The institution of terrorism--that is, the mindset that gives birth to people who think "Yes, blowing up civilians is a perfectly acceptable tactic"
was embraced by all the major powers in World War II as "Strategic Bombing", and then became the cornerstone of the United States' Cold War nuclear strategy as the "balance of terror".
It's difficult for the militaries of the West to oppose the idea of bombing civilians without abandoning Nuclear Deterrence. Which would be a huge step forward for humanity, actually, if we managed to survive the ensuing period of chaos.
It's a reactive answer to the real problem- which is more that Windows is insecure by design than anything else.
Which parts of the design ? What features and capabilities are lacking ?
A good question. Windows has a very nice security capability model at the WinNT kernel level, but this model isn't always used at higher-level APIs, rendering it partially useless.
COM and ActiveX primarily are the worst security culprits, I think, allowing "documents" you'd think would be passive data (like Word Docs or HTML pages) to embed arbitrary executable services, but also the Win32 subsystem takes a lot of hits by basing things on the old DOS filesystem model and then trying to add security over the top. A culture of write-access required to root of C:\ for installers, going back to the DOS era (restricted now in Win 7, but the legacy remains). A windowing model where any running process can (I think) access any open window and insert keystrokes or mouseclicks if it merely knows the window name.
The 'both' part being a large part of the problem.
You're assuming that a majority of citizens holding a political position with which you disagree - and their representatives recognising and implementing their will - is in fact a "problem" in the first place.
Oh please, both parties ride the drug war hobby horse, and both parties love restricting the first ammendment.
So... if both major political parties are in favour of a certain position, and they're doing it to win votes... that would suggest that that political position is, in fact, strongly endorsed by the majority of voters.
In other words, democracy is working precisely as designed, delivering laws that the majority of citizens want... but you think this is broken because it doesn't give you the laws that you, a minority, want. But you think that because you're a special snowflake, your will should override everyone else's. And because it doesn't, you're unhappy.
Remind me again why a correctly functioning political system which the majority of citizens endorse is a bad thing?
No surprises the 3-strikes law seems to be popping up in many countries with open diplomatic channels to the US. In some cases (ie the British equivelent) the language in the law is word-for-word identical.
Yes, that's hardly cricket. If it were truly British it would be called the Leg Before Wicket, Bowled For A Six At Silly Mid Off law.
The population of New Zealand is 4.5 million - half that of New York City. Isn't the media industries worry over this much ado over, seriously, nothing?
Actually it's more of an unexpected party for the media industry. They've heard that there's a bit of a dragon's hoard down south and they're looking for a burglar to help them get it. They expect to deal with a few trolls and the odd elf, that's normal in this industry, but it's shaping up to be more of a battle of five armies than they counted on.
I think people should be expected to pay for things that they use that other people work to provide for them, and for which they expect payment in return.
But why should such an expectation exist in the first place?
Hello! I expect you to pay me five hundred dollars for passing this alley! Because, uh, I got up at 5am in the morning and walked a hundred miles to come and sit here and ask all passers-by to pay me five hundred dollars!
What? Just because I expect you to pay, and because I worked hard to get in a position to ask you to pay, and blistered my feet doing all this work, you don't feel obligated to pay me?
The people who create goods should expect to feed their families, this isn't the result of a "money-obsessed, money-worshiping society".
No, actually, the people who have families should expect to feed their families, just because they're human beings and are already doing a productive and difficult job: bringing new humans into the world and educating them. So they should get a family-raising allowance from the productive labour of others just because they're helping the human race.
And in fact, the productive labour should really be done by robots, rather than people, because that's more efficient. And once it is, it will be obvious that there's no necessary moral or logical connection between who does the work, and who gets the goods, because robots aren't going to need high pay, and if a robot replaces a human's job, that human shouldn't starve.
But thinking too deeply about this leads to the realisation that worshiping money IS wrong, and that the Communist slogan of "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs" is, in fact, morally just (even if the means taken by the Bolsheviks to try to create such a state were self-defeating).
You are a douche forcing communism on someone and when they refuse starving them to death is not a man-made accidental disaster.
Sure it is. Ever hear of "unintended consequences"? That's how you get most accidental man-made disasters: someone wants Good Outcome A, they use Questionable (Yet Effective Looking) Method B to attempt to get it, and instead they get Inevitable (Yet Undesired) Outcome C.
For instance: A. you want unlimited power too cheap to meter, B. you install a General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor, C. You say goodbye to a 20 km radius of farmland.
Or: A. The working poor are starving while idle rich bastards are feasting. Also you still have actual feudal serfdom, and your rich bastards just got you embroiled in a nasty war that you're losing. B. You decide to kill the idle rich and give their stuff to the productive poor. C. Now you have a new state but people are rioting. So you ship them off to the prisons built by the rich bastards, and now you've become a bigger bastard yourself.
they should be thanking the space program for their precious iPhones.
Yes, that would be why manned space missions use off-the-shelf consumer technology and not specialist, space-rated, radiation-hardened gear purpose-built by defense contractors for the unique challenges of zero-gravity environments which are ten times as expensive and useless on Earth.
GPS is the only directly space-derived technology in this list (in that, it literally could not exist without space). You could have added satellite phones, satellite radio, and satellite TV. Those are clear benefits of launch capability with clear commercial markets as products in themselves. However, manned
The others - I'm not convinced they were actually developed for the space program, and even to the extent that they were partially funded by NASA money, they are still side projects, not the bulk of what was bought and paid for.
What NASA primarily bought was rockets, photos and bootprints on the Moon. The first one was to make the generals happy and give the A-bomb a delivery mechanism. The second was to make the spies happy (and the scientists as spinoffs, on the off chance they might discover the supernova bomb or a cure for cancer or something useful). The third one was a propaganda stunt to make the whole world love America rather than the USSR - and it worked brilliantly.
Now that those jobs are all done? It's not clear what else manned space is useful for, other than keeping bored Russian missile scientists from selling their toys to the next highest bidder.
They have a unique need, private industry fills it, and then take what they learned to make other products they sell.
Quite. And the result is a lot of American aerospace defense contractors who know in precise and exacting detail how to make O-rings for Space Shuttle boosters and ballistic missile guidance computers and nuclear warheads.... which are all extremely useful in the civiian market, am I right?
Satellites are useful in peacetime, sure. And SAGE and Apollo and Minuteman did help promote the development of computers. But on the whole, the parent poster was right. If the money spent on 'priming the pump' through space and defense (two sides of the same booster really- just different payloads on top) was spent on directly funding research aimed at non-defense applications... it seems like it would be orders of magnitude more effective at generating commercial spinoffs, rather than making endless black world classified special-purpose bomb and rocket tech that can't be readily transferred.
But you couldn't sell that program to Congress as 'protecting Merican Values from the Islamofascist Commies'. It'd be damned as socialism in an instant.
Meanwhile, all the USA seems able to produce any more is Obama's birth certificate.
It took him that long to do it? Sheesh. I assumed he had to show it to someone way back when he got the Democratic nomination. How hard would it have been to go 'sure, here' four years ago?
(for spacecraft), which is only useful if you already have somewhere in space to go to. If you're looking for fuel on earth, then bringing it down the well from space would add enormously to the cost.
So fuel, in itself, is not a viable reason to go to space. It's a subsidary industry once you already have a reason.
vacuum
Yes, space has a lot of hard vacuum. It's rather its defining feature. But how many compelling industrial uses for hard vacuum are there? And is it cheaper to lift payload to orbit and down again on giant cans of explosive, or to install some vacuum pumps in a mineshaft?
more unpolluted land to trash
If by 'land' you mean 'metallic rock and gas', certainly. But not equivalent to the New World, unless you have an urgent need for bulk mega-industrial quantities of aluminium oxide, pig-iron, sulphur and hydrogen, but no urgent need to drink or breathe in the foreseeable future.
What industries would that make sense for?
without displacing an indigenous people
Certainly the lack of indigenous lifeforms, after the vacuum, is the second most important characteristic of space. It's all about the lack of stuff.
a test bed for a truly free or totally controlled population
Not really 'free' if you're going to have to ship even your oxygen up from Earth at millions of dollars per launch. Very very controlled, yes. But much more expensive than building a dome in a salt mine or a base in Antarctica.
a new dumping ground for Earth's trash or unwanted people. the ultimate high level maximum security prison/Gitmo
Good grief, no. If you have people you despise so much you don't even want them on Earth, you're going to give them millions of dollars of astronaut training apiece and ship them up on expensive rockets they can sabotage and turn into weapons of mass destruction - all at taxpayer expense? In what world does that even begin to make sense?
A tyrannical government in that position would just execute its undesirables for the cost of one bullet each, and recycle the organs. It's only in squeamish family-friendly TV sci-fi that they 'ship them to space'.
so forth and so on.
Still waiting for even one good use case for space to 'so forth' from.
Slashdot Mirror
If you have to put up suicide nets and make people sign contracts promising not to kill themself then you're doing it wrong.
So why are we still importing anything that this company makes?
And if China's laws can't protect workers from this company, then why are we still importing anything China makes?
F-Spot... easily replaced by... gThumb
I'm actually enjoying Shotwell. It's also a good advertisement for the Vala language, which seems interesting.
The institution of terrorism--that is, the mindset that gives birth to people who think "Yes, blowing up civilians is a perfectly acceptable tactic"
was embraced by all the major powers in World War II as "Strategic Bombing", and then became the cornerstone of the United States' Cold War nuclear strategy as the "balance of terror".
It's difficult for the militaries of the West to oppose the idea of bombing civilians without abandoning Nuclear Deterrence. Which would be a huge step forward for humanity, actually, if we managed to survive the ensuing period of chaos.
Meanwhile, bullets are one trick ponies.
True, but it's a really impressive trick.
Which parts of the design ? What features and capabilities are lacking ?
A good question. Windows has a very nice security capability model at the WinNT kernel level, but this model isn't always used at higher-level APIs, rendering it partially useless.
COM and ActiveX primarily are the worst security culprits, I think, allowing "documents" you'd think would be passive data (like Word Docs or HTML pages) to embed arbitrary executable services, but also the Win32 subsystem takes a lot of hits by basing things on the old DOS filesystem model and then trying to add security over the top. A culture of write-access required to root of C:\ for installers, going back to the DOS era (restricted now in Win 7, but the legacy remains). A windowing model where any running process can (I think) access any open window and insert keystrokes or mouseclicks if it merely knows the window name.
Any others?
Casual users do not care about BES servers, Office file viewers, security and remote wipes.
They want Angry Birds.
Conversely, enterprise users don't care about Angry Birds.
The 'both' part being a large part of the problem.
You're assuming that a majority of citizens holding a political position with which you disagree - and their representatives recognising and implementing their will - is in fact a "problem" in the first place.
Oh please, both parties ride the drug war hobby horse, and both parties love restricting the first ammendment.
So... if both major political parties are in favour of a certain position, and they're doing it to win votes... that would suggest that that political position is, in fact, strongly endorsed by the majority of voters.
In other words, democracy is working precisely as designed, delivering laws that the majority of citizens want... but you think this is broken because it doesn't give you the laws that you, a minority, want. But you think that because you're a special snowflake, your will should override everyone else's. And because it doesn't, you're unhappy.
Remind me again why a correctly functioning political system which the majority of citizens endorse is a bad thing?
No surprises the 3-strikes law seems to be popping up in many countries with open diplomatic channels to the US. In some cases (ie the British equivelent) the language in the law is word-for-word identical.
Yes, that's hardly cricket. If it were truly British it would be called the Leg Before Wicket, Bowled For A Six At Silly Mid Off law.
The population of New Zealand is 4.5 million - half that of New York City.
Isn't the media industries worry over this much ado over, seriously, nothing?
Actually it's more of an unexpected party for the media industry. They've heard that there's a bit of a dragon's hoard down south and they're looking for a burglar to help them get it. They expect to deal with a few trolls and the odd elf, that's normal in this industry, but it's shaping up to be more of a battle of five armies than they counted on.
Perhaps something along the lines of:
But why should such an expectation exist in the first place?
Hello! I expect you to pay me five hundred dollars for passing this alley! Because, uh, I got up at 5am in the morning and walked a hundred miles to come and sit here and ask all passers-by to pay me five hundred dollars!
What? Just because I expect you to pay, and because I worked hard to get in a position to ask you to pay, and blistered my feet doing all this work, you don't feel obligated to pay me?
That, sir, is an outrage!
The people who create goods should expect to feed their families, this isn't the result of a "money-obsessed, money-worshiping society".
No, actually, the people who have families should expect to feed their families, just because they're human beings and are already doing a productive and difficult job: bringing new humans into the world and educating them. So they should get a family-raising allowance from the productive labour of others just because they're helping the human race.
And in fact, the productive labour should really be done by robots, rather than people, because that's more efficient. And once it is, it will be obvious that there's no necessary moral or logical connection between who does the work, and who gets the goods, because robots aren't going to need high pay, and if a robot replaces a human's job, that human shouldn't starve.
But thinking too deeply about this leads to the realisation that worshiping money IS wrong, and that the Communist slogan of "from each according to their means, to each according to their needs" is, in fact, morally just (even if the means taken by the Bolsheviks to try to create such a state were self-defeating).
And that's just un-American.
How the... what.
Just what.
Who was it that said "letting you light your candle from my flame costs me nothing and doubles the light"?
A dirty thieving light-pirate, that's who.
You are a douche forcing communism on someone and when they refuse starving them to death is not a man-made accidental disaster.
Sure it is. Ever hear of "unintended consequences"? That's how you get most accidental man-made disasters: someone wants Good Outcome A, they use Questionable (Yet Effective Looking) Method B to attempt to get it, and instead they get Inevitable (Yet Undesired) Outcome C.
For instance: A. you want unlimited power too cheap to meter, B. you install a General Electric Mark I Boiling Water Reactor, C. You say goodbye to a 20 km radius of farmland.
Or: A. The working poor are starving while idle rich bastards are feasting. Also you still have actual feudal serfdom, and your rich bastards just got you embroiled in a nasty war that you're losing. B. You decide to kill the idle rich and give their stuff to the productive poor. C. Now you have a new state but people are rioting. So you ship them off to the prisons built by the rich bastards, and now you've become a bigger bastard yourself.
Oops.
s/suspiction/suspicion/
Your knowledge of spelling is highly suspictious and could lead to a convicion on grounds of conspictionary.
our Galtian overlords would work out that privacy is an aspect of security
Security for who? Your lack of privacy is their security.
they should be thanking the space program for their precious iPhones.
Yes, that would be why manned space missions use off-the-shelf consumer technology and not specialist, space-rated, radiation-hardened gear purpose-built by defense contractors for the unique challenges of zero-gravity environments which are ten times as expensive and useless on Earth.
In reality however, they weren't. We're talking about reality.
No, we're talking about the small subset of reality which was the consequence of funding decisions made in the 1950s.
It is entirely possible that, in the same reality, different decisions could lead to different outcomes.
GPS
GPS is the only directly space-derived technology in this list (in that, it literally could not exist without space). You could have added satellite phones, satellite radio, and satellite TV. Those are clear benefits of launch capability with clear commercial markets as products in themselves. However, manned
The others - I'm not convinced they were actually developed for the space program, and even to the extent that they were partially funded by NASA money, they are still side projects, not the bulk of what was bought and paid for.
What NASA primarily bought was rockets, photos and bootprints on the Moon. The first one was to make the generals happy and give the A-bomb a delivery mechanism. The second was to make the spies happy (and the scientists as spinoffs, on the off chance they might discover the supernova bomb or a cure for cancer or something useful). The third one was a propaganda stunt to make the whole world love America rather than the USSR - and it worked brilliantly.
Now that those jobs are all done? It's not clear what else manned space is useful for, other than keeping bored Russian missile scientists from selling their toys to the next highest bidder.
They have a unique need, private industry fills it, and then take what they learned to make other products they sell.
Quite. And the result is a lot of American aerospace defense contractors who know in precise and exacting detail how to make O-rings for Space Shuttle boosters and ballistic missile guidance computers and nuclear warheads.... which are all extremely useful in the civiian market, am I right?
Satellites are useful in peacetime, sure. And SAGE and Apollo and Minuteman did help promote the development of computers. But on the whole, the parent poster was right. If the money spent on 'priming the pump' through space and defense (two sides of the same booster really- just different payloads on top) was spent on directly funding research aimed at non-defense applications... it seems like it would be orders of magnitude more effective at generating commercial spinoffs, rather than making endless black world classified special-purpose bomb and rocket tech that can't be readily transferred.
But you couldn't sell that program to Congress as 'protecting Merican Values from the Islamofascist Commies'. It'd be damned as socialism in an instant.
"fully manned and fully operational space station"
Your friends at Tranquility Base are walking into a trap. An entire legion of my best iPod assembly line technicians await them.
Meanwhile, all the USA seems able to produce any more is Obama's birth certificate.
It took him that long to do it? Sheesh. I assumed he had to show it to someone way back when he got the Democratic nomination. How hard would it have been to go 'sure, here' four years ago?
Fuel
(for spacecraft), which is only useful if you already have somewhere in space to go to. If you're looking for fuel on earth, then bringing it down the well from space would add enormously to the cost.
So fuel, in itself, is not a viable reason to go to space. It's a subsidary industry once you already have a reason.
vacuum
Yes, space has a lot of hard vacuum. It's rather its defining feature. But how many compelling industrial uses for hard vacuum are there? And is it cheaper to lift payload to orbit and down again on giant cans of explosive, or to install some vacuum pumps in a mineshaft?
more unpolluted land to trash
If by 'land' you mean 'metallic rock and gas', certainly. But not equivalent to the New World, unless you have an urgent need for bulk mega-industrial quantities of aluminium oxide, pig-iron, sulphur and hydrogen, but no urgent need to drink or breathe in the foreseeable future.
What industries would that make sense for?
without displacing an indigenous people
Certainly the lack of indigenous lifeforms, after the vacuum, is the second most important characteristic of space. It's all about the lack of stuff.
a test bed for a truly free or totally controlled population
Not really 'free' if you're going to have to ship even your oxygen up from Earth at millions of dollars per launch. Very very controlled, yes. But much more expensive than building a dome in a salt mine or a base in Antarctica.
a new dumping ground for Earth's trash or unwanted people. the ultimate high level maximum security prison/Gitmo
Good grief, no. If you have people you despise so much you don't even want them on Earth, you're going to give them millions of dollars of astronaut training apiece and ship them up on expensive rockets they can sabotage and turn into weapons of mass destruction - all at taxpayer expense? In what world does that even begin to make sense?
A tyrannical government in that position would just execute its undesirables for the cost of one bullet each, and recycle the organs. It's only in squeamish family-friendly TV sci-fi that they 'ship them to space'.
so forth and so on.
Still waiting for even one good use case for space to 'so forth' from.
Adding a fake bug report form... Good idea!
It's at the bottom of the Cancel Account menu, under DISUSED LAVATORY, next to the sticky read-only thread that says "Beware of the Leopard".