We already have a consitutional guarantee that events like 9/11 will and should not have happened. It is called the right to bear arms and no terrorist in their right mind would atempt to hijack a plane filled with armed passengers.
Except you don't want people with regular firearms in a preassurised aircraft.
Since the Government has already taken our weapons away and our cans of Whoop-ass(tm), obviously they need to protect us. The have already taken way our ability to protect ourselves
Which the US government failed to do, dispite having a huge militray and a complex (and expensive) air defence system. Including procedures for interception of civilian aircraft doing strange things. After all they managed to send fighters after a Lear Jet. (Which, IIRC, can fly faster and higher than the average wide bodied jet.)
30%: "If this is what it takes to not get blown up by terrorists, OK."
But the "if" is a big if. You cannot be sure that it will do anything to stop terrorism at all, security which is more an illusion than actual (or security which is open to subversion) could make terrorism easier.
You know, all the./ers said terrorists would never use export grade encryption either, yet we all know of the recent story where one did.
Terrorists will use whatever is available. If they can't use encryption they will use some other method of covert communication. Of course they might simply use the encryption for disinformation...
Jeez, here they (some) go again. The reason the attack on the WTC worked so well was because nobody every really considered the possibility of using airplanes as projectile explosives.
The idea cropped up in fiction quite a while ago. It's the "endgame" sequence in the novel of "The Running Man", the novel "Stroming Heaven" a terrorist organisation buying up a used 747, repainting it and managing to file a fake flight plan that it's a US government E4. Also the Japanese used aircraft in exactly this way against US warships nearly 60 years ago. It's a "no brainer" that civil aircraft could be used as improvised cruise missiles.
I'd say that there is really no chance that any terror network is going to waste its time trying to get onto a plane at this point. Yes, the US airline system was pathetically unsecure, but it really wasn't an issue until last year.
They arn't going to use planes because all the attention is focussed there. Instead they will look for something where security is overlooked now.
As Big Brother starts to collate that data I expect some interesting patterns will emerge. The famous "bought incubus CD -->probable anachristDO NOT issue that speeding ticket, you'll be embarassed on court!--"
Maybe you should rename the USA as the ADR (American Democratic Republic). Then place bets on how long it will take for this to go the same way as the GDR...
Not only that, but after so many false hits the screeners stop believing the results. If 99 out of 100 hits is a false positive, you can bet that screeners are going to be just waving people through.
Or they will wave some people through and attempt a greater investigation of a small mimority. Of course a real terrorist organisation is going to want to work out how to either never be "hit" in the first place or how to be in the majority of hits that get "waved through".
So again, we have only the illusion of security, and possibly even less real security than before.
An illusion of security is probably worst than having zero security and everyone knowing that is the case.
These are the petty annoyances with systems like this - the false hits far outweigh the real ones, and innocent people get harassed and treated rudely by ignorant, underpaid security guards for things they never know about.
Assuming that you actually get many real hits. The terrorists can stay home whilst the "secuity" people do their work for them....
Do you honestly think that the people putting this together haven't already thought of these and a few tens of other "little" (read: blindingly obvious) cases that would drown out any useful information if they didn't handle them sensibly?
Do you honestly think that all of the people who might consider attempting to subvert such a system have not thought about it either. If a terrorist organisation can create panic by some kind of hoax or manipulating law enforcement into persuing innocent people then they will do this.
This is why Europe should have never backed down with the US over data protection. It would be illegal to do this in Europe without the express permission of everybody who they take the data from.
Whereas in the US you have the whole et of issues about "privacy policies".
Europe will not allow companies to export data to countries that do not have any form of data protection legislature (like the US).
Similar issues also apply to attempts to extradite terrorist suspects to the US. Since the US fails to satisfy various human rights standards. e.g. not killing people...
In addition, the government is moving to build a database that will track all of the individuals applying for a pilots license. Is this going to work? Probably not. The government already has a database of suspected terroists and their profiles. That failed miserably on 911 when some 16 people boarded those various planes completely undetected.
Indeed part of the problem with systems in place before September the 11th is the issue of information gathering outstripping the ability to analyse it. This kind of thing is only likely to make such a probelm worst. The US also spends huge amounts of money on ATC and Military radar systems. But apparently all of these systems were incapable of tracking large aircraft by primary return alone. If was truely what happened then every airport in the US is a disater waiting to happen. The last thing you want is any aircarft able to enter crowded airspace unseen...
Re:SuSE LILO required (was Re:Breakout suggestion)
on
Animate Your LILO
·
· Score: 2
Yes, you do need the SuSE version of LILO because this is the only version that includes support for callback functions and timer events. This is mandatory for making the animations work.
The version of Lilo with Suse 7.3 does a little bit of animation by default anyway.
It's nice that ISP's could provide 100x faster service, but they're already capping the bandwidth they DO provide. I think this technology is solving a problem that simply doesn't exist in the cable ISP game.
The same issue may apply with the 500 channels of HDTV. How many cable systems actually use that number of channels, even with inbuilt time shifting...
If you want to run a webserver, you need to spend more, both for a static ip, and for a isp whos willing to let you run a webserver.
In the case of cable modem or ADSL since you need an IP address for each customer anyway it makes sense to have an IP stay with the customer, unless you make some drastic changes to the way the network is configured, which shouldn't happen very often.
Regardless of where the bottleneck is, i don't want my connection being slowed by some idiot who thinks its fun to run a server on his home computer.
Plenty of things suck more bandwidth than a web server
It's more a case of ISPs trying to copy the kind of setup they used for dialups to cable modem/adsl without considering if this is the best model for a permenantly on type of connection.
There's a classic rule that scientists use, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Conspiracy theorists believe in the opposite of that one. The wilder the claim, the less evidence needed.
The problem is that you don't just see wild claims from conspiracy theorists. There are more than a few cases of such claims being official versions of events...
One of those important freedoms is the right to vote for who will represent us in the government. One of the most important causes of the American Revolution is that the American colonies had no representation in Parliament. We can't make that claim about the current American government.
Simply having a "vote" does not imply "representation". Soviet Russia had "election", Zimbabwe is planning to have some soon. Another problem is that it is much harder to make the counting of ballots by machine transparent than with counting by hand. In the latter situation you simply have representatives of all candidates watching the count...
As bad as our government might be, it is still composed of people who are chosen by a majority of Americans.
IIRC The US congress is elected by a "first past the post" method. Which elects based on the largest minority of votes actually cast. Not everyone votes, indeed the largest number of people can easily be those not voting for one reason or another.
"It's also a democracy, where you can elect a new government to install new laws if you disagree with the current state of affairs. Elected officials (who presumably represent a majority of the populace)" Except for the current president. He's the guy who came in second and got elected anyway.
Remember that the US is dominated by two political parties. Even though there are other political parties in the US these tend to be completly ignored. How much do the Republicans and Democrats differ. Are there areas where there is little or no difference between them. (e.g. the same kind of policies, even though they might use different language.) It is quite possible to end up with a situation where even if the voting system worked perfectly issues would never have been decided by any kind of popular vote. Because candidates do not hold differing views on them,
The founders of the U.S. were considered terrorists by the British government, they chose to work outside the system to change it, and they won.
They probably initially tried to work "within the system" then decided this wouldn't work.
In this sense, the founders of the U.S. were much like this kid that recently got busted, though clearly Jefferson, et al were older and wiser than this kid.
Maybe we should be fighting terrorists with better foreign policy, and a review of our commercial morality.
Assuming you can separate US foreign policy and commercial morality. Since they appear to be intertwined. Maybe a good first step would be to abolish the concept of corporations as people. Maybe also the radical policy of the US not supporting non democratic governments and not supporting one side in a civil war.
Particularly seeing as how the 1960s semi-humorous "how to build a nuke" textfiles were actually found in Afghanistan, which tells you something about the odds that 11th-century minds are gonna be able to build 20th-century weapons, I thought this was a great idea.
IIRC some of the Americans for first found them in Afghanistan also belived them to be real...
when you want to mount successful political opposition, you start by keeping your nose squeaky clean so that no one can defame your character when the real work of change begins. this kid obviously didn't get that.
What makes you think that governments are incapable of creating some "dirt" if they need to? Or even dropping hints that someone being "squeaky clean" implies that they might be hiding something...
The identity of the victim of a crime isn't relevant as to whether or not a crime was commited.
Kind of hard to prove that there ever was a crime without being able to identify the alleged victim.
Suggesting that the identity of the victim justifies the crime is the same logic used by whackjobs who bomb abortion clinics and shoot people all the while claiming that they're doing God's work.
However in order to prosecute such a shooting or bombing you need both evidence there actually was a shooting or bombing and some ability to tie that to the suspect. As for someone identity being used as justification, if you are big enough that will work. If you want to see it in action, watch the news...
A lot of my TV watching revolves around Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, and SciFi channel. Not so much for their series, but rather the specials like Walking with Dinos, Blue Planet, the occasional SciFi miniseries.
You do realise that the two examples you give were actually made by the BBC? Also "Walking with Dinosaurs" attracted quite a degree of critisism since it presents fictional elements (in places complete fiction) as though it is facts. Similarly with the followup, "Walking with Beasts".
Slashdot Mirror
We already have a consitutional guarantee that events like 9/11 will and should not have happened. It is called the right to bear arms and no terrorist in their right mind would atempt to hijack a plane filled with armed passengers.
Except you don't want people with regular firearms in a preassurised aircraft.
Since the Government has already taken our weapons away and our cans of Whoop-ass(tm), obviously they need to protect us. The have already taken way our ability to protect ourselves
Which the US government failed to do, dispite having a huge militray and a complex (and expensive) air defence system. Including procedures for interception of civilian aircraft doing strange things. After all they managed to send fighters after a Lear Jet. (Which, IIRC, can fly faster and higher than the average wide bodied jet.)
30%: "If this is what it takes to not get blown up by terrorists, OK."
But the "if" is a big if. You cannot be sure that it will do anything to stop terrorism at all, security which is more an illusion than actual (or security which is open to subversion) could make terrorism easier.
You know, all the ./ers said terrorists would never use export grade encryption either, yet we all know of the recent story where one did.
Terrorists will use whatever is available. If they can't use encryption they will use some other method of covert communication. Of course they might simply use the encryption for disinformation...
Jeez, here they (some) go again. The reason the attack on the WTC worked so well was because nobody every really considered the possibility of using airplanes as projectile explosives.
The idea cropped up in fiction quite a while ago. It's the "endgame" sequence in the novel of "The Running Man", the novel "Stroming Heaven" a terrorist organisation buying up a used 747, repainting it and managing to file a fake flight plan that it's a US government E4. Also the Japanese used aircraft in exactly this way against US warships nearly 60 years ago.
It's a "no brainer" that civil aircraft could be used as improvised cruise missiles.
I'd say that there is really no chance that any terror network is going to waste its time trying to get onto a plane at this point. Yes, the US airline system was pathetically unsecure, but it really wasn't an issue until last year.
They arn't going to use planes because all the attention is focussed there. Instead they will look for something where security is overlooked now.
As Big Brother starts to collate that data I expect some interesting patterns will emerge. The famous "bought incubus CD -->probable anachristDO NOT issue that speeding ticket, you'll be embarassed on court!--"
Maybe you should rename the USA as the ADR (American Democratic Republic). Then place bets on how long it will take for this to go the same way as the GDR...
Not only that, but after so many false hits the screeners stop believing the results. If 99 out of 100 hits is a false positive, you can bet that screeners are going to be just waving people through.
Or they will wave some people through and attempt a greater investigation of a small mimority. Of course a real terrorist organisation is going to want to work out how to either never be "hit" in the first place or how to be in the majority of hits that get "waved through".
So again, we have only the illusion of security, and possibly even less real security than before.
An illusion of security is probably worst than having zero security and everyone knowing that is the case.
These are the petty annoyances with systems like this - the false hits far outweigh the real ones, and innocent people get harassed and treated rudely by ignorant, underpaid security guards for things they never know about.
Assuming that you actually get many real hits. The terrorists can stay home whilst the "secuity" people do their work for them....
Do you honestly think that the people putting this together haven't already thought of these and a few tens of other "little" (read: blindingly obvious) cases that would drown out any useful information if they didn't handle them sensibly?
Do you honestly think that all of the people who might consider attempting to subvert such a system have not thought about it either.
If a terrorist organisation can create panic by some kind of hoax or manipulating law enforcement into persuing innocent people then they will do this.
This is why Europe should have never backed down with the US over data protection. It would be illegal to do this in Europe without the express permission of everybody who they take the data from.
Whereas in the US you have the whole et of issues about "privacy policies".
Europe will not allow companies to export data to countries that do not have any form of data protection legislature (like the US).
Similar issues also apply to attempts to extradite terrorist suspects to the US. Since the US fails to satisfy various human rights standards. e.g. not killing people...
In addition, the government is moving to build a database that will track all of the individuals applying for a pilots license. Is this going to work? Probably not. The government already has a database of suspected terroists and their profiles. That failed miserably on 911 when some 16 people boarded those various planes completely undetected.
Indeed part of the problem with systems in place before September the 11th is the issue of information gathering outstripping the ability to analyse it. This kind of thing is only likely to make such a probelm worst.
The US also spends huge amounts of money on ATC and Military radar systems. But apparently all of these systems were incapable of tracking large aircraft by primary return alone. If was truely what happened then every airport in the US is a disater waiting to happen. The last thing you want is any aircarft able to enter crowded airspace unseen...
Yes, you do need the SuSE version of LILO because this is the only version that includes support for callback functions and timer events. This is mandatory for making the animations work.
The version of Lilo with Suse 7.3 does a little bit of animation by default anyway.
It's nice that ISP's could provide 100x faster service, but they're already capping the bandwidth they DO provide. I think this technology is solving a problem that simply doesn't exist in the cable ISP game.
The same issue may apply with the 500 channels of HDTV. How many cable systems actually use that number of channels, even with inbuilt time shifting...
If you want to run a webserver, you need to spend more, both for a static ip, and for a isp whos willing to let you run a webserver.
In the case of cable modem or ADSL since you need an IP address for each customer anyway it makes sense to have an IP stay with the customer, unless you make some drastic changes to the way the network is configured, which shouldn't happen very often.
Regardless of where the bottleneck is, i don't want my connection being slowed by some idiot who thinks its fun to run a server on his home computer.
Plenty of things suck more bandwidth than a web server
It's more a case of ISPs trying to copy the kind of setup they used for dialups to cable modem/adsl without considering if this is the best model for a permenantly on type of connection.
There's a classic rule that scientists use, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Conspiracy theorists believe in the opposite of that one. The wilder the claim, the less evidence needed.
The problem is that you don't just see wild claims from conspiracy theorists. There are more than a few cases of such claims being official versions of events...
From what the FBI knew, the suspect could have been anything from a whiny script kiddie to a mob leader with a dozen heavily armed bodyguards.
You mean they didn't investigate the building they intended raiding. That would be just stupid.
and if you havn't already noticed, that sort of info is available from thousands of websites and before that bbs.
You can probably find the information, about explosives if not bombs, in most public libraries too. Under either "chemistry" or "history".
One of those important freedoms is the right to vote for who will represent us in the government. One of the most important causes of the American Revolution is that the American colonies had no representation in Parliament. We can't make that claim about the current American government.
Simply having a "vote" does not imply "representation". Soviet Russia had "election", Zimbabwe is planning to have some soon. Another problem is that it is much harder to make the counting of ballots by machine transparent than with counting by hand. In the latter situation you simply have representatives of all candidates watching the count...
As bad as our government might be, it is still composed of people who are chosen by a majority of Americans.
IIRC The US congress is elected by a "first past the post" method. Which elects based on the largest minority of votes actually cast. Not everyone votes, indeed the largest number of people can easily be those not voting for one reason or another.
"It's also a democracy, where you can elect a new government to install new laws if you disagree with the current state of affairs. Elected officials (who presumably represent a majority of the populace)" Except for the current president. He's the guy who came in second and got elected anyway.
Remember that the US is dominated by two political parties. Even though there are other political parties in the US these tend to be completly ignored.
How much do the Republicans and Democrats differ. Are there areas where there is little or no difference between them. (e.g. the same kind of policies, even though they might use different language.)
It is quite possible to end up with a situation where even if the voting system worked perfectly issues would never have been decided by any kind of popular vote. Because candidates do not hold differing views on them,
The founders of the U.S. were considered terrorists by the British government, they chose to work outside the system to change it, and they won.
They probably initially tried to work "within the system" then decided this wouldn't work.
In this sense, the founders of the U.S. were much like this kid that recently got busted, though clearly Jefferson, et al were older and wiser than this kid.
Maybe luckier too.
Maybe we should be fighting terrorists with better foreign policy, and a review of our commercial morality.
Assuming you can separate US foreign policy and commercial morality. Since they appear to be intertwined. Maybe a good first step would be to abolish the concept of corporations as people. Maybe also the radical policy of the US not supporting non democratic governments and not supporting one side in a civil war.
Particularly seeing as how the 1960s semi-humorous "how to build a nuke" textfiles were actually found in Afghanistan, which tells you something about the odds that 11th-century minds are gonna be able to build 20th-century weapons, I thought this was a great idea.
IIRC some of the Americans for first found them in Afghanistan also belived them to be real...
when you want to mount successful political opposition, you start by keeping your nose squeaky clean so that no one can defame your character when the real work of change begins. this kid obviously didn't get that.
What makes you think that governments are incapable of creating some "dirt" if they need to? Or even dropping hints that someone being "squeaky clean" implies that they might be hiding something...
The identity of the victim of a crime isn't relevant as to whether or not a crime was commited.
Kind of hard to prove that there ever was a crime without being able to identify the alleged victim.
Suggesting that the identity of the victim justifies the crime is the same logic used by whackjobs who bomb abortion clinics and shoot people all the while claiming that they're doing God's work.
However in order to prosecute such a shooting or bombing you need both evidence there actually was a shooting or bombing and some ability to tie that to the suspect. As for someone identity being used as justification, if you are big enough that will work. If you want to see it in action, watch the news...
I mean they don't require sites to have any sort of standards, they just require that they have the policies in place,
Most likely "in place" equates to publishing some. Rather than actually following some policies...
A lot of my TV watching revolves around Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, and SciFi channel. Not so much for their series, but rather the specials like Walking with Dinos, Blue Planet, the occasional SciFi miniseries.
You do realise that the two examples you give were actually made by the BBC? Also "Walking with Dinosaurs" attracted quite a degree of critisism since it presents fictional elements (in places complete fiction) as though it is facts. Similarly with the followup, "Walking with Beasts".