The problem isn't the celebrities, it's a public more willing to listen to celebrities than scientists about an issue that's almost entirely scientific. We have an endemic fear culture that embraces worry over knowledge. People only listen to the celebrities because they're spreading a message that the public is primed to receive. We have to eliminate the culture that embraces this message of ignorance and fear, and anti-intellectualism. The celebrities are merely a symptom of our broken culture.
Would that not at least be more scientific that just believing your opinion that you claim is undeniable fact (based on zero actual observation)?
You're right. In fact, have you measured the area around your OWN home lately? No? Then you have zero evidence to suspect it's not hotter than Fukushima, drizzled in Chernobyle, and wrapped in the rubble from Three Mile Island. I suggested buying very expensive 24/7 monitoring equipment pronto. In fact, buy two to be safe. On the safe side you better buy 3. If you only buy two, and they disagree, how do you know which one is right?
You should do this immediately, and no longer waste your time posting to Slashdot. After all, you're wasting time that could be spent looking for things that might be radioactive in your neighborhood. I mean, shit.. There could be radioactive shit killing you RIGHT NOW, and you have zero reason to suspect there's not! Yes, run and hide. Run and hide. Then buy top notch monitoring equipment to protect you. It's the only scientific thing to do! I don't think I like the look of your neighbor's cat. Maybe it's been playing in a spent cancer treatment machine? It's happened before! Science will save you.
However, if it is dealing with nuclear power, which apparently the majority of Slashdoters are completely sold on, the highest modded posts are, "don't bother." Any ideas on the discrepancy?
Yes, the answer is this is a "side of the room" problem. It's essentially a form of tribalism. A "side of the room" problem is where a complex issue is divided into two sides, with no room in between. Each group tries to enforce a strict, and narrow viewpoint. Anyone outside of this narrow point of view is simply ignored, or assumed to be "with the other side". It's a profoundly stupid way to think, but it's incredibly common, and hardly restricted to Slashdot.
Slashdot is of course on the "pro-nuclear" side, with a smaller minority who's essentially ignored. Expressed group opinions are enforced through moderation. This insulates the majority opinion and discourages other viewpoints, so no others can influence the group. This is doubly reinforced because our fear-culture over-reacts to anything potentially dangerous where ignorance is vast. The media gives makes up scary stories based on slivers of information, and half-truths. Radiation is especially prone to the fear culture because you can't see it, and most people are profoundly ignorant about it.
So the effect on Slashdot is for essentially normal people to over-react and put someone asking a question about something they know little about into "the other side", and assume they're complete morons lapping up the fear. You don't want to be one of those idiots that just fear everything the media tells you, right? It doesn't exactly help that Slashdot tends to be inhabited by people with poor social skills, and superiority complexes.
Basically the problem is that people on Slashdot don't want to listen to "the other" for fear of becoming "the other".
So the story others have pointed towards talks about a "neutron hotspot" someone found. The measured level of neutron radiation is 464 nano-Sieverts/hour. That's an annual dose of 464*24*365= about 4 million nano-sieverts/year, or 4 milli-sieverts/year. Background radiation varies in the world from around 2-6 milli-sieverts/year. So essentially the additional neutron radiation is about equal to a normal background radiation. Basically these so called "hot-spots" are completely harmless. If you're especially worried because it's "neutron radiation", and "extra harmful" well, the sievert unit is already calibrated to account for the additional damage that neutrons impart.
If these "hot spots" (more like slightly warmer spots) actually exist it makes me wonder what causes them. Just random variation? Some form of bio-accumulation? What? Mushrooms for instance bio-accumulate certain radioactive elements, to the point where in some parts of Europe you still can't eat the wild mushrooms because of Chernobyl.
What you call brilliance, I call "cleverness". Brilliance is seeing things in a flash, or seeing what others can't. Cleverness is just a narrow minded view of making this fast, or cool, or "efficient", or whatever, without regard to maintainability, readability, or the entire larger picture of software development. There's plenty of people tat are brilliant, and see beyond what others can and also value simplicty, maintainability, etc. The underlying problem (one of many) is the narrow focus and tunnel vision. Another problem is simply that management all to often doesn't understand the problems that maintenance presents, so little focus or reward is placed on maintainable software, or maintaining it at all. It's a systemic problem, with multiple root causes.
I've never been much for statements like "broadly defined, nebulous thing X can never replace broadly defined nebulous thing Y". Blanket statements like that become essentially meaningless unless you very narrowly define what was originally something very broad. Can't someone be brilliant about creating simplicity, or brilliant about maintaining code? Why does this have to come through experience and education? Those sorts of hard lined statements aren't terribly enlightening.
Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're saying and agree with the values. I simply don't agree as to the causes or associations. Brilliant people can certainly create bad code. They may be just as bad as an average coder is, I really couldn't say. The point being, to solve the problem we need to change the culture, not create terminology, and draw circles around people.
I agree that there's many, many poor interfaces, unmaintainable code, and security nightmares. But what makes you think this has anything to do with "engineer coders"? I've been in this industry for 15 years, and I have no idea what a "engineer coder" means. Fools come in many shapes and forms, and I've never found any simple way to distinguish between them.
Much of the problem is that quality code isn't valued in academic programs. So it's no surprise that people come out without having these skills.
Gate's solution is the same way. he will solve one problem, but it will only increase the other issues: population increases without monetary increases.
Sheesh. You'd think the guy was pissing on your lawn. Has it ever occurred to you that death (especially childhood death) is extremely costly? Costly emotionally, costly financially, costly economically, and costly spiritually. In many of these poor countries a couple has to have many children to guarantee a couple of them survive to adulthood. Having them die early only causes people to have more children, (so they can increase odds of childhood survival). A childs death only puts a greater strain on the family, in all the ways I just mentioned. Avoiding that death in the first place can lead to couples having to have less children, and less financial strain.
Think about the amount of resources that go to keeping a child healthy and raising it to adulthood. Food, medicine, education, shelter. All that goes to waste when the child dies before reaching adulthood. The obvious (and terrible) consequence is to the family and friends of that child who died. The hidden consequence is to the society. All that went into the child is wasted when the child dies.
As far as "only solving one problem", you're right. But so what? Poverty comes from multiple sources, one of which is early death.
There difference is that there are still numerous professionals who will stand by the old definition of the word "hacker" because it is a common term for them.
I'm one of those numerous professionals, and I recognise that the word hacker has multiple meanings, dependant on context. The problem is that the OP was trying to deny a perfectly valid, and widely accepted definition. The general public calls plasma "blood".
It does? That's a new on on me. I've never heard someone call plasma, blood before. Should we tell the doctors to give up correcting people on this because hey, words change meaning?
If the meaning had been so corrupted that 99% of the population didn't know what plasma was, then yes. This hasn't happened (your example is incredibly bad). Language is used for communication, not some weird holy war where words are real things. People gave up the original definitions of doctor long ago, to the point where if someone says "I'm a doctor" (and provides no other context), everyone just assumes a medical doctor, and not someone with a PHD. People insisting on the original definition are quite rightly looked at as kooks.
Exactly! Words never change meaning, as we all know!
I'm sure you'll also support my quest against people who use the wrong definition of undertaker (originally meant entrepreneur, not this bastardised meaning of the funeral guy!, and doctor (what as we all know really means teacher, not medical doctor!). I'm always the first to correct people whenever they use the wrong definitions of these words. Long live the originalists!
The paper doesn't claim that the distances were measured incorrectly, it claims the timing was inaccurate do to special relativity (not general relativity which another poster in this thread was confused by.
In essence, the paper makes the claim that the experiment is using GPS as a reference clock, and the reference clock (the satellite) is in motion differently, relative to the neutrino source, and detector.
Hiring auditors to overlook things (even in a wink-wink nodge-nodge manner) would constitute any number of felonies. Any publicly traded company is so awash in money that it would find it fairly difficult to make felonies more profitable than simply sticking to its core business.
Are you really this naive? Nobody has to sit around and think "I'm going to go commit some felonies for the company" for meaningless audits to occur. All that has to happen is that everyone has to think they're doing their job. The people hiring the auditors decide they want a good audit, and get rewarded for everything coming out clean. They talk to their buddies, who recommend an auditing firm that's performed "well" for them in the past. The auditing firm does the audit, doesn't dig particularly deep, or ask "the wrong questions", and gives them a nice clean audit. Nobody commits any overt felonies. The audit is shit of course, but getting a real audit was never in anyones interests, now was it?
If you don't believe me, just look at what happened with Enron. They were publicly traded, and underwent audits. That was obviously a high-profile case, but it certainly proves the point that big name audits are only as good as the auditor. Are you really foolish enough to think it's changed that much in the last few years?
Every publicly traded company has to be independently audited every quarter. I doubt IRS will find anything Google can't.
The "independent" auditor is hired by the company to perform the audit every year. This company makes significant amounts of money performing audits, and attracting customer loyalty. How much incentive do you think they have to dig deep, and find anything really wrong?
Anyone who knows anything about audits knows the audit is only as good as the auditor. Think the IRS might have some deeper motivations to find illegal tax dodges?
I've always dreamed that one day, someone will make an SSH client in a browser so all the fun XSS,, CSRF, and the bevy of other web vulnerabilities could come to SSH. SSH has just been to darn secure over the years, but now with this new application, an SSH client can be just as insecure as everything on the web. Thanks!
The article is correct. APT is merely a buzzword to throw around to make the attack sound sophisticated. It was certainly a good attack, but it's hardly something that requires the resources of a "nation state". Individuals are constantly finding software flaws that are more sophisticated than what RSA was hit by. The attack merely combines social engineering (getting the victim to open the spreadsheet), a hidden payload of Flash packaged inside it, and a flash exploit. None of those are really that sophisticated, or particularly new.
I don't think any details have been given about what happened once the initial machine was owned. But given that RSA is already trying to hack into something resembling "the hack of the century", AND the fact they didn't reveal tokens had been stolen until AFTER a stolen token was used in a Lockheed Martin attack, I'd say the opinion of RSA on who was involved can't be trusted.
Speculation of the attacker based on who has an interest in breaking Lockheed Martin is meaningless. I could come up with a dozen different explanations, all equally plausible that wouldn't involve a nation state at all. Perhaps the first attacker breached RSA, then sold the stolen tokens to some other hacker. Without evidence to keep us honest, we can make up whatever theories we like.
I'd really like to get a sense of the resources (time, machinery, and dollars) went into the project. Obviously your biggest non-monetary cost was labor, but what did you pay out of pocket? How many resources were donated (i.e. specialized machinery)?
You're a moron. Parents who don't empathise with kids, even those not their own, have the genetic problem, not the ones who do think about the children.
Strawman.
The OP was talking about going overboard, where children are overprotected, and emotions become out of control and override thinking. That's what people are talking about when they use the phrase "Think of the children". We've got a whole set of people in this country that'll do that over and over and over again. Letting your emotions run your entire thinking process is a Bad Idea, and that's exactly what's happening with these dumb laws. 17 year olds sending pictures of their tits to other 17 year olds is not a crime. These laws were "supposed" to protect you children from being exploited by adults. Instead they've also been used to project some sort of weird morality where a 17 year old showing her tits live to another 17 year old is legal, but taking a picture of them and sending them over a cell phone is suddenly illegal.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? That's the best you can come up with?
Whether MAD made the world more stable is quite irrelevant. The weapons that have been dismantled are by definition not necessary to achieve MAD. They are completely redundant for that purpose. So they therefore were a complete and utter waste to produce.
I remember Barbara Streisand giving a speech back in the 80's, about how buying ICBMs was wasteful because "they'd never be used". Shows what she knew.
More than you, apparently. Much as I hate Barbara Streisand, she was right. Putting money into these ICBMs WAS a waste of money. You think launching a few satellites justifies creating these things? You've obviously not thought it through. There's the cost of the warhead, which was never, and hopefully will never be used in the first place (many of which are dismantled, another cost). Add to that the maintenance cost of the missile itself. Add in the cost of the facilities it's housed in+ maintenance costs. Now add in the additional cost of a missile that's accurate enough to deliver a warhead to Russia, not to mention sit around for years being ready at a moments notice.
Still think this was a wise financial decision to make?
Years ago I participated in a paid research study as part of the control group. Part of the research was having an MRI done. After being in the MRI for a short period of time I had the oddest sense of vertigo, despite staying perfectly still. I asked the technician about this, and he brushed it off like it didn't happen, or I imagined it. I was sure he was just wrong, and went home and did my own research. I recall finding some people who had the same experience, but no real idea what the mechanism was. It's fascinating that years later, I have an explanation of what I felt dizzy in the MRI. (Interestinginly, it seemed to persist for a half hour after leaving the MRI).
Once the oil runs dry you'd better hope they've come up with a viable electric car, otherwise you'll have to knock down and rebuild your entire country.
Yes, this is certainly a problem. It's one of the reasons I don't feel so bad when gas prices skyrocket. But I'd say it pales in comparison to the problem of much of our economy being dependant on low oil prices. People living in the middle of nowhere, and commuting 40 miles each way every day is part of that larger problem.
It doesn't take a whole lot of thought to arrive at the conclusion that choosing a UK based VPN provider to attack US based sites is a bad idea. What country has a better relationship with the US than the UK? Even if that company "doesn't do logging", do you think that a court order can't change that very, very quickly?
Slashdot Mirror
With exactly zero evidence to back it up. The faster we ignore this entire story, the better.
The media is part of the problem, but they're still only able to operate because we have a culture that accepts this sort of crap.
The problem isn't the celebrities, it's a public more willing to listen to celebrities than scientists about an issue that's almost entirely scientific. We have an endemic fear culture that embraces worry over knowledge. People only listen to the celebrities because they're spreading a message that the public is primed to receive. We have to eliminate the culture that embraces this message of ignorance and fear, and anti-intellectualism. The celebrities are merely a symptom of our broken culture.
Would that not at least be more scientific that just believing your opinion that you claim is undeniable fact (based on zero actual observation)?
You're right. In fact, have you measured the area around your OWN home lately? No? Then you have zero evidence to suspect it's not hotter than Fukushima, drizzled in Chernobyle, and wrapped in the rubble from Three Mile Island. I suggested buying very expensive 24/7 monitoring equipment pronto. In fact, buy two to be safe. On the safe side you better buy 3. If you only buy two, and they disagree, how do you know which one is right?
You should do this immediately, and no longer waste your time posting to Slashdot. After all, you're wasting time that could be spent looking for things that might be radioactive in your neighborhood. I mean, shit.. There could be radioactive shit killing you RIGHT NOW, and you have zero reason to suspect there's not! Yes, run and hide. Run and hide. Then buy top notch monitoring equipment to protect you. It's the only scientific thing to do! I don't think I like the look of your neighbor's cat. Maybe it's been playing in a spent cancer treatment machine? It's happened before! Science will save you.
However, if it is dealing with nuclear power, which apparently the majority of Slashdoters are completely sold on, the highest modded posts are, "don't bother." Any ideas on the discrepancy?
Yes, the answer is this is a "side of the room" problem. It's essentially a form of tribalism. A "side of the room" problem is where a complex issue is divided into two sides, with no room in between. Each group tries to enforce a strict, and narrow viewpoint. Anyone outside of this narrow point of view is simply ignored, or assumed to be "with the other side". It's a profoundly stupid way to think, but it's incredibly common, and hardly restricted to Slashdot.
Slashdot is of course on the "pro-nuclear" side, with a smaller minority who's essentially ignored. Expressed group opinions are enforced through moderation. This insulates the majority opinion and discourages other viewpoints, so no others can influence the group. This is doubly reinforced because our fear-culture over-reacts to anything potentially dangerous where ignorance is vast. The media gives makes up scary stories based on slivers of information, and half-truths. Radiation is especially prone to the fear culture because you can't see it, and most people are profoundly ignorant about it.
So the effect on Slashdot is for essentially normal people to over-react and put someone asking a question about something they know little about into "the other side", and assume they're complete morons lapping up the fear. You don't want to be one of those idiots that just fear everything the media tells you, right? It doesn't exactly help that Slashdot tends to be inhabited by people with poor social skills, and superiority complexes.
Basically the problem is that people on Slashdot don't want to listen to "the other" for fear of becoming "the other".
So the story others have pointed towards talks about a "neutron hotspot" someone found. The measured level of neutron radiation is 464 nano-Sieverts/hour. That's an annual dose of 464*24*365= about 4 million nano-sieverts/year, or 4 milli-sieverts/year. Background radiation varies in the world from around 2-6 milli-sieverts/year. So essentially the additional neutron radiation is about equal to a normal background radiation. Basically these so called "hot-spots" are completely harmless. If you're especially worried because it's "neutron radiation", and "extra harmful" well, the sievert unit is already calibrated to account for the additional damage that neutrons impart.
If these "hot spots" (more like slightly warmer spots) actually exist it makes me wonder what causes them. Just random variation? Some form of bio-accumulation? What? Mushrooms for instance bio-accumulate certain radioactive elements, to the point where in some parts of Europe you still can't eat the wild mushrooms because of Chernobyl.
What you call brilliance, I call "cleverness". Brilliance is seeing things in a flash, or seeing what others can't. Cleverness is just a narrow minded view of making this fast, or cool, or "efficient", or whatever, without regard to maintainability, readability, or the entire larger picture of software development. There's plenty of people tat are brilliant, and see beyond what others can and also value simplicty, maintainability, etc. The underlying problem (one of many) is the narrow focus and tunnel vision. Another problem is simply that management all to often doesn't understand the problems that maintenance presents, so little focus or reward is placed on maintainable software, or maintaining it at all. It's a systemic problem, with multiple root causes.
I've never been much for statements like "broadly defined, nebulous thing X can never replace broadly defined nebulous thing Y". Blanket statements like that become essentially meaningless unless you very narrowly define what was originally something very broad. Can't someone be brilliant about creating simplicity, or brilliant about maintaining code? Why does this have to come through experience and education? Those sorts of hard lined statements aren't terribly enlightening.
Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're saying and agree with the values. I simply don't agree as to the causes or associations. Brilliant people can certainly create bad code. They may be just as bad as an average coder is, I really couldn't say. The point being, to solve the problem we need to change the culture, not create terminology, and draw circles around people.
I agree that there's many, many poor interfaces, unmaintainable code, and security nightmares. But what makes you think this has anything to do with "engineer coders"? I've been in this industry for 15 years, and I have no idea what a "engineer coder" means. Fools come in many shapes and forms, and I've never found any simple way to distinguish between them.
Much of the problem is that quality code isn't valued in academic programs. So it's no surprise that people come out without having these skills.
Gate's solution is the same way. he will solve one problem, but it will only increase the other issues: population increases without monetary increases.
Sheesh. You'd think the guy was pissing on your lawn. Has it ever occurred to you that death (especially childhood death) is extremely costly? Costly emotionally, costly financially, costly economically, and costly spiritually. In many of these poor countries a couple has to have many children to guarantee a couple of them survive to adulthood. Having them die early only causes people to have more children, (so they can increase odds of childhood survival). A childs death only puts a greater strain on the family, in all the ways I just mentioned. Avoiding that death in the first place can lead to couples having to have less children, and less financial strain.
Think about the amount of resources that go to keeping a child healthy and raising it to adulthood. Food, medicine, education, shelter. All that goes to waste when the child dies before reaching adulthood. The obvious (and terrible) consequence is to the family and friends of that child who died. The hidden consequence is to the society. All that went into the child is wasted when the child dies.
As far as "only solving one problem", you're right. But so what? Poverty comes from multiple sources, one of which is early death.
There difference is that there are still numerous professionals who will stand by the old definition of the word "hacker" because it is a common term for them.
I'm one of those numerous professionals, and I recognise that the word hacker has multiple meanings, dependant on context. The problem is that the OP was trying to deny a perfectly valid, and widely accepted definition.
The general public calls plasma "blood".
It does? That's a new on on me. I've never heard someone call plasma, blood before.
Should we tell the doctors to give up correcting people on this because hey, words change meaning?
If the meaning had been so corrupted that 99% of the population didn't know what plasma was, then yes. This hasn't happened (your example is incredibly bad). Language is used for communication, not some weird holy war where words are real things. People gave up the original definitions of doctor long ago, to the point where if someone says "I'm a doctor" (and provides no other context), everyone just assumes a medical doctor, and not someone with a PHD. People insisting on the original definition are quite rightly looked at as kooks.
Exactly! Words never change meaning, as we all know!
I'm sure you'll also support my quest against people who use the wrong definition of undertaker (originally meant entrepreneur, not this bastardised meaning of the funeral guy!, and doctor (what as we all know really means teacher, not medical doctor!). I'm always the first to correct people whenever they use the wrong definitions of these words. Long live the originalists!
The paper doesn't claim that the distances were measured incorrectly, it claims the timing was inaccurate do to special relativity (not general relativity which another poster in this thread was confused by.
In essence, the paper makes the claim that the experiment is using GPS as a reference clock, and the reference clock (the satellite) is in motion differently, relative to the neutrino source, and detector.
Hiring auditors to overlook things (even in a wink-wink nodge-nodge manner) would constitute any number of felonies. Any publicly traded company is so awash in money that it would find it fairly difficult to make felonies more profitable than simply sticking to its core business.
Are you really this naive? Nobody has to sit around and think "I'm going to go commit some felonies for the company" for meaningless audits to occur. All that has to happen is that everyone has to think they're doing their job. The people hiring the auditors decide they want a good audit, and get rewarded for everything coming out clean. They talk to their buddies, who recommend an auditing firm that's performed "well" for them in the past. The auditing firm does the audit, doesn't dig particularly deep, or ask "the wrong questions", and gives them a nice clean audit. Nobody commits any overt felonies. The audit is shit of course, but getting a real audit was never in anyones interests, now was it?
If you don't believe me, just look at what happened with Enron. They were publicly traded, and underwent audits. That was obviously a high-profile case, but it certainly proves the point that big name audits are only as good as the auditor. Are you really foolish enough to think it's changed that much in the last few years?
Every publicly traded company has to be independently audited every quarter. I doubt IRS will find anything Google can't.
The "independent" auditor is hired by the company to perform the audit every year. This company makes significant amounts of money performing audits, and attracting customer loyalty. How much incentive do you think they have to dig deep, and find anything really wrong?
Anyone who knows anything about audits knows the audit is only as good as the auditor. Think the IRS might have some deeper motivations to find illegal tax dodges?
It isn't the programming language that makes it insecure, it is the programmer.
It's the programmer, AND the environment the application was written in. A web browser isn't exactly a secure environment.
I've always dreamed that one day, someone will make an SSH client in a browser so all the fun XSS,, CSRF, and the bevy of other web vulnerabilities could come to SSH. SSH has just been to darn secure over the years, but now with this new application, an SSH client can be just as insecure as everything on the web. Thanks!
The article is correct. APT is merely a buzzword to throw around to make the attack sound sophisticated. It was certainly a good attack, but it's hardly something that requires the resources of a "nation state". Individuals are constantly finding software flaws that are more sophisticated than what RSA was hit by. The attack merely combines social engineering (getting the victim to open the spreadsheet), a hidden payload of Flash packaged inside it, and a flash exploit. None of those are really that sophisticated, or particularly new.
I don't think any details have been given about what happened once the initial machine was owned. But given that RSA is already trying to hack into something resembling "the hack of the century", AND the fact they didn't reveal tokens had been stolen until AFTER a stolen token was used in a Lockheed Martin attack, I'd say the opinion of RSA on who was involved can't be trusted.
Speculation of the attacker based on who has an interest in breaking Lockheed Martin is meaningless. I could come up with a dozen different explanations, all equally plausible that wouldn't involve a nation state at all. Perhaps the first attacker breached RSA, then sold the stolen tokens to some other hacker. Without evidence to keep us honest, we can make up whatever theories we like.
I'd really like to get a sense of the resources (time, machinery, and dollars) went into the project. Obviously your biggest non-monetary cost was labor, but what did you pay out of pocket? How many resources were donated (i.e. specialized machinery)?
You're a moron. Parents who don't empathise with kids, even those not their own, have the genetic problem, not the ones who do think about the children.
Strawman.
The OP was talking about going overboard, where children are overprotected, and emotions become out of control and override thinking. That's what people are talking about when they use the phrase "Think of the children". We've got a whole set of people in this country that'll do that over and over and over again. Letting your emotions run your entire thinking process is a Bad Idea, and that's exactly what's happening with these dumb laws. 17 year olds sending pictures of their tits to other 17 year olds is not a crime. These laws were "supposed" to protect you children from being exploited by adults. Instead they've also been used to project some sort of weird morality where a 17 year old showing her tits live to another 17 year old is legal, but taking a picture of them and sending them over a cell phone is suddenly illegal.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? That's the best you can come up with?
Whether MAD made the world more stable is quite irrelevant. The weapons that have been dismantled are by definition not necessary to achieve MAD. They are completely redundant for that purpose. So they therefore were a complete and utter waste to produce.
If you need a nuclear deterrent, (and back then most people thought we did)
Those people were wrong. We didn't need to build the massive, massive stockpiles of nuclear weaspons. Fear sells though.
In any case, the argument falls apart if you have to justify it through "most people thought we needed it".
I remember Barbara Streisand giving a speech back in the 80's, about how buying ICBMs was wasteful because "they'd never be used". Shows what she knew.
More than you, apparently. Much as I hate Barbara Streisand, she was right. Putting money into these ICBMs WAS a waste of money. You think launching a few satellites justifies creating these things? You've obviously not thought it through. There's the cost of the warhead, which was never, and hopefully will never be used in the first place (many of which are dismantled, another cost). Add to that the maintenance cost of the missile itself. Add in the cost of the facilities it's housed in+ maintenance costs. Now add in the additional cost of a missile that's accurate enough to deliver a warhead to Russia, not to mention sit around for years being ready at a moments notice.
Still think this was a wise financial decision to make?
Years ago I participated in a paid research study as part of the control group. Part of the research was having an MRI done. After being in the MRI for a short period of time I had the oddest sense of vertigo, despite staying perfectly still. I asked the technician about this, and he brushed it off like it didn't happen, or I imagined it. I was sure he was just wrong, and went home and did my own research. I recall finding some people who had the same experience, but no real idea what the mechanism was. It's fascinating that years later, I have an explanation of what I felt dizzy in the MRI. (Interestinginly, it seemed to persist for a half hour after leaving the MRI).
Once the oil runs dry you'd better hope they've come up with a viable electric car, otherwise you'll have to knock down and rebuild your entire country.
Yes, this is certainly a problem. It's one of the reasons I don't feel so bad when gas prices skyrocket. But I'd say it pales in comparison to the problem of much of our economy being dependant on low oil prices. People living in the middle of nowhere, and commuting 40 miles each way every day is part of that larger problem.
It doesn't take a whole lot of thought to arrive at the conclusion that choosing a UK based VPN provider to attack US based sites is a bad idea. What country has a better relationship with the US than the UK? Even if that company "doesn't do logging", do you think that a court order can't change that very, very quickly?