (perhaps Kyle Wiens), or perhaps in the company name, which is probably something like IFI LLC. It probably wasn't registered using the domain name of the web site.
So even assuming someone at Apple looks at all new developer accounts, how are they to know that Kyle Wiens is associated with ifixit.com? Should Apple launch an investigation of everyone who wants a developer account?
Yes, virtualization isn't guaranteed to always be 100% perfect. There was one bug that was fixed years before it became public. Compare the number of bugs in Windows over the last 10 pr 20 years. I'd say running within the hypervisor is several orders of magnitude safer.
As I mentioned, that's one reason we use the simplest practical virtualization- to avoid bugs in hypervisor features or related utilities. It's pretty darn effective, though not 100% perfect.
Air gaps and disposable images can of course be pretty safe too. If you're paranoid, you can keep the test hardware only for malware testing - never move a box from testing to production. That adds a layer of protection against damage from firmware exploits.
I simplified a bit. The malicious code can be inside of the.app package- it does not need to be downloaded separately. It LOOKS like the signature is on the package, but it's not. It's on some parts of the package. Here's a quote from the Apple developer documentation for you:
Changes That Don't Invalidate a Code Signature There are a few changes you can make to a signed bundle that won't invalidate its signature.
If you have optional or replaceable content you wish to change without invalidating the code signature, nested code can be replaced... without disturbing the outer signature.
Throughout the Apple documentation, you will find references to the "main exectuable ". This is the file that's primarily protected. In my example above, that's setup.exe.
The exploit is for users with #2, registered developers. A bad guy who is not a registered developer can publish code which appears to be signed by a trusted developer.
The root of the problem is that it checks a signature on the -executable-, not the -package-. A typical package has a setup executable, which we'll call setup.exe. That's signed by Apple, Adobe, or whoever the developer is.
Setup.exe loads whattodoo.dll and runs some functions in it, then runs register_filetypes.exe, does some other stuff, then runs photoshop.exe. Neither whattodo.dll, register_filetypes.exe, photoshop.exe, nor the package the came in need to be signed. MOST of the executable code isn't signed.
A bad guy can download the Photoshop package and replace whattodo.dll and register_filetypes.exe with code of their choosing. Just rename backdoor.dll and botnet.exe. Mac treats it as signed because setup.exe is signed.
So the victim would download a malicious package and because setup.exe is signed, OSX would run it by default- thereby running backdoor.dll (renamed as whattodo.dll) and botnet.exe (renamed as register_filetypes.exe).
This is normally avoided on Linux by signing / hashing the entire package, not just one file in the package.
We run malware on purpose. In a simple virtual machine. Simple matters - when you do tricky stuff like sharing storage between the VM and the host, it may open vulnerabilities.
The idea of having a cheap consumer device that can so easily etch any bitmap with such fine detail intrigues me. I wonder what else you could etch. If there was a coating for circuit boards that these lasers could etch that would be really cool. Pop a board in your CD burner amd minutes later have a perfectly etched board.
That's certainly true, few people were expecting that type of attack, or had any reason to suspect such an attack might occur, AS FAR AS WE KNOW. (We don't know what all information the spooks had.) They were thinking of terrorist acts as being old-fashioned hijacking.
ALSO, we know that the CIA had names of people suspected to have links with Al Quaeda (the hijackers), the NSA had indications that a Al Quaeda was planning something big in the near future.* The FBI had some other relevant info.
So it's POSSIBLE that someone (or some software) looking at all the information could come up with the following thought: Al Quaeda is planning something big, and these two guys seem to be Al Quaeda operatives, so maybe we should check in on them and see what they're doing this week."
They wouldn't need to suspect exactly what happened- suspected terrorists both buying plane tickets screams "hijacking" (the old fashioned kind). It would have been possible to do a "random search" on these two suspects and discover the box cutters.
Having said that, I'll repeat I don't think it's worth it. The NSA and CIA should be clearly and fully separated from domestic law enforcement. Of course that requires the balls to call terrorism "terrorism" and have it handled by the appropriate agency.
You listed two programs exclusively used by intelligence agencies.
You then listed the two 1940s era programs which directly (and openly) CAUSED Congress to pass the law saying that NSA cannot collect information on US persons. That's precisely the Act that was amended after 9/11 to reduce the restrictions on the NSA (FISA).
You also list Main Core, which little more than a vague rumor that someone is collecting a bunch of data for some reason - we don't have nearly enough facts to even start discussing that.
Are you under the impression that the PATRIOT ACT and FISA Act amendments did NOT occur, that that is not how Congress responded to 9/11?
And still that's your mistake. Again, government spends $10,000 to buy a car. The govt lights the car on fire. The money spent on the car is wasted, it's gone.
The fact that the dollar bills used to keep track of transaction are recycled doesn't change the fact that the money spent is gone, wasted. The money spent is the wasted resources. The cash is just a note keeping track of who is owed money. If you know anything about chemistry, maybe this will help you understand :
Consider a machines which creates reactions with these properties: Inputs: Compound A, compound B, energy Outputs: Compound A, Compound B
Since we get back what we started with, the energy is wasted, right?
Consider this machine: Inputs: Gold coins (worth $100), energy (work, worth $100) Outputs: Gold coins (worth $100)
That second machine is a govt program. The govt puts in 10 dollars (coins), so that people will do work worth $100. At the end, the coin still exists, but AN EQUAL AMOUNT OF WORK HAS BEEN USED UP. Any time the govt spends $100, it uses up $100 worth of valuable resources, while only the cash remains. The "money", in economic terms, is the $100 of resources that were used up. That's why the govt purchased them - to use them. The economic "money" - the value - is used up.
My post was missing the word "car". Bumping into light poles and trees in parking lots suggests that I might also be a moron. A moron who knows how to normalize a database, but a moron nonetheless.
Yeah in my post forgot to mention something. Based on the dents in my, caused by low-speed collisions with trees, poles, and other immobile objects, evidence suggests that I may be q moron.
It is often the case that your predecessor was a moron. I have no doubt that's as true for my successor as it was for me. My successor's predecessor was probably a moron too, from his perspective.
There was more separation between intelligence and law enforcement in the US prior to 9/11. The cops shouldn't be doing some of the sneaky stuff (or asking someone else to do it), so there were laws in place forbidding much data sharing.
Looking into how an attack like 9/11 could be prevented in the future, it was found that more cooperation between agencies might have prevented it. The intelligence agencies had parts of the puzzle and the FBI had other parts. Nobody had enough to see the whole picture. The idea, the proposed benefit, was that something like 9/11 could be potentially be prevented by the FBI, CIA, and NSA sharing information. It stands to reason that they might be able to be more effective without the legal prohibition on sharing information, BUT we're now seeing why they SHOULD be clearly separated. It might make their job harder, but it's worth it.
I hated it too. 35 years years later, people STILL bug me.
> If I am going to succeed or fail in school it should NOT be based on the morons the teacher groups me with, but on my own capabilities.
Maybe it "should" be on your own merit, but where I work, there are other people. When I'm working in a group with what you call "morons", I have to deal with that and figure out how to still get something done. For a while, I worked in a company that was only me, before I hired some people. When I was the only person in the company, I was the guy answering the phone to deal with customers (morons), suppliers (morons), and third parties such as my clients' web hosting companies (all morons).
It seems to me that if school is supposed to prepare you for the "real world", for adult responsibilities, a key subject to learn is "working with morons".
Some of my co-workers read Slashdot. I'm glad none of them are morons. Especially not the boss. The boss if a friggin genius, if he's reading this post.
> QA is who they cut first, when things get tight. This is massively stupid - because it's who you need to get OUT of the jam.
In general, debt is normally dumb. Except when it's for an offsetting investment. OCCASIONALLY, in business debt is smart. For example, being first to market for a rapidly growing sector may well justify debt. Survival mode may justify debt. Technical debt, poor code and systems, IS debt. Get the product out now, pay the cost of poor code later. That's NORMALLY a bad idea. Occasionally, it's the correct move.
An example from my very recent experience is replacing the annual licensing of a $xx million / year third party program with one built in-house. Two weeks before the deadline, it's better to get it done poorly and fix it later than to pay another $XX million to license the third-party app for another year. But we WILL have to fix it later. SOMETIMES quality actually isn't the most important thing. Which bugs the shit out of me.
I said you're confusing cash versus work, resources, value. You replied:
> > that ten years of work is used up, it's gone. > Every penny you paid
You're STILL thinking they are the same thing. I buy a car for $20,000. I light the car on fire. Did the value of the car go up in smoke? Yes, that value is gone. Even though the cash I paid to acquire that value still exists.
Lighting a car on fire shows that when money is spent on something stupid, value is actually lost. GP got confused and thought that as long as cash isn't burned, value isn't wasted. Burning the car is a vivid way of showing that spending money on something wasteful does in fact "use up" money aka resources.
So we've established that a mars mission does in fact use up resources which could have been used elsewhere. Now you can argue that the Mars mission is (or isn't) the BEST use of those resources.
The next Mars rover costs about $2.5 billion. If spending $2.5 billion on traffic safety would be expected to save 25,000 lives, you can now argue that what we learn about Mars is more important than 25,000 lives.
Maybe you can make a convincing argument that sending another probe to Mars is more important than traffic safety. What you can't do is claim that all the resources used in building the Mars probe weren't actually used, because those resources were paid for. They were paid WITH MONEY THAT COULD HAVE INSTEAD BEEN USED ON TRAFFIC SAFETY.
I guess I didn't make it clear enough. To clarify, let's use two synonyms for money - cash and resources (or if you prefer, dollars and value).
Cash (dollars) REPRESENT resources (value). Those are two different things. Resources (time, gold) are real . Dollars are just notes on paper which represent a claim on resources.
When we say "spend $100 million" what we really mean is "use up $100 million worth of resources". If you buy a car for $20,000 and light it on fire, the dollars still exist, while the car (the thing of value) is gone. You're essentially arguing that it's not wasteful to buy a car and then immediately light it on fire, because the cash you used to purchase the car still exists. Yes, the cash still exists, but it now represents a claim on a DIFFERENT thing of value. The value of the car ($20,000 worth of value) has been destroyed.
If engineers spend ten years developing some thing, that ten years of work is used up, it's gone. They can't use that same ten years on something else of value. Trading pieces of paper around doesn't change that fact.
Our relationships with the UK, Canada, and Australia have improved under the Obama doctrine? Because Bush and Blair hated each other?
In international relations, there are two major ways tight alliances are formed. First, economically- you like other countries to buy stuff"from you, because that gives you money. Second, you know they've got your back - that they can and will come to your aid militarily. Those are the big two.
Canada doesn't really have or need a military navy, their navy is similar to the US Coast Guard. Canada's navy has fewer sailors than ONE US carrier group. Why doesn't Canada have a military navy? They don't need one because the US has them covered.
Under Obama, are we buying more stuff from Canada, are"we hping them export more? Or are we reneging on previously negotiated projects and blocking their exports, spending 10 years performing repeated "environmental studies" of major pipelines from Canada, when study keeps showing that the pipeline is environmentally superior to the alternatives?
Does Canada feel MORE protected because the US military they depend on is STRONGER under Obama, or has he WEAKENED rhe military, and weakened the perception of US strength, thereby encouraging Soviet aggression? (Russia is right next to Canada, FYI. Canada wants Russia to be scared of us, not have Russia invading wherever they feel like invading while Obama frowns, not even making a strongly worded speech demanding that they stop invading neighboring areas.
You've understood an important point, but missed a critical companion point. You're correct that cash doesn't normally disappear, it circulates. But the money represents _value_, resources. _Value_ can disappear , resources CAN be squandered.
If scientists spend $1 million of their time doing anything else, such as working on vaccines, you end up with $1million worth of vaccine research done, and still they spend their salaries on stuff. If the engineers design safer cars, we get safer cars (millions of them), and the engineers still spend the cash. On the other hand, if the engineers spend their time designing a space probe, we get a space probe (one) and then literally send that value off into space.
When we say "spend $100 million on mars " what that means is "spend $100 million worth of engineer's time, rather than spending that time on making cars safer, making high speed internet more affordable, etc.)
You CAN argue that it's better to spend that money (engineering time, etc) on a mars probe than to spend it on anything else. And that's exactly the argument you have to make. Because we only have a certain number of engineers , and they only work a certain number of hours. Dollars are a way to put a consistent number on all of the different resources used up in a project, including people's time.
What you said is essentially the Obama doctrine. It kinda sounds nice. Has it worked? Are relations with Russia better? Is China better? Is the middle east more stable?
Slashdot Mirror
Which do you think is the lesser of two evils right now, the federal government or your state?
The recent rulings have been that laptop searches are unconstitutional. The courts have said this is so because a ) laptops and phones contain highly personal information, much more so that suitcases normally do, and b) customs is to be searching for things like products being smuggled in, or drugs. Hard drives can't contain drugs and wouldn't contain smuggled products. Two recent examples include:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/ru...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
The Obama administration has argued that they don't need a warrant, but the courts have ruled against them.
I sure hope neither Fiorina or Trump gets the nomination. And Biden rather than Sanders or Clinton. Dr. Carson seems like a far more capable and thoughtful person. Cruz knows what he's talking about and has actually produced full workable legislation like a federal budget, whereas the other candidates only produced sound bites. There are several options better than Fiorina and Trump.
This particular judge invited defendants to file to have the troll pay their fees. That puts this troll, who is 10% of the problem, out of business.
It wouldn't take too many cases in which Intellectual Ventures has to pay the people they sue before IV would run out of money and be gone. They are responsible for around 30% of the trolling.
Four companies file 90% of the patent cases. Of the remaining 10%, many are legitimate disputes, so well over 90% of the trolling is those four entities. Put those four out of business and you've pretty much solved the problem of patent trolls. (And by making it costly for those four, others will be discouraged from attempting it).
It seems likely that the developer account would be registered in the developer's name (perhaps Kyle Wiens), or perhaps in the company name, which is probably something like IFI LLC. It probably wasn't registered using the domain name of the web site.
So even assuming someone at Apple looks at all new developer accounts, how are they to know that Kyle Wiens is associated with ifixit.com? Should Apple launch an investigation of everyone who wants a developer account?
Yes, virtualization isn't guaranteed to always be 100% perfect. There was one bug that was fixed years before it became public. Compare the number of bugs in Windows over the last 10 pr 20 years. I'd say running within the hypervisor is several orders of magnitude safer.
As I mentioned, that's one reason we use the simplest practical virtualization- to avoid bugs in hypervisor features or related utilities. It's pretty darn effective, though not 100% perfect.
Air gaps and disposable images can of course be pretty safe too. If you're paranoid, you can keep the test hardware only for malware testing - never move a box from testing to production. That adds a layer of protection against damage from firmware exploits.
I simplified a bit. The malicious code can be inside of the .app package- it does not need to be downloaded separately. It LOOKS like the signature is on the package, but it's not. It's on some parts of the package. Here's a quote from the Apple developer documentation for you:
Changes That Don't Invalidate a Code Signature
There are a few changes you can make to a signed bundle that won't invalidate its signature.
If you have optional or replaceable content you wish to change without invalidating the code signature, nested code can be replaced ... without disturbing the outer signature.
Throughout the Apple documentation, you will find references to the "main exectuable ". This is the file that's primarily protected. In my example above, that's setup.exe.
On real operating systems, including OS X, the executable can have any name I want it to have. If I want to name it setup.exe, I will.
I -could- have named the exectuable icon.png, but that would make the explanation much harder for idiots like yourself to follow.
The exploit is for users with #2, registered developers. A bad guy who is not a registered developer can publish code which appears to be signed by a trusted developer.
The root of the problem is that it checks a signature on the -executable-, not the -package-. A typical package has a setup executable, which we'll call setup.exe. That's signed by Apple, Adobe, or whoever the developer is.
Setup.exe loads whattodoo.dll and runs some functions in it, then runs register_filetypes.exe, does some other stuff, then runs photoshop.exe. Neither whattodo.dll, register_filetypes.exe, photoshop.exe, nor the package the came in need to be signed. MOST of the executable code isn't signed.
A bad guy can download the Photoshop package and replace whattodo.dll and register_filetypes.exe with code of their choosing. Just rename backdoor.dll and botnet.exe. Mac treats it as signed because setup.exe is signed.
So the victim would download a malicious package and because setup.exe is signed, OSX would run it by default- thereby running backdoor.dll (renamed as whattodo.dll) and botnet.exe (renamed as register_filetypes.exe).
This is normally avoided on Linux by signing / hashing the entire package, not just one file in the package.
We run malware on purpose. In a simple virtual machine. Simple matters - when you do tricky stuff like sharing storage between the VM and the host, it may open vulnerabilities.
The idea of having a cheap consumer device that can so easily etch any bitmap with such fine detail intrigues me. I wonder what else you could etch. If there was a coating for circuit boards that these lasers could etch that would be really cool. Pop a board in your CD burner amd minutes later have a perfectly etched board.
That's certainly true, few people were expecting that type of attack, or had any reason to suspect such an attack might occur, AS FAR AS WE KNOW. (We don't know what all information the spooks had.) They were thinking of terrorist acts as being old-fashioned hijacking.
ALSO, we know that the CIA had names of people suspected to have links with Al Quaeda (the hijackers), the NSA had indications that a Al Quaeda was planning something big in the near future.* The FBI had some other relevant info.
So it's POSSIBLE that someone (or some software) looking at all the information could come up with the following thought:
Al Quaeda is planning something big, and these two guys seem to be Al Quaeda operatives, so maybe we should check in on them and see what they're doing this week."
They wouldn't need to suspect exactly what happened- suspected terrorists both buying plane tickets screams "hijacking" (the old fashioned kind). It would have been possible to do a "random search" on these two suspects and discover the box cutters.
Having said that, I'll repeat I don't think it's worth it. The NSA and CIA should be clearly and fully separated from domestic law enforcement. Of course that requires the balls to call terrorism "terrorism" and have it handled by the appropriate agency.
You listed two programs exclusively used by intelligence agencies.
You then listed the two 1940s era programs which directly (and openly) CAUSED Congress to pass the law saying that NSA cannot collect information on US persons. That's precisely the Act that was amended after 9/11 to reduce the restrictions on the NSA (FISA).
You also list Main Core, which little more than a vague rumor that someone is collecting a bunch of data for some reason - we don't have nearly enough facts to even start discussing that.
Are you under the impression that the PATRIOT ACT and FISA Act amendments did NOT occur, that that is not how Congress responded to 9/11?
> "money" is cash.
And still that's your mistake.
Again, government spends $10,000 to buy a car.
The govt lights the car on fire.
The money spent on the car is wasted, it's gone.
The fact that the dollar bills used to keep track of transaction are recycled doesn't change the fact that the money spent is gone, wasted. The money spent is the wasted resources. The cash is just a note keeping track of who is owed money. If you know anything about chemistry, maybe this will help you understand :
Consider a machines which creates reactions with these properties:
Inputs: Compound A, compound B, energy
Outputs: Compound A, Compound B
Since we get back what we started with, the energy is wasted, right?
Consider this machine:
Inputs: Gold coins (worth $100), energy (work, worth $100)
Outputs: Gold coins (worth $100)
That second machine is a govt program. The govt puts in 10 dollars (coins), so that people will do work worth $100. At the end, the coin still exists, but AN EQUAL AMOUNT OF WORK HAS BEEN USED UP. Any time the govt spends $100, it uses up $100 worth of valuable resources, while only the cash remains. The "money", in economic terms, is the $100 of resources that were used up. That's why the govt purchased them - to use them. The economic "money" - the value - is used up.
My post was missing the word "car". Bumping into light poles and trees in parking lots suggests that I might also be a moron. A moron who knows how to normalize a database, but a moron nonetheless.
Yeah in my post forgot to mention something.
Based on the dents in my, caused by low-speed collisions with trees, poles, and other immobile objects, evidence suggests that I may be q moron.
It is often the case that your predecessor was a moron. I have no doubt that's as true for my successor as it was for me. My successor's predecessor was probably a moron too, from his perspective.
There was more separation between intelligence and law enforcement in the US prior to 9/11. The cops shouldn't be doing some of the sneaky stuff (or asking someone else to do it), so there were laws in place forbidding much data sharing.
Looking into how an attack like 9/11 could be prevented in the future, it was found that more cooperation between agencies might have prevented it. The intelligence agencies had parts of the puzzle and the FBI had other parts. Nobody had enough to see the whole picture. The idea, the proposed benefit, was that something like 9/11 could be potentially be prevented by the FBI, CIA, and NSA sharing information. It stands to reason that they might be able to be more effective without the legal prohibition on sharing information, BUT we're now seeing why they SHOULD be clearly separated. It might make their job harder, but it's worth it.
I hated it too. 35 years years later, people STILL bug me.
> If I am going to succeed or fail in school it should NOT be based on the morons the teacher groups me with, but on my own capabilities.
Maybe it "should" be on your own merit, but where I work, there are other people. When I'm working in a group with what you call "morons", I have to deal with that and figure out how to still get something done. For a while, I worked in a company that was only me, before I hired some people. When I was the only person in the company, I was the guy answering the phone to deal with customers (morons), suppliers (morons), and third parties such as my clients' web hosting companies (all morons).
It seems to me that if school is supposed to prepare you for the "real world", for adult responsibilities, a key subject to learn is "working with morons".
Some of my co-workers read Slashdot. I'm glad none of them are morons. Especially not the boss. The boss if a friggin genius, if he's reading this post.
> QA is who they cut first, when things get tight. This is massively stupid - because it's who you need to get OUT of the jam.
In general, debt is normally dumb. Except when it's for an offsetting investment. OCCASIONALLY, in business debt is smart. For example, being first to market for a rapidly growing sector may well justify debt. Survival mode may justify debt. Technical debt, poor code and systems, IS debt. Get the product out now, pay the cost of poor code later. That's NORMALLY a bad idea. Occasionally, it's the correct move.
An example from my very recent experience is replacing the annual licensing of a $xx million / year third party program with one built in-house. Two weeks before the deadline, it's better to get it done poorly and fix it later than to pay another $XX million to license the third-party app for another year. But we WILL have to fix it later. SOMETIMES quality actually isn't the most important thing. Which bugs the shit out of me.
I said you're confusing cash versus work, resources, value. You replied:
> > that ten years of work is used up, it's gone.
> Every penny you paid
You're STILL thinking they are the same thing.
I buy a car for $20,000. I light the car on fire. Did the value of the car go up in smoke? Yes, that value is gone. Even though the cash I paid to acquire that value still exists.
Lighting a car on fire shows that when money is spent on something stupid, value is actually lost. GP got confused and thought that as long as cash isn't burned, value isn't wasted. Burning the car is a vivid way of showing that spending money on something wasteful does in fact "use up" money aka resources.
So we've established that a mars mission does in fact use up resources which could have been used elsewhere. Now you can argue that the Mars mission is (or isn't) the BEST use of those resources.
The next Mars rover costs about $2.5 billion. If spending $2.5 billion on traffic safety would be expected to save 25,000 lives, you can now argue that what we learn about Mars is more important than 25,000 lives.
Maybe you can make a convincing argument that sending another probe to Mars is more important than traffic safety. What you can't do is claim that all the resources used in building the Mars probe weren't actually used, because those resources were paid for. They were paid WITH MONEY THAT COULD HAVE INSTEAD BEEN USED ON TRAFFIC SAFETY.
I guess I didn't make it clear enough. To clarify, let's use two synonyms for money - cash and resources (or if you prefer, dollars and value).
Cash (dollars) REPRESENT resources (value). Those are two different things. Resources (time, gold) are real . Dollars are just notes on paper which represent a claim on resources.
When we say "spend $100 million" what we really mean is "use up $100 million worth of resources". If you buy a car for $20,000 and light it on fire, the dollars still exist, while the car (the thing of value) is gone. You're essentially arguing that it's not wasteful to buy a car and then immediately light it on fire, because the cash you used to purchase the car still exists. Yes, the cash still exists, but it now represents a claim on a DIFFERENT thing of value. The value of the car ($20,000 worth of value) has been destroyed.
If engineers spend ten years developing some thing, that ten years of work is used up, it's gone. They can't use that same ten years on something else of value. Trading pieces of paper around doesn't change that fact.
Our relationships with the UK, Canada, and Australia have improved under the Obama doctrine? Because Bush and Blair hated each other?
In international relations, there are two major ways tight alliances are formed. First, economically- you like other countries to buy stuff"from you, because that gives you money. Second, you know they've got your back - that they can and will come to your aid militarily. Those are the big two.
Canada doesn't really have or need a military navy, their navy is similar to the US Coast Guard. Canada's navy has fewer sailors than ONE US carrier group. Why doesn't Canada have a military navy? They don't need one because the US has them covered.
Under Obama, are we buying more stuff from Canada, are"we hping them export more? Or are we reneging on previously negotiated projects and blocking their exports, spending 10 years performing repeated "environmental studies" of major pipelines from Canada, when study keeps showing that the pipeline is environmentally superior to the alternatives?
Does Canada feel MORE protected because the US military they depend on is STRONGER under Obama, or has he WEAKENED rhe military, and weakened the perception of US strength, thereby encouraging Soviet aggression? (Russia is right next to Canada, FYI. Canada wants Russia to be scared of us, not have Russia invading wherever they feel like invading while Obama frowns, not even making a strongly worded speech demanding that they stop invading neighboring areas.
You've understood an important point, but missed a critical companion point. You're correct that cash doesn't normally disappear, it circulates. But the money represents _value_, resources. _Value_ can disappear , resources CAN be squandered.
If scientists spend $1 million of their time doing anything else, such as working on vaccines, you end up with $1million worth of vaccine research done, and still they spend their salaries on stuff. If the engineers design safer cars, we get safer cars (millions of them), and the engineers still spend the cash. On the other hand, if the engineers spend their time designing a space probe, we get a space probe (one) and then literally send that value off into space.
When we say "spend $100 million on mars " what that means is "spend $100 million worth of engineer's time, rather than spending that time on making cars safer, making high speed internet more affordable, etc.)
You CAN argue that it's better to spend that money (engineering time, etc) on a mars probe than to spend it on anything else. And that's exactly the argument you have to make. Because we only have a certain number of engineers , and they only work a certain number of hours. Dollars are a way to put a consistent number on all of the different resources used up in a project, including people's time.
What you said is essentially the Obama doctrine. It kinda sounds nice. Has it worked? Are relations with Russia better? Is China better? Is the middle east more stable?