Wow, really? Most people I talk to disagree, or have different views of the future.
Obviously, predicting the future is impossible, however, there's a few basic ideas :
1. It isn't impossible to recreate human intelligence using electronic circuitry, and it'll happen sooner or later. A recent developement is a PhD researcher noticed how the human brain is extremely noisy and neurons are actually fairly flakey and inconsistent, and he built a brain simulator using ASICs that is about 10,000 times more power efficient than current supercomputers. While the human brain has some incredibly complex structures, we can cheat in a lot of ways (our AIs will have MUCH better hardware and cleaner data input for one), and we think nature designed the whole thing completely blind.
2. Once it becomes clear that it IS possible to create AI, the forces pushing humans to develop it would be unstoppable. No law or U.N. resolution could stop the developement : any nation or group that had a working AI would also possess a weapon that would make nukes look like firecrackers. (because a working AI with good hardware would be able to run at around 10 million times the thinking speed of human beings, able to create new tech or weapons or control robots or hack into human programmed computers with ease)
3. Such AIs will need resources. Unless they have technology different from what we can imagine, they'll need to use solid matter in their nanomachines (well, very large machines that are built atom by atom). The energy to power all these state changes will mostly come from the sun. While it's possible that they could kill us to free up the matter in our bodies and biosphere, I have to hope that beings vastly smarter than us will have enough compassion or curiosity to preserve the race of primates that created them, as well as the rest of the biosphere. (the reason we'd be in rotating space habitats is that is a LOT more mass efficient than leaving the earth intact).
You have a point that this might only last for a while. Unless FTL communication is possible, there won't ever be an interstellar empire or network of AI civilizations. Matter here at Sol will always be limited resource, and the AIs might scan our brains and compact us down to thumbnail sized scraps of molecular circuitry or something in order to save on mass. (followed by data compression...no need to keep billions of human personalities up and running when they could sorta almagate us into a virtual museum exhibit of just a few 'everyman' human personalities)
Well...we have flying cars...they are called helicopters. A few of us are wealthy or important enough to actually use them like cars and get chauffeured around in them.
In a similar manner, there might be a way that you could do amateur exploration of Mars. Some day there might be so much robotic hardware already on the planet from cheaper space travel that you'd be able to remotely control some of it as a member of the public or as a kid.
Personally, I think when the Singularity finally happens, whenever that is, our nanotechnology equipped AI overlords will create a digital mapping of mars down to the micrometer level as they are tearing the planet apart for raw materials. You'll be able to explore every last crevice of what (was) mars at your leisure as you live in one of the rotating Hab modules that act as a human reservation.
You know what the solution to this problem is? Send more rovers. Lots more. If we had a spare rover near Spirit, we could probably have it roll over and give Spirit a tow...
I'm no malware writer : but I have to ask...how hard would it be to make self-modifying undetectable code? Essentially you'd have your malware executable, however many bytes of assembled code that do stuff. Then you'd insert various dummy instructions that are randomly chosen but cancel each other out throughout the code. (so you might have an add instruction followed by a subtract instruction, etc). Every time the malware installs itself on a new PC, it randomly creates a new set of dummy instructions.
So the malware would still have a constant codebase that is doing the work, but wouldn't the dummy instructions prevent anti-virus/anti-malware software from being able to "see" the executable? In a similar manner, any registry entries that the malware needs would be randomly chosen character strings. The server address that the malware uses to communicate with would be scrambled via a randomly chosen encryption key as well.
What I'm describing isn't hard at all : a basic project that a junior or senior cs student could easily complete.
If you can afford a laptop computer, and have the time to be doing a little long range hacking via wifi, you probably can afford a $100 antenna that gives you 10-100 times the range of a saucepan.
So, theoretically, you could have a phone on a long cord going to a wall jack in the second floor, and be up in your attic with the phone cord going down into the black floodwater below? And it would still work???!!!
Welcome to the club. People have been doing this since wi fi was first publicly available. There are special antennas available that are much better than improvised ones, as well as special wireless radios that are hacked to give a stronger signal. For a long time, everyone was using WEP for security so that basically anyone with the right equipment also had access.
You've got the wrong idea. If we spend the money on infrastructure/social programs in Afganistan, WE don't benefit.
If we have the American car companies make autos and smash them, we're back to the broken window fallacy.
The idea of spending that same war funding on 'green energy' is more like a solution. While windmills and solar panels and batteries may not be very cost effective, a trillion would buy an awful lot of them. At least in that case we'd have SOMETHING left after spending the money. (thousands of square miles of solar panels, or states covered with wind farms, or a shit-ton of batteries)
Have you actually looked at an X-ray scanner as stuff goes through it? Off the shelf consumer electronics already look like a hand made mess. The terrorists could use a breadboard to create neat looking wiring that would look like a PCB on the X-ray.
I've never tried to use a GPS on a plane, that is true. There might not be enough signal paths through the fuselage to get a GPS fix. Still, it's just a thought : the last time an airliner was blown up with a bomb was the Libyans, wasn't it? And as I recall, the plane wreckage ended up on land. For airplanes lost in the ocean, they sometimes can't even find the flight data recorder.
Thing is, a battery pack of a laptop computer has the same density as an explosive charge on an x-ray. This is why the airport personal sometimes make you open it up and turn it on. There's a trivial way to bypass this security theater.
Anyways, I think it could be done easily. You must think it is hard. You're completely wrong. Google for a kid who demonstrated how easy it was, by smuggling modeling clay and gun parts through airport security.
If you get attacked in Afganistan, those people setting the IEDs are NOT international terrorists. Notice the word "international". They are either locals or people from a neighboring country. They are probably attacking you because you are in their home.
Discussion is pointless. A commercial airliner is extremely fragile, and there are countless ways that a terrorist could destroy one. That isn't the hard part. The good news is, taking over an airliner to use it as a guided missile is now nearly impossible. Even in the extreme case, where a terrorist brought a fully loaded AK-47 to subdue to cabin, and some kind of tool to cut the cockpit door could easily be twarted. (the pilots could invert the plane, or fly it into the ground to prevent it being used as a missile)
Put the batteries and electronics for the detonator in a device where airport security would expect to see batteries and electronics. The obvious is a laptop, cellphone, or camera.
A 10 year old could think of this. It's the kind of thing they do on Instructables or various hacks that are posted right here to slashdot.
A truly foolproof detonator would have a GPS unit inside, so the bomb would only detonate if the plane were over open ocean. (that's what went wrong when the Libyans blew that airliner decades ago). It would also have a remote trigger so that if airport security DID find the bomb, an accomplice in the airport could set it off at the security station, where ironically there are often as many people crowded there as on an actual flight.
And this is just the obvious weakness. On the news they talked about how commercial cargo is carried in the holds of airliners on a routine basis, WITHOUT ANY SECURITY SCREENING AT ALL.
Conclusion? There are very few international terrorists who hate America in the world, and none of them are competent engineers or commandos. If there were, they would be committing major attacks on a regular basis that would neatly bypass all our security.
100% incorrect. Look at the "broken window fallacy". All that trillion dollars (I am talking about Iraq, Afganistan, Homeland Security, and other waste...more than a trillion, actually) is pissed down the drain. See, the same money could have been used to create new wealth instead of being expended. Iraq and Afganistan expend men, ammunition, vehicles, and so forth. Those same people could have been working in the U.S. and have created a trillion dollars worth of wealth, such as a trillion worth of consumer goods or nuclear reactors or wind and solar panels and so forth. And we'd still HAVE that wealth.
Instead, to illustrate : we are bringing shrink wrapped helicopters over to Iraq and Afganistan that are fresh from the factory. Those helicopters will never be brought home. We are building special armored vehicles that consume too much gas and are too slow to ever be used again. And so forth. Every round of ammunition fired, you can't get back. Every soldier who loses his life or limb you can't get back. And so on.
Nail on the head. Our society is experiencing anaphylactic shock in response to terrorism. Other societies don't have such extreme sensitivity, even when faced with a far more consistent campaign. The fact is, in a country with 300 million people that gives a far amount of personal freedom to it's citizens, freedom means the freedom to do bad things as well as good. A few bad apples committing bad acts is simply unavoidable without taking freedom away. Next time you're on an airplane being a good citizen, keep that in mind when they put you under arrest for the last hour of the flight. Keep in mind that even in Soviet Russia at least you're all comrades.
Must have been bottom of the class engineers who barely passed at all. All of the terrorist attacks carried out (all 5-10 of them over two decades) against the U.S. were poorly planned and poorly executed. Even the September 11 attacks could have been 10 fold more deadly had they been timed and executed better.
And don't get me started on the shoe and underwear bombers. Evidently, the "engineers" who plotted those attacks didn't think that maybe they should build a foolproof electronic detonator for their bomb rather than rely on the skillz of someone who is willing to blow himself up.
Why am I harping on this? It pisses me off that as a result of the actions of a few idiots, a TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS (that is, the life's work of at least a million people) has been blown reacting to these idiots. The terrorists have WON. They've caused grievous damaged to the United States thanks to the response of the U.S. government and it's sheeple.
Had we done NOTHING at all in response to the attacks (except for maybe giving the FBI a billion dollar budget increase or something cheap like that) it would have cost us far less treasure and lifetimes of labor. Those freaking towers were only insured for a couple of billion, tops.
If we're going to spend a trillion dollars fighting a few evil individuals, they better be a Lex Luther...not Cletus.
Well, if you are communicating with someone that you REALLY need to keep it confidential (aka you're a mafia member or doing something illegal) then I bet there's "an app for that" that would let you share a long one time pad between iphones. You'd do the data sharing in person, holding the phones next to each other or something.
Or, if Apple won't let it through their app screening process, you could write a relatively simple app for one of the google phones. Start with an open source voice chat app for an android phone, find a part of the code that handles the compressed voice data, and add a XOR instruction and some file read commands. Could literally fit it into 10 lines of code I suspect. Then write a script to create the one time pad files based upon existing software. Use a hardware random number generator if you REALLY want it to be secure.
Ironically, with the capacity of cheap flash cards, for cell phone voice calls that gold plated security is now almost practical. Suppose the voice data takes up a megabyte every 30 seconds (a rough estimate). Then a 16 gig SD flash card would last for 133 hours.
Ok, that's not quite enough. Idea is, the customer would get a new flash card with the random encryption key every 2 years when he/she changes phones.
The carrier would have the other copy of the key in it's servers.
Course, if the two people communicating were to both have a unique secret key like this between their phones, nobody on earth could ever crack the conversation.
The Pan Am bomb was only about a pound of explosives. Reasonably high quality, premade in a factory, high explosives. The gasses from the blast overpressurized the plane and caused it to rip along a seam in the fuselage. If there actually were large numbers of modestly competent terrorists in the world, instead of a few nuts and a lot of mythical boogiemen, then those terrorists could have blown up dozens of planes by now.
Oddly enough, the United States is basically the only country in the world that keeps a fleet of ICBM equipped submarines under water all the time. The Russians have mostly quit due to budget cuts, and the same goes for everyone else. Oddly enough, no modern country in the world with reasonable resources has lost to a land invasion since 1945.
Again, yet another fallacy. Whenever there's the slightest weakness found in our nuclear deterrence system, there's always an outcry. An enemy might attack! For example : Oak ridge can't guarantee the nukes will go off if we don't manufacture a brand new line of atomic warheads.
Sheer idiocy. No enemy commander is going to attack the United States on the hope that our nukes won't detonate.
This is the reason for the submarine force, as well. Despite the fact that the whole concept is incredibly expensive and dangerous and not at all cost effective, the Pentagon has convinced Congress that we can't be sure enough nukes in armored bunkers would survive an all out attack. Thus, we submerge intercontinental ballistic missiles under hundreds of feet of salt water and move them around. Of course, for every missile aboard a sub, we could probably install 5-10 more land based ICBMs.
As a submariner, what goods or services did you create? Have you ever heard of the broken window fallacy?
Yes, the United States does need some defense or someone will come and mess us up. It's debatable just how much weaponry is actually needed to accomplish this. Go read up on the broken window fallacy, and realize that the military are professional window breakers. A weapon is a dead loss of resources.
That's less than half the troops we have accomplishing nothing of value in Iraq/Afganistan.
Plus, we could do two birds with one stone if we had the Army patrolling the border. They could run all sorts of training exercises up and down along the border.
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Wow, really? Most people I talk to disagree, or have different views of the future. Obviously, predicting the future is impossible, however, there's a few basic ideas : 1. It isn't impossible to recreate human intelligence using electronic circuitry, and it'll happen sooner or later. A recent developement is a PhD researcher noticed how the human brain is extremely noisy and neurons are actually fairly flakey and inconsistent, and he built a brain simulator using ASICs that is about 10,000 times more power efficient than current supercomputers. While the human brain has some incredibly complex structures, we can cheat in a lot of ways (our AIs will have MUCH better hardware and cleaner data input for one), and we think nature designed the whole thing completely blind. 2. Once it becomes clear that it IS possible to create AI, the forces pushing humans to develop it would be unstoppable. No law or U.N. resolution could stop the developement : any nation or group that had a working AI would also possess a weapon that would make nukes look like firecrackers. (because a working AI with good hardware would be able to run at around 10 million times the thinking speed of human beings, able to create new tech or weapons or control robots or hack into human programmed computers with ease) 3. Such AIs will need resources. Unless they have technology different from what we can imagine, they'll need to use solid matter in their nanomachines (well, very large machines that are built atom by atom). The energy to power all these state changes will mostly come from the sun. While it's possible that they could kill us to free up the matter in our bodies and biosphere, I have to hope that beings vastly smarter than us will have enough compassion or curiosity to preserve the race of primates that created them, as well as the rest of the biosphere. (the reason we'd be in rotating space habitats is that is a LOT more mass efficient than leaving the earth intact). You have a point that this might only last for a while. Unless FTL communication is possible, there won't ever be an interstellar empire or network of AI civilizations. Matter here at Sol will always be limited resource, and the AIs might scan our brains and compact us down to thumbnail sized scraps of molecular circuitry or something in order to save on mass. (followed by data compression...no need to keep billions of human personalities up and running when they could sorta almagate us into a virtual museum exhibit of just a few 'everyman' human personalities)
Well...we have flying cars...they are called helicopters. A few of us are wealthy or important enough to actually use them like cars and get chauffeured around in them.
In a similar manner, there might be a way that you could do amateur exploration of Mars. Some day there might be so much robotic hardware already on the planet from cheaper space travel that you'd be able to remotely control some of it as a member of the public or as a kid.
Personally, I think when the Singularity finally happens, whenever that is, our nanotechnology equipped AI overlords will create a digital mapping of mars down to the micrometer level as they are tearing the planet apart for raw materials. You'll be able to explore every last crevice of what (was) mars at your leisure as you live in one of the rotating Hab modules that act as a human reservation.
Wow. Remember Terminator 2, when Arnold said his power core would be good for about a century? James Cameron got that scientific fact exactly correct.
You know what the solution to this problem is? Send more rovers. Lots more. If we had a spare rover near Spirit, we could probably have it roll over and give Spirit a tow...
I'm no malware writer : but I have to ask...how hard would it be to make self-modifying undetectable code? Essentially you'd have your malware executable, however many bytes of assembled code that do stuff. Then you'd insert various dummy instructions that are randomly chosen but cancel each other out throughout the code. (so you might have an add instruction followed by a subtract instruction, etc). Every time the malware installs itself on a new PC, it randomly creates a new set of dummy instructions.
So the malware would still have a constant codebase that is doing the work, but wouldn't the dummy instructions prevent anti-virus/anti-malware software from being able to "see" the executable? In a similar manner, any registry entries that the malware needs would be randomly chosen character strings. The server address that the malware uses to communicate with would be scrambled via a randomly chosen encryption key as well.
What I'm describing isn't hard at all : a basic project that a junior or senior cs student could easily complete.
If you can afford a laptop computer, and have the time to be doing a little long range hacking via wifi, you probably can afford a $100 antenna that gives you 10-100 times the range of a saucepan.
Well, that's the only way people could be trapped in their attics yet still able to make outgoing calls. They wouldn't need the phone to ring.
Alas, I don't have POTS any more, so I don't have any way to test this :P
So, theoretically, you could have a phone on a long cord going to a wall jack in the second floor, and be up in your attic with the phone cord going down into the black floodwater below? And it would still work???!!!
How would they still work in that scenario? Wouldn't the floodwater short out any telephones?
Welcome to the club. People have been doing this since wi fi was first publicly available. There are special antennas available that are much better than improvised ones, as well as special wireless radios that are hacked to give a stronger signal. For a long time, everyone was using WEP for security so that basically anyone with the right equipment also had access.
You've got the wrong idea. If we spend the money on infrastructure/social programs in Afganistan, WE don't benefit.
If we have the American car companies make autos and smash them, we're back to the broken window fallacy.
The idea of spending that same war funding on 'green energy' is more like a solution. While windmills and solar panels and batteries may not be very cost effective, a trillion would buy an awful lot of them. At least in that case we'd have SOMETHING left after spending the money. (thousands of square miles of solar panels, or states covered with wind farms, or a shit-ton of batteries)
Have you actually looked at an X-ray scanner as stuff goes through it? Off the shelf consumer electronics already look like a hand made mess. The terrorists could use a breadboard to create neat looking wiring that would look like a PCB on the X-ray.
I've never tried to use a GPS on a plane, that is true. There might not be enough signal paths through the fuselage to get a GPS fix. Still, it's just a thought : the last time an airliner was blown up with a bomb was the Libyans, wasn't it? And as I recall, the plane wreckage ended up on land. For airplanes lost in the ocean, they sometimes can't even find the flight data recorder.
Thing is, a battery pack of a laptop computer has the same density as an explosive charge on an x-ray. This is why the airport personal sometimes make you open it up and turn it on. There's a trivial way to bypass this security theater.
Anyways, I think it could be done easily. You must think it is hard. You're completely wrong. Google for a kid who demonstrated how easy it was, by smuggling modeling clay and gun parts through airport security.
If you get attacked in Afganistan, those people setting the IEDs are NOT international terrorists. Notice the word "international". They are either locals or people from a neighboring country. They are probably attacking you because you are in their home.
Discussion is pointless. A commercial airliner is extremely fragile, and there are countless ways that a terrorist could destroy one. That isn't the hard part. The good news is, taking over an airliner to use it as a guided missile is now nearly impossible. Even in the extreme case, where a terrorist brought a fully loaded AK-47 to subdue to cabin, and some kind of tool to cut the cockpit door could easily be twarted. (the pilots could invert the plane, or fly it into the ground to prevent it being used as a missile)
Put the batteries and electronics for the detonator in a device where airport security would expect to see batteries and electronics. The obvious is a laptop, cellphone, or camera.
A 10 year old could think of this. It's the kind of thing they do on Instructables or various hacks that are posted right here to slashdot.
A truly foolproof detonator would have a GPS unit inside, so the bomb would only detonate if the plane were over open ocean. (that's what went wrong when the Libyans blew that airliner decades ago). It would also have a remote trigger so that if airport security DID find the bomb, an accomplice in the airport could set it off at the security station, where ironically there are often as many people crowded there as on an actual flight.
And this is just the obvious weakness. On the news they talked about how commercial cargo is carried in the holds of airliners on a routine basis, WITHOUT ANY SECURITY SCREENING AT ALL.
Conclusion? There are very few international terrorists who hate America in the world, and none of them are competent engineers or commandos. If there were, they would be committing major attacks on a regular basis that would neatly bypass all our security.
100% incorrect. Look at the "broken window fallacy". All that trillion dollars (I am talking about Iraq, Afganistan, Homeland Security, and other waste...more than a trillion, actually) is pissed down the drain. See, the same money could have been used to create new wealth instead of being expended. Iraq and Afganistan expend men, ammunition, vehicles, and so forth. Those same people could have been working in the U.S. and have created a trillion dollars worth of wealth, such as a trillion worth of consumer goods or nuclear reactors or wind and solar panels and so forth. And we'd still HAVE that wealth.
Instead, to illustrate : we are bringing shrink wrapped helicopters over to Iraq and Afganistan that are fresh from the factory. Those helicopters will never be brought home. We are building special armored vehicles that consume too much gas and are too slow to ever be used again. And so forth. Every round of ammunition fired, you can't get back. Every soldier who loses his life or limb you can't get back. And so on.
Nail on the head. Our society is experiencing anaphylactic shock in response to terrorism. Other societies don't have such extreme sensitivity, even when faced with a far more consistent campaign. The fact is, in a country with 300 million people that gives a far amount of personal freedom to it's citizens, freedom means the freedom to do bad things as well as good. A few bad apples committing bad acts is simply unavoidable without taking freedom away. Next time you're on an airplane being a good citizen, keep that in mind when they put you under arrest for the last hour of the flight. Keep in mind that even in Soviet Russia at least you're all comrades.
Must have been bottom of the class engineers who barely passed at all. All of the terrorist attacks carried out (all 5-10 of them over two decades) against the U.S. were poorly planned and poorly executed. Even the September 11 attacks could have been 10 fold more deadly had they been timed and executed better.
And don't get me started on the shoe and underwear bombers. Evidently, the "engineers" who plotted those attacks didn't think that maybe they should build a foolproof electronic detonator for their bomb rather than rely on the skillz of someone who is willing to blow himself up.
Why am I harping on this? It pisses me off that as a result of the actions of a few idiots, a TRILLION FUCKING DOLLARS (that is, the life's work of at least a million people) has been blown reacting to these idiots. The terrorists have WON. They've caused grievous damaged to the United States thanks to the response of the U.S. government and it's sheeple.
Had we done NOTHING at all in response to the attacks (except for maybe giving the FBI a billion dollar budget increase or something cheap like that) it would have cost us far less treasure and lifetimes of labor. Those freaking towers were only insured for a couple of billion, tops.
If we're going to spend a trillion dollars fighting a few evil individuals, they better be a Lex Luther...not Cletus.
Well, if you are communicating with someone that you REALLY need to keep it confidential (aka you're a mafia member or doing something illegal) then I bet there's "an app for that" that would let you share a long one time pad between iphones. You'd do the data sharing in person, holding the phones next to each other or something.
Or, if Apple won't let it through their app screening process, you could write a relatively simple app for one of the google phones. Start with an open source voice chat app for an android phone, find a part of the code that handles the compressed voice data, and add a XOR instruction and some file read commands. Could literally fit it into 10 lines of code I suspect. Then write a script to create the one time pad files based upon existing software. Use a hardware random number generator if you REALLY want it to be secure.
Ironically, with the capacity of cheap flash cards, for cell phone voice calls that gold plated security is now almost practical. Suppose the voice data takes up a megabyte every 30 seconds (a rough estimate). Then a 16 gig SD flash card would last for 133 hours.
Ok, that's not quite enough. Idea is, the customer would get a new flash card with the random encryption key every 2 years when he/she changes phones.
The carrier would have the other copy of the key in it's servers.
Course, if the two people communicating were to both have a unique secret key like this between their phones, nobody on earth could ever crack the conversation.
The Pan Am bomb was only about a pound of explosives. Reasonably high quality, premade in a factory, high explosives. The gasses from the blast overpressurized the plane and caused it to rip along a seam in the fuselage. If there actually were large numbers of modestly competent terrorists in the world, instead of a few nuts and a lot of mythical boogiemen, then those terrorists could have blown up dozens of planes by now.
I suppose, but a decent sized bomb made with real explosives would make that moot. Real explosives are not hard to make or obtain.
air pressure makes that impossible.
Oddly enough, the United States is basically the only country in the world that keeps a fleet of ICBM equipped submarines under water all the time. The Russians have mostly quit due to budget cuts, and the same goes for everyone else. Oddly enough, no modern country in the world with reasonable resources has lost to a land invasion since 1945.
Again, yet another fallacy. Whenever there's the slightest weakness found in our nuclear deterrence system, there's always an outcry. An enemy might attack! For example : Oak ridge can't guarantee the nukes will go off if we don't manufacture a brand new line of atomic warheads.
Sheer idiocy. No enemy commander is going to attack the United States on the hope that our nukes won't detonate.
This is the reason for the submarine force, as well. Despite the fact that the whole concept is incredibly expensive and dangerous and not at all cost effective, the Pentagon has convinced Congress that we can't be sure enough nukes in armored bunkers would survive an all out attack. Thus, we submerge intercontinental ballistic missiles under hundreds of feet of salt water and move them around. Of course, for every missile aboard a sub, we could probably install 5-10 more land based ICBMs.
Anyways, who is being deterred?
As a submariner, what goods or services did you create? Have you ever heard of the broken window fallacy?
Yes, the United States does need some defense or someone will come and mess us up. It's debatable just how much weaponry is actually needed to accomplish this. Go read up on the broken window fallacy, and realize that the military are professional window breakers. A weapon is a dead loss of resources.
That's less than half the troops we have accomplishing nothing of value in Iraq/Afganistan.
Plus, we could do two birds with one stone if we had the Army patrolling the border. They could run all sorts of training exercises up and down along the border.