I think the most important part of wikileaks is not so much the content of the leaks, but the reaction of people in power to them.
Exactly. If you didn't know 90% of the stuff in those leaks already, then you aren't going to learn anything from it being placed on some distributed servers somewhere and emanated via a thousand blogs and newspaper back-pages. You're going to learn it when there's a name and a face going around giving television interviews and provoking a backlash both from the established powers and from the ignorant public that maintains them. From what I have seen, Assange has done a deliberate and masterful job of attention-whoring for his cause.
They are similar, but the tube thing is a little worse.
A 2 meter long tube of explosives underground couldn't possibly be a worse threat than a 3-ton truck at street level.
the tubes might go underneath a building. Setting off a bomb there might be an easier way of taking it down than setting it off in front.
Many buildings have parking garages that go right underneath them. Remember the '93 WTC bombing? The OKC bomb was in a truck in front of the building.
Also, they can escape far from the scene of the crime without committing suicide. The current crop of terrorists might be okay with suicide, but if that changes, they'd be happy to know there was an automated delivery system.
Perhaps, but trucks and airplanes are already easy enough to operate remotely for a dedicated terrorist who doesn't want to commit suicide. And shipping a pallet of explosives across town already might as well be automated for under $500.
Also, for convenience, these systems would unload very close to your building, and may bypass traditional security systems if they are only intended for goods, and not people. This means that a bomber might be able to get much closer to a building than with a truck.
Now you're just describing stupid security setups. Obviously letting materials "bypass security systems" is going to cause problems. But most loading docks are already attached directly to buildings and completely un-guarded. And driving a truck through the front door pretty much gets you as close as you're going to get.
Nothing you've mentioned is a novel threat in any way.
The *real* problem with an automated material delivery system is preventing terrorists from loading up a giant bomb into one. And that is something that has frustrated me for a long time.
What's the difference between this and terrorists loading up a giant bomb in a truck and "delivering" it to your house?
Yeah, but just think of all the cheap jailbroken Linux remote-control tracking device cameras we will have two years from now. Like, a whole beowulf cluster of them.
These days, half of everyone works for the government in some capacity, and mostly spend their time tracking or actively harassing the other half.
This guy was apparently an active botnet herder, so was probably being watched by one government agency or five.
And, given that Wikileaks is a great advertisement for growth of the police-state info-dragnet apparatus, it's likely that they all wanted Wikileaks to succeed in bringing as much attention to the "dangers" of uncontrolled internet speech as possible.
Then you must not live in the US, glorious progenitor of the "rape-productive-employees-for-all-you-can-get-sell-your-stock-options-then-drive-your-company-into-the-ground-and-profit" brand of capitalism.
Unfortunately, most Americans actually are so mentally ill or highly-medicated, one, so as to believe that they fart rainbows and that everyone should support them and welcome them as liberators, mostly because Ronald Reagan told them so.
As far as I can tell, North Korea is an impoverished, economically crippled state with absolutely no imperialist aspirations whatsoever. Their national political philosophy, Juche, follows the model of "socialism in one country" and emphasizes self-sufficiency above all else. Please elaborate on why you feel that North Korea wants to have "strategic superiority over us"?
Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech "On Socialist Construction and the South Korean Revolution in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea":
1. "independence in political work" (chaju)
2. "self-sustenance in economic endeavors" (charip)
3. "self-defense in national defense" (chawi).
It's not that I disagree with you, but your argument seems to hinge on the assertion that the US gov't would never do anything that is ill-conceived or ultimately self-defeating.
Work harder, improve things, build redundancies, automate your job, etc...
I'll tell you from experience exactly where that gets you:
1) We don't know what you do, so we have to fire you;
2) We *do* know what you do, so you can train a replacement then we have to fire you; or,
3) You're irreplaceable, so we have to fire you.
So here's my career advice: smile and tell stupid jokes, leave exactly at 5:00 to go straight to the gym, and be completely incompetent at everything. This will land you a management and/or sales position in no time, along with a nice raise.
Because taxes are paid on profit. And profits are earned through technological advantage. And technology that is stolen from the US eliminates that advantage.
Alternately, one of the primary purposes of government is to protect people's rights, like the right not to be robbed. (haha j/k no one actually believes that anymore do they?)
Right. I have mod points, but not nearly enough to correct even half of the retarded stuff in this discussion. Welcome to Obama's America, where not taxing == spending, and attracting high-paying service jobs to your country makes it go broke.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's important to identify the reason that this appears so. Because the naive interpretation, that the companies are somehow taking advantage of the government or the people, is simply not true, at least in this case.
Corporations that set up shop in a tax haven represent an un-realized asset to that country. As in, they could theoretically be taxed at a higher rate, at least for a little while, but they aren't. So there's money to be made there. And it's important to recognize the nature of this profit potential: raising taxes creates short-term profit at the expense of the long-term benefits of having these companies remain.
Regardless, this creates incentive for *someone* to capitalize on this imbalance in tax rates. It might be that a new political party could arise, and offer to raise taxes. Or it might be that an external power might create pressure to raise taxes. Or, in this case, what occurred is that third parties backed by the Irish government, the banks, just went ahead and spent more money than they could afford, forcing the gov't to raise the revenue elsewhere.
That's not true. Companies create capital and economies of scale that individuals cannot. This is what is taxed, in order to level the playing field and encourage entrepreneurialism and free markets over corporatism and monopoly.
It would be really nice if we could get back to the model where many applications run under a single managed O/S entity. To help maintain availability, however, that single O/S entity should be distributed across a cluster of hardware servers.
This is what MOSIX does. Five years ago, I might have thought it still had a chance to be the game-changer that brought sanity and efficiency back to the server room. I tend to think the reasons it wasn't a game-changer had more to do with the limitations of X than anything.
In fact, if one were really motivated, it's possible to bypass X altogether and use a cluster of Linux machines to serve Windows apps via RDP from a single logical MOSIX OS.
But these days it seems clear that the market will continue in this protracted slugfest between MS and their legions of crappy, cheap programmers building one buzzword-laden kludge after another, and the competent developers slowly taking over the world with massively-scalable Java and LAMP apps. One is agile, the other works. It doesn't look like we will return to any type of elegant framework that is agile, functional and easy to manage any time soon.
Running a remote desktop session for a single app that could just as well have been installed locally is pretty much the definition of "cloud computing" according to Microsoft.
Remember everyone's fears in 2003 when it was suspected that microsoft and other companies would start charging you to access your own files and essentially control your data?
Those fears only existed in the IT community. Accountants and, by extension, corporate officers, loved the idea.
Which is why internal "clouds" have always amused me to no end...
Personally, as a *nix generalist, even the idea of an external "cloud" is ridiculous to me. What the hell does a company actually do, if it outsources even it's own knowledge management?
But I agree that an internal "cloud" is just as misguided. The sad fact is that most companies with more than a few hundred employees are organized as collections of surprisingly small fiefdoms. Even until recently, the idea of centralizing something as common as IT infrastructure really was so foreign to the typical corporate structure that it had to be sold in a way that those fiefdoms could treat it as an external service.
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I think the most important part of wikileaks is not so much the content of the leaks, but the reaction of people in power to them.
Exactly. If you didn't know 90% of the stuff in those leaks already, then you aren't going to learn anything from it being placed on some distributed servers somewhere and emanated via a thousand blogs and newspaper back-pages. You're going to learn it when there's a name and a face going around giving television interviews and provoking a backlash both from the established powers and from the ignorant public that maintains them. From what I have seen, Assange has done a deliberate and masterful job of attention-whoring for his cause.
He meant to say "my Asian sister-in-law".
They are similar, but the tube thing is a little worse.
A 2 meter long tube of explosives underground couldn't possibly be a worse threat than a 3-ton truck at street level.
the tubes might go underneath a building. Setting off a bomb there might be an easier way of taking it down than setting it off in front.
Many buildings have parking garages that go right underneath them. Remember the '93 WTC bombing? The OKC bomb was in a truck in front of the building.
Also, they can escape far from the scene of the crime without committing suicide. The current crop of terrorists might be okay with suicide, but if that changes, they'd be happy to know there was an automated delivery system.
Perhaps, but trucks and airplanes are already easy enough to operate remotely for a dedicated terrorist who doesn't want to commit suicide. And shipping a pallet of explosives across town already might as well be automated for under $500.
Also, for convenience, these systems would unload very close to your building, and may bypass traditional security systems if they are only intended for goods, and not people. This means that a bomber might be able to get much closer to a building than with a truck.
Now you're just describing stupid security setups. Obviously letting materials "bypass security systems" is going to cause problems. But most loading docks are already attached directly to buildings and completely un-guarded. And driving a truck through the front door pretty much gets you as close as you're going to get.
Nothing you've mentioned is a novel threat in any way.
How does that compare to the price of wheat, or some other commodity that more accurately reflects the value of a dollar?
It hasn't quite matched the tsunami of incompetent monetary policy that struck in 07/08, but it's getting there. Wheat has gone up 50% in six months.
The *real* problem with an automated material delivery system is preventing terrorists from loading up a giant bomb into one. And that is something that has frustrated me for a long time.
What's the difference between this and terrorists loading up a giant bomb in a truck and "delivering" it to your house?
Yeah, but just think of all the cheap jailbroken Linux remote-control tracking device cameras we will have two years from now. Like, a whole beowulf cluster of them.
So exercising your right to free speech is responsible for the growth of the police state?
Does it not seem that way to you, at least in the short term?
Julian Assange's picture is on "Wanted: Dead or Alive" posters and most Americans seem to think he should be prosecuted for one thing or another.
These days, half of everyone works for the government in some capacity, and mostly spend their time tracking or actively harassing the other half.
This guy was apparently an active botnet herder, so was probably being watched by one government agency or five.
And, given that Wikileaks is a great advertisement for growth of the police-state info-dragnet apparatus, it's likely that they all wanted Wikileaks to succeed in bringing as much attention to the "dangers" of uncontrolled internet speech as possible.
So, yes.
Then you must not live in the US, glorious progenitor of the "rape-productive-employees-for-all-you-can-get-sell-your-stock-options-then-drive-your-company-into-the-ground-and-profit" brand of capitalism.
Unfortunately, most Americans actually are so mentally ill or highly-medicated, one, so as to believe that they fart rainbows and that everyone should support them and welcome them as liberators, mostly because Ronald Reagan told them so.
As far as I can tell, North Korea is an impoverished, economically crippled state with absolutely no imperialist aspirations whatsoever. Their national political philosophy, Juche, follows the model of "socialism in one country" and emphasizes self-sufficiency above all else. Please elaborate on why you feel that North Korea wants to have "strategic superiority over us"?
Kim Il-sung outlined the three fundamental principles of Juche in his April 14, 1965, speech "On Socialist Construction and the South Korean Revolution in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea":
1. "independence in political work" (chaju)
2. "self-sustenance in economic endeavors" (charip)
3. "self-defense in national defense" (chawi).
It's not that I disagree with you, but your argument seems to hinge on the assertion that the US gov't would never do anything that is ill-conceived or ultimately self-defeating.
The US military is officially just a giant rube goldberg contraption designed to transfer tax monies to defense contractors.
I think this might even beat out the guys who manage to sell their anti-gravity tesla coils to the pentagon.
Work harder, improve things, build redundancies, automate your job, etc...
I'll tell you from experience exactly where that gets you:
1) We don't know what you do, so we have to fire you;
2) We *do* know what you do, so you can train a replacement then we have to fire you; or,
3) You're irreplaceable, so we have to fire you.
So here's my career advice: smile and tell stupid jokes, leave exactly at 5:00 to go straight to the gym, and be completely incompetent at everything. This will land you a management and/or sales position in no time, along with a nice raise.
Why was the FBI and taxpayer money involved?
Because taxes are paid on profit. And profits are earned through technological advantage. And technology that is stolen from the US eliminates that advantage.
Alternately, one of the primary purposes of government is to protect people's rights, like the right not to be robbed. (haha j/k no one actually believes that anymore do they?)
Right. I have mod points, but not nearly enough to correct even half of the retarded stuff in this discussion. Welcome to Obama's America, where not taxing == spending, and attracting high-paying service jobs to your country makes it go broke.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's important to identify the reason that this appears so. Because the naive interpretation, that the companies are somehow taking advantage of the government or the people, is simply not true, at least in this case.
Corporations that set up shop in a tax haven represent an un-realized asset to that country. As in, they could theoretically be taxed at a higher rate, at least for a little while, but they aren't. So there's money to be made there. And it's important to recognize the nature of this profit potential: raising taxes creates short-term profit at the expense of the long-term benefits of having these companies remain.
Regardless, this creates incentive for *someone* to capitalize on this imbalance in tax rates. It might be that a new political party could arise, and offer to raise taxes. Or it might be that an external power might create pressure to raise taxes. Or, in this case, what occurred is that third parties backed by the Irish government, the banks, just went ahead and spent more money than they could afford, forcing the gov't to raise the revenue elsewhere.
They have their own banks. They aren't sound.
These American banks, and corporations, are subsidized by the US, so there isn't really any downside to having them in Ireland.
Do you really think that these companies would be such idiots if Ireland were looking for an excuse to get rid of them?
That's not true. Companies create capital and economies of scale that individuals cannot. This is what is taxed, in order to level the playing field and encourage entrepreneurialism and free markets over corporatism and monopoly.
Is anything really external?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxq9yj2pVWk
It would be really nice if we could get back to the model where many applications run under a single managed O/S entity. To help maintain availability, however, that single O/S entity should be distributed across a cluster of hardware servers.
This is what MOSIX does. Five years ago, I might have thought it still had a chance to be the game-changer that brought sanity and efficiency back to the server room. I tend to think the reasons it wasn't a game-changer had more to do with the limitations of X than anything.
In fact, if one were really motivated, it's possible to bypass X altogether and use a cluster of Linux machines to serve Windows apps via RDP from a single logical MOSIX OS.
But these days it seems clear that the market will continue in this protracted slugfest between MS and their legions of crappy, cheap programmers building one buzzword-laden kludge after another, and the competent developers slowly taking over the world with massively-scalable Java and LAMP apps. One is agile, the other works. It doesn't look like we will return to any type of elegant framework that is agile, functional and easy to manage any time soon.
Running a remote desktop session for a single app that could just as well have been installed locally is pretty much the definition of "cloud computing" according to Microsoft.
Remember everyone's fears in 2003 when it was suspected that microsoft and other companies would start charging you to access your own files and essentially control your data?
Those fears only existed in the IT community. Accountants and, by extension, corporate officers, loved the idea.
Which is why internal "clouds" have always amused me to no end...
Personally, as a *nix generalist, even the idea of an external "cloud" is ridiculous to me. What the hell does a company actually do, if it outsources even it's own knowledge management?
But I agree that an internal "cloud" is just as misguided. The sad fact is that most companies with more than a few hundred employees are organized as collections of surprisingly small fiefdoms. Even until recently, the idea of centralizing something as common as IT infrastructure really was so foreign to the typical corporate structure that it had to be sold in a way that those fiefdoms could treat it as an external service.