I could go for a free first term, though it would probably be more along the lines of a processing cost. This all relies on having a bureaucracy to track and charge for this, so that money needs to come from somewhere. Like the US Post Office, I would want to have it be self sufficient, using collected fees to run itself. I would imagine that with just a few long extended copyrights that they would have enough money to keep running.
I like your plan, though I would change the lengths a bit.
My idea on how to have stuff fall into the public domain, while appeasing the Disney's of the world:
The initial copyright lasts 10 years and costs $100.
The next 5 years costs $1,000, the next 5 years $100,000, and the next 5 costs $10,000,000 and so on. Every extension costs 100x more than the last. If a product is really worth it to a company to keep in copyright, they can keep it for as long as they like, it's just going to reach a point of being too expensive to be practical.
I'm sure the numbers would be argued over, and a compromise could be reached; but the goal is to make companies do a real cost-benefit analysis on a copyright, rather pooling their resources to buy a few congressmen every 10 years.
Suppose we find trilobite skeletons on Mars... and the next day an alien ship enters our system. In his work, those two are contradictory events. They cannot happen in the same universe. But there are all kinds of ways they COULD happen.
Not really, it just means that they have been hiding from us this whole time, and life is common. He accepts that whatever aliens exist could be hoodwinking us, but it's not worth considering. If they are, they are doing a damn good job of it and we aren't likely to figure it out for a while now. We can only go on the evidence we have, and that evidence currently points to us being alone.
Now, whether a million years is significant or not...
It is not in the entire history of Life.
It is VERY significant in the history of any single species.
Agreed, but keep in mind that, if humanity isn't wiped out for any other reason we've got something close to 4 billion years to keep spinning on this planet. A few million here or there is nothing. If something does wipe us out, that points towards this Great Filter idea, and we fail it.
Rather, a civilization would colonize the area around it... develop that area... and then move out from that fringe in X years. So you would have a new fringe area every X years. And X would (given human life spans) be a few thousand years. Just long enough to get the colony's population up to where it could build a space program of its own.
Yup, that is probably how it is going to be done. But there are a few things to remember.
First, it won't take thousands of years to build up to the point of sending people on. The Earth's population has only really exploded since the Industrial Revolution, until that point it was fairly steady. So the needed population growth will probably happen in a few centuries.
Second, the colony won't be starting from scratch. They will be taking knowledge with them and will be able to bootstrap a civilization on the new planet which has a technological civilization similar to that of the parent planet. Consider the US, the European colonies didn't have to start over again and build up from the stone age. They didn't need to figure out how to work copper, and then learn to make bronze and finally figure out how to collect and burn coal so that they could smelt iron. They had that knowledge and it was much faster to build a modern (for that time) civilization.
The problem with our being alone in our galaxy is that it is improbable, without some limiting factor on space faring civilizations (read: a Great Filter). Even with slow generation ships, this galaxy has had 13 billion years for another intelligent race to explore it. Even if we assume that it took such a race 5 billion years to evolve to that point and even if it took the galaxy 5 billion years to get around to making such a planet, they have had 3 billion years to map out the galaxy, notice this nice planet of ours, and take it for their own. Even if we assume that it takes them 10,000 years to push 1 light year closer to us, and they happen to be at the exact opposite side of the galaxy from us, they should have been here 2 billion years ago.
For example, the whole article (what I read of it before my eyes glazed over and I passed out) seems to revolve around this whole idea of the existence of a "Great Filter" event that makes technologically advanced species highly unlikely. He bases this on the statistical probabilities of such a species existing but not contacting us, but offers no really convincing arguments that such a filter event must exist.
The reason for the assumption of a Great Filter comes out of the Fermi Paradox. If you start by looking at the Drake Equation and the assumption that Earth like planets with intelligent civilizations are not that uncommon, you very quickly come to the conclusion that there should be a whole lot of intelligent species in just our own galaxy. Further, since there are billions of stars which existed well before our own (talking billions of years before) one would expect that there should be at least a few advanced civilizations which have had time to colonize our galaxy. Even with slow generation ships this should only take on the order of a couple hundred million years. If they only started out while our planet was cooling, they should have found us by now, known that this planet was going to be Earth-like and setup shop back when they could go hunting Dinosaurs.
So, where the hell are they?
However, I would argue that with the number of planets out there (many millions probably, since we've managed to find some around lots of stars, and we can't even detect the Earth-sized ones yet) and the vast distances involved, the chances of some interstellar-traveling species coming upon our particular little planet is pretty slim, no matter what sci-fi would have you believe.
Much of our fantasizing about extraterrestrial life has assumed that there is some way to travel faster than light and we just haven't discovered it yet. However, what if there really isn't? What if physics simply won't allow faster than light travel? In that case, unless the advanced civilization was extraordinarily close to us, it's virtually impossible for them to have encountered us by now, even if they had been out landing on other planets for thousands or millions of years.
Yes, but in the amount of time in which the Milky Way is known to have existed; and assuming that space faring civilizations are not ridiculously uncommon; they've had plenty of time to map this galaxy.
The oldest known star in our galaxy is about 13 billion years old, so the galaxy is at least that old, if not close to the actual age of the Universe itself (current estimates put it around 13.7 billion years). So, let's try to make some reasonable assumptions. For example, let us assume that it took our galaxy half of it's life to produce the first space faring civilization which felt the need to expand. If we call the formation of the galaxy year 0 and go forward, this civilization would have set out to colonize the universe at year 6.5 billion. Our very own solar system was still about 1.96 billion years from forming. At about 250 billion stars in our galaxy, it means that they would have needed to map an average of 128 stars a year to know about the Earth when it was forming. And then they had another 4 billion plus years before humans decided to show up, reducing the mapping load to 42 stars a year on average. And they probably wouldn't need to visit every star. Even with the technology we have now, we can get a good idea of what a star is like and know where it is. Our ability to detect exoplanets is getting better and better; it is quite possible that we will reach a point where we can detect Earth-like planets without the need to go there. So the mapping need would really amount to only visiting stars with likely planets. The problem is that, they should have had billions of years to be finding planets, not just the paltry millions you are giving them.
So again, where the hell are they?
There are only a few possible logical conclusions:
A) They're hiding - For whatev
You forgot pro-hacking.
I'm willing to bet that the more technical savvy among Slashdot would be willing to point out hacking techniques and information, just for the asking. The assumption being that by exposing the flaws in the system, they will be fixed. Try passing off 'security through obscurity' as real security and you'll be lucky to make it out without a few burns.
That said, assuming this is a real case, most of what is being asked for is easy and could be figured out with Google and a little logical thought.
With physical access to the laptop, getting to the files is trivial unless they are encrypted. The steps for recovering a lost root password come up in Google really quick.
The stuff from a University can be had by the parents for the asking. But it would have to be the parents with a Death Certificate, I can't see the University giving it out to a random person.
MSN, Hotmail, MySpace, et al. have procedures for account recovery. If you know the account name and have control of the associated email address, resetting the password would be a matter of guessing the response to a personal question. Since the person in question is well known, this should be possible. Also, if you have the mailbox, the password may be lurking in it already.
Also, I'd guess that MSN et al. has a procedure in place for this sort of thing. Email them and ask.
Anglish is a fucked up and weird aborted bastard child of a language. Seriously, spend a little time with most of the "rules" and you will end up with something along the lines of:
If A then B, except in cases where C is true, then we do D. And there are a few special cases where we do F just because, and don't you dare mess those up. And when the moon is full on the third Tuesday of the Second Month after the third snow storm of the year in Walla Walla Washington we do Q.
Now, moving on to i before e....
Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.
** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.
Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.
So, what's sentience?
Of course the choice of where to draw the line, of what is ok to eat and what is not, is very vague. There's really not a logically defensible place to put it. For example, you use the ability to learn as a reason to place something in the not edible category. Why? What is so special about the ability to learn that places a thing in the not edible category?
What to eat and what not to eat is really just a moral choice that each of us needs to make ourselves. There are some consequences to our choices, but otherwise it is all the same. The biggest problem with eating other human beings is that our current society tends to value human life to the point that doing so is a bad plan for your own survival. Consider the popular reaction to Jeffery Dahmer, even the criminals of our society wanted him gone. So, as a matter of personal survival, eating other human beings is a bad plan. Excepting in extreme survival situations, in which case it can be mildly heroic. As was the case with the Andes Flight Disaster
The problem with trying to place any choice of what is ok to eat and what is not, is that it will inevitably be based on some sort of moral foundation. Unless that moral foundation is universally agreed upon, you may as well be building a castle in the clouds. And that, at it's heart is the problem with this who pro/anti meat eating argument. Neither side really has a leg to stand on.
In the end, I take the stance that it's up to each of us to decide and we're welcome to it. I think the reason many meat eaters react as the poster above did is that we can feel threatened by the more militant of vegetarians (PETA being a good example). I have no problem with someone who decides not to eat meat, but please, leave my steak alone.
That said, huzzah for PETA on this. I'll gladly take a cloned steak over a real one, assuming that the taste is close enough. I believe that this is one of the great promises of cloning technology, the ability to make meat, without the need for the farming and killing of animals. Just take a few cells and grow them into whatever muscle based meat you want. Designer meats might even make eating too much meat less unhealthy. And with a bit of work, we might be able to feed those populations who are in places where agriculture has failed.
The engineering department wanted WiFi in the building in order to hook up the conference rooms and let students use wireless in the classroom. Seems simple enough, especially in this day and age. A formal request was made. And rejected by IT. Random bitching and moaning. So after a few months of inaction, the engineering department installed a few routers themselves, under the radar.
The obvious questions is: why was the request denied?
While having wireless is convenient, it's not critical to getting work done. It sounds like they had a functioning network, but they just couldn't be bothered to run a cable or two. It may be that the IT department either didn't have the money or resources to do it correctly at that time and didn't want to half-ass it. It takes up a lot less resources and creates a lot less frustration in the long run to plan it out and do it correctly the first time, than to half-ass it and then be forever fixing it, only to finally redo it the right way in the end; which usually takes up more time because you now have to plan for a transition as well.
Implementing wireless in a secure and controlled fashion means a bit more than just hooking up an access point and hoping for the best. Just off the top of my head, you have to think about interference to and from other devices in the area. Having multiple access points configured in an area to overlap and provide a seamless network. And, <insert deity here> forbid that there is actually some sort of security to keep non-university traffic off the network. As we all know, Universities love to have their bandwidth consumed by random people in the area/driving by downloading porn and running bit-torrent clients.
Also, with the politics at a University, you can bet that as soon as one department has a wireless network, every other department will be whining day and night about why they don't have one yet, so it isn't just one department to worry about, it's all of them.
But to fuck 'em, we want our wireless network and we want it now, and IT is just being bitchy and acting like a bunch of spoiled kids with a little bit of power. They don't have the best interests of the University at heart, they just want to be lazy and not give me what I want now.
1 TB = a small corner of my SAN.
Personally, I love the idea of small, high capacity, solid state drives. The systems I admin are used for GIS research, and I dread what may happen anytime one of the researches takes a laptop into the field for data collection. So far, the worst which has happened was that one laptop went for a swim, which might have been ok except the salinity of the water was very high.
Ok, so a solid state drive may not have helped too much in that case, but for the occasional drop, bang or 120 degree weather; solid state drives are just gonna survive better.
I'm thinking eSATA may fill the gap, though it does have the drawback of not powering the device directly. Of course, there is an easy solution to that: have a device which runs on 5VDC at less than 5mw. Connect the data port to eSATA and the power port to the USB port, and you're done.
There are a lot of people out there who think it would be hilarious to find that FBI address and hide it all over there internet camouflaged and try to get it clicked as often as possible, both to waste the FBI time as well as make strangers and sometimes known enemies suffer.
I wouldn't call it hilarious, but I think if we could reach a point where there was a sufficient number of rich false positives, we might just get this stupidity shut down. While I agree with locking up pedos who go after 4 year olds; with the damage it does to someone's life to just be accused of such a thing, I think we need to be really careful about who we tar and feather.
If nothing else, just getting people to wardrive around affluent neighborhoods and have some sort of spider which starts off at known pedo sites and follows links for a few minutes might be a good start. If we can get a few judges and politicians nailed with this stupidity, even better.
While I agree with your premise, I think it would help for the people behind the security schemes to not throw the gauntlet down at the feet of the hackers, that just pisses them off. I will give BD+ credit though, it managed to hold them off for 8 months, which is a pretty long time considering the brain power which was probably thrown at this.
Young Earth type: the Bible was literal truth, fossils exist only to test our faith
Of all the Young Earth types, these ones seem to at least have some intellectual honesty. Consider the argument as a whole for a moment. If we assume that there is some sort of omnipotent being (I realize that this assumption is the weak point for a lot of people, but just go with me for a moment). And we further assume that it was within this being's power and desire to create the universe, why would it be necessary for it to have been created at any particular point in time? Working within the base assumption of omnipotence, this being should be able to create a universe with a set of rules to achieve a particular result, and then start it at a point in time as if all of the previous run time had occurred.
Could it simply be that "god" wanted a new fishbowl to stare at, knew what type of fish he wanted to stare at, and rather than make a universe and wait around for those fish to pop up; he simply designed the fishbowl, and built it with the timer set for the right type of fish to be in it? Of course, us fish are now stuck in it and just figuring out the rules he setup for this particular universe and how best to live in it. This means that the universe is not really old, in an absolute sense, even though it's starting conditions make it appear so. Why it took him 7 days to do it, who knows; perhaps omnipotence is a bit of an overstatement, and even god has trouble with long division.
I can see that someone who is otherwise intelligent, and capable at science might be able to use this sort of logic to arrive at a Young Earth belief that doesn't have a problem with 4 million year old fossils. God just wanted a race of beings which met certain specifications, to worship him (god really is an egotistical bastard, isn't he?). And rather than create a universe and wait around for them to spring up or create an internally inconsistent universe which would prove his existence, he created a consistent universe for them to live in, and just started it off as if all that previous boring time without people to worship him had already happened. He then went through the trouble to tinker with that universe, shortly after its creation, to make sure that the fish in it knew of him, and would worship him of their own free will (or burn in hell, nothing like a little fear to make people bow down willingly; I guess we can say that god was the universe's first terrorist;) ).
I think most techs, and even admins are going to fall into the, "as long as it doesn't break anything, I don't really care." camp. As an admin, I couldn't care less which browser people use. We do have a few in house applications which are IE only, but as long as people are willing to deal with their own browser issues, if they want to use Firefox, Safari, Lynx, go for it. Just don't bug me when your browser of choice doesn't display correctly. Mind you, I work for a small research group at a University; so, YMMV.
On the other side of the coin, I do understand why IT departments can be heavy handed about the software on client systems. It's tough to support $diety knows what on a system that has a million different applications installed. While it's simple to tell people that we won't support anything which is not on the "approved" list, it's much harder in practice to tell someone that they have lost all of their data to a bug in a program that helps them in their work. As an example of this, part of my mission is to support certain masters level students and their computers. I had one poor lady who's entire master's thesis was nearly lost because of a third party application which helps with adding and managing endnotes. The official answer would have been, "we don't support that, sorry." But it takes a certain level of heartlessness to actually say that to someone. So, I spent a few hours figuring out how to get the document back out of the program.
And none of this considers the poor bastards who have to deal with HIPPA and/or Sarbanes-Oxley. With the security requirements mandated by both of those, I can kinda understand the BOFH approach and using mafia style tactics to enforce desktop policy. There are just some environments where security is a must, and the IT guys suddenly have to be the bad guys about it. Again, by way of example, my last job was setting up systems for physical security and access control systems. A guard level login to the system presented the user with a blank desktop, no taskbar, and a small application with a couple buttons on it to launch the required applications. Beyond that, they had nothing. The Start Menu was disabled, right clicking on the desktop was disabled, sticky keys and other accessibility options were disabled, autorun was disabled, the BIOS had a password, the system would only boot to the primary drive, etc. There was also the expectation that the system itself was going to be locked up to prevent physical access. It worked pretty well for what it was meant to do, which was prevent a bored guard from installing something at 3am.
I think one of the other important points the article makes is that the hacked FTP servers aren't just random FTP server nor are they just small shops running Windows SBS with the Next-Next-Next install and no one monitoring them. The FTP servers were from large companies whom users might trust.
As has been said by someone above, blindly trusting links you get in emails, and then running the linked executable, either requires an amazing amount of ignorance these days, or a special kind of stupid. Yet, somehow, trojans are alive and well in the intertubes.
The constitution does two things: limits the power of the government, and makes sure that what power they do have is used properly.
I would argue that this is entirely backwards to the intent of the US Constitution. The Constitution does not limit the power of government, it grants power to the government. Government power should not be limited by what we say it can't do, but instead it should only have what powers we directly give to it. That is the reason we are in the mess we are with the Bush administration, we have let the definition of what powers the government has be changed.
This was actually one of the primary arguments against the Bill of Rights when it was introduced. The claim was that, by explicitly listing limitations on what the government could do, it would imply that the government could do anything else it wanted to do. Funny thing about that argument, it seems to be bearing out. The compromise was to include the Ninth and Tenth Amendments; which, ideally, state that the list of rights isn't exhaustive and that the Federal Government has no more power than is listed in the Articles of the Constitution. To make life easy: Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Tenth Amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Essentially, the Ninth states that the list isn't exhaustive and that the people have other rights. So, next time someone says to you, "there is no Constitutional Right to Privacy" bitch slap them and show them this amendment. Just because a right is not listed in the constitution, doesn't mean that we do not have it. If you really want to carry that "not in the Constitution" stupidity to its logical extreme, you don't have a Right to Life either. Keep in mind that the oft quoted "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" isn't in the Constitution anywhere; it's from the Declaration of Independence. A document which was really just a rant to King George III about what an asshole he was, and has no legal standing in the US.
The Tenth Amendment was supposed to also be the stop gap on the Federal Government claiming other powers which were not given to it by the Articles of the Constitution. But this may as well not exist anymore as the US Supreme Court gave Congress a complete end run on it by ruling that intrastate commerce effects interstate commerce and therefore can be regulated by the Federal Government. As such, the Federal Government merely needs to show a link between any activity they want to regulate and commerce of some sort, and they can now regulate it.
The US Constitution is not supposed to "limit the power of the government". It is supposed to grant powers to the Federal Government, and they can go get stuffed if they want to do anything else. It is a huge problem that the perception of this has been turned around. The Constitution has stopped being the way in which We the People pass powers to our government and become a shield we try to use to defend ourselves from a Federal Government grown out of control. My hope is that we can fix this, and put the Federal Government back in it's box; I worry though, that this can only end badly.
Because enough of society has bought into the War on Your Rights...er, Drugs that the idea of using employers to be the enforcers of that particular brand of stupidity is easily accepted. The few objectors are probably junkies who should be in jail anyway.
I think bwthomas hit the nail on the head with this. We should be scrutinizing our politicians and police because we have given them special powers in our society, and that needs to bring with it oversight. In the case of employers and their employees, it's not the employer's place to police what people do in their personal lives, unless there is a direct effect on their work. For example, if you show up for work three sheets to the wind, you're probably about to get a pink slip; doesn't matter what drug you're doing it on. On the other hand, if you like to get drunk on the weekends, and snort coke off of the belly of a prostitute while being fucked in the ass by a donkey; you're a sicko, but as long as there is no one being actually harmed (willing BDSM doesn't count), go for it! Just so long as you arrive at work Monday morning clear and ready to work.
So, because something might have a failure point, it should never be done?
Most defensive systems are layered because it is understood that each layer may fail; but, taken as a whole the system should be close to bullet-proof. This is part of the problem with the fence plan, it is being promoted as a panacea to the problem of illegal immigration, it won't be. But what it is, is another layer to prevent illegal immigration.
Right now, the border has nothing to prevent crossing along large stretches; and unsurprisingly, it is being crossed regularly. A physical fence will serve to slow down or redirect crossings. A virtual fence would provide some warning to border guards about an attempt. And assuming that the federal government actually cared enough to fund the program, the border guards would be able to stop the crossing. Would it be perfect? Not likely, but really, show me a complex system which is. This then needs to be followed up further in, the catch and release of illegal immigrants needs to be stopped. The people who employ illegal immigrants need to punished (mind you, I said people, fining companies is a good start, but people need to end up in jail over it; starting with C-Level execs).
After that, we need to start looking at how to get immigrants here legally to do the low end jobs. As you have put forth several times, it is beneficial for us here in the US to have immigrant labor. But it needs to be controlled for a number of reasons. First and foremost, is the treatment of the people in those jobs. Illegal immigrants are often treated little better than slaves, and possibly worse. At the very least a slave owner had some incentive to keep a slave alive and in reasonable health, a new slave was expensive; a new illegal immigrant is just a trip to the corner away and the old one will probably do you the favor of going somewhere else to die. The second reason is that we do not want a large, disaffected underclass. These tend to cause problems such as crime. Lastly, for tax purposes. These people should be paying taxes and receiving the benefits of those taxes. I want people who come here to have access to our education system and, if they pay into it, our social security system.
In the end, this is probably along the lines of a guest worker program. That's fine, but considering that the last time illegal immigration was a hot button issue (in the 80's) we tried the amnesty first, and we'll get around to the enforcement later; it failed. I want to try it the other way 'round this time. Prove to me that we will actually control our borders, and then we'll talk about how to deal with the labor needs. Fool me once...
And the last piece of the puzzle, is going to be how to allow our farmers and manufacturers to deal with international competition. If we actually enforce some standards on the working conditions of these types of jobs, it is going to raise prices. With competition from other countries, without these standards, our local producers will not be able to compete. Now, the way I see it, we're going to need to do a two way approach. First, we may well have to establish a second level of minimum wage for those jobs such as picking berries. It's probably not going to be something we would view as a livable wage, with livable defined by the current standard of living in the US middle class; but it will be more than the pittance and often with-held wages illegal immigrants receive now. It would also give the immigrant workers some legal standing and backing to get those wages. We will also need to accept that those jobs will not carry the benefits most Americans take for granted (medical, dental, paid leave, etc.). Safety and health codes though, should be kept up and inspected.
These changes alone probably won't be enough; after all, having some working standards is probably more expensive than a sweatshop in China using forced labor. The second part of this approach is going to be a certain level of isolationism. We are going to have
Yes but:
Oh my god, there was an electrical fire in a substation and all of the safety protocols worked flawlessly, EVERYONE PANIC!!1!1ONE-ELEVENTY1!!
Doesn't make for a good headline. Now, throw Nukular in there somehow and we can whip up some real panic.
Am I that important? At the moment no. Now, prove to me that I won't end up in some grouping of people who is later considered dangerous, because I was born to the wrong parents. Won't happen in the US? Bullshit, it already did once and nothing has changed drastically to prevent it happening again.
The problem with unchecked data collection is that that data will hang around for a long time to come. Should some faction of the government, or the government as a whole decide that they suddenly want to be rid of a certain segment of the population that data will be searched and the hits will be hit. The problem about data collection isn't what is being done with it now, it's what may be done with it in the future. Unless there is a compelling reason (sorry, both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror fall under epic fail here) the government should not be allowed to collect that information. The government, no matter how benign at the moment always has the potential to grow out of control. It is important that should such an unfortunate occurrence come to pass that it is as difficult as possible for that government to dominate the people.
Well, a quick google search turned up that a cell phone has about a 1 watt transmitter. A Bluetooth class 1 transmitter has a power output of about 100mw, but this is unlikely to be in a cell phone. Class 2 and 3 only transmit with 2.5mW and 1mW respectively. So, at worst, the bluetooth headsets are 10x less energetic than the cell phone's transmission and more likely down around 500-1000x less energetic. I'd fear bluetooth far less (about a 500x less;-) ) than I would fear a cell phone, which isn't much to begin with.
For one thing, what's the point of taking over a territory if there's nobody there to rebuild and to use as a resource?
It depends on the goals of the war. If it is a war of conquest, you are right that you want to keep the infrastructure as intact as possible, and enough civilians alive to make it useful.
On the other hand, if the war is over land or resources, an indigenous population may be counterproductive to the goal. Ultimately, you may not want the local people to interfere with the collection of or compete for those resources. In this case, mowing down the civilian population may be more productive, unless there is a need for a large, unskilled labor force for collection.
A defensive war is also a place where massive civilian casualties is an option. If the goal is the destruction of an enemy's ability to wage war, without the added goal of conquest, you would want to destroy as much of the enemy infrastructure as possible, and killing the enemy civilians also helps to destroy the ability to make war. A good example of this would be Rome's last campaign against Carthage; the city was destroyed, the people killed or enslaved, and the ground salted; not pretty, but Carthage was never a threat to Rome again. Arguably, it wasn't at the time it was destroyed either, but I'm looking at the goals and results, not the reasons. This is also where we see the firebombing of WWII, such as Dresden or Tokyo. Not exactly nice things, but they destroyed the production of the cities involved and sapped the will to fight from the people in them.
The fact is, wars are not nice, and we should never expect them to be so. In the modern age we seem to have forgotten this and have been using wars as ome sort of surgical tool to further political gain. This is a mistake, and something which we should pull off the table for our political leaders. Sadly, I don't think we will be able to do this for some time to come and without a lot of social strife.
I think it's more along the lines of it was first 'a' and now it's becoming 'b'.
The American people gave up on taking responsibility for themselves when the Great Depression hit. They had screwed up and instead of working themselves out of it, they turned to government to fix it. Ever since, when troubles arise, instead of working it out themselves, people turn to government to fix it. It should be no surprise that our leaders have used that blind trust and faith to garner power and money for themselves and their cronies. The end result is where we are now, the people have given up their superiority over their government and unless we the people decide it's time to take responsibility for ourselves, and actually do it, it's going to be a fun ride into whatever form of tyranny we end up with (I've got my money on a "Brave New World" type central authoritarian system).
And to think, I consider myself a patriot. But, I'm not so blinded by it to be unable to see that we have screwed up royal and that we're in trouble.
I wouldn't really expect it, every ISP will be worried that someone will stick with the flat-rate scheme and customers will flock to it.
Back when AOL was actually worth getting (at least Neverwinter Nights made it so for me), they started out with the pay-as-you-go idea. You paid a basic fee for access and a few minutes and then they charged you for anything beyond that at a per-minute rate. Worked out OK, though I did find myself going over pretty regularly. But when they switched to the flat-rate all-you-can-eat plan, AOL exploded. The number of users shot through the roof and they had a lot of trouble keeping up with demand. In my own little corner of the world at that time, I could spend an hour or more dialing, getting a busy signal, dialing, getting a busy signal, etc. It took them a while to catch up with demand, once they did though I never looked back and never would have wanted to go back. Then they killed NWN and my account was canceled shortly afterwards, but that was just a matter of not wanting the hassle of AOL's crapware just to get on the internet.
The pay-as-you-go idea has been tried, it worked when there wasn't another choice; and, unless the recent changes in the requirement for access to small ISP's really does kill off all competition, I don't see ISP's going back. They will be far to scared that their customers will go elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I could go for a free first term, though it would probably be more along the lines of a processing cost. This all relies on having a bureaucracy to track and charge for this, so that money needs to come from somewhere. Like the US Post Office, I would want to have it be self sufficient, using collected fees to run itself. I would imagine that with just a few long extended copyrights that they would have enough money to keep running.
I like your plan, though I would change the lengths a bit.
My idea on how to have stuff fall into the public domain, while appeasing the Disney's of the world:
The initial copyright lasts 10 years and costs $100.
The next 5 years costs $1,000, the next 5 years $100,000, and the next 5 costs $10,000,000 and so on. Every extension costs 100x more than the last. If a product is really worth it to a company to keep in copyright, they can keep it for as long as they like, it's just going to reach a point of being too expensive to be practical.
I'm sure the numbers would be argued over, and a compromise could be reached; but the goal is to make companies do a real cost-benefit analysis on a copyright, rather pooling their resources to buy a few congressmen every 10 years.
Suppose we find trilobite skeletons on Mars ... and the next day an alien ship enters our system. In his work, those two are contradictory events. They cannot happen in the same universe. But there are all kinds of ways they COULD happen.
...
... develop that area ... and then move out from that fringe in X years. So you would have a new fringe area every X years. And X would (given human life spans) be a few thousand years. Just long enough to get the colony's population up to where it could build a space program of its own.
Not really, it just means that they have been hiding from us this whole time, and life is common. He accepts that whatever aliens exist could be hoodwinking us, but it's not worth considering. If they are, they are doing a damn good job of it and we aren't likely to figure it out for a while now. We can only go on the evidence we have, and that evidence currently points to us being alone.
Now, whether a million years is significant or not
It is not in the entire history of Life.
It is VERY significant in the history of any single species.
Agreed, but keep in mind that, if humanity isn't wiped out for any other reason we've got something close to 4 billion years to keep spinning on this planet. A few million here or there is nothing. If something does wipe us out, that points towards this Great Filter idea, and we fail it.
Rather, a civilization would colonize the area around it
Yup, that is probably how it is going to be done. But there are a few things to remember.
First, it won't take thousands of years to build up to the point of sending people on. The Earth's population has only really exploded since the Industrial Revolution, until that point it was fairly steady. So the needed population growth will probably happen in a few centuries.
Second, the colony won't be starting from scratch. They will be taking knowledge with them and will be able to bootstrap a civilization on the new planet which has a technological civilization similar to that of the parent planet. Consider the US, the European colonies didn't have to start over again and build up from the stone age. They didn't need to figure out how to work copper, and then learn to make bronze and finally figure out how to collect and burn coal so that they could smelt iron. They had that knowledge and it was much faster to build a modern (for that time) civilization.
The problem with our being alone in our galaxy is that it is improbable, without some limiting factor on space faring civilizations (read: a Great Filter). Even with slow generation ships, this galaxy has had 13 billion years for another intelligent race to explore it. Even if we assume that it took such a race 5 billion years to evolve to that point and even if it took the galaxy 5 billion years to get around to making such a planet, they have had 3 billion years to map out the galaxy, notice this nice planet of ours, and take it for their own. Even if we assume that it takes them 10,000 years to push 1 light year closer to us, and they happen to be at the exact opposite side of the galaxy from us, they should have been here 2 billion years ago.
So, where they hell are they?
For example, the whole article (what I read of it before my eyes glazed over and I passed out) seems to revolve around this whole idea of the existence of a "Great Filter" event that makes technologically advanced species highly unlikely. He bases this on the statistical probabilities of such a species existing but not contacting us, but offers no really convincing arguments that such a filter event must exist.
The reason for the assumption of a Great Filter comes out of the Fermi Paradox. If you start by looking at the Drake Equation and the assumption that Earth like planets with intelligent civilizations are not that uncommon, you very quickly come to the conclusion that there should be a whole lot of intelligent species in just our own galaxy. Further, since there are billions of stars which existed well before our own (talking billions of years before) one would expect that there should be at least a few advanced civilizations which have had time to colonize our galaxy. Even with slow generation ships this should only take on the order of a couple hundred million years. If they only started out while our planet was cooling, they should have found us by now, known that this planet was going to be Earth-like and setup shop back when they could go hunting Dinosaurs.
So, where the hell are they?
However, I would argue that with the number of planets out there (many millions probably, since we've managed to find some around lots of stars, and we can't even detect the Earth-sized ones yet) and the vast distances involved, the chances of some interstellar-traveling species coming upon our particular little planet is pretty slim, no matter what sci-fi would have you believe.
Much of our fantasizing about extraterrestrial life has assumed that there is some way to travel faster than light and we just haven't discovered it yet. However, what if there really isn't? What if physics simply won't allow faster than light travel? In that case, unless the advanced civilization was extraordinarily close to us, it's virtually impossible for them to have encountered us by now, even if they had been out landing on other planets for thousands or millions of years.
Yes, but in the amount of time in which the Milky Way is known to have existed; and assuming that space faring civilizations are not ridiculously uncommon; they've had plenty of time to map this galaxy.
The oldest known star in our galaxy is about 13 billion years old, so the galaxy is at least that old, if not close to the actual age of the Universe itself (current estimates put it around 13.7 billion years). So, let's try to make some reasonable assumptions. For example, let us assume that it took our galaxy half of it's life to produce the first space faring civilization which felt the need to expand. If we call the formation of the galaxy year 0 and go forward, this civilization would have set out to colonize the universe at year 6.5 billion. Our very own solar system was still about 1.96 billion years from forming. At about 250 billion stars in our galaxy, it means that they would have needed to map an average of 128 stars a year to know about the Earth when it was forming. And then they had another 4 billion plus years before humans decided to show up, reducing the mapping load to 42 stars a year on average. And they probably wouldn't need to visit every star. Even with the technology we have now, we can get a good idea of what a star is like and know where it is. Our ability to detect exoplanets is getting better and better; it is quite possible that we will reach a point where we can detect Earth-like planets without the need to go there. So the mapping need would really amount to only visiting stars with likely planets. The problem is that, they should have had billions of years to be finding planets, not just the paltry millions you are giving them.
So again, where the hell are they?
There are only a few possible logical conclusions:
A) They're hiding - For whatev
You forgot pro-hacking.
I'm willing to bet that the more technical savvy among Slashdot would be willing to point out hacking techniques and information, just for the asking. The assumption being that by exposing the flaws in the system, they will be fixed. Try passing off 'security through obscurity' as real security and you'll be lucky to make it out without a few burns.
That said, assuming this is a real case, most of what is being asked for is easy and could be figured out with Google and a little logical thought.
With physical access to the laptop, getting to the files is trivial unless they are encrypted. The steps for recovering a lost root password come up in Google really quick.
The stuff from a University can be had by the parents for the asking. But it would have to be the parents with a Death Certificate, I can't see the University giving it out to a random person.
MSN, Hotmail, MySpace, et al. have procedures for account recovery. If you know the account name and have control of the associated email address, resetting the password would be a matter of guessing the response to a personal question. Since the person in question is well known, this should be possible. Also, if you have the mailbox, the password may be lurking in it already.
Also, I'd guess that MSN et al. has a procedure in place for this sort of thing. Email them and ask.
Having played far too much WoW, I do have the urge to run everywhere. Now if I can just get me a riding wolf, all will be well with the world.
Anglish is a fucked up and weird aborted bastard child of a language. Seriously, spend a little time with most of the "rules" and you will end up with something along the lines of:
If A then B, except in cases where C is true, then we do D. And there are a few special cases where we do F just because, and don't you dare mess those up. And when the moon is full on the third Tuesday of the Second Month after the third snow storm of the year in Walla Walla Washington we do Q.
Now, moving on to i before e....
Moral equivalency. You are declaring eating any form of life as equivalent to any other. The ~99%** of people who find the concept of raising humans for meat abhorrent would disagree with you.
** -- I did specify 99% because on occasion, I have found people who find nothing wrong with this. Thankfully, they're rare.
Let's focus a little more on #2. What is so abhorrent about eating other humans to most people? Usually, it's some variant on the destruction of the self. Call it a soul, call it a conscience, self-awareness, whatever you will. Raising a sentient being and deliberately killing them for their meat when you don't need to is generally seen as abhorrent.
So, what's sentience?
Of course the choice of where to draw the line, of what is ok to eat and what is not, is very vague. There's really not a logically defensible place to put it. For example, you use the ability to learn as a reason to place something in the not edible category. Why? What is so special about the ability to learn that places a thing in the not edible category?
What to eat and what not to eat is really just a moral choice that each of us needs to make ourselves. There are some consequences to our choices, but otherwise it is all the same. The biggest problem with eating other human beings is that our current society tends to value human life to the point that doing so is a bad plan for your own survival. Consider the popular reaction to Jeffery Dahmer, even the criminals of our society wanted him gone. So, as a matter of personal survival, eating other human beings is a bad plan. Excepting in extreme survival situations, in which case it can be mildly heroic. As was the case with the Andes Flight Disaster
The problem with trying to place any choice of what is ok to eat and what is not, is that it will inevitably be based on some sort of moral foundation. Unless that moral foundation is universally agreed upon, you may as well be building a castle in the clouds. And that, at it's heart is the problem with this who pro/anti meat eating argument. Neither side really has a leg to stand on.
In the end, I take the stance that it's up to each of us to decide and we're welcome to it. I think the reason many meat eaters react as the poster above did is that we can feel threatened by the more militant of vegetarians (PETA being a good example). I have no problem with someone who decides not to eat meat, but please, leave my steak alone.
That said, huzzah for PETA on this. I'll gladly take a cloned steak over a real one, assuming that the taste is close enough. I believe that this is one of the great promises of cloning technology, the ability to make meat, without the need for the farming and killing of animals. Just take a few cells and grow them into whatever muscle based meat you want. Designer meats might even make eating too much meat less unhealthy. And with a bit of work, we might be able to feed those populations who are in places where agriculture has failed.
The engineering department wanted WiFi in the building in order to hook up the conference rooms and let students use wireless in the classroom. Seems simple enough, especially in this day and age. A formal request was made. And rejected by IT. Random bitching and moaning. So after a few months of inaction, the engineering department installed a few routers themselves, under the radar.
The obvious questions is: why was the request denied?
While having wireless is convenient, it's not critical to getting work done. It sounds like they had a functioning network, but they just couldn't be bothered to run a cable or two. It may be that the IT department either didn't have the money or resources to do it correctly at that time and didn't want to half-ass it. It takes up a lot less resources and creates a lot less frustration in the long run to plan it out and do it correctly the first time, than to half-ass it and then be forever fixing it, only to finally redo it the right way in the end; which usually takes up more time because you now have to plan for a transition as well.
Implementing wireless in a secure and controlled fashion means a bit more than just hooking up an access point and hoping for the best. Just off the top of my head, you have to think about interference to and from other devices in the area. Having multiple access points configured in an area to overlap and provide a seamless network. And, <insert deity here> forbid that there is actually some sort of security to keep non-university traffic off the network. As we all know, Universities love to have their bandwidth consumed by random people in the area/driving by downloading porn and running bit-torrent clients.
Also, with the politics at a University, you can bet that as soon as one department has a wireless network, every other department will be whining day and night about why they don't have one yet, so it isn't just one department to worry about, it's all of them.
But to fuck 'em, we want our wireless network and we want it now, and IT is just being bitchy and acting like a bunch of spoiled kids with a little bit of power. They don't have the best interests of the University at heart, they just want to be lazy and not give me what I want now.
1 TB = a small corner of my SAN.
Personally, I love the idea of small, high capacity, solid state drives. The systems I admin are used for GIS research, and I dread what may happen anytime one of the researches takes a laptop into the field for data collection. So far, the worst which has happened was that one laptop went for a swim, which might have been ok except the salinity of the water was very high.
Ok, so a solid state drive may not have helped too much in that case, but for the occasional drop, bang or 120 degree weather; solid state drives are just gonna survive better.
I'm thinking eSATA may fill the gap, though it does have the drawback of not powering the device directly. Of course, there is an easy solution to that: have a device which runs on 5VDC at less than 5mw. Connect the data port to eSATA and the power port to the USB port, and you're done.
There are a lot of people out there who think it would be hilarious to find that FBI address and hide it all over there internet camouflaged and try to get it clicked as often as possible, both to waste the FBI time as well as make strangers and sometimes known enemies suffer.
I wouldn't call it hilarious, but I think if we could reach a point where there was a sufficient number of rich false positives, we might just get this stupidity shut down. While I agree with locking up pedos who go after 4 year olds; with the damage it does to someone's life to just be accused of such a thing, I think we need to be really careful about who we tar and feather.
If nothing else, just getting people to wardrive around affluent neighborhoods and have some sort of spider which starts off at known pedo sites and follows links for a few minutes might be a good start. If we can get a few judges and politicians nailed with this stupidity, even better.
While I agree with your premise, I think it would help for the people behind the security schemes to not throw the gauntlet down at the feet of the hackers, that just pisses them off. I will give BD+ credit though, it managed to hold them off for 8 months, which is a pretty long time considering the brain power which was probably thrown at this.
Young Earth type: the Bible was literal truth, fossils exist only to test our faith
;) ).
Of all the Young Earth types, these ones seem to at least have some intellectual honesty. Consider the argument as a whole for a moment. If we assume that there is some sort of omnipotent being (I realize that this assumption is the weak point for a lot of people, but just go with me for a moment). And we further assume that it was within this being's power and desire to create the universe, why would it be necessary for it to have been created at any particular point in time? Working within the base assumption of omnipotence, this being should be able to create a universe with a set of rules to achieve a particular result, and then start it at a point in time as if all of the previous run time had occurred.
Could it simply be that "god" wanted a new fishbowl to stare at, knew what type of fish he wanted to stare at, and rather than make a universe and wait around for those fish to pop up; he simply designed the fishbowl, and built it with the timer set for the right type of fish to be in it? Of course, us fish are now stuck in it and just figuring out the rules he setup for this particular universe and how best to live in it. This means that the universe is not really old, in an absolute sense, even though it's starting conditions make it appear so. Why it took him 7 days to do it, who knows; perhaps omnipotence is a bit of an overstatement, and even god has trouble with long division.
I can see that someone who is otherwise intelligent, and capable at science might be able to use this sort of logic to arrive at a Young Earth belief that doesn't have a problem with 4 million year old fossils. God just wanted a race of beings which met certain specifications, to worship him (god really is an egotistical bastard, isn't he?). And rather than create a universe and wait around for them to spring up or create an internally inconsistent universe which would prove his existence, he created a consistent universe for them to live in, and just started it off as if all that previous boring time without people to worship him had already happened. He then went through the trouble to tinker with that universe, shortly after its creation, to make sure that the fish in it knew of him, and would worship him of their own free will (or burn in hell, nothing like a little fear to make people bow down willingly; I guess we can say that god was the universe's first terrorist
I think most techs, and even admins are going to fall into the, "as long as it doesn't break anything, I don't really care." camp. As an admin, I couldn't care less which browser people use. We do have a few in house applications which are IE only, but as long as people are willing to deal with their own browser issues, if they want to use Firefox, Safari, Lynx, go for it. Just don't bug me when your browser of choice doesn't display correctly. Mind you, I work for a small research group at a University; so, YMMV.
On the other side of the coin, I do understand why IT departments can be heavy handed about the software on client systems. It's tough to support $diety knows what on a system that has a million different applications installed. While it's simple to tell people that we won't support anything which is not on the "approved" list, it's much harder in practice to tell someone that they have lost all of their data to a bug in a program that helps them in their work. As an example of this, part of my mission is to support certain masters level students and their computers. I had one poor lady who's entire master's thesis was nearly lost because of a third party application which helps with adding and managing endnotes. The official answer would have been, "we don't support that, sorry." But it takes a certain level of heartlessness to actually say that to someone. So, I spent a few hours figuring out how to get the document back out of the program.
And none of this considers the poor bastards who have to deal with HIPPA and/or Sarbanes-Oxley. With the security requirements mandated by both of those, I can kinda understand the BOFH approach and using mafia style tactics to enforce desktop policy. There are just some environments where security is a must, and the IT guys suddenly have to be the bad guys about it. Again, by way of example, my last job was setting up systems for physical security and access control systems. A guard level login to the system presented the user with a blank desktop, no taskbar, and a small application with a couple buttons on it to launch the required applications. Beyond that, they had nothing. The Start Menu was disabled, right clicking on the desktop was disabled, sticky keys and other accessibility options were disabled, autorun was disabled, the BIOS had a password, the system would only boot to the primary drive, etc. There was also the expectation that the system itself was going to be locked up to prevent physical access. It worked pretty well for what it was meant to do, which was prevent a bored guard from installing something at 3am.
I think one of the other important points the article makes is that the hacked FTP servers aren't just random FTP server nor are they just small shops running Windows SBS with the Next-Next-Next install and no one monitoring them. The FTP servers were from large companies whom users might trust.
As has been said by someone above, blindly trusting links you get in emails, and then running the linked executable, either requires an amazing amount of ignorance these days, or a special kind of stupid. Yet, somehow, trojans are alive and well in the intertubes.
The constitution does two things: limits the power of the government, and makes sure that what power they do have is used properly.
I would argue that this is entirely backwards to the intent of the US Constitution. The Constitution does not limit the power of government, it grants power to the government. Government power should not be limited by what we say it can't do, but instead it should only have what powers we directly give to it. That is the reason we are in the mess we are with the Bush administration, we have let the definition of what powers the government has be changed.
This was actually one of the primary arguments against the Bill of Rights when it was introduced. The claim was that, by explicitly listing limitations on what the government could do, it would imply that the government could do anything else it wanted to do. Funny thing about that argument, it seems to be bearing out. The compromise was to include the Ninth and Tenth Amendments; which, ideally, state that the list of rights isn't exhaustive and that the Federal Government has no more power than is listed in the Articles of the Constitution. To make life easy:
Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
Tenth Amendment:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Essentially, the Ninth states that the list isn't exhaustive and that the people have other rights. So, next time someone says to you, "there is no Constitutional Right to Privacy" bitch slap them and show them this amendment. Just because a right is not listed in the constitution, doesn't mean that we do not have it. If you really want to carry that "not in the Constitution" stupidity to its logical extreme, you don't have a Right to Life either. Keep in mind that the oft quoted "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" isn't in the Constitution anywhere; it's from the Declaration of Independence. A document which was really just a rant to King George III about what an asshole he was, and has no legal standing in the US.
The Tenth Amendment was supposed to also be the stop gap on the Federal Government claiming other powers which were not given to it by the Articles of the Constitution. But this may as well not exist anymore as the US Supreme Court gave Congress a complete end run on it by ruling that intrastate commerce effects interstate commerce and therefore can be regulated by the Federal Government. As such, the Federal Government merely needs to show a link between any activity they want to regulate and commerce of some sort, and they can now regulate it.
The US Constitution is not supposed to "limit the power of the government". It is supposed to grant powers to the Federal Government, and they can go get stuffed if they want to do anything else. It is a huge problem that the perception of this has been turned around. The Constitution has stopped being the way in which We the People pass powers to our government and become a shield we try to use to defend ourselves from a Federal Government grown out of control. My hope is that we can fix this, and put the Federal Government back in it's box; I worry though, that this can only end badly.
Because enough of society has bought into the War on Your Rights...er, Drugs that the idea of using employers to be the enforcers of that particular brand of stupidity is easily accepted. The few objectors are probably junkies who should be in jail anyway.
I think bwthomas hit the nail on the head with this. We should be scrutinizing our politicians and police because we have given them special powers in our society, and that needs to bring with it oversight. In the case of employers and their employees, it's not the employer's place to police what people do in their personal lives, unless there is a direct effect on their work. For example, if you show up for work three sheets to the wind, you're probably about to get a pink slip; doesn't matter what drug you're doing it on. On the other hand, if you like to get drunk on the weekends, and snort coke off of the belly of a prostitute while being fucked in the ass by a donkey; you're a sicko, but as long as there is no one being actually harmed (willing BDSM doesn't count), go for it! Just so long as you arrive at work Monday morning clear and ready to work.
So, because something might have a failure point, it should never be done?
Most defensive systems are layered because it is understood that each layer may fail; but, taken as a whole the system should be close to bullet-proof. This is part of the problem with the fence plan, it is being promoted as a panacea to the problem of illegal immigration, it won't be. But what it is, is another layer to prevent illegal immigration.
Right now, the border has nothing to prevent crossing along large stretches; and unsurprisingly, it is being crossed regularly. A physical fence will serve to slow down or redirect crossings. A virtual fence would provide some warning to border guards about an attempt. And assuming that the federal government actually cared enough to fund the program, the border guards would be able to stop the crossing. Would it be perfect? Not likely, but really, show me a complex system which is. This then needs to be followed up further in, the catch and release of illegal immigrants needs to be stopped. The people who employ illegal immigrants need to punished (mind you, I said people, fining companies is a good start, but people need to end up in jail over it; starting with C-Level execs).
After that, we need to start looking at how to get immigrants here legally to do the low end jobs. As you have put forth several times, it is beneficial for us here in the US to have immigrant labor. But it needs to be controlled for a number of reasons. First and foremost, is the treatment of the people in those jobs. Illegal immigrants are often treated little better than slaves, and possibly worse. At the very least a slave owner had some incentive to keep a slave alive and in reasonable health, a new slave was expensive; a new illegal immigrant is just a trip to the corner away and the old one will probably do you the favor of going somewhere else to die. The second reason is that we do not want a large, disaffected underclass. These tend to cause problems such as crime. Lastly, for tax purposes. These people should be paying taxes and receiving the benefits of those taxes. I want people who come here to have access to our education system and, if they pay into it, our social security system.
In the end, this is probably along the lines of a guest worker program. That's fine, but considering that the last time illegal immigration was a hot button issue (in the 80's) we tried the amnesty first, and we'll get around to the enforcement later; it failed. I want to try it the other way 'round this time. Prove to me that we will actually control our borders, and then we'll talk about how to deal with the labor needs. Fool me once...
And the last piece of the puzzle, is going to be how to allow our farmers and manufacturers to deal with international competition. If we actually enforce some standards on the working conditions of these types of jobs, it is going to raise prices. With competition from other countries, without these standards, our local producers will not be able to compete. Now, the way I see it, we're going to need to do a two way approach. First, we may well have to establish a second level of minimum wage for those jobs such as picking berries. It's probably not going to be something we would view as a livable wage, with livable defined by the current standard of living in the US middle class; but it will be more than the pittance and often with-held wages illegal immigrants receive now. It would also give the immigrant workers some legal standing and backing to get those wages. We will also need to accept that those jobs will not carry the benefits most Americans take for granted (medical, dental, paid leave, etc.). Safety and health codes though, should be kept up and inspected.
These changes alone probably won't be enough; after all, having some working standards is probably more expensive than a sweatshop in China using forced labor. The second part of this approach is going to be a certain level of isolationism. We are going to have
Yes but:
Oh my god, there was an electrical fire in a substation and all of the safety protocols worked flawlessly, EVERYONE PANIC!!1!1ONE-ELEVENTY1!!
Doesn't make for a good headline. Now, throw Nukular in there somehow and we can whip up some real panic.
Am I that important? At the moment no. Now, prove to me that I won't end up in some grouping of people who is later considered dangerous, because I was born to the wrong parents. Won't happen in the US? Bullshit, it already did once and nothing has changed drastically to prevent it happening again.
The problem with unchecked data collection is that that data will hang around for a long time to come. Should some faction of the government, or the government as a whole decide that they suddenly want to be rid of a certain segment of the population that data will be searched and the hits will be hit. The problem about data collection isn't what is being done with it now, it's what may be done with it in the future. Unless there is a compelling reason (sorry, both the War on Drugs and the War on Terror fall under epic fail here) the government should not be allowed to collect that information. The government, no matter how benign at the moment always has the potential to grow out of control. It is important that should such an unfortunate occurrence come to pass that it is as difficult as possible for that government to dominate the people.
Well, a quick google search turned up that a cell phone has about a 1 watt transmitter. A Bluetooth class 1 transmitter has a power output of about 100mw, but this is unlikely to be in a cell phone. Class 2 and 3 only transmit with 2.5mW and 1mW respectively. So, at worst, the bluetooth headsets are 10x less energetic than the cell phone's transmission and more likely down around 500-1000x less energetic. I'd fear bluetooth far less (about a 500x less ;-) ) than I would fear a cell phone, which isn't much to begin with.
For one thing, what's the point of taking over a territory if there's nobody there to rebuild and to use as a resource?
It depends on the goals of the war. If it is a war of conquest, you are right that you want to keep the infrastructure as intact as possible, and enough civilians alive to make it useful.
On the other hand, if the war is over land or resources, an indigenous population may be counterproductive to the goal. Ultimately, you may not want the local people to interfere with the collection of or compete for those resources. In this case, mowing down the civilian population may be more productive, unless there is a need for a large, unskilled labor force for collection.
A defensive war is also a place where massive civilian casualties is an option. If the goal is the destruction of an enemy's ability to wage war, without the added goal of conquest, you would want to destroy as much of the enemy infrastructure as possible, and killing the enemy civilians also helps to destroy the ability to make war. A good example of this would be Rome's last campaign against Carthage; the city was destroyed, the people killed or enslaved, and the ground salted; not pretty, but Carthage was never a threat to Rome again. Arguably, it wasn't at the time it was destroyed either, but I'm looking at the goals and results, not the reasons. This is also where we see the firebombing of WWII, such as Dresden or Tokyo. Not exactly nice things, but they destroyed the production of the cities involved and sapped the will to fight from the people in them.
The fact is, wars are not nice, and we should never expect them to be so. In the modern age we seem to have forgotten this and have been using wars as ome sort of surgical tool to further political gain. This is a mistake, and something which we should pull off the table for our political leaders. Sadly, I don't think we will be able to do this for some time to come and without a lot of social strife.
I think it's more along the lines of it was first 'a' and now it's becoming 'b'.
The American people gave up on taking responsibility for themselves when the Great Depression hit. They had screwed up and instead of working themselves out of it, they turned to government to fix it. Ever since, when troubles arise, instead of working it out themselves, people turn to government to fix it. It should be no surprise that our leaders have used that blind trust and faith to garner power and money for themselves and their cronies. The end result is where we are now, the people have given up their superiority over their government and unless we the people decide it's time to take responsibility for ourselves, and actually do it, it's going to be a fun ride into whatever form of tyranny we end up with (I've got my money on a "Brave New World" type central authoritarian system).
And to think, I consider myself a patriot. But, I'm not so blinded by it to be unable to see that we have screwed up royal and that we're in trouble.
I wouldn't really expect it, every ISP will be worried that someone will stick with the flat-rate scheme and customers will flock to it.
Back when AOL was actually worth getting (at least Neverwinter Nights made it so for me), they started out with the pay-as-you-go idea. You paid a basic fee for access and a few minutes and then they charged you for anything beyond that at a per-minute rate. Worked out OK, though I did find myself going over pretty regularly. But when they switched to the flat-rate all-you-can-eat plan, AOL exploded. The number of users shot through the roof and they had a lot of trouble keeping up with demand. In my own little corner of the world at that time, I could spend an hour or more dialing, getting a busy signal, dialing, getting a busy signal, etc. It took them a while to catch up with demand, once they did though I never looked back and never would have wanted to go back. Then they killed NWN and my account was canceled shortly afterwards, but that was just a matter of not wanting the hassle of AOL's crapware just to get on the internet.
The pay-as-you-go idea has been tried, it worked when there wasn't another choice; and, unless the recent changes in the requirement for access to small ISP's really does kill off all competition, I don't see ISP's going back. They will be far to scared that their customers will go elsewhere.