Are you absolutely positive (do you have first hand knowledge) that this was done by the US strikes? I think not.
I'm not saying it wasn't.... these things happen. But I would not put it past a regime like the Taliban to blow up a building full of UN people and blame the US.
And given the UN knew what was coming (or certainly should have), why wouldn't they have evacuated? Poor planning on their part exposes them to casualties.
Surgical strikes merely offer a lower ratio of civilians killed than indiscriminate bombing. They offer a better chance of getting the people you are after (military targets) rather than innocents (say civilians like those in the WTC). They don't offer a gaurantee and I don't think anyone in the US administration has tried to convey any gaurantee of no civilian casualties. They try to minimize the number (unlike the terrorists and their supporters) of civilians who die.
The other option, of course, would be to sit back, let the terrorists get away with mass murder and/or accede to their vision of how the world must unfold.
I think dissidents, moderates, Christians, and women in Afghanistan might give us some idea of why that's not such a good option.
Yes, sometimes you'll kill a civilian or ten. Life sucks that way. Sometimes bad things happen to innocent people. The difference between the West and the terrorists is we do at least try to differentiate a military target from a civilian target and we don't hold an entire nation to blame for the actions of its government. The West is going after the Taliban and Bin Laden, not the Afghani people or else they'd carpet bomb Kabul. Do the terrorists try to follow any such conventions? Not a chance.
I think that is the important distinction we need to remember. War is never Just. War is never clean or sanitary. War is never Good. But it is sometimes necessary. The world _can_ be a better place after all this is over.
Yep, you've cited some great examples of sub-optimal results. Like Normandy (Hmmm... methinks the Yanks won that one). And Panama. (same result). And Vietnam (okay, they lost that one, on the politicial level, not military). Korea (I assume that's where you mean). They lost that one when they got the Chinese in there. Japan? They have a staunch ally in Japan now. Nicaragua? What transpired there isn't resolved yet.
Sure some of these ops were less successful than they might have been - few battle plans survive contact with the enemy. However, I'd have to say the USA was more successful than Nazi Germany, Manuel Noriega's Regime, and the Japanese regime of the 2nd world war era. They may not fight the smartest way possible sometimes (note this is MUCH less prevalent in the last 20 years), but they don't usually lose unless either A) The situation escalates to be an impending world-war or B) the political will for the conflict goes away.
It's easy to be an AC and be a critic. You never have to stand up for what you believe in.
But what's he passing? I had heard that his couriers carried disks encrypted with some rather sophisticated encryption.
Bin Laden, misguided as he is, is no dummy. He's a grade 'A' danger. He knows how to use technology where it has potence, and he knows where to use simplicity and human methods where technology is more fallible.
The only way to beat an enemy like this is to be better at those kinds of choices than he is, by bringing more force to bear where it will be effective, and by being relentless in our pursuit of murderous monsters like him.
As usual, Katz incisive and thought provoking (NOT) analysis of the situation leaves one breathless...
What are laser-guided bombs, satellite guided missiles, penetrating sensor systems, stealth planes, etc?
Force Multipliers.
But anything times zero is still zero.
The core of this, and every other conflict, is the soldier. The core of any operation involving taking ground and holding it, or in denying that ground to an enemy, is the infantry. Poor, thankless, cold, and tired infantry. Some poor shmuck (possibly quite well educated nowadays) a long way from home, in a nasty situation, with some people out to kill him and maybe some friends he's trying to keep alive. And hoping he'll get out in one piece and hoping he'll have dry socks.
This isn't a _new_ kind of war. It's a very _old_ kind of war - what is going on in Afghanistan today is a conventional war - suppression of air defenses prior to ground action. This war (like many others back many millenia) will be fought by conventional and unconventional means.
Will technology make a difference? It'll help. Being able to see at night is a big plus. Having comms and fire support and airborne mobility are pretty big assets. But ultimately, it'll be skirmishers, light infantry and special operations forces that will go toe to toe with the terrorists in the hilly backcountry of Afghanistan. All the technology in the world won't change that reality.
And will the allied forces get their asses kicked? Maybe they'll take some hits (probably some boys will be dying... this is always the cost of fighting an implacable enemy such as the terrorists are...). But the allied military forces have learned a lot from the Russian experiences and they've learned a lot in conflicts around the world in the last 10 years (Kosovo, Sarajevo, Bosnia, The Gulf, etc.) about how new conflicts are fought, their horrors, and their risks.
Ultimately, they will prevail against a government that does not enjoy unified support from its people because it is corrupt and because it abuses its populace. But don't ever think they have prevailed because of some wazoo technology.
They will have prevailed because some farm boy from Iowa was willing to bust his ass training to be a Green Beret and because he's willing to lay that same ass on the line for what he believes in and to do what it takes, wherever in the world that may be, to get the job done and make the world a safer place for his fellow citizens. That farm boy's guts and training and sacrifice will be what carries the day, as always.
1) If you've checked out the DARPA website lately (www.darpa.org I think), you'll find they have projects afoot to develop energy storage with more than ten times current day energy density. So your phone that lasts 4 hours of talk time would last 40 hours of talk time (assuming no development of lower powered phones). Of course, their interest is in allowing an infantryman to carry many electronic gizmos (wearable computing, sensors, and maybe even a laser rifle).
2) Something like this should probably only be invoked in the case of an emergency, and perhaps some sort of emergency key would need to be broadcast to activate this mode. In the event of such a local emergency, I'm sure no one would mind their cellphone being commandeered to allow fire and rescue coordination traffic to get through....
(Or course, insert mandatory cautionary note about hackers....)
Tomb
Re:Signal power of a mobile phone?
on
Peer-to-Peer Cellular
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think I recall this....
Typical cellphones are a few hundred milliWatts.
A tower can punch out power (in some cases) up to 60 Watts or more, though it doesn't usually.
At least that was how it worked for cell data systems such as CDPD. Cellphones are probably analogous. I think when they try to either acquire a channel or when they are broadcasting, they can amp the power up (I'm not sure quite at what starting level they use) up to 200 or 300 mW max. If you have one of the in-car systems, you can go up to 2 or 3 W. (Considerable increase in range, and the big ass antennae helps receiving fainter signals). Towers can pretty much always reach a phone that can reach them. Usually it is the phones returning signal that drops below the noise threshold rather than the signal from the tower.
FYI... (from memories a couple or four years old).
Good and evil are not relative. Moral relativism is a weak and wrong idea.
Spoken like a true zealot.
That's not something to be proud of.
The question isn't so much if there is or is not an absolute morality. As it turns out, the question is meaningless.
Each of us has our own experiences and our own perceptions which shape our world view. Collectively, these allow us to form a moral construct for our selves. We each have imperfect knowledge of the universe, and consequently a limited perception of things upon which to build our moral construct.
So it doesn't matter if there is or is not an absolute morality - because not one of us has unique unadulterated clear access to it! Each person has his or her own developed moral construct - whether this is from a perception of some part of the larger universal absolute morality or merely from an entirely subjective experience DOES NOT MATTER. The end result is the same. Everyone's moral construct is unique, personal, and enjoys some commonality and some disagreement with his fellows' morality.
If you think you have total access to the truth, then I think you are overtaken by outrageous ego. God, if one has faith, is greater than you can understand, and certainly no one of us can claim to fully understand his works or his creation. And the fact that different views of morality exist certainly suggests that the moral absolute is either not available at all or (as mesocyclone seems to think) available directly to only a few carefully selected subscribers! (Yah right....)
Moral absolutism is an attempt to cloak the complexities of the world in a simplistic form and use special pleading to say "but I know the truth!". The truth is, all that a moral absolutist knows is HIS or HER truth, not THE truth, because if there is One Truth, then be sure that none among us has complete access to it!
When we turn a human into an object, we lay
the foundations for inhumane treatment of the
person in question.
The ability to think of another human in an
objectified manner, as in when we treat the
local fast-food server as if he or she was
merely an interchangeable part with no important
human characteristics, we then begin to think
of them in a way which (taken to the extreme)
allows one to devalue their lives completely.
If we make an effort to treat each human as having
intrinsic value, every life as having some worth,
then we begin to eliminate the thinking that
breeds suicide bombers. For if every man's life
has worth, then to take another life is reducing
the worth of the world.
Objectification is very common in our world today.
The terrorist trainers use it (and its cousin,
demonization) to train suicide bombers. We use
it in our industrialized society. When we
recognize the underlying commonality here -
treating another person only in terms of
inhuman characteristics such as whether they
can serve you something, or whether they can
deliver a service for a buck, etc. - then
we begin to see where part of the fix lies.
I'm not utopian enough to think good thoughts
alone are enough. But if the democratic and
ostensibly civilized free world does not set
a precedent based on the value of _any_ human
life, then they haven't attacked the mindset
that allows manipulators to turn the downtrodden
or aggreived into human weapons.
And if we don't address the root cause, we can
expect more of the same ad infinitum.
I agree to a limited degree with the comments
about the human part of the human-tool pairing
being the part from which most evil originates.
But this does not mean all tools are devoid of
any meaning or purpose.
A sword, for example, is clearly a military
tool. Its evolution, and its purpose, is
inherent in its form. It is designed to injure
and kill.
The atomic bomb is designed to vaporize things.
Yes, you can (with some effort) envision a
situation where either of these items can be
not-used but perhaps threatened to obtain a
"good" outcome. But by their nature, if they
are ever employed, the results are not what
one would call good.
Some tools exist for no purpose other than
the infliction of damage upon another human.
Some tools cannot damage another human
practically (ie a pencil eraser). These
tools are differentiable, one from the other,
by this distinction of purpose and form and
if one wants to use the problematic concepts,
by their different potentials for doing evil.
PGP has been a powerful step in offering
the average user of things like e-mail
at least a limited form of security.
But what's the next step? What new technologies
exist on the horizon to help insure civil
liberties (privacy in particular)? It would
be interesting to here Mr. Zimmerman speak on
what the next-step technologies are in his view,
and what advantages they will offer civil society.
I think we have policies in place...that state a nuclear attack on israel or the USA will result in nuclear retaliation against the most likely agressor, period. It would be a shame to see tens or hundreds of thousands of moderate muslims get nuked because of a few hundred radicals. They say we would never do it, don't bet on that, ever.
Lovely plan, Einstein. I can see how this would play out...
USA: Okay, get this. If anyone attacks us, we'll nuke.... country X.
Country Y: We really hate X. Let's launch a sneak attack on USA. (*BOOM*)
Never mind that most of bin Ladin's operatives are in other countries far from there (Middle East, but also Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America).
Jeez, I know we've had a porous border and we've been bitchy about softwood lumber, but I hope nobody has plans to be nuking the True North Strong and Free. Despite the limp-wristed response from our government, our people feel a special kinship with our friends from the U-S-of-A.
The fact you wouldn't risk your life doing it, nor would many other folks, is one of the reasons it is hard to imagine defeating a people who have nothing, and hence nothing to lose.
You have to break the will or the spirit of the Afghans. Has that EVER been done? I have my doubts.
God Bless America. They'll need His help, especially all those poor b*st*rds in uniform who'll be doing the dying for all the armchair generals and hawkish pro-war pundits. They'll do their duty, and many of them won't come home, while a bunch of sanctimonious children talk about being "willing to sacrifice".
Notice the guy who isn't in favour of an all out hammering is the guy who was in the military during Vietnam. A lack of institutional memory in the government and the military brass is going to cost a lot of brave young men and women their lives.
Fortunately, the greatest weakness in racist bullsh*t is the low IQ of those that spout it.
Time to do more than sit silently for 3 minutes
on
Handling the Loads
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· Score: 1
Condolences matter. Sympathy matters. Silence is a symbol.
But as a Canuck, how about:
- fixing a leaky border that let some of these evil dirtbags into Canada?
- fixing a military that would be hard pressed to help itself let alone our nearest and most important neighbour?
- fixing a political system that encourages a complacent and laggardly response to tragedy?
How about every Canadian gets off his or her respective ass (note: some already have, and them I salute) to givesblood at Canadian Blood Services, to give money to the American Red Cross through PayPal and Amazon, and to support the upcoming military action when NATO and the USA go after those responsible? We (both the USA and Canada) will probably have to endure casualties both Military and Civilian to win the coming War on Terrorism. The bad guys won't play fair, they won't warn us who or where they hit. And they won't identify themselves. So we (in Canada and the USA and other civilized countries) need to band together and prepare.
And of course, to prevent hate against our honest, innocent, and equally shocked and horrified citizens of Arabic descent or of the Muslim faith? 99.9999% of these folks are 'just people' very much like the Christian majority. Imagine the horror they must feel at having their religion or ethnicity associated with something this repulsive? Sure, some jackasses in the occupied territories were dancing, but that isn't the same as Canadian and American citizens of Islamic faith or Arabic descent. If you are one of these folks, be open with your disavowal of the villains responsible, and use this as an opportunity to take control of your Faith and the perception that it is dominated by madmen. Moderates must assert their forces!
Silence is nice. Condolence is nice. Action, donation, and vocal lobbying of our respective governments to let them know we support the efforts to hunt these animals down and to see that they cannot repeat this process - these are the real keys.
Networks like Ericsson's Mobitex network have hardware that is "base station in a box". Worth about (at a guess) $30-50K, these litte units come in a big yellow (think high seas waterproof impact proof) plastic box, open them up, power them (wall plug), boot up.... bingo you've got another cell data tower in your network.
Conventional towers cost $100K+ (sometimes ++) and need some serious construction to erect sometimes. These fast "base station in a box" options were developed for research, for testing purposes, and for fill-ins where coverage isn't adequate (in a weak area between two full sized cells). I think they can pump out quite a bit of wattage and we ran a lot of high volume public safety data through them during some testing and they were fairly snappy.
I'd think solutions like this would allow fast fill-in of holes in network coverage. Of course, if you NCC (Network Control Center) is taken out/down, then you've got a whole other category of network problems. But usually they have redundant NCCs physically separated by a fair distance.
Admittedly the remap in software is useful, but nor as much for learning. Once I've learned to type Dvorak, then I won't look at the keys so it won't matter. Then software remapping is great. But until then, a keyboard with keycaps that were Dvorak-correct might be a better solution.
Having both had my own office and having had several cubes (senior developer), I'll take a cubicle (a good one) any day.
Cubicle disads vs office:
-- space (sometimes)
-- privacy
-- solitude to get work done uninterrupted
Office disads vs cubicle:
-- isolation (social/jungle telegraph)
-- often lower air quality than open areas
-- you can get cornered even more effectively by annoying folks
-- it tends to come with more responsibility and that can be a pain
The main reason a cube is better is the social interaction, cross-pollenation between developers, and the ability to use jungle telegraph to pickup on neat things you need to know happening in the office (new toys, odd corporate happenings, etc).
-- you move from being one of "us" (the cube farm dwellers) to being one of "them" (the office enabled class) thus creating a bit of a social gulf (even if you say it won't change you, like most lottery winners, moving tends to change you... different neighbourhood, different friends).
The best solution is a full wall cube in an area with good lighting and air circulation off of the main thoroughfares in cubeville. You get the best combination of ability to be "in the know" and "in the loop", the best social interface with co-workers, and a sufficient amount of privacy to concentrate.
So instead of damning the cubicle, damn poorly designed cube-farms with poor lighting and not enough elbow room. A good cube is a very productive place.
A shady porch with a cold beverage is close but I can one up that: White sandy beach, near crystal blue water (and a sealed, ruggedized laptop with wireless access... if you care), 27 deg C, a cool drink, a palm or a beach umbrella for some shade, sun, and the sea breeze. That verges on not being work.
Of course, if it was like the last Cuban beach I was on (Sorry, you Americans wouldn't know about it - nice holiday spot just south of Florida - you really should try a visit sometime...), there'd be enough _distractions_ that productivity would suffer.
That is in fact what I was referring to. We looked at implementing some third party (there name started with En and ended with trust) software. But the number of transactions at the front end to establish the session, already a painful process if 30 cops hit the same tower at shift change, was prohibitive. I think we figured the overall size increase was somewhere between 5 and 15% (nearer 5 I think) in the overall dataflow, but the logon hit (and the necessity to repeat the authentication process a few times during a shift on a periodic basis) was no small matter.
100 Kbps wireless nets will remove this item as a concern, certainly.
What market niche will the new grid-array processor be targeted at? 60 BOPS is a fair value for a buck. But is the power consumption ridiculous? Or would this be suitable for deployment in various mobile applications? Or is the only way to get this high of projected performance by clocking the chip like a six year old on chocolate frosted sugar bombs?
And an aside:
My ignorance of Forth might be showing (one of the few I haven't had kicked into me over the years) - but wouldn't "meaningful colour syntax" represent quite a nasty disadvantage for those who are either entirely or partially (red-green) colour blind?
And speaking of Dvorak... anyone know where I can get an ergonomic, full sized, keyboard with a Dvorak key layout. I can probably remap the keys on the existing MS keyboard, but the idea of switching the keycaps is nasty. It'd be better to have a keyboard that sent the right scancodes.
I've worked with non-US federal policing agencies. They've had the challenge to protect _their_own_ datastreams from the bad guys. Try this sometime over 14.4 or 9600 bps links. Even 28.8. And try doing it with a large organization with hundreds of members where biometric keying or hardware keys would be prohibitively expensive and management of public keyrings would be very involved and extensive. No small feat.
Encryption (due to overhead on embedded (read: often old) processors and via slow wireless links) can be pretty ugly. But the opposition (the Mob, other bad guys) can crack some of the low-overhead encryptions in real-time on common PC hardware.
This set of problems will continue to plague cellphone users as well. The low data rate of most cell nets make practical encryption difficult and most users aren't up to the challenges of key management. Most can't even stop their VCR flashing 12:00 .
It would be nice if some cell network came out with a system that was high bandwidth and that allowed the end user to load his own encryption and authentication software (and maybe that had some interface for hardware keys). But the odds of this happening are pretty low.
Any anyone who thinks the public has nothing to worry about if they are not a criminal and that the cops can be trusted entirely because their are punishments.... oh boy are you naive!
Most cops are good folks trying to do a crappy job and stop scum. But, who is or is not a criminal is sometimes debatable and if you'll note trends via DMCA and other legislation, this is more and more being defined in a corporate manner and not necessarily along lines we'd all appreciate.
And not every cop is a good guy (they get some bad apples too). If you get taken advantage of, is it much consolation that they cop in question eventually gets punished (if that happens)? I think not.
So, do you depend on the action of someone else (a politician passing legislation, a police watchdog agency trying to keep an eye on things, the integrity of the cop or the tech reading your email, etc) to secure yourself? I suppose you might if you enjoy playing the lottery or going to casinos. This is the equivalent of driving in a car without crumple zones or seatbelts because you're pretty sure the other drivers are competent and their is legislation to prevent them from doing wrong and punish them if they do.
Does this seem sensible?
Take some steps to defend yourself. Watch what you say in voice or email correspondences if they aren't heavily encrypted. Heck, just watch what you get involved in! And support the EFF and FSF and the ACLU and other liberty-defending organizations. Freedom is not a state of being, it is a continuum and where your country sits on that continuum varies... central control and strong government forces (and corporatist) forces pull one way... maybe citizens interested in freedom and quality of life should pull the other... often by the time you discover your Freedom has eroded to an unacceptable level, it is kind of late to do much about it.
(Note to non-Wargamers: Soak-offs are where you use a trivial piece to divert a much more significant piece of your opponent, so that you can defeat what's left with relative ease. In this case, I used the "trivial" problem of picking the right algorithm to soak-off the processing power of the opponent. My "main forces" (encryption, intrusion detection, etc) could then walk right over whatever was left.)
I believe the military refers to this as "defeat in detail". A very potent technique _if_ you manage to fool your enemy.
Wargaming and computer security, IMHO, are very closely related. However, legal issues prevent me from applying my favourite tactic in "Squad Leader" and "Advanced Squad Leader" -- steamroller one flank, setting fire to everything behind me so I can't be encircled. I'd love to see a Black Hat vs. 3 stacks of 3 x 8-4-3's with HMG's, and a 10-2 leader, but I suspect that would be considered excessive by The Powers That Be.
Excessive? You aren't even calling for artillery support or air strikes! It'd do most of these villains good to find themselves in a good Napalm or FAE strike.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you absolutely positive (do you have first hand knowledge) that this was done by the US strikes? I think not.
I'm not saying it wasn't.... these things happen. But I would not put it past a regime like the Taliban to blow up a building full of UN people and blame the US.
And given the UN knew what was coming (or certainly should have), why wouldn't they have evacuated? Poor planning on their part exposes them to casualties.
Surgical strikes merely offer a lower ratio of civilians killed than indiscriminate bombing. They offer a better chance of getting the people you are after (military targets) rather than innocents (say civilians like those in the WTC). They don't offer a gaurantee and I don't think anyone in the US administration has tried to convey any gaurantee of no civilian casualties. They try to minimize the number (unlike the terrorists and their supporters) of civilians who die.
The other option, of course, would be to sit back, let the terrorists get away with mass murder and/or accede to their vision of how the world must unfold.
I think dissidents, moderates, Christians, and women in Afghanistan might give us some idea of why that's not such a good option.
Yes, sometimes you'll kill a civilian or ten. Life sucks that way. Sometimes bad things happen to innocent people. The difference between the West and the terrorists is we do at least try to differentiate a military target from a civilian target and we don't hold an entire nation to blame for the actions of its government. The West is going after the Taliban and Bin Laden, not the Afghani people or else they'd carpet bomb Kabul. Do the terrorists try to follow any such conventions? Not a chance.
I think that is the important distinction we need to remember. War is never Just. War is never clean or sanitary. War is never Good. But it is sometimes necessary. The world _can_ be a better place after all this is over.
Tomb
Yep, you've cited some great examples of sub-optimal results. Like Normandy (Hmmm... methinks the Yanks won that one). And Panama. (same result). And Vietnam (okay, they lost that one, on the politicial level, not military). Korea (I assume that's where you mean). They lost that one when they got the Chinese in there. Japan? They have a staunch ally in Japan now. Nicaragua? What transpired there isn't resolved yet.
Sure some of these ops were less successful than they might have been - few battle plans survive contact with the enemy. However, I'd have to say the USA was more successful than Nazi Germany, Manuel Noriega's Regime, and the Japanese regime of the 2nd world war era. They may not fight the smartest way possible sometimes (note this is MUCH less prevalent in the last 20 years), but they don't usually lose unless either A) The situation escalates to be an impending world-war or B) the political will for the conflict goes away.
It's easy to be an AC and be a critic. You never have to stand up for what you believe in.
But what's he passing? I had heard that his couriers carried disks encrypted with some rather sophisticated encryption.
Bin Laden, misguided as he is, is no dummy. He's a grade 'A' danger. He knows how to use technology where it has potence, and he knows where to use simplicity and human methods where technology is more fallible.
The only way to beat an enemy like this is to be better at those kinds of choices than he is, by bringing more force to bear where it will be effective, and by being relentless in our pursuit of murderous monsters like him.
As usual, Katz incisive and thought provoking (NOT) analysis of the situation leaves one breathless...
What are laser-guided bombs, satellite guided missiles, penetrating sensor systems, stealth planes, etc?
Force Multipliers.
But anything times zero is still zero.
The core of this, and every other conflict, is the soldier. The core of any operation involving taking ground and holding it, or in denying that ground to an enemy, is the infantry. Poor, thankless, cold, and tired infantry. Some poor shmuck (possibly quite well educated nowadays) a long way from home, in a nasty situation, with some people out to kill him and maybe some friends he's trying to keep alive. And hoping he'll get out in one piece and hoping he'll have dry socks.
This isn't a _new_ kind of war. It's a very _old_ kind of war - what is going on in Afghanistan today is a conventional war - suppression of air defenses prior to ground action. This war (like many others back many millenia) will be fought by conventional and unconventional means.
Will technology make a difference? It'll help. Being able to see at night is a big plus. Having comms and fire support and airborne mobility are pretty big assets. But ultimately, it'll be skirmishers, light infantry and special operations forces that will go toe to toe with the terrorists in the hilly backcountry of Afghanistan. All the technology in the world won't change that reality.
And will the allied forces get their asses kicked? Maybe they'll take some hits (probably some boys will be dying... this is always the cost of fighting an implacable enemy such as the terrorists are...). But the allied military forces have learned a lot from the Russian experiences and they've learned a lot in conflicts around the world in the last 10 years (Kosovo, Sarajevo, Bosnia, The Gulf, etc.) about how new conflicts are fought, their horrors, and their risks.
Ultimately, they will prevail against a government that does not enjoy unified support from its people because it is corrupt and because it abuses its populace. But don't ever think they have prevailed because of some wazoo technology.
They will have prevailed because some farm boy from Iowa was willing to bust his ass training to be a Green Beret and because he's willing to lay that same ass on the line for what he believes in and to do what it takes, wherever in the world that may be, to get the job done and make the world a safer place for his fellow citizens. That farm boy's guts and training and sacrifice will be what carries the day, as always.
God Bless America (and I'm not even 'Merican!)
Tomb Raider
1) If you've checked out the DARPA website lately (www.darpa.org I think), you'll find they have projects afoot to develop energy storage with more than ten times current day energy density. So your phone that lasts 4 hours of talk time would last 40 hours of talk time (assuming no development of lower powered phones). Of course, their interest is in allowing an infantryman to carry many electronic gizmos (wearable computing, sensors, and maybe even a laser rifle).
2) Something like this should probably only be invoked in the case of an emergency, and perhaps some sort of emergency key would need to be broadcast to activate this mode. In the event of such a local emergency, I'm sure no one would mind their cellphone being commandeered to allow fire and rescue coordination traffic to get through....
(Or course, insert mandatory cautionary note about hackers....)
Tomb
I think I recall this ....
Typical cellphones are a few hundred milliWatts.
A tower can punch out power (in some cases) up to 60 Watts or more, though it doesn't usually.
At least that was how it worked for cell data systems such as CDPD. Cellphones are probably analogous. I think when they try to either acquire a channel or when they are broadcasting, they can amp the power up (I'm not sure quite at what starting level they use) up to 200 or 300 mW max. If you have one of the in-car systems, you can go up to 2 or 3 W. (Considerable increase in range, and the big ass antennae helps receiving fainter signals). Towers can pretty much always reach a phone that can reach them. Usually it is the phones returning signal that drops below the noise threshold rather than the signal from the tower.
FYI... (from memories a couple or four years old).
Tomb
Seems to me people who can type 120 wpm can probably type faster than they can speak. Try saying 120 wpm. And people have been known to type 180 wpm.
Good and evil are not relative. Moral relativism is a weak and wrong idea.
Spoken like a true zealot.
That's not something to be proud of.
The question isn't so much if there is or is not an absolute morality. As it turns out, the question is meaningless.
Each of us has our own experiences and our own perceptions which shape our world view. Collectively, these allow us to form a moral construct for our selves. We each have imperfect knowledge of the universe, and consequently a limited perception of things upon which to build our moral construct.
So it doesn't matter if there is or is not an absolute morality - because not one of us has unique unadulterated clear access to it! Each person has his or her own developed moral construct - whether this is from a perception of some part of the larger universal absolute morality or merely from an entirely subjective experience DOES NOT MATTER. The end result is the same. Everyone's moral construct is unique, personal, and enjoys some commonality and some disagreement with his fellows' morality.
If you think you have total access to the truth, then I think you are overtaken by outrageous ego. God, if one has faith, is greater than you can understand, and certainly no one of us can claim to fully understand his works or his creation. And the fact that different views of morality exist certainly suggests that the moral absolute is either not available at all or (as mesocyclone seems to think) available directly to only a few carefully selected subscribers! (Yah right....)
Moral absolutism is an attempt to cloak the complexities of the world in a simplistic form and use special pleading to say "but I know the truth!". The truth is, all that a moral absolutist knows is HIS or HER truth, not THE truth, because if there is One Truth, then be sure that none among us has complete access to it!
When we turn a human into an object, we lay
the foundations for inhumane treatment of the
person in question.
The ability to think of another human in an
objectified manner, as in when we treat the
local fast-food server as if he or she was
merely an interchangeable part with no important
human characteristics, we then begin to think
of them in a way which (taken to the extreme)
allows one to devalue their lives completely.
If we make an effort to treat each human as having
intrinsic value, every life as having some worth,
then we begin to eliminate the thinking that
breeds suicide bombers. For if every man's life
has worth, then to take another life is reducing
the worth of the world.
Objectification is very common in our world today.
The terrorist trainers use it (and its cousin,
demonization) to train suicide bombers. We use
it in our industrialized society. When we
recognize the underlying commonality here -
treating another person only in terms of
inhuman characteristics such as whether they
can serve you something, or whether they can
deliver a service for a buck, etc. - then
we begin to see where part of the fix lies.
I'm not utopian enough to think good thoughts
alone are enough. But if the democratic and
ostensibly civilized free world does not set
a precedent based on the value of _any_ human
life, then they haven't attacked the mindset
that allows manipulators to turn the downtrodden
or aggreived into human weapons.
And if we don't address the root cause, we can
expect more of the same ad infinitum.
I agree to a limited degree with the comments
about the human part of the human-tool pairing
being the part from which most evil originates.
But this does not mean all tools are devoid of
any meaning or purpose.
A sword, for example, is clearly a military
tool. Its evolution, and its purpose, is
inherent in its form. It is designed to injure
and kill.
The atomic bomb is designed to vaporize things.
Yes, you can (with some effort) envision a
situation where either of these items can be
not-used but perhaps threatened to obtain a
"good" outcome. But by their nature, if they
are ever employed, the results are not what
one would call good.
Some tools exist for no purpose other than
the infliction of damage upon another human.
Some tools cannot damage another human
practically (ie a pencil eraser). These
tools are differentiable, one from the other,
by this distinction of purpose and form and
if one wants to use the problematic concepts,
by their different potentials for doing evil.
PGP has been a powerful step in offering
the average user of things like e-mail
at least a limited form of security.
But what's the next step? What new technologies
exist on the horizon to help insure civil
liberties (privacy in particular)? It would
be interesting to here Mr. Zimmerman speak on
what the next-step technologies are in his view,
and what advantages they will offer civil society.
I think we have policies in place...that state a nuclear attack on israel or the USA will result in nuclear retaliation against the most likely agressor, period. It would be a shame to see tens or hundreds of thousands of moderate muslims get nuked because of a few hundred radicals. They say we would never do it, don't bet on that, ever.
Lovely plan, Einstein. I can see how this would play out...
USA: Okay, get this. If anyone attacks us, we'll nuke.... country X.
Country Y: We really hate X. Let's launch a sneak attack on USA. (*BOOM*)
USA: What? Someone attacked us! Nuke X!
Country X: (as the bombs fall) What the F*CK?
Country Y: Street Party! We win!
Any Civilized Country: USA - What the F*CK?
Never mind that most of bin Ladin's operatives are in other countries far from there (Middle East, but also Germany, France, Switzerland, the UK, US, Canada, Mexico, Central and South America).
Jeez, I know we've had a porous border and we've been bitchy about softwood lumber, but I hope nobody has plans to be nuking the True North Strong and Free. Despite the limp-wristed response from our government, our people feel a special kinship with our friends from the U-S-of-A.
Smart man say:
(Though some lesbian and bi women I know seem kind of hooked on Xena, but that's a different story.)
I reply:
Really, who isn't?
The fact you wouldn't risk your life doing it, nor would many other folks, is one of the reasons it is hard to imagine defeating a people who have nothing, and hence nothing to lose.
You have to break the will or the spirit of the Afghans. Has that EVER been done? I have my doubts.
God Bless America. They'll need His help, especially all those poor b*st*rds in uniform who'll be doing the dying for all the armchair generals and hawkish pro-war pundits. They'll do their duty, and many of them won't come home, while a bunch of sanctimonious children talk about being "willing to sacrifice".
Notice the guy who isn't in favour of an all out hammering is the guy who was in the military during Vietnam. A lack of institutional memory in the government and the military brass is going to cost a lot of brave young men and women their lives.
Tomb
The world seems full enough of f*cking idiots.
/dev/null.
We hardly need to encourage them.
Mod the moronic parents of this post to
Fortunately, the greatest weakness in racist bullsh*t is the low IQ of those that spout it.
Condolences matter. Sympathy matters. Silence is a symbol.
But as a Canuck, how about:
- fixing a leaky border that let some of these evil dirtbags into Canada?
- fixing a military that would be hard pressed to help itself let alone our nearest and most important neighbour?
- fixing a political system that encourages a complacent and laggardly response to tragedy?
How about every Canadian gets off his or her respective ass (note: some already have, and them I salute) to givesblood at Canadian Blood Services, to give money to the American Red Cross through PayPal and Amazon, and to support the upcoming military action when NATO and the USA go after those responsible? We (both the USA and Canada) will probably have to endure casualties both Military and Civilian to win the coming War on Terrorism. The bad guys won't play fair, they won't warn us who or where they hit. And they won't identify themselves. So we (in Canada and the USA and other civilized countries) need to band together and prepare.
And of course, to prevent hate against our honest, innocent, and equally shocked and horrified citizens of Arabic descent or of the Muslim faith? 99.9999% of these folks are 'just people' very much like the Christian majority. Imagine the horror they must feel at having their religion or ethnicity associated with something this repulsive? Sure, some jackasses in the occupied territories were dancing, but that isn't the same as Canadian and American citizens of Islamic faith or Arabic descent. If you are one of these folks, be open with your disavowal of the villains responsible, and use this as an opportunity to take control of your Faith and the perception that it is dominated by madmen. Moderates must assert their forces!
Silence is nice. Condolence is nice. Action, donation, and vocal lobbying of our respective governments to let them know we support the efforts to hunt these animals down and to see that they cannot repeat this process - these are the real keys.
Thomas
Angry in Ottawa
Networks like Ericsson's Mobitex network have hardware that is "base station in a box". Worth about (at a guess) $30-50K, these litte units come in a big yellow (think high seas waterproof impact proof) plastic box, open them up, power them (wall plug), boot up.... bingo you've got another cell data tower in your network.
Conventional towers cost $100K+ (sometimes ++) and need some serious construction to erect sometimes. These fast "base station in a box" options were developed for research, for testing purposes, and for fill-ins where coverage isn't adequate (in a weak area between two full sized cells). I think they can pump out quite a bit of wattage and we ran a lot of high volume public safety data through them during some testing and they were fairly snappy.
I'd think solutions like this would allow fast fill-in of holes in network coverage. Of course, if you NCC (Network Control Center) is taken out/down, then you've got a whole other category of network problems. But usually they have redundant NCCs physically separated by a fair distance.
Admittedly the remap in software is useful, but nor as much for learning. Once I've learned to type Dvorak, then I won't look at the keys so it won't matter. Then software remapping is great. But until then, a keyboard with keycaps that were Dvorak-correct might be a better solution.
Having both had my own office and having had several cubes (senior developer), I'll take a cubicle (a good one) any day.
Cubicle disads vs office:
-- space (sometimes)
-- privacy
-- solitude to get work done uninterrupted
Office disads vs cubicle:
-- isolation (social/jungle telegraph)
-- often lower air quality than open areas
-- you can get cornered even more effectively by annoying folks
-- it tends to come with more responsibility and that can be a pain
The main reason a cube is better is the social interaction, cross-pollenation between developers, and the ability to use jungle telegraph to pickup on neat things you need to know happening in the office (new toys, odd corporate happenings, etc).
-- you move from being one of "us" (the cube farm dwellers) to being one of "them" (the office enabled class) thus creating a bit of a social gulf (even if you say it won't change you, like most lottery winners, moving tends to change you... different neighbourhood, different friends).
The best solution is a full wall cube in an area with good lighting and air circulation off of the main thoroughfares in cubeville. You get the best combination of ability to be "in the know" and "in the loop", the best social interface with co-workers, and a sufficient amount of privacy to concentrate.
So instead of damning the cubicle, damn poorly designed cube-farms with poor lighting and not enough elbow room. A good cube is a very productive place.
Hemos,
A shady porch with a cold beverage is close but I can one up that: White sandy beach, near crystal blue water (and a sealed, ruggedized laptop with wireless access... if you care), 27 deg C, a cool drink, a palm or a beach umbrella for some shade, sun, and the sea breeze. That verges on not being work.
Of course, if it was like the last Cuban beach I was on (Sorry, you Americans wouldn't know about it - nice holiday spot just south of Florida - you really should try a visit sometime...), there'd be enough _distractions_ that productivity would suffer.
The big plus is that you don't give a damn...
That is in fact what I was referring to. We looked at implementing some third party (there name started with En and ended with trust) software. But the number of transactions at the front end to establish the session, already a painful process if 30 cops hit the same tower at shift change, was prohibitive. I think we figured the overall size increase was somewhere between 5 and 15% (nearer 5 I think) in the overall dataflow, but the logon hit (and the necessity to repeat the authentication process a few times during a shift on a periodic basis) was no small matter.
100 Kbps wireless nets will remove this item as a concern, certainly.
What market niche will the new grid-array processor be targeted at? 60 BOPS is a fair value for a buck. But is the power consumption ridiculous? Or would this be suitable for deployment in various mobile applications? Or is the only way to get this high of projected performance by clocking the chip like a six year old on chocolate frosted sugar bombs?
And an aside:
My ignorance of Forth might be showing (one of the few I haven't had kicked into me over the years) - but wouldn't "meaningful colour syntax" represent quite a nasty disadvantage for those who are either entirely or partially (red-green) colour blind?
And speaking of Dvorak... anyone know where I can get an ergonomic, full sized, keyboard with a Dvorak key layout. I can probably remap the keys on the existing MS keyboard, but the idea of switching the keycaps is nasty. It'd be better to have a keyboard that sent the right scancodes.
Briefly:
;)
I've worked with non-US federal policing agencies. They've had the challenge to protect _their_own_ datastreams from the bad guys. Try this sometime over 14.4 or 9600 bps links. Even 28.8. And try doing it with a large organization with hundreds of members where biometric keying or hardware keys would be prohibitively expensive and management of public keyrings would be very involved and extensive. No small feat.
Encryption (due to overhead on embedded (read: often old) processors and via slow wireless links) can be pretty ugly. But the opposition (the Mob, other bad guys) can crack some of the low-overhead encryptions in real-time on common PC hardware.
This set of problems will continue to plague cellphone users as well. The low data rate of most cell nets make practical encryption difficult and most users aren't up to the challenges of key management. Most can't even stop their VCR flashing 12:00 .
It would be nice if some cell network came out with a system that was high bandwidth and that allowed the end user to load his own encryption and authentication software (and maybe that had some interface for hardware keys). But the odds of this happening are pretty low.
Any anyone who thinks the public has nothing to worry about if they are not a criminal and that the cops can be trusted entirely because their are punishments.... oh boy are you naive!
Most cops are good folks trying to do a crappy job and stop scum. But, who is or is not a criminal is sometimes debatable and if you'll note trends via DMCA and other legislation, this is more and more being defined in a corporate manner and not necessarily along lines we'd all appreciate.
And not every cop is a good guy (they get some bad apples too). If you get taken advantage of, is it much consolation that they cop in question eventually gets punished (if that happens)? I think not.
So, do you depend on the action of someone else (a politician passing legislation, a police watchdog agency trying to keep an eye on things, the integrity of the cop or the tech reading your email, etc) to secure yourself? I suppose you might if you enjoy playing the lottery or going to casinos. This is the equivalent of driving in a car without crumple zones or seatbelts because you're pretty sure the other drivers are competent and their is legislation to prevent them from doing wrong and punish them if they do.
Does this seem sensible?
Take some steps to defend yourself. Watch what you say in voice or email correspondences if they aren't heavily encrypted. Heck, just watch what you get involved in! And support the EFF and FSF and the ACLU and other liberty-defending organizations. Freedom is not a state of being, it is a continuum and where your country sits on that continuum varies... central control and strong government forces (and corporatist) forces pull one way... maybe citizens interested in freedom and quality of life should pull the other... often by the time you discover your Freedom has eroded to an unacceptable level, it is kind of late to do much about it.
Tomb
PS - No, I am not a crackpot.
(Note to non-Wargamers: Soak-offs are where you use a trivial piece to divert a much more significant piece of your opponent, so that you can defeat what's left with relative ease. In this case, I used the "trivial" problem of picking the right algorithm to soak-off the processing power of the opponent. My "main forces" (encryption, intrusion detection, etc) could then walk right over whatever was left.)
I believe the military refers to this as "defeat in detail". A very potent technique _if_ you manage to fool your enemy.
Wargaming and computer security, IMHO, are very closely related. However, legal issues prevent me from applying my favourite tactic in "Squad Leader" and "Advanced Squad Leader" -- steamroller one flank, setting fire to everything behind me so I can't be encircled. I'd love to see a Black Hat vs. 3 stacks of 3 x 8-4-3's with HMG's, and a 10-2 leader, but I suspect that would be considered excessive by The Powers That Be.
Excessive? You aren't even calling for artillery support or air strikes! It'd do most of these villains good to find themselves in a good Napalm or FAE strike.