Windows isn't distributed as individual packages from desperate sources
And that's Linux's secret edge. Its developers are outlaws, lean and dangerous. We could do anything, anytime. We could fork your OpenOffice.org and call it LibreOffice... and then fork it right back. We could switch your default filesystem to btrfs, stone cold. We could drop X11 and replace it with Wayland... just like that.
So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no."
So did Richard Stallman, and everyone was like "wah wah stallman-sux wah wah get your Free Software politics out of our commercial Open Source wah wah we need binary modules to have a software ecosystem".
Although a working ABI and a kernel that didn't break compatibility every five minutes would also have worked.
Run XP as a guest operating system on a Windows 8 hypervisor. Win 7 for example shipped with virtual XP for exactly this sort of situation.
I've supported at least one piece of medical hardware for which the drivers only exist on XP and which simply did not work with a VM. In this case, because the cheap USB security dongle was badly coded and the VM didn't virtualise it.
VMs work well except for tricky corner cases of drivers and security dongles. Which isn't surprising since security dongles are written explicitly to stop people doing things like running them on VMs.
Why manufacturers of expensive hardware insist on adding cheap and buggy hardware copy protection to their cheaper and buggier driver software which is utterly useless without the expensive hardware itself, I have no idea. But they do it all the time.
... until the first Patch Tuesday after security updates expire, then it will be open season for script kiddies.
It would be nice if we could sue companies for releasing software with zero-day root vulnerabilities. In fact, if we're going to classify cyberattacks as "warfare", then it should really be treason. Call in the drones! er, but first do a proper code audit on the flight software.
I am a HUGE Star Trek nerd, but I always got grossed out when that dude's dad cut his hand off at the end of the second movie.
You only think you're kidding. The way Into Darkness is shaping up, it probably will end with Sulu swordfighting Spock's dad in a carbonite chamber in a Borg Cube while Cylon Empress Janeway activates the Hand of Omega.
Not to mention that weird "all your data goes to our servers in Canada first" thing.
Maybe it'd help if you think of it as "all your data goes to our servers in a-country-that-respects-privacy first"
Or as "all your data goes to our servers in a country that has traditionally had very strong links with US-UK secret intelligence".
Yes, it worries me too. Theoretically, the BES server and the Blackberry device encrypt everything before sending it to Canada. Theoretically. But we can't audit the devices because, closed source everybody! And that's an awful lot of high-impact corporate emails in one company's hands, and it's not like there's no precedent for tinfoil-hat thinking in this business. I'd feel a lot safer if the data just went out to the wide open Internet like it's supposed to, where at least the NSA would have to intercept the raw packets at the peering points and not have it all neatly laid out for them with metadata intact.
As opposed to BlackBerry, where we know that some governments have access to at least some emails sent to/from blackberries.
Actually, we don't know that. Are you possibly confusing BIS with BAS? It's a little like the situation with Java vs JavaScript: RIM runs twoBlackberry services, one of which is a hosted email system, Blackberry Internet Service (BIS), on a par with Gmail and Hotmail but accessible by Blackberry devices, which is indeed intercepted by some governments in which it's located. Blackbery Enterprise Service, on the other hand, is a server which is located on your corporation's own LAN and theoretically is not crackable even by RIM, as it uses AES encryption end-to-end. And it's BES that most corporates will be using, not BIS.
Now I say theoretically because there is an additional wringle: even with a private BES server, all your emails are sent not just over the Internet but through RIM's own Blackberry routing servers, so they do have access to an encrypted copy of everything you send. That means your security really does depend on how well they've implemented AES and that there really truly are no backdoors. And it's close-source software so of course nobody can verify this. If there were backdoors - even just "the NSA runs a huge server farm / quantum computer and brute forces your cipher" - then, yes, your corporate mail would be readable by RIM and whoever they chose to give that data to. They of course swear blind that there are no backdoors in BES. But, then again, that's exactly what they would say if.gov had got to them, wouldn't they? And RIM is the preferred contractor for the US military and White House, which means as a company they've got the potential and a very big incentive to comply with "special" cyberwarfare requests. So I'd tend to assume that everything you send via Blackberry is at least cached in encrypted form in an NSA server. As is everything you send through any US internet interconnect point (remember the wiretaps that were installed about five years back?) But maybe that's just my tinfoil talking.
But back this side of the rabbit hole, for most people, they're worried about "Blackberry" because they've completely confused BIS with BES, which is pretty silly, and that's solely because the tech press has created this confusion with their usual abysmal standards of reporting.
We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning. It's been investigated my the military for quite some time now.
Moving on, in completely unrelated news, there's also been a huge spike in mental health problems in currently deployed US soldiers. Officials say this is perfectly normal and nothing to be concerned about. Now for a word from our sponsor. Sleep-No-Mor(Tm), one capsule a day and those eight wasted night hours are yours again!
"Needs" only account for a small fraction of our economy. I shudder to think of a world where the market incentive is to buy only what you need, and nothing else.
I understand what you're saying, but it seems like there is already a specific application for "intrinsic value" in finance.... "For example, if the strike price for a call option is USD $1 and the price of the underlying is USD 1.20, then the option has an intrinsic value of USD 0.20."
And how many litres of water and kilograms of bread can a call option worth USD 0.20 buy me?
There's financial jargon, and then there's physics. At some point a number has to be converted into atoms; that's when reality occurs.
I think it's pretty clear how the "free market" handles the issue, and it results in private individuals and corporations issuing "fiat currency" in a much more volatile and unstable format.
If you want to outlaw fiat currency, you must outlaw interest-bearing loans.... All of them...
Loans and fiat currency go hand in hand.
++ this.
Personally, I think backing a currency with Italian compact cars is rather a good idea, and certainly better than letting private for-profit banks create dollars out of infinitely compounding future debt as we do now.
In a free market you would be free to create and use your own currencies.
And you'd also be free to create and enjoy your own currency crashes. And you'd also be not at all surprised if the owners of the large mainstream currencies exercised their right to not convert any of yours because they didn't want your random hyperinflation, fraud and wild speculative swings infecting theirs.
Or do you want the freedom to create your own financial Ponzi scheme, *plus* the freedom to force a national/global scale currency to buy your worthless trinkets?
We tried that back in the 1920s with shares. It worked great... until the fantasy stock-ticker symbols that lots of people had bought fell off a cliff and exploded the real world economy, causing WW2 among other wonderful things.
The "private sector" is not the source of all innovation. It's not even a particularly meaningful term when it comes to electronics, Silicon Valley and the Internet. It's all a big ball of fundy-wundy defensey-wensey stuff. Aad a lot of the money has come from American taxpayers, and the long-term strategic investment direction has come from men in grey suits in the Pentagon who draw a government paycheck. And then there's the defense contractors who are only nominally "private". Somewhere floating on top of the big American tech melting pot is a thin layer of flashy public venture capitalism- the Googles and Facebooks. But they're not the ones who did the original hard work of science and invention that makes the fire underneath go.
it's a beautiful consequence of the ugly rising head of the government
Ah, that strange and recent invention, "government", and the even stranger and more recent practice of governments stamping their own imprint on coinage of mixed provenance and calling them currency. Truly we have forgotten our fathers.
That is exactly the same problem general desktop computing has. The OS is secure, the hardware is secure, it is the poorly engineered browser addons (and sometimes browsers) which bring the system to its knees from a security persepective.
If an operating system is written in such a way that it blindly gives full root-level access to untrusted third-party binary add-ons -- then your definition of "secure OS" is not the same as mine.
Seriously, it seems like in the last 20 years we've forgotten (or deliberately chosen to unlearn) everything we knew in the 1980s about security. The trend then was away from monolithic kernels towards microkernels, because, well, it's the only mathematically possible way to achieve security and reliability. (In the same way that "not distributing the decryption keys with the content" is the only mathematically possible way to achieve secure encryption.) But it was slow, at least back in the days when 4 Mhz CPUs and 1MB of RAM was a lot. So... we threw away security for speed. Raw C/C++ everywhere. And then built an entire global Internet based on operating systems built on a completely non-securable model. That includes Linux. Yes, do let's run native x86 machine code shared libraries everywhere, we can mitigate the damage after the fact with sufficiently clever code signing / virus scanning / patching. Except that, of course, in practice we can't.
Security of arbitrary x86 binaries is as much of a pipe dream as DRM is. It's simply impossible to close all the gaps when you're passing raw memory pointers and rewritable memory blocks around. The only way to do this right is to start from scratch, use a tiny security-audited microkernel at the bare metal level, with a securely designed message passing architecture everywhere above it. It'll be slow, it'll cost trillions of dollars in coder hours to rewrite all the incorrect code we wrote in the 1990-2000s boom, but it will be mathematically provable to be secure and not kill people.
So, of course, we won't be doing that anytime soon. Welcome to the Gibsonian cyberpunk present. System cracking as a videogame where everything is vulnerable and it's just a matter of how much you want to pay the Somalian Pirate Mafia or disgruntled USAF cyberwarfare cadets to buy the latest exploit. I used to think Neuromancer was a ridiculous scenario, that of course we'd fix the obvious bugs before Internet went 1.0; but we didn't, and now we're living the result.
We could have done it right. But we're stuffing up everything else on the planet, why did we expect that software would be any better?
A crystal structure is composed of a pattern, a set of atoms arranged in a particular way, and a lattice exhibiting long-range order and symmetry. Patterns are located upon the points of a lattice, which is an array of points repeating periodically in three dimensions.
The idea, (which is now completely broken in practice due to extreme imbalance of might) was that a government would be far less willing to give the public the finger, if the public could point a gun at the government, and remind them who really owns the country. Additionally, it was also intended that should a violent aggressor arrive in the country without warning or preparation, the public will have some means of defending itself. (organized militia, et. al.)
I suspect that the real reason behind the post-WW2 popularity of this idea was the Cold War. Specifically, the belief on the US right wing that a Soviet takeover - either by invasion or by internal "fifth column" coup - was a possibility. Therefore, the reasoning went, the ForcesofFreedom'n'Capitalism (tm) needed the ability to rapidly mobilise a home militia to take back the country. And so, deliberate sponsorship began of a chain of linked anticommunist causes that included a wide group of "strange bedfellows" rangong fom the NRA to arms manufacturers to the John Birch society to libertarian militant atheist small government conservatism to evangelical Christian churches preaching end-times paranoia, to external nonstate actors like Moon's Unification Church in Korea, the P2 in Italy - and, by the 1970s, the Islamic jihadis in Afghanistan. All with the intention of creating a standing underground militia-funding-ideology complex that could be mobilised as a last-ditch stand against a Soviet-backed Communist takeover.
Yes, mass distribution of small arms were never going to work for a random "the people vs the government" rebellion in the USA. But if the feared Communist takeover and subsequent right-wing rebellion had occurred, it wouldn't have been just "the people" waving their M-16s and Constitutions. It would have been the popular militias plus whatever factions of the US military remained loyal, versus the insurgents and foreign military advisors, and that would have evened the odds a lot more.
At least that's my theory. I'm not sure how much of this was actually implemented, and how much it evolved as the Cold War progressed, but if I were in the covert world in the 1950s USA and frightened by Communism I would have begun organising something similar. And it's the only way I can explain the otherwise strange political connections on the US right wing: often, the only cause they share is Cold War era anticommunism. And why there's such passion for handguns "to fight the government" by the same people who support increased military budgets and secrecy for that same government.
You do understand the social solutions to problems have existed very intentionally for thousands of years correct? Why would that be? Why would Socrates and Plato say those things are needed for a successful Republic?
Ah, Plato. The rich slave-owner who advocated kidnapping children at birth and forcibly separating them into brainwashed castes? Yes, his advice would be relevant to a modern democracy, indeed.
"if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
That's ridiculous! Basic economics proves that the supply of humanly usable matter and energy on Earth simply can't be a constant - if it was, the sharemarket would go down! And that can't happen, ever. Therefore, there must be an infinite supply of invisible stuff that can be turned into dollars. It's probably all the dark matter the physicsts keep talking about.
I would rather see somebody fight back and attack the actors. After all, they have a right and responsibility to defend civilized society from violence.
Come on now, just because Michael Bay and George Lucas make films which destroy civilized society doesn't mean that we should attack the actors - it's the directors we should be punishing for their blasphemy.
Bumblebee was a Volkswagen and Han shot first. FACT.
Yes, a for-pay cloud storage service for all my files, email addresses and contacts with no encryption on it. And when I asked actual Ubuntu employees "what's with the no host-end encryption? Can you please offer me a service that doesn't mean I have to trust you not to read my personal contact data?" they literally argued with me that no, I'm wrong, I don't need any protection, because "Ubuntu is a company of nice guys and they'd never abuse that priviledge".
Yeah, um, no. If that's the corporate direction on their cloud services, then something was rotten right from the top and has been for a while.
Good luck, guys. You had a chance to do the right thing. It didn't even seem to cross your minds that there was a difference between right and wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows isn't distributed as individual packages from desperate sources
And that's Linux's secret edge. Its developers are outlaws, lean and dangerous. We could do anything, anytime. We could fork your OpenOffice.org and call it LibreOffice... and then fork it right back. We could switch your default filesystem to btrfs, stone cold. We could drop X11 and replace it with Wayland... just like that.
Don't push us, man.
So this company managed to Microsoft our asses using Linux. Bravo. For the record, during evaluation six years ago, I said "no."
So did Richard Stallman, and everyone was like "wah wah stallman-sux wah wah get your Free Software politics out of our commercial Open Source wah wah we need binary modules to have a software ecosystem".
Although a working ABI and a kernel that didn't break compatibility every five minutes would also have worked.
Run XP as a guest operating system on a Windows 8 hypervisor. Win 7 for example shipped with virtual XP for exactly this sort of situation.
I've supported at least one piece of medical hardware for which the drivers only exist on XP and which simply did not work with a VM. In this case, because the cheap USB security dongle was badly coded and the VM didn't virtualise it.
VMs work well except for tricky corner cases of drivers and security dongles. Which isn't surprising since security dongles are written explicitly to stop people doing things like running them on VMs.
Why manufacturers of expensive hardware insist on adding cheap and buggy hardware copy protection to their cheaper and buggier driver software which is utterly useless without the expensive hardware itself, I have no idea. But they do it all the time.
If it isn't broken, don't fix it. XP isn't broken
... until the first Patch Tuesday after security updates expire, then it will be open season for script kiddies.
It would be nice if we could sue companies for releasing software with zero-day root vulnerabilities. In fact, if we're going to classify cyberattacks as "warfare", then it should really be treason. Call in the drones! er, but first do a proper code audit on the flight software.
So why would you buy a phone to be a jack of all trades.
Because I only have one free pocket in my jeans.
I am a HUGE Star Trek nerd, but I always got grossed out when that dude's dad cut his hand off at the end of the second movie.
You only think you're kidding. The way Into Darkness is shaping up, it probably will end with Sulu swordfighting Spock's dad in a carbonite chamber in a Borg Cube while Cylon Empress Janeway activates the Hand of Omega.
The Ewoks come at night. Mostly.
Not to mention that weird "all your data goes to our servers in Canada first" thing.
Maybe it'd help if you think of it as "all your data goes to our servers in a-country-that-respects-privacy first"
Or as "all your data goes to our servers in a country that has traditionally had very strong links with US-UK secret intelligence".
Yes, it worries me too. Theoretically, the BES server and the Blackberry device encrypt everything before sending it to Canada. Theoretically. But we can't audit the devices because, closed source everybody! And that's an awful lot of high-impact corporate emails in one company's hands, and it's not like there's no precedent for tinfoil-hat thinking in this business. I'd feel a lot safer if the data just went out to the wide open Internet like it's supposed to, where at least the NSA would have to intercept the raw packets at the peering points and not have it all neatly laid out for them with metadata intact.
As opposed to BlackBerry, where we know that some governments have access to at least some emails sent to/from blackberries.
Actually, we don't know that. Are you possibly confusing BIS with BAS? It's a little like the situation with Java vs JavaScript: RIM runs twoBlackberry services, one of which is a hosted email system, Blackberry Internet Service (BIS), on a par with Gmail and Hotmail but accessible by Blackberry devices, which is indeed intercepted by some governments in which it's located. Blackbery Enterprise Service, on the other hand, is a server which is located on your corporation's own LAN and theoretically is not crackable even by RIM, as it uses AES encryption end-to-end. And it's BES that most corporates will be using, not BIS.
Now I say theoretically because there is an additional wringle: even with a private BES server, all your emails are sent not just over the Internet but through RIM's own Blackberry routing servers, so they do have access to an encrypted copy of everything you send. That means your security really does depend on how well they've implemented AES and that there really truly are no backdoors. And it's close-source software so of course nobody can verify this. If there were backdoors - even just "the NSA runs a huge server farm / quantum computer and brute forces your cipher" - then, yes, your corporate mail would be readable by RIM and whoever they chose to give that data to. They of course swear blind that there are no backdoors in BES. But, then again, that's exactly what they would say if .gov had got to them, wouldn't they? And RIM is the preferred contractor for the US military and White House, which means as a company they've got the potential and a very big incentive to comply with "special" cyberwarfare requests. So I'd tend to assume that everything you send via Blackberry is at least cached in encrypted form in an NSA server. As is everything you send through any US internet interconnect point (remember the wiretaps that were installed about five years back?) But maybe that's just my tinfoil talking.
But back this side of the rabbit hole, for most people, they're worried about "Blackberry" because they've completely confused BIS with BES, which is pretty silly, and that's solely because the tech press has created this confusion with their usual abysmal standards of reporting.
We've already found drugs that can keep a person going without sleep for weeks or months at a time, apparently without any significant reduction in cognitive ability or any significant change in neurological functioning. It's been investigated my the military for quite some time now.
Moving on, in completely unrelated news, there's also been a huge spike in mental health problems in currently deployed US soldiers. Officials say this is perfectly normal and nothing to be concerned about. Now for a word from our sponsor. Sleep-No-Mor(Tm), one capsule a day and those eight wasted night hours are yours again!
"Needs" only account for a small fraction of our economy. I shudder to think of a world where the market incentive is to buy only what you need, and nothing else.
#firstworldeconomicproblems.
I understand what you're saying, but it seems like there is already a specific application for "intrinsic value" in finance. ... "For example, if the strike price for a call option is USD $1 and the price of the underlying is USD 1.20, then the option has an intrinsic value of USD 0.20."
And how many litres of water and kilograms of bread can a call option worth USD 0.20 buy me?
There's financial jargon, and then there's physics. At some point a number has to be converted into atoms; that's when reality occurs.
I think it's pretty clear how the "free market" handles the issue, and it results in private individuals and corporations issuing "fiat currency" in a much more volatile and unstable format.
If you want to outlaw fiat currency, you must outlaw interest-bearing loans.... All of them...
Loans and fiat currency go hand in hand.
++ this.
Personally, I think backing a currency with Italian compact cars is rather a good idea, and certainly better than letting private for-profit banks create dollars out of infinitely compounding future debt as we do now.
In a free market you would be free to create and use your own currencies.
And you'd also be free to create and enjoy your own currency crashes. And you'd also be not at all surprised if the owners of the large mainstream currencies exercised their right to not convert any of yours because they didn't want your random hyperinflation, fraud and wild speculative swings infecting theirs.
Or do you want the freedom to create your own financial Ponzi scheme, *plus* the freedom to force a national/global scale currency to buy your worthless trinkets?
We tried that back in the 1920s with shares. It worked great... until the fantasy stock-ticker symbols that lots of people had bought fell off a cliff and exploded the real world economy, causing WW2 among other wonderful things.
With every new innovation... the private sector decreased cost of production...by introducing better design ideas
Says someone typing on a computer based on semiconductor integrated circuits which were invented by university academics using government funding and sold by the private sector to the military using more government funding.
The "private sector" is not the source of all innovation. It's not even a particularly meaningful term when it comes to electronics, Silicon Valley and the Internet. It's all a big ball of fundy-wundy defensey-wensey stuff. Aad a lot of the money has come from American taxpayers, and the long-term strategic investment direction has come from men in grey suits in the Pentagon who draw a government paycheck. And then there's the defense contractors who are only nominally "private". Somewhere floating on top of the big American tech melting pot is a thin layer of flashy public venture capitalism- the Googles and Facebooks. But they're not the ones who did the original hard work of science and invention that makes the fire underneath go.
it's a beautiful consequence of the ugly rising head of the government
Ah, that strange and recent invention, "government", and the even stranger and more recent practice of governments stamping their own imprint on coinage of mixed provenance and calling them currency. Truly we have forgotten our fathers.
That is exactly the same problem general desktop computing has. The OS is secure, the hardware is secure, it is the poorly engineered browser addons (and sometimes browsers) which bring the system to its knees from a security persepective.
If an operating system is written in such a way that it blindly gives full root-level access to untrusted third-party binary add-ons -- then your definition of "secure OS" is not the same as mine.
Seriously, it seems like in the last 20 years we've forgotten (or deliberately chosen to unlearn) everything we knew in the 1980s about security. The trend then was away from monolithic kernels towards microkernels, because, well, it's the only mathematically possible way to achieve security and reliability. (In the same way that "not distributing the decryption keys with the content" is the only mathematically possible way to achieve secure encryption.) But it was slow, at least back in the days when 4 Mhz CPUs and 1MB of RAM was a lot. So... we threw away security for speed. Raw C/C++ everywhere. And then built an entire global Internet based on operating systems built on a completely non-securable model. That includes Linux. Yes, do let's run native x86 machine code shared libraries everywhere, we can mitigate the damage after the fact with sufficiently clever code signing / virus scanning / patching. Except that, of course, in practice we can't.
Security of arbitrary x86 binaries is as much of a pipe dream as DRM is. It's simply impossible to close all the gaps when you're passing raw memory pointers and rewritable memory blocks around. The only way to do this right is to start from scratch, use a tiny security-audited microkernel at the bare metal level, with a securely designed message passing architecture everywhere above it. It'll be slow, it'll cost trillions of dollars in coder hours to rewrite all the incorrect code we wrote in the 1990-2000s boom, but it will be mathematically provable to be secure and not kill people.
So, of course, we won't be doing that anytime soon. Welcome to the Gibsonian cyberpunk present. System cracking as a videogame where everything is vulnerable and it's just a matter of how much you want to pay the Somalian Pirate Mafia or disgruntled USAF cyberwarfare cadets to buy the latest exploit. I used to think Neuromancer was a ridiculous scenario, that of course we'd fix the obvious bugs before Internet went 1.0; but we didn't, and now we're living the result.
We could have done it right. But we're stuffing up everything else on the planet, why did we expect that software would be any better?
There are Quasicrystals. These are ordered in space, but not periodic.
... hence the "quasi".
It is commonly understood that crystals exist in a state of matter that is periodic in space.
If your Bullshit Detector didn't go off as soon you read this in the original post
Mine didn't. Does yours need calibration?
A crystal structure is composed of a pattern, a set of atoms arranged in a particular way, and a lattice exhibiting long-range order and symmetry. Patterns are located upon the points of a lattice, which is an array of points repeating periodically in three dimensions.
Periodicity is a well-defined concept.
Back to the 70's, and ancient Atlantis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Monster
I initially misread that as "... and ancient Ataris".
Which was even scarier than the Doctor Who premise.
The idea, (which is now completely broken in practice due to extreme imbalance of might) was that a government would be far less willing to give the public the finger, if the public could point a gun at the government, and remind them who really owns the country. Additionally, it was also intended that should a violent aggressor arrive in the country without warning or preparation, the public will have some means of defending itself. (organized militia, et. al.)
I suspect that the real reason behind the post-WW2 popularity of this idea was the Cold War. Specifically, the belief on the US right wing that a Soviet takeover - either by invasion or by internal "fifth column" coup - was a possibility. Therefore, the reasoning went, the ForcesofFreedom'n'Capitalism (tm) needed the ability to rapidly mobilise a home militia to take back the country. And so, deliberate sponsorship began of a chain of linked anticommunist causes that included a wide group of "strange bedfellows" rangong fom the NRA to arms manufacturers to the John Birch society to libertarian militant atheist small government conservatism to evangelical Christian churches preaching end-times paranoia, to external nonstate actors like Moon's Unification Church in Korea, the P2 in Italy - and, by the 1970s, the Islamic jihadis in Afghanistan. All with the intention of creating a standing underground militia-funding-ideology complex that could be mobilised as a last-ditch stand against a Soviet-backed Communist takeover.
Yes, mass distribution of small arms were never going to work for a random "the people vs the government" rebellion in the USA. But if the feared Communist takeover and subsequent right-wing rebellion had occurred, it wouldn't have been just "the people" waving their M-16s and Constitutions. It would have been the popular militias plus whatever factions of the US military remained loyal, versus the insurgents and foreign military advisors, and that would have evened the odds a lot more.
At least that's my theory. I'm not sure how much of this was actually implemented, and how much it evolved as the Cold War progressed, but if I were in the covert world in the 1950s USA and frightened by Communism I would have begun organising something similar. And it's the only way I can explain the otherwise strange political connections on the US right wing: often, the only cause they share is Cold War era anticommunism. And why there's such passion for handguns "to fight the government" by the same people who support increased military budgets and secrecy for that same government.
You do understand the social solutions to problems have existed very intentionally for thousands of years correct? Why would that be? Why would Socrates and Plato say those things are needed for a successful Republic?
Ah, Plato. The rich slave-owner who advocated kidnapping children at birth and forcibly separating them into brainwashed castes? Yes, his advice would be relevant to a modern democracy, indeed.
"if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
That's ridiculous! Basic economics proves that the supply of humanly usable matter and energy on Earth simply can't be a constant - if it was, the sharemarket would go down! And that can't happen, ever. Therefore, there must be an infinite supply of invisible stuff that can be turned into dollars. It's probably all the dark matter the physicsts keep talking about.
QED.
I would rather see somebody fight back and attack the actors. After all, they have a right and responsibility to defend civilized society from violence.
Come on now, just because Michael Bay and George Lucas make films which destroy civilized society doesn't mean that we should attack the actors - it's the directors we should be punishing for their blasphemy.
Bumblebee was a Volkswagen and Han shot first. FACT.
At some point the light should go off in everyone's head
... because they'd left their mind open, but now it's safely closed again?
offering affordable cloud services
Yes, a for-pay cloud storage service for all my files, email addresses and contacts with no encryption on it. And when I asked actual Ubuntu employees "what's with the no host-end encryption? Can you please offer me a service that doesn't mean I have to trust you not to read my personal contact data?" they literally argued with me that no, I'm wrong, I don't need any protection, because "Ubuntu is a company of nice guys and they'd never abuse that priviledge".
Yeah, um, no. If that's the corporate direction on their cloud services, then something was rotten right from the top and has been for a while.
Good luck, guys. You had a chance to do the right thing. It didn't even seem to cross your minds that there was a difference between right and wrong.