Why would it not be a good idea for both countries to share information as to potential ongoing attacks, and even have a similar kind of hotline akin to the Red Phone to have a dedicated 24x7 contact to ask if one country was really under attack from another, as it might appear...
Sure, but that's not what was being proposed. You've rationalized the President's notion into something a lot more reasonable sounding. The president was talking about enlisting Russian aid in developing an impenetrable barrier (I laughed out loud when I heard that) to foreign election meddling. Making the Russians an equal partner to that would be be like making the Mafia a partner in your anti-organized crime effort. In fact the FBI did something very much like that in Boston with Whitey Bulger.
It's not that we Americans are innocent of meddling in other peoples' elections; but if we want to secure our own making the Russians our partner in that is just plain stupid. They are the number one meddler in their own elections. There is no mutual interest here to be secured. At least not between Americans as a whole and the Russian regime.
I don't think people were paying enough attention to details to be hoping he was lying.
Take Trump's Obamacare repeal promises. He promised he'd have a plan where everyone would have insurance, regardless of their ability to pay. There would be no cuts to Medicaid. Nobody would lose coverage. Nobody would be worse off financially. Everybody would get much better care than they do now. The government would pay for health care for the uninsured, but save money overall while at the same time being less involved with health care than it is now. Above all the plan would be simple, so simple, and ready to go shortly after he took office.
Now persons of a critical frame of mind would look at these promises and conclude that these promises would be quite challenging to keep, given that US health care spending rose faster than inflation every single year from around 1960 to 2015, and that under a private health care system with the federal government only stepping in to take the least insurable people of all -- the elderly and the poor. Yet at the same time, any attempt to address this long-developing crisis necessarily is going to have to sound ambitious in its goals. The devil is in the details.
The thing is, I don't think the details ever entered into most peoples' minds. In an age where we have unprecedented access to information, there's so much of the stuff people have become hostile to the stuff, preferring to fall back on their gut: does this guy sound sincere? Does he speak with conviction?
Donald Trump speaks with more genuine conviction than any politician of our time, excepting perhaps Bernie Sanders. There is no doubting the genuineness of Sanders' hatred for the billionaire class, or Trump's conviction that immigrants are ruining the country. Yet the sincerity of those feelings have no bearings on the wisdom of the policies that come out of those feelings. In fact sincerity has no bearing on the truthfulness of the candidate. People lie all the time about things they care about strongly; in a way a more emotionally detached candidate would likely be more reliable.
Well, I think it's a bit of a stretch to put all "windows users" into a single group, but I do go on a week long Windows jag every couple of months, just to keep up with what the rest of the world is experiencing. And every time I do I'm astonished that people still put up with it.
Leaving aside the inevitable and clunky upgrade I go through; the whole system is clunky. It's not that it's slow, exactly; that would show up in benchmarks. It's just inconsistent enough you can't really get into a good working rhythm -- and this is on a relatively recent i7 processor with 16GB of RAM doing plain old office and web stuff.
But most of all the fundamental concept of Windows is hopelessly antiquated: it wants to be the switchboard for your digital life. It wants you to use it for the things nearly everyone in the civilized world is using their phone for.
To be fair, the heavier-weight Unix desktops have this problem too. Their whole concept is just wrong: the desktop is a place for getting tasks done, not juggling your life. It's not a place where you want to be interrupted or distracted, and it's especially not something you want to spend a lot of time screwing around with. Windows makes this inherent misconception worse with its relentlessly intrusive paternalism. It's constantly trying to get your attention, to redirect you to Microsoft (or partners') services and products.
Windows (and KDE and Gnome) would be much better if they simply tried to do less; if it just managed the hardware, the screen, and interprocess communication, rather than trying to manage the user. But of course, that's the whole point for Microsoft; its a vantage point from which it can sell to nearly everyone in the world who uses a computer -- or sell those people to other vendors. Google does the same thing, but the architecture of their sales effort is so much slicker it feels less intrusive (although it gets creepy when you start to notice it).
When I set up computers for other people I usually I set them up with XFCE, and not one person has ever asked for news stories or valuable offers to pop up in their start menu, or any of the other Windows 10 bells and whistles. I myself find even XFCE overkill; I use the i3 tiling window manager, which is admittedly clunky, but it a bounded, finite, very small amount of clunkiness. Learning to deal with that modest dose of clunkiness is a small price to pay for a desktop environment that starts instantly, consumes almost no resources, including my attention.
I wouldn't be applauding. The executive branch shouldn't be using it's powers to extort favorable coverage or to carry out the president's personal vendettas.
Now here's an interesting question. Name a liberal president who would consider doing such a thing.
Just because the manual is written as if you had a human typing commands into a shell doesn't necessarily mean that's how it was expected to be used. I imagine that when you're writing the manual for a piece of secret software you're supposed to be discreet about describing the exact capabilities other pieces of secret software have. At least I would be.
In any case the precise vector used probably changes over time
You are making a strawman argument. Not surprisingly, the strawman is easy to defeat.
Every species affects the environment. It's common for species to overrun local resources, for individuals in that species to suffer and die prematurely, and then start all over again after the population crashes.
What's different about human beings is that we can anticipate this, and ask ourselves, is this really something we want to go through?
Not every medicine works at that level. Aspirin, Ibuprofen, naproxen sodium (alleve), while all different, are all COX-2 inhibitors, which reduce the production of prostaglandin hormones that both promote inflammation and sensitize peripheral nervous system neurons to pain. This is why you can't stack aspirin with Ibuprofen; they both work the same way. These drugs are unlikely to affect your judgment other than by reducing pain and inflammation.
You *can* stack acetaminophen (Tylenol) with Ibuprofen, say taking it between your scheduled doses, because acetaminophen works completely differently. It operates inside the brain modifying the behavior of the brain's endocannabinoid system.
This isn't the first psychological effect discovered for Tylenol. Studies have suggested that it may be effective for existential or purely psychological pain, e.g. the awareness that you're going to die some day.
Granted, the gymnasium was one of the top schools in its area; however I doubt you could find that many students as fluent in conversational German in the entire state. The best schools turn out a handful of kids each year who can ask for directions to the library or how much something in a shop costs.
I would be astonished if you could find a thousand high school seniors in the entire US public school system who could, say, discuss their favorite movie in a foreign language they learned exclusively in school.
But language education can work. Just not the way we do it in the US.
When we hosted a high school student from Hamburg, all the German kids spoke perfect idiomatic English and could follow a conversation at full speed, even though Boston area speakers are among the fastest in the US. These kids didn't speak English at home (although their parents could), they learned at school.
"Hate speech", at least in US law, isn't just speech that expresses hate; that's Constitutionally protected. Hate speech laws pertain to acts that are already criminal such as vandalism or criminal threats, and incitement of imminent violence.
In the US it absolutely is possible to commit a hate crime against white men. In fact SCOTUS in a landmark 1993 decision upheld the conviction of black teenagers who assaulted a white teenager under hate crime laws, holding that considering hatred as an aggravating (i.e., complicating) factor in a crime does not violate the First Amendment.
Now hate speech in particular usually takes the form of groupintimidation. Burning a cross on a lawn isn't just a personal message, it's for the entire group. Since white men are (in most situations) a large and (again in most situations) high status group, it *is* quite difficult to do the intimidating form of hate speech (although not necessarily other kinds like the harassing forms). However it is certainly a logical possibility.
Think about it. Intelligence agencies routinely do things which violate norms of civilized behavior. Suborning treason (in other countries' nationals) and invading privacy are standard operating procedure. Yet you depend on your employees to scrupulously follow the rules and norms when it comes to your own agency.
So you give people symbols, rituals and training which ground them in the traditions and identity of your service. I expect this works pretty well, because pride and belonging are powerful motivators. You can count on people to obey the meta-rules; like fouling in basketball. It's technically against the rules, but it's also part of the game, something you do to advance the interests of your team. Nobody intentionally fouls their own team.
Except contractors aren't really part of the team, are they? The agency is just a cash cow for them. This leaves the agency vulnerable to honorable people who feel a higher loyalty that lies elsewhere, like Snowden, as well as borderline anti-social people whose not-quite-sociopatic tendencies fly under the radar because they're mainly directed at outsiders.
Because the polar ice caps melting were not enough observable evidence?
Short answer: no.
Somewhat longer answer: in a complex system, the precise details of what is going on are never completely settled. There's always loose threads somewhere to be tugged at. In principle the whole fabric of scientific consensus can be unravelled this way.
Alright AC, if you're an oceanographer, what do you call 1 million cubic meters of water per second? Name a prominent oceanographer who never received a PhD. What keeps London warmer than Newfoundland even though it's further north?
Hacking US state government websites is definitely something ISIS would do if it could. But it's also something other people would do just for the reaction it would get. There are plenty of chaosmongers who are out to get the biggest reaction they can; "This is ISIS, perpare to die," is going to raise a much bigger stink than "Nyah, nyah, you've been hacked luser."
In a way that works with ISIS's playbook; they're a tiny force about the size of two US National Guard divisions that relies on asymmetric warfare tactics to survive. Their political significance outside their immediate territory is dependent on social media savvy and inspiring disaffected locals to keep their name in the news. That poses a real (although statistically tiny) danger around the world.
But hacking a state government website is pure PR. It doesn't mean they're poised to sweep into the US and impose Sharia Law, nor does it mean they've got an active cell operating in the affected state. All it means is that that state government does a lousy job securing its websites; a single person could have done this from his parent's basement, anywhere in the world. And, in a way, the politicians in that state who are responsible for the operations of state government are playing into ISIS's hands too. They'd much rather whip up a public panic than face questions about why their systems are so poorly secured, and the also-very real (and non-trivial) privacy risk this poses for citizens.
As a bunch of " hocus pocus, guesswork, and strongly held religious beliefs." Aside from things like humor theory, astrology and alchemical theories were freely mixed into medieval and Renaissance medicine. For centuries there was little reason not to prefer alternative medicinal theories to academic medicine.
But the fact that conventional medical training was done at great academic centers gave it a long term advantage. As empiricism became the basis of scientific inquiry, medicine adopted it too. Medical empiricism has never been quite so robust as scientific empiricism, but by 1900 you were probably better off with a medical doctor than with the village herbalist, faith healer, or random quack. A hundred years earlier that'd have been a dubious proposition.
I worked for years in mosquito control so I know a lot of entomologists, including one who has for years now operated a service for identifying pests like hair lice and bedbugs. More than half of the time the samples of bedbugs he's been asked to look at are something else.
The first step in a problem like this is to get someone who knows what he's doing to look at samples of what you're seeing. You could have a completely different problem going on -- a different kind of insect like fleas or bat bugs -- or even mass hysteria over an innocuous insect infestation.
Suck up to the cop and maybe you'll get a pass; piss him off and you've just coincidentally committed a serious but ostensibly unrelated crime.
And unless they collect information on people "carefully and prudently" texting and driving (whatever the hell that is) we'll never know whether the law is the same for everyone... but I have a sneaking suspicion that it won't be.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would it not be a good idea for both countries to share information as to potential ongoing attacks, and even have a similar kind of hotline akin to the Red Phone to have a dedicated 24x7 contact to ask if one country was really under attack from another, as it might appear...
Sure, but that's not what was being proposed. You've rationalized the President's notion into something a lot more reasonable sounding. The president was talking about enlisting Russian aid in developing an impenetrable barrier (I laughed out loud when I heard that) to foreign election meddling. Making the Russians an equal partner to that would be be like making the Mafia a partner in your anti-organized crime effort. In fact the FBI did something very much like that in Boston with Whitey Bulger.
It's not that we Americans are innocent of meddling in other peoples' elections; but if we want to secure our own making the Russians our partner in that is just plain stupid. They are the number one meddler in their own elections. There is no mutual interest here to be secured. At least not between Americans as a whole and the Russian regime.
Because the conviction is emotional, not intellectual.
The tone is consistent, not the propositions delivered by that tone.
I don't think people were paying enough attention to details to be hoping he was lying.
Take Trump's Obamacare repeal promises. He promised he'd have a plan where everyone would have insurance, regardless of their ability to pay. There would be no cuts to Medicaid. Nobody would lose coverage. Nobody would be worse off financially. Everybody would get much better care than they do now. The government would pay for health care for the uninsured, but save money overall while at the same time being less involved with health care than it is now. Above all the plan would be simple, so simple, and ready to go shortly after he took office.
Now persons of a critical frame of mind would look at these promises and conclude that these promises would be quite challenging to keep, given that US health care spending rose faster than inflation every single year from around 1960 to 2015, and that under a private health care system with the federal government only stepping in to take the least insurable people of all -- the elderly and the poor. Yet at the same time, any attempt to address this long-developing crisis necessarily is going to have to sound ambitious in its goals. The devil is in the details.
The thing is, I don't think the details ever entered into most peoples' minds. In an age where we have unprecedented access to information, there's so much of the stuff people have become hostile to the stuff, preferring to fall back on their gut: does this guy sound sincere? Does he speak with conviction?
Donald Trump speaks with more genuine conviction than any politician of our time, excepting perhaps Bernie Sanders. There is no doubting the genuineness of Sanders' hatred for the billionaire class, or Trump's conviction that immigrants are ruining the country. Yet the sincerity of those feelings have no bearings on the wisdom of the policies that come out of those feelings. In fact sincerity has no bearing on the truthfulness of the candidate. People lie all the time about things they care about strongly; in a way a more emotionally detached candidate would likely be more reliable.
Well, I think it's a bit of a stretch to put all "windows users" into a single group, but I do go on a week long Windows jag every couple of months, just to keep up with what the rest of the world is experiencing. And every time I do I'm astonished that people still put up with it.
Leaving aside the inevitable and clunky upgrade I go through; the whole system is clunky. It's not that it's slow, exactly; that would show up in benchmarks. It's just inconsistent enough you can't really get into a good working rhythm -- and this is on a relatively recent i7 processor with 16GB of RAM doing plain old office and web stuff.
But most of all the fundamental concept of Windows is hopelessly antiquated: it wants to be the switchboard for your digital life. It wants you to use it for the things nearly everyone in the civilized world is using their phone for.
To be fair, the heavier-weight Unix desktops have this problem too. Their whole concept is just wrong: the desktop is a place for getting tasks done, not juggling your life. It's not a place where you want to be interrupted or distracted, and it's especially not something you want to spend a lot of time screwing around with. Windows makes this inherent misconception worse with its relentlessly intrusive paternalism. It's constantly trying to get your attention, to redirect you to Microsoft (or partners') services and products.
Windows (and KDE and Gnome) would be much better if they simply tried to do less; if it just managed the hardware, the screen, and interprocess communication, rather than trying to manage the user. But of course, that's the whole point for Microsoft; its a vantage point from which it can sell to nearly everyone in the world who uses a computer -- or sell those people to other vendors. Google does the same thing, but the architecture of their sales effort is so much slicker it feels less intrusive (although it gets creepy when you start to notice it).
When I set up computers for other people I usually I set them up with XFCE, and not one person has ever asked for news stories or valuable offers to pop up in their start menu, or any of the other Windows 10 bells and whistles. I myself find even XFCE overkill; I use the i3 tiling window manager, which is admittedly clunky, but it a bounded, finite, very small amount of clunkiness. Learning to deal with that modest dose of clunkiness is a small price to pay for a desktop environment that starts instantly, consumes almost no resources, including my attention.
I wouldn't be applauding. The executive branch shouldn't be using it's powers to extort favorable coverage or to carry out the president's personal vendettas.
Now here's an interesting question. Name a liberal president who would consider doing such a thing.
Just because the manual is written as if you had a human typing commands into a shell doesn't necessarily mean that's how it was expected to be used. I imagine that when you're writing the manual for a piece of secret software you're supposed to be discreet about describing the exact capabilities other pieces of secret software have. At least I would be.
In any case the precise vector used probably changes over time
And by that I mean I should be able to hit "reply" on any email I receive and expect someone will read it.
You can and you can. You'll just be disappointed on that second one, but that could happen anyway.
You are making a strawman argument. Not surprisingly, the strawman is easy to defeat.
Every species affects the environment. It's common for species to overrun local resources, for individuals in that species to suffer and die prematurely, and then start all over again after the population crashes.
What's different about human beings is that we can anticipate this, and ask ourselves, is this really something we want to go through?
Not every medicine works at that level. Aspirin, Ibuprofen, naproxen sodium (alleve), while all different, are all COX-2 inhibitors, which reduce the production of prostaglandin hormones that both promote inflammation and sensitize peripheral nervous system neurons to pain. This is why you can't stack aspirin with Ibuprofen; they both work the same way. These drugs are unlikely to affect your judgment other than by reducing pain and inflammation.
You *can* stack acetaminophen (Tylenol) with Ibuprofen, say taking it between your scheduled doses, because acetaminophen works completely differently. It operates inside the brain modifying the behavior of the brain's endocannabinoid system.
This isn't the first psychological effect discovered for Tylenol. Studies have suggested that it may be effective for existential or purely psychological pain, e.g. the awareness that you're going to die some day.
Granted, the gymnasium was one of the top schools in its area; however I doubt you could find that many students as fluent in conversational German in the entire state. The best schools turn out a handful of kids each year who can ask for directions to the library or how much something in a shop costs.
I would be astonished if you could find a thousand high school seniors in the entire US public school system who could, say, discuss their favorite movie in a foreign language they learned exclusively in school.
It explains the idiomatic perfection of their English, but their parents are also extremely fluent in English, albeit more noticeably accented.
Because they're required to put your ass in a seat in a "French class". Clearly they aren't being required to actually teach French.
But language education can work. Just not the way we do it in the US.
When we hosted a high school student from Hamburg, all the German kids spoke perfect idiomatic English and could follow a conversation at full speed, even though Boston area speakers are among the fastest in the US. These kids didn't speak English at home (although their parents could), they learned at school.
"Hate speech", at least in US law, isn't just speech that expresses hate; that's Constitutionally protected. Hate speech laws pertain to acts that are already criminal such as vandalism or criminal threats, and incitement of imminent violence.
In the US it absolutely is possible to commit a hate crime against white men. In fact SCOTUS in a landmark 1993 decision upheld the conviction of black teenagers who assaulted a white teenager under hate crime laws, holding that considering hatred as an aggravating (i.e., complicating) factor in a crime does not violate the First Amendment.
Now hate speech in particular usually takes the form of groupintimidation. Burning a cross on a lawn isn't just a personal message, it's for the entire group. Since white men are (in most situations) a large and (again in most situations) high status group, it *is* quite difficult to do the intimidating form of hate speech (although not necessarily other kinds like the harassing forms). However it is certainly a logical possibility.
Think about it. Intelligence agencies routinely do things which violate norms of civilized behavior. Suborning treason (in other countries' nationals) and invading privacy are standard operating procedure. Yet you depend on your employees to scrupulously follow the rules and norms when it comes to your own agency.
So you give people symbols, rituals and training which ground them in the traditions and identity of your service. I expect this works pretty well, because pride and belonging are powerful motivators. You can count on people to obey the meta-rules; like fouling in basketball. It's technically against the rules, but it's also part of the game, something you do to advance the interests of your team. Nobody intentionally fouls their own team.
Except contractors aren't really part of the team, are they? The agency is just a cash cow for them. This leaves the agency vulnerable to honorable people who feel a higher loyalty that lies elsewhere, like Snowden, as well as borderline anti-social people whose not-quite-sociopatic tendencies fly under the radar because they're mainly directed at outsiders.
And you are just a communist, nigger loving ape-eh-shit, so go die in a fucking fire fucktard.
Ah, I see you've been forced to play your trump card.
Because the polar ice caps melting were not enough observable evidence?
Short answer: no.
Somewhat longer answer: in a complex system, the precise details of what is going on are never completely settled. There's always loose threads somewhere to be tugged at. In principle the whole fabric of scientific consensus can be unravelled this way.
Alright AC, if you're an oceanographer, what do you call 1 million cubic meters of water per second? Name a prominent oceanographer who never received a PhD. What keeps London warmer than Newfoundland even though it's further north?
I refute your calculations with a single word: thermocline
That's all assuming this is ISIS behind this.
Hacking US state government websites is definitely something ISIS would do if it could. But it's also something other people would do just for the reaction it would get. There are plenty of chaosmongers who are out to get the biggest reaction they can; "This is ISIS, perpare to die," is going to raise a much bigger stink than "Nyah, nyah, you've been hacked luser."
In a way that works with ISIS's playbook; they're a tiny force about the size of two US National Guard divisions that relies on asymmetric warfare tactics to survive. Their political significance outside their immediate territory is dependent on social media savvy and inspiring disaffected locals to keep their name in the news. That poses a real (although statistically tiny) danger around the world.
But hacking a state government website is pure PR. It doesn't mean they're poised to sweep into the US and impose Sharia Law, nor does it mean they've got an active cell operating in the affected state. All it means is that that state government does a lousy job securing its websites; a single person could have done this from his parent's basement, anywhere in the world. And, in a way, the politicians in that state who are responsible for the operations of state government are playing into ISIS's hands too. They'd much rather whip up a public panic than face questions about why their systems are so poorly secured, and the also-very real (and non-trivial) privacy risk this poses for citizens.
Surely they should just keep to the facts of the matter.
I suspect talking this way shows a certain contempt for the intellect of others.
Because in the 1800s the germ theory of disease had been established and by 1900 the importance of sterilization was understood.
As a bunch of " hocus pocus, guesswork, and strongly held religious beliefs." Aside from things like humor theory, astrology and alchemical theories were freely mixed into medieval and Renaissance medicine. For centuries there was little reason not to prefer alternative medicinal theories to academic medicine.
But the fact that conventional medical training was done at great academic centers gave it a long term advantage. As empiricism became the basis of scientific inquiry, medicine adopted it too. Medical empiricism has never been quite so robust as scientific empiricism, but by 1900 you were probably better off with a medical doctor than with the village herbalist, faith healer, or random quack. A hundred years earlier that'd have been a dubious proposition.
I worked for years in mosquito control so I know a lot of entomologists, including one who has for years now operated a service for identifying pests like hair lice and bedbugs. More than half of the time the samples of bedbugs he's been asked to look at are something else.
The first step in a problem like this is to get someone who knows what he's doing to look at samples of what you're seeing. You could have a completely different problem going on -- a different kind of insect like fleas or bat bugs -- or even mass hysteria over an innocuous insect infestation.
Suck up to the cop and maybe you'll get a pass; piss him off and you've just coincidentally committed a serious but ostensibly unrelated crime.
And unless they collect information on people "carefully and prudently" texting and driving (whatever the hell that is) we'll never know whether the law is the same for everyone... but I have a sneaking suspicion that it won't be.