This is not that great of a thing. That Kaspersky walked out with $5000 may be great for them, they got their pound of flesh, but a responsible company would have forced litigation and invalidated the patent so this troll couldn't do this to anyone else... My already neutral opinion of Kaspersky just got lower. Seeing who is better at shaking the other down for money is a third world tactic. Here in the West we try to strive for fair play (in theory).
To a certain degree, this is the ineffable nature of invention. You do not know what twists and turns it will take until it happens. You can try to logically extend the consequences of an invention that you think up (like video phones or humanoid robots in the 1980s) but until it happens, real world inventions are by definition un-knowable. (If you knew what real world inventions would be created, you could make a killing running a business or trading in the stock market.)
Part of what made Blade Runner such a good movie was that unlike Star Trek and that ilk, it portrayed a dystopian future fraught with massive inequality, where the haves lived in massive wealth, while the have nots lived in relative poverty. The method used to portray those differences were more important to the story than the Scifi backdrop.
So this was not actually a think tank, this organization was a tax deductible way for Google to shill and lobby for it's policies covertly. This kind of conflict of interest with charitable donations should be scrutinized hard by the federal government. It is likely that Google owes tax on every dollar sent to this institution since they are clearly a Google proxy, and not an independent entity. The think tank should probably also lose any tax benefits it has and be re-categorized as a lobbying organization.
Something similar happened to a friend of mine. He had completely paid off his work truck a few months back and he woke up one morning at 5am to find a tow truck in his driveway hooking up his truck. He went running out and called the police. The tow truck driver already had his truck hooked up and drove off with it before he could stop them. When the police arrived, he reported it stolen, but when the police called it in, they found an impound notice had been filed by the car dealership for failure to pay the monthly payments (that's right, after he had paid off the truck entirely a few months back).
Long story short, he called the dealership and argued with them for a while. He hired a lawyer and shelled out around $2000 in legal fees at that point. Several days later they called him and told him he could come pick up his truck. He sued them in court and recovered all his legal fees ($10k at that point), cost of hist lost time, rental vehicle fees, other incidental costs and around $10,000 in punitive damages for theft of his vehicle (they had a pattern of pulling this kind of shit). All told the car dealership lost around $25,000 not including their legal fees. He found out later that several people in the financing department lost their job, as well as the senior manager.
The bottom line though is no one at the dealership cared until it cost them a significant sum of money. On balance, there are a lot of dead beats out there who are irresponsible and buy cars they can barely afford and when they lose their job, rather than doing the right thing and selling their brand new expensive car and paying off the loan or lease, they try to keep something that does not belong to them and thus you have immobilizers and crack of dawn towing companies.
The only real way to solve this problem is a federal law that realistically limits the % of a person's documented income that can be spent towards a car loan or lease. I have bought used and driven older cars for most of my life, and it is a much more economical way to live (not to mention new cars are a terrible waste of money). I paid $4800 for my last car that I drove for 10 years and my current truck was $4000 and I have had it for 7 years so far. Both vehicles have been quite reliable and I have only spent a few thousand over the years beyond routine maintenance.
The key culprit here is refined carbohydrates, both refined sugar and refined starches. Why are they so bad? Well just look at what the refining process removes. For sugars, not only does the refining process remove all vitamins and minerals, but also all dietary fiber, which is needed to help reduce the absorption rate of refined sugars. Consuming refined sugars, for example in sodas, can play merry hell with your blood sugar and blood chemistry, while eating a banana and an apple that have the equivalent sugar, will do no such thing and are in fact good for you. At the same time, that soda is empty calories with no vitamin or mineral contribution to your daily needs.
This article almost completely misses the point. The problem is not sugar or carbs, it is refined foods that have had all vitamins, minerals and other beneficial accompaniments found in nature striped away.
Then you have just disqualified nearly all women from serving in the police force. If you expect women to wrestle male suspects to the ground, almost no females can do it. The strongest women in the world, the Olympic competitors are only about as strong as an athletic high school senior male or about the top 20% of the male population.
Being "certain that there are some instances where it's a legitimate option" Implies that most instances are not, and that is fallacious and derogatory towards police.
Is every single tasing incident legitimate? No. Are the vast majority of tasing incidence legitimate? Yes they are. Do police know what it feels like to be tased? Yes, a lot of them do when they get the training. What percentage of people die as a direct result of being tased? The number is extremely small, but your odds of death go up if you are ODing on meth or other stimulants, or have other underlying health issues. Tasers are not perfect, but they are a less lethal way to stop criminals who are resisting or fleeing.
Your original post and this reply is exactly the smarmy, liberal bias that I was reacting to. I hope the police take 30 minutes to arrive at your house when the career felon released early from prison by Obama is invading your home, and the police all forget their tasers and guns in their cars, so they are forced to negotiate with the felon instead of neutralizing him... Just another example of liberal mental disability...
Until someone robs their house, or rapes their sister or murders their brother... Then they will go crying to the police to catch the criminals and probably wouldn't say a peep if the felon died from a tasing while resisting arrest...
Police have a duty assigned to them by society as a whole, to stop dangerous criminals. When they interact with the public in a law enforcement capacity, they do not know John Q. Public or if he has just murdered someone, so they are inherently cautious and suspicious. If you are actively resisting police, they will verbally warn you and then they will start using escalation of force to make you comply. If you are unarmed but reaching into a concealed area and ignoring verbal warnings, you will be tased or shot. It is just that simple.
Police officers often only have a fraction of a second to make a life or death choice, and society expects them to protect their own lives and those of society over anyone who is ignoring lawful orders and presenting a threat. The fact that we have so many microcephallics who are too stupid, ignorant or full of themselves to understand that and actively disobey lawful orders and instead act like a threat are the main reason why we have as many tasing and shooting incidents as we do.
Police do not shoot or tase people for fun, anyone who says that is full of shit, but if you are not obeying them or actively fighting with them, your stupid has earned whatever comes to you.
Next time you can try to subdue the 230lb gorilla high out of his gourd on Meth then... Let me know how that works out for you. When tasers don't work, you get this: http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Tasers are also more often used by female officers. Should we ban female officers because they don't have the physical strength to subdue 50% of the male population? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Violence has it's limits with kids too, but in general violence is an inherent facet of human life. Plants and animals are killed and eaten by humans (and nearly all animals on the planet) on a daily basis. Violence can be made extremely graphic or relatively tame based on the effects used, but even a relatively young child can understand and process when the hero kills the villain, monster etc. Violence is not inherently good or evil, it is a part of life and while parents tend to shield their children from extremely graphic violence, more tame violence is generally acceptable and often even healthy (it can aid the development of empathy, understanding of self sacrifice, conflict etc.)
Regarding sex and nudity, it is not about "having fun." Sex is an exclusively adult activity and it can demonstrably hurt children to be exposed to sexual imagery (which is why it is a crime) because they are not yet emotionally equipped to deal with it. You might think it is fun, but sex has deep seated long term psychological effects. Responsible parents understand this and shield even their adolescent children from sexual imagery as much as they can.
Regarding post release censoring, it is far past time for a federal law to amend copyright to allow this to be done by any service as long as they offer both an un-altered version as well as the altered version, both clearly described as such (but the original can be locked behind a parental password). Hell, broadcast TV has been doing this exact same thing for what 50 years now...
When will the idiots in Hollywood realize that the old adage "The customer is always right" exists to enhance business. The customer didn't like commercials, didn't like being a slave to TV schedules, didn't like crowded, noisy movie theaters, and now streaming services are killing off the old models because it is what the customer wants.
In the same way, if I want to watch an obscenity censored version of Terminator (or whatever) because I don't want the kids walking in Arnold's dick flopping around, I as the paying customer should have that option. Maybe Hollywood can collect some statistics and realize that a movie doesn't need T&A, exploding heads and obscenities every 5th word to be a good story or a commercial success, even with the majority of adults. Hollywood's "artistic integrity" ends at my front door. They wonder why their profits are down when 60% of the country refuse to buy 90% of the movies they make because of the extraneous filth they shovel in.
As an engineer, this is not surprising, but it is also disappointing. Given how dishonest VW has been, it would not surprise me to find out that they convinced this guy he was going to prison anyway (engineers have unseverable criminal liability in most modern countries regarding both fraud and willful negligence) and his family has a pallet of hundred dollar bills sitting in their garage (or in a Swiss bank account) to keep this engineer from testifying against middle and upper management, as well as a few C-level executives. There is no way that this happened in a vacuum without management knowing about it.
The couple of times I have been asked to do something morally questionable as an engineer and on several occasions when I saw a design error that presented the risk of death or great bodily injury, I made sure to follow up my concerns with a summarizing email to the the manager and his manager, and BCC myself on my personal email. The middle management squeals like a stuck pig over that kind of accountability, but engineers have a very real moral responsibility to protect society beyond most other professions. That has always resolved the issue, but I am always prepared to go directly to the CEO or if that doesn't work, state officials. When engineers don't have that level of commitment to protecting the public, scores of people can be injured or killed. In one instance, a space shuttle exploded.
Besides that, enriching someone else is the absolute dumbest reason I can think of to go to prison. Criminals in general are pretty stupid, but at least they have figured out that if you are going to rob a bank, you rob it for yourself, not stock holders or managers...
I have a news flash for you: Wikipedia does not always reflect reality, especially when you get away from the hard sciences. If you think it does, you will end up ignorant and brainwashed.
Regarding Iraq, I don't need some half whit liberal shill on Wikipedia to tell me what he read from some other half whit liberal, which is what is actually on Wikipedia:
"Seymour Hersh writes that, according to a Pentagon adviser, "[OSP] was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to be true".
Here is a hint for you: when the author cites another author (who happens to be a liberal shill) who cites an anonymous "adviser" i.e. not an actual Pentagon employee on the record with an actual name who can be questioned for some form of proof and whose motivations can be estimated, you have a bunch of bullshit and innuendo. I happen to be immune to this kind of crap because I lived it and was paying very close attention at the time.
Fact 1: Saddam Hussein kicked out the IAEA/weapons inspectors over a year before. This material breach by it'self was grounds to resume conflict with Iraq, and there was no reason for Saddam to kick them out if he wasn't trying to pursue banned WMD fabrication.
Fact 2: everyone who knew WTF they were talking about, including Hillary Clinton and 15 plus international intelligence agencies from around the world believed that Saddam Hussein had all the tools to build nuclear weapons and he was working rapidly to that goal.
Fact 3: Saddam already had chemical weapons (he had already used them on the Kurds in the past).
Fact 4: Saddam was paying homicide bombers families a bounty if they would go and kill people in Israel, in an attempt to destabilize the region.
Fact 5: Multiple mobile bio/chem labs, which Saddam was banned from having, were captured in Iraq.
Fact 6: Over 200 tons of yellow cake uranium were seized and removed from Iraq after the war.
Fact 7: Dozens of industrial centrifuges were dug up after the war, which had been buried to hide them from the US military. These industrial centrifuges were the type used to enrich Uranium and the Iraquis who told us where to find them confirmed that they were to be used as such.
You can believe the liberal bullshit, based on lies, half truths and dishonest speculation aimed at discrediting president Bush, or you can believe the above facts, now that you have them, and realize that the US was fully justified from a legal and moral standpoint to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq.
I think you are on the money there, at least in part, but there are other reasons too. The amount of spam, phishing and virus laden junkmail directed at companies is already pretty significant. The online forms that integrate a captcha and require some information prevent spammers from having yet another easy avenue of streaming garbage or worse into your business.
It is just a theory obviously, and way back on my first post I posit that there was either negligence on the part of the naval crew, or some type of E-warfare to interfere with the naval vessel's radar, which should have seen and aided in the naval vessel avoiding the collision either by changing course or speed. These collisions were happening in low visibility and just pre dawn when most humans are at their least alert.
1. Shipping lanes are open ocean (differentiating from harbors and inlets, etc). The busiest shipping lanes it the world are still not that crowded, with literal miles between ships. If you are thinking LA traffic you are sadly mistaken.
2. Changing the commercial vessel's course a few degrees would not be noticeable, even by the crew, especially because the changes happened in the dark of night (the collision happened right around sunrise).
3. By other sensors, you are assuming they had an accurate compass? It is a well known fact that compass readings can drift a few degrees from the generators in a large ship, which is why they are rarely consulted anymore. As far as obsevational navigation, that doesn't typically happen at night on cargo vessels unless there is a known hazard in the area. You give the crew far too much credit. These days everyone trusts GPS blindly (ever heard of death by GPS)?
After the first collision, I was right there with you regarding the cause being likely a technical failure or incompetence. But this is the third T bone collision in under 3 months, whereas in the 26 YEARS prior there were a total of 4 surface ship collisions in the US navy, with the US navy doing everything the same (including crossing shipping lanes). Of those historical collisions, 3 were sideswipes with refuel/restock vessels that were close on purpose, and the 4th was a small fishing vessel trying to "beat the train" in front of an aircraft carrier and it got squished.
The statistics of these type of collision make this far less likely to be some kind of system failure after the second incident. And we have already had a third collision already.
"Shipping lanes" can be hundreds of miles wide. Just crossing one should be trivial for a naval vessel, and course correcting the commercial vessel into the naval vessel would not necessarily take the commercial vessel out of the shipping lane... No relevance to our discussion.
Your complicated plan could work, but not if the crew pays attention. You would need expensive specialized equipment to 'remote control' a ship and not affect the nearby ones.
And, I would not wonder if a high quality ship GPS is watching far more than 4 satellites, and probably even shows an error if some of them seem unusually strong.
Which is why these attacks have been carried out in low visibility or early morning hours when everyone is more reliant on GPS and is less alert.
Also, you have got to educate yourself on how GPS signals work and the scales of magnitude involved here. GPS signals are extremely weak signals to begin with. THERE IS NO CHANCE OF AFFECTING NEARBY SHIPS IF YOU ARE SPOOFING A COMMERCIAL VESSEL 0.2m FROM IT'S GPS ANTENNA. Those spoofing GPS signals will be undetectable at 100m and these ships are 180m long and they usually stay multiple kilometers apart, even when they are "close" in shipping lanes. The spoofing device could be commanded remotely via satellite internet connection or shorter range radio data connection (microwave or some such) which is on a unique and completely different band than GPS and thus would have no effect on other ships in the vicinity (i.e. 10km).
Commercial ships all use commercial GPS hardware that looks at the strongest 4 satellites in the constellation. There are not, as far as I am aware, any commercial GPS receivers that look at more than 4, largely due to no added value and the algorithm that calculates position uses exactly 4, if you added more you would have to rewrite the algorithm to use the additional satellites for additional positional validation calculations which would add unnecessary overhead to the processor. There is also nothing preventing the GPS spoofing device from spoofing more than 4 satellites if for example 6 satellites were used to try to combat 4 satellite spoofing.
The spoofing equipment development cost might be expensive for you, but for a rogue nation like North Korea or Iran, that is pennies on the dollar to disable an otherwise untouchable ship that could single handedly sink their entire surface navies. Watch for them to try to cause collisions with an aircraft carrier next.
You may have had high school physics but I would have failed you if you had been in any of the courses I taught in college (and I have some criticism for the HS physics teacher who passed you without the ability to properly define the problem at hand).
There are a number of holes in your statement. Several other members have pointed out the flaws in your critique, but lets review:
Point 1: Lets assume that the drone's field of GPS spoofing extends 100M, If a drone spoofer were parked on top of the GPS antenna (0.2M away) this is generous, since the spoofing signal can be extremely weak at that distance and still overpower the GPS satellite signals by 10x. The vessel type in question has the bridge and comms array near the stern and the vessel that collided with the John S. McCain IS 183m LONG! https://www.vesseltracker.com/... So the 100m spoofing range would have been meaningless in averting the collision, not even extending out to the bow of the ship.
Point 2: Assuming the GPS spoofing device had an effective range of 1000m (unlikely but not impossible) the vessels involved both take multiple kilometers to stop or turn. Once their course and speed are set, detecting a spoofed GPS signal at 1000m (actually about 800m subtracting the commercial vessels length) is not enough time for either crew to react and avert the collision. The vessel that collided with the John S McCain unladen weighs roughly 30,000 tons (60,000,000 pounds) and is 183m (600 feet) long and I believe it was carrying 12,000 tons of fuel oil at the time. The John S McCain is 505 feet long... These vessels cannot stop or turn rapidly.
Point 3: I am asserting spoofing not jamming, but either effect would need the same signal strength in the GPS signals frequency (something like 10x the actual satellite signal strength). Placing the spoofing/jamming device adjacent to the GPS antenna (less than 0.2m) defines how strong the spoofing device signal needs to be at the source, and at that range, either spoofing or jamming would be invisible at 100m (or less) if done properly which as we just reviewed above would not affect any other ship in the vicinity.
Just admit that your criticism was incorrect and you have gaps in your knowledge of how GPS actually works and didn't know what these ships look like or their size or their turning radius and stopping distance when under way. It is already clear to everyone reading this thread. Continuing to argue only proves that you are also unable to learn from your mistakes which only perpetuates your own ignorance.
A. I don't allow some random news outlet (or a well known one) to tell me how to think.
B. Until they have a definitive, well explained reason for these crashes, my theory (a GPS spoofer attached to a negatively buoyant drone that crashes itself in the ocean a few moments before impact) just as accurately explains the evidence as any other theory.
C. FROM THE LINKED ARTICLE "Could a... vessel be hacked? In essence, what if GPS spoofing... caused personnel to be unaware of any imminent danger or unable to respond?" https://thenextweb.com/insider...
Maybe you should read first and criticize once you have a clue?
Another name for it is monopoly/near monopoly (they have ~75% of the console market) and/or interference with commerce, both of which can get you into trouble. IMHO Sony corporate are a bunch of greedy idiots who treat their customers no better than Microsoft. The Sony gaming division is essentially a US run company now and in general has made a lot of good choices for the PS4. It would be interesting to see how a class action/federal anti-trust investigation would play out in this scenario.
Alternatively, I would love to see developers start selling cross platform games (buy our game once and get it on any console and PC) via a single disc and digital unlock codes similar to what you get with multi-format bluray discs (bluray, DVD and digital iTunes and digital Ultraviolet).
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This is not that great of a thing. That Kaspersky walked out with $5000 may be great for them, they got their pound of flesh, but a responsible company would have forced litigation and invalidated the patent so this troll couldn't do this to anyone else... My already neutral opinion of Kaspersky just got lower. Seeing who is better at shaking the other down for money is a third world tactic. Here in the West we try to strive for fair play (in theory).
To a certain degree, this is the ineffable nature of invention. You do not know what twists and turns it will take until it happens. You can try to logically extend the consequences of an invention that you think up (like video phones or humanoid robots in the 1980s) but until it happens, real world inventions are by definition un-knowable. (If you knew what real world inventions would be created, you could make a killing running a business or trading in the stock market.)
Part of what made Blade Runner such a good movie was that unlike Star Trek and that ilk, it portrayed a dystopian future fraught with massive inequality, where the haves lived in massive wealth, while the have nots lived in relative poverty. The method used to portray those differences were more important to the story than the Scifi backdrop.
So this was not actually a think tank, this organization was a tax deductible way for Google to shill and lobby for it's policies covertly. This kind of conflict of interest with charitable donations should be scrutinized hard by the federal government. It is likely that Google owes tax on every dollar sent to this institution since they are clearly a Google proxy, and not an independent entity. The think tank should probably also lose any tax benefits it has and be re-categorized as a lobbying organization.
Something similar happened to a friend of mine. He had completely paid off his work truck a few months back and he woke up one morning at 5am to find a tow truck in his driveway hooking up his truck. He went running out and called the police. The tow truck driver already had his truck hooked up and drove off with it before he could stop them. When the police arrived, he reported it stolen, but when the police called it in, they found an impound notice had been filed by the car dealership for failure to pay the monthly payments (that's right, after he had paid off the truck entirely a few months back).
Long story short, he called the dealership and argued with them for a while. He hired a lawyer and shelled out around $2000 in legal fees at that point. Several days later they called him and told him he could come pick up his truck. He sued them in court and recovered all his legal fees ($10k at that point), cost of hist lost time, rental vehicle fees, other incidental costs and around $10,000 in punitive damages for theft of his vehicle (they had a pattern of pulling this kind of shit). All told the car dealership lost around $25,000 not including their legal fees. He found out later that several people in the financing department lost their job, as well as the senior manager.
The bottom line though is no one at the dealership cared until it cost them a significant sum of money. On balance, there are a lot of dead beats out there who are irresponsible and buy cars they can barely afford and when they lose their job, rather than doing the right thing and selling their brand new expensive car and paying off the loan or lease, they try to keep something that does not belong to them and thus you have immobilizers and crack of dawn towing companies.
The only real way to solve this problem is a federal law that realistically limits the % of a person's documented income that can be spent towards a car loan or lease. I have bought used and driven older cars for most of my life, and it is a much more economical way to live (not to mention new cars are a terrible waste of money). I paid $4800 for my last car that I drove for 10 years and my current truck was $4000 and I have had it for 7 years so far. Both vehicles have been quite reliable and I have only spent a few thousand over the years beyond routine maintenance.
The key culprit here is refined carbohydrates, both refined sugar and refined starches. Why are they so bad? Well just look at what the refining process removes. For sugars, not only does the refining process remove all vitamins and minerals, but also all dietary fiber, which is needed to help reduce the absorption rate of refined sugars. Consuming refined sugars, for example in sodas, can play merry hell with your blood sugar and blood chemistry, while eating a banana and an apple that have the equivalent sugar, will do no such thing and are in fact good for you. At the same time, that soda is empty calories with no vitamin or mineral contribution to your daily needs.
This article almost completely misses the point. The problem is not sugar or carbs, it is refined foods that have had all vitamins, minerals and other beneficial accompaniments found in nature striped away.
Then you have just disqualified nearly all women from serving in the police force. If you expect women to wrestle male suspects to the ground, almost no females can do it. The strongest women in the world, the Olympic competitors are only about as strong as an athletic high school senior male or about the top 20% of the male population.
Being "certain that there are some instances where it's a legitimate option" Implies that most instances are not, and that is fallacious and derogatory towards police.
Is every single tasing incident legitimate? No.
Are the vast majority of tasing incidence legitimate? Yes they are.
Do police know what it feels like to be tased? Yes, a lot of them do when they get the training.
What percentage of people die as a direct result of being tased? The number is extremely small, but your odds of death go up if you are ODing on meth or other stimulants, or have other underlying health issues. Tasers are not perfect, but they are a less lethal way to stop criminals who are resisting or fleeing.
Your original post and this reply is exactly the smarmy, liberal bias that I was reacting to. I hope the police take 30 minutes to arrive at your house when the career felon released early from prison by Obama is invading your home, and the police all forget their tasers and guns in their cars, so they are forced to negotiate with the felon instead of neutralizing him... Just another example of liberal mental disability...
Until someone robs their house, or rapes their sister or murders their brother... Then they will go crying to the police to catch the criminals and probably wouldn't say a peep if the felon died from a tasing while resisting arrest...
Police have a duty assigned to them by society as a whole, to stop dangerous criminals. When they interact with the public in a law enforcement capacity, they do not know John Q. Public or if he has just murdered someone, so they are inherently cautious and suspicious. If you are actively resisting police, they will verbally warn you and then they will start using escalation of force to make you comply. If you are unarmed but reaching into a concealed area and ignoring verbal warnings, you will be tased or shot. It is just that simple.
Police officers often only have a fraction of a second to make a life or death choice, and society expects them to protect their own lives and those of society over anyone who is ignoring lawful orders and presenting a threat. The fact that we have so many microcephallics who are too stupid, ignorant or full of themselves to understand that and actively disobey lawful orders and instead act like a threat are the main reason why we have as many tasing and shooting incidents as we do.
Police do not shoot or tase people for fun, anyone who says that is full of shit, but if you are not obeying them or actively fighting with them, your stupid has earned whatever comes to you.
Next time you can try to subdue the 230lb gorilla high out of his gourd on Meth then... Let me know how that works out for you. When tasers don't work, you get this: http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Tasers are also more often used by female officers. Should we ban female officers because they don't have the physical strength to subdue 50% of the male population? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Alternatively, being subdued by 30 rounds of 9mm leads to a 99.999% fatality rate. I would say the Taser is an improvement.
Violence has it's limits with kids too, but in general violence is an inherent facet of human life. Plants and animals are killed and eaten by humans (and nearly all animals on the planet) on a daily basis. Violence can be made extremely graphic or relatively tame based on the effects used, but even a relatively young child can understand and process when the hero kills the villain, monster etc. Violence is not inherently good or evil, it is a part of life and while parents tend to shield their children from extremely graphic violence, more tame violence is generally acceptable and often even healthy (it can aid the development of empathy, understanding of self sacrifice, conflict etc.)
Regarding sex and nudity, it is not about "having fun." Sex is an exclusively adult activity and it can demonstrably hurt children to be exposed to sexual imagery (which is why it is a crime) because they are not yet emotionally equipped to deal with it. You might think it is fun, but sex has deep seated long term psychological effects. Responsible parents understand this and shield even their adolescent children from sexual imagery as much as they can.
Regarding post release censoring, it is far past time for a federal law to amend copyright to allow this to be done by any service as long as they offer both an un-altered version as well as the altered version, both clearly described as such (but the original can be locked behind a parental password). Hell, broadcast TV has been doing this exact same thing for what 50 years now...
When will the idiots in Hollywood realize that the old adage "The customer is always right" exists to enhance business. The customer didn't like commercials, didn't like being a slave to TV schedules, didn't like crowded, noisy movie theaters, and now streaming services are killing off the old models because it is what the customer wants.
In the same way, if I want to watch an obscenity censored version of Terminator (or whatever) because I don't want the kids walking in Arnold's dick flopping around, I as the paying customer should have that option. Maybe Hollywood can collect some statistics and realize that a movie doesn't need T&A, exploding heads and obscenities every 5th word to be a good story or a commercial success, even with the majority of adults. Hollywood's "artistic integrity" ends at my front door. They wonder why their profits are down when 60% of the country refuse to buy 90% of the movies they make because of the extraneous filth they shovel in.
As an engineer, this is not surprising, but it is also disappointing. Given how dishonest VW has been, it would not surprise me to find out that they convinced this guy he was going to prison anyway (engineers have unseverable criminal liability in most modern countries regarding both fraud and willful negligence) and his family has a pallet of hundred dollar bills sitting in their garage (or in a Swiss bank account) to keep this engineer from testifying against middle and upper management, as well as a few C-level executives. There is no way that this happened in a vacuum without management knowing about it.
The couple of times I have been asked to do something morally questionable as an engineer and on several occasions when I saw a design error that presented the risk of death or great bodily injury, I made sure to follow up my concerns with a summarizing email to the the manager and his manager, and BCC myself on my personal email. The middle management squeals like a stuck pig over that kind of accountability, but engineers have a very real moral responsibility to protect society beyond most other professions. That has always resolved the issue, but I am always prepared to go directly to the CEO or if that doesn't work, state officials. When engineers don't have that level of commitment to protecting the public, scores of people can be injured or killed. In one instance, a space shuttle exploded.
Besides that, enriching someone else is the absolute dumbest reason I can think of to go to prison. Criminals in general are pretty stupid, but at least they have figured out that if you are going to rob a bank, you rob it for yourself, not stock holders or managers...
I have a news flash for you: Wikipedia does not always reflect reality, especially when you get away from the hard sciences. If you think it does, you will end up ignorant and brainwashed.
Regarding Iraq, I don't need some half whit liberal shill on Wikipedia to tell me what he read from some other half whit liberal, which is what is actually on Wikipedia:
"Seymour Hersh writes that, according to a Pentagon adviser, "[OSP] was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, wanted to be true".
Here is a hint for you: when the author cites another author (who happens to be a liberal shill) who cites an anonymous "adviser" i.e. not an actual Pentagon employee on the record with an actual name who can be questioned for some form of proof and whose motivations can be estimated, you have a bunch of bullshit and innuendo. I happen to be immune to this kind of crap because I lived it and was paying very close attention at the time.
Fact 1: Saddam Hussein kicked out the IAEA/weapons inspectors over a year before. This material breach by it'self was grounds to resume conflict with Iraq, and there was no reason for Saddam to kick them out if he wasn't trying to pursue banned WMD fabrication.
Fact 2: everyone who knew WTF they were talking about, including Hillary Clinton and 15 plus international intelligence agencies from around the world believed that Saddam Hussein had all the tools to build nuclear weapons and he was working rapidly to that goal.
Fact 3: Saddam already had chemical weapons (he had already used them on the Kurds in the past).
Fact 4: Saddam was paying homicide bombers families a bounty if they would go and kill people in Israel, in an attempt to destabilize the region.
Fact 5: Multiple mobile bio/chem labs, which Saddam was banned from having, were captured in Iraq.
Fact 6: Over 200 tons of yellow cake uranium were seized and removed from Iraq after the war.
Fact 7: Dozens of industrial centrifuges were dug up after the war, which had been buried to hide them from the US military. These industrial centrifuges were the type used to enrich Uranium and the Iraquis who told us where to find them confirmed that they were to be used as such.
You can believe the liberal bullshit, based on lies, half truths and dishonest speculation aimed at discrediting president Bush, or you can believe the above facts, now that you have them, and realize that the US was fully justified from a legal and moral standpoint to remove Saddam Hussein from Iraq.
I think you are on the money there, at least in part, but there are other reasons too. The amount of spam, phishing and virus laden junkmail directed at companies is already pretty significant. The online forms that integrate a captcha and require some information prevent spammers from having yet another easy avenue of streaming garbage or worse into your business.
It is just a theory obviously, and way back on my first post I posit that there was either negligence on the part of the naval crew, or some type of E-warfare to interfere with the naval vessel's radar, which should have seen and aided in the naval vessel avoiding the collision either by changing course or speed. These collisions were happening in low visibility and just pre dawn when most humans are at their least alert.
1. Shipping lanes are open ocean (differentiating from harbors and inlets, etc). The busiest shipping lanes it the world are still not that crowded, with literal miles between ships. If you are thinking LA traffic you are sadly mistaken.
2. Changing the commercial vessel's course a few degrees would not be noticeable, even by the crew, especially because the changes happened in the dark of night (the collision happened right around sunrise).
3. By other sensors, you are assuming they had an accurate compass? It is a well known fact that compass readings can drift a few degrees from the generators in a large ship, which is why they are rarely consulted anymore. As far as obsevational navigation, that doesn't typically happen at night on cargo vessels unless there is a known hazard in the area. You give the crew far too much credit. These days everyone trusts GPS blindly (ever heard of death by GPS)?
After the first collision, I was right there with you regarding the cause being likely a technical failure or incompetence. But this is the third T bone collision in under 3 months, whereas in the 26 YEARS prior there were a total of 4 surface ship collisions in the US navy, with the US navy doing everything the same (including crossing shipping lanes). Of those historical collisions, 3 were sideswipes with refuel/restock vessels that were close on purpose, and the 4th was a small fishing vessel trying to "beat the train" in front of an aircraft carrier and it got squished.
The statistics of these type of collision make this far less likely to be some kind of system failure after the second incident. And we have already had a third collision already.
"Shipping lanes" can be hundreds of miles wide. Just crossing one should be trivial for a naval vessel, and course correcting the commercial vessel into the naval vessel would not necessarily take the commercial vessel out of the shipping lane... No relevance to our discussion.
Done with you.
Not even going to respond to this garbled mess.
Your complicated plan could work, but not if the crew pays attention.
You would need expensive specialized equipment to 'remote control' a ship and not affect the nearby ones.
And, I would not wonder if a high quality ship GPS is watching far more than 4 satellites, and probably even shows an error if some of them seem unusually strong.
Which is why these attacks have been carried out in low visibility or early morning hours when everyone is more reliant on GPS and is less alert.
Also, you have got to educate yourself on how GPS signals work and the scales of magnitude involved here. GPS signals are extremely weak signals to begin with. THERE IS NO CHANCE OF AFFECTING NEARBY SHIPS IF YOU ARE SPOOFING A COMMERCIAL VESSEL 0.2m FROM IT'S GPS ANTENNA. Those spoofing GPS signals will be undetectable at 100m and these ships are 180m long and they usually stay multiple kilometers apart, even when they are "close" in shipping lanes. The spoofing device could be commanded remotely via satellite internet connection or shorter range radio data connection (microwave or some such) which is on a unique and completely different band than GPS and thus would have no effect on other ships in the vicinity (i.e. 10km).
Commercial ships all use commercial GPS hardware that looks at the strongest 4 satellites in the constellation. There are not, as far as I am aware, any commercial GPS receivers that look at more than 4, largely due to no added value and the algorithm that calculates position uses exactly 4, if you added more you would have to rewrite the algorithm to use the additional satellites for additional positional validation calculations which would add unnecessary overhead to the processor. There is also nothing preventing the GPS spoofing device from spoofing more than 4 satellites if for example 6 satellites were used to try to combat 4 satellite spoofing.
The spoofing equipment development cost might be expensive for you, but for a rogue nation like North Korea or Iran, that is pennies on the dollar to disable an otherwise untouchable ship that could single handedly sink their entire surface navies. Watch for them to try to cause collisions with an aircraft carrier next.
Exactly right on both counts Hawguy.
You may have had high school physics but I would have failed you if you had been in any of the courses I taught in college (and I have some criticism for the HS physics teacher who passed you without the ability to properly define the problem at hand).
There are a number of holes in your statement. Several other members have pointed out the flaws in your critique, but lets review:
Point 1: Lets assume that the drone's field of GPS spoofing extends 100M, If a drone spoofer were parked on top of the GPS antenna (0.2M away) this is generous, since the spoofing signal can be extremely weak at that distance and still overpower the GPS satellite signals by 10x. The vessel type in question has the bridge and comms array near the stern and the vessel that collided with the John S. McCain IS 183m LONG! https://www.vesseltracker.com/... So the 100m spoofing range would have been meaningless in averting the collision, not even extending out to the bow of the ship.
Point 2: Assuming the GPS spoofing device had an effective range of 1000m (unlikely but not impossible) the vessels involved both take multiple kilometers to stop or turn. Once their course and speed are set, detecting a spoofed GPS signal at 1000m (actually about 800m subtracting the commercial vessels length) is not enough time for either crew to react and avert the collision. The vessel that collided with the John S McCain unladen weighs roughly 30,000 tons (60,000,000 pounds) and is 183m (600 feet) long and I believe it was carrying 12,000 tons of fuel oil at the time. The John S McCain is 505 feet long... These vessels cannot stop or turn rapidly.
Point 3: I am asserting spoofing not jamming, but either effect would need the same signal strength in the GPS signals frequency (something like 10x the actual satellite signal strength). Placing the spoofing/jamming device adjacent to the GPS antenna (less than 0.2m) defines how strong the spoofing device signal needs to be at the source, and at that range, either spoofing or jamming would be invisible at 100m (or less) if done properly which as we just reviewed above would not affect any other ship in the vicinity.
Just admit that your criticism was incorrect and you have gaps in your knowledge of how GPS actually works and didn't know what these ships look like or their size or their turning radius and stopping distance when under way. It is already clear to everyone reading this thread. Continuing to argue only proves that you are also unable to learn from your mistakes which only perpetuates your own ignorance.
A. I don't allow some random news outlet (or a well known one) to tell me how to think.
B. Until they have a definitive, well explained reason for these crashes, my theory (a GPS spoofer attached to a negatively buoyant drone that crashes itself in the ocean a few moments before impact) just as accurately explains the evidence as any other theory.
C. FROM THE LINKED ARTICLE "Could a ... vessel be hacked? In essence, what if GPS spoofing ... caused personnel to be unaware of any imminent danger or unable to respond?" https://thenextweb.com/insider...
Maybe you should read first and criticize once you have a clue?
Another name for it is monopoly/near monopoly (they have ~75% of the console market) and/or interference with commerce, both of which can get you into trouble. IMHO Sony corporate are a bunch of greedy idiots who treat their customers no better than Microsoft. The Sony gaming division is essentially a US run company now and in general has made a lot of good choices for the PS4. It would be interesting to see how a class action/federal anti-trust investigation would play out in this scenario.
Alternatively, I would love to see developers start selling cross platform games (buy our game once and get it on any console and PC) via a single disc and digital unlock codes similar to what you get with multi-format bluray discs (bluray, DVD and digital iTunes and digital Ultraviolet).