That's a great question. After you've paid $20k to your lawyer you might be able to spend a week or two in court hearings so that he can raise it. You might even like the answer you get. Not that it will impress your employer who is upset that you missed work, or your kids who just had their college fund raided.
I know little about the particulars of the individual or this case, but the speed of the US justice system is in itself an injustice. Is his case more important than the others - absolutely not. They should all be heard quickly.
If you're charged with a crime the entire process from end to end should take a few weeks at most, assuming you're given bail. I'd go a step further and simply make it a law that anybody who isn't convicted in this period of time walks. If the government can't do that, then they need to build more courtrooms, or arrest fewer people. Everybody is busy, but being busy is never a valid excuse, as it is almost always under your own control.
The assertion that there are any number of possible decodings only works when you have zero knowledge of expected content, and as such its a tired and juvenile objection.
You might want to avoid getting personal when it is fairly obvious that you don't understand one-time pads.
With a properly-used one-time pad every possible message of the same length has equal probability of being the correct message. So, the decoded message might be "Meet infiltrator on beach bravo at 16:30 zulu." or "Assassinate general living at 1310 Main Street" or "Go to beach bravo for pickup at 11:10 zulu." or anything else you can imagine. There will be trillions of messages that don't make sense in context, and trillions of messages that do make sense in context. Likely it will be far more than trillions - however many valid sentences of that length.
Properly used one-time pads are simply impossible to break. They're also highly impractical, which is why they're rarely used.
I'm not sure if they were used for field agents in WWII. The problem with using them is that your agent would run out of key if too many messages were sent (though I guess you could take a risk and re-use some of it - if two messages were intercepted using the same key then they might be decoded, though if your transmission system is carrier pigeon the risk of that has to be lower). One-time pad systems are not designed to protect against key reuse so you're extremely vulnerable if you do it. Other systems normally involve key re-use and doing so does increase the risk of the code being broken, but only minimally. Re-supplying the agent with new key material would be difficult (you're talking about submarines carrying code books or whatever. One advantage of a one-time pad is that it is very simple to use, even by hand. Strong ciphers generally are fairly difficult to implement by hand.
To use a one-time pad the agent would need a code book as long as all the messages he would ever send or receive. Every time a line was used it would be crossed out, and pages should be destroyed when used up. Whoever is talking to all those agents would need a copy of the book for each one, and would need to follow the same procedure.
Well, the bigger issue for Iron Dome is just the speed of the larger missiles. A Fajr-5 only travels around mach 3, and I'm not sure how fast it is moving at the point of interception (since it is entirely atmospheric it might slow down by then). Larger ballistic missiles are MUCH faster. The Iskander is twice as fast as a Fajr-5, and even an old V2 is 50% faster. SLBMs are 6x faster than a Fajr-5, and ICBMs are about 7x faster (7 km/s).
Sure, the longer-range missiles are above the horizon longer, but your window to hit them in is very short. I can imagine you'd need a pretty big radar to spot them at long range as well.
Agreed. If the militants were to set up a much more sophisticated conventional force Iron Dome probably wouldn't be sufficient, but a conventional force would be easily defeated by the IDF. The militants are limited to highly improvised weapons fired from rapidly deployed launchers. Anything bigger or more coordinated is going to be spotted and targeted.
Though, for something like a rocket a solution similar to CIWS might be possible. That would certainly be cheaper, since the ammunition would just be bullets. CIWS is designed to engage MUCH faster threats, though in its present form it can't really confront multiple threats and is designed to work at short range.
You'd need something that could calculate a decent firing solution and fire off a few rounds, measure their trajectory, correct, and repeat. Ideally it could do that with multiple targets at once (fire a few rounds at one, move, and so on). That would require a VERY accurate mount since it would need to use absolute positioning if it were to cycle between targets. Or you could just put up a wall of lead at one target at a time, but that would mean that it would take several seconds per rocket to shoot them down, and you'd need many guns to handle multiple threats, and of course fire control radar that could track all those bullets.
Probably not practical. Big issues I see is varying wind/etc which could cause difficulty with corrections, and insufficiently accurate mounts to actually aim bullets with that precision at that range.
I do live in a nice area, but the cops rarely investigate things like robbery as long as nobody gets hurt.
They aren't impolite or anything, they just say they'll keep their eye out or something and that is the end of it.
If it were up to me I'd have them do a much better job investigating minor crimes. Go ahead and spend $10k when somebody steals $100 and nail them. If you stop the minor crimes you probably will have a big impact on the major crimes, and if somebody thinks they can get away with stealing $100 pretty soon every house on the block will be missing $100.
Oh, I'm all for rehabilitation and all that as well - not just locking people up. However, the solution to excessive prison populations isn't to stop enforcing the law either. There do need to be social changes, but real crimes with victims need to be prosecuted.
Sure, copper might be routinely recycled by contractors, but it isn't routinely recycled by average people. Contractors won't have any trouble producing ID, and I'm sure the people who deal with them know who they are.
Just pass legislation requiring that scrap yards be registered, that IDs are recorded when somebody trades copper and made traceable to the items purchased, and that items be held for 7 days before being resold or processed.
So, you first fix all the legitimate ones. Then you send cops around dressed as junkies with handfuls of power line and you throw the book at anybody who buys it without ID. Take the easy money out of the system, and you're only left with serious criminals. However, serious criminals probably have better things to do than electrocute themselves breaking into substations.
Maybe, but having hung out with people with a military background, I can vouch that there is a fairly deep-set appreciation for security that is engendered within the armed forces. Now, consider the fact that all Israeli citizens serve in the military - male and female. I think that this has a big cultural impact.
Also, factor in that the whole country is about the size of New Jersey - you're not far from a potential battleground anywhere you go. Every adult probably knows somebody who witnessed an act of terrorism firsthand - they were having incidents almost daily a decade ago. So, you get the under siege mentality as well. Compare US border security with Israeli border security and you'll see a stark contrast - you might as well compare a US state line to the Berlin wall.
The Israelis that I've met over the years don't really strike me as being anti-arabic or anything. In fact, it seems like they try to foster relationships where they can, since every so often they have to go on active duty and when you're patrolling some Palestinian neighborhood it doesn't hurt to be on good terms.
Yup, I went through Israeli airport security once. I was actually concerned I might have been detained. Everybody gets a personal interview. The interviewer was fairly intimidating. The interview wasn't very long, but I got a clear understanding that if it didn't go well it could become VERY long.
Believe it or not I still see applications being developed with reliance on two-digit years.
People say that Y2K was the result of computers not having enough memory to store 4 digits. That might have been true once upon a time for a few systems, but for the most part it is due to laziness. Ugh, can't you shorten that field? And so on...
True, but the fact that so much of this cost is overhead means that the cost to replace a missile is much lower.
You could say that some fighter jet costs $100M to build. However, the bigger picture is that the first fighter that you build probably costs $10B, and every one after that just costs a few million. So, when you decide whether to build a fleet of fighters you can use the $100M figure, but when you decide whether it is worth it to replace a fighter you lost, or boost your forces, then you use the lower figure.
In the software industry these economies are even more pronounced. To sell an extra copy of some DLC costs microcents, but writhing the software in the first place certainly doesn't!
None of that is likely to happen. Shopping malls need to allow random strangers in if they want to sell anything, and need to be built in the middle of densely populated areas to draw crowds. Military outposts do not have the same requirements. Stick one in the middle of an open area outside of a city, and nobody can just run up to the thing to blow it up. The best you could do is some kind of portable artillery (mortars, rockets, cannons) - get close enough to open fire. However, sneaking that stuff into the middle of Israel can't be easy.
That's like asking why the 9/11 hijackers didn't just fire on the world trade center with howitzers. Sure, they might do the job, but do you know how much infrastructure it takes to build, supply, operate, and target one of those things?
Well, cheap is relative. It might be 50x more expensive than the intercepted weapon, but it is cheap compared to an apartment complex or whatever else is down range.
That's just the asymmetry of offense, which is why in addition to shooting down missiles the IDF is busy bombing the Gaza strip.
Yup, I was amused at the depiction of the terminal phase of a warhead in the recent Mission Impossible. If you could snap a picture containing a warhead and anything resembling a city to the naked eye, then that city would be vaporized in the blink of an eye.
If by some miracle the warhead was disabled in time, it wouldn't just smash a few windows and make a splash in the bay - that thing would be like a bomb going off just due to momentum.
You could see a nuclear warhead in the terminal phase in the same way that you can see a shooting star - a streak of light in the upper atmosphere if your vantage is right, and then a flash of light on the horizon if you're close enough to see it.
Would be more interested in details, but I'm surprised that Fratricide is THAT big of a problem.
Consider how fast nuclear warheads are travelling at impact. You're talking about hypersonic velocities - something like mach 10-20. Those things cover HUGE distances in short periods of time. So, even if you just launch missiles a few seconds apart at the same target, I would think that when a warhead detonates the nearby ones would be miles away at least. Nuclear warheads have to be hardened against nuclear detonations, since that was the most obvious interceptor warhead technology of the era in which they were designed. No doubt they can't handle a direct hit, but a detonation miles away probably wouldn't bother them a bit - and their momentum is huge so they're not going to get pushed off course either.
Well there's a right way and a wrong way to go about correcting people.
Hey, we should come up with some way to teach kids this. Maybe we should hire professionals who can teach lessons to them. We could call them "teachers!"
Kids aren't born knowing how to handle social situations - they have to learn. If the teacher feels all offended that a 13-year-old pointed out an error they made, then they should work with them and their parents to explain how to better handle the situation in the future.
However, for the problematic teachers, you're lucky if they even catch on that they're wrong in the first place. I had a science teacher who insisted that her aneroid barometer with a scale running from about 28-32 delivered readings in millibars, since aneroid barometers do not contain mercury. Apparently she gave my brother grief with her insistence that a whale's blowhole had no functional purpose. Books/etc were useless in persuading her.
Then at the graduate level I had a professor who actually had a slight misunderstanding about some theoretical concept in his field, and when I pointed out the flaw and the logical consequences of it, he immediately recognized that there was a problem and adjusted on the fly. No doubt my own communication/social skills had improved in the years that separated these events, but a big part of intelligence is recognizing when you're wrong.
Sounds like they should just hold the pigeon shoot near a power plant or similar area. These generally have NOTAMs forbidding loitering flight nearby post-9/11. Who knows - maybe if you tell the FAA about your shooting you could have a NOTAM for the area overhead as well for the safety of general air traffic.
I'm not a pilot, but I would think that in general loitering over a particular occupied area at anything other than high altitude is frowned upon.
That said, I'm sure if they were high enough they could mount effective surveillance from a manned aircraft, and clearly shooting at those is asking for trouble. At serious altitude firing on an aircraft is a non-trivial problem in any case. A light aircraft today isn't really any easier to kill than a WWI or early WWII fighter, and just look at the kind of flak they used back then.
I'd think that you couldn't shoot at a drone any more than you could shoot at any other object that happened to wander into your property by mistake. I could maybe see it being allowed if the thing was loitering (as this was no doubt doing), but if somebody's RC airplane happens to fly near your house it isn't open season.
You could just call the police or FAA. There are laws against flying aircraft at low altitude.
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That's a great question. After you've paid $20k to your lawyer you might be able to spend a week or two in court hearings so that he can raise it. You might even like the answer you get. Not that it will impress your employer who is upset that you missed work, or your kids who just had their college fund raided.
Justice delayed is justice denied.
I know little about the particulars of the individual or this case, but the speed of the US justice system is in itself an injustice. Is his case more important than the others - absolutely not. They should all be heard quickly.
If you're charged with a crime the entire process from end to end should take a few weeks at most, assuming you're given bail. I'd go a step further and simply make it a law that anybody who isn't convicted in this period of time walks. If the government can't do that, then they need to build more courtrooms, or arrest fewer people. Everybody is busy, but being busy is never a valid excuse, as it is almost always under your own control.
The assertion that there are any number of possible decodings only works when you have zero knowledge of expected content, and as such its a tired and juvenile objection.
You might want to avoid getting personal when it is fairly obvious that you don't understand one-time pads.
With a properly-used one-time pad every possible message of the same length has equal probability of being the correct message. So, the decoded message might be "Meet infiltrator on beach bravo at 16:30 zulu." or "Assassinate general living at 1310 Main Street" or "Go to beach bravo for pickup at 11:10 zulu." or anything else you can imagine. There will be trillions of messages that don't make sense in context, and trillions of messages that do make sense in context. Likely it will be far more than trillions - however many valid sentences of that length.
Properly used one-time pads are simply impossible to break. They're also highly impractical, which is why they're rarely used.
I'm not sure if they were used for field agents in WWII. The problem with using them is that your agent would run out of key if too many messages were sent (though I guess you could take a risk and re-use some of it - if two messages were intercepted using the same key then they might be decoded, though if your transmission system is carrier pigeon the risk of that has to be lower). One-time pad systems are not designed to protect against key reuse so you're extremely vulnerable if you do it. Other systems normally involve key re-use and doing so does increase the risk of the code being broken, but only minimally. Re-supplying the agent with new key material would be difficult (you're talking about submarines carrying code books or whatever. One advantage of a one-time pad is that it is very simple to use, even by hand. Strong ciphers generally are fairly difficult to implement by hand.
To use a one-time pad the agent would need a code book as long as all the messages he would ever send or receive. Every time a line was used it would be crossed out, and pages should be destroyed when used up. Whoever is talking to all those agents would need a copy of the book for each one, and would need to follow the same procedure.
Well, the bigger issue for Iron Dome is just the speed of the larger missiles. A Fajr-5 only travels around mach 3, and I'm not sure how fast it is moving at the point of interception (since it is entirely atmospheric it might slow down by then). Larger ballistic missiles are MUCH faster. The Iskander is twice as fast as a Fajr-5, and even an old V2 is 50% faster. SLBMs are 6x faster than a Fajr-5, and ICBMs are about 7x faster (7 km/s).
Sure, the longer-range missiles are above the horizon longer, but your window to hit them in is very short. I can imagine you'd need a pretty big radar to spot them at long range as well.
Agreed. If the militants were to set up a much more sophisticated conventional force Iron Dome probably wouldn't be sufficient, but a conventional force would be easily defeated by the IDF. The militants are limited to highly improvised weapons fired from rapidly deployed launchers. Anything bigger or more coordinated is going to be spotted and targeted.
Agreed.
Though, for something like a rocket a solution similar to CIWS might be possible. That would certainly be cheaper, since the ammunition would just be bullets. CIWS is designed to engage MUCH faster threats, though in its present form it can't really confront multiple threats and is designed to work at short range.
You'd need something that could calculate a decent firing solution and fire off a few rounds, measure their trajectory, correct, and repeat. Ideally it could do that with multiple targets at once (fire a few rounds at one, move, and so on). That would require a VERY accurate mount since it would need to use absolute positioning if it were to cycle between targets. Or you could just put up a wall of lead at one target at a time, but that would mean that it would take several seconds per rocket to shoot them down, and you'd need many guns to handle multiple threats, and of course fire control radar that could track all those bullets.
Probably not practical. Big issues I see is varying wind/etc which could cause difficulty with corrections, and insufficiently accurate mounts to actually aim bullets with that precision at that range.
I do live in a nice area, but the cops rarely investigate things like robbery as long as nobody gets hurt.
They aren't impolite or anything, they just say they'll keep their eye out or something and that is the end of it.
If it were up to me I'd have them do a much better job investigating minor crimes. Go ahead and spend $10k when somebody steals $100 and nail them. If you stop the minor crimes you probably will have a big impact on the major crimes, and if somebody thinks they can get away with stealing $100 pretty soon every house on the block will be missing $100.
Oh, I'm all for rehabilitation and all that as well - not just locking people up. However, the solution to excessive prison populations isn't to stop enforcing the law either. There do need to be social changes, but real crimes with victims need to be prosecuted.
Heck - they've been fried climbing into substations. What were they going to do - bang on a 30kv bus bar with a sledge hammer?
They're idiots - an electric fence won't stop them. I wouldn't be surprised if they just threw themselves at it looking for weaknesses.
Massachusetts explosions can cause Massachusetts lacerations and Massachusetts severe burns and welts? Who would have thought!?
Sure, copper might be routinely recycled by contractors, but it isn't routinely recycled by average people. Contractors won't have any trouble producing ID, and I'm sure the people who deal with them know who they are.
Just pass legislation requiring that scrap yards be registered, that IDs are recorded when somebody trades copper and made traceable to the items purchased, and that items be held for 7 days before being resold or processed.
So, you first fix all the legitimate ones. Then you send cops around dressed as junkies with handfuls of power line and you throw the book at anybody who buys it without ID. Take the easy money out of the system, and you're only left with serious criminals. However, serious criminals probably have better things to do than electrocute themselves breaking into substations.
That actually is a good description of what I experienced.
Well, then set quotas based on parental income, not race. If the concern is that the poor are being discriminated against, then help the poor...
Maybe, but having hung out with people with a military background, I can vouch that there is a fairly deep-set appreciation for security that is engendered within the armed forces. Now, consider the fact that all Israeli citizens serve in the military - male and female. I think that this has a big cultural impact.
Also, factor in that the whole country is about the size of New Jersey - you're not far from a potential battleground anywhere you go. Every adult probably knows somebody who witnessed an act of terrorism firsthand - they were having incidents almost daily a decade ago. So, you get the under siege mentality as well. Compare US border security with Israeli border security and you'll see a stark contrast - you might as well compare a US state line to the Berlin wall.
The Israelis that I've met over the years don't really strike me as being anti-arabic or anything. In fact, it seems like they try to foster relationships where they can, since every so often they have to go on active duty and when you're patrolling some Palestinian neighborhood it doesn't hurt to be on good terms.
Yup, I went through Israeli airport security once. I was actually concerned I might have been detained. Everybody gets a personal interview. The interviewer was fairly intimidating. The interview wasn't very long, but I got a clear understanding that if it didn't go well it could become VERY long.
Believe it or not I still see applications being developed with reliance on two-digit years.
People say that Y2K was the result of computers not having enough memory to store 4 digits. That might have been true once upon a time for a few systems, but for the most part it is due to laziness. Ugh, can't you shorten that field? And so on...
True, but the fact that so much of this cost is overhead means that the cost to replace a missile is much lower.
You could say that some fighter jet costs $100M to build. However, the bigger picture is that the first fighter that you build probably costs $10B, and every one after that just costs a few million. So, when you decide whether to build a fleet of fighters you can use the $100M figure, but when you decide whether it is worth it to replace a fighter you lost, or boost your forces, then you use the lower figure.
In the software industry these economies are even more pronounced. To sell an extra copy of some DLC costs microcents, but writhing the software in the first place certainly doesn't!
None of that is likely to happen. Shopping malls need to allow random strangers in if they want to sell anything, and need to be built in the middle of densely populated areas to draw crowds. Military outposts do not have the same requirements. Stick one in the middle of an open area outside of a city, and nobody can just run up to the thing to blow it up. The best you could do is some kind of portable artillery (mortars, rockets, cannons) - get close enough to open fire. However, sneaking that stuff into the middle of Israel can't be easy.
That's like asking why the 9/11 hijackers didn't just fire on the world trade center with howitzers. Sure, they might do the job, but do you know how much infrastructure it takes to build, supply, operate, and target one of those things?
Well, cheap is relative. It might be 50x more expensive than the intercepted weapon, but it is cheap compared to an apartment complex or whatever else is down range.
That's just the asymmetry of offense, which is why in addition to shooting down missiles the IDF is busy bombing the Gaza strip.
Yup, I was amused at the depiction of the terminal phase of a warhead in the recent Mission Impossible. If you could snap a picture containing a warhead and anything resembling a city to the naked eye, then that city would be vaporized in the blink of an eye.
If by some miracle the warhead was disabled in time, it wouldn't just smash a few windows and make a splash in the bay - that thing would be like a bomb going off just due to momentum.
You could see a nuclear warhead in the terminal phase in the same way that you can see a shooting star - a streak of light in the upper atmosphere if your vantage is right, and then a flash of light on the horizon if you're close enough to see it.
Would be more interested in details, but I'm surprised that Fratricide is THAT big of a problem.
Consider how fast nuclear warheads are travelling at impact. You're talking about hypersonic velocities - something like mach 10-20. Those things cover HUGE distances in short periods of time. So, even if you just launch missiles a few seconds apart at the same target, I would think that when a warhead detonates the nearby ones would be miles away at least. Nuclear warheads have to be hardened against nuclear detonations, since that was the most obvious interceptor warhead technology of the era in which they were designed. No doubt they can't handle a direct hit, but a detonation miles away probably wouldn't bother them a bit - and their momentum is huge so they're not going to get pushed off course either.
But, if the physics say otherwise, I'm all ears.
Well there's a right way and a wrong way to go about correcting people.
Hey, we should come up with some way to teach kids this. Maybe we should hire professionals who can teach lessons to them. We could call them "teachers!"
Kids aren't born knowing how to handle social situations - they have to learn. If the teacher feels all offended that a 13-year-old pointed out an error they made, then they should work with them and their parents to explain how to better handle the situation in the future.
However, for the problematic teachers, you're lucky if they even catch on that they're wrong in the first place. I had a science teacher who insisted that her aneroid barometer with a scale running from about 28-32 delivered readings in millibars, since aneroid barometers do not contain mercury. Apparently she gave my brother grief with her insistence that a whale's blowhole had no functional purpose. Books/etc were useless in persuading her.
Then at the graduate level I had a professor who actually had a slight misunderstanding about some theoretical concept in his field, and when I pointed out the flaw and the logical consequences of it, he immediately recognized that there was a problem and adjusted on the fly. No doubt my own communication/social skills had improved in the years that separated these events, but a big part of intelligence is recognizing when you're wrong.
Sounds like they should just hold the pigeon shoot near a power plant or similar area. These generally have NOTAMs forbidding loitering flight nearby post-9/11. Who knows - maybe if you tell the FAA about your shooting you could have a NOTAM for the area overhead as well for the safety of general air traffic.
I'm not a pilot, but I would think that in general loitering over a particular occupied area at anything other than high altitude is frowned upon.
That said, I'm sure if they were high enough they could mount effective surveillance from a manned aircraft, and clearly shooting at those is asking for trouble. At serious altitude firing on an aircraft is a non-trivial problem in any case. A light aircraft today isn't really any easier to kill than a WWI or early WWII fighter, and just look at the kind of flak they used back then.
I'd think that you couldn't shoot at a drone any more than you could shoot at any other object that happened to wander into your property by mistake. I could maybe see it being allowed if the thing was loitering (as this was no doubt doing), but if somebody's RC airplane happens to fly near your house it isn't open season.
You could just call the police or FAA. There are laws against flying aircraft at low altitude.