I've seen magic number estimation, and it works well. Extreme Programming uses them. Here's how it works:
Geeks are notoriously bad at taking things such as writing reports, talking on the phone, staff meetings, etc. into account.
So we don't ask them to. We ask them to estimate in "perfect programming days" or "optimum time". That is, "How many eight-hour days would it take, pretending for the time being that nobody bothered you and you could just write the code without being interrupted".
We then multiply that estimate by a magic number, or fudge factor, to get the real time needed.
If we don't have a fudge factor, usually we put in 3.
Once we've done this a couple of times, we start measuring the actual time taken. Divide the actual time taken by the optimum time, and you have the fudge factor.
Doing a fudge factor this way works, regardless of the sorts of time sinks a developer has, so long as those time sinks don't vary widely. Rather than trying to figure out all the things that might impact the project, you work on the assumption that the same things that slowed you down last month will slow you down this month, and let the fudge factor handle all of them. You keep recalculating the proper fudge factor, and if it suddenly shoots up, you know you have a problem.
My understanding of the paper is "Software estimation has been proven to be impossible by any formal systems."
Now, this paper makes a hell of a lot more sense to anyone who's read Hofstadler's Godel, Escher, Bach, but I suspect that many, even most, Slashdotters have read this one.
What makes the paper irrelevant is that we don't use formal systems to estimate software. We use our own head. We use hunches. We use intuition. These things are informal systems, capable of forms of reasoning that no formal system can achieve. That's what Godel proved.
The paper is saying that you can't take a spec, give it to an estimator program, and have the program write the estimate. You can give the spec to humans who write estimates for parts of it, feed that into an estimator program (like a spreadsheet), and you can get an estimate, but you simply cannot remove the human from the loop.
Software development isn't always like physics--often we are boldly going where people have gone before. However, certain factors in software houses cause underestimations:
Underestimation as a Marketing Tactic
AKA "Vaporware". Even if marketing knew when a product would be shippable, a particularly cinical marketing department may claim it to be earlier, thus freezing competitor's development.
Lack of Feedback (Moving Targets)
Software engineers are particularly bad at estimating because they have never done what they estimated. They are given a large project, give a large estimate, start working on it, and the project changes in the middle in a major way. This is a moving target; the estimate no longer applies. Major law of software development: You cannot change the spec or the development team on the project without impacting the real ship date. If you don't re-assess the estimated ship date, you are simply fooling yourself. Thus, they don't have any clue whether they hit the estimate or not. One way to defend against this is to break the project down into bite-sized pieces and estimate them; a small piece gives you a chance to do precisely what you estimated. Once you have that, you can have somebody track your estimates, and come back saying something like "On average, you go one third over your estimates. Add a third to your estimates from now on, and we'll be accurate".
Management Estimates
Often, engineers don't do the estimate. The management or marketing people tell you what must be done, and how long you have. Sometimes this is done explicitly; other times, management may have a number in mind and shame a software team into agreeing with it by laughing off any number that doesn't match theirs. Business people often negotiate the ship date with the geeks, like any negotiate with any other vendor. To a suit, vendor negotiations are how you determine the "margin", or how much the vendor is making (like when you buy a car, you and the dealer come to a number that determines the dealer's margin). This doesn't work in in-house software develoment because geeks hold back precious little "slack" or "margin" (they don't get paid profits, they get paid salaries); in a decent shop, geeks program at flank speed all the time and always give the project 100%.
See Ed Yourdon's Death March or any of Ward Cunningham's Extreme Programming books for more details, and ways to avoid the above traps. Yourdon suggests that the head geek has to take a hard stand in scheduling to prevent business interests from setting both the project spec and the ship date. He especially tells you never to negotiate schedule, and to help the suits understand why you never do. Whatever number you estimate doesn't affect the actual ship date, so playing with that number is simply fooling yourself.
Extreme Programming actually has a "planning game" (sort of a ritual dance) which places business interests and geeks on the same side of the table. Two big rules are "The geeks may not reject any part of the spec" and "The suits may not reject any part of the estimate". Once the suits set the spec, both teams break it down into pieces-parts, line them up in order of what gets done first and the geeks give their estimates. From there, the suits can choose the ship date (and can instantly see how much product will be ready by then), or can choose a certain amount of project completion (and can instantly see the ship date). The fun part about this method is that the suits can change their minds at any time by changing, adding, or removing pieces-parts, and can instantly see how that affects the ship date. The other fun part is that breaking up the project into pieces-parts allows developers to do a (small) project they estimated. This allows people to track estimated versus real time, and to give developers feedback that lets them make better estimates. Such a team will start off with bad estimates like everybody else, but they will be able to improve rapidly.
A problem with hypermedia is that the human brain is just too slow to be an effective filter at the quantities of news we receive every day. And for good reason, we resist others' controlling our view of the news.
We need thick clients to allow us to control our own view of the news.
Think of our news clients: the television, the radio, the Web browser. Each of these are particularly dumb entities.
What you need is a program that can search your favorite news sources, download the appropriate stories, apply your filters (e.g. "Drop all articles with a Jon Katz byline; give top priority to crypto articles; ignore all sports except major league soccer"), and give you a personalized, online newspaper.
This program could be on your own computer, or virtually hosted elsewhere (so that you can be mobile and get your news scroll anywhere), but it needs to be under your control.
This sort of thing, done right, would allow us to go to one place for all our news, because that has gone to every other place for us and applied our own filters. IMHO, there is economic incentive to do this as well. If a company wants to run virtual news filter hosting, they can track your preferences and advertise based on those prefs. Or, you can subscribe to it and pay a monthly fee like a newspaper if you hate ads.
IMHO, the lesson to be learned here is "The technology is not the business. The benefit is the business."
Poloroid has never been in the self-developing photograph business. Nobody wants self-developing photographs. People want instant photographs, and Poloroid has been in the instant photography business for ages now.
Digital photography also provides instant photographs, so Poloroid has new competition.
This is exactly what happened to the "rail" industry. "Rail" companies were and are railroads in the freight hauling business and the passenger transportation business. Because they thought of themselves as a rail business, they didn't invest heavily in the new technologies of tractor-trailer trucks, coach bussing, and passenger airliners. As such, they saw their market failing, when what was happening was that their market was working quite well--serviced by companies which invested in new technologies.
A word to the suits. The market you are in is not the technology you sell or use, but the benefit you give your customers. You're not in the rail business, you're in the freight business. You're not in the pinball business, you're in the arcade entertainment business. You're not in the floppy disk business, you're in the removable media business.
Companies that understood this survived the tractor-trailer, the video game, and the CD-RW. Those that didn't have gone the way of the dodo.
Only one -- ONE -- senator voted against. Maybe it's not as bad as you think?
When you have such agreement in any comittee, including Congress, it means one of two things.
The bill is obviously a Good Thing (TM)
The comittee has fallen into groupthink.
Now that the government has a clearly defined enemy, we as a nation and a government are vulnerable to groupthink. This is when everybody agrees on something because they are afraid not to. In the Cold War, the term "Communist" was used to invoke groupthink and gave us McCarthyism and the Bay of Pigs. In the 90s, it has been "for the children". Today, it's "terrorism".
I've tried to examine the bill (S.1510, and it looks like line noise. I have to go to the press reactions, simply because IANAL. How many senators actually read this stuff?
The space shuttle Challenger had a fair bit of hydrogen. It blew up just fine.
Regarding the Challenger explosion:
The initial failure was the O-rings on the solid fuel rocket boosters. Because of that, you had a direct rocket blast into the liquid fuel tanks. Not only did you have an intense source of heat, but an intense source of thrust.
The rocket blast succeeded in breaching the liquid hydrogen tank, causing a hydrogen leak and igniting said leak. This in itself would cause a jet of flame, but the hydrogen tank would not explode. The hydrogen was simply burning as it escaped and met with heat and the local atmosphere. You have high pressure hydrogen burning with low pressure oxygen, so you would have a slow burn.
But that wasn't all. The rocket blast also breached the liquid oxygen tank which was right next to it. Now you had heat, high pressure hydrogen, and high pressure pure oxygen in close proximity. That caused the fireball that destroyed the Challenger.
It took a rocket blast to breach the tanks; this would be more force and heat than, say, a jet engine flying apart. Even so, a hydrogen jet airplane would be physically incapable of exploding like the Challenger, as it would not have a local source of high-pressure oxygen.
The fundamental energetics of hydrogen combustion suck compared to fossil fuel combustion.
If that is so, why did the Challenger blow up just fine? You can't have it both ways.
Hydrogen and oxygen combine for the most exothermic chemical reaction modern science is aware of. In short, hydrogen gets you the most bang for the kilogram. The fact that a kilogram of hydrogen takes up so much space is another story, and can be resolved by storing it in liquid form.
Actually, there are no really good points there. This is just another attemt by the pro-hydrogen people to capitalize on catastrophe to push their inane agenda.
I somehow doubt that there is a large group of "pro-hydrogen people". If there is, I doubt that they have a large, coherent agenda.
Reasons hydrogen is stupid:
1. To get enough of it in a small space, you need high-pressure tanks. These are heavy, expensive, and hard to build. It is far from certain that we could produce mass-produce them and ensure a reasonable useful life, too.
Perhaps that's because we haven't tried, and perhaps that's because the problems involved are way too difficult. Note, however, that every liquid fueled rocket or stage thereof has two high-pressure cryotanks.
Cryotanks are mass-produced today; think of all the liquid nitrogen tanks outside of various factory facilities.
OTOH, mass-producing mobile cryotanks and rigging airports to be able to load same with liquid hydrogen, on a commercial basis, is a new problem.
2. Hydrogen makes a pretty spiffy fuel-air bomb, too. Remember the Hindenburg? (Or the Challenger, for a more apt example of what *liquid* hydrogen does when vented near a flame...)
Good point. The Challenger is the more accurate example, but remember how it happened. The solid fuel booster leaked, shooting flame directly at the liquid fuel tanks. That flame is what caused the liquid fuel tank to fail (read: melt through) and for the main explosion to occur. Anyone considering hydrogen fuel should consider that a large liquid hydrogen tank is a terrorist target. Somebody tell NASA.
3. The ONLY source of hydrogen suitable for the production of such large quantities is natural gas, one of the best and cleanest fuels known anyway. If we're going to deal with the problems of gaseous fuels, why not use LNG directly and save the HUGE additional costs of converting to and dealing with hydrogen?
I disagree. Any fuel source powering a generator, plus an open body of water, can be used to generate hydrogen. While I don't know the economics or thermodynamics associated with burning LNG to produce electricity to produce hydrogen, I can't answer to that point.
However, one advantage to hydrogen is that it can be produced by any fuel source, so local markets can use whatever is handy. Current planes require a certain petroleum blend, whether it is made nearby or overseas. LNG planes require access to LNG, which is again not universal. Hydrogen can be readily produced by any fuel source, and thus isn't tied to any given fuel source.
4. Hydrogen, being the smallest and most rapidly spreading elment in the universe, is notoriously hard to keep confined. Gas-tight selas for such a tiny molucule are NOT trivial, and the cost of screwing up is rather high.
You said earlier that you would need high-pressure tanks. If hydrogen is stored in liquid form, is likely as hard to keep confined as liquid nitrogen. And we have that down cold.
In short, it would be tough to come up with a stupider proposal. It's more likely that those proposing this were on nitrous oxide than hydrogen..
Actually, I think that there is merit here. It may be a poor proposal today, or it may not be. You have made some excellent points in the above. But it's not stupid. None of the problems outlined above require a scientific or engineering breakthrough to resolve; it's possible to build a hydrogen jet aircraft. And it may be economical today, or maybe economical twenty years from now.
Nice advantage to liquid hydrogen--it does not need to be transported as such.
Everyone remembers the science class where you stick two electrodes in a beaker of water and collect hydrogen and oxygen. Given that, you can make hydrogen fuel anywhere you have a (polluted or not) body of water and electric power. So the need for huge tankers or pipelines is limited.
Of course, for any such facilities that do exist, the ruptures will not be pretty. The Hindenburg was a hydrogen rupture. So was the Challenger. If a rupture didn't encounter a spark, the hydrogen would all escape to the stratosphere and be of minimal impact. With a spark, however, a small rupture could grow by melting the containment unit.
First off, let me disagree with you on hydrogen being a low energy fuel. It is the highest energy chemical (as opposed to atomic) fuel, per kilogram, that we have. It is low energy per liter if uncompressed, since it's a gas at standard pressure. Most liquid fueled rockets today use hydrogen, stored cryogenically in a liquid form (think of a giant Thermos bottle), specifically because it's the lightest, most powerful fuel there is. Aircraft would be much better than rockets with hydrogen, because rockets must carry eight kilograms of liquid oxygen for every kilogram of liquid hydrogen, where aircraft can get their oxygen for free out of the air they fly through. IIRC, the difficulty would be doing cryo-compression simple enough to use in a daily commercial environment. Remember, liquid hydrogen is like liquid nitrogen--dip your hand in it, and it can shatter like glass. A second problem would be building a jet engine that can withstand the tremendous temperatures involved in hydrogen combustion--current designs run within a few degrees of the melting point when burning only jet fuel.
Using hydrogen in aircraft would provide a big environmental benefit. First off, it would require less mass of fuel (and probably less volume). There would be added mass due to the cryogenics, but a cube-squared law makes this less relevant for bigger planes. Less fuel to lift is less fuel to burn.
Secondly, using an intermediate power source such as hydrogen allows you to use the local favorite fuel source. Currently, you can only fly an airplane if you have jet fuel, an expensive petroleum derivative. Since hydrogen can be extracted from water with two wires and an electric charge, any fuel source can be used, from natural gas to waste incinerators to Hoover Dam There are many fuel sources cheaper per KWH than petroleum. Note that this also has political benefits; hydrogen-powered aircraft are not directly tied to oil-producing nations.
Finally, hydrogen combustion produces steam as an exhaust. That's about as environmentally friendly as you can get.
Since hyrdogen is an intermediate energy source, we must factor in the efficiency loss and pollution caused by the plant producing the hydrogen (effectively, the local electric power plant).
Stationary power plants tend to be more efficient and cleaner than mobile power plants (such as jet engines and car engines). First off, bigger usually means more efficient when you're burning something. Second, these can be maintained more easily, and can have engineers and technicians available around the clock. Finally, the power plants can make the trade off of efficiency and cleanliness versus mobility. After all, where can you put a waste management system on a jet engine?
The combination of a stationary hydrogen plant plus a hydrogen jet engine will be cleaner than current jet engines (since a hydrogen-burning jet engine will have negligible environmental impact), but it will likely be less fuel efficient (since you're losing energy in the original power plant, then again burning hydrogen in the air). This may be offset by the lower fuel mass the plane must carry. Regardless of the amount of energy needed, hydrogen aircraft would likely be cheaper to run, since the intermediate energy source of hydrogen allows suppliers to use cheaper energy sources.
Human face recognition is horribly unreliable. We are much worse than machines. It may be easy for you to recognize your family members in a photograph, but trying to determine if a stranger matches a mug shot is no easy task.
First off, I believe that humans are much better than machines at matching faces to mug shots. Facial recognition is a deeply implanted survival trait.
Secondly, if you're right and I'm wrong, we're all doomed. In our society and legal system, an arrest warrant and a face that matches a mug shot is sufficient cause for arrest. If you're right, all those faces in the Post Office, and all the mug books at the police stations, are worse.
Furthermore, what do you do when you find a match? Do you turn the person away just because some governemnt agent labelled them a terrorist? This seems to fly in the face of due process.
That is a problem, but not one that can be solved by a facial recognition system, nor any security system under the sun. That will be solved only with legislators and lawyers.
As far as "due process" goes, the only addition I can give to that is that, since the airlines are privately owned, they at least have the right to hand you your money back and politely ask you to leave the gate.
As I said above, the cost of verifying a false trip of a biometric system is having the officer on duty look at the picture the computer matched you to, and then look at you. There is no need to even slow the person down, or even to notify them that they tripped the computer, unless the officer thinks you matched the mug shot.
If the officer thinks you match the mug shot, you will be subject to arrest. If he doesn't, he flags you through just as if you didn't trip the computer system.
I've suggested this elsewhere. You rig the facial recognition software to respond to a positive by showing an operator the photograph the system matched. From there, it is the responsibility of the operator to do his own facial recognition. The system consists of both the software and the operator. If the system flags a false positive, the operator looks down at a picture, up at the face, and that's that.
As a people, we do trust people to be excellent facial recognizers. Let the machine be smart enough to remember the faces of five gazillion bad guys, and the person be smart enough to figure out if you look like a given mug shot.
Such a system, with the software and the wetware, will be almost precisely as accurate as a person checking a mug shot, certainly better than the machine itself.
After all, if you let the machine do your security for you, you get Skynet.
Now, we had 101 trips, of which 1 was false, so the odds that you aren't a terrorist given that you were fingered are just under a percent. That's given the assumption that the system mis-identifies innocent people only one in a million times, and assuming that one person in ten thousand is a terrorist. Increase the false positive rate by a factor of ten (one in one hundred thousand innocents gets fingered), and decrease the terrorist population to a tenth of what we assumed (one terrorist in one hundred thousand) and you now have roughly fifty-fifty odds that a person fingered by the system is innocent.
And that, people, is why systems like this don't work.
By that logic, metal detectors are a lousy system. Anecdotally, at least 50% of the passengers trip off the metal detector. Note that it's not there to detect metal, but weapons. If 1 in 1000 people are carrying weapons, then the metal detectors are giving 500 false positives per 1000 people.
That, is of course, why the metal detector isn't a system. It is a part of the system; security officers and protocols are the remainder of the system. As such, tripping off the metal detector isn't a huge deal, but it does require further securing you (emptying pockets, etc.) until you no longer trip it.
Similarly, facial recognition software is a bad system when used alone. When used in conjunction with a security officer, it can be damned effective. I suggest in another post that the software's response to finding a match is showing the security officers the snapshot it matched to. Let the officer quickly check the real person against a mug shot, and most false positives won't even be noticed by the passenger falsely matched. Those who are incorrectly detained are detained because an officer thinks you look like a particular mug shot, regardless of what the machine says. As a society, we regard that as an acceptable risk, otherwise we wouldn't post faces in post offices.
It's not the technology, it's the way that you use it.
Note that we humans are excellent at facial recognition. We're bad at storehousing thousands of faces from photographs, but we're even quite good at comparing one's face to a photograph.
To me, a facial recognition system would be less invasive than a metal detector. How many people get stopped at the metal detector? 50%?
Install a facial recognition system at a security checkpoint, and assign an officer to it. He makes sure to get a good facial shot, then hits the button.
If the software finds a match, it does not ring the gong, set off the red light, anything of the sort. It puts up on a screen (visible only to the facial recognizer officer) that shows the picture it believes the person matches. Likely, it brings up a brief bio containing information helpful to apprehending said person--is he a crack shot, a mad bomber, a black belt?
Now, the facial recognition officer uses his or her own eyes to decide whether the person looks like the photograph. If he doesn't, the person gets waved through as if nothing happened--because it didn't. If the officer decides that the person looks like the bad guy in the photograph, he can detain the person.
Note this scenario. The software cannot order people to detain anybody. It can only suggest a possible match. If a person is detained, it is because a human security officer believes that the person looks like a known terrorist/criminal/bad guy. And this is no different from being stopped because the officer remembers your mug shot.
Effectively, the software is reduced to a gigantic version of the wall at the post office that has mug shots of known public enemies. It jogs the memory, as it were.
The problem with such profiling is not that anybody who looks like a terrorist is being singled out once for closer inspection. It's that he will be singled out every
time he travels. Whereas for random checks, you'd have to be fairly unlucky to get picked every single time.
That's not a problem with the technology. That's an unfortunate consequence of having that face.
If you just happen to look like Whitey Bulger (a Boston area Mob boss on the lam), you are going to get stopped a lot by cops. It's unfortunate, but it makes sense.
Facial recog software is only a stand-in for poor human memories that can't recall the faces of several thousand public enemies.
Spock's parents were married, and thus in an intimate relationship with each other. Certainly, there are forms of touch that one only feels comfortable about with their lover, no?
My guess is that skin contact is to a Vulcan what running fingers through hair is to a Human. As for me, I feel comfortable with exactly three people running fingers through my hair. My wife is the first. The second is my year-old daughter who doesn't know any better. The third is my barber.
Zefram didn't know, and I'm assuming the Vulcans also didn't know that the humans' minds would be so emotional and unsavory to Vulcans. Perhaps the Vulcans on the team assumed that by offering skin-to-skin contact, Zefram was a member of a touch-telepathic race and wanted to communicate.
One thing I find so...fascinating...is Vulcans' continal disappointment and surprise of Human (and only Human) emotionalism. As of Enterprise, the Vulcans have shown themselves to already be a well-traveled spacefaring race. By now they should have noticed that the other species they meet are all emotional. They certainly know how emotional they were, until their race's own savior (Surak) started preaching logic.
Think about this. They don't understand Human psychology because it is so illogical, but they deign to tell humans about what will and will not offend the Klingons. Do they understand the Klingons better (consider: they have put a team on Earth for 90 years, and show no sign of permanent relations with the Klingon Empire) than they understand us? Are Klingons more logical than humans?
All in all, it seems that Vulcans are friendlier towards other emotional races than they are towards humans. It seems that there is something particularly disturbing to Vulcans about Humans, and I can't see it as being our emotion. I have a suspicion that the Vulcan attitude towards Humans in Enterprise is completely illogical. Remember that Vulcans have emotions, but hold them in strict check.
I hope that this is something Berman, et. al. have planned, rather than being some sort of mental dropout. If they have this planned, I look forward to seeing what it is about Humans that makes us particularly infuriating.
My company is still fun. We had a doughnut-eating competition to raise money for the WTC bombing. Pranks are still played.
I'll read that as "We had a doughnut-eating competition to raise money for the WTC bombing relief errorts. Pranks are still played."
Either that, or the Feds has one hell of a new lead.;^>
(OT: True story. Back in my freshmen year of college, there was a special course on preventing date rape. The headline in the school paper: "Date Rape Program a Success". Choose your words carefully friend...)
It costs to deploy Linux. Deployment costs include licensing (the only free thing in Linux), hardware, and support (anybody else want to add to this list?).
Linux is free. Filling an office iwth Linux boxen is not.
In this case, also write President Bush, and Vice-President Cheney. I'm suggesting this because this is a law enforcement issue, that's their ballpark, and I have some very good law enforcement reasons why we should not have backdoors.
Sure, we all figure that the law will be too easy for terrorists to ignore. Sure, we think that this is a Second Amendment issue. Sure, we think that this gives the lie to the argument that we shouldn't regulate Microsoft because we don't want the government messing with the future of software development. However, the reason below may be understood more by politicians.
Encryption with backdoors means that there is a master key, held by the government, that can decrypt anything the crypto package. This is similar to asking lock companies to make a master key that will open any of their locks, and to hand that key to the government.
The instant you do that, that key becomes an incredibly valuable item. What would be the black market value for the master key to Windows IE secure mode?
The black market value must be at least in the millions. With such a key, you can monitor internet traffic and suck down credit card data. You can listen in on corporate execs talking to each other over VPNs. In the wrong hands, this key will lead to massive mayhem.
And this key will fall into the wrong hands. For it to be useful, there will need to be a large group of people who have access to the key. Odds are, one of them is going to be on the take.
Even if that doesn't happen, it instantly becomes the cracking target for computer-savvy criminals everywhere (especially the terrorists suspected of using strong crypto). We would have to be extremely careful to make a key that could not be cracked with the current computing power of the US. Because that is what the criminals will have access to.
The internet community has already cracked keys in triple-DES and RC5, as part of contests sponsored by the key owners. They were cracked using distributed key crackers. The programs were downloaded by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world, and they used the spare clock cycles of desktop machines to try all possible keys.
A computer savvy criminal could take a distributed key cracker program, attach it to an email virus, and put a significant percentage of the Internet to work cracking this key. The White House knows the sort of nuisance attack it got from the Code Red virus; imagine the next Code Red silently cracking the master key rather than trying to topple a government Web server.
The key would get out one way or another. The terrorists would have it, organized crime would have it, the "script kiddie" high school students out for a digital prank would have it. No matter how much we trust the government, we don't trust everybody else.
What exactly do you fear? Is there something you all are trying to hide from the government? Is it just the principle of the thing? Having my email filtered or my phone calls monitored seems like a trivial price to pay if it means I can get on a plane this christmas and fly home without worrying about smashing into a skyscraper or having my throat slit with a box cutter. It's YOUR government listening and YOUR security and life being protected. Why oppose these things?
There are a lot of people out there, including myself, that don't trust the government. We built this great country by not trusting the government. That is a valuable piece of American culture.
Think about this. Would you give the government a back door into all of our crypto? One bad cop gets that back door onto the black market. Then the terrorists (and the mafia, and the L33T script kiddies) get to tap all our credit cards.
You're probably going to reply to me and say "but the Constitution says...!". Do you honestly mean to tell me that you are construing a document written hundreds of years ago as being directly applicable to this situation? That is suicidal and not realistic in the least.
Belief that the Constitution is directly applicable to the situation is the key American value. If you oppose the Constitution, you attack America's backbone.
The Constitution has this wonderful feature, it's called "amendment". When the creators of the Constitution get it wrong, it is the job of our government to edit the Constitution to get it right.
This requires a lot of political will. But that is so that we don't make major decisions lightly. If the government feels it needs to sacrifice our rights for our security, I suggest that they amend the constitution. If they don't have the necessary support, perhaps the changes are not needed after all.
When the Constitution was written, there were no planes, no internet, no skyscrapers, no phones, and there were no terrorist groups committing mass murder.
It served us through the seperation of this nation, through AIDS, through the Cold War...and every time we stray from it, we pay the price.
Committing an atrocity on a scale equal to what we witnessed was perhaps impossible. Hell, there werent even Arabs crashing horses into barns!
(IMHO: Tuesday's attack causes a temporary moratorium of Godwin's Law)
Somebody tell that to a guy named Adolf.
This doesn't begin to cut it for atrocity. Five thousand people died that day. The Nazis killed six million Jews. Contrary to your belief, this isn't off the scale.
Certainly the creators of the Constitution never could have forseen the kind of cowardly attacks we faced recently.
See above.
Do you people even grasp the severity of what happened? The "impenetrable" United States was attacked on its own soil! I believe the Constitution says that our privacy is guaranteed not to be violated "without reason", or something to that affect. Clearly this attack was well beyond reason. In fact, for many of us, it is beyond comprehension.
We've been attacked on our own soil before. And while the attack may have been beyond reason, our response must be within reason.
For those of you claiming that we are "violating" the US Constitution, I propose that it is YOU who wish to violate it. One of our government's greatest strengths is that it is NOT rigid. It must constantly evolve to maintain the balance of liberty while giving due powers to those who must protect us and our way of life. Obviously, when an unseen enemy turns our own modes of communication and transportation into terrible weapons, it is time for an adjustment.
I agree wholeheartedly. However, I also believe that these adjustments must be rational, well-thought out, and legal. Frankly, Congress isn't very good at this when planes aren't falling down ourside their windows. The first reaction is likely to be the wrong one.
Granted, Osama does have violent intentions toward the US. But the way his organization works is that wanna-be terrorists go to his camp to be trained and become part of the community. They meet each other and develop their own terrorist plans, completely independent of central leadership. If Osama Bin Laden thinks that US citizens should die, then yes, he is guilty... of THOUGHTCRIME. The first ammendment would protect him until it was proven that he was somehow part of the planning for the specific incident. The US Gov has yet to produce any evidence that would prove this beyond reasonable doubt.
That might be interesting, were this to ever come to trial. However, the only way that this would happen is if Bin Laden were delivered (or delivered himself) into US custody, or enters US territory. Until and unless this happens, he is completely outside the reach of the DoJ and our justice system. Our justice system, which concerns itself with the guilt or innocence of a person, does not apply in Afghanistan.
Since he's not in America, this is not a DoJ issue, it is a DoD issue. And the DoD doesn't care about guilt or innocence. It cares about threats to American interests, American soveriegnty, and American lives. Currently, Bin Laden is considered a threat to all three, and as such is a valid target.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: you cannot expect to use our justice system in a foriegn land. When you persue someone domestically under law enforcement, there are certain rules of conduct we must follow, such as trial by jury and the limitations we give police officers. When you persue someone in a foriegn land, you have another set of rules of conduct, dictated by diplomacy. To use both sets of restrictions simultaneously would render us ineffective.
Imagine if we tried to "arrest" Bin Laden in Afghanistan. We'd immediately run into a Waco-style standoff. In addition, we'd have Taliban coming in from the outside, attacking the forces we have surrounding him. You can't be a soldier and a police officer.
Scary thought: if Bin Laden were to smuggle himself into the US, and turn himself in at the local police station, I wonder if they could do anything. Since he has (afaik) never entered US soil, he arguably has never committed a crime he can be tried for in the US. In theory, all we could do would be to extradite him to the UN World Court.
As far as I know, the culprits are already dead, they were on the planes. There's nobody left to kill.
I sincerely doubt that. Terrorist attacks tend to be masterminded from behind. The planners are still out there, IMHO.
The US cannot 'avenge' the dead innocents by killing more.
No, but we can prevent more attacks by killing those who plan to attack and are attacking the United States. That's precisely the mission of the armed forces: killing foreign threats before they kill our civilians.
Go home, take your anti-islamic rhetoric off your pickup trucks, and ask your leaders for a more sane approach to the situation.
Ah, yes, we all drive pickup trucks here, yup yup. And I'm sure that we're all missing a couple of fingers from cleaning our guns before we unload them, and we're good ol' boys who drive those pickups while drinking cans of beer. That's about as good as the anti-Islamic rhetoric.
For that matter, I haven't seen that much anti-Islamic rhetoric. The person on the street is figuring out that these terrorists are to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity--just better armed.
That's why the DoJ offices are analyzing every scrap of evidence they can find, while the military is only on heightened alert.
The high brass is looking over options, in what we geeks call the analysis phase. They know that they have a poorly-defined mission, they are working with the President to define it more properly.
Of course they don't know what they're doing; this is a new type of conflict. But they're thinking about it. If they didn't, we'd have gone off to bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, regardless of the fact that they are already in the stone age.
They don't know what they're doing yet, but they're working at it. I have no issue with what the DoD is doing right now. I do have an issue that they didn't predict this sort of conflict and have better antiterrorism and counterterrorism forces in place by now.
I understand *fully*, why face recognition systems in public places is wrong.
Would somebody explain it to me, then?
The last time I checked, nobody has a right to privacy in a public place.
I would oppose them being hidden, but having them publicly visible makes sense. We already have facial-recog systems--we call them "cops".
I am big on privacy and similar rights, and I would thus say that having one of them in a private place would be a violation. But in an airport, a park, anything like that violates no privacy because you had none to begin with.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing a fudge factor this way works, regardless of the sorts of time sinks a developer has, so long as those time sinks don't vary widely. Rather than trying to figure out all the things that might impact the project, you work on the assumption that the same things that slowed you down last month will slow you down this month, and let the fudge factor handle all of them. You keep recalculating the proper fudge factor, and if it suddenly shoots up, you know you have a problem.
Now, this paper makes a hell of a lot more sense to anyone who's read Hofstadler's Godel, Escher, Bach, but I suspect that many, even most, Slashdotters have read this one.
What makes the paper irrelevant is that we don't use formal systems to estimate software. We use our own head. We use hunches. We use intuition. These things are informal systems, capable of forms of reasoning that no formal system can achieve. That's what Godel proved.
The paper is saying that you can't take a spec, give it to an estimator program, and have the program write the estimate. You can give the spec to humans who write estimates for parts of it, feed that into an estimator program (like a spreadsheet), and you can get an estimate, but you simply cannot remove the human from the loop.
Underestimation as a Marketing Tactic
AKA "Vaporware". Even if marketing knew when a product would be shippable, a particularly cinical marketing department may claim it to be earlier, thus freezing competitor's development.
Lack of Feedback (Moving Targets)
Software engineers are particularly bad at estimating because they have never done what they estimated. They are given a large project, give a large estimate, start working on it, and the project changes in the middle in a major way. This is a moving target; the estimate no longer applies. Major law of software development: You cannot change the spec or the development team on the project without impacting the real ship date. If you don't re-assess the estimated ship date, you are simply fooling yourself. Thus, they don't have any clue whether they hit the estimate or not. One way to defend against this is to break the project down into bite-sized pieces and estimate them; a small piece gives you a chance to do precisely what you estimated. Once you have that, you can have somebody track your estimates, and come back saying something like "On average, you go one third over your estimates. Add a third to your estimates from now on, and we'll be accurate".
Management Estimates
Often, engineers don't do the estimate. The management or marketing people tell you what must be done, and how long you have. Sometimes this is done explicitly; other times, management may have a number in mind and shame a software team into agreeing with it by laughing off any number that doesn't match theirs. Business people often negotiate the ship date with the geeks, like any negotiate with any other vendor. To a suit, vendor negotiations are how you determine the "margin", or how much the vendor is making (like when you buy a car, you and the dealer come to a number that determines the dealer's margin). This doesn't work in in-house software develoment because geeks hold back precious little "slack" or "margin" (they don't get paid profits, they get paid salaries); in a decent shop, geeks program at flank speed all the time and always give the project 100%.
See Ed Yourdon's Death March or any of Ward Cunningham's Extreme Programming books for more details, and ways to avoid the above traps. Yourdon suggests that the head geek has to take a hard stand in scheduling to prevent business interests from setting both the project spec and the ship date. He especially tells you never to negotiate schedule, and to help the suits understand why you never do. Whatever number you estimate doesn't affect the actual ship date, so playing with that number is simply fooling yourself.
Extreme Programming actually has a "planning game" (sort of a ritual dance) which places business interests and geeks on the same side of the table. Two big rules are "The geeks may not reject any part of the spec" and "The suits may not reject any part of the estimate". Once the suits set the spec, both teams break it down into pieces-parts, line them up in order of what gets done first and the geeks give their estimates. From there, the suits can choose the ship date (and can instantly see how much product will be ready by then), or can choose a certain amount of project completion (and can instantly see the ship date). The fun part about this method is that the suits can change their minds at any time by changing, adding, or removing pieces-parts, and can instantly see how that affects the ship date. The other fun part is that breaking up the project into pieces-parts allows developers to do a (small) project they estimated. This allows people to track estimated versus real time, and to give developers feedback that lets them make better estimates. Such a team will start off with bad estimates like everybody else, but they will be able to improve rapidly.
We need thick clients to allow us to control our own view of the news.
Think of our news clients: the television, the radio, the Web browser. Each of these are particularly dumb entities.
What you need is a program that can search your favorite news sources, download the appropriate stories, apply your filters (e.g. "Drop all articles with a Jon Katz byline; give top priority to crypto articles; ignore all sports except major league soccer"), and give you a personalized, online newspaper.
This program could be on your own computer, or virtually hosted elsewhere (so that you can be mobile and get your news scroll anywhere), but it needs to be under your control.
This sort of thing, done right, would allow us to go to one place for all our news, because that has gone to every other place for us and applied our own filters. IMHO, there is economic incentive to do this as well. If a company wants to run virtual news filter hosting, they can track your preferences and advertise based on those prefs. Or, you can subscribe to it and pay a monthly fee like a newspaper if you hate ads.
Poloroid has never been in the self-developing photograph business. Nobody wants self-developing photographs. People want instant photographs, and Poloroid has been in the instant photography business for ages now.
Digital photography also provides instant photographs, so Poloroid has new competition.
This is exactly what happened to the "rail" industry. "Rail" companies were and are railroads in the freight hauling business and the passenger transportation business. Because they thought of themselves as a rail business, they didn't invest heavily in the new technologies of tractor-trailer trucks, coach bussing, and passenger airliners. As such, they saw their market failing, when what was happening was that their market was working quite well--serviced by companies which invested in new technologies.
A word to the suits. The market you are in is not the technology you sell or use, but the benefit you give your customers. You're not in the rail business, you're in the freight business. You're not in the pinball business, you're in the arcade entertainment business. You're not in the floppy disk business, you're in the removable media business.
Companies that understood this survived the tractor-trailer, the video game, and the CD-RW. Those that didn't have gone the way of the dodo.
Only one -- ONE -- senator voted against. Maybe it's not as bad as you think?
When you have such agreement in any comittee, including Congress, it means one of two things.
Now that the government has a clearly defined enemy, we as a nation and a government are vulnerable to groupthink. This is when everybody agrees on something because they are afraid not to. In the Cold War, the term "Communist" was used to invoke groupthink and gave us McCarthyism and the Bay of Pigs. In the 90s, it has been "for the children". Today, it's "terrorism".
I've tried to examine the bill (S.1510, and it looks like line noise. I have to go to the press reactions, simply because IANAL. How many senators actually read this stuff?
Regarding the Challenger explosion:
The initial failure was the O-rings on the solid fuel rocket boosters. Because of that, you had a direct rocket blast into the liquid fuel tanks. Not only did you have an intense source of heat, but an intense source of thrust.
The rocket blast succeeded in breaching the liquid hydrogen tank, causing a hydrogen leak and igniting said leak. This in itself would cause a jet of flame, but the hydrogen tank would not explode. The hydrogen was simply burning as it escaped and met with heat and the local atmosphere. You have high pressure hydrogen burning with low pressure oxygen, so you would have a slow burn.
But that wasn't all. The rocket blast also breached the liquid oxygen tank which was right next to it. Now you had heat, high pressure hydrogen, and high pressure pure oxygen in close proximity. That caused the fireball that destroyed the Challenger.
It took a rocket blast to breach the tanks; this would be more force and heat than, say, a jet engine flying apart. Even so, a hydrogen jet airplane would be physically incapable of exploding like the Challenger, as it would not have a local source of high-pressure oxygen.
The fundamental energetics of hydrogen combustion suck compared to fossil fuel combustion.
If that is so, why did the Challenger blow up just fine? You can't have it both ways.
Hydrogen and oxygen combine for the most exothermic chemical reaction modern science is aware of. In short, hydrogen gets you the most bang for the kilogram. The fact that a kilogram of hydrogen takes up so much space is another story, and can be resolved by storing it in liquid form.
I somehow doubt that there is a large group of "pro-hydrogen people". If there is, I doubt that they have a large, coherent agenda.
Reasons hydrogen is stupid:
1. To get enough of it in a small space, you need high-pressure tanks. These are heavy, expensive, and hard to build. It is far from certain that we could produce mass-produce them and ensure a reasonable useful life, too.
Perhaps that's because we haven't tried, and perhaps that's because the problems involved are way too difficult. Note, however, that every liquid fueled rocket or stage thereof has two high-pressure cryotanks.
Cryotanks are mass-produced today; think of all the liquid nitrogen tanks outside of various factory facilities.
OTOH, mass-producing mobile cryotanks and rigging airports to be able to load same with liquid hydrogen, on a commercial basis, is a new problem.
2. Hydrogen makes a pretty spiffy fuel-air bomb, too. Remember the Hindenburg? (Or the Challenger, for a more apt example of what *liquid* hydrogen does when vented near a flame...)
Good point. The Challenger is the more accurate example, but remember how it happened. The solid fuel booster leaked, shooting flame directly at the liquid fuel tanks. That flame is what caused the liquid fuel tank to fail (read: melt through) and for the main explosion to occur. Anyone considering hydrogen fuel should consider that a large liquid hydrogen tank is a terrorist target. Somebody tell NASA.
3. The ONLY source of hydrogen suitable for the production of such large quantities is natural gas, one of the best and cleanest fuels known anyway. If we're going to deal with the problems of gaseous fuels, why not use LNG directly and save the HUGE additional costs of converting to and dealing with hydrogen?
I disagree. Any fuel source powering a generator, plus an open body of water, can be used to generate hydrogen. While I don't know the economics or thermodynamics associated with burning LNG to produce electricity to produce hydrogen, I can't answer to that point.
However, one advantage to hydrogen is that it can be produced by any fuel source, so local markets can use whatever is handy. Current planes require a certain petroleum blend, whether it is made nearby or overseas. LNG planes require access to LNG, which is again not universal. Hydrogen can be readily produced by any fuel source, and thus isn't tied to any given fuel source.
4. Hydrogen, being the smallest and most rapidly spreading elment in the universe, is notoriously hard to keep confined. Gas-tight selas for such a tiny molucule are NOT trivial, and the cost of screwing up is rather high.
You said earlier that you would need high-pressure tanks. If hydrogen is stored in liquid form, is likely as hard to keep confined as liquid nitrogen. And we have that down cold.
In short, it would be tough to come up with a stupider proposal. It's more likely that those proposing this were on nitrous oxide than hydrogen..
Actually, I think that there is merit here. It may be a poor proposal today, or it may not be. You have made some excellent points in the above. But it's not stupid. None of the problems outlined above require a scientific or engineering breakthrough to resolve; it's possible to build a hydrogen jet aircraft. And it may be economical today, or maybe economical twenty years from now.
Everyone remembers the science class where you stick two electrodes in a beaker of water and collect hydrogen and oxygen. Given that, you can make hydrogen fuel anywhere you have a (polluted or not) body of water and electric power. So the need for huge tankers or pipelines is limited.
Of course, for any such facilities that do exist, the ruptures will not be pretty. The Hindenburg was a hydrogen rupture. So was the Challenger. If a rupture didn't encounter a spark, the hydrogen would all escape to the stratosphere and be of minimal impact. With a spark, however, a small rupture could grow by melting the containment unit.
Using hydrogen in aircraft would provide a big environmental benefit. First off, it would require less mass of fuel (and probably less volume). There would be added mass due to the cryogenics, but a cube-squared law makes this less relevant for bigger planes. Less fuel to lift is less fuel to burn.
Secondly, using an intermediate power source such as hydrogen allows you to use the local favorite fuel source. Currently, you can only fly an airplane if you have jet fuel, an expensive petroleum derivative. Since hydrogen can be extracted from water with two wires and an electric charge, any fuel source can be used, from natural gas to waste incinerators to Hoover Dam There are many fuel sources cheaper per KWH than petroleum. Note that this also has political benefits; hydrogen-powered aircraft are not directly tied to oil-producing nations.
Finally, hydrogen combustion produces steam as an exhaust. That's about as environmentally friendly as you can get.
Since hyrdogen is an intermediate energy source, we must factor in the efficiency loss and pollution caused by the plant producing the hydrogen (effectively, the local electric power plant).
Stationary power plants tend to be more efficient and cleaner than mobile power plants (such as jet engines and car engines). First off, bigger usually means more efficient when you're burning something. Second, these can be maintained more easily, and can have engineers and technicians available around the clock. Finally, the power plants can make the trade off of efficiency and cleanliness versus mobility. After all, where can you put a waste management system on a jet engine?
The combination of a stationary hydrogen plant plus a hydrogen jet engine will be cleaner than current jet engines (since a hydrogen-burning jet engine will have negligible environmental impact), but it will likely be less fuel efficient (since you're losing energy in the original power plant, then again burning hydrogen in the air). This may be offset by the lower fuel mass the plane must carry. Regardless of the amount of energy needed, hydrogen aircraft would likely be cheaper to run, since the intermediate energy source of hydrogen allows suppliers to use cheaper energy sources.
First off, I believe that humans are much better than machines at matching faces to mug shots. Facial recognition is a deeply implanted survival trait.
Secondly, if you're right and I'm wrong, we're all doomed. In our society and legal system, an arrest warrant and a face that matches a mug shot is sufficient cause for arrest. If you're right, all those faces in the Post Office, and all the mug books at the police stations, are worse.
Furthermore, what do you do when you find a match? Do you turn the person away just because some governemnt agent labelled them a terrorist? This seems to fly in the face of due process.
That is a problem, but not one that can be solved by a facial recognition system, nor any security system under the sun. That will be solved only with legislators and lawyers.
As far as "due process" goes, the only addition I can give to that is that, since the airlines are privately owned, they at least have the right to hand you your money back and politely ask you to leave the gate.
If the officer thinks you match the mug shot, you will be subject to arrest. If he doesn't, he flags you through just as if you didn't trip the computer system.
As a people, we do trust people to be excellent facial recognizers. Let the machine be smart enough to remember the faces of five gazillion bad guys, and the person be smart enough to figure out if you look like a given mug shot.
Such a system, with the software and the wetware, will be almost precisely as accurate as a person checking a mug shot, certainly better than the machine itself.
After all, if you let the machine do your security for you, you get Skynet.
And that, people, is why systems like this don't work.
By that logic, metal detectors are a lousy system. Anecdotally, at least 50% of the passengers trip off the metal detector. Note that it's not there to detect metal, but weapons. If 1 in 1000 people are carrying weapons, then the metal detectors are giving 500 false positives per 1000 people.
That, is of course, why the metal detector isn't a system. It is a part of the system; security officers and protocols are the remainder of the system. As such, tripping off the metal detector isn't a huge deal, but it does require further securing you (emptying pockets, etc.) until you no longer trip it.
Similarly, facial recognition software is a bad system when used alone. When used in conjunction with a security officer, it can be damned effective. I suggest in another post that the software's response to finding a match is showing the security officers the snapshot it matched to. Let the officer quickly check the real person against a mug shot, and most false positives won't even be noticed by the passenger falsely matched. Those who are incorrectly detained are detained because an officer thinks you look like a particular mug shot, regardless of what the machine says. As a society, we regard that as an acceptable risk, otherwise we wouldn't post faces in post offices.
It's not the technology, it's the way that you use it.
To me, a facial recognition system would be less invasive than a metal detector. How many people get stopped at the metal detector? 50%?
Install a facial recognition system at a security checkpoint, and assign an officer to it. He makes sure to get a good facial shot, then hits the button.
If the software finds a match, it does not ring the gong, set off the red light, anything of the sort. It puts up on a screen (visible only to the facial recognizer officer) that shows the picture it believes the person matches. Likely, it brings up a brief bio containing information helpful to apprehending said person--is he a crack shot, a mad bomber, a black belt?
Now, the facial recognition officer uses his or her own eyes to decide whether the person looks like the photograph. If he doesn't, the person gets waved through as if nothing happened--because it didn't. If the officer decides that the person looks like the bad guy in the photograph, he can detain the person.
Note this scenario. The software cannot order people to detain anybody. It can only suggest a possible match. If a person is detained, it is because a human security officer believes that the person looks like a known terrorist/criminal/bad guy. And this is no different from being stopped because the officer remembers your mug shot.
Effectively, the software is reduced to a gigantic version of the wall at the post office that has mug shots of known public enemies. It jogs the memory, as it were.
time he travels. Whereas for random checks, you'd have to be fairly unlucky to get picked every single time.
That's not a problem with the technology. That's an unfortunate consequence of having that face.
If you just happen to look like Whitey Bulger (a Boston area Mob boss on the lam), you are going to get stopped a lot by cops. It's unfortunate, but it makes sense.
Facial recog software is only a stand-in for poor human memories that can't recall the faces of several thousand public enemies.
My guess is that skin contact is to a Vulcan what running fingers through hair is to a Human. As for me, I feel comfortable with exactly three people running fingers through my hair. My wife is the first. The second is my year-old daughter who doesn't know any better. The third is my barber.
One thing I find so...fascinating...is Vulcans' continal disappointment and surprise of Human (and only Human) emotionalism. As of Enterprise, the Vulcans have shown themselves to already be a well-traveled spacefaring race. By now they should have noticed that the other species they meet are all emotional. They certainly know how emotional they were, until their race's own savior (Surak) started preaching logic.
Think about this. They don't understand Human psychology because it is so illogical, but they deign to tell humans about what will and will not offend the Klingons. Do they understand the Klingons better (consider: they have put a team on Earth for 90 years, and show no sign of permanent relations with the Klingon Empire) than they understand us? Are Klingons more logical than humans?
All in all, it seems that Vulcans are friendlier towards other emotional races than they are towards humans. It seems that there is something particularly disturbing to Vulcans about Humans, and I can't see it as being our emotion. I have a suspicion that the Vulcan attitude towards Humans in Enterprise is completely illogical. Remember that Vulcans have emotions, but hold them in strict check.
I hope that this is something Berman, et. al. have planned, rather than being some sort of mental dropout. If they have this planned, I look forward to seeing what it is about Humans that makes us particularly infuriating.
I'll read that as "We had a doughnut-eating competition to raise money for the WTC bombing relief errorts. Pranks are still played."
Either that, or the Feds has one hell of a new lead.
(OT: True story. Back in my freshmen year of college, there was a special course on preventing date rape. The headline in the school paper: "Date Rape Program a Success". Choose your words carefully friend...)
Linux is free. Filling an office iwth Linux boxen is not.
In this case, also write President Bush, and Vice-President Cheney. I'm suggesting this because this is a law enforcement issue, that's their ballpark, and I have some very good law enforcement reasons why we should not have backdoors.
Sure, we all figure that the law will be too easy for terrorists to ignore. Sure, we think that this is a Second Amendment issue. Sure, we think that this gives the lie to the argument that we shouldn't regulate Microsoft because we don't want the government messing with the future of software development. However, the reason below may be understood more by politicians.
Encryption with backdoors means that there is a master key, held by the government, that can decrypt anything the crypto package. This is similar to asking lock companies to make a master key that will open any of their locks, and to hand that key to the government.
The instant you do that, that key becomes an incredibly valuable item. What would be the black market value for the master key to Windows IE secure mode?
The black market value must be at least in the millions. With such a key, you can monitor internet traffic and suck down credit card data. You can listen in on corporate execs talking to each other over VPNs. In the wrong hands, this key will lead to massive mayhem.
And this key will fall into the wrong hands. For it to be useful, there will need to be a large group of people who have access to the key. Odds are, one of them is going to be on the take.
Even if that doesn't happen, it instantly becomes the cracking target for computer-savvy criminals everywhere (especially the terrorists suspected of using strong crypto). We would have to be extremely careful to make a key that could not be cracked with the current computing power of the US. Because that is what the criminals will have access to.
The internet community has already cracked keys in triple-DES and RC5, as part of contests sponsored by the key owners. They were cracked using distributed key crackers. The programs were downloaded by hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world, and they used the spare clock cycles of desktop machines to try all possible keys.
A computer savvy criminal could take a distributed key cracker program, attach it to an email virus, and put a significant percentage of the Internet to work cracking this key. The White House knows the sort of nuisance attack it got from the Code Red virus; imagine the next Code Red silently cracking the master key rather than trying to topple a government Web server.
The key would get out one way or another. The terrorists would have it, organized crime would have it, the "script kiddie" high school students out for a digital prank would have it. No matter how much we trust the government, we don't trust everybody else.
There are a lot of people out there, including myself, that don't trust the government. We built this great country by not trusting the government. That is a valuable piece of American culture.
Think about this. Would you give the government a back door into all of our crypto? One bad cop gets that back door onto the black market. Then the terrorists (and the mafia, and the L33T script kiddies) get to tap all our credit cards.
You're probably going to reply to me and say "but the Constitution says...!". Do you honestly mean to tell me that you are construing a document written hundreds of years ago as being directly applicable to this situation? That is suicidal and not realistic in the least.
Belief that the Constitution is directly applicable to the situation is the key American value. If you oppose the Constitution, you attack America's backbone.
The Constitution has this wonderful feature, it's called "amendment". When the creators of the Constitution get it wrong, it is the job of our government to edit the Constitution to get it right.
This requires a lot of political will. But that is so that we don't make major decisions lightly. If the government feels it needs to sacrifice our rights for our security, I suggest that they amend the constitution. If they don't have the necessary support, perhaps the changes are not needed after all.
When the Constitution was written, there were no planes, no internet, no skyscrapers, no phones, and there were no terrorist groups committing mass murder.
It served us through the seperation of this nation, through AIDS, through the Cold War...and every time we stray from it, we pay the price.
Committing an atrocity on a scale equal to what we witnessed was perhaps impossible. Hell, there werent even Arabs crashing horses into barns!
(IMHO: Tuesday's attack causes a temporary moratorium of Godwin's Law)
Somebody tell that to a guy named Adolf.
This doesn't begin to cut it for atrocity. Five thousand people died that day. The Nazis killed six million Jews. Contrary to your belief, this isn't off the scale.
Certainly the creators of the Constitution never could have forseen the kind of cowardly attacks we faced recently.
See above.
Do you people even grasp the severity of what happened? The "impenetrable" United States was attacked on its own soil! I believe the Constitution says that our privacy is guaranteed not to be violated "without reason", or something to that affect. Clearly this attack was well beyond reason. In fact, for many of us, it is beyond comprehension.
We've been attacked on our own soil before. And while the attack may have been beyond reason, our response must be within reason.
For those of you claiming that we are "violating" the US Constitution, I propose that it is YOU who wish to violate it. One of our government's greatest strengths is that it is NOT rigid. It must constantly evolve to maintain the balance of liberty while giving due powers to those who must protect us and our way of life. Obviously, when an unseen enemy turns our own modes of communication and transportation into terrible weapons, it is time for an adjustment.
I agree wholeheartedly. However, I also believe that these adjustments must be rational, well-thought out, and legal. Frankly, Congress isn't very good at this when planes aren't falling down ourside their windows. The first reaction is likely to be the wrong one.
That might be interesting, were this to ever come to trial. However, the only way that this would happen is if Bin Laden were delivered (or delivered himself) into US custody, or enters US territory. Until and unless this happens, he is completely outside the reach of the DoJ and our justice system. Our justice system, which concerns itself with the guilt or innocence of a person, does not apply in Afghanistan.
Since he's not in America, this is not a DoJ issue, it is a DoD issue. And the DoD doesn't care about guilt or innocence. It cares about threats to American interests, American soveriegnty, and American lives. Currently, Bin Laden is considered a threat to all three, and as such is a valid target.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: you cannot expect to use our justice system in a foriegn land. When you persue someone domestically under law enforcement, there are certain rules of conduct we must follow, such as trial by jury and the limitations we give police officers. When you persue someone in a foriegn land, you have another set of rules of conduct, dictated by diplomacy. To use both sets of restrictions simultaneously would render us ineffective.
Imagine if we tried to "arrest" Bin Laden in Afghanistan. We'd immediately run into a Waco-style standoff. In addition, we'd have Taliban coming in from the outside, attacking the forces we have surrounding him. You can't be a soldier and a police officer.
Scary thought: if Bin Laden were to smuggle himself into the US, and turn himself in at the local police station, I wonder if they could do anything. Since he has (afaik) never entered US soil, he arguably has never committed a crime he can be tried for in the US. In theory, all we could do would be to extradite him to the UN World Court.
As far as I know, the culprits are already dead, they were on the planes. There's nobody left to kill.
I sincerely doubt that. Terrorist attacks tend to be masterminded from behind. The planners are still out there, IMHO.
The US cannot 'avenge' the dead innocents by killing more.
No, but we can prevent more attacks by killing those who plan to attack and are attacking the United States. That's precisely the mission of the armed forces: killing foreign threats before they kill our civilians.
Go home, take your anti-islamic rhetoric off your pickup trucks, and ask your leaders for a more sane approach to the situation.
Ah, yes, we all drive pickup trucks here, yup yup. And I'm sure that we're all missing a couple of fingers from cleaning our guns before we unload them, and we're good ol' boys who drive those pickups while drinking cans of beer. That's about as good as the anti-Islamic rhetoric.
For that matter, I haven't seen that much anti-Islamic rhetoric. The person on the street is figuring out that these terrorists are to Islam what the KKK is to Christianity--just better armed.
The high brass is looking over options, in what we geeks call the analysis phase. They know that they have a poorly-defined mission, they are working with the President to define it more properly.
Of course they don't know what they're doing; this is a new type of conflict. But they're thinking about it. If they didn't, we'd have gone off to bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, regardless of the fact that they are already in the stone age.
They don't know what they're doing yet, but they're working at it. I have no issue with what the DoD is doing right now. I do have an issue that they didn't predict this sort of conflict and have better antiterrorism and counterterrorism forces in place by now.
Would somebody explain it to me, then?
The last time I checked, nobody has a right to privacy in a public place.
I would oppose them being hidden, but having them publicly visible makes sense. We already have facial-recog systems--we call them "cops".
I am big on privacy and similar rights, and I would thus say that having one of them in a private place would be a violation. But in an airport, a park, anything like that violates no privacy because you had none to begin with.