Last time I checked, it was perfectly legal to possess mp3s, even of copyrighted material. It is also legal to play those mp3s, even in public. What would be illegal would be to sell those coprighted mp3s, or to use them for commercial gain (e.g. in your bar or dance studio) without compensating the copyright holder.
If I am wrong about this, prove it!
And quit chaining yourself to the immortal vultures (RIAA, MPA, corrupt feds, etc).
Arguments for shn
on
Non-MP3 Codecs?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
After collecting 60 Gb worth of mp3s, I switched to almost strictly shn format
over 2 years ago. Here is my reasoning:
1. Stick with a lossless format if you can afford the bandwidth and storage
space. Plan for the future, when bandwidth and hd space will be much
more plentiful.
2. I can definitely hear the difference between lossless and any compressed
format at 128 kb/s (that annoying wavery sound), and even at 256 kb/s (barely)
on very delicate passages and high-end speakers.
3. Also, if you want to reprocess the music (dehiss, dehum, equalize, normalize,
respatialize, etc) you experience a much more noticeable degradation in the
sound if you start with a lossy format.
4. shn is the standard format for trading music.
It is a lot less work to store in shn then have to decode and reencode every
time you make a music trade.
For lots of good links on shn format, see my trading page at http://www.vsl.ist.ucf.edu/groups/vtb/TradeList_ 20 01-11-25.html
(Now that I've come this far, what the hell, trade requests here
Interesting how, when the jobs of the middle classes are lost, it is attributed to the natural evolution of the economy in a capitalistic free market system...
...but when the jobs of CEOs are threatened, it is attributed to evil forces that must be halted by government intervention
As specified by the founding fathers in the U.S. Constitution, copyright is a gift from the governnment, given to authors and inventors to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
In it's current form, copyright has become a gift from the politicans, given to corporations to promote increased campaign contributions.
Just as we have found meteorites that originated from Mars on the surface of the earth, it is a near certainty that meteors have been blasted from the surface of the Earth by asteroid impacts, possibly seeding the entire solar system with bacterial spores already. Thus, if we do find life elsewhere in the solar system, we can never be 100%, absolutely sure it did not originate on Earth. The corollary is that we cannot be absolutely sure that life on Earth did not originate somewhere else.
Making software developers liable for damage due to blatent, criminal negligence would seem to be a good idea on its surface, but given how money corrupts our political system, any such incipient bill being developed in Congress could be easily be turned on its head. If every software developer is held liable for *any* damage caused by their product, imagine the destruction such a law would wreak on the free source movement. Who would dare donate code, faced with such huge potential liability? Bye-bye gnu cc, bye bye Linux.
Reasonable diligence should be exercised to protect security, but no large, complex piece of software can be bug-free. Building software ain't the same as building bridges, boy!
A few quotations in support of an intellectual discussion are clearly within our fair use rights in the USA, no matter what the copyright notice says. Learn about your rights before you try to restrict the rights of others!
I realize this comment is just a joke, but anyone else ever notice how an anecdotal attack will often be used when a valid argument does not exist. Kind of like how the the one "food stamp queen" driving a Cadillac is supposed to make us forget about the multitude of children that are being fed.
Analyzing the median results of a program, along with the variance of the distribution, is much more meaningful than talking about a couple of freak cases way out on the tail of the distribution. Anytime you see somebody using the anecdotal attack, a good working assumption is that either they don't know what they are talking about, or they are lying.
Although there are some analog afficionados that prefer vinyl, the analog recording medium-of-choice for most audio engineers is still reel-to-reel tape.
The reason for some audiophiles preference of analog over digital is because of the different characteristics of the distortion and noise introduced by the two recording processes. Overdriving high-quality analog results in a graceful , "warm and fuzzy" degradation, whereas exceeding levels in digital results in overflow: a harsh digital clicking. Main source of noise in analog tape is hiss due to random magnetization errors - a broadband noise easy on the ears, like falling rain or wind. Sources of noise in digital recordings include aliasing errors and truncation errors: very harsh and unnatural sounds.
With the advent of commodity of 24/96 digital, there are very few audiophiles left that argue that the fidelity of analog is higher than digital, regardless of how sophisticated and expensive the analog technology.
Yet another reason to oppose the
Bush Administration's idiotic policies restricting stem cell research.
It looks like the sight-impaired in this country can look forward
to having new eyes with little "Made in Japan" labels.
Why bother. Remember, Moore's Law is still in effect. Recently, we've
hit the point in the curve where supercomputers are no longer needed, nor
cost-effective. That is, the time it takes for the industry to deliver a
far superior product has eclipsed the average lifespan of your typical superco
mputer.
True, Moore's Law needs to be factored in to the cost/benefit calculations,
but are you claiming that, in the time it takes to build a cluster using
CPUs with computational power P(OLD), the total computational power of the
N node cluster PN=N*(Parallelization Efficiency)*P(OLD) will be approached
by the computational power of a single processor P(NEW)? Granted, the
previous discussion is simplified, as the efficiency is problem dependent
and also dependent on N, but for many reasonable problems and sufficiently
large Ns the answer is 'Of Course Not!'.
And for what problems can we use the massive computational power afforded
by clusters?
Video Compression, 3D feature extraction, temporal update of remote sensing
imagery, ultra-wideband simulation in urban environments, dynamic forest
growth simulations, computational fluid dynamics, N-body simulations of star
clusters, weather and climate prediction, sea ice tracking and prediction,
intelligent automated forces, disaster planning and simulation using autonomous
entities...
on and on...Only limited by your imagination!
Organize to survive - donate to EFF
on
DMCA 2, Freedom 0
·
· Score: 1
I hope to hell this gets modded down as redundant: I just donated money to the EFF.
I am a long-time member of the UAW and the NEA, because even a superficial study of history reveals that the working classes (that's us) must organize en masse to counter the onslaughts of the vested interests. The first step is political and economic organization within the constraints of the legal system, and if this doesn't pay dividends, action must be extended to mass strikes and protest in the streets. As a group of professionals, we must shed the self-defeating neo-conservative ideologies that have grown to insulate the technical classes from these political realities. As our fathers and grandfathers were rewarded by the rich with home loans and college educations for risking their lives to save the country from Hilter, so should we demand protection of our basic civil rights as payment for saving their elites asses from terrorism.
There is really no substitute for a well-rounded education. What is
today's technological marvel is nothing but tomorrow's surplus junkpile.
In a quality educational program, abstraction and timeless principles are
emphasized over concrete implementation details. How many programmers
are there that can write syntactically correct C++ code, but don't know an
AVI tree from an oak tree, have no idea how to do complexity analysis, think
Chomskyian grammer is political criticism, and wouldn't recognize a
correctness proof if it bit them on the ass. Syntax is easy, synthesis
and analysis are hard.
In addition,what some people forget is that a college education has different
goals than a trade school. Democratic societies require that the general
populace possess sufficient education to make rational choices required to
assure survival of a democratic political system, to discern the leaders
from the demagogic poseurs. Economic theory, as well, from Adam Smith
onwards, assumes that the consumer is making the rational and informed choices
necessary for the continuation of prosperity.
If you can forgive me pushing one of my old alma maters, in my opinion one
of the best, and most underrated, engineering degrees in the country is offered
by Dartmouth College,
Thayer School of Engineering. The Bachelor's degree in engineering is interdisciplinary, and generally
requires 2-3 semesters beyond the A.B., which is a prerequisite. This
program emphasizes "how to think" over "what to think", and produces an unusually
high proportion of successful entrepeneurs and businessmen (Among the students,
one of the local "conceits" is that Thayer graduates will start a business,
and then go hire MIT graduates to work for them). The Ph.D. program
is interdisciplinary as well, and has a special emphasis on the applied mathematical
principles that underly all of the engineering disciplines. The latter
program is the one that I have the honor of graduating from, and it
has served my career well, providing me with a solid background and the flexibility
required to remain competitive in rapidly evolving fields of research related
to computer science and technology.
Re:A surefire way to get Facetime with your Rep
on
Slashdot in Politics?
·
· Score: 1
I've thought about this option myself, and I must say I have a lot of respect for your dedication and sense of civic responsibility for actually following through. How much time and money did you have to commit? Did your campaign do any damage to personal or business relationships in your community, or was the experience mostly positive? Out of curiosity, what was the issue(s) you were most concerned with?
My own thought was to run in the general election as a minor party candidate, for example, an incumbent Dem might take particular notice of a Green party opponent, similarly a Republican of a competing Reform party or libertarian candidate. However, it would seem that running in a primary would be more efficient, and perhaps more effective as well, by provoking less enmity through use of an intra-party tact.
Where did this happen? It didn't happen on Main Street, or at the mall
or in your immediate neighborhood. It happend next to an Air Force installation
(which one?). I think it is well within the security police's purview to
have checked out what they thought was suspicious.
His trunk was rattling because he had subwoofers in it and he was playing
his stereo. How, pray tell, is that "suspicious"?
The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights states:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and
effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or
affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the
persons or things to be seized."
The bill of rights is the only thing that seperates us from fascists (and
theofascists like the Taliban). It is what makes our country worth
fighting for, and what all of the soldiers in all of the previous wars have
died to protect. Without these freedoms, the Orwellian boot of the
powerful will be stamping on our face soon, and forever.
Today, my son's friend paid us a visit and told us a story that chilled me to the bone. He was driving on a road adjacent to the local Airforce base, playing his stereo loudly, when he was pulled over by the base MPs. He was immediately surrounded by four men in fatigues carrying M-16s, and told to open his trunk "because it was rattling". The kid is a teenager, a real whitebread, all-american looking kid driving the car that his daddy bought him. Needless to say, he was terrified, and did everything he was asked to do, submitting to a full search, apparently because he was playing his music loudly.
I say, why bother with a national ID card, why not just tattoo an ID number on everyone's arm and get it over with. Unless we start taking to the streets real soon, stick a fork in us, we're done.
Part of my job involves performing research that supports simulation and
training for the Army, so in the days after the September 11 attacks, I began
to research the history of military engagements in Afghanistan to try and
gain an understanding of the Army's near term simulation and training requirements.
The parent article was new to me, but there are several other related
articles I found that may be of interest:
This link covers the history of the first anglo-afghan war, culminating
in the wintertime British retreat from Kabul of 16,500 soldiers and camp
followers, of which only one person survived.
An excellent "lessons learned" overview of the recent Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan is given
here, written by a General of the Soviet Army of Afghanistan. One
of the most striking revelations are that disease incapicated far more Soviet
soldiers than Afghan bullets. Demoralization of the Soviet soldier
also played an important role in the eventual failure of the operation, making
the regular soldiers more likely to shield themselves behind massive but
ineffective artillery fire, without engaging in the close-in infantry fighting
that was necessary for success. Operations of the Spetsnaz (Soviet
special forces) generally met with better success. A very interesting
preview to tactics that are likely to be employed, vs. those tactics that
are likely to be avoided by the US Army.
This article on
Artillery tactics provides a detailed review of the success and failure of
Soviet artillery tactics in Afghanistan. Conclusions are that the Soviets
too often attempted to substitute firepower for ground maneuvers, and that
such tactics, while sometimes appropriate for conventional warfare, are ineffective
in battling guerilla forces in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan.
One of the best overall analysis I have found of the military and political
history of Afghanistan is given in the article
"Afghanistan
as a Rentier State Model: Lessons from the Collapse". The thesis
is that Afghanistan is a "rentier state", a nation that cannot survive without
economic support from external sources. In recent times this support
has come from the Soviets, and then the US and other western sources. After
the support was withdrawn, the expected disintegration of the Afghan state
occurred, until support from the Pakistanis allowed the Taliban to become
a unifying force. Highly recommended reading if you want to get a better
understanding of the internal politics of Afghanistan.
Finally, on a related note, the first three chapters of an English translation
of the Russian historical novel "Assault on Grozny Downtown" can be accessed
here. The
Russian version is written by former Russian Captain Vyacheslav Mironov,
describing his experiences in fighting the Islamic fundamentalists in Chechnya.
The translations are provided by volunteers, and more volunteers are
needed to finish the translation. More than anything else I have read
recently, this piece most accurately communicates what I imagine to be the
horrors of urban warfare in which no quarter is given and none is received.
>>Oh, wait, Bin Laden himself was funded and
trained by the CIA...
>No, he wasn't. The CIA has nothing to do with him. The CIA offered
to help him against Russia, he refused.
You information must be based on the "plausible denials" issued to the
mainstream press after the terrorist attack.
According to a
these excerpts
from scholarly treatise published by Yale University Press and written by
somebody "who was there", Bin Laden did
benefit from CIA funding and training. Note that the book was written
well before Sept.11, while the frantic denials have come after that date.
Putting 2 and 2 together (CIA's aggressive support for Afghan "Freedom
Fighters", and Bin Laden's key role in fighting the Soviets), maybe those
denials aren't so plausible after all.
The acts of the political profiteers in this country who are using the deaths of thousands to push their pre-existing anti-civle liberties political agendas are only surpassed by the heinous acts of the terrorists themselves. Both parties are waging war against the American citizens.
There is no evidence, nor plausible scenario, in which internet wiretapping of American citizens could have prevented the horrific events of Spetember 11. All of the acts, as well as planning and support, was carried out by non-citizens, many who were apparently here illegally.
You are missing the point. If we have to spend all of our time chasing down those falsely identified, who will have time for the real terrorists?
If we spend all of our money, and then sit fat and happy, feeling safe with a technology that doesn't really work, then who is to blame when the next 6,000 people die?
Sound familiar?
Not even the commercial vendors of face recognition systems are claiming 100% accuracy. The question is, just how accurate are these applications, and what accuracy is required to provide a real benefit. Remember that there are real costs associated with using these products: the cost of buying, installing and maintaining, loss of privacy, delays and distractions due to false positives. If the false positive rate is sufficiently high, these approaches will actually be a detriment to law enforcement, as the time spent chasing down false leads will detract from time spent on other, potentially more effective activities. Also, if the false negative rate is high, then using such systems is only giving us a false sense of security, and it is likely that the real terrorists will be those who are most adept at avoiding detection.
Other questions occur. What if the lips are covered with facial hair? What if the eyes are covered with dark glasses? What is the error in facial feature space due to "pitch" and "roll" angles with respect to the image plane? How is the 3D extraction done? Stereo views? Multiple frames?
BTW, "92% accuracy" is hardly descriptive. What is the false alarm rate? What is the false negative rate? What sample size was used to generate these values? What is the sample error?
Do we know the answers to these questions, or are we legislating and spending multi-millions on the word of some salesman? (And just how much has the salesman's company donated to the re-election campaigns of these legislators)?
Agreed. For example, it is hard to imagine that we could maintain the alliance of any of Afganistan's neighbor's if we begin polluting the region with radioactive fallout. The use of nuclear weapons would seem to be politically and strategically infeasible except in the most dire situations.
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I checked, it was perfectly legal to possess mp3s, even of copyrighted material. It is also legal to play those mp3s, even in public. What would be illegal would be to sell those coprighted mp3s, or to use them for commercial gain (e.g. in your bar or dance studio) without compensating the copyright holder.
If I am wrong about this, prove it!
And quit chaining yourself to the immortal vultures (RIAA, MPA, corrupt feds, etc).
After collecting 60 Gb worth of mp3s, I switched to almost strictly shn format
over 2 years ago. Here is my reasoning:
1. Stick with a lossless format if you can afford the bandwidth and storage
space. Plan for the future, when bandwidth and hd space will be much
more plentiful.
2. I can definitely hear the difference between lossless and any compressed
format at 128 kb/s (that annoying wavery sound), and even at 256 kb/s (barely)
on very delicate passages and high-end speakers.
3. Also, if you want to reprocess the music (dehiss, dehum, equalize, normalize,
respatialize, etc) you experience a much more noticeable degradation in the
sound if you start with a lossy format.
4. shn is the standard format for trading music.
It is a lot less work to store in shn then have to decode and reencode every
time you make a music trade.
For lots of good links on shn format, see my trading page at
http://www.vsl.ist.ucf.edu/groups/vtb/TradeList
(Now that I've come this far, what the hell, trade requests here
.
;-)
Interesting how, when the jobs of the middle classes are lost, it is attributed to the natural evolution of the economy in a capitalistic free market system...
...but when the jobs of CEOs are threatened, it is attributed to evil forces that must be halted by government intervention
As specified by the founding fathers in the U.S. Constitution, copyright is a gift from the governnment, given to authors and inventors to promote the progress of science and useful arts.
In it's current form, copyright has become a gift from the politicans, given to corporations to promote increased campaign contributions.
Just as we have found meteorites that originated from Mars on the surface of the earth, it is a near certainty that meteors have been blasted from the surface of the Earth by asteroid impacts, possibly seeding the entire solar system with bacterial spores already. Thus, if we do find life elsewhere in the solar system, we can never be 100%, absolutely sure it did not originate on Earth. The corollary is that we cannot be absolutely sure that life on Earth did not originate somewhere else.
Making software developers liable for damage due to blatent, criminal negligence would seem to be a good idea on its surface, but given how money corrupts our political system, any such incipient bill being developed in Congress could be easily be turned on its head. If every software developer is held liable for *any* damage caused by their product, imagine the destruction such a law would wreak on the free source movement. Who would dare donate code, faced with such huge potential liability? Bye-bye gnu cc, bye bye Linux.
Reasonable diligence should be exercised to protect security, but no large, complex piece of software can be bug-free. Building software ain't the same as building bridges, boy!
"The majority of our problems come from about 10% of the population on campus who are online 24/7 downloading their pr0n"
Nice smear. I'm surprised you didn't come right out and say "child porn".
How do you know it isn't perfectly legal etree music trading, for example?
A few quotations in support of an intellectual discussion are clearly within our fair use rights in the USA, no matter what the copyright notice says. Learn about your rights before you try to restrict the rights of others!
I realize this comment is just a joke, but anyone else ever notice how an anecdotal attack will often be used when a valid argument does not exist. Kind of like how the the one "food stamp queen" driving a Cadillac is supposed to make us forget about the multitude of children that are being fed.
Analyzing the median results of a program, along with the variance of the distribution, is much more meaningful than talking about a couple of freak cases way out on the tail of the distribution. Anytime you see somebody using the anecdotal attack, a good working assumption is that either they don't know what they are talking about, or they are lying.
Although there are some analog afficionados that prefer vinyl, the analog recording medium-of-choice for most audio engineers is still reel-to-reel tape.
The reason for some audiophiles preference of analog over digital is because of the different characteristics of the distortion and noise introduced by the two recording processes. Overdriving high-quality analog results in a graceful , "warm and fuzzy" degradation, whereas exceeding levels in digital results in overflow: a harsh digital clicking. Main source of noise in analog tape is hiss due to random magnetization errors - a broadband noise easy on the ears, like falling rain or wind. Sources of noise in digital recordings include aliasing errors and truncation errors: very harsh and unnatural sounds.
With the advent of commodity of 24/96 digital, there are very few audiophiles left that argue that the fidelity of analog is higher than digital, regardless of how sophisticated and expensive the analog technology.
Yet another reason to oppose the Bush Administration's idiotic policies restricting stem cell research. It looks like the sight-impaired in this country can look forward to having new eyes with little "Made in Japan" labels.
Yeah, my wife can't stop playing pysol!
Why bother. Remember, Moore's Law is still in effect. Recently, we've hit the point in the curve where supercomputers are no longer needed, nor cost-effective. That is, the time it takes for the industry to deliver a far superior product has eclipsed the average lifespan of your typical superco mputer.
True, Moore's Law needs to be factored in to the cost/benefit calculations, but are you claiming that, in the time it takes to build a cluster using CPUs with computational power P(OLD), the total computational power of the N node cluster PN=N*(Parallelization Efficiency)*P(OLD) will be approached by the computational power of a single processor P(NEW)? Granted, the previous discussion is simplified, as the efficiency is problem dependent and also dependent on N, but for many reasonable problems and sufficiently large Ns the answer is 'Of Course Not!'.
And for what problems can we use the massive computational power afforded by clusters?
Video Compression, 3D feature extraction, temporal update of remote sensing imagery, ultra-wideband simulation in urban environments, dynamic forest growth simulations, computational fluid dynamics, N-body simulations of star clusters, weather and climate prediction, sea ice tracking and prediction, intelligent automated forces, disaster planning and simulation using autonomous entities...
on and on...Only limited by your imagination!
I hope to hell this gets modded down as redundant: I just donated money to the EFF. I am a long-time member of the UAW and the NEA, because even a superficial study of history reveals that the working classes (that's us) must organize en masse to counter the onslaughts of the vested interests. The first step is political and economic organization within the constraints of the legal system, and if this doesn't pay dividends, action must be extended to mass strikes and protest in the streets. As a group of professionals, we must shed the self-defeating neo-conservative ideologies that have grown to insulate the technical classes from these political realities. As our fathers and grandfathers were rewarded by the rich with home loans and college educations for risking their lives to save the country from Hilter, so should we demand protection of our basic civil rights as payment for saving their elites asses from terrorism.
There is really no substitute for a well-rounded education. What is today's technological marvel is nothing but tomorrow's surplus junkpile. In a quality educational program, abstraction and timeless principles are emphasized over concrete implementation details. How many programmers are there that can write syntactically correct C++ code, but don't know an AVI tree from an oak tree, have no idea how to do complexity analysis, think Chomskyian grammer is political criticism, and wouldn't recognize a correctness proof if it bit them on the ass. Syntax is easy, synthesis and analysis are hard.
In addition,what some people forget is that a college education has different goals than a trade school. Democratic societies require that the general populace possess sufficient education to make rational choices required to assure survival of a democratic political system, to discern the leaders from the demagogic poseurs. Economic theory, as well, from Adam Smith onwards, assumes that the consumer is making the rational and informed choices necessary for the continuation of prosperity.
If you can forgive me pushing one of my old alma maters, in my opinion one of the best, and most underrated, engineering degrees in the country is offered by Dartmouth College, Thayer School of Engineering. The Bachelor's degree in engineering is interdisciplinary, and generally requires 2-3 semesters beyond the A.B., which is a prerequisite. This program emphasizes "how to think" over "what to think", and produces an unusually high proportion of successful entrepeneurs and businessmen (Among the students, one of the local "conceits" is that Thayer graduates will start a business, and then go hire MIT graduates to work for them). The Ph.D. program is interdisciplinary as well, and has a special emphasis on the applied mathematical principles that underly all of the engineering disciplines. The latter program is the one that I have the honor of graduating from, and it has served my career well, providing me with a solid background and the flexibility required to remain competitive in rapidly evolving fields of research related to computer science and technology.
I've thought about this option myself, and I must say I have a lot of respect for your dedication and sense of civic responsibility for actually following through. How much time and money did you have to commit? Did your campaign do any damage to personal or business relationships in your community, or was the experience mostly positive? Out of curiosity, what was the issue(s) you were most concerned with?
My own thought was to run in the general election as a minor party candidate, for example, an incumbent Dem might take particular notice of a Green party opponent, similarly a Republican of a competing Reform party or libertarian candidate. However, it would seem that running in a primary would be more efficient, and perhaps more effective as well, by provoking less enmity through use of an intra-party tact.
Where did this happen? It didn't happen on Main Street, or at the mall or in your immediate neighborhood. It happend next to an Air Force installation (which one?). I think it is well within the security police's purview to have checked out what they thought was suspicious.
His trunk was rattling because he had subwoofers in it and he was playing his stereo. How, pray tell, is that "suspicious"?
The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights states:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The bill of rights is the only thing that seperates us from fascists (and theofascists like the Taliban). It is what makes our country worth fighting for, and what all of the soldiers in all of the previous wars have died to protect. Without these freedoms, the Orwellian boot of the powerful will be stamping on our face soon, and forever.
Today, my son's friend paid us a visit and told us a story that chilled me to the bone. He was driving on a road adjacent to the local Airforce base, playing his stereo loudly, when he was pulled over by the base MPs. He was immediately surrounded by four men in fatigues carrying M-16s, and told to open his trunk "because it was rattling". The kid is a teenager, a real whitebread, all-american looking kid driving the car that his daddy bought him. Needless to say, he was terrified, and did everything he was asked to do, submitting to a full search, apparently because he was playing his music loudly.
I say, why bother with a national ID card, why not just tattoo an ID number on everyone's arm and get it over with. Unless we start taking to the streets real soon, stick a fork in us, we're done.
Part of my job involves performing research that supports simulation and training for the Army, so in the days after the September 11 attacks, I began to research the history of military engagements in Afghanistan to try and gain an understanding of the Army's near term simulation and training requirements. The parent article was new to me, but there are several other related articles I found that may be of interest:
This link covers the history of the first anglo-afghan war, culminating in the wintertime British retreat from Kabul of 16,500 soldiers and camp followers, of which only one person survived.
An excellent "lessons learned" overview of the recent Soviet occupation of Afghanistan is given here, written by a General of the Soviet Army of Afghanistan. One of the most striking revelations are that disease incapicated far more Soviet soldiers than Afghan bullets. Demoralization of the Soviet soldier also played an important role in the eventual failure of the operation, making the regular soldiers more likely to shield themselves behind massive but ineffective artillery fire, without engaging in the close-in infantry fighting that was necessary for success. Operations of the Spetsnaz (Soviet special forces) generally met with better success. A very interesting preview to tactics that are likely to be employed, vs. those tactics that are likely to be avoided by the US Army.
This article on Artillery tactics provides a detailed review of the success and failure of Soviet artillery tactics in Afghanistan. Conclusions are that the Soviets too often attempted to substitute firepower for ground maneuvers, and that such tactics, while sometimes appropriate for conventional warfare, are ineffective in battling guerilla forces in the mountainous terrain of Afghanistan.
One of the best overall analysis I have found of the military and political history of Afghanistan is given in the article "Afghanistan as a Rentier State Model: Lessons from the Collapse". The thesis is that Afghanistan is a "rentier state", a nation that cannot survive without economic support from external sources. In recent times this support has come from the Soviets, and then the US and other western sources. After the support was withdrawn, the expected disintegration of the Afghan state occurred, until support from the Pakistanis allowed the Taliban to become a unifying force. Highly recommended reading if you want to get a better understanding of the internal politics of Afghanistan.
Finally, on a related note, the first three chapters of an English translation of the Russian historical novel "Assault on Grozny Downtown" can be accessed here. The Russian version is written by former Russian Captain Vyacheslav Mironov, describing his experiences in fighting the Islamic fundamentalists in Chechnya. The translations are provided by volunteers, and more volunteers are needed to finish the translation. More than anything else I have read recently, this piece most accurately communicates what I imagine to be the horrors of urban warfare in which no quarter is given and none is received.
>No, he wasn't. The CIA has nothing to do with him. The CIA offered to help him against Russia, he refused.
You information must be based on the "plausible denials" issued to the mainstream press after the terrorist attack.
According to a these excerpts from scholarly treatise published by Yale University Press and written by somebody "who was there", Bin Laden did benefit from CIA funding and training. Note that the book was written well before Sept.11, while the frantic denials have come after that date.
Putting 2 and 2 together (CIA's aggressive support for Afghan "Freedom Fighters", and Bin Laden's key role in fighting the Soviets), maybe those denials aren't so plausible after all.
The acts of the political profiteers in this country who are using the deaths of thousands to push their pre-existing anti-civle liberties political agendas are only surpassed by the heinous acts of the terrorists themselves. Both parties are waging war against the American citizens.
There is no evidence, nor plausible scenario, in which internet wiretapping of American citizens could have prevented the horrific events of Spetember 11. All of the acts, as well as planning and support, was carried out by non-citizens, many who were apparently here illegally.
You are missing the point. If we have to spend all of our time chasing down those falsely identified, who will have time for the real terrorists?
If we spend all of our money, and then sit fat and happy, feeling safe with a technology that doesn't really work, then who is to blame when the next 6,000 people die?
Sound familiar?
Not even the commercial vendors of face recognition systems are claiming 100% accuracy. The question is, just how accurate are these applications, and what accuracy is required to provide a real benefit. Remember that there are real costs associated with using these products: the cost of buying, installing and maintaining, loss of privacy, delays and distractions due to false positives. If the false positive rate is sufficiently high, these approaches will actually be a detriment to law enforcement, as the time spent chasing down false leads will detract from time spent on other, potentially more effective activities. Also, if the false negative rate is high, then using such systems is only giving us a false sense of security, and it is likely that the real terrorists will be those who are most adept at avoiding detection.
Other questions occur. What if the lips are covered with facial hair? What if the eyes are covered with dark glasses? What is the error in facial feature space due to "pitch" and "roll" angles with respect to the image plane? How is the 3D extraction done? Stereo views? Multiple frames?
BTW, "92% accuracy" is hardly descriptive. What is the false alarm rate? What is the false negative rate? What sample size was used to generate these values? What is the sample error?
Do we know the answers to these questions, or are we legislating and spending multi-millions on the word of some salesman? (And just how much has the salesman's company donated to the re-election campaigns of these legislators)?
Agreed. For example, it is hard to imagine that we could maintain the alliance of any of Afganistan's neighbor's if we begin polluting the region with radioactive fallout. The use of nuclear weapons would seem to be politically and strategically infeasible except in the most dire situations.