> It's that Windows UI designers repeatedly make conscious design decisions that result in the
gun always pointing at even the feet of the knowledgeable user, with the user blindfolded, and
with a voice screaming "PULL THE TRIGGER! PULL THE TRIGGER! SHOOT NOW!". > > hehehehheeee.... fuckin hilarious.....
Someone's pointed out that I could have done one better:
"Shoot me! Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of gunpowder! And cordite! And burnt feathers! I'm a.SHS file - shoot me! It's.SHS file season! I'm a fiddler.LNK file! Why don'tcha shoot me? It's fiddler.LNK file season!"
> What you are implying is that there's TWO checkboxes... one for all the normal file extensions and another one for the 'advanced' ones like.lnk and.url. Is that right? Because he was talking about extensions that don't show up even if you check the styandard "Always show file
extensions" checkbox...
Half-right. It's even dumber than what you imagine.
There is ONE checkbox. For the standard extension.
There is NO checkbox for the "uber" extensions. These extensions do NOT show up if you say "Always show file extensions". You must hack the registry key that corresponds to each "uber" extension for which you want to enable display.
> The more I see wrt to 9/11 and the trading, the more it stinks.
The only people who would be in a position to know are the database administrators of the firms that worked there.
They're not talking in public because they're ethically bound not to talk -- confidentiality of legitimate client records would be compromised along with the terrorst clients' records.
All we can do is hope that the intelligence community got copies of the relevant data, ran the right SQL queries, congratulated the people who tagged along on the trade (i.e. people who tagged along for the ride, speculating that something like a bankruptcy filing was in the works and had been leaked), and "disappeared" those who traded it as part of part of a money-laundering and terror-financing network.
For those without a financial background, you can trade stuff like that legitimately. You see a shift in pricing that cannot be explained by what you know about the airline business. You see a lot of people shoveling a lot of money into something that doesn't make any sense. But obviously someone was willing to put their money on the line for their opinion that the airlines were about to tank. Sometimes the right move is to say "No, you're wrong" -- and take their money away. Other times, the right move is to say "They know something I don't. I'll play along with them" and see how things turn out.
This game is played all the time. The next few times a small or medium-sized bank gets bought out, look at the chart during the weeks leading up to the takeover. Then look at the rumor mill regarding potential takeovers of said bank. A pattern will emerge. Learn to see those signs on the charts, and you can learn to anticipate mergers and acquisitions with better-than-random accuracy. While you won't win them all, you can profit handsomely. It's a great game, and nobody has to get killed.
Back to the matter at hand, the general public won't know, and sadly, probably can't be permitted to know, until 50 years or whatever the limitation on classification is. Given the human tendency towards conspiracy theory, too many legitimate speculators against the airlines (remember, the economy was just entering recession and there was already ample reason to believe that some of the airlines would fold, and soon) would be unfairly tarred with the "terrorist" brush.
Bottom line: Let sleeping dogs lie, and consider that your friends may have already been avenged by people who don't have to let sleeping dogs lie.
> Whoooo nelly... It kind of makes you wonder what kind of "enhanced security" those boys loaded that thing up with?
Well, those who are able should be going over the source closely anyways. The adversaries are!
Remember, NSA has two mandates:
1) Help Americans secure their boxen, and
2) Be able to 0wnz0r any non-American's boxen.
Just because #2 gets all the press on Slashdot doesn't invalidate #1. The net effect of "more machines on the network are secure, even though some of those machines are used by non-Americans, and even if that fact makes some things a little more difficult for the other half of NSA" is still an increase in security for Americans.
SELinux is consistent with NSA's goals in providing a secure information infrastructure for US Citizens. Given that NSA knows that the code will be closely examined by both NSA-friendly and NSA-hostile folk alike, I'd expect SELinux code to be safe, and would treat such code with a policy of "trust, but verify." (More precisely: "Verify, but trust.")
> Hell, I could chmod my whatever.txt to +x and try it!! It will actually attempt to run that way! Not smart.
But at least your OS shows whatever.txt as whatever.txt. Not whatever.
In Windows, users can't (by default) see the difference between boobies.jpg.exe and boobies.jpg. The OS hides it from them.
Compounding this - no directory paths, because (in the words of a Mattel toy) "Directories are hard". So it's not always apparent whether you're about to run C:\SOMEWHERE_UNUSUAL\EXPLORER.EXE and C:\TWHERE_IT_BELONGS\EXPLORER.EXE
And last but not least -- even if you turn the directories on and file extensions on, the OS still hides some extensions. Just because you said "Show me the full name of the files and where they live", obviously didn't mean you wanted to see the full name of the files! If it's named BOOBIES.JPG.SHS, it shows up as BOOBIES.JPG no matter what you've done.
There's no deeply-buried GUI option to show.SHS, you have to hack the registry to show the "super hidden" file extensions like.SHB,.URL,.LNK,.PIF,.SCF, and.SHS.
The difference in security doesn't arise because Linux won't let you shoot yourself in the foot -- of course you can. It's that Windows UI designers repeatedly make conscious design decisions that result in the gun always pointing at even the feet of the knowledgeable user, with the user blindfolded, and with a voice screaming "PULL THE TRIGGER! PULL THE TRIGGER! SHOOT NOW!".
> Tell me Mr.Politician, what is more important: Survival of mankind or playing the powermonger game with your politician-buddys?
Never ask a question unless you already know the answer.
> I say, if politicians (which are by the way trusted with OUR FATE!) behave like they do today they are gambling with the chance of survival for the entire human race. This should be considered a crime and prosecuted accordingly.
Prosecuted? Pray tell, citizen... by whom?
*cracks knuckles and smiles in a vision of pure malice and lust for power*
> Think of the last game you played from 1998, the year Wing Commander: Secret Ops was published as a free download. 6 years and mods and fan projects are still going
Oh, man. I remember that. Only place I could get it was from work. I spent a week, carting floppies back and forth, to assemble the installer.
And it was worth it! WC:Secret Ops rocked. Brought back a lot of WC memories, and that it was free-as-in-beer was an astounding display of generosity on the part of OSI.
Five days before 9/11. A Texas-based host of Arabic websites, shut down as part of a terrorism investigation. Yep, just coincidence. Move along. Nothing to see there.
The memory hole is deep indeed. I'd even forgotten my own posting, four days before 9/11, which turned out to be pretty fucking spot-on. The ISP was indeed part of the Holy Land Foundation, a front group that laundered money for terrorists, and was declared as such while New Yorkers were still cleaning the dust from their apartments.
As for me, I'm going to start keeping very close watch on the implied volatility of options contracts in the publicly traded securities of certain industries this week.
A huge increase in implied volatility in the options market was the second tipoff that civilians could have used to figure out that something was afoot during the days before the attack.
Being an armchair open source intelligence analyst is a hell of a lot of fun. If the options market starts to go screwball in the obvious target industries, the next two weeks are gonna be a hell of a lot of fun.
Meantime, cross your fingers, and even if you're an ACLU sympathizer, just once, root for the FBI. Imagine what things would be like they not fucked up so fucking badly in 2001. Now, do you really want them to fuck it up again? During an election year?
> > I'm surprised that there hasn't been any discussion of Magic Lantern for awhile... > >Oh there has... those members have just been dragged off, beaten, and then killed. > I really shouldn't attempt humor before breakfast.:-/
I hereby propose two new/. moderations.
(+1, Cynical): When someone tries for (+1, Funny) and gets (+1, Informative)
(+1, Ironic): When someone tries for (+1, Informative) and gets (+1, Funny).
> And if searching for evidence on a computer requires the FBI to physically cart the equipment to some distant lab, I guess we just write off any expectation that they'll be able to find data quickly in an emergency -- like, just off the top of my head here, for instance, wholly unlikely I'm sure, an imminent terrorist act?
Wasn't there a Slashdot article in the week before 9/11 about an ISP that got raided by Agents looking for precisely that?
> Believe me, the last thing some poor special agent wants to do is sift through TBs of customer crap and put a company out of business or under financial hardship.
First part true. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a pain and slows the investigation. (Unless you can use the wheat for future investigations, but the Agents aren't getting paid to go on fishing expeditions yet.)
Second part untrue. What makes you think the Agents gives a flying fsck through a rolling doughnut about collateral damage to some business he's never heard of and isn't paid to protect?
I mean, what's the collateral damage gonna do? Sue an Agent? (Score +6, Funny) Sue the Agent's employer? (Score +7, Hysterical) And what if through some sick twist of fate, they win such a suit? (Score -8, Witness of Evolution In Action).
There's three kinds of people in the world. Cops, perps, and perps who haven't been caught. Power corrupts, but power without accountability is an awful lot of fun.
If you're in college, consider majoring in Criminal Justice and joining the winning side. You can be under the gun, or you can hold the gun. Better to be a killer than a victim.
> Yes, several times in the past 4+ billion years asteroids have impacted our planet. However, the odds of one occuring anytime in the near future are absurdly small. I'd rather spend my time worrying about things that are more likely to kill me than this.
Even a small impact of a cometary fragment such as that that happened over Tunguska would be devastating if it happened in a populated area.
Question: Suppose such an event happened over a populated area today. How long would the authorities of that nation wait before retaliating against their enemies for what looks, to a layperson's eye, an awful lot like a nuclear strike?
And is that time longer or shorter than the time it would take the scientific community to conclude that it wasn't a nuclear strike and convey that information to the leaders of the rocksmacked nation?
And would the population of the nation actually believe what the scientists were saying?
That's if the world's lucky enough that the rock in question lands in a nation that even has scientists.
What would the world be like had the Tunguska event occurred in 1968 instead of 1908?
> > One Bolshevik, one kulak, one "Enemy of the People", one Jew, one Japanese-American, one
Communist, one educated person, one literate person, one Arab. > > Walk into a bar...
...and the bartender says "Amd with all of you schmucks here, who cares what Neimoller says! It'll take years for them to get to the cliche-spouters!"
> Forcing people to give up their religion is the quickest way to make people hate you, and hate you for a long time.
Sure. And at the moment, it's still easier and cheaper to undermine their memes by selling stuff to them, rather than killing them. Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy, and all that lot. It's cheaper and safer to defuse a bomb than to haul it somewhere deserted and blow it.
If the campaign of cultural imperialism fails to win their hearts and minds, they will eventually find out we have other methods of dealing with them.
> The TIA program, driven underground tho still alive, paired with modelling inreal time will turn the entire planet -- eventually -- into a prison. The only places without tracking tech will be the rooms where the watchers watch us -- and the homes and offices of the people who give them orders.
The trivial solution to any problems posed by this scenario is to get a job working for those who give the orders.
> Awww, c'mon. What of the sudden rash of Chechen suicide widows? Y'know, the wives of the
guys who had their brains splattered all over the place by the Russians. They should've killed them at the time, too.
> >...and the children, as too many of them would grow up and want to do nothing more than avenge their parents' deaths...
Nits grow up to be lice.
- John Brown, when asked to comment on his unorthodox approach towards the elimination of slavery.
> Violence only succeeds when you completely eradicate your opposition. If you don't, all it does is breed hatred amongst the survivors.
Unless you track down and kill every last person who opposes your will, you're going to have to deal with those who hate you because you've destroyed their lives and families. Is this what you're advocating--the wholesale slaughter of every terrorist, their families, and all those who cared about them? Think you can keep up the pace?
Well, there's only one way to find out: ask a Carthaginian if the Romans could keep up the pace.
One of my favorite rants came from someone who wrote:
"200 years from now, I want their children's children's children's children to cower and cringe in fear whenever they hear the sounds of jet engines overhead because their legends tell of fire from the sky.
I want them to hide in dark caves and holes in the earth, shivering with
terror whenever they hear the roar of diesel engines because the tales of their ancestors talk about metal monsters crawling over the earth, spitting death and destruction."
What that poster wanted was revenge. I'd go one step further. I want peace. And against fanatics - by definition immune to reason - the only way to achieve peace is through superior firepower.
For peace, they must abandon their fanaticism in God and Prophet -- and the only way to do that is to demonstrate, time and again, that neither their God nor Prophet can help them. We can tell them that their God and Prophet are lies, and it'll shake some of the weaker ones into the civilized camp, but it will do nothing against the fanatics. For the fanatics, we must show them. They must come to the conclusion that their God and their Prophet are lies of their own accord, and face the implications of that simple fact full-on.
When they have come to that conclusion, whether they choose to join civilization, or whether they choose to meet their God by walking for miles across the radioactive fused-glass plain where once their meteorite stood, is up to them.
All it takes is one man with the launch codes, the legal authority, and the will to use them.
All it takes is one man with the courage to stand up and say "Enough! Carthago delenda est!"
> OK, there's a previous study that used a really strong field for 2 hours, and it caused damage. Now they used a low-level field for 24 (and 48 hours) and it caused damage. How exactly does that get extrapolated to a low-level field for 3 minutes a day over a long period of time causing damage?
And while both experiments are interesting (as is the testing of the hypothesis by fiddling with the iron in the rat brains), I still have to wonder why they didn't do the obvious third experiment: low-level field, 10 minutes a day, over the lifetime of the rat.
(Or high-level field, 10 minutes a day, for the rat's lifetime, and low-level field, 5 minutes every hour, for a week, and so on, and so on.)
Bottom line: Interesting data so far, but the investigation looks pretty incomplete. It also looks like it wouldn't take more than a month or two of additional experiments to complete the investigation of the really interesting hypothesis, namely that Electric Shavers Rot Rat Brains.
> Is the president of Sony going to come and rape your children if you do not buy a new tv when your old one breaks?
When will you idiots learn to stop giving Raph Koster and the rest of Sony Online Entertainment any more ideas for Star Wars Galaxies: "Terrain Engine and Chat Client" MMORPG game design?
> Driver: You may search my car officer as soon as you tell me your probable cause. > > If someone else has a better statement please let me know
"No, Officer, it's not OK. If you're asking my permission, it's because you need my permission, and therefore you don't have probable cause. If you have probable cause, you don't need my consent. I'm not trying to get in your way, Officer, just going by what my Lawyer friend (or if you have one, my Cop relative) said the rules were."
> What if I say "Hey that guy over there looks suspicious, officer"... and point to you. Should the officer be able to walk up to you and ask for your papers?
If the officer agrees with your assessment (maybe it's the wrong time of day and I'm the wrong neighborhood), then yes. "Sir, I have a report of suspicious behavior. You match the description of the person in the report. Who are you? What are you doing here?"
If I answer "None of your business", the officer's quite within his right to press the matter. "Sir, this area is frequented by people purchasing and dealing drugs. You don't look like a dealer. You're also too well-dressed and too-well spoken for it to be likely that you live here. I think you're here to purchase narcotics. Have you ever been arrested? Please show me some identification."
If I again answer "No, I'm not, and no I haven't, and you don't need to see my identification", and the officer believes I'm lying, he's still conducting a lawful investigation: "Sir, I'm afraid I don't believe you. You're not a Jedi Knight. I do need to see your identification to confirm that you have no priors."
I've bashed both FBI-types and ACLU types with pretty much no mercy. Now that I've re-readTFA, I think this time the ACLU-bashing is truly justified. The cop was conducting a lawful investigation.
The fact that the Supremes even deigned to HEAR this absurd case is proof positive that you civil libertines are still well-protected from The Man.
Lucas: We couldn't get Star Wars movies right, we cost Hasbro hundreds of millions of dollars in Episode I-II toys, we made the 2003 Coaster of the Year "Worst MMORPG Evah" award! Ruining things is too easy. We need a challenge. What haven't we ruined yet? What would be almost impossible to fuck up? Oh yeah! Booze!
Slashdot Mirror
>
> hehehehheeee.... fuckin hilarious.....
Someone's pointed out that I could have done one better:
"Shoot me! Shoot me again! I enjoy it! I love the smell of gunpowder! And cordite! And burnt feathers! I'm a .SHS file - shoot me! It's .SHS file season! I'm a fiddler .LNK file! Why don'tcha shoot me? It's fiddler .LNK file season!"
Half-right. It's even dumber than what you imagine.
There is ONE checkbox. For the standard extension.
There is NO checkbox for the "uber" extensions. These extensions do NOT show up if you say "Always show file extensions". You must hack the registry key that corresponds to each "uber" extension for which you want to enable display.
The only people who would be in a position to know are the database administrators of the firms that worked there.
They're not talking in public because they're ethically bound not to talk -- confidentiality of legitimate client records would be compromised along with the terrorst clients' records.
All we can do is hope that the intelligence community got copies of the relevant data, ran the right SQL queries, congratulated the people who tagged along on the trade (i.e. people who tagged along for the ride, speculating that something like a bankruptcy filing was in the works and had been leaked), and "disappeared" those who traded it as part of part of a money-laundering and terror-financing network.
For those without a financial background, you can trade stuff like that legitimately. You see a shift in pricing that cannot be explained by what you know about the airline business. You see a lot of people shoveling a lot of money into something that doesn't make any sense. But obviously someone was willing to put their money on the line for their opinion that the airlines were about to tank. Sometimes the right move is to say "No, you're wrong" -- and take their money away. Other times, the right move is to say "They know something I don't. I'll play along with them" and see how things turn out.
This game is played all the time. The next few times a small or medium-sized bank gets bought out, look at the chart during the weeks leading up to the takeover. Then look at the rumor mill regarding potential takeovers of said bank. A pattern will emerge. Learn to see those signs on the charts, and you can learn to anticipate mergers and acquisitions with better-than-random accuracy. While you won't win them all, you can profit handsomely. It's a great game, and nobody has to get killed.
Back to the matter at hand, the general public won't know, and sadly, probably can't be permitted to know, until 50 years or whatever the limitation on classification is. Given the human tendency towards conspiracy theory, too many legitimate speculators against the airlines (remember, the economy was just entering recession and there was already ample reason to believe that some of the airlines would fold, and soon) would be unfairly tarred with the "terrorist" brush.
Bottom line: Let sleeping dogs lie, and consider that your friends may have already been avenged by people who don't have to let sleeping dogs lie.
Well, those who are able should be going over the source closely anyways. The adversaries are!
Remember, NSA has two mandates:
1) Help Americans secure their boxen, and
2) Be able to 0wnz0r any non-American's boxen.
Just because #2 gets all the press on Slashdot doesn't invalidate #1. The net effect of "more machines on the network are secure, even though some of those machines are used by non-Americans, and even if that fact makes some things a little more difficult for the other half of NSA" is still an increase in security for Americans.
SELinux is consistent with NSA's goals in providing a secure information infrastructure for US Citizens. Given that NSA knows that the code will be closely examined by both NSA-friendly and NSA-hostile folk alike, I'd expect SELinux code to be safe, and would treat such code with a policy of "trust, but verify." (More precisely: "Verify, but trust.")
But at least your OS shows whatever.txt as whatever.txt. Not whatever.
In Windows, users can't (by default) see the difference between boobies.jpg.exe and boobies.jpg. The OS hides it from them.
Compounding this - no directory paths, because (in the words of a Mattel toy) "Directories are hard". So it's not always apparent whether you're about to run C:\SOMEWHERE_UNUSUAL\EXPLORER.EXE and C:\TWHERE_IT_BELONGS\EXPLORER.EXE
And last but not least -- even if you turn the directories on and file extensions on, the OS still hides some extensions. Just because you said "Show me the full name of the files and where they live", obviously didn't mean you wanted to see the full name of the files! If it's named BOOBIES.JPG.SHS, it shows up as BOOBIES.JPG no matter what you've done.
There's no deeply-buried GUI option to show .SHS, you have to hack the registry to show the "super hidden" file extensions like .SHB, .URL, .LNK, .PIF, .SCF, and .SHS.
The difference in security doesn't arise because Linux won't let you shoot yourself in the foot -- of course you can. It's that Windows UI designers repeatedly make conscious design decisions that result in the gun always pointing at even the feet of the knowledgeable user, with the user blindfolded, and with a voice screaming "PULL THE TRIGGER! PULL THE TRIGGER! SHOOT NOW!".
Never ask a question unless you already know the answer.
> I say, if politicians (which are by the way trusted with OUR FATE!) behave like they do today they are gambling with the chance of survival for the entire human race. This should be considered a crime and prosecuted accordingly.
Prosecuted? Pray tell, citizen... by whom?
*cracks knuckles and smiles in a vision of pure malice and lust for power*
Oh, man. I remember that. Only place I could get it was from work. I spent a week, carting floppies back and forth, to assemble the installer.
And it was worth it! WC:Secret Ops rocked. Brought back a lot of WC memories, and that it was free-as-in-beer was an astounding display of generosity on the part of OSI.
Five days before 9/11. A Texas-based host of Arabic websites, shut down as part of a terrorism investigation. Yep, just coincidence. Move along. Nothing to see there.
The memory hole is deep indeed. I'd even forgotten my own posting, four days before 9/11, which turned out to be pretty fucking spot-on. The ISP was indeed part of the Holy Land Foundation, a front group that laundered money for terrorists, and was declared as such while New Yorkers were still cleaning the dust from their apartments.
As for me, I'm going to start keeping very close watch on the implied volatility of options contracts in the publicly traded securities of certain industries this week.
A huge increase in implied volatility in the options market was the second tipoff that civilians could have used to figure out that something was afoot during the days before the attack.
Being an armchair open source intelligence analyst is a hell of a lot of fun. If the options market starts to go screwball in the obvious target industries, the next two weeks are gonna be a hell of a lot of fun.
Meantime, cross your fingers, and even if you're an ACLU sympathizer, just once, root for the FBI. Imagine what things would be like they not fucked up so fucking badly in 2001. Now, do you really want them to fuck it up again? During an election year?
>
>Oh there has
> I really shouldn't attempt humor before breakfast.
I hereby propose two new /. moderations.
(+1, Cynical): When someone tries for (+1, Funny) and gets (+1, Informative)
(+1, Ironic): When someone tries for (+1, Informative) and gets (+1, Funny).
Wasn't there a Slashdot article in the week before 9/11 about an ISP that got raided by Agents looking for precisely that?
Or did that go down the memory hole too?
First part true. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a pain and slows the investigation. (Unless you can use the wheat for future investigations, but the Agents aren't getting paid to go on fishing expeditions yet.)
Second part untrue. What makes you think the Agents gives a flying fsck through a rolling doughnut about collateral damage to some business he's never heard of and isn't paid to protect?
I mean, what's the collateral damage gonna do? Sue an Agent? (Score +6, Funny) Sue the Agent's employer? (Score +7, Hysterical) And what if through some sick twist of fate, they win such a suit? (Score -8, Witness of Evolution In Action).
There's three kinds of people in the world. Cops, perps, and perps who haven't been caught. Power corrupts, but power without accountability is an awful lot of fun.
If you're in college, consider majoring in Criminal Justice and joining the winning side. You can be under the gun, or you can hold the gun. Better to be a killer than a victim.
Even a small impact of a cometary fragment such as that that happened over Tunguska would be devastating if it happened in a populated area.
Question: Suppose such an event happened over a populated area today. How long would the authorities of that nation wait before retaliating against their enemies for what looks, to a layperson's eye, an awful lot like a nuclear strike?
And is that time longer or shorter than the time it would take the scientific community to conclude that it wasn't a nuclear strike and convey that information to the leaders of the rocksmacked nation?
And would the population of the nation actually believe what the scientists were saying?
That's if the world's lucky enough that the rock in question lands in a nation that even has scientists.
What would the world be like had the Tunguska event occurred in 1968 instead of 1908?
>
> Walk into a bar...
Sure. And at the moment, it's still easier and cheaper to undermine their memes by selling stuff to them, rather than killing them. Democracy, Whiskey, Sexy, and all that lot. It's cheaper and safer to defuse a bomb than to haul it somewhere deserted and blow it.
If the campaign of cultural imperialism fails to win their hearts and minds, they will eventually find out we have other methods of dealing with them.
The trivial solution to any problems posed by this scenario is to get a job working for those who give the orders.
>
>
Nits grow up to be lice.
- John Brown, when asked to comment on his unorthodox approach towards the elimination of slavery.
Unless you track down and kill every last person who opposes your will, you're going to have to deal with those who hate you because you've destroyed their lives and families. Is this what you're advocating--the wholesale slaughter of every terrorist, their families, and all those who cared about them? Think you can keep up the pace?
Well, there's only one way to find out: ask a Carthaginian if the Romans could keep up the pace.
One of my favorite rants came from someone who wrote:
What that poster wanted was revenge. I'd go one step further. I want peace. And against fanatics - by definition immune to reason - the only way to achieve peace is through superior firepower.
For peace, they must abandon their fanaticism in God and Prophet -- and the only way to do that is to demonstrate, time and again, that neither their God nor Prophet can help them. We can tell them that their God and Prophet are lies, and it'll shake some of the weaker ones into the civilized camp, but it will do nothing against the fanatics. For the fanatics, we must show them. They must come to the conclusion that their God and their Prophet are lies of their own accord, and face the implications of that simple fact full-on.
When they have come to that conclusion, whether they choose to join civilization, or whether they choose to meet their God by walking for miles across the radioactive fused-glass plain where once their meteorite stood, is up to them.
All it takes is one man with the launch codes, the legal authority, and the will to use them.
All it takes is one man with the courage to stand up and say "Enough! Carthago delenda est!"
And while both experiments are interesting (as is the testing of the hypothesis by fiddling with the iron in the rat brains), I still have to wonder why they didn't do the obvious third experiment: low-level field, 10 minutes a day, over the lifetime of the rat.
(Or high-level field, 10 minutes a day, for the rat's lifetime, and low-level field, 5 minutes every hour, for a week, and so on, and so on.)
Bottom line: Interesting data so far, but the investigation looks pretty incomplete. It also looks like it wouldn't take more than a month or two of additional experiments to complete the investigation of the really interesting hypothesis, namely that Electric Shavers Rot Rat Brains.
Why wasn't that done?
When will you idiots learn to stop giving Raph Koster and the rest of Sony Online Entertainment any more ideas for Star Wars Galaxies: "Terrain Engine and Chat Client" MMORPG game design?
>
> If someone else has a better statement please let me know
"No, Officer, it's not OK. If you're asking my permission, it's because you need my permission, and therefore you don't have probable cause. If you have probable cause, you don't need my consent. I'm not trying to get in your way, Officer, just going by what my Lawyer friend (or if you have one, my Cop relative) said the rules were."
If the officer agrees with your assessment (maybe it's the wrong time of day and I'm the wrong neighborhood), then yes. "Sir, I have a report of suspicious behavior. You match the description of the person in the report. Who are you? What are you doing here?"
If I answer "None of your business", the officer's quite within his right to press the matter. "Sir, this area is frequented by people purchasing and dealing drugs. You don't look like a dealer. You're also too well-dressed and too-well spoken for it to be likely that you live here. I think you're here to purchase narcotics. Have you ever been arrested? Please show me some identification."
If I again answer "No, I'm not, and no I haven't, and you don't need to see my identification", and the officer believes I'm lying, he's still conducting a lawful investigation: "Sir, I'm afraid I don't believe you. You're not a Jedi Knight. I do need to see your identification to confirm that you have no priors."
I've bashed both FBI-types and ACLU types with pretty much no mercy. Now that I've re-readTFA, I think this time the ACLU-bashing is truly justified. The cop was conducting a lawful investigation.
The fact that the Supremes even deigned to HEAR this absurd case is proof positive that you civil libertines are still well-protected from The Man.
No. If you ACLU-types truly believe what you're saying, then you're already dead, you just don't know it yet. It's too late for you to sell out.
For those of us who are still neutral on the whole matter, it's not time to sell out. It's time to BUY IN!
So... umm... ...in Soviet Russia, you electrocute uh, typing hamsters?
Whatever turns your crank, buddy, but I still don't get it.
Lucas: We couldn't get Star Wars movies right, we cost Hasbro hundreds of millions of dollars in Episode I-II toys, we made the 2003 Coaster of the Year "Worst MMORPG Evah" award! Ruining things is too easy. We need a challenge. What haven't we ruined yet? What would be almost impossible to fuck up? Oh yeah! Booze!