Even with speaking out and performing civil disobediance, we don't seem to be able to gain any traction, let alone actual forward motion against our government.
(Speaking in the generic 'you' here.)
That's because at the end of the day, after your little play acting, you go home and spend hours writing and commenting in each others blogs over how wonderful your were today rather than creating a coherent political strategy. Then you go out and do the same thing the next day, and the next, and the next... And when nothing changes, rather than asking what you are doing wrong - you blame others for your own failings. And then go right back out to your play acting.
Throwing tantrums may have modified your parents behavior... But the government isn't your parents. Play acting may impress your friends, but the government isn't your friends.
The government is "we the people". And changing the government means getting organized and doing the hard bits like creating a coherent platform, creating a coherent political strategy, running candidates, monitoring candidates whom you've gotten elected, etc... etc... It's hard fucking work. Much harder than play acting and pretending you are "making a difference".
Maybe instead of taking the time to drag the US in the mud with your name calling, you could use all that energy for some good ol' civil disobediance. Put a burning tire around one of those cameras, sabotage something, anything.
Maybe you can take that energy you use being destructive and do something constructive (as outlined above) instead. But the constructive stuff is hard work and doesn't provide an instant dose of 'satisfaction' - so few people even try. It's easier to act like a vandal and blame society rather than taking responsibility for yourself.
If anything, both of our systems of government are broken irreparably, and need to be tore down with something new put in its place. Of course, that will be awfully hard to do peacefully, which is my greatest fear.
Of course it's hard to do peacefully, pretty much anything worth doing is hard. But it is doable. (And it's telling that you are afraid of the hard things...)
Nothing is 'up' with the UK 'these days', this kind of thing has been par for the course there for centuries. Oh, there's been a little liberalization here-and-there, but nothing really has changed.
There were problems with more than just storage - after WWII was over, nearly all the nuclear physicists and engineers who had built these bombs (BY HAND) left to return to universities. This left the US nuclear stockpile at a surprising level: ZERO. We literally had no reserve and no capacity to build any more
Not completely true. Our reserves were small, and so was our capacity to build more - but it was never zero. Had they been zero... How did we do Crossroads in 1946 and Sandstone in 1948?
You're right - but I think it's a myth that nukes and their delivery systems can be set, waiting without maintenance for years until somone just presses the button.
And you base this belief on what exactly?
In practice (I'm no expert, but this is the internet!) when you take the serviceability of weapons, missiles, communications, bunkers and all the other pieces into account, I'd be surprised if more that 1/4 of any major nuclear force could be launched on any particular day
That's why there is redundancy in the communications, bunkers, and "all the other pieces". I am something of an expert, and in practice 99%+ of the available forces can be launched in a given minute. (Yeah, I palmed a bit of a card there by restricting it to "available forces", but on any given day around 80% of the total force can be classified as available.)
unless there was a lot of build up time to get all the parts reassembled and tested. Just look at how long it takes to get a satellite launch vehicle or the scuttle ready to go.
The parts are kept assembled and tested. Comparing them to the Shuttle or a satellite launch vehicle is to compare apples and oranges - nuclear systems are considerably simpler and designed to react on short notice. The Shuttle and satellite launch vehicles... aren't.
That does lead to the rather worrying question of just how many nukes are in transit between their SILOs and the (re)manufacturing facilities on any given day.
I understand that "information wants to be free" and that "censorship is bad", but I think we need to recognize that there is a limit to the healthy release of this sort of information.
How can we have any meaningful discussion on arms control if we don't know how difficult or easy it is to build nuclear weapons?
This diagrams tells you nothing about how difficult or easy it is. Any but the most casual study of the issues involved would tell you that the difficulty ranges from medium difficult to insanely difficult depending on the starting conditions. Or to put it simply, the information needed for the debate is already widely available, and doesn't need detailed weapons diagrams.
Iran and North Korea already know this stuff. It's to our benefit to stop pretending that engineering knowledge can be kept away from the "bad guys", and get everything out in the open.
The broad design of Trinity has been known for some time now, but what has been much less understood are the designs of the explosive lenses, the detonators for the lenses and perhaps most secretive - the initiator.
Maybe for amateurs. Folks who actually study nuclear weapons have known pretty much everything on the diagram and everything you describe as "less understood" for years now.
For the same reason, much of the amateur commentary on the Wikileaks page makes me gag.
"Diagram Roughly to scale. No easy feat in days prior to computerized drafting tools." WTF? Making a diagram to scale, even roughly, is trivial. I was doing it in the sixth grade (1974!) with little plastic ruler and a cheap metal compass. "High Explosives & Miznay/Schardin effect (e.g. shaped charge) Miznay/Schardin effect will work in this design, in all likelihood, though the additional layer of HE after the first layer of lenses is a surprise." Well, no - the second layer isn't a surprise. Richard Rhodes described it in the The Making of the Atomic Bomb" in 1986! "Neutron Initiator Theoretically workable." Well, duh. This has also been widely described in the literature - I'd have been surprised to find if it weren't as diagrammed.
Po is not the only option here. Ra will also work, so will a few others. In fact if anything makes me doubt this document is exactly this. The Hirosima and Nagasaki bombs were manufactured before the radioactive isotope industry came online. In those years everything was geared towards plutonium and U235. Very few resources were devoted to other stuff. So I would have expected to see Ra there, not Po because Ra was retrieved as a byproduct of the mining and did not require special manufacturing.
Sometimes I find the arrogance of Slashdot incredible. It doesn't matter what history records - the document can't be correct because you "wouldn't expect" the configuration it shows. You can't even be bothered to google or do any other research.
At the cost of contaminating the exterior of the station, plus increasing the the cost of the clothes a couple of orders of magnitude to withstand the environment, plus adding a potential point of failure, etc... etc...
This does also beg the question of how the russians, who would frequently stay on Mir for months on end managed to do things.
Pretty much the same way we did on Skylab and we (and they) are doing on ISS. (Modulo modern electronics for entertainment.)
I can't see a tiny washing machine being all that ridiculous of a thing to have on board.
It's not ridiculous to have - it's ridiculous to use, there's no recycling system, so any water used for washing clothes becomes waste. (Not to mention humidity problems in drying them.) The clothes for 90 days (wearing them a couple of days and discarding them) weigh less and take up less space than clothes + water to wash them wish for 90 days.
Seriously, geeks will be geeks and find something to homebrew... But what's next? An open source buggy whip? A Franklin stove built using a Beowulf cluster of Commodore 64's to optimize the burning and thermodynamic characteristics?
Seriously? Somebody modified a program so that a system designed to do one thing could do something else and sent the modifications millions of miles across space on a radio link. There's probably not much chance of a three tier development/test/production environment here.
Indeed. And as another poster has pointed out, it's hellishly complicated with significant limitations (I.E. power, bandwidth). Not to mention (as no one has so far) it's a one-off one-of-a-kind system. OK, there are emulators and simulators, and engineering development boxen sitting around... But still, not much of an installed base to work from.
Of course this isn't necessarily the best way to characterise people anyway, but it gives a good feel that the military don't really want just any old person. A lot of people I know are ENTP (like me) or INFP and you just know they wouldn't fit in a military command structure.
Actually... you'd probably be very surprised. I knew a number of people who I suspect were/are INFP - as there is nothing inimical there towards being in a command structure. Ditto for ENTP.
There have been studies done on this (google it) and it makes sense that the armed forces isn't the best place for people who place emphasis on feelings, intuition (in the MBTI sense this refers to those who place an emphasis on abstract and theoretical data and future possibilities and insight) and Perceiving (MBTI defines this as being someone who sees the world in shades of grey).
Just because it isn't the best place for them, doesn't mean they won't do well there. The ESTJ may be the typical 'soldier type'... But there is a hell of a lot more to the military than the grunt-on-ground. There really isn't a typical 'soldier type' outside of academia and stereotypes. (And maybe the Infantry, both USA and USMC.)
An ENTP with a little dollop of discipline would make a hell of an officer for example. I'll bet you'll find many ISTP in the various elite/special forces... A good portion of the technical specialist types I served with in the submarine service probably were INTJ. It takes a certain mindset to be a good technical specialist like a fire controlman, sonar operator, etc... etc...
Which is why Silent Running used Saturn as a backdrop - Douglas Trumbull (Who did the SFX for both) recycled test footage from 2001 as stock footage for Silent Running.
You could have saved yourself a lot of typing: "my mind is made up regardless of facts, so don't confuse me with facts, or confront me with information that doesn't agree with my biases and blinders as I'll just make stuff that does so agree anyhow" is so much shorter than what you wrote.
A security clearance of Secret is much easier to obtain than many expect. Top Secret can also be obtained somewhat easily, even given a set of questionable actions in the past, based on good interviews with people from your sphere of influence. Special allowance cases are made all the time for either. Many people assume (wrongly) that a past arrest or drug use immediately rule out either. The important parts here are complete honesty, showing a changed "nature" if needed and that your versions of past events match up with other witnesses.
Yup. I've lived just that - as by the strict interpretation of The Book I shouldn't have got a clearance at all. But I ended up with a TS clearance.
Actually, it's even more interesting that that - I was originally rejected for a Secret clearance to work with nuclear reactors. By some alchemy I've never understood, when I showed an interest in (and an aptitude for) a nuclear weapons related job... I ended up with the aforementioned TS clearance. But, in the end, the key was that I owned up to the (single) incident that should have denied me a clearance (and temporarily did) and my subsequent record was clean.
Such "prickly independence" is the opposite of the stereotype of the military that's lodged in my mind. Now, I know that stereotype is somewhat inaccurate, but nonetheless the rebel/renegade streak that runs through many -- though by no means all -- of the creative, intelligent people who often know technology well.
Well, from my decade of service in the USN Submarine Service I'd say that a significant (if not vast) majority of my fellow bubbleheads exhibited the traits of "prickly independence" and "rebel/renegade". From encounters and conversations with other parts of the Navy and other branches of the service over the years I'd say that (outside of the more elite branches, like the Submarine Service) the traits are present in what amounts to only a very slight minority.
Many in the military also tend to be more creative than you might think. Certainly we're trained as most people think, to treat The Book as something to be followed slavishly. What most people don't realize is that we are also schooled in the principles behind The Book so that when the shit hits the fan and The Book has to be tossed over our shoulder - we are ringing the changes rather than merely improvising. (And even when we do have to improvise, we've still got that grounding to work from.)
Which is why the military values those traits - someone who doesn't have them flounders when you have to heave The Book. And the military knows full well that in the real world things will go all pear shaped - its inevitable. (And, inevitably, leads to tension between 'the kind of serviceman you want in peacetime' and 'the serviceman you need in harm's way'.)
The difference between the typical creative person and the military mind, I think, lies in the ability of the military mind to 'switch modes' as it were. The discipline to stay in robot mode when needed, matched with the ability to operate creatively when needed. You can't have artistic tantrums when the bullets are flying, or even in peacetime in garrison.
Geeks tend to favor blunt straight answers. Part of the reason we usually hate management.
Geeks may tend to favor blunt straight answers - but the world is not always simple enough to accommodate that desire. Geeks also tend to favor concrete black-or-white answers, but again the world is rarely so accommodating. The real problem I've found over the years is that geeks have a curious blind spot - despite (in general) being open to new knowledge and eager to learn new things, geeks go to great lengths to resist learning new 'languages'. This is a large part of their 'ugly American' image - they refuse to understand other 'languages' when spoken to, and refuse to speak in other 'languages' when conversing with the natives there.
This is kind of understandable - as geeks also revel in being different from the 'herd'. (Despite being conformist within their own kind.) But as many geeks seem to be (to me) stuck in a kind of adolescence, they haven't grown up enough to realize that their actions have consequences.
Would have been nice to see some simple (to understand, not necessarily simple in thought) answers to the questions.
Many of the questions asked can't be answered simply. However, as I said, the answers are quite clear if you speak the language.
Okay. Good luck with splicing together itty bitty fragments of flash memory chips.
And you think the FAA doesn't know the potential problems and hasn't been working on them for years? These devices have been under development for around thirty years and have been commercially available (and certified by the FAA) for over a decade now.
The FAA didn't just make this decision out of the blue you know.
This is the only Slashdot account I could remember at short notice (all the other ones are lame Ian M Banks ship names). My name is Tony Sidaway and I've been a Wikipedia editor about three years.
*yawn* BFD. Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, claiming to be one adds no weight to your claims but does lead to the suspicion that you are trying to (falsely) argue from authority.
The reason for temporary protection (locking the article to stop edits by some users) is given by Wales as "an attempt to keep trolling to a minimum during an experimental rewrite" which is pretty sensible.
It's only sensible if the article was a regular target for trolls before - otherwise it's only one article out of a million, and such protection makes no sense.
So it's really a non-story. We protect articles against people who want to write "WEE WEE WEE JACK IS GAY!" all the time and this is precisely the mode of protection we use for, say, "George W. Bush"
That's my point - unless the article is contentious or otherwise an ongoing target for trolls, then that kind of protection is unusual. Reviewing the pages history does not show it to have been such a target.
And that's why the IRS keeps a weather eye on large charities/non[not for] profits. There's no need for 'celebrity' board members.
History has shown that the IRS and other government agencies, from the SEC to the FDA, are not successful in preventing fraud. Just read the newspaper.
Well, duh. There isn't any way they can prevent fraud short of doing the books themselves or checking them on what amounts to a daily basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Facts is facts folks - even if Slashdot mods 'em "troll" and tries to pretend otherwise.
(Speaking in the generic 'you' here.)
That's because at the end of the day, after your little play acting, you go home and spend hours writing and commenting in each others blogs over how wonderful your were today rather than creating a coherent political strategy. Then you go out and do the same thing the next day, and the next, and the next... And when nothing changes, rather than asking what you are doing wrong - you blame others for your own failings. And then go right back out to your play acting.
Throwing tantrums may have modified your parents behavior... But the government isn't your parents. Play acting may impress your friends, but the government isn't your friends.
The government is "we the people". And changing the government means getting organized and doing the hard bits like creating a coherent platform, creating a coherent political strategy, running candidates, monitoring candidates whom you've gotten elected, etc... etc... It's hard fucking work. Much harder than play acting and pretending you are "making a difference".
Maybe you can take that energy you use being destructive and do something constructive (as outlined above) instead. But the constructive stuff is hard work and doesn't provide an instant dose of 'satisfaction' - so few people even try. It's easier to act like a vandal and blame society rather than taking responsibility for yourself.
Of course it's hard to do peacefully, pretty much anything worth doing is hard. But it is doable. (And it's telling that you are afraid of the hard things...)
Nothing is 'up' with the UK 'these days', this kind of thing has been par for the course there for centuries. Oh, there's been a little liberalization here-and-there, but nothing really has changed.
What's missing is the material from which the moderator and tamper is made - but that's been known from other sources (Not the USSR) for years now.
Not completely true. Our reserves were small, and so was our capacity to build more - but it was never zero. Had they been zero... How did we do Crossroads in 1946 and Sandstone in 1948?
And you base this belief on what exactly?
That's why there is redundancy in the communications, bunkers, and "all the other pieces". I am something of an expert, and in practice 99%+ of the available forces can be launched in a given minute. (Yeah, I palmed a bit of a card there by restricting it to "available forces", but on any given day around 80% of the total force can be classified as available.)
The parts are kept assembled and tested. Comparing them to the Shuttle or a satellite launch vehicle is to compare apples and oranges - nuclear systems are considerably simpler and designed to react on short notice. The Shuttle and satellite launch vehicles... aren't.
Not many.
This diagrams tells you nothing about how difficult or easy it is. Any but the most casual study of the issues involved would tell you that the difficulty ranges from medium difficult to insanely difficult depending on the starting conditions. Or to put it simply, the information needed for the debate is already widely available, and doesn't need detailed weapons diagrams.
Nice try - but one doesn't follow from the other.
Maybe for amateurs. Folks who actually study nuclear weapons have known pretty much everything on the diagram and everything you describe as "less understood" for years now.
For the same reason, much of the amateur commentary on the Wikileaks page makes me gag.
"Diagram Roughly to scale. No easy feat in days prior to computerized drafting tools." WTF? Making a diagram to scale, even roughly, is trivial. I was doing it in the sixth grade (1974!) with little plastic ruler and a cheap metal compass. "High Explosives & Miznay/Schardin effect (e.g. shaped charge) Miznay/Schardin effect will work in this design, in all likelihood, though the additional layer of HE after the first layer of lenses is a surprise." Well, no - the second layer isn't a surprise. Richard Rhodes described it in the The Making of the Atomic Bomb" in 1986! "Neutron Initiator Theoretically workable." Well, duh. This has also been widely described in the literature - I'd have been surprised to find if it weren't as diagrammed.
Etc... etc..
Sometimes I find the arrogance of Slashdot incredible. It doesn't matter what history records - the document can't be correct because you "wouldn't expect" the configuration it shows. You can't even be bothered to google or do any other research.
At the cost of contaminating the exterior of the station, plus increasing the the cost of the clothes a couple of orders of magnitude to withstand the environment, plus adding a potential point of failure, etc... etc...
Pretty much the same way we did on Skylab and we (and they) are doing on ISS. (Modulo modern electronics for entertainment.)
It's not ridiculous to have - it's ridiculous to use, there's no recycling system, so any water used for washing clothes becomes waste. (Not to mention humidity problems in drying them.) The clothes for 90 days (wearing them a couple of days and discarding them) weigh less and take up less space than clothes + water to wash them wish for 90 days.
Maybe you've noticed that over the air TV broadcasts are essentially coming to an end in a few years?
Or maybe you're too stupid to realize that performing extreme optimizations on one specific antenna design means jack point shit for other antennas?
Seriously, geeks will be geeks and find something to homebrew... But what's next? An open source buggy whip? A Franklin stove built using a Beowulf cluster of Commodore 64's to optimize the burning and thermodynamic characteristics?
Indeed. And as another poster has pointed out, it's hellishly complicated with significant limitations (I.E. power, bandwidth). Not to mention (as no one has so far) it's a one-off one-of-a-kind system. OK, there are emulators and simulators, and engineering development boxen sitting around... But still, not much of an installed base to work from.
Actually... you'd probably be very surprised. I knew a number of people who I suspect were/are INFP - as there is nothing inimical there towards being in a command structure. Ditto for ENTP.
Just because it isn't the best place for them, doesn't mean they won't do well there. The ESTJ may be the typical 'soldier type'... But there is a hell of a lot more to the military than the grunt-on-ground. There really isn't a typical 'soldier type' outside of academia and stereotypes. (And maybe the Infantry, both USA and USMC.)
An ENTP with a little dollop of discipline would make a hell of an officer for example. I'll bet you'll find many ISTP in the various elite/special forces... A good portion of the technical specialist types I served with in the submarine service probably were INTJ. It takes a certain mindset to be a good technical specialist like a fire controlman, sonar operator, etc... etc...
Which is why Silent Running used Saturn as a backdrop - Douglas Trumbull (Who did the SFX for both) recycled test footage from 2001 as stock footage for Silent Running.
You could have saved yourself a lot of typing: "my mind is made up regardless of facts, so don't confuse me with facts, or confront me with information that doesn't agree with my biases and blinders as I'll just make stuff that does so agree anyhow" is so much shorter than what you wrote.
Yup. I've lived just that - as by the strict interpretation of The Book I shouldn't have got a clearance at all. But I ended up with a TS clearance.
Actually, it's even more interesting that that - I was originally rejected for a Secret clearance to work with nuclear reactors. By some alchemy I've never understood, when I showed an interest in (and an aptitude for) a nuclear weapons related job... I ended up with the aforementioned TS clearance. But, in the end, the key was that I owned up to the (single) incident that should have denied me a clearance (and temporarily did) and my subsequent record was clean.
Which really means that cyberwarfare isn't all that different from any other kind.
Well, from my decade of service in the USN Submarine Service I'd say that a significant (if not vast) majority of my fellow bubbleheads exhibited the traits of "prickly independence" and "rebel/renegade". From encounters and conversations with other parts of the Navy and other branches of the service over the years I'd say that (outside of the more elite branches, like the Submarine Service) the traits are present in what amounts to only a very slight minority.
Many in the military also tend to be more creative than you might think. Certainly we're trained as most people think, to treat The Book as something to be followed slavishly. What most people don't realize is that we are also schooled in the principles behind The Book so that when the shit hits the fan and The Book has to be tossed over our shoulder - we are ringing the changes rather than merely improvising. (And even when we do have to improvise, we've still got that grounding to work from.)
Which is why the military values those traits - someone who doesn't have them flounders when you have to heave The Book. And the military knows full well that in the real world things will go all pear shaped - its inevitable. (And, inevitably, leads to tension between 'the kind of serviceman you want in peacetime' and 'the serviceman you need in harm's way'.)
The difference between the typical creative person and the military mind, I think, lies in the ability of the military mind to 'switch modes' as it were. The discipline to stay in robot mode when needed, matched with the ability to operate creatively when needed. You can't have artistic tantrums when the bullets are flying, or even in peacetime in garrison.
Geeks may tend to favor blunt straight answers - but the world is not always simple enough to accommodate that desire. Geeks also tend to favor concrete black-or-white answers, but again the world is rarely so accommodating. The real problem I've found over the years is that geeks have a curious blind spot - despite (in general) being open to new knowledge and eager to learn new things, geeks go to great lengths to resist learning new 'languages'. This is a large part of their 'ugly American' image - they refuse to understand other 'languages' when spoken to, and refuse to speak in other 'languages' when conversing with the natives there.
This is kind of understandable - as geeks also revel in being different from the 'herd'. (Despite being conformist within their own kind.) But as many geeks seem to be (to me) stuck in a kind of adolescence, they haven't grown up enough to realize that their actions have consequences.
Many of the questions asked can't be answered simply. However, as I said, the answers are quite clear if you speak the language.
Not content free at all - merely phrased in military speak and bureaucrat speak and quite informative. I really don't know what you expected.
And you think the FAA doesn't know the potential problems and hasn't been working on them for years? These devices have been under development for around thirty years and have been commercially available (and certified by the FAA) for over a decade now.
The FAA didn't just make this decision out of the blue you know.
*yawn* BFD. Anyone can be a Wikipedia editor, claiming to be one adds no weight to your claims but does lead to the suspicion that you are trying to (falsely) argue from authority.
It's only sensible if the article was a regular target for trolls before - otherwise it's only one article out of a million, and such protection makes no sense.
That's my point - unless the article is contentious or otherwise an ongoing target for trolls, then that kind of protection is unusual. Reviewing the pages history does not show it to have been such a target.
Well, duh. There isn't any way they can prevent fraud short of doing the books themselves or checking them on what amounts to a daily basis.