The odds of an open ocean collision are astronomical. There have been 4 such naval surface vessel collisions in the prior 26 years. None were T-bone. 3 of those were the result of refueling/resupply mishaps between ships intentionally trying to get close to each other. The 4th was a small fishing boat that tried to "beat the train" in front of a aircraft carrier and got squished. Now we have 3 T-bone collisions in 2 months in one specific region of the world, all by large to massive ships.
I could accomplish the task with less than $10,000 and a few software/electrical engineers. Build a GPS spoofing device, smuggle it onto the commercial vessel and plant it near the GPS antenna. Use it to steer the commercial vessel into the naval ship, which is totally unprepared and unsuspecting that such a thing would happen. The naval vessel will likely change course and speed several times to avoid collision, but they can't sink a 30,000 ton commercial vessel without cause and by the time they realize what is happening, the collision is unavoidable. For good measure, mount the GPS spoofing device to a negatively buoyant drone and fly it into the ocean just before the collision, erasing all evidence of the GPS spoofer. All the tech involved is OTS and not that hard to integrate with the exception of actually forming the spoofed GPS signals well enough to steer the commercial vessel, which take some sophistication.
Your lack of imagination doesn't make something impossible or even unlikely.
Not saying that isn't possible, but if that were the case then why have we only had 4 surface ship collisions in the prior 26 years and then 3 in the last two months? Open ocean collisions not involving resupply or refueling ships is vanishingly rare, and now we suddenly have 3 in two months, all in the same global region, all T-bone collisions (which on the open ocean are like finding a mermaid riding a unicorn, a.k.a. they don't happen to large modern vessels).
I don't usually reply to ACs, but I have a minute, so let me clarify.
THE COMMERCIAL VESSEL'S GPS WAS SPOOFED. Not the military vessel. The spoofing device was likely placed on or directly next to the commercial vessels GPS antenna.
The military vessel likely saw the commercial vessel, noted the collision course, and changed course to avoid the collision. Probably more than once. What the naval officers on duty at the time didn't account for was that the commercial vessel, unlike every commercial vessel they had ever seen before was not going from A to B, it was being steered like a 30,000 ton torpedo directly at them. By the time they realized this, the collision was likely unavoidable. The Naval ship had no recourse and nothing to do. It is unlikely that they could have even sunk the commercial ship before the collision.
There are many on slashdot who think themselves experts because they once read something about X. It is a common affliction in our modern world with the advent of the internet and Wikipedia, you actually can educate yourself on a wide variety of topics, but proper application of that knowledge requires intelligence and sadly many are still lacking in that regard. The icing on the cake is that most of them are also clueless about their own limitations and instead are confident of their intellectual and moral superiority to everyone else they come across, and are only too eager to demonstrate the fact.
GPS radio waves are a very weak signal at sea level, and if you plant a GPS spoofer directly adjacent to the commercial ship's GPS antenna, that signal can be 10x more powerful to the commercial ship than the real GPS signal and not even be detectable 100 yards away let alone to other ships miles away. You might want to educate yourself on how radiant intensity works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This exactly, the only problem is that US naval ships have not been on high alert for commercial vessels being steered directly on them, thus it may be something as simple as the radar officer sees the commercial vessel, sees it is on a collision course, so the naval vessel plots a new course and then they go back to playing solitaire not realizing that the commercial vessel is course correcting to collide with the naval vessels new course. 30 minutes later that collision is unavoidable since these ships literally cannot get out of each others way once they are within a certain distance and course.
Facepalms self. FFS don't assume that you are smarter than everyone else on the internet, especially when you haven't actually studied GPS or how large ships navigate.
GPS works by locating the signal from 4 or more GPS satellites and then comparing the signals to determine a location. GPS signals are very weak and both the Russians and Chinese have specific GPS jamming weapon systems (and in turn the US has guided missiles that home in on GPS jamming signals). Furthermore, what I suggest here is the spoofing of the GPS signals to the commercial vessel only. This can be easily accomplished using a device near the GPS antenna or a drone landed near the antenna or a plane at relatively low altitude with a directional antenna that within a small radius spoofs the GPS constellation overhead. That GPS spoofing vehicle or device can "steer" the commercial vessel remotely, whose auto navigation GPS based system updates it's course every few minutes, (since drifting even a little off course can cost thousands of dollars of extra fuel). Once the ships are within 2000 meters or so, the collision is inevitable and the GPS spoofing vehicle can bug out, leaving no trace.
Or he was let go due to incompetence in blaming personnel instead of figuring out what is going on, which I cited in my original post. After the second collision, the navy should have pulled out all the stops to figure out what is being done to affect our ships (hacking, electronic warfare, whatever it is) but they did not. Given that all of these collisions have happened within proximity to North Korea and I doubt China would be stupid enough to attack the US, it is very likely that North Korea is attacking the US navy using either hacks or some other method to blind our radar systems and then GPS spoofing to steer other ships into our naval ships. If/when we figure out the method and tie it to North Korea, they are going to get the military annihilation they have been begging for recently. I hope China doesn't mind the nuclear fallout from their proxy drifting over their border (tough shit if they don't like it).
Your "logic" fails a basic understanding of shipping lanes and navy ship procedures, precautions and general practice. The equivalent analogy is 4 car accidents in a few months where each vehicle is navigated by multiple professionals where that is their sole job, in addition to computers and radar that sees for hundreds of miles in all directions. Furthermore, while under way (i.e. not in a harbor) the equivalent analogy is that the "roads" are hundreds if not thousands of miles wide and there are millions of miles of "road" and there are well under a million vehicles in total (not the 263,000,000 registered cars in the US) all of which are operated by professionals responsible for multi-million dollar vehicles.
So lets recount the errors in your analogy: -Each ship has multiple professional "drivers" to guide the ship (not a single person with a few dozen hours of training like cars) -Each naval ship has active radar that can see to the horizon to avoid other ships long before they even get close. -Each naval ship has computer systems as well as humans that monitor their defensive "sphere" and track and alert to anything inside that sphere. -There are fewer that 1,000,000 large ships in the Pacific, whereas there are 263x more cars in use in the US. -The "roads" used by ships are hundreds of miles wide (shipping lanes). -The "roads" used by ships cover 70% of the earths surface. Assuming less than 1M large ships, if we assume equal distribution, each ship has roughly 200 square miles to it'self. Even without equal distribution, ships on the high sea typically stay thousands of meters apart.
All of these factors that you ignored or are ignorant of lead to massively reduce the chances of an accidental T-bone collision to near zero chances (i.e. 0.0001% chance). If you review the list of historical accidental collisions, out of the 7 collisions from 1989-2015 (26 years) 3 accidental collisions involve submarines which are inherently invisible to ships and themselves struggle to avoid collision inside harbors where traffic is heavy and their maneuverability is limited. Nearly all of the remaining collisions were either with small vessels some of which did not even have a radio or during exercises (refueling/resupply/training) where the ships were intentionally in close proximity and sustained broadside contact (not a collision as we have recently seen). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Zero collisions involved T-bone collisions on the high seas. Now we have seen the John McCain, the Fitzgerald, the Lake Champlain all T-boned by other large ships in less than 3 months.
Zero collisions in the prior 26 years involved massive commercial transport ships. The most recent two collisions have both been with massive transports which rammed into the naval vessels mid ship.
To sum it up for you: Zero of the 4 naval surface ship collisions in the last 26 YEARS have been with large commercial ships, zero of the collisions have been T-bone collisions and now suddenly we have had 3 in less than 3 months in a single region of the world. I guess to the America haters that is a coincidence. To those of us with a brain it is something else.
....OK... What we are talking about here (a covert attack on US naval sips) has nothing to do with past social programs for starters. There is no way that a massive tanker can sneak up on one of these ships unless their radar has been tampered with. Under normal circumstances, Navy ships can see everything to the horizon on their radar. The way radar works, the closer these cargo ships got, the larger their signature, and automatic proximity alarms would have gone off, as well as the radar officer seeing the cargo ship long before then.
So the US would have been better off according to you letting the drug free for all of the 1960s continue, nevermind most of those drugs we know today have long term effects, often causing permanent damage to the brain.
And instead of the war on poverty, we should just let those at the lowest levels of society try to manage not to starve with no assistance to try to elevate them back into self sufficiency, as was the case in the late 1800s?
Were there unintended consequences? Sure. Were there people who fell through the cracks? Sure. Were both efforts worth it? History says yes.
The spending cuts didn't help, but the odds of a mid sea T-bone collision are extremely low to start with. There is clearly guidance (probably spoofed GPS) to line up these big tankers on a collision course and some form of electronic warfare to blind the naval ships radar to the approaching cargo ships.
Four times is some form of attack combined with incompetent response.
It is clear that there is some form of electronic warfare (not necessarily hacking) at play here. This goes beyond just GPS spoofing, since these ships are loaded with surface radar that should spot a massive container or tanker ship from the horizon, even if one or both ships is off course. I highly doubt that N. Korea's saber rattling which caused more US naval assets to enter the region was a coincidence. Given the location of all the ships involved prior to and during the accidents, I highly suspect that either China or N. Korea have been field testing a new clandestine weapon. Once we figure out what it is and who has been doing it, we should make sure to obliterate the source and sink 4 of their naval ships for starters. If they want to continue to attack the US navy, we can continue to to destroy their assets, since this is an act of war according to international law.
Yes, that is the standard approach, and for good reason. There is no reason you can't build your own battery bank though. (Very few people have the technical skill to build a battery charge/discharge balancer though.)
Unless these people built a cinderblock bunker roofed with a galvanized steel roof (i.e. no wood in the structure at all) and a steel fire rated door that is completely removed from their main residence, the first time one of these Lithium batteries fails thermally, their entire "wall" will likely go up and burn down their house. If they have each battery in a ceramic, isolated cubby outside their house, they are marginally better, but this is definitely not a good way to go about powering your house or living off grid... You are better off building your own lead acid battery array with deep cycle batteries...
If you had read the article, I believe that it said that you could pre-download HD patches for existing games before launch day, so that should help further reduce traffic on the servers day one.
Also, just to be clear, I transferred my data a few times on my 360, and pushing 340GB plus of data through a USB2 connection is a pain in the ass, especially when dealing with all the other DRM related steps you had to take on the old/new HDD, compared to hot swapping a 5TB USB3 HDD that you can copy to overnight. Just saying.
There are any number of ADAs who are looking to make their name. They will arrest and overcharge to the point of the ridiculous. It is SOP for district attorneys as a tactic to get a plea deal, saving them from actually having to prove their case in court which takes real evidence.
Arrest is not evidence of either a crime or culpability. The evidence was likely provided by Lowes as well as a request to arrest the couple, so how much leg work was actually done by real police detectives was little to none. If the district attorneys office actually has to face a real defense attorney (not a public defender) the case will probably fall apart pretty quickly.
I can see where you are coming from, but please restrain yourself and your use of invective. The bottom line is we are both speculating and I think the simple truth here is that we do not have enough information on the flaw and how it manifested (not a security exploit) to know if it was criminal theft or not. There are a number of consumer protections that hold businesses accountable for their own mistakes, and prevent businesses from going after consumers or trying to charge them further after a transaction has been completed.
2. Don't bog down your gaming network as 20M users all try to re-download 5TB worth of games for their new system.
I own every system since the Atari 2600, but I have been primarily using my PS4 this generation, while I used my 360 primarily last generation. Microsoft made some huge miscalculations with the Xbone and I held off buying it for several years, and since it doesn't have many exclusives, it is mainly a pass through and 360 game player. Hopefully this is more indication of putting the customer first and giving gamers what gamers want first and foremost.
Sony could learn a thing or two in this regard, as well as backwards comparability so that the customer doesn't feel ripped off buying the same game twice...
Due to cable packages and billing models, the majority who watched less TV on a few channels always subsidized a minority who watched a lot of TV across a lot of channels. Cable is cheaper if you want to watch ESPN and live sports or watch a lot of TV on a lot of channels.
If you are like most people though, with a $15 sub to Hulu, a $14 sub to Netflix and your annual Amazon prime membership (that I had before free videos anyway), you have way more content than you could ever watch for around $30/month, commercial free. High speed internet was essential in my home long before the rise of VOD streaming services, so I don't consider it part of the cost (at the least it gets amortized over VoIP phone/gaming/VOD streaming/internet/face-time/etc., etc.) so it's not really a big part of the equation.
The key that many companies value is not so much cross disciplinary education per se, but being able to be highly knowledgeable across a wide variety of fields and then taking that knowledge and using it to come up with unique, valuable solutions that draw on that knowledge.
Brute forcing a problem is something you can get out of any fresh college graduate, but an elegant, economical solution that draws on multiple fields is truly valuable and the people who can regularly generate those kinds of solutions are both rare and valuable.
1. Go to Russia 2. Become a Russian citizen (you can skip this if you want). 3. Start writing for a Russian news outlet or blog 4. Criticize Vladimir Putin
Let me know how well that constitution limits the power of the government or that bill of rights protects you from living out your days in a Siberian work camp.
On the one hand you have the US, the equivalent of a police officer. Not perfect, but clearly a force for good in the world. The US saved millions of lives in WW2, South Korea, etc. at our own expense of blood and treasure. After WW2, we didn't plunder and annex the losing countries. We created stable democracies where people live in peace and freedom in Japan and Germany. We tried to create peaceful democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan and spent billions to rebuild them both, but Islam is a medieval religion incompatible with freedom/democracy and we made the mistake of not destroying it like we destroyed emperor worship in Japan after WW2. When there is a disaster around the world, or a dictator is murdering innocents, after the UN has passed a meaningless resolution, the world looks to the US, and we always offer aid, and sometimes use our military to try to end the bloodshed.
OTOH, you have Russia, the former core of the USSR whose stated goal was to take over the world with military force and who held with force nearly a dozen eastern European countries for around 70 years. The USSR stole nuclear technology from the US and then spent the next 70 years threatening the rest of the free world with nuclear annihilation . Soviet Russia killed tens of millions of innocents, mostly its own citizens and more recently, former KGB agent/dictator for life Vladimir Putin invaded and annexed Crimea using military force. Around 10,000 people were killed in that agression.
But their both exactly the same right? Talk about clueless...
Your professor clearly failed to teach you logic (or you were taught what to think instead of how to think). Take a seat because school is now in session:
No, it is not moving the goal posts. Recent invasion for the purpose of occupation and assimilation is a huge red flag indicator of a nation looking to further it's power and holdings by military action (AKA take over the world in common vernacular). Please show me any evidence that the USSR did not want to take over the world? Where is the evidence that former KGB agent and dictator for life Vladimir Putin would not take over the world given the chance? He clearly wants to restore Russia to its former dominance and has used military invasion to further that goal.
Nor is it strawman. Your argument was making moral equivalence between the US and Russia. My statement expounded on the flaws in that equivalence.
After WW2 the US was the only country on the planet with nuclear weapons and the most powerful standing military in the world. If we had wanted to, we could have subjugated the entire planet with just the threat of nuclear bombardment and seized a huge chunk of global wealth, but we did not. Since WW2 the US has only attacked when we or our allies are attacked or threatened to be attacked. Lets look at the US wars:
Iraq war: Rogue dictator threatened the US with WMD after kicking out legally required UN nuclear inspectors for several years. Afterwards we removed 200 tons of yellow cake uranium, multiple mobile bio/chem labs and his chemical weapons were later located being used by Asad, Saddams allies in Syria. The US set up a democratic government and trained an Iraqi army to facilitate the Iraq people having their own governance and sovereignty as well as building billions of dollars of infrastructure.
Afghanistan war: Religious terrorists based in Afghanistan murdered ~3000 US civilians in an unprovoked attack based in and back by the government of Afghanistan (Taliban). After we invaded, we built schools, infrastructure and set up a democratic government for the Afghani people.
Gulf (Iraq) war: Iraqi dictator invaded small US allied nation Kuait in a grab of oil fields and pipeline access to the gulf. The US freed Kuait and destroyed the Iraqi army without removing the leadership in Iraq.
Vietnam war: Tried to defend South Korea against a Chinese Communist backed coup. When the US left, millions of innocent people were slaughtered.
Korean war: Defended South Korea against a Chinese Communist backed coup. South Korea is a thriving, first world democracy. North Korea is a starving dictatorship on the verge of being obliterated on a daily basis solely because of the actions of their leader, who is still backed by the Chinese.
So please, use some facts to show how the US and our defense and intel departments are equivalent to Russia? Your examples must be systemic and not criminal acts by outliers who were subsequently punished for unsanctioned activities (outlier criminal activity cannot rationally be used to condemn organizations, only systemic or sanctioned activities and policies are valid for that purpose).
Slashdot Mirror
The odds of an open ocean collision are astronomical. There have been 4 such naval surface vessel collisions in the prior 26 years. None were T-bone. 3 of those were the result of refueling/resupply mishaps between ships intentionally trying to get close to each other. The 4th was a small fishing boat that tried to "beat the train" in front of a aircraft carrier and got squished. Now we have 3 T-bone collisions in 2 months in one specific region of the world, all by large to massive ships.
I could accomplish the task with less than $10,000 and a few software/electrical engineers. Build a GPS spoofing device, smuggle it onto the commercial vessel and plant it near the GPS antenna. Use it to steer the commercial vessel into the naval ship, which is totally unprepared and unsuspecting that such a thing would happen. The naval vessel will likely change course and speed several times to avoid collision, but they can't sink a 30,000 ton commercial vessel without cause and by the time they realize what is happening, the collision is unavoidable. For good measure, mount the GPS spoofing device to a negatively buoyant drone and fly it into the ocean just before the collision, erasing all evidence of the GPS spoofer. All the tech involved is OTS and not that hard to integrate with the exception of actually forming the spoofed GPS signals well enough to steer the commercial vessel, which take some sophistication.
Your lack of imagination doesn't make something impossible or even unlikely.
Not saying that isn't possible, but if that were the case then why have we only had 4 surface ship collisions in the prior 26 years and then 3 in the last two months? Open ocean collisions not involving resupply or refueling ships is vanishingly rare, and now we suddenly have 3 in two months, all in the same global region, all T-bone collisions (which on the open ocean are like finding a mermaid riding a unicorn, a.k.a. they don't happen to large modern vessels).
I don't usually reply to ACs, but I have a minute, so let me clarify.
THE COMMERCIAL VESSEL'S GPS WAS SPOOFED. Not the military vessel. The spoofing device was likely placed on or directly next to the commercial vessels GPS antenna.
The military vessel likely saw the commercial vessel, noted the collision course, and changed course to avoid the collision. Probably more than once. What the naval officers on duty at the time didn't account for was that the commercial vessel, unlike every commercial vessel they had ever seen before was not going from A to B, it was being steered like a 30,000 ton torpedo directly at them. By the time they realized this, the collision was likely unavoidable. The Naval ship had no recourse and nothing to do. It is unlikely that they could have even sunk the commercial ship before the collision.
There are many on slashdot who think themselves experts because they once read something about X. It is a common affliction in our modern world with the advent of the internet and Wikipedia, you actually can educate yourself on a wide variety of topics, but proper application of that knowledge requires intelligence and sadly many are still lacking in that regard. The icing on the cake is that most of them are also clueless about their own limitations and instead are confident of their intellectual and moral superiority to everyone else they come across, and are only too eager to demonstrate the fact.
GPS radio waves are a very weak signal at sea level, and if you plant a GPS spoofer directly adjacent to the commercial ship's GPS antenna, that signal can be 10x more powerful to the commercial ship than the real GPS signal and not even be detectable 100 yards away let alone to other ships miles away. You might want to educate yourself on how radiant intensity works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This exactly, the only problem is that US naval ships have not been on high alert for commercial vessels being steered directly on them, thus it may be something as simple as the radar officer sees the commercial vessel, sees it is on a collision course, so the naval vessel plots a new course and then they go back to playing solitaire not realizing that the commercial vessel is course correcting to collide with the naval vessels new course. 30 minutes later that collision is unavoidable since these ships literally cannot get out of each others way once they are within a certain distance and course.
Facepalms self. FFS don't assume that you are smarter than everyone else on the internet, especially when you haven't actually studied GPS or how large ships navigate.
GPS works by locating the signal from 4 or more GPS satellites and then comparing the signals to determine a location. GPS signals are very weak and both the Russians and Chinese have specific GPS jamming weapon systems (and in turn the US has guided missiles that home in on GPS jamming signals). Furthermore, what I suggest here is the spoofing of the GPS signals to the commercial vessel only. This can be easily accomplished using a device near the GPS antenna or a drone landed near the antenna or a plane at relatively low altitude with a directional antenna that within a small radius spoofs the GPS constellation overhead. That GPS spoofing vehicle or device can "steer" the commercial vessel remotely, whose auto navigation GPS based system updates it's course every few minutes, (since drifting even a little off course can cost thousands of dollars of extra fuel). Once the ships are within 2000 meters or so, the collision is inevitable and the GPS spoofing vehicle can bug out, leaving no trace.
Or he was let go due to incompetence in blaming personnel instead of figuring out what is going on, which I cited in my original post. After the second collision, the navy should have pulled out all the stops to figure out what is being done to affect our ships (hacking, electronic warfare, whatever it is) but they did not. Given that all of these collisions have happened within proximity to North Korea and I doubt China would be stupid enough to attack the US, it is very likely that North Korea is attacking the US navy using either hacks or some other method to blind our radar systems and then GPS spoofing to steer other ships into our naval ships. If/when we figure out the method and tie it to North Korea, they are going to get the military annihilation they have been begging for recently. I hope China doesn't mind the nuclear fallout from their proxy drifting over their border (tough shit if they don't like it).
Your "logic" fails a basic understanding of shipping lanes and navy ship procedures, precautions and general practice. The equivalent analogy is 4 car accidents in a few months where each vehicle is navigated by multiple professionals where that is their sole job, in addition to computers and radar that sees for hundreds of miles in all directions. Furthermore, while under way (i.e. not in a harbor) the equivalent analogy is that the "roads" are hundreds if not thousands of miles wide and there are millions of miles of "road" and there are well under a million vehicles in total (not the 263,000,000 registered cars in the US) all of which are operated by professionals responsible for multi-million dollar vehicles.
So lets recount the errors in your analogy:
-Each ship has multiple professional "drivers" to guide the ship (not a single person with a few dozen hours of training like cars)
-Each naval ship has active radar that can see to the horizon to avoid other ships long before they even get close.
-Each naval ship has computer systems as well as humans that monitor their defensive "sphere" and track and alert to anything inside that sphere.
-There are fewer that 1,000,000 large ships in the Pacific, whereas there are 263x more cars in use in the US.
-The "roads" used by ships are hundreds of miles wide (shipping lanes).
-The "roads" used by ships cover 70% of the earths surface. Assuming less than 1M large ships, if we assume equal distribution, each ship has roughly 200 square miles to it'self. Even without equal distribution, ships on the high sea typically stay thousands of meters apart.
All of these factors that you ignored or are ignorant of lead to massively reduce the chances of an accidental T-bone collision to near zero chances (i.e. 0.0001% chance). If you review the list of historical accidental collisions, out of the 7 collisions from 1989-2015 (26 years) 3 accidental collisions involve submarines which are inherently invisible to ships and themselves struggle to avoid collision inside harbors where traffic is heavy and their maneuverability is limited. Nearly all of the remaining collisions were either with small vessels some of which did not even have a radio or during exercises (refueling/resupply/training) where the ships were intentionally in close proximity and sustained broadside contact (not a collision as we have recently seen). https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Zero collisions involved T-bone collisions on the high seas. Now we have seen the John McCain, the Fitzgerald, the Lake Champlain all T-boned by other large ships in less than 3 months.
Zero collisions in the prior 26 years involved massive commercial transport ships. The most recent two collisions have both been with massive transports which rammed into the naval vessels mid ship.
To sum it up for you: Zero of the 4 naval surface ship collisions in the last 26 YEARS have been with large commercial ships, zero of the collisions have been T-bone collisions and now suddenly we have had 3 in less than 3 months in a single region of the world. I guess to the America haters that is a coincidence. To those of us with a brain it is something else.
....OK... What we are talking about here (a covert attack on US naval sips) has nothing to do with past social programs for starters. There is no way that a massive tanker can sneak up on one of these ships unless their radar has been tampered with. Under normal circumstances, Navy ships can see everything to the horizon on their radar. The way radar works, the closer these cargo ships got, the larger their signature, and automatic proximity alarms would have gone off, as well as the radar officer seeing the cargo ship long before then.
So the US would have been better off according to you letting the drug free for all of the 1960s continue, nevermind most of those drugs we know today have long term effects, often causing permanent damage to the brain.
And instead of the war on poverty, we should just let those at the lowest levels of society try to manage not to starve with no assistance to try to elevate them back into self sufficiency, as was the case in the late 1800s?
Were there unintended consequences? Sure.
Were there people who fell through the cracks? Sure.
Were both efforts worth it? History says yes.
The spending cuts didn't help, but the odds of a mid sea T-bone collision are extremely low to start with. There is clearly guidance (probably spoofed GPS) to line up these big tankers on a collision course and some form of electronic warfare to blind the naval ships radar to the approaching cargo ships.
Once is a tragedy.
Twice is a coincidence.
Thrice is an attack.
Four times is some form of attack combined with incompetent response.
It is clear that there is some form of electronic warfare (not necessarily hacking) at play here. This goes beyond just GPS spoofing, since these ships are loaded with surface radar that should spot a massive container or tanker ship from the horizon, even if one or both ships is off course. I highly doubt that N. Korea's saber rattling which caused more US naval assets to enter the region was a coincidence. Given the location of all the ships involved prior to and during the accidents, I highly suspect that either China or N. Korea have been field testing a new clandestine weapon. Once we figure out what it is and who has been doing it, we should make sure to obliterate the source and sink 4 of their naval ships for starters. If they want to continue to attack the US navy, we can continue to to destroy their assets, since this is an act of war according to international law.
Yes, that is the standard approach, and for good reason. There is no reason you can't build your own battery bank though. (Very few people have the technical skill to build a battery charge/discharge balancer though.)
Own a license or a copy, whatever. There is not a time limit on my ownership of the digital version or the bluray/DVD.
Unless these people built a cinderblock bunker roofed with a galvanized steel roof (i.e. no wood in the structure at all) and a steel fire rated door that is completely removed from their main residence, the first time one of these Lithium batteries fails thermally, their entire "wall" will likely go up and burn down their house. If they have each battery in a ceramic, isolated cubby outside their house, they are marginally better, but this is definitely not a good way to go about powering your house or living off grid... You are better off building your own lead acid battery array with deep cycle batteries...
If you had read the article, I believe that it said that you could pre-download HD patches for existing games before launch day, so that should help further reduce traffic on the servers day one.
Also, just to be clear, I transferred my data a few times on my 360, and pushing 340GB plus of data through a USB2 connection is a pain in the ass, especially when dealing with all the other DRM related steps you had to take on the old/new HDD, compared to hot swapping a 5TB USB3 HDD that you can copy to overnight. Just saying.
If all Disney movies and TV shows ever are available on there, it might be worth it for families with small children.
Most adults like myself already own the MCU content, Star Wars content, and Disney movie content that they want so it's probably not worth it.
There are any number of ADAs who are looking to make their name. They will arrest and overcharge to the point of the ridiculous. It is SOP for district attorneys as a tactic to get a plea deal, saving them from actually having to prove their case in court which takes real evidence.
Arrest is not evidence of either a crime or culpability. The evidence was likely provided by Lowes as well as a request to arrest the couple, so how much leg work was actually done by real police detectives was little to none. If the district attorneys office actually has to face a real defense attorney (not a public defender) the case will probably fall apart pretty quickly.
I can see where you are coming from, but please restrain yourself and your use of invective. The bottom line is we are both speculating and I think the simple truth here is that we do not have enough information on the flaw and how it manifested (not a security exploit) to know if it was criminal theft or not. There are a number of consumer protections that hold businesses accountable for their own mistakes, and prevent businesses from going after consumers or trying to charge them further after a transaction has been completed.
Two smart moves:
1. Make it easy for your customers to upgrade.
2. Don't bog down your gaming network as 20M users all try to re-download 5TB worth of games for their new system.
I own every system since the Atari 2600, but I have been primarily using my PS4 this generation, while I used my 360 primarily last generation. Microsoft made some huge miscalculations with the Xbone and I held off buying it for several years, and since it doesn't have many exclusives, it is mainly a pass through and 360 game player. Hopefully this is more indication of putting the customer first and giving gamers what gamers want first and foremost.
Sony could learn a thing or two in this regard, as well as backwards comparability so that the customer doesn't feel ripped off buying the same game twice...
Due to cable packages and billing models, the majority who watched less TV on a few channels always subsidized a minority who watched a lot of TV across a lot of channels. Cable is cheaper if you want to watch ESPN and live sports or watch a lot of TV on a lot of channels.
If you are like most people though, with a $15 sub to Hulu, a $14 sub to Netflix and your annual Amazon prime membership (that I had before free videos anyway), you have way more content than you could ever watch for around $30/month, commercial free. High speed internet was essential in my home long before the rise of VOD streaming services, so I don't consider it part of the cost (at the least it gets amortized over VoIP phone/gaming/VOD streaming/internet/face-time/etc., etc.) so it's not really a big part of the equation.
The key that many companies value is not so much cross disciplinary education per se, but being able to be highly knowledgeable across a wide variety of fields and then taking that knowledge and using it to come up with unique, valuable solutions that draw on that knowledge.
Brute forcing a problem is something you can get out of any fresh college graduate, but an elegant, economical solution that draws on multiple fields is truly valuable and the people who can regularly generate those kinds of solutions are both rare and valuable.
I have an experiment for you:
1. Go to Russia
2. Become a Russian citizen (you can skip this if you want).
3. Start writing for a Russian news outlet or blog
4. Criticize Vladimir Putin
Let me know how well that constitution limits the power of the government or that bill of rights protects you from living out your days in a Siberian work camp.
One of us sure the hell is brainwashed.
On the one hand you have the US, the equivalent of a police officer. Not perfect, but clearly a force for good in the world. The US saved millions of lives in WW2, South Korea, etc. at our own expense of blood and treasure. After WW2, we didn't plunder and annex the losing countries. We created stable democracies where people live in peace and freedom in Japan and Germany. We tried to create peaceful democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan and spent billions to rebuild them both, but Islam is a medieval religion incompatible with freedom/democracy and we made the mistake of not destroying it like we destroyed emperor worship in Japan after WW2. When there is a disaster around the world, or a dictator is murdering innocents, after the UN has passed a meaningless resolution, the world looks to the US, and we always offer aid, and sometimes use our military to try to end the bloodshed.
OTOH, you have Russia, the former core of the USSR whose stated goal was to take over the world with military force and who held with force nearly a dozen eastern European countries for around 70 years. The USSR stole nuclear technology from the US and then spent the next 70 years threatening the rest of the free world with nuclear annihilation . Soviet Russia killed tens of millions of innocents, mostly its own citizens and more recently, former KGB agent/dictator for life Vladimir Putin invaded and annexed Crimea using military force. Around 10,000 people were killed in that agression.
But their both exactly the same right? Talk about clueless...
Your professor clearly failed to teach you logic (or you were taught what to think instead of how to think). Take a seat because school is now in session:
No, it is not moving the goal posts. Recent invasion for the purpose of occupation and assimilation is a huge red flag indicator of a nation looking to further it's power and holdings by military action (AKA take over the world in common vernacular). Please show me any evidence that the USSR did not want to take over the world? Where is the evidence that former KGB agent and dictator for life Vladimir Putin would not take over the world given the chance? He clearly wants to restore Russia to its former dominance and has used military invasion to further that goal.
Nor is it strawman. Your argument was making moral equivalence between the US and Russia. My statement expounded on the flaws in that equivalence.
After WW2 the US was the only country on the planet with nuclear weapons and the most powerful standing military in the world. If we had wanted to, we could have subjugated the entire planet with just the threat of nuclear bombardment and seized a huge chunk of global wealth, but we did not. Since WW2 the US has only attacked when we or our allies are attacked or threatened to be attacked. Lets look at the US wars:
Iraq war: Rogue dictator threatened the US with WMD after kicking out legally required UN nuclear inspectors for several years. Afterwards we removed 200 tons of yellow cake uranium, multiple mobile bio/chem labs and his chemical weapons were later located being used by Asad, Saddams allies in Syria. The US set up a democratic government and trained an Iraqi army to facilitate the Iraq people having their own governance and sovereignty as well as building billions of dollars of infrastructure.
Afghanistan war: Religious terrorists based in Afghanistan murdered ~3000 US civilians in an unprovoked attack based in and back by the government of Afghanistan (Taliban). After we invaded, we built schools, infrastructure and set up a democratic government for the Afghani people.
Gulf (Iraq) war: Iraqi dictator invaded small US allied nation Kuait in a grab of oil fields and pipeline access to the gulf. The US freed Kuait and destroyed the Iraqi army without removing the leadership in Iraq.
Vietnam war: Tried to defend South Korea against a Chinese Communist backed coup. When the US left, millions of innocent people were slaughtered.
Korean war: Defended South Korea against a Chinese Communist backed coup. South Korea is a thriving, first world democracy. North Korea is a starving dictatorship on the verge of being obliterated on a daily basis solely because of the actions of their leader, who is still backed by the Chinese.
So please, use some facts to show how the US and our defense and intel departments are equivalent to Russia? Your examples must be systemic and not criminal acts by outliers who were subsequently punished for unsanctioned activities (outlier criminal activity cannot rationally be used to condemn organizations, only systemic or sanctioned activities and policies are valid for that purpose).