Actually if you look at the guy's home page at MIT you'll see that he isn't spenging his life studying just this but fluid dynamics generally. He seems to have a particular interest in the fine points of stuff you see everyday like the fluid dynamics of wine in a glass and soap film
I suppose you might still consider this boring but I sort of like the idea of the brainy mathematician walking around looking at everyday things nobody (not even other scientists) really notices and saying "I wonder why it does that?"
I think you may be misunderstanding where the name "Christian Science Monitor" is coming from. This is NOT a journal of science put out by Christians (creationist or otherwise) The CSM is a paper that was founded by a religous group founded in the 1800's known as the "Christian Scientists" or more formally "The Church of Christ, Scientist". The group is often considered a cult and is pretty much disavowed by both christians and scientists (and presumably christian scientists that are not "Christian Scientists"). From time to time they get in the papers because at the core of their beliefs is faith healing, or more accurately that there really is no such thing sickness anyway, so they will refuse medical treatment for themselves and their children.
The Christian Science Monitor itself is a highly respected paper and while I think it is still officially owned by the church I think they have a hands off approach to running it and if they are using it for "evangelistic" purposes they use it by putting out a very high quality paper that by it's quality lends credibility to their group rather than using it as a polemic tool in itself. It's seems it's sort of like the Moonies owning the Washington Times rather than like an official organ of the church.
It's kind of like open source for intelligence analysis. With enough eyeballs, all plots are shallow.:-)
Good point. I hadn't thought of it that way but that is one of the big benefits.
But by involving money, they just made it look crass.
True, despite the benefits I think that this aspect in some way would be harmful to society in itself. I suppose one could argue that it wouldn't be any more crass than life insurance which is also gambling on human life, but there is a difference between "betting" that you yourself are going to die and someone else betting that you are going to die. Others have pointed out that companies that would be harmed by particular political situations could use this as a hedge to minimise their risk - sort of "political instability insurance" but it is the speculators "betting" on human tragedy that would make this work as a predictive tool.
It's worth pointing out though that this is a DARPA project which means it's *research*. They are probably tinkering with the idea and even if in it's raw (and crass) form it never comes to pass I think they may come up with a lot of better (or at least more acceptable) ideas and implimentations of the basic concept. Perhaps simply using something like this internally among CIA and Washington think tank analysts to reward accuracy and the reality rather than the appearance of insight. Fewer eyeballs but presumably with better information. To bring a few more eyeballs in perhaps open it up to select academics and industry analysts (industry analysts could bring back that commercial hedge investment aspect). Perhaps encourage insurance companies to offer some kind of insurance based on a model like this (insurance against particular military and political threats) to companies that would be effected by those threats. Just watch the rates on insurance against different threats and you have the same predictive tool from a wide array of informed (and self-interested) opinion that this "future's market" would provide. Something provided by private companies on an open market would have tha additional diplomatic advantage of not being directly connected with the U.S. government. I think despite the "open" nature of this it would still be diplomatically problematic if the "official" and public(!) concensus view of a U.S. government project was that the king of Jordan had a 75% chance of being assasinated in the next year. Much better (dipolomatically speaking) that it be the official view of some insurance company or hedge fund with no direct involvement of the government (aside from monitoring the rates to reap the insights of the analysts).
This initial implimentation has a lot of advantages but has quite a few disadvantages itself. Some things are so crass that perhaps they should not be done even if they are effective.
Thanks, I hadn't had my coffee yet - you deserve all the "informative" mod points that went to me;)
If I'm understanding correctly where I got it wrong is that if you buy a put option you have the option, but are NOT obligated (as I mistakenly said), to sell at the given price on the given date.
I think any organization bright enough to pull off a major terrorist act would also be bright enough not to make a bet with the pentagon about when and where it would happen.
The stupidity involved in designing this system is amazing.
RTA - You are missing the point. It's NOT about getting a stupid terrorist to make a bet on his own actions (though I'm sure that is a potential bonus). It is about getting honest, objective analysis of all the existing data from a wide range of professional and amateur analysts. We have more data than we know what to do with, any Joe with a TV and a computer with an internet connection has access to a vast universe of data that is simply too vast to be subjected to meaningful analysis by the experts employed by the intelligence agencies. This "market" is a way to not only do a massive amount of honest and objective analysis but also get honest and objective judgement on the quality of that analysis. Right now a few highly trained (and prejudiced by their training) experts with all sorts of conficts of interest and axes to grind, operating in a highly political atmosphere are being paid to write "insightful" analysis but NOT on whether their predictions come true. This market subjects a wide range of international political issues to the judgement of huge number of analysts who because they are putting their own money on the line will make honest bets about the probability of various outcomes, out of that mass of tiny individual bits of analysis a cohesive, widely (and more importantly) honestly held concensus of all those peoples best analysis emerges.
The main thing is that the "market" would be pretty good at analysis itself. But the system I'm sure would also be able to identify those traders that consistently do better than the market as a whole, not because of "insider trading" but because those traders are smarter, better researchers, more knowledgeable about particular issues, etc. Identifying those people, and noting what they are betting on would give the CIA access to both the broad, honestly held, concensus view but also the potentially contrarian views of the truly insightful.
Why buy airline options *before* 9/11? The share prices for airlines fell after 9/11 if I am not mistaken which means that the price of options would have fallen after that date.
It is a *PUT* option. It is a promise to sell the buyer the stock at a given price on a given date. As the seller you are betting that the stock will be *lower* than the price you promised to sell at, the buyer is betting that it will be higher. If the stock plummets you make money.
While I agree it takes a radical change to bring in new technology the fact is Iraq HAD one of the most advanced communication networks before it was blown up.
I have no idea what their civillian network was like. But I recall reading an article prior to the war about their military network for controlling their AA batteries - which was the very top of top notch. Not that it did them much good, I'm sure it was the very first thing taken out.
The US would have severe problems funding it -- anti missile technology to protect against (well something) and other military projects will take priority.
This is a little silly. The US would/could have no problem funding it as compared to China. We are orders of magnitude wealthier than the Chinese. We can fund things we don't really care about at levels as high, or perhaps even higher, than they can fund things that are their central goals.
More significantly what you don't seem to realize is that space programs *are* military projects. The space race was a military project - it was the "noble" scientific public relations face on the arms race. The skills, capabilities and hardware involved in putting something in orbit are the same whether the payload is a spacecraft or a nuclear warhead. Once you have reached your primary goal of being able to deliver warheads the secondary goal of "journey's of discovery" still has a romantic appeal but not serving any pragmatic purpose it fades away and exists on in maintentance mode.
The U.S. *has* ICBM's, more than we need, we no longer need a space race as an excuse/side effect of the effort to attain them. China right now is coming late to the arms race, she is expending the wealth of the nation to acquire ICBM's and the noble quest to reach Mars is just PR, and a motivational tactic to engage the imagination of the best and the brightest. Some, perhaps even some high up in the society may be sold on the idea but once the immediate military goal is achieved they will find themselves sliding into irrelevance and massively reduced funding.
In any event the Chinese government will get it to it's primary goal (ICBM's) a long time before the secondary public goal is reached (Mars) and the civillian face on the project will fade into increasing irrelevance just as NASA has. In fact given their relative poverty the PR excersise will probably fade even more quickly and be maintained at an even lower level in China.
but the communists in the 50's weren't blowing up too many buildings or killing people.
Hello?? I think there are few million Ukrainians, Chinese, Poles, Czechs, Cambodians, etc. etc. etc. who would beg to differ (including my foster brother who saw quite a few people killed by Communists in Pol Pot's killing fields)
Like I said, too cute. They mistakenly thought that Dr. Usher's copyrighted material was Mr. Usher's copyrighted material who they swore, under penalty of perjury, that they were the authorized agent of. They never claimed to be Dr. Usher's agent. Sorry, it simply is not perjury no matter how much you or I dislike the RIAA.
I think if Dr. Usher was harmed by the RIAA's negligent mistake he probably has some recourse in civil court.
The law is not vague because it is complex, it is vague because it is fairly simple. It's a few short lines that say "If you're only copying part of it and you're doing it for a review or for educational purposes" then it is fair use. In most cases it's obvious whether something is fair use or not. A few excerpts in a review is fair use. Quoting the whole thing and adding a forward and calling it a "review" is NOT. In a few cases there is a dispute, in those cases there *are* some rules of thumb that judges use to help them come to a decision in the dispute - but it comes down to a judgement call and as such even an attorney can't say when a "line has been crossed". Only the judge can and he (hopefully) has to put some effort into thinking about it.
Of course in our adversarial system of law where you *always* have at least one attorney on either side of *every* issue - unless they can read the judge & juries mind they can't ever say with utter confidence when a "line has been crossed."
Clever, but a little too cute. This was obviously a case of mistaken identity. If it was a rival professer that was trying to get the Usher.mpg taken down THEN it would have been a criminal purjury case.
Professor Usher DOES probably have recourse in civil court though.
Funny how people think that saying that allows them to insult you with impunity.
I think that is a little unfair... I am not trying to insult you, but I DO have to point out a flaw in your argument, the pointing out of which can be taken as an implicit insult. Frankly you simply ignored my post and apparently didn't read the article. Pointing that out may sound insulting (which is why I apologized in advance) but it's hard to avoid.
renders the entire exercise of debate futile.
With that attitude, it certainly is.
I don't think my attitude towards debate is the problem. If you had and argument that rendered the facts I presented irrelevant that - would be debate. If you had presented your own evidence that cast doubt on the facts I presented - that would be debate. Simply ignoring the facts as though they hadn't come up is NOT debate and conversation on that basis IS a futile exercise.
Sure, some security features may be poorly thought out, or leave gaping holes that renders them useless but in general more security features == more secure. Another important question is: is the added security from any given security feature worth the costs. But, you have to *dispassionately* evaluate both the increase in security and the cost rather than immediately assuming that the cost is to high.
The problem, if there is one, is not false passports, but real ones issued under false pretenses. Or real ones issued to people with clean records who have evil plans. Or real ones issued by corrupt civil servants to anyone who pays enough, or is sympathetic to their aims.
NO, read my original post. In several instances the problem was indeed FALSE PASSPORTS and STOLEN PASSPORTS. (To add to the evidence of this problem the recent arrest of an al Queada cell in Saudi Arabia with a cache of FAKE PASSPORTS).
And at the risk of repeating myself, there were no problems(AFAIR) with US passports
Again, read the article, or my post. The united states is adding biometrics to their passports in order to get OTHER COUNTRIES to add them to their passports. Including not coincidentally the countries that had their passports stolen or faked as part of the 9/11 attacks. The United States is conforming to a standard that they will require of any country taking part in the visa-free program. Here is a relevant quote from Janes Intelligence Review (I bolded a particularly relevant example)
Washington has visa-waiver agreements with 29 countries, which allows residents of those nations to stay in the USA for three months as long as they arrive with a round-trip ticket... A report by the US Department of Justice discovered that the American Visa Waiver Pilot Program (VWPP) - which has now been made permanent - provided a conduit for criminals and terrorists attempting to enter the country. Moreover, terrorist or criminal groups often discover that passports of visa-waiver participating nations are more valuable because they receive less scrutiny during the immigration-screening phase. Chinese human smuggling syndicates have been known to rely on stolen Japanese passports - the bearers of which are entitled to visa-free entry into the USA - to smuggle Chinese nationals. Similarly,
one of the co-conspirators in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 was caught at New York City's JFK airport, attempting to enter the country with a photo-substituted Swedish passport. Sweden is among the 29 countries that enjoy visa- free access to the USA.
Not surprisingly, the most prized passports on the black market are those from those countries that are part of visa-waiver or visa-free arrangements. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimates that more than 100,000 passports of countries in the Visa Waiver programme have been stolen and are in circulation.
As my own note I would add that the Millenium bomb plot involved a fake Canadian passport as did the Nabil al-Marabh who was involved at least peripherally in the 9/11 plot
You also seem to assume that because US passports were not a problem in this one particular instance that they are never a problem. I'm sure Indonesia and Australia would beg to differ.
so these measures won't help anything except justify reducing the headcount of human security checkers who might use their brains to assess risk.
I don't see any indication that this move to biometrics on identity papers is being accompanied by any reduction inthe quantity or quality of security personell.
If the existence of documentation leads to less security and/or making existing documentation more reliable and less easy to forge leads to less security perhaps you would be willing to use the services of
Sure. But none of the fake papers you mentioned were US passports. Evidently then they're already secure enough.
Well that and these weren't Americans or faux Americans abusing American passports in another country but Saudi's or faux Saudi's abusing Saudi and Canadian(!) passports in America.
Also, read the article. This is America conforming to a new international standard that will just happen to also apply to Canada and (I think) Saudi Arabia - two countries that did have false passports at least peripherally involved in the 9/11 attack. The U.S. will require of any country that enjoy's visa free travel to the U.S. to use these measures - those would be the countries you would most want to get a passport from if you were a terrorist since you would enjoy open travel in the US without the US vetting you the way they would if you came from a country that required the US to issue a Visa to you.
"Thank you, this has been Angry Metal Fishnipple, goodnight! If you like our songs, go to iTunes!"... That's gonna get heard for a quarter the cost of a TV spot in every dingy bar across the nation forever more?
Not only would that be pure marketting gold but "The iTunes Music Store now with 10 million songs!" is also a valuable thing. Sure very few people will want Angry Metal Fishnipple's latest song but the fact that you KNOW the iTunes store will have a song you're looking for no matter how obscure is a great selling point. The existance of obscure, never downloaded music sitting on their servers will probably win them a LOT of business for middle tier artists that are quite a bit more popular and profitable. The customer will be reasoning "Well, Strawberry's might have this sorta obscure band, but I know Apple will have it."
Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like ITune.
I really want to know. Why? It seems to me Apple could just put the info about the artist and the songs in their database and a file on a hard drive and that's it. Storage is cheap, computers are cheap, especially for the manufacturer. Bandwidth is only a cost if people are listening to and thus at least interested in *buying* that song. So what's expensive? It's not like they're paying through the nose to rent storage space on someone elses server. It's their own system.
It seems to me the problem would not be any cost associated with storing a bunch of junk not many people access but in possibly diluting your own brand by having any low quality music.
Reading about what Jobs vision for iTunes is it sounds like he is not concerned about storing lots of obscure (but reasonable quality) titles. He wants to get into the big 5 distributors archives to get millions of out of print titles as well. iTunes would have any song you ever might want, so what if only a small handful of people ever download a particular song? It's only (cheap) hard disk space.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually if you look at the guy's home page at MIT you'll see that he isn't spenging his life studying just this but fluid dynamics generally. He seems to have a particular interest in the fine points of stuff you see everyday like the fluid dynamics of wine in a glass and soap film
I suppose you might still consider this boring but I sort of like the idea of the brainy mathematician walking around looking at everyday things nobody (not even other scientists) really notices and saying "I wonder why it does that?"
I think you may be misunderstanding where the name "Christian Science Monitor" is coming from. This is NOT a journal of science put out by Christians (creationist or otherwise) The CSM is a paper that was founded by a religous group founded in the 1800's known as the "Christian Scientists" or more formally "The Church of Christ, Scientist". The group is often considered a cult and is pretty much disavowed by both christians and scientists (and presumably christian scientists that are not "Christian Scientists"). From time to time they get in the papers because at the core of their beliefs is faith healing, or more accurately that there really is no such thing sickness anyway, so they will refuse medical treatment for themselves and their children.
The Christian Science Monitor itself is a highly respected paper and while I think it is still officially owned by the church I think they have a hands off approach to running it and if they are using it for "evangelistic" purposes they use it by putting out a very high quality paper that by it's quality lends credibility to their group rather than using it as a polemic tool in itself. It's seems it's sort of like the Moonies owning the Washington Times rather than like an official organ of the church.
You *really* have to get out more.
Get your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
It's kind of like open source for intelligence analysis. With enough eyeballs, all plots are shallow. :-)
Good point. I hadn't thought of it that way but that is one of the big benefits.
But by involving money, they just made it look crass.
True, despite the benefits I think that this aspect in some way would be harmful to society in itself. I suppose one could argue that it wouldn't be any more crass than life insurance which is also gambling on human life, but there is a difference between "betting" that you yourself are going to die and someone else betting that you are going to die. Others have pointed out that companies that would be harmed by particular political situations could use this as a hedge to minimise their risk - sort of "political instability insurance" but it is the speculators "betting" on human tragedy that would make this work as a predictive tool.
It's worth pointing out though that this is a DARPA project which means it's *research*. They are probably tinkering with the idea and even if in it's raw (and crass) form it never comes to pass I think they may come up with a lot of better (or at least more acceptable) ideas and implimentations of the basic concept. Perhaps simply using something like this internally among CIA and Washington think tank analysts to reward accuracy and the reality rather than the appearance of insight. Fewer eyeballs but presumably with better information. To bring a few more eyeballs in perhaps open it up to select academics and industry analysts (industry analysts could bring back that commercial hedge investment aspect). Perhaps encourage insurance companies to offer some kind of insurance based on a model like this (insurance against particular military and political threats) to companies that would be effected by those threats. Just watch the rates on insurance against different threats and you have the same predictive tool from a wide array of informed (and self-interested) opinion that this "future's market" would provide. Something provided by private companies on an open market would have tha additional diplomatic advantage of not being directly connected with the U.S. government. I think despite the "open" nature of this it would still be diplomatically problematic if the "official" and public(!) concensus view of a U.S. government project was that the king of Jordan had a 75% chance of being assasinated in the next year. Much better (dipolomatically speaking) that it be the official view of some insurance company or hedge fund with no direct involvement of the government (aside from monitoring the rates to reap the insights of the analysts).
This initial implimentation has a lot of advantages but has quite a few disadvantages itself. Some things are so crass that perhaps they should not be done even if they are effective.
hahaha, too bad i'm the one that you're lampooning - I can't mod you up.
How about "anti-aircraft batteries"
Thanks, I hadn't had my coffee yet - you deserve all the "informative" mod points that went to me ;)
If I'm understanding correctly where I got it wrong is that if you buy a put option you have the option, but are NOT obligated (as I mistakenly said), to sell at the given price on the given date.
I'm sure the Bible-belt approves of this idea...
Hmm... Bible belt... Gambling... I think you're letting your prejudices get ahead of you.
I think any organization bright enough to pull off a major terrorist act would also be bright enough not to make a bet with the pentagon about when and where it would happen.
The stupidity involved in designing this system is amazing.
RTA - You are missing the point. It's NOT about getting a stupid terrorist to make a bet on his own actions (though I'm sure that is a potential bonus). It is about getting honest, objective analysis of all the existing data from a wide range of professional and amateur analysts. We have more data than we know what to do with, any Joe with a TV and a computer with an internet connection has access to a vast universe of data that is simply too vast to be subjected to meaningful analysis by the experts employed by the intelligence agencies. This "market" is a way to not only do a massive amount of honest and objective analysis but also get honest and objective judgement on the quality of that analysis. Right now a few highly trained (and prejudiced by their training) experts with all sorts of conficts of interest and axes to grind, operating in a highly political atmosphere are being paid to write "insightful" analysis but NOT on whether their predictions come true. This market subjects a wide range of international political issues to the judgement of huge number of analysts who because they are putting their own money on the line will make honest bets about the probability of various outcomes, out of that mass of tiny individual bits of analysis a cohesive, widely (and more importantly) honestly held concensus of all those peoples best analysis emerges.
The main thing is that the "market" would be pretty good at analysis itself. But the system I'm sure would also be able to identify those traders that consistently do better than the market as a whole, not because of "insider trading" but because those traders are smarter, better researchers, more knowledgeable about particular issues, etc. Identifying those people, and noting what they are betting on would give the CIA access to both the broad, honestly held, concensus view but also the potentially contrarian views of the truly insightful.
Why buy airline options *before* 9/11? The share prices for airlines fell after 9/11 if I am not mistaken which means that the price of options would have fallen after that date.
It is a *PUT* option. It is a promise to sell the buyer the stock at a given price on a given date. As the seller you are betting that the stock will be *lower* than the price you promised to sell at, the buyer is betting that it will be higher. If the stock plummets you make money.
While I agree it takes a radical change to bring in new technology the fact is Iraq HAD one of the most advanced communication networks before it was blown up.
I have no idea what their civillian network was like. But I recall reading an article prior to the war about their military network for controlling their AA batteries - which was the very top of top notch. Not that it did them much good, I'm sure it was the very first thing taken out.
The US would have severe problems funding it -- anti missile technology to protect against (well something) and other military projects will take priority.
This is a little silly. The US would/could have no problem funding it as compared to China. We are orders of magnitude wealthier than the Chinese. We can fund things we don't really care about at levels as high, or perhaps even higher, than they can fund things that are their central goals.
More significantly what you don't seem to realize is that space programs *are* military projects. The space race was a military project - it was the "noble" scientific public relations face on the arms race. The skills, capabilities and hardware involved in putting something in orbit are the same whether the payload is a spacecraft or a nuclear warhead. Once you have reached your primary goal of being able to deliver warheads the secondary goal of "journey's of discovery" still has a romantic appeal but not serving any pragmatic purpose it fades away and exists on in maintentance mode.
The U.S. *has* ICBM's, more than we need, we no longer need a space race as an excuse/side effect of the effort to attain them. China right now is coming late to the arms race, she is expending the wealth of the nation to acquire ICBM's and the noble quest to reach Mars is just PR, and a motivational tactic to engage the imagination of the best and the brightest. Some, perhaps even some high up in the society may be sold on the idea but once the immediate military goal is achieved they will find themselves sliding into irrelevance and massively reduced funding.
In any event the Chinese government will get it to it's primary goal (ICBM's) a long time before the secondary public goal is reached (Mars) and the civillian face on the project will fade into increasing irrelevance just as NASA has. In fact given their relative poverty the PR excersise will probably fade even more quickly and be maintained at an even lower level in China.
As a rule, most folks who get arrested, sued, punished and publicised are from countries regarded as anti-US during the cold-war, at any rate.
Pakistan?!? What kind of history do they teach at your school?
but the communists in the 50's weren't blowing up too many buildings or killing people.
Hello?? I think there are few million Ukrainians, Chinese, Poles, Czechs, Cambodians, etc. etc. etc. who would beg to differ (including my foster brother who saw quite a few people killed by Communists in Pol Pot's killing fields)
This is true of passenger planes, but an equally fuel-laden cargo plane is just as deadly a weapon, and there is only the small crew to overcome.
Of course in that case the would be terrorist has to overcome the "Hey, who the **** are you!" factor before the plane even gets off the ground.
Like I said, too cute. They mistakenly thought that Dr. Usher's copyrighted material was Mr. Usher's copyrighted material who they swore, under penalty of perjury, that they were the authorized agent of. They never claimed to be Dr. Usher's agent. Sorry, it simply is not perjury no matter how much you or I dislike the RIAA.
I think if Dr. Usher was harmed by the RIAA's negligent mistake he probably has some recourse in civil court.
So I'll only have to be careful for a maximum of 60 months in prison...
Sooo... tds67 you're ADMITTING that you are infringing on someone's IP. We'll be right over.
I TOLD you we read slashdot.
The law is not vague because it is complex, it is vague because it is fairly simple. It's a few short lines that say "If you're only copying part of it and you're doing it for a review or for educational purposes" then it is fair use. In most cases it's obvious whether something is fair use or not. A few excerpts in a review is fair use. Quoting the whole thing and adding a forward and calling it a "review" is NOT. In a few cases there is a dispute, in those cases there *are* some rules of thumb that judges use to help them come to a decision in the dispute - but it comes down to a judgement call and as such even an attorney can't say when a "line has been crossed". Only the judge can and he (hopefully) has to put some effort into thinking about it.
Of course in our adversarial system of law where you *always* have at least one attorney on either side of *every* issue - unless they can read the judge & juries mind they can't ever say with utter confidence when a "line has been crossed."
Clever, but a little too cute. This was obviously a case of mistaken identity. If it was a rival professer that was trying to get the Usher .mpg taken down THEN it would have been a criminal purjury case.
Professor Usher DOES probably have recourse in civil court though.
Aggghh!! I've been trolled!
Had me hooked. congratulations
Funny how people think that saying that allows them to insult you with impunity.
I think that is a little unfair... I am not trying to insult you, but I DO have to point out a flaw in your argument, the pointing out of which can be taken as an implicit insult. Frankly you simply ignored my post and apparently didn't read the article. Pointing that out may sound insulting (which is why I apologized in advance) but it's hard to avoid.
renders the entire exercise of debate futile.
With that attitude, it certainly is.
I don't think my attitude towards debate is the problem. If you had and argument that rendered the facts I presented irrelevant that - would be debate. If you had presented your own evidence that cast doubt on the facts I presented - that would be debate. Simply ignoring the facts as though they hadn't come up is NOT debate and conversation on that basis IS a futile exercise.
Sure, some security features may be poorly thought out, or leave gaping holes that renders them useless but in general more security features == more secure. Another important question is: is the added security from any given security feature worth the costs. But, you have to *dispassionately* evaluate both the increase in security and the cost rather than immediately assuming that the cost is to high.
The problem, if there is one, is not false passports, but real ones issued under false pretenses. Or real ones issued to people with clean records who have evil plans. Or real ones issued by corrupt civil servants to anyone who pays enough, or is sympathetic to their aims.
NO, read my original post. In several instances the problem was indeed FALSE PASSPORTS and STOLEN PASSPORTS. (To add to the evidence of this problem the recent arrest of an al Queada cell in Saudi Arabia with a cache of FAKE PASSPORTS).
And at the risk of repeating myself, there were no problems(AFAIR) with US passports
Again, read the article, or my post. The united states is adding biometrics to their passports in order to get OTHER COUNTRIES to add them to their passports. Including not coincidentally the countries that had their passports stolen or faked as part of the 9/11 attacks. The United States is conforming to a standard that they will require of any country taking part in the visa-free program. Here is a relevant quote from Janes Intelligence Review (I bolded a particularly relevant example)
As my own note I would add that the Millenium bomb plot involved a fake Canadian passport as did the Nabil al-Marabh who was involved at least peripherally in the 9/11 plot
You also seem to assume that because US passports were not a problem in this one particular instance that they are never a problem. I'm sure Indonesia and Australia would beg to differ.
so these measures won't help anything except justify reducing the headcount of human security checkers who might use their brains to assess risk.
I don't see any indication that this move to biometrics on identity papers is being accompanied by any reduction inthe quantity or quality of security personell.
If the existence of documentation leads to less security and/or making existing documentation more reliable and less easy to forge leads to less security perhaps you would be willing to use the services of
Sure. But none of the fake papers you mentioned were US passports. Evidently then they're already secure enough.
Well that and these weren't Americans or faux Americans abusing American passports in another country but Saudi's or faux Saudi's abusing Saudi and Canadian(!) passports in America.
Also, read the article. This is America conforming to a new international standard that will just happen to also apply to Canada and (I think) Saudi Arabia - two countries that did have false passports at least peripherally involved in the 9/11 attack. The U.S. will require of any country that enjoy's visa free travel to the U.S. to use these measures - those would be the countries you would most want to get a passport from if you were a terrorist since you would enjoy open travel in the US without the US vetting you the way they would if you came from a country that required the US to issue a Visa to you.
"Thank you, this has been Angry Metal Fishnipple, goodnight! If you like our songs, go to iTunes!"... That's gonna get heard for a quarter the cost of a TV spot in every dingy bar across the nation forever more?
Not only would that be pure marketting gold but "The iTunes Music Store now with 10 million songs!" is also a valuable thing. Sure very few people will want Angry Metal Fishnipple's latest song but the fact that you KNOW the iTunes store will have a song you're looking for no matter how obscure is a great selling point. The existance of obscure, never downloaded music sitting on their servers will probably win them a LOT of business for middle tier artists that are quite a bit more popular and profitable. The customer will be reasoning "Well, Strawberry's might have this sorta obscure band, but I know Apple will have it."
Storage and maintenance is not cheap for sites like ITune.
I really want to know. Why? It seems to me Apple could just put the info about the artist and the songs in their database and a file on a hard drive and that's it. Storage is cheap, computers are cheap, especially for the manufacturer. Bandwidth is only a cost if people are listening to and thus at least interested in *buying* that song. So what's expensive? It's not like they're paying through the nose to rent storage space on someone elses server. It's their own system.
It seems to me the problem would not be any cost associated with storing a bunch of junk not many people access but in possibly diluting your own brand by having any low quality music.
Reading about what Jobs vision for iTunes is it sounds like he is not concerned about storing lots of obscure (but reasonable quality) titles. He wants to get into the big 5 distributors archives to get millions of out of print titles as well. iTunes would have any song you ever might want, so what if only a small handful of people ever download a particular song? It's only (cheap) hard disk space.