But I'd love to hear about this technology that would allow us to govern ourselves.
The issue isn't technological, it's more about how you do government. The original way "democracy" was done was to randomly select a group of citizens on a per "bill" basis. Doing this was not "high tech" even in the bronze age. Nor does the likes of ensuring that people both pro and anti the proposed legislation have equal time to speak.
So how do you know that your representatives are in fact doing what you elected them for?
Do you just trust their word for it, leave them to it and come relection time you just vote them back in based on their statements about their own honesty?
I bet that when you go to a fish-monger you don't just take his word on the weight of the fish he's trying to sell you and want him to actually weigh it and yet you seem to be willing to take the word of somebody when a lot more money and power is involved...
Which is utter madness considering that politicians have been repeatedly shown to be amongst the least trustworthy people in society.
For years the fashion has been to bury corruption and mismanagement in government under the cover of National Security
A very great number (thousands) of years probably before then it was "City Security" since city states predate nation states...
In Toronto, Canada for example, the city's transit system (TTC) has cameras in all of its vehicles but the privacy commissioner was actually brought and signed off on the program. One of the conditions for this was that the footage is deleted automatically after three days if it's not needed for a police investigation.
Which presumably means that any complaint against a police officer will only start being investigated 73 hours after it is made
Jaywalking isn't a crime in the UK, except on a Motorway (where pedestrians aren't allowed).
In the UK (as with most of Europe) pedestrians always have right of way on a public road over wheeled vehicles. Possibly this goes back as far as Roman times. The motorway situation is somewhat more complex since they are still public roads, a pedestrian on one is tresspassing. So you have two different laws interacting.
A wired connection requires a physical cable to be run to a specific location through the floor or ceiling and if the decision is made to rearrange the cubicles it adds thousands of dollars in rewiring. WiFi eliminates this requirement but necessitates an extra FCC license for every connection driving up the cost of the equipment. I suspect this would initially bypass the FCC as it does not use the RF spectrum.
There's the issue of WiFi having quite complex propergation patterns. Whereas with visible light to can easily tell where the coverage area and confine it to specific rooms without needing exotic building materials.
Which would still cause connections to time out and the parties to have to reconnect at the new IP address. Or is there a way to hand off a TCP connection from one IP to another in the same way that a cellular voice connection is handed off from one tower to another?
This would have to be in every TCP implimentation. Together with some, secure, way to let a machine know that a peer had changed it's IP address. That's before even considering the number of apps written with the assumption that peer IP addresses don't change. Even webapps which assume that a peer IP address is constant over a "session". One thing which dosn't change in a cellular handover is the telephone number. Even if the call routing has to be radically changed.
Because a lot of services don't work well through NAT. VPN and voice services are good examples.
It actually depends on the protocol. OpenVPN and IAX tend to be less troubled by NAT since they use a single UDP port. An IPsec VPN system requires a NAT system which can handle IPSEC/IP . SIP uses TCP and multiple ports. Something which tends to work poorly with any kind of NAT.
Engineering of application-layer protocols is far easier when everyone is addressable. The deployment of NAT has had a cascading effect on many application layer protocols that would have had a simple, obvious implementation were every node equally addressable. Instead, every new application protocol has to consider and work around NAT.
As well as having to work out ways of getting pre-existing protocols to work with NAT. Even protocols such as STUN which are only required due to NAT. Working around NAT in the general case is non trivial due to there being various ways of doing it which can potentially be cascaded in a variety of ways. NAT can also complicate things where networks with "private" addresses need to be connected. (Especially if the addressing overlaps.) As well as making things like debugging connection problems and firewalling more complex. e.g. how do to restrict access to machines in a single department of a company where everything from the company appears to come from a small number of IP addresses due to a many to one NAT.
I can remember that easily and then make up a plan such as "/64 corresponds to VLAN". Say you have VLAN 5 and a statically assigned host 9 on that VLAN.
VLANs are an ethernet (or equivalent) layer concept. A specific VLAN can have an arbitrary number (including zero) of IP4 or IP6 networks on it.
Who uses IPs anymore anyway except in a few corner cases for debugging?
Turns out that explicit IP addresses get used in an awful lot of places. Including devices such as network printers and wireless access points with half baked DHCP clients which are unable to set options such as syslog & NTP servers via DHCP. Quite often the only thing these will accept in their configuration is and IP address. (Typically it's a web based configuration since any programmer capable of thinking of using TFTP to download settings can generally also manage to write a proper DHCP client). There's also plenty of bespoke software which for one daft reason or another uses IP addresses, even long lists of IP addresses (since the writer was apparently unaware of the concept of subnet masks).
Actually they are developing railguns for launching projectiles and weapons. If the weapon doesn't need to have a chemical propellant it makes it much smaller and you can carry a lot more.
Possibly also a higher rate of fire and able to sustain fire for longer without the the gun overheating.
if we consider ourselves members of a rational society, this shouldn't be news.
UFO reports should be public period. They are reports of phenomena that are unexplained to the observers. If everyone has access to those reports, than it's easier to find someone who can explain them.
Many people are not rational about UFOs. Hence you get the idea of alien spacecraft/robot probes. Rather than weather/aviation/planets/etc.
really don't understand why these reports were secret in the first place (except for the names and similar stuff).
The whole alien thing has been used to draw attention away from secret aircraft. Maybe the RNZAF are flying something they claim not to have...
Try the Bible. Specifically, the story of Lot and how he nailed his daughters after they supposedly got him drunk. And they would have been under what we consider adult age at that time, most likely they were around the age of 14.
When does the concept of "Bat Mitzvah" originate from? Even in modern history it isn't so long ago that someone aged 14 would be considered "adult".
Oh, keep in mind this is the same guy who just got done pimping them out to an entire town for an orgy, supposedly in order to protect a couple of 'angels'.
The two events are some time, most likely several years apart.
Exactly. I also hate that the author explaining himself in the way he does - to me that's validating the line of questioning valid. Especially when she says there is no underage incest in her books.
Thing is that the rules about "underage" are a very mixed bag even if you were to stick to the here and now. As are also the rules of what is and isn't "incest" in various situations. In the case any historical fiction there would be issues of should the author use the rules applicable to when and where they set the story, even if these are very different from anything you could find now. e.g. Bronze age Egypt. In the case of sci-fi and fantasy (which includes anything set on prehistoric Earth) an author can more or less make up his/her own rules. e.g. the Ocampa from Star Trek:Voyager, who who are adult within 1 year but very unlikely to live long enough to make it even to the lower end of current human ages of consent.
IMHO, companies like PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard are not caving in to the government pressure. They are boycotting Wikileaks because it already has buckets of dirt on financial institutions, and so they are afraid that they are next.
Such a boycott is likely to have the effect of making it more likely they will be "next".
I recall an old game where the pirated version was clean but the official European version was the one that was virus infested.
IIRC virus infected software has been shipped on official versions (including pressed CDROMS) more than once. As well as viruses winding up on various USB storage devices.
The whole "pirated equals infected' is just lame scare tactics.
People must believe it since this claim has being being made for years. Though typically in a vague way without any verified examples.
I think the point the GP was making was that, yes the US military can instantly and overwhelmingly wipe out any civil resistance. However that is entirely dependent on said soldiers of the US military actually following those orders. If there was a civil insurrection, there is a real possibility that soldiers would simply refuse to open fire on civilians and also possible that they would simply join them. In that case you have a full scale civil war.
There have certainly been revolutions where the regular army have simply taken a "not our problem" attitude and stayed out of it. Thus leaving the only protection the (soon to be ex) government being presidential guards/police.
Considering these cables are on every news site and on TV it's no longer classified by law.
I suspect you will find that "the law" (probably in practice several laws) says otherwise.
They can try and pretend like it's still classified but it's not. Once it's saturated in the media and millions of people know about it all over the world it's public information.
The two may well not be mutually exclusive... Especially to people in the "intelligence" community.
Wikileaks hasn't actually released anything that the New York Times hasn't also released, with precisely the same redactions.
That's because the only way state secrets can lose their classification is by an appropriate official making the appropriate changes. The information leaking does not do this automatically even if anyone on the planet can now read it. There's probably plenty of secrets which have leaked sometime in the last century which are still just as secret as the Wikileaks stuff which no fuss is being made about however.
The issue we have now is that we cannot trust the government to properly classify reports and cables.
Governments have not suddenly become untrustworthy. Nor are they only untrustworthy in this respect. The basic problem is that too many people view governments and government officials as being trustworthy until proved (to a very high standard) otherwise. Whereas it would make considerably more sense to view all governments and government officials as untrustworthy until proven otherwise.
Many things are left unlawfully classified in order to cover up embarrassing events.
This is the norm for any government in recorded history.
In general I agree that there are instances when sensitive information needs to remain secret, but it is clear in my mind that our government has not applied the necessary level of discretion in their classifications to warrant unquestioned trust.
Anyone who thinks that there should be "unquestioned trust" in any human institution is so foolish that at the very least they should have the legal status of an infant. Such a level of trust is only ever appropriate for the highly religious to apply to omnipotent beings.
I'll type it slowly: if you go to war ostensibly over a memo, then you were already going to war. The memo just came along at a convenient time.
In such a situation if someone else hadn't leaked the memo then sooner or later you would need to leak either than memo or one you'd cooked up specifically to be leaked.
I thought we still had some notion of "Innocent til proven guilty" in this country. If we want to pretend to stick with that, then saying to the plaintiffs "Show me that they actually did something wrong by explaining to my satisfaction why this isn't fair use" is exactly the right and fair approach.
It sounds like the judge is saying something akin to "I can't see that you have any case at all. This is your last chance to convince me that you are not just wasting my (and the defendant's) time."
Because it's too expensive to guard the millions of miles of railway track from terrorists, I propose, for security's sake, we randomize the train departure times and destinations and implement random delays and schedule changes en route.
The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Boston and New England Amtrak have had these security measures for years and, as one can infer from the lack of terrorist incidents, they have clearly presented a most difficult target. Note that when the 9/11 attackers left Boston, they chose to fly rather than take the train.
Some bus companies also use the same technique. Though they have possibly missed a trick by failing to enter their timetables into contests for works of fiction:)
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But I'd love to hear about this technology that would allow us to govern ourselves.
The issue isn't technological, it's more about how you do government. The original way "democracy" was done was to randomly select a group of citizens on a per "bill" basis. Doing this was not "high tech" even in the bronze age. Nor does the likes of ensuring that people both pro and anti the proposed legislation have equal time to speak.
So how do you know that your representatives are in fact doing what you elected them for? ...
Do you just trust their word for it, leave them to it and come relection time you just vote them back in based on their statements about their own honesty?
I bet that when you go to a fish-monger you don't just take his word on the weight of the fish he's trying to sell you and want him to actually weigh it and yet you seem to be willing to take the word of somebody when a lot more money and power is involved
Which is utter madness considering that politicians have been repeatedly shown to be amongst the least trustworthy people in society.
For years the fashion has been to bury corruption and mismanagement in government under the cover of National Security
A very great number (thousands) of years probably before then it was "City Security" since city states predate nation states...
In Toronto, Canada for example, the city's transit system (TTC) has cameras in all of its vehicles but the privacy commissioner was actually brought and signed off on the program. One of the conditions for this was that the footage is deleted automatically after three days if it's not needed for a police investigation.
Which presumably means that any complaint against a police officer will only start being investigated 73 hours after it is made
Jaywalking isn't a crime in the UK, except on a Motorway (where pedestrians aren't allowed).
In the UK (as with most of Europe) pedestrians always have right of way on a public road over wheeled vehicles. Possibly this goes back as far as Roman times. The motorway situation is somewhat more complex since they are still public roads, a pedestrian on one is tresspassing. So you have two different laws interacting.
A wired connection requires a physical cable to be run to a specific location through the floor or ceiling and if the decision is made to rearrange the cubicles it adds thousands of dollars in rewiring. WiFi eliminates this requirement but necessitates an extra FCC license for every connection driving up the cost of the equipment. I suspect this would initially bypass the FCC as it does not use the RF spectrum.
There's the issue of WiFi having quite complex propergation patterns. Whereas with visible light to can easily tell where the coverage area and confine it to specific rooms without needing exotic building materials.
Which would still cause connections to time out and the parties to have to reconnect at the new IP address. Or is there a way to hand off a TCP connection from one IP to another in the same way that a cellular voice connection is handed off from one tower to another?
This would have to be in every TCP implimentation. Together with some, secure, way to let a machine know that a peer had changed it's IP address. That's before even considering the number of apps written with the assumption that peer IP addresses don't change. Even webapps which assume that a peer IP address is constant over a "session".
One thing which dosn't change in a cellular handover is the telephone number. Even if the call routing has to be radically changed.
Because a lot of services don't work well through NAT. VPN and voice services are good examples.
It actually depends on the protocol. OpenVPN and IAX tend to be less troubled by NAT since they use a single UDP port. An IPsec VPN system requires a NAT system which can handle IPSEC/IP . SIP uses TCP and multiple ports. Something which tends to work poorly with any kind of NAT.
Engineering of application-layer protocols is far easier when everyone is addressable. The deployment of NAT has had a cascading effect on many application layer protocols that would have had a simple, obvious implementation were every node equally addressable. Instead, every new application protocol has to consider and work around NAT.
As well as having to work out ways of getting pre-existing protocols to work with NAT. Even protocols such as STUN which are only required due to NAT.
Working around NAT in the general case is non trivial due to there being various ways of doing it which can potentially be cascaded in a variety of ways. NAT can also complicate things where networks with "private" addresses need to be connected. (Especially if the addressing overlaps.) As well as making things like debugging connection problems and firewalling more complex. e.g. how do to restrict access to machines in a single department of a company where everything from the company appears to come from a small number of IP addresses due to a many to one NAT.
I can remember that easily and then make up a plan such as "/64 corresponds to VLAN". Say you have VLAN 5 and a statically assigned host 9 on that VLAN.
VLANs are an ethernet (or equivalent) layer concept. A specific VLAN can have an arbitrary number (including zero) of IP4 or IP6 networks on it.
Who uses IPs anymore anyway except in a few corner cases for debugging?
Turns out that explicit IP addresses get used in an awful lot of places.
Including devices such as network printers and wireless access points with half baked DHCP clients which are unable to set options such as syslog & NTP servers via DHCP. Quite often the only thing these will accept in their configuration is and IP address. (Typically it's a web based configuration since any programmer capable of thinking of using TFTP to download settings can generally also manage to write a proper DHCP client).
There's also plenty of bespoke software which for one daft reason or another uses IP addresses, even long lists of IP addresses (since the writer was apparently unaware of the concept of subnet masks).
Actually they are developing railguns for launching projectiles and weapons. If the weapon doesn't need to have a chemical propellant it makes it much smaller and you can carry a lot more.
Possibly also a higher rate of fire and able to sustain fire for longer without the the gun overheating.
if we consider ourselves members of a rational society, this shouldn't be news. UFO reports should be public period. They are reports of phenomena that are unexplained to the observers. If everyone has access to those reports, than it's easier to find someone who can explain them.
Many people are not rational about UFOs. Hence you get the idea of alien spacecraft/robot probes. Rather than weather/aviation/planets/etc.
really don't understand why these reports were secret in the first place (except for the names and similar stuff).
The whole alien thing has been used to draw attention away from secret aircraft. Maybe the RNZAF are flying something they claim not to have...
Try the Bible. Specifically, the story of Lot and how he nailed his daughters after they supposedly got him drunk. And they would have been under what we consider adult age at that time, most likely they were around the age of 14.
When does the concept of "Bat Mitzvah" originate from? Even in modern history it isn't so long ago that someone aged 14 would be considered "adult".
Oh, keep in mind this is the same guy who just got done pimping them out to an entire town for an orgy, supposedly in order to protect a couple of 'angels'.
The two events are some time, most likely several years apart.
Adam and Eve, was Eve not a copy from one of his ribs?
The original version may have said "baculum" which makes rather more sense than "rib"...
OK then what about Lot's daughters? That one is very specific, and specifically relates to incest.
It also involves drugged rape. (Committed by women.)
Exactly. I also hate that the author explaining himself in the way he does - to me that's validating the line of questioning valid. Especially when she says there is no underage incest in her books.
Thing is that the rules about "underage" are a very mixed bag even if you were to stick to the here and now. As are also the rules of what is and isn't "incest" in various situations. In the case any historical fiction there would be issues of should the author use the rules applicable to when and where they set the story, even if these are very different from anything you could find now. e.g. Bronze age Egypt. In the case of sci-fi and fantasy (which includes anything set on prehistoric Earth) an author can more or less make up his/her own rules. e.g. the Ocampa from Star Trek:Voyager, who who are adult within 1 year but very unlikely to live long enough to make it even to the lower end of current human ages of consent.
IMHO, companies like PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard are not caving in to the government pressure. They are boycotting Wikileaks because it already has buckets of dirt on financial institutions, and so they are afraid that they are next.
Such a boycott is likely to have the effect of making it more likely they will be "next".
I recall an old game where the pirated version was clean but the official European version was the one that was virus infested.
IIRC virus infected software has been shipped on official versions (including pressed CDROMS) more than once. As well as viruses winding up on various USB storage devices.
The whole "pirated equals infected' is just lame scare tactics.
People must believe it since this claim has being being made for years. Though typically in a vague way without any verified examples.
I think the point the GP was making was that, yes the US military can instantly and overwhelmingly wipe out any civil resistance. However that is entirely dependent on said soldiers of the US military actually following those orders. If there was a civil insurrection, there is a real possibility that soldiers would simply refuse to open fire on civilians and also possible that they would simply join them. In that case you have a full scale civil war.
There have certainly been revolutions where the regular army have simply taken a "not our problem" attitude and stayed out of it. Thus leaving the only protection the (soon to be ex) government being presidential guards/police.
Considering these cables are on every news site and on TV it's no longer classified by law.
I suspect you will find that "the law" (probably in practice several laws) says otherwise.
They can try and pretend like it's still classified but it's not. Once it's saturated in the media and millions of people know about it all over the world it's public information.
The two may well not be mutually exclusive... Especially to people in the "intelligence" community.
Wikileaks hasn't actually released anything that the New York Times hasn't also released, with precisely the same redactions.
That's because the only way state secrets can lose their classification is by an appropriate official making the appropriate changes. The information leaking does not do this automatically even if anyone on the planet can now read it.
There's probably plenty of secrets which have leaked sometime in the last century which are still just as secret as the Wikileaks stuff which no fuss is being made about however.
The issue we have now is that we cannot trust the government to properly classify reports and cables.
Governments have not suddenly become untrustworthy. Nor are they only untrustworthy in this respect. The basic problem is that too many people view governments and government officials as being trustworthy until proved (to a very high standard) otherwise. Whereas it would make considerably more sense to view all governments and government officials as untrustworthy until proven otherwise.
Many things are left unlawfully classified in order to cover up embarrassing events.
This is the norm for any government in recorded history.
In general I agree that there are instances when sensitive information needs to remain secret, but it is clear in my mind that our government has not applied the necessary level of discretion in their classifications to warrant unquestioned trust.
Anyone who thinks that there should be "unquestioned trust" in any human institution is so foolish that at the very least they should have the legal status of an infant. Such a level of trust is only ever appropriate for the highly religious to apply to omnipotent beings.
I'll type it slowly: if you go to war ostensibly over a memo, then you were already going to war. The memo just came along at a convenient time.
In such a situation if someone else hadn't leaked the memo then sooner or later you would need to leak either than memo or one you'd cooked up specifically to be leaked.
I thought we still had some notion of "Innocent til proven guilty" in this country. If we want to pretend to stick with that, then saying to the plaintiffs "Show me that they actually did something wrong by explaining to my satisfaction why this isn't fair use" is exactly the right and fair approach.
It sounds like the judge is saying something akin to "I can't see that you have any case at all. This is your last chance to convince me that you are not just wasting my (and the defendant's) time."
Because it's too expensive to guard the millions of miles of railway track from terrorists, I propose, for security's sake, we randomize the train departure times and destinations and implement random delays and schedule changes en route.
:)
The Metropolitan Transit Authority of Boston and New England Amtrak have had these security measures for years and, as one can infer from the lack of terrorist incidents, they have clearly presented a most difficult target. Note that when the 9/11 attackers left Boston, they chose to fly rather than take the train.
Some bus companies also use the same technique. Though they have possibly missed a trick by failing to enter their timetables into contests for works of fiction