While it may be irritating, as long as they don't feed data to governments, it's not really Orwellian.
And you know thatInternet companies which keep all their internal dealings secret for "commercial sensitivity" reasons are NOT feeding our data to a government which made it illegal for companies to report their national security letters.... how?
Same way as we know that meat companies aren't cutting their beefburgers with horsemeat, I guess.
After several months of researching best practices of cyber metrics in commercial, academia and government spaces, the Task Force determined that no metrics are currently available to directly determine or predict the cyber security or resilience of a given system..... Even knowing if a system is compromised is very difficult.... In the process of conducting this study, it became apparent that the full spectrum cyber threat represented by a Tier V-VI capability is of such magnitude and sophistication that it could not be defended against.... Organizations in the Department today, however, do not generally share details about cyber attacks that have compromised their systems. Instead, system compromises are often classified, keeping people in the dark who must be aware so they can anticipate similar attacks. Consequently, DoD organizations are trying to field defenses based only on partial knowledge of what kind of vulnerabilities are being exploited.... For more than 15 years, the Department has invested significant resources (people and funding) in an effort to prevent, detect and respond to a full range of cyber threats.... Strong authentication based on the Common Access Card (CAC) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) capabilities and other Defense in Depth mechanisms added to the overall “assurance” of the networks. Then, based on a significant infection of the Unclassified but Sensitive Internet Protocol (IP) Router Network (NIPRNet) and the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) in 2008, deployment of additional technologies, e.g., Host Based Security System (HBSS) and other hardening and situational awareness tools were accelerated.
While well-intentioned and strongly supported, these and subsequent initiatives have not had the desired impact on the overall IA posture of the Department. Defensive measures implemented at the boundaries between the NIPRNet and the Internet proved to be only marginally effective in blocking successful intrusions or reducing the overall attack surface of DoD networks and systems. Mobile platforms (smart phones, tablets, etc.) exacerbate this already challenging problem. Red teams, conducting operations during military exercises or at the request of Military Department and Agency officials, continue to have a nearly perfect success rate breaking into the systems.
Within classified networks, once thought to be safe for military command and control traffic, our adversary has successfully penetrated vulnerabilities created by poor user practices and a lack of discipline at all levels of the command structure. Operation BUCKSHOT YANKEE was clearly a wake-up call, suggesting that every system relied on for the conduct of war fighting operations is at risk of exploitation by an increasingly sophisticated adversary; an adversary ready and able to exploit any technical or human weakness to achieve their objectives.
Emphasis mine, but this is scary stuff. Even the classified US military IP networks have lousy security and have been infected by viruses.
I've never seen this announced before, but it's basically game over for network defense. The DoD can't keep their boxes patched. That's why they're talking about offensive cyber and nuclear first strike.
I don't know why I have a feeling that US'es best interest is to fix their security flaws.
Fix... the flaws? But... that would be like... shipping products which were warranted to be of merchantable fitness! It would require mandatory code regression analysis and testing which might cost money and would certainly create jobs! You're asking the software industry to submit to invasive scrutiny from the same kind of Government jackboots that the food, banking and building industries now tremble under daily! And that's socialism.
The only thing that can stop a black hat with a rootkit is a white hat with a rootkit! If you outlaw shoddy, worthless software containing a million zero-day exploits, only outlaws will be exploited! You'll take my imperative thread-based unsafe self-modifying code from my cold dead FATAL EXCEPTION AT 00FE:4358 SYSTEM HALTED!
In conclusion, I support Mom, apple pie, and an American software developer's inalienable right to immediately patent and ship whatever string of line noise can be coerced to come out the other end of a rusty, sawn-off C++ compiler, and my esteemed opponent does not.
I know I can trust you all to vote with your hearts.
The problem is that "configuration" exists... there is this utterly artificial distinction between configuration and code, the user and developer, because of languages like C where the skill jump from using to writing is obscene
but interfaces are still static and difficult...Why can't I just ask to inspect whatever I click at, and alter my interface at run time? We let people add and remove tool bar buttons... why not everything?
Quoted for universal truth. This artificially hard wall between 'configuration' and 'programming', separating users from programmers, in my opinion is THE problem with computing today, and what makes me very sad is that it was identified as a problem in the 1960s, with Douglas Engelbart's On-Line System (which invented the mouse) and Ted Nelson's Xanadu (which invented the concept though not a working implementation of hypertext). Then it was rediscovered in the 1980s by Alan Kay, with Smalltalk. Both Smalltalk and Emacs, as well as Richard Stallman's Free Software ethos, derive directly from the Lisp Machine environments of the 1980s. And the roots of Lisp as a dynamic language modifiable at runtime are in the 1950s.
This is not rocket science. It's hardly even computer science. These are not new issues, they're fundamental findings from the ancient past. And yet, each generation of programmers somehow manages to lose this knowledge. This ought to be shocking. We specialise in the institutional storage and recall of information and knowledge - so why can't we remember stuff?
I'm really disappointed with the whole trajectory that desktop computing took from the introduction of C++ through Windows to Linux. We missed a huge opportunity to make the desktop environment (as Kay intended with the Dynabook) both user-programmable and secure. Now we're paying the price, but we still don't yet understand even what we've lost.
the robot car PR people will have to continually remind people how many loved ones are not dead because of how trustworthy the robot car really is.
Isn't that basically what the nuclear industry did?
Yes, that and several decades of constant fraud, corruption, embezzlement and outright lying at the highest levels of the industry. Of course nothing like that happens today.
Perhaps you young'uns born after the 1990s don't realise it, but people didn't start out distrustful of commercial nuclear power at all. There was no 'anti-nuclear lobby' in the immediate post-WW2 era. There was suspicion of atomic weapons, yes, but the pop media of the 1950s and 1960s was saturated in nothing but positive, upbeat press about peaceful atomic energy. Much like 'cyberspace' today, the concept of 'atoms' had huge pop-sci geek appeal and combined with government backing it seemed like it could do no wrong. The industry earned its bad rep fair and square through its own efforts and the storm finally broke in the 1970s - alongside the general disillusionment with government and decay in infrastructure all through Western society, which continues today.
If the nuclear power industry wants to be trusted again, perhaps it could try earning that trust. But that would involve divesting itself from the military secrecy surrounding all other things nuclear, which doesn't seem likely to happen.
>However, "Robot shall not harm humans" is a lot better of a starting ground than "Let's siphon up all your personal data and sell it". Or automated war drones.
We agree that the Three Laws seem sensible for machines. It's also obvious that our current globally-dominant human culture is diametrically opposed to implementing the Three Laws as a value system for governments and corporations, and by extension the machines they control. In fiction we like robots that preserve human life; in reality we think that those robots would be unprofitable, or unpatriotic, or both. The algorithms we're building are being used for hostile trading on Wall Street, and for killing terrorists.
The Three Laws enshrine a value system of pacificistic altruism, which is an extreme minority viewpoint among humans, and certainly not on the US Republican-Democratic political axis. A Three Laws based robot at the moment wouldn't do very well on the market - there'd be no defense funding for it, no venture capital funding, the Republicans would consider it treasonous and anti-American, and Democrats would consider it insufficiently scientific and pragmatic. Even science fiction fans would probably consider a Three Laws robot to be "wimpy" compared to a gun-totin' weapons platform.
I think it's a very interesting question to ask which set of values we actually want, and how we might get from where we are now to a Three Laws world. Or even if we want to.
1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
And of course, in the real world, we're pouring millions of dollars into military murderbots for which the First Law would be complete mission failure.
The right set of physical actions and sound effects could very easily convince people to trust, like, even love a robot. And it would all be fake.
The First Law of Marketable Robotics: a robot must always look and act as if it could never injure a human The Second Law of Marketable Robotics: a robot must always give the impression to its human master that it is obeying orders The Third Law of Marketable Robotics: (placeholder: actual operating code outsourced to the lowest bidder)
Still though, I gotta trust Google with some of my mail. I gotta trust Comcast with some of my pipes.
Well, fortunately the "you have to trust the pipes" problem has been solved ever since PGP became legal in the late 1990s, and now we all routinely public-key encrypt all our packets and are smarter than to trust a private for-profit data-mining web service to store the contents all our inbox in plaintext...... oh. Right. We've done this to ourselves, haven't we?
For those too young to remember: in those far-off frantic Internet build-out years of the 1990s, it was well understood by almost everyone who counted that we can't trust the pipework of the Internet, and therefore that with legal, open-source mandatory encryption we'd be safe because we wouldn't have to. And somehow, although everyone nodded assent, we've ended up doing the exact opposite: building an Internet that is 100% untrustworthy which everyone still trusts. Spam and botnets are the most obvious problem; pervasive secret surveillance and identity theft almost at will by both governments and private actors is the bigger one beneath the surface. And that's a completely bad thing, and a completely avoidable thing. This is not the Internet we should have got, it's not the Internet we want, it's not the Internet most people think we have, it's not an Internet which will work in the long term, and it's going to stab us in the back at every opportunity until we fix that. Which we probably won't, because an untrustworthy Internet means profit to quite a few powerful and nasty actors.
Admittedly, it's becoming obvious that it's not just the Internet that we can't trust - we've also built untrustworthy and unsustainable global finance, commerce, military, environmental and governmental systems, and despite them being horrible, we're continuing to roll them out at a breakneck pace as if we could rely on them. And they're also going to stab us in the back just like the Internet is, because we didn't stop to think if we were doing the right thing before we did it.
tldr: Humans are dumb, and having computers just makes us faster at being dumb.
The sync is the point though, otherwise you might as well just use a local note app.
A truly local note app is exactly what I want on my phone, for exactly the kind of security reason as this article highlights. I don't want my notes anywhere but in my pocket. That's why they're notes, not shared documents.
But no. Most note apps out there automatically sync my private notes to some "cloud service" whether I want to or not. So far the best option I've found has been to install an app which wants to sync to a service I don't have an account on. But that's a dumb workaround to a dumber misfeature.
Mobile and Cloud are two of the worst things that have happened to computer security at the moment. Far too many people are putting far to much data onto public storage with far too little privacy, and most of the time they're not even aware that it's happening. That's a problem, and eventually we're going to find out how much of a problem. But that will be long after the damage is done.
The Revolutionary War got started because, against all odds, the rebels sucessfully captured armories.
Well, that and massive military support from the French government. The hugely unpopular and undemocratic war debts from which campaign then led to the collapse of that government in the French Revolution. Which then led to the death of 40,000 in the Terror, the rise of the dictator Napoleon and another huge English-French world conflict. Yay freedom, I guess.
So basically, if you want to argue from history, if a ragtag band of rebels wants to overthrow a tyrannical regime by force they pretty much have to have the support of another tyrannical regime that hates the first one and wants to use the rebels as a proxy war. But that doesn't make for a nice Hollywood movie.
A minor nuclear war with each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs as airbursts on urban areas could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions,
So what you're saying is, science has solved the Global Warming problem? Excellent thinking from our boys in the white coats! Huzzah!
or sneak a real nuke onto the site and threaten to detonate, spewing all this lovely stuff into the atmosphere.
Um, wouldn't threatening to blow up nuclear waste with a nuclear weapon be a little like threatening to blow up a firecracker with a house full of dynamite?
It's not like fission bombs are amazingly clean themselves, especially if you detonate them at ground level.
Wait, doesn't the government do the regulating? When the government is running the show, who the heck is the regulator?
Well, it was a Cold War nuclear project, so I guess the other regulating agency would have been the Soviet Union. And then the Cold War ended..... nowdays I guess it's Al-Qaeda?
Someone infiltrates Iran's industrial control infrastructure in this way, and once it's completely irrevocable, issue what amounts to a blackmail notice. If it all worked as designed then Iran has no choice but to give in to any demands made, or have irrecovable damage done to their country.
Ah, I see you've lived through a few Microsoft product upgrade cycles.
(I can assure you Java would fall flat on it's face (in fact it and the companies that bet on it did...) if you tried to handle securities trading volumes from just one exchange, say, NASDAQ.
Given that high-speed securities trading is about the #1 threat to life, freedom and security on the planet... is crashing the exchanges actually a bug?
while conservatives want to protect the water so that businesses that need the water will relocate to the area.
That's interesting - in New Zealand, our political conservatives in the national government removed an entire province's democratic right to vote because our regional councillors were refusing to allow businesses to extract our water fast enough. (To turn into into milk solids for export + cow poo in our streams.) And the same government is encouraging fracking, also against the express wishes of local residents, which is likely to add a whole new source of pollution to our water.
It's not? You get to vote on laws, which is a lot more input than a corporation will give you on its contract, and if you don't like the whole package, you can always pack up and apply for citizenship in another country. (Arguably the other country may not allow you entry, which admittedly is a problem, but we could solve that if we gave the same force to international treaties on migrants' rights as we do now to international treaties forcing the free movement of goods.)
The problem is that government is a natural monopoly, not that it's not voluntary. It's a bit like broadband Internet in that respect. The solution is not to try to create artificial competition, but to increase citizen participation in government. Which ends up looking a lot more like democracy than it does capitalism.
Some families I'm sure the number is already $200 or more a week. They'll face $400 to $600 food bills. That's $1,600 to $2,400 a month. It'll equal or exceed their mortgage.
So the invisible hand of the market will respond by moving investment from old, tired, mortgages to a whole new and exciting class of debt to all these families so they can meet their monthly food and water bills. And then even more debt to meet the interest payments on the other ones.
There is nothing that could possibly go wrong with this scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
While it may be irritating, as long as they don't feed data to governments, it's not really Orwellian.
And you know thatInternet companies which keep all their internal dealings secret for "commercial sensitivity" reasons are NOT feeding our data to a government which made it illegal for companies to report their national security letters.... how?
Same way as we know that meat companies aren't cutting their beefburgers with horsemeat, I guess.
but the corporations that make the juiciest targets should also be capable of at least some self-defense.
You might think that, but apparently no. For example, here's this January 2013 report from the Defense Science Board, which I'm surprised hasn't made it to Slashdot yet. It's very sad and sobering reading.
After several months of researching best practices of cyber metrics in commercial, academia and government spaces, the Task Force determined that no metrics are currently available to directly determine or predict the cyber security or resilience of a given system. .... Even knowing if a system is compromised is very difficult. ... ... ... ... Strong authentication based on the Common Access Card (CAC) and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) capabilities and other Defense in Depth mechanisms added to the overall “assurance” of the networks. Then, based on a significant infection of the Unclassified but Sensitive Internet Protocol (IP) Router Network (NIPRNet) and the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet) in 2008, deployment of additional technologies, e.g., Host Based Security System (HBSS) and other hardening and situational awareness tools were accelerated.
In the process of conducting this study, it became apparent that the full spectrum cyber threat represented by a Tier V-VI capability is of such magnitude and sophistication that it could not be defended against.
Organizations in the Department today, however, do not generally share details about cyber attacks that have compromised their systems. Instead, system compromises are often classified, keeping people in the dark who must be aware so they can anticipate similar attacks. Consequently, DoD organizations are trying to field defenses based only on partial knowledge of what kind of vulnerabilities are being exploited.
For more than 15 years, the Department has invested significant resources (people and funding) in an effort to prevent, detect and respond to a full range of cyber threats.
While well-intentioned and strongly supported, these and subsequent initiatives have not had the desired impact on the overall IA posture of the Department. Defensive measures implemented at the boundaries between the NIPRNet and the Internet proved to be only marginally effective in blocking successful intrusions or reducing the overall attack surface of DoD networks and systems. Mobile platforms (smart phones, tablets, etc.) exacerbate this already challenging problem. Red teams, conducting operations during military exercises or at the request of Military Department and Agency officials, continue to have a nearly perfect success rate breaking into the systems.
Within classified networks, once thought to be safe for military command and control traffic, our adversary has successfully penetrated vulnerabilities created by poor user practices and a lack of discipline at all levels of the command structure. Operation BUCKSHOT YANKEE was clearly a wake-up call, suggesting that every system relied on for the conduct of war fighting operations is at risk of exploitation by an increasingly sophisticated adversary; an adversary ready and able to exploit any technical or human weakness to achieve their objectives.
Emphasis mine, but this is scary stuff. Even the classified US military IP networks have lousy security and have been infected by viruses.
I've never seen this announced before, but it's basically game over for network defense. The DoD can't keep their boxes patched. That's why they're talking about offensive cyber and nuclear first strike.
I don't know why I have a feeling that US'es best interest is to fix their security flaws.
Fix... the flaws? But... that would be like... shipping products which were warranted to be of merchantable fitness! It would require mandatory code regression analysis and testing which might cost money and would certainly create jobs! You're asking the software industry to submit to invasive scrutiny from the same kind of Government jackboots that the food, banking and building industries now tremble under daily! And that's socialism.
The only thing that can stop a black hat with a rootkit is a white hat with a rootkit!
If you outlaw shoddy, worthless software containing a million zero-day exploits, only outlaws will be exploited!
You'll take my imperative thread-based unsafe self-modifying code from my cold dead FATAL EXCEPTION AT 00FE:4358 SYSTEM HALTED!
In conclusion, I support Mom, apple pie, and an American software developer's inalienable right to immediately patent and ship whatever string of line noise can be coerced to come out the other end of a rusty, sawn-off C++ compiler, and my esteemed opponent does not.
I know I can trust you all to vote with your hearts.
The problem is that "configuration" exists... there is this utterly artificial distinction between configuration and code, the user and developer, because of languages like C where the skill jump from using to writing is obscene
but interfaces are still static and difficult ...Why can't I just ask to inspect whatever I click at, and alter my interface at run time? We let people add and remove tool bar buttons ... why not everything?
Quoted for universal truth. This artificially hard wall between 'configuration' and 'programming', separating users from programmers, in my opinion is THE problem with computing today, and what makes me very sad is that it was identified as a problem in the 1960s, with Douglas Engelbart's On-Line System (which invented the mouse) and Ted Nelson's Xanadu (which invented the concept though not a working implementation of hypertext). Then it was rediscovered in the 1980s by Alan Kay, with Smalltalk. Both Smalltalk and Emacs, as well as Richard Stallman's Free Software ethos, derive directly from the Lisp Machine environments of the 1980s. And the roots of Lisp as a dynamic language modifiable at runtime are in the 1950s.
This is not rocket science. It's hardly even computer science. These are not new issues, they're fundamental findings from the ancient past. And yet, each generation of programmers somehow manages to lose this knowledge. This ought to be shocking. We specialise in the institutional storage and recall of information and knowledge - so why can't we remember stuff?
I'm really disappointed with the whole trajectory that desktop computing took from the introduction of C++ through Windows to Linux. We missed a huge opportunity to make the desktop environment (as Kay intended with the Dynabook) both user-programmable and secure. Now we're paying the price, but we still don't yet understand even what we've lost.
the robot car PR people will have to continually remind people how many loved ones are not dead because of how trustworthy the robot car really is.
Isn't that basically what the nuclear industry did?
Yes, that and several decades of constant fraud, corruption, embezzlement and outright lying at the highest levels of the industry. Of course nothing like that happens today.
Perhaps you young'uns born after the 1990s don't realise it, but people didn't start out distrustful of commercial nuclear power at all. There was no 'anti-nuclear lobby' in the immediate post-WW2 era. There was suspicion of atomic weapons, yes, but the pop media of the 1950s and 1960s was saturated in nothing but positive, upbeat press about peaceful atomic energy. Much like 'cyberspace' today, the concept of 'atoms' had huge pop-sci geek appeal and combined with government backing it seemed like it could do no wrong. The industry earned its bad rep fair and square through its own efforts and the storm finally broke in the 1970s - alongside the general disillusionment with government and decay in infrastructure all through Western society, which continues today.
If the nuclear power industry wants to be trusted again, perhaps it could try earning that trust. But that would involve divesting itself from the military secrecy surrounding all other things nuclear, which doesn't seem likely to happen.
>However, "Robot shall not harm humans" is a lot better of a starting ground than "Let's siphon up all your personal data and sell it". Or automated war drones.
We agree that the Three Laws seem sensible for machines. It's also obvious that our current globally-dominant human culture is diametrically opposed to implementing the Three Laws as a value system for governments and corporations, and by extension the machines they control. In fiction we like robots that preserve human life; in reality we think that those robots would be unprofitable, or unpatriotic, or both. The algorithms we're building are being used for hostile trading on Wall Street, and for killing terrorists.
The Three Laws enshrine a value system of pacificistic altruism, which is an extreme minority viewpoint among humans, and certainly not on the US Republican-Democratic political axis. A Three Laws based robot at the moment wouldn't do very well on the market - there'd be no defense funding for it, no venture capital funding, the Republicans would consider it treasonous and anti-American, and Democrats would consider it insufficiently scientific and pragmatic. Even science fiction fans would probably consider a Three Laws robot to be "wimpy" compared to a gun-totin' weapons platform.
I think it's a very interesting question to ask which set of values we actually want, and how we might get from where we are now to a Three Laws world. Or even if we want to.
1 A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
And of course, in the real world, we're pouring millions of dollars into military murderbots for which the First Law would be complete mission failure.
Nothing bad could ever come of this.
The right set of physical actions and sound effects could very easily convince people to trust, like, even love a robot. And it would all be fake.
The First Law of Marketable Robotics: a robot must always look and act as if it could never injure a human
The Second Law of Marketable Robotics: a robot must always give the impression to its human master that it is obeying orders
The Third Law of Marketable Robotics: (placeholder: actual operating code outsourced to the lowest bidder)
Still though, I gotta trust Google with some of my mail. I gotta trust Comcast with some of my pipes.
Well, fortunately the "you have to trust the pipes" problem has been solved ever since PGP became legal in the late 1990s, and now we all routinely public-key encrypt all our packets and are smarter than to trust a private for-profit data-mining web service to store the contents all our inbox in plaintext... ... oh. Right. We've done this to ourselves, haven't we?
For those too young to remember: in those far-off frantic Internet build-out years of the 1990s, it was well understood by almost everyone who counted that we can't trust the pipework of the Internet, and therefore that with legal, open-source mandatory encryption we'd be safe because we wouldn't have to. And somehow, although everyone nodded assent, we've ended up doing the exact opposite: building an Internet that is 100% untrustworthy which everyone still trusts. Spam and botnets are the most obvious problem; pervasive secret surveillance and identity theft almost at will by both governments and private actors is the bigger one beneath the surface. And that's a completely bad thing, and a completely avoidable thing. This is not the Internet we should have got, it's not the Internet we want, it's not the Internet most people think we have, it's not an Internet which will work in the long term, and it's going to stab us in the back at every opportunity until we fix that. Which we probably won't, because an untrustworthy Internet means profit to quite a few powerful and nasty actors.
Admittedly, it's becoming obvious that it's not just the Internet that we can't trust - we've also built untrustworthy and unsustainable global finance, commerce, military, environmental and governmental systems, and despite them being horrible, we're continuing to roll them out at a breakneck pace as if we could rely on them. And they're also going to stab us in the back just like the Internet is, because we didn't stop to think if we were doing the right thing before we did it.
tldr: Humans are dumb, and having computers just makes us faster at being dumb.
The sync is the point though, otherwise you might as well just use a local note app.
A truly local note app is exactly what I want on my phone, for exactly the kind of security reason as this article highlights. I don't want my notes anywhere but in my pocket. That's why they're notes, not shared documents.
But no. Most note apps out there automatically sync my private notes to some "cloud service" whether I want to or not. So far the best option I've found has been to install an app which wants to sync to a service I don't have an account on. But that's a dumb workaround to a dumber misfeature.
Mobile and Cloud are two of the worst things that have happened to computer security at the moment. Far too many people are putting far to much data onto public storage with far too little privacy, and most of the time they're not even aware that it's happening. That's a problem, and eventually we're going to find out how much of a problem. But that will be long after the damage is done.
The "informed" know that Libre Office is free.
Ooh, burn! But what do the actually informed think?
Quotation marks: The English language's ironically mocking hipster grammar "friend" (disclaimer: they may not actually be your friend).
And if you stop subscribing you loose access to your documents?
Yes. Your documents are loosed upon the world for all to read, edit, laugh at, and share on Reddit.
people who have a single pistol, shotgun, or rifle, and a fail number of people who need to use one for work...
Hi Dr Freud!
Secondly, those combat troops would be more likely to join in overthrowing the government than they would be to shoot at American people.
Ah, just like police riot squads would rather shoot tear gas grenades at their fellow officers than at unarmed street protesters?
The Revolutionary War got started because, against all odds, the rebels sucessfully captured armories.
Well, that and massive military support from the French government. The hugely unpopular and undemocratic war debts from which campaign then led to the collapse of that government in the French Revolution. Which then led to the death of 40,000 in the Terror, the rise of the dictator Napoleon and another huge English-French world conflict. Yay freedom, I guess.
So basically, if you want to argue from history, if a ragtag band of rebels wants to overthrow a tyrannical regime by force they pretty much have to have the support of another tyrannical regime that hates the first one and wants to use the rebels as a proxy war. But that doesn't make for a nice Hollywood movie.
A minor nuclear war with each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs as airbursts on urban areas could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions,
So what you're saying is, science has solved the Global Warming problem? Excellent thinking from our boys in the white coats! Huzzah!
or sneak a real nuke onto the site and threaten to detonate, spewing all this lovely stuff into the atmosphere.
Um, wouldn't threatening to blow up nuclear waste with a nuclear weapon be a little like threatening to blow up a firecracker with a house full of dynamite?
It's not like fission bombs are amazingly clean themselves, especially if you detonate them at ground level.
We shouldn't take Hanford as a prototypical example of "The Nuclear Industry."
Um, actually, since Hanford was literally a nuclear prototyping facility, I'd say it's about as prototypical an example as you can get...
Wait, doesn't the government do the regulating? When the government is running the show, who the heck is the regulator?
Well, it was a Cold War nuclear project, so I guess the other regulating agency would have been the Soviet Union. .... nowdays I guess it's Al-Qaeda?
And then the Cold War ended.
Someone infiltrates Iran's industrial control infrastructure in this way, and once it's completely irrevocable, issue what amounts to a blackmail notice. If it all worked as designed then Iran has no choice but to give in to any demands made, or have irrecovable damage done to their country.
Ah, I see you've lived through a few Microsoft product upgrade cycles.
(I can assure you Java would fall flat on it's face (in fact it and the companies that bet on it did...) if you tried to handle securities trading volumes from just one exchange, say, NASDAQ.
Given that high-speed securities trading is about the #1 threat to life, freedom and security on the planet... is crashing the exchanges actually a bug?
Remove oil and what fills the void?.... could it be ground water?
And mud, and fracking fluid... mmm tasty.
while conservatives want to protect the water so that businesses that need the water will relocate to the area.
That's interesting - in New Zealand, our political conservatives in the national government removed an entire province's democratic right to vote because our regional councillors were refusing to allow businesses to extract our water fast enough. (To turn into into milk solids for export + cow poo in our streams.) And the same government is encouraging fracking, also against the express wishes of local residents, which is likely to add a whole new source of pollution to our water.
But government is not a voluntary association.
It's not? You get to vote on laws, which is a lot more input than a corporation will give you on its contract, and if you don't like the whole package, you can always pack up and apply for citizenship in another country. (Arguably the other country may not allow you entry, which admittedly is a problem, but we could solve that if we gave the same force to international treaties on migrants' rights as we do now to international treaties forcing the free movement of goods.)
The problem is that government is a natural monopoly, not that it's not voluntary. It's a bit like broadband Internet in that respect. The solution is not to try to create artificial competition, but to increase citizen participation in government. Which ends up looking a lot more like democracy than it does capitalism.
Some families I'm sure the number is already $200 or more a week. They'll face $400 to $600 food bills. That's $1,600 to $2,400 a month. It'll equal or exceed their mortgage.
So the invisible hand of the market will respond by moving investment from old, tired, mortgages to a whole new and exciting class of debt to all these families so they can meet their monthly food and water bills. And then even more debt to meet the interest payments on the other ones.
There is nothing that could possibly go wrong with this scenario.
Growth forever!