I was visiting an aviation site a couple of days ago and it said you could start picking up decent used planes at around $30k.
Yup, and by those standards you can pick up a decent used car for around $200.
Granted, the engines on the planes are in much better condition, but the interior is probably not nearly as nice as what you'd find in a $200 used car, nor is the safety equipment.
You can buy a Cessna for the cost of a normal car and build one yourself without dealing with the red tape.
Uh, you can buy yourself a 40 year old Cessna for the cost of a brand new Lexus. For the price of a normal car of the same age you could buy yourself the amount of oil you'll probably put into it over a year.
Think about what you just said. A crash killed somebody, therefore pilots should have a medical exam every few years (and it is worth noting that a fairly large number of conditions and medications disqualify you from flying).
Car crashes routinely kill several people at a time, and yet I don't believe that any state requires periodic physicals, disqualifying anybody from driving who takes some of the common blood pressure medications. If they did half the population wouldn't be able to drive.
I think there is a balance, and it probably involves more strict regulations on driving and less strict regulation on flying.
It seems that you've made the mistake of thinking that education is about getting a job. It isn't.
Yeah, I'm sure that Americans are borrowing $80k in the hopes of being enriched without any care to whether they get a job. If so, then quite a few appear to be successful...
The purpose of school isn't to differentiate between who are the elite and who are the median, but whether to certify that you learned whatever it was they were supposed to be learning.
The only reason employers look at grades is to judge who is elite and who are the median.
When you get 400 applicants for a job, chances are that 350 of them can do the job. The employer wants the best person for the job, in the hopes that they will do the job better than whoever their competitor hires and give them an advantage.
Saying that colleges shouldn't give out grades is like saying that amazon shouldn't post prices on their website. Instead you should tell them how much you have in their bank account and what you want, and they'll tell you whether you can afford it. If you can, its yours and they just deduct what they feel it is worth. After all, the exact price doesn't matter, only whether you can afford it.
Well, I'm sure one of the usual defense contractors built all the stuff the NSA is using in the first place, so having one build and run it someplace else doesn't seem like a problem. It just doesn't really seem like a solution either. How does moving around the lines on the org chart fix this issue?
Thanks for the link. One of Charles Stross's books also touches on space combat at relativistic distances, though is is not really the main theme of the book. I was surprised about how much like submarine warfare it actually is, but that is because the situations are similar - as in the scale of submarine warfare space is free of horizons and detection ranges are very long compared to maneuver speed. The analogy breaks down with speed-of-light weapons, because submarines do not have weapons that travel at the speed of sound in water.
Sure, VLANing the payment kiosks seems to make a lot of sense to me. However, the HVAC will almost certainly be on a general-purpose network unless you segregate just about every system in a corporation onto its own network. No large company I'm aware of operates that way.
Honestly, though, the only thing that seems stupid in this whole scenario is that the payment machines have access to a customer's authentication credentials in the first place, and that for that matter the authentication credentials are printed in plain text on the front of the card for the whole world to see. There is no reason the card can't contain a chip housing a private key that would make it unnecessary to protect any of the downstream transmissions.
one kilogram of gold that would literally fit in your pocket is worth upwards of $40,000 at current market price..my point is that the most important thing for the criminals is actually getting away with the crime, not getting the highest value possible for the money
And where are they going to get a kilogram of gold? Do you walk up to the local gold bar merchant and hand them a briefcase full of counterfeit bills and hope that they won't check them carefully? There can't be that many of these merchants out there either, so once your bills start hitting the bank the Feds will know where they are coming from and will track you down, with lots of help from the gold bar merchants that you ripped off. Plus, $40k is only 400x $100 bills - I doubt they smuggled and assembled a $1M press to print $40k in currency.
My point was that spending counterfeit money at this scale isn't easy. You can't just walk into the bank with $100M in $100 bills and tell them that you'd like to trade them for new ones.
Well, not allowing the database to be used for positive uses has no bearing on the ability to use it for corrupt purposes. The only way you're going to block that is to not have a database at all. That creates a lot of other problems, however (lack of continuity of care, etc).
If the database exists, then it can be accessed by those who aren't concerned with following the law. The only thing the law can really do is prevent society from benefitting from the database.
I would not allow citizens to opt-out of data mining, and they would not need to opt in either. How is it ethical to tell somebody who dies from a disease that they might have been cured if you hadn't allowed somebody to keep their data private, even though sharing it wouldn't have harmed them in any way?
If I were in charge I would also not require consent for organ donations after death, nor would I allow individuals to object to such donations. Their ownership rights ceased with their last breath.
Virtually anything you might buy or sell derives at least some of its value from faith...When something happens to shake that faith, the value drops.
I won't disagree with anything you said, but value also derives from usefulness. A working hammer is more valuable than a broken hammer, and while there is some element of faith in believing that it will still work on the next strike, it isn't much of a leap.
There aren't a lot of currency exchanges that convert bitcoins to traditional currency. If one of them closes up, then bitcoin has less utility, because I can do less with it.
If gas stations stopped selling non-diesel fuel then you'd see the value of non-diesel cars drop significantly, even though nothing about the cars themselves changed. They would have far less utility if they couldn't be driven in a practical way.
Now, usefulness and faith also interplay, because there is a question as to whether another entity could/would replace mtgox. The fact that one exchange handles such a large percentage of bitcoin-to-usd/etc transactions suggests that this is not something that is easy to replace (mostly due to legal reasons). That creates a general fear that bitcoins could lose a lot more of their utility, because right now it is hard to buy anything directly using bitcoins.
The gold fetishist believe gold has value, no matter what. It doesn't. Examples are for instance the holocaust, people ended up selling small fortunes of gold just to survive or even just to eat.
Why were people willing to trade gold for food, but not, say, rocks for food?
Obviously because it is easier to go out in your back yard and pick up a rock than to grow some more food and give it to somebody in exchange for a rock.
However, if food were scarce people might not be so willing to trade gold for it, but they might be willing to trade for some other scarce commodity for it (like ammunition). God doesn't actually have much intrinsic value - it is just a useful currency because it is rare. Sure, you can make microchips using it, but such applications require very little material, and microchips themselves only have value in an industrial society.
You can't opt out, you must participate if you want to use the NHS. You can opt out of the data being shared with other doctors, but not the police.
Oh, I understand that. I'm just saying that this will give people incentive to not receive care from the NHS, or to conceal things from their doctors, or to bribe their doctors to provide advice without updating the database, etc. All of these things degrade the quality of both individual and public health (do you want people with infectious diseases walking around untreated?).
Unless you have successive reflective layers stacked, or rotating missile, or opaque fluid ejection from surface when laser radiation is detected, etc., etc.
I'm not sure it is really possible to stack reflective layers in a way that keeps them reflective when the laser ablates through the previous layer. You'd probably have to space them apart so that the heat from the laser blasting through doesn't destroy the next layer before even reaching it, and I don't really see that being very practical in a cone that has to travel at mach 10.
Rotating missiles is a well-known defense, and no doubt a laser system would not be deployed unless it could handle this. A military laser would probably be pulsed for only a very short duration - if the laser is designed to destroy the missile in a few nanoseconds then rotation really isn't a factor. The same applies to any kind of active defense - there would be little time for a fluid to be ejected if the laser acts very quickly. A laser weapon that doesn't act quickly would probably be ineffective simply due to the inability to maintain focus on a single spot on anything at long range, let alone a hypersonic missile.
Hey, I'm not saying that shooting down missiles using lasers is easy. I'm just saying that if somebody works it out then I don't see hypersonic missiles providing much of an improved attack against them. Now, a projectile that approaches a target at relativistic velocity would be another matter, as would be another laser weapon.
The issue is simple. An outsider needs limited access. You can do that without complex ACLs on everything. Outside of computing it's managed pretty damn well with door keys that give differing amounts of access so why should we think we are special just because we work with computer networks?
The door key analogy is actually a good one. The HVAC contractor was likely given a userid/password with access to stuff like email and the HVAC system. The network itself is open so they can send packets anywhere on the network. They didn't use their key to hack into credit card processing devices - they no doubt exploited a flaw in their software.
So, this is analogous to being issued a building key and an office key. You use your building key to get into the building on a weekend, then you walk to somebody else's office and pick the lock on their door.
If you want to do what most security experts would like to see done with ACLs on a computer network, then you stick a lock on every phone, door, filing cabinet, water cooler, microwave, and cafeteria. You put locks on the chairs in the cafeteria so that you can't use a chair without removing the chain holding it under the table. The vending machines have locks too. If you call up somebody on the phone you have to authenticate with them using a shared secret before they'll even tell you their name, let alone help you. If you walk up to a secretary you present your ID and let her check against the authorized list before he provides a service to you. Also, at every intersection in every hallway you install doors and key each one individually. Employees walk around with huge rings full of hundreds of keys.
If you did this the guy who wants to break into somebody else's office over the weekend would have a hard time indeed. They might need to break through 14 doors just to get to the office, with a chance of detection at each one. Once inside the office he would need to break open locks on drawers, and even the pens would be chained to the desk. Even still, a determined attacker might still get past it if there isn't an army of guards actively patrolling the building.
That is the problem with ACLs and controlling network access. Sure, you can VLAN every port and only route packets from it to devices that it is supposed to talk to, but it is a nightmare to maintain. So, most companies tend to be much looser on security. An HVAC account probably couldn't log into the most critical resources, but they could almost certainly send packets to the servers controlling them and thus attack them.
I do think that VLANing the credit card readers and cash registers would still make sense. It isn't like these are general-access resources on the network.
You underestimate your opponents. Iran and China both have subs and stealth drones.
War with China is extremely unlikely. Of course you need the weaponry to deter such a war on both sides, but neither the US nor China have any desire to get into a shooting war with each other.
Iranian subs are very limited in capability, though in the confined waters of the gulf itself they could be dangerous. They have low endurance so I imagine that destroying them in port would be a priority, and it seems likely that the US would try to tail any as they leave port during peacetime. If I were planning a war with Iran I'd probably avoid placing any hard-to-replace assets in the Gulf at the start of the war as they would be too vulnerable. Once the coast is reasonably under control they could be moved in.
Stealth drones aren't stealthy if they are using radar, and if they aren't it is very hard to find ships with them (they could detect radar emitters, but these probably won't be ships of value). Nobody really knows what the US ability to detect them is, either.
China has military satellites and Iran probably will too in the next decade. Total war where all enemy satellites are shot down is an unlikely scenario, and beside which by the time you start firing missiles at the satellites you will already have them coming at your ships.
Again, war with China is very unlikely - the real purpose of most US armaments is to fight the wars the US usually fights, which is against small dictators who managed to buy some toys. If one of those toys is a fancy anti-ship missile the current state of the art in missile defenses would probably be helpful.
The kind of scenario you're talking about is a surprise war - a situation where the US did not expect to end up in a war and thus its forces start out vulnerable to attack. In the first volley of such a war I would expect many US ships to be lost. However, you're now talking about a Pearl Harbor like situation and that didn't really work out too well for the Japanese. Unless the attacker can actually neutralize the US ability to resupply (which probably requires strikes deep into US territory and likely occupation as well) the US is going to use whatever assets it has left to hold the enemy at bay and then resupply under wartime mobilization.
Psychologically I doubt the US population (which isn't accustomed to losing wars) is likely to concede defeat until the war duration hits a decade and the cost is measured in trillions of dollars and millions of lives. That really isn't a great scenario for whoever attacked the US win-or-lose.
Satellites really only have their privileged status of being allowed to spy without repercussions because the world has been at peace for the last 50 years. If Germany launched Sputnik in 1945 I doubt anybody would have just sat and watched it circle the Earth. After any serious war between any of the major powers I doubt any orbit would be commercially usable for a century due to debris. For military use I could see suborbital reconnaissance missions, or placing relatively cheap satellites into orbit knowing that they'll only last a few weeks.
But this is again all the fantasy scenario where either the US or China decides that it makes sense to commit economic suicide and start a war that results in trillions of dollars in losses and probably kills 10-20% of their population, or which further escalates into nuclear war and kills off just about everybody everywhere.
information is to prevent bad things from happening. So what happens when a bad thing happens and the police fail to prevent it, even though they have information that clearly indicates something bad is about to happen? I wonder if civil lawsuits against the police (and awards to plaintiffs) will increase.
Yeah, good luck with that. At least in the US I don't think the police actually have any legal "duty" to stop any particular crime (in the legal liability sense of the word). If you get mugged because the cops are busy tasering some old geezer who didn't show proper respect that's too bad for you.
In what possible scenario would the police need health records?
Since nobody has suggested it, here is the hypothetical somewhat-legitimate use of this access (though I do not think it should be allowed all the same).
Health records can be potentially useful in identifying suspects. Suppose a witness notices a distinctive scar on a suspect. A consulting doctor could decide that the scar is likely the result of a particular surgical procedure and a query of the NHS records might provide a fairly short list of everybody who had this procedure performed. Additional data could be used to filter the list (geographic location, height, gender, hair color, etc). If you get it down to just a few individuals you can check alibis, collect DNA, and so on and end up with a very likely suspect.
Another "legitimate" use would be identifying individuals with narcotic prescribing patterns that seems suspicious.
I'm sure it would be abused fairly often (I'm defining abuse as use for a purpose other than detecting somebody violating laws that are on the books). However, I really consider this beside the point. I'm not really a fan of use of medical data for the detection of crime in general. I'd be fine for using it to identify victims, as doing so helps their families and perhaps helps them to seek justice, which is an indirect benefit to the individual whose data is accessed (and if the victim is alive but unable to identify themselves it could even provide direct medical benefit to them).
I think the key is that if you're going to use individual medical data without consent you need to do so in a way that ensures that it only works out for their genuine benefit, or is at least neutral to every individual and provides a general public benefit. The problem is that where crime is concerned the data is going to be used in a way that is not in the interest of whoever is going to get charged with the crime (whether they are innocent or not).
The fun part being that once your data is on this access-for-all database it isn't yours anymore and thus you have no say in how it is doled out to all and sundry. There can't be a privacy violation if the new data owner (whichever dolt is Secretary of State for health at the time) allows it.
Honestly, I'm fine with SOME change in the traditional doctor/patient relationship. For example, I think it is fine to be able to mine the database in aggregate for information that could be used to improve public health. I'd even be fine with mining the database to find individuals and contacting them to request their consent to participate in studies that would improve public health (and possibly their own).
However, the theme here is that this is about using the data in a way that generally protects the individual interest and which provides a general benefit to everybody, and perhaps even a specific benefit to the individual whose data is accessed.
All of this would be controlled as well - queries of data would be a part of a study and would be reviewed before they could be run to ensure that data being extracted is appropriately de-personalized. If the intent is to contact individuals then the investigators would provide the criteria, and perhaps evaluate a data set which has been blinded (map identifiers to a study-specific set for which the government holds the relationship table). Then the investigator would provide the list of blinded IDs to contact, and the government would handle communications, perhaps directly or through the local doctor. Again everything would be controlled like any other clinical trial in terms of review of consent forms, proper disclosure, etc.
Police access to this data is of course outrageous. This gives individuals incentive to not participate which has impact to both their personal health and public health.
Agree that a hypersonic missile would work against a fixed target.
Unless, of course, you made sure that you could see any hypersonic missile coming (they're not stealth) long before it got near your fixed target. Then you could throw countermeasures in its path.
I believe the new development is in low-altitude hypersonic missiles. (Otherwise ICBMs have been hypersonic since the 50s.) Detecting a low-altitude hypersonic missile is a challenge due to terrain masking, though it certainly is possible if you have networked sensors. Low-altitude supersonic missiles are hard enough to detect and hit.
Of course, if the trajectory is low you might be able to defeat the missile with a fence/net of some kind (think torpedo net). A hypersonic missile can't really do a pop-up without losing all its speed (indeed, it would need substantial airbrakes just to dump the speed in the first place).
Virtually all the drugs on the market had their clinical trials paid for by pharma companies. For each one there were many more that had an equal level of spending but were demonstrated to be unsafe and thus never made it onto the market.
It is true that the initial mechanisms and sometimes even the lead molecules are discovered elsewhere, but there are thousands of these discovered every year and most of them will do nothing good for your health, It takes billions of dollars in trials to figure out which ones are which.
I'm all for having the government fund that activity and own the patents on the drugs so that they can be freely licensed. I doubt it will make drugs much cheaper, but it will change who actually pays for them.
For the most part the online pills are as genuine as the stuff on thepiratebay. Sure, you can get burned either way, but it usually works (granted, being burned by counterfeit drugs is a much more serious problem).
The issue is that just as with thepiratebay somebody needs to actually pay to make the drugs. I'm all for that being the NIH or whatever, but right now very little is spent on drug clinical trials by anybody other than pharma companies. We need to change that if we really want to have a different business model. The thing is, if we do change that then there is no need to get rid of patents or whatever, because the patents will all be owned by the government anyway and it can license them out freely.
If you only have two seconds to fire in order to score a hit, the missile only has two seconds to maneuver towards you in order to score a hit. I can't see how a sea-skimming hypersonic missile could hit a ship unless its position at time of impact were known with high accuracy.
An aircraft carrier is a rather larger target than a missile.
Sure, but its position might only be known within a few miles, so if the missile is blasting along at 10 feet up at Mach 10 it can only hit the carrier if it is within a few hundred yards of its path most likely.
Hypersonic missiles are designed to destroy targets within minutes of detecting their position. Detection can be via satellite or done or submarine etc. You need to get a good fix but then you can get the missile there so quickly that the target doesn't have time to move very far.
The problem with this is that you need to be relatively close to accomplish this. Few nations can field submarines at all, and the Navy is unlikely to allow either drones or subs to get close enough to a carrier/etc to get an accurate fix.
Satellites are a bigger problem, but only because by convention we allow them a lot of freedom of navigation. In an actual war any satellite belonging to an enemy nation would be shot down.
With conventional missiles you can at least fire somewhat blindly on inferred positions (you see fighters attacking from some direction, you can guess there is a carrier somewhere out there).
Don't get me wrong - I think hypersonic missiles are real threat. It just don't think they're the ultimate weapon some think they are.
Slashdot Mirror
I was visiting an aviation site a couple of days ago and it said you could start picking up decent used planes at around $30k.
Yup, and by those standards you can pick up a decent used car for around $200.
Granted, the engines on the planes are in much better condition, but the interior is probably not nearly as nice as what you'd find in a $200 used car, nor is the safety equipment.
You can buy a Cessna for the cost of a normal car and build one yourself without dealing with the red tape.
Uh, you can buy yourself a 40 year old Cessna for the cost of a brand new Lexus. For the price of a normal car of the same age you could buy yourself the amount of oil you'll probably put into it over a year.
Think about what you just said. A crash killed somebody, therefore pilots should have a medical exam every few years (and it is worth noting that a fairly large number of conditions and medications disqualify you from flying).
Car crashes routinely kill several people at a time, and yet I don't believe that any state requires periodic physicals, disqualifying anybody from driving who takes some of the common blood pressure medications. If they did half the population wouldn't be able to drive.
I think there is a balance, and it probably involves more strict regulations on driving and less strict regulation on flying.
It seems that you've made the mistake of thinking that education is about getting a job. It isn't.
Yeah, I'm sure that Americans are borrowing $80k in the hopes of being enriched without any care to whether they get a job. If so, then quite a few appear to be successful...
The purpose of school isn't to differentiate between who are the elite and who are the median, but whether to certify that you learned whatever it was they were supposed to be learning.
The only reason employers look at grades is to judge who is elite and who are the median.
When you get 400 applicants for a job, chances are that 350 of them can do the job. The employer wants the best person for the job, in the hopes that they will do the job better than whoever their competitor hires and give them an advantage.
Saying that colleges shouldn't give out grades is like saying that amazon shouldn't post prices on their website. Instead you should tell them how much you have in their bank account and what you want, and they'll tell you whether you can afford it. If you can, its yours and they just deduct what they feel it is worth. After all, the exact price doesn't matter, only whether you can afford it.
Well, I'm sure one of the usual defense contractors built all the stuff the NSA is using in the first place, so having one build and run it someplace else doesn't seem like a problem. It just doesn't really seem like a solution either. How does moving around the lines on the org chart fix this issue?
Thanks for the link. One of Charles Stross's books also touches on space combat at relativistic distances, though is is not really the main theme of the book. I was surprised about how much like submarine warfare it actually is, but that is because the situations are similar - as in the scale of submarine warfare space is free of horizons and detection ranges are very long compared to maneuver speed. The analogy breaks down with speed-of-light weapons, because submarines do not have weapons that travel at the speed of sound in water.
Sure, VLANing the payment kiosks seems to make a lot of sense to me. However, the HVAC will almost certainly be on a general-purpose network unless you segregate just about every system in a corporation onto its own network. No large company I'm aware of operates that way.
Honestly, though, the only thing that seems stupid in this whole scenario is that the payment machines have access to a customer's authentication credentials in the first place, and that for that matter the authentication credentials are printed in plain text on the front of the card for the whole world to see. There is no reason the card can't contain a chip housing a private key that would make it unnecessary to protect any of the downstream transmissions.
one kilogram of gold that would literally fit in your pocket is worth upwards of $40,000 at current market price..my point is that the most important thing for the criminals is actually getting away with the crime, not getting the highest value possible for the money
And where are they going to get a kilogram of gold? Do you walk up to the local gold bar merchant and hand them a briefcase full of counterfeit bills and hope that they won't check them carefully? There can't be that many of these merchants out there either, so once your bills start hitting the bank the Feds will know where they are coming from and will track you down, with lots of help from the gold bar merchants that you ripped off. Plus, $40k is only 400x $100 bills - I doubt they smuggled and assembled a $1M press to print $40k in currency.
My point was that spending counterfeit money at this scale isn't easy. You can't just walk into the bank with $100M in $100 bills and tell them that you'd like to trade them for new ones.
Well, not allowing the database to be used for positive uses has no bearing on the ability to use it for corrupt purposes. The only way you're going to block that is to not have a database at all. That creates a lot of other problems, however (lack of continuity of care, etc).
If the database exists, then it can be accessed by those who aren't concerned with following the law. The only thing the law can really do is prevent society from benefitting from the database.
I would not allow citizens to opt-out of data mining, and they would not need to opt in either. How is it ethical to tell somebody who dies from a disease that they might have been cured if you hadn't allowed somebody to keep their data private, even though sharing it wouldn't have harmed them in any way?
If I were in charge I would also not require consent for organ donations after death, nor would I allow individuals to object to such donations. Their ownership rights ceased with their last breath.
Android has been doing this for eons. Why do you think they were snooping for isids when they did all the street view passes?
Virtually anything you might buy or sell derives at least some of its value from faith...When something happens to shake that faith, the value drops.
I won't disagree with anything you said, but value also derives from usefulness. A working hammer is more valuable than a broken hammer, and while there is some element of faith in believing that it will still work on the next strike, it isn't much of a leap.
There aren't a lot of currency exchanges that convert bitcoins to traditional currency. If one of them closes up, then bitcoin has less utility, because I can do less with it.
If gas stations stopped selling non-diesel fuel then you'd see the value of non-diesel cars drop significantly, even though nothing about the cars themselves changed. They would have far less utility if they couldn't be driven in a practical way.
Now, usefulness and faith also interplay, because there is a question as to whether another entity could/would replace mtgox. The fact that one exchange handles such a large percentage of bitcoin-to-usd/etc transactions suggests that this is not something that is easy to replace (mostly due to legal reasons). That creates a general fear that bitcoins could lose a lot more of their utility, because right now it is hard to buy anything directly using bitcoins.
The gold fetishist believe gold has value, no matter what. It doesn't. Examples are for instance the holocaust, people ended up selling small fortunes of gold just to survive or even just to eat.
Why were people willing to trade gold for food, but not, say, rocks for food?
Obviously because it is easier to go out in your back yard and pick up a rock than to grow some more food and give it to somebody in exchange for a rock.
However, if food were scarce people might not be so willing to trade gold for it, but they might be willing to trade for some other scarce commodity for it (like ammunition). God doesn't actually have much intrinsic value - it is just a useful currency because it is rare. Sure, you can make microchips using it, but such applications require very little material, and microchips themselves only have value in an industrial society.
You can't opt out, you must participate if you want to use the NHS. You can opt out of the data being shared with other doctors, but not the police.
Oh, I understand that. I'm just saying that this will give people incentive to not receive care from the NHS, or to conceal things from their doctors, or to bribe their doctors to provide advice without updating the database, etc. All of these things degrade the quality of both individual and public health (do you want people with infectious diseases walking around untreated?).
Unless you have successive reflective layers stacked, or rotating missile, or opaque fluid ejection from surface when laser radiation is detected, etc., etc.
I'm not sure it is really possible to stack reflective layers in a way that keeps them reflective when the laser ablates through the previous layer. You'd probably have to space them apart so that the heat from the laser blasting through doesn't destroy the next layer before even reaching it, and I don't really see that being very practical in a cone that has to travel at mach 10.
Rotating missiles is a well-known defense, and no doubt a laser system would not be deployed unless it could handle this. A military laser would probably be pulsed for only a very short duration - if the laser is designed to destroy the missile in a few nanoseconds then rotation really isn't a factor. The same applies to any kind of active defense - there would be little time for a fluid to be ejected if the laser acts very quickly. A laser weapon that doesn't act quickly would probably be ineffective simply due to the inability to maintain focus on a single spot on anything at long range, let alone a hypersonic missile.
Hey, I'm not saying that shooting down missiles using lasers is easy. I'm just saying that if somebody works it out then I don't see hypersonic missiles providing much of an improved attack against them. Now, a projectile that approaches a target at relativistic velocity would be another matter, as would be another laser weapon.
The issue is simple. An outsider needs limited access. You can do that without complex ACLs on everything.
Outside of computing it's managed pretty damn well with door keys that give differing amounts of access so why should we think we are special just because we work with computer networks?
The door key analogy is actually a good one. The HVAC contractor was likely given a userid/password with access to stuff like email and the HVAC system. The network itself is open so they can send packets anywhere on the network. They didn't use their key to hack into credit card processing devices - they no doubt exploited a flaw in their software.
So, this is analogous to being issued a building key and an office key. You use your building key to get into the building on a weekend, then you walk to somebody else's office and pick the lock on their door.
If you want to do what most security experts would like to see done with ACLs on a computer network, then you stick a lock on every phone, door, filing cabinet, water cooler, microwave, and cafeteria. You put locks on the chairs in the cafeteria so that you can't use a chair without removing the chain holding it under the table. The vending machines have locks too. If you call up somebody on the phone you have to authenticate with them using a shared secret before they'll even tell you their name, let alone help you. If you walk up to a secretary you present your ID and let her check against the authorized list before he provides a service to you. Also, at every intersection in every hallway you install doors and key each one individually. Employees walk around with huge rings full of hundreds of keys.
If you did this the guy who wants to break into somebody else's office over the weekend would have a hard time indeed. They might need to break through 14 doors just to get to the office, with a chance of detection at each one. Once inside the office he would need to break open locks on drawers, and even the pens would be chained to the desk. Even still, a determined attacker might still get past it if there isn't an army of guards actively patrolling the building.
That is the problem with ACLs and controlling network access. Sure, you can VLAN every port and only route packets from it to devices that it is supposed to talk to, but it is a nightmare to maintain. So, most companies tend to be much looser on security. An HVAC account probably couldn't log into the most critical resources, but they could almost certainly send packets to the servers controlling them and thus attack them.
I do think that VLANing the credit card readers and cash registers would still make sense. It isn't like these are general-access resources on the network.
You underestimate your opponents. Iran and China both have subs and stealth drones.
War with China is extremely unlikely. Of course you need the weaponry to deter such a war on both sides, but neither the US nor China have any desire to get into a shooting war with each other.
Iranian subs are very limited in capability, though in the confined waters of the gulf itself they could be dangerous. They have low endurance so I imagine that destroying them in port would be a priority, and it seems likely that the US would try to tail any as they leave port during peacetime. If I were planning a war with Iran I'd probably avoid placing any hard-to-replace assets in the Gulf at the start of the war as they would be too vulnerable. Once the coast is reasonably under control they could be moved in.
Stealth drones aren't stealthy if they are using radar, and if they aren't it is very hard to find ships with them (they could detect radar emitters, but these probably won't be ships of value). Nobody really knows what the US ability to detect them is, either.
China has military satellites and Iran probably will too in the next decade. Total war where all enemy satellites are shot down is an unlikely scenario, and beside which by the time you start firing missiles at the satellites you will already have them coming at your ships.
Again, war with China is very unlikely - the real purpose of most US armaments is to fight the wars the US usually fights, which is against small dictators who managed to buy some toys. If one of those toys is a fancy anti-ship missile the current state of the art in missile defenses would probably be helpful.
The kind of scenario you're talking about is a surprise war - a situation where the US did not expect to end up in a war and thus its forces start out vulnerable to attack. In the first volley of such a war I would expect many US ships to be lost. However, you're now talking about a Pearl Harbor like situation and that didn't really work out too well for the Japanese. Unless the attacker can actually neutralize the US ability to resupply (which probably requires strikes deep into US territory and likely occupation as well) the US is going to use whatever assets it has left to hold the enemy at bay and then resupply under wartime mobilization.
Psychologically I doubt the US population (which isn't accustomed to losing wars) is likely to concede defeat until the war duration hits a decade and the cost is measured in trillions of dollars and millions of lives. That really isn't a great scenario for whoever attacked the US win-or-lose.
Satellites really only have their privileged status of being allowed to spy without repercussions because the world has been at peace for the last 50 years. If Germany launched Sputnik in 1945 I doubt anybody would have just sat and watched it circle the Earth. After any serious war between any of the major powers I doubt any orbit would be commercially usable for a century due to debris. For military use I could see suborbital reconnaissance missions, or placing relatively cheap satellites into orbit knowing that they'll only last a few weeks.
But this is again all the fantasy scenario where either the US or China decides that it makes sense to commit economic suicide and start a war that results in trillions of dollars in losses and probably kills 10-20% of their population, or which further escalates into nuclear war and kills off just about everybody everywhere.
information is to prevent bad things from happening. So what happens when a bad thing happens and the police fail to prevent it, even though they have information that clearly indicates something bad is about to happen? I wonder if civil lawsuits against the police (and awards to plaintiffs) will increase.
Yeah, good luck with that. At least in the US I don't think the police actually have any legal "duty" to stop any particular crime (in the legal liability sense of the word). If you get mugged because the cops are busy tasering some old geezer who didn't show proper respect that's too bad for you.
In what possible scenario would the police need health records?
Since nobody has suggested it, here is the hypothetical somewhat-legitimate use of this access (though I do not think it should be allowed all the same).
Health records can be potentially useful in identifying suspects. Suppose a witness notices a distinctive scar on a suspect. A consulting doctor could decide that the scar is likely the result of a particular surgical procedure and a query of the NHS records might provide a fairly short list of everybody who had this procedure performed. Additional data could be used to filter the list (geographic location, height, gender, hair color, etc). If you get it down to just a few individuals you can check alibis, collect DNA, and so on and end up with a very likely suspect.
Another "legitimate" use would be identifying individuals with narcotic prescribing patterns that seems suspicious.
I'm sure it would be abused fairly often (I'm defining abuse as use for a purpose other than detecting somebody violating laws that are on the books). However, I really consider this beside the point. I'm not really a fan of use of medical data for the detection of crime in general. I'd be fine for using it to identify victims, as doing so helps their families and perhaps helps them to seek justice, which is an indirect benefit to the individual whose data is accessed (and if the victim is alive but unable to identify themselves it could even provide direct medical benefit to them).
I think the key is that if you're going to use individual medical data without consent you need to do so in a way that ensures that it only works out for their genuine benefit, or is at least neutral to every individual and provides a general public benefit. The problem is that where crime is concerned the data is going to be used in a way that is not in the interest of whoever is going to get charged with the crime (whether they are innocent or not).
The fun part being that once your data is on this access-for-all database it isn't yours anymore and thus you have no say in how it is doled out to all and sundry. There can't be a privacy violation if the new data owner (whichever dolt is Secretary of State for health at the time) allows it.
Honestly, I'm fine with SOME change in the traditional doctor/patient relationship. For example, I think it is fine to be able to mine the database in aggregate for information that could be used to improve public health. I'd even be fine with mining the database to find individuals and contacting them to request their consent to participate in studies that would improve public health (and possibly their own).
However, the theme here is that this is about using the data in a way that generally protects the individual interest and which provides a general benefit to everybody, and perhaps even a specific benefit to the individual whose data is accessed.
All of this would be controlled as well - queries of data would be a part of a study and would be reviewed before they could be run to ensure that data being extracted is appropriately de-personalized. If the intent is to contact individuals then the investigators would provide the criteria, and perhaps evaluate a data set which has been blinded (map identifiers to a study-specific set for which the government holds the relationship table). Then the investigator would provide the list of blinded IDs to contact, and the government would handle communications, perhaps directly or through the local doctor. Again everything would be controlled like any other clinical trial in terms of review of consent forms, proper disclosure, etc.
Police access to this data is of course outrageous. This gives individuals incentive to not participate which has impact to both their personal health and public health.
Unless, of course, you made sure that you could see any hypersonic missile coming (they're not stealth) long before it got near your fixed target. Then you could throw countermeasures in its path.
I believe the new development is in low-altitude hypersonic missiles. (Otherwise ICBMs have been hypersonic since the 50s.) Detecting a low-altitude hypersonic missile is a challenge due to terrain masking, though it certainly is possible if you have networked sensors. Low-altitude supersonic missiles are hard enough to detect and hit.
Of course, if the trajectory is low you might be able to defeat the missile with a fence/net of some kind (think torpedo net). A hypersonic missile can't really do a pop-up without losing all its speed (indeed, it would need substantial airbrakes just to dump the speed in the first place).
Virtually all the drugs on the market had their clinical trials paid for by pharma companies. For each one there were many more that had an equal level of spending but were demonstrated to be unsafe and thus never made it onto the market.
It is true that the initial mechanisms and sometimes even the lead molecules are discovered elsewhere, but there are thousands of these discovered every year and most of them will do nothing good for your health, It takes billions of dollars in trials to figure out which ones are which.
I'm all for having the government fund that activity and own the patents on the drugs so that they can be freely licensed. I doubt it will make drugs much cheaper, but it will change who actually pays for them.
For the most part the online pills are as genuine as the stuff on thepiratebay. Sure, you can get burned either way, but it usually works (granted, being burned by counterfeit drugs is a much more serious problem).
The issue is that just as with thepiratebay somebody needs to actually pay to make the drugs. I'm all for that being the NIH or whatever, but right now very little is spent on drug clinical trials by anybody other than pharma companies. We need to change that if we really want to have a different business model. The thing is, if we do change that then there is no need to get rid of patents or whatever, because the patents will all be owned by the government anyway and it can license them out freely.
If you only have two seconds to fire in order to score a hit, the missile only has two seconds to maneuver towards you in order to score a hit. I can't see how a sea-skimming hypersonic missile could hit a ship unless its position at time of impact were known with high accuracy.
An aircraft carrier is a rather larger target than a missile.
Sure, but its position might only be known within a few miles, so if the missile is blasting along at 10 feet up at Mach 10 it can only hit the carrier if it is within a few hundred yards of its path most likely.
Hypersonic missiles are designed to destroy targets within minutes of detecting their position. Detection can be via satellite or done or submarine etc. You need to get a good fix but then you can get the missile there so quickly that the target doesn't have time to move very far.
The problem with this is that you need to be relatively close to accomplish this. Few nations can field submarines at all, and the Navy is unlikely to allow either drones or subs to get close enough to a carrier/etc to get an accurate fix.
Satellites are a bigger problem, but only because by convention we allow them a lot of freedom of navigation. In an actual war any satellite belonging to an enemy nation would be shot down.
With conventional missiles you can at least fire somewhat blindly on inferred positions (you see fighters attacking from some direction, you can guess there is a carrier somewhere out there).
Don't get me wrong - I think hypersonic missiles are real threat. It just don't think they're the ultimate weapon some think they are.