I'm doubtful that a psychopath would be attracted to combat arms, after all, you're in an environment where there is constant, close social interaction and a lot of people who can kill you or lock you up if they discover who you are.
Yeah, if he was calling for fire (the guy I was talking about was operating an LRASS) he could have claimed a lot of kills. It depends how you count it, after all, the arty guys might want some credit. I'm not going to get into the debate because it's all a lot of dick waving, and that makes my arms tired.
Usually a confirmed kill is you acquire the target and pull the trigger, and no one else can reasonably claim it. Most kills for non-snipers are unconfirmed because everyone opens up and the squad collectively fires hundreds of rounds. So snipers get the most, and 200 would put you as one of the top snipers in the world, quoth Wikipedia.
You have made me realize an interesting point, though: as long as ISPs do not migrate their users to IPv6, they can charge extortionary prices for the remaining IPv4 addresses; ISPs have an incentive to create this artificial scarcity. Time to call for government regulation?;)
Just to clarify, are you saying that it's time to regulate when we see the extortionate prices? And what's extortionate?
And, to further clarify, what regulation? If the ISPs, globally, are conspiring to create an artificial scarcity, that would be pretty easy to prove, and we have laws against that already.
However, both women did consent, but are claiming that Assange went "too far" and failed to stop on command -- continuing to have sex with a broken condom, having sex while one of them was asleep, etc.
There are cases where consenting adults can, during sex, do things that aren't entirely consenting because they're caught up in the moment. And it's damned easy to make stuff up. It's damned easy to to go overboard and crucify someone over it in the name of "zero tolerance" and such. No one has come up with a good system that consistently and fairly adjudicates sex charges.
But that's not a good argument to limit "rape" to only clearly violent encounters.
Either "rape" means violence, or it does not.
Simple battery is generally defined as any unwanted touch, no matter how light. Same with assault, you simply have to move in such a way that you deliberately restrict the person's freedom of movement.
Imagine if it wasn't so. A mugger would only need to corner a person and poke, because the victim couldn't (legally) do *anything* in response. It's already a bit like that with the squeegee guys in many cities.
In many cases, wives get away with abusing their husbands because they're "only" screaming at them and the men (and often the courts) don't view that as abusive.
Generally speaking, written laws have to be broad because people will actively seek out loopholes and exploit them. Social mores are subject to the same problem.
we should not conflate what Assange did [with] the sort of violent crime that most people think of when they think "rape."
Just to be sure: It's still something that I could never do to a woman, even if I didn't who she was. And it's morally equivalent, at least, to slapping a woman around. So, on the scumbag scale, he's at least on the order of a guy who hits his girlfriend, arguably worse.
Your logic reported you to the UN for torturing it. Besides, if you really think soliders aren't capable of, and encouraged to, think of shooting someone in a warzone as an almost orgasmic experience, you really need to talk to a few more soldiers.
Well, being a veteran, a few combat veterans actually opened up to me, and none of them said anything remotely like that.
While in, I formulated a rule that if someone claimed something that sounded over the top, I would divide by ten or drop it an order of magnitude, whichever made more sense. If someone was a great mechanic, it meant he could probably change the oil on his car. If his girlfriend was a model, she was probably average. One story about 200 confirmed kills turned into 100, then definitely 30, and BTW it was indirect so not "confirmed kills" as much as "estimated BDA." And damned near every National Guard idiot has a collection of combat patches of units he knows nothing about, and they all claim to be infantry because they were slotted as infantry for six months.
So, really, if someone is talking about how shooting someone was "orgasmic," first of all, I'd be suspicious as to whether the person really was a combat veteran, because that's just not how I've ever heard it described on the *rare* occasion they talk about it. And even then, I'd take it with a huge fucking grain of salt, because I guarantee you that there are guys who will lie their asses off about that, and do it with a tone of total reverence.
But more important, have you ever noticed how all those important brackets and punctuation that you NEED in 99% of the languages are near impossible to type without breaking your fingers on non-English keyboard, especially if that language has to deal with a lot of diacritical characters? On most non-English keyboard the { and } brackets are only reachable with the combination of Alt-GR and 7-0. And let's not even talk about the "Polish writing keyboard layout", which is a nightmare to program with. I still think they did it on purpose, I cannot imagine that anyone could actually code using such a layout.
In Liepzig, Germany, I saw some little web terminals (running IE 6, natch) with a sticky on them explaining how to type the @ sign.
Enter vim, you rarely need to remove your fingers from the home row.;)
Except, you know, every three seconds, unless you have remapped your keyboard so that the most important command in vim is not assigned to the far top left corner of the keyboard.
Heh... vim and emacs trolls can *still* generate a dozen identical replies.
(Yes, loved vim especially the . command, switched to emacs because after several years switching modes *still* irritated me.)
After 10 years most of the debt build up by persistent trade deficits will be gone.
Debt is built up when government spending exceeds revenues from taxation and fees and the government closes the difference by issuing bonds. A trade deficit means the private sector is buying more G&S overseas than it's selling. The two have nothing in common.
...you should be well on your way to raw material and energy self sufficiency.
Are you insane? Why, in God's name, would we want to restrict ourselves to using only materials and energy from within the US? That would be economic suicide!
European here
Personally I'd suggest the FED does QE++
Thankfully, not all Europeans are complete economic ignoramuses, and the political class (at least of bigger nations like Germany and the UK) are wisely cutting spending instead. I hope we'll take their example.
I use a 16,000 line/etc/hosts file to keep from seeing crap like that.
And a decade ago, people signed up for a toolbar that showed a banner ad every minute, just for an extra 50 cents per hour of surfing the web. Some people even memorized the best startup sequence so that they could get GetPaid4, Spedia, and AllAdvantage running all at the same time.
There are still ventures like that. There was one that would give you free net access, another gave you a free pc, and there are still a ton of sites where you can fill in surveys and crap for coupons or even money.
There seems to be a whole industry oriented around people not doing any work and not getting paid for it.
What the Good Lord Algorithmic Efficiency Improvements giveth, the Evil Lord Real-Time-Virus-Scanner taketh away.
Heretic! Thine computer is a vessel of purity whose sole purpose for existence is to be continually purged of impurity. Thou shalt be grateful for the pittance of cycles that our great Real-Tyme Virus Scanner does leave ye to work with your ill begotten "productivity applications."
Thats an interesting figure because when the alpha came out DEC were predicting 1000 fold improvement in speed over about the same period. They split the improvement over factors of ten: clock speed, parallelism in the CPU and multiple cores were each expected to deliver a factor of ten improvement.
Now while our algorithms might be getting better our programmers definitely are not. A lot of those improved algorithms must be in our APIs. Like the way its easy to use a Hashtable in java now but in the last you might have just searched a linear array.
There are more programmers because programming is becoming more accessible, so naturally more people who suck at programming are doing it.
There's another problem: while gains from Moore's law have historically been realized by a recompile or less, most new algorithms require actually changing the code.
Watching the video, the conclusion that the video makes is "...You are likely not in the fastest line".
That does not necessarily mean that the reverse (the title) is true -- and yet they somehow jump to that conclusion with the title "...You are likely in the slowest Line."
Can we get some people who actually understand this magical thing called "logic" to start editing Slashdot?
While we're at it, I'd like peace in the middle east, and a pony.
I once worked at a grocery store for two years. It had nine checkout lines, and in that time all of them were manned once that I saw. Don't remember when it was, but most likely it was before the 4th of July or Thanksgiving.
You must have never been in a grocery store when there's news of a snowstorm.
In particular, if you find yourself making protectionist arguments or anti-technology arguments, these are not necessarily based on a zero-sum premise, but they are certainly very prone to it.
The reason the self-checkout lines don't cost jobs is because they allow the store to do more business. Having someone make a list of what's in a cart instead of having a machine do it means:
Spending a year putting stuff in a cart means that next year the employee will have no new qualifications, so their next job isn't going to be much better. That means they're not going to supply as much to the economy, and will demand less from it.
Because the employees are idle when the store is slow, they're not getting paid much. Less pay means less demand for goods and services.
For the customers, it means peak times involve longer waiting. They'll have to make decisions about how to utilize their time, e.g. an hour standing in line vs. an hour with the family. Generally, they'll buy less stuff, meaning the store will do less business.
In any individual case, it doesn't seem like it makes a huge difference. Just a few hours here and there wasted, but in aggregate it means that capital investment allows everyone involved to simply do more stuff; you actually expand the economy. And it doesn't expand "at the top" and "trickle down," rather, the expansion is happening at the lowest level, people buying and selling goods, more demand for qualified employees, and the results of that trickle up to the larger investors.
You can see the difference quite dramatically if you visit a third world country. Everything they do is via teams of dozens of guys, the results are usually inconsistent and slow, so it just means that getting anything done takes forever. There is less business done, people don't have qualifications for good jobs, and the whole place is poor. (But not poor like we understand poverty here, poor as in dying in the streets during a bad winter poor.)
And if the one group of soldiers would harm or through inaction allow harm to another, then I wouldn't want them in the military.
Not to be pedantic, but I'll assume you meant something like "then they ought not be in the military."
And I think this is hard to dispute: all soldiers are human, so as a group they are subject to fear and so they could, through inaction, allow someone to die.
Homophobia is a manifestation of fear. (I make no pretense of being a psychologist, though.) And the natural objection is that it's hardly the same as being afraid of bullets, but in my experience fear doesn't work in such a rational manner.
Is there something wrong with me because I can jump out of an airplane, but I can't stand snakes and spiders? And, while I've got about 25 jumps under my belt, I've never been the first jumper. It's *much* harder to be the first because you spend a good few minutes staring down at the empty sky and can lock up with panic. If you're even second in line you're inside the plane and just have to follow the guy in front, hand off your reserve, turn and just "push" through the emptiness. If I had been the first guy, it's entirely possible I could have been a jump refusal and then I would have probably lost my wings.
So, even for a case where fear is a clear disqualifier for a eminently practical reason, and even when that fear is tested repeatedly, it's extremely difficult to determine who has "too much" fear with any reliability, let alone to the point where you can say there is a "group" that shouldn't be allowed to perform some activity.
If anything, I know I've worked with people who are racist and in some cases didn't like me because they didn't like white people. Similarly, I knew people who certainly expressed prejudice against gays, but I also knew there were a few closeted gays in the unit. Given that they didn't take any action but possibly could have, should they have been disqualified from service?
On a more practical note, how would you make a policy out of this? Would we be able to find enough people to form a military? And would you be able to sell that policy to people who were suspicious that you were trying to shrink the military?
Sorry, but using a physical world analogy for a virtual world concept = FAIL.
Go back and think about it, and you will see that as soon as you are dealing with a easily replicated key (such as a combination lock) the number of key holders increases over time, making lock replacement necessary.
Passwords aren't limited to the virtual world; they are routinely used in military and intelligence scenarios in meatspace.
But you're missing the point, as are most of the responses I got.
I'm not using keys as an analogy to say that users are responsible with passwords and can be trusted with them.
I'm saying that users aren't necessarily the weak point; that they can in fact employ a security device and do so on a regular basis.
But it has to be a security device that actually works. Passwords are broken.
To use the kind of analogy you despise, can you imagine lugging around a key that weighed five pounds?
Of course not. You would probably not want to dig it out of your closet, so it would be left lying about somewhere obvious. You could only keep four or five on you on a regular basis.
The human brain isn't good at storing random data. The brain's budget for purely random data varies greatly but it's probably around 200 bits or so. A typical good password should have 40 bits of entropy.
So we can typically store maybe four or five passwords. We wind up reusing them, writing them down, etc.
If you're trying to devise a security device, just like any device, you have to work with the limitations of the user. Passwords, fundamentally, don't work and the only reason we use them ubiquitously is that we blame the user instead of designing a better device.
For the record, that wasn't my math, I was responding to it by pointing out (rather obliquely I guess) that the larger radius of contamination can be used to greater effect than by trying to blast every individual person to smithereens.
The *only* evidence your article produces is an affidavit that refers to a "listening device placed in the cellular telephone," which it says could be software or hardware.
Either way, they had to either put something in there physically or upload some software. They can't just switch any phone's mic on.
Let me change one word in your first sentence (in italics):
This has got to be one of the stupidest moves they could make. Make and repeal all the laws you want, but there's no getting around the fact that there are some people that just hate blacks.
Which was very true when the army was first integrated, and it's still true today.
Nope, integration actually worked in the military, far more than it ever did in broader society. One of the reasons I suspect liberals hate the military is that we actually did what liberals paid lip service to.
The army survived integration, though, and it's fine. It'll survive the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell, and it'll still be fine
The better comparison, though, would be including women in the ranks. There's never been an honest assessment of the impact, especially since all the services avoided allowing women in combat arms. In the Army, and from what I've heard it's true in other services, the non-combat arms jobs are becoming more like civilian jobs. I was attached to a support company while in Iraq, and they had constant disciplinary problems due to sex. NCOs who were combat arms and who were put in charge in support units have all said it's a nightmare dealing with all the issues that come up. 18-25 year old gay males are going to be fucking like rabbits; most gay guys consider that to be the number one selling point of being gay.
You won't hear much about it, just like you don't hear about the problems with integrating females. After all, all units have disciplinary problems, and they deal with them all the time. The difference is simply that when there are more problems, your command spends more time doing legal paperwork and less time working on training. You have more soldiers who are not pulling their weight. You lose camaraderie and get bickering and politics. I think that's been a major problem with our support units and, notably, we have been moving towards using contractors for support jobs far more than we used to. I can't see how we're going to insulate our combat units from this change.
The bottom line is that this is a social experiment being performed that will result in people dying. It's a privilege to serve, not a right, and not one that's worth a single person dying.
I'd rather have the gays in the military than the homophobes. At least then they'd all believe in the freedom they're fighting for.
Most American enlisted men, when it really comes down to it, are fighting more for each other than any abstract cause. They're not generally ideologues.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't turn off the accessories, so the heater will still work.
You DO know how a Heater works, don't you?
For those who don't or (like me) kinda sorta do.
I'm doubtful that a psychopath would be attracted to combat arms, after all, you're in an environment where there is constant, close social interaction and a lot of people who can kill you or lock you up if they discover who you are.
Yeah, if he was calling for fire (the guy I was talking about was operating an LRASS) he could have claimed a lot of kills. It depends how you count it, after all, the arty guys might want some credit. I'm not going to get into the debate because it's all a lot of dick waving, and that makes my arms tired.
Usually a confirmed kill is you acquire the target and pull the trigger, and no one else can reasonably claim it. Most kills for non-snipers are unconfirmed because everyone opens up and the squad collectively fires hundreds of rounds. So snipers get the most, and 200 would put you as one of the top snipers in the world, quoth Wikipedia.
You have made me realize an interesting point, though: as long as ISPs do not migrate their users to IPv6, they can charge extortionary prices for the remaining IPv4 addresses; ISPs have an incentive to create this artificial scarcity. Time to call for government regulation? ;)
Just to clarify, are you saying that it's time to regulate when we see the extortionate prices? And what's extortionate?
And, to further clarify, what regulation? If the ISPs, globally, are conspiring to create an artificial scarcity, that would be pretty easy to prove, and we have laws against that already.
However, both women did consent, but are claiming that Assange went "too far" and failed to stop on command -- continuing to have sex with a broken condom, having sex while one of them was asleep, etc.
There are cases where consenting adults can, during sex, do things that aren't entirely consenting because they're caught up in the moment. And it's damned easy to make stuff up. It's damned easy to to go overboard and crucify someone over it in the name of "zero tolerance" and such. No one has come up with a good system that consistently and fairly adjudicates sex charges.
But that's not a good argument to limit "rape" to only clearly violent encounters.
Either "rape" means violence, or it does not.
Simple battery is generally defined as any unwanted touch, no matter how light. Same with assault, you simply have to move in such a way that you deliberately restrict the person's freedom of movement.
Imagine if it wasn't so. A mugger would only need to corner a person and poke, because the victim couldn't (legally) do *anything* in response. It's already a bit like that with the squeegee guys in many cities.
In many cases, wives get away with abusing their husbands because they're "only" screaming at them and the men (and often the courts) don't view that as abusive.
Generally speaking, written laws have to be broad because people will actively seek out loopholes and exploit them. Social mores are subject to the same problem.
we should not conflate what Assange did [with] the sort of violent crime that most people think of when they think "rape."
Just to be sure: It's still something that I could never do to a woman, even if I didn't who she was. And it's morally equivalent, at least, to slapping a woman around. So, on the scumbag scale, he's at least on the order of a guy who hits his girlfriend, arguably worse.
sorry, BDA means "Battle-Damage Assessment" and is a catch all for casualties, vehicles destroyed, etc.
Your logic reported you to the UN for torturing it. Besides, if you really think soliders aren't capable of, and encouraged to, think of shooting someone in a warzone as an almost orgasmic experience, you really need to talk to a few more soldiers.
Well, being a veteran, a few combat veterans actually opened up to me, and none of them said anything remotely like that.
While in, I formulated a rule that if someone claimed something that sounded over the top, I would divide by ten or drop it an order of magnitude, whichever made more sense. If someone was a great mechanic, it meant he could probably change the oil on his car. If his girlfriend was a model, she was probably average. One story about 200 confirmed kills turned into 100, then definitely 30, and BTW it was indirect so not "confirmed kills" as much as "estimated BDA." And damned near every National Guard idiot has a collection of combat patches of units he knows nothing about, and they all claim to be infantry because they were slotted as infantry for six months.
So, really, if someone is talking about how shooting someone was "orgasmic," first of all, I'd be suspicious as to whether the person really was a combat veteran, because that's just not how I've ever heard it described on the *rare* occasion they talk about it. And even then, I'd take it with a huge fucking grain of salt, because I guarantee you that there are guys who will lie their asses off about that, and do it with a tone of total reverence.
But more important, have you ever noticed how all those important brackets and punctuation that you NEED in 99% of the languages are near impossible to type without breaking your fingers on non-English keyboard, especially if that language has to deal with a lot of diacritical characters? On most non-English keyboard the { and } brackets are only reachable with the combination of Alt-GR and 7-0. And let's not even talk about the "Polish writing keyboard layout", which is a nightmare to program with. I still think they did it on purpose, I cannot imagine that anyone could actually code using such a layout.
In Liepzig, Germany, I saw some little web terminals (running IE 6, natch) with a sticky on them explaining how to type the @ sign.
Except, you know, every three seconds, unless you have remapped your keyboard so that the most important command in vim is not assigned to the far top left corner of the keyboard.
Heh... vim and emacs trolls can *still* generate a dozen identical replies.
(Yes, loved vim especially the . command, switched to emacs because after several years switching modes *still* irritated me.)
After 10 years most of the debt build up by persistent trade deficits will be gone.
Debt is built up when government spending exceeds revenues from taxation and fees and the government closes the difference by issuing bonds. A trade deficit means the private sector is buying more G&S overseas than it's selling. The two have nothing in common.
...you should be well on your way to raw material and energy self sufficiency.
Are you insane? Why, in God's name, would we want to restrict ourselves to using only materials and energy from within the US? That would be economic suicide!
European here
Personally I'd suggest the FED does QE++
Thankfully, not all Europeans are complete economic ignoramuses, and the political class (at least of bigger nations like Germany and the UK) are wisely cutting spending instead. I hope we'll take their example.
FTFS: "unlimited consumer lawsuits from unlimited plaintiffs"
Au contraire. You can limit the lawsuits by limiting the amount of spam you send.
I use a 16,000 line /etc/hosts file to keep from seeing crap like that.
And a decade ago, people signed up for a toolbar that showed a banner ad every minute, just for an extra 50 cents per hour of surfing the web. Some people even memorized the best startup sequence so that they could get GetPaid4, Spedia, and AllAdvantage running all at the same time.
There are still ventures like that. There was one that would give you free net access, another gave you a free pc, and there are still a ton of sites where you can fill in surveys and crap for coupons or even money.
There seems to be a whole industry oriented around people not doing any work and not getting paid for it.
What the Good Lord Algorithmic Efficiency Improvements giveth, the Evil Lord Real-Time-Virus-Scanner taketh away.
Heretic! Thine computer is a vessel of purity whose sole purpose for existence is to be continually purged of impurity. Thou shalt be grateful for the pittance of cycles that our great Real-Tyme Virus Scanner does leave ye to work with your ill begotten "productivity applications."
Thats an interesting figure because when the alpha came out DEC were predicting 1000 fold improvement in speed over about the same period. They split the improvement over factors of ten: clock speed, parallelism in the CPU and multiple cores were each expected to deliver a factor of ten improvement.
Now while our algorithms might be getting better our programmers definitely are not. A lot of those improved algorithms must be in our APIs. Like the way its easy to use a Hashtable in java now but in the last you might have just searched a linear array.
There are more programmers because programming is becoming more accessible, so naturally more people who suck at programming are doing it.
There's another problem: while gains from Moore's law have historically been realized by a recompile or less, most new algorithms require actually changing the code.
Watching the video, the conclusion that the video makes is "...You are likely not in the fastest line".
That does not necessarily mean that the reverse (the title) is true -- and yet they somehow jump to that conclusion with the title "...You are likely in the slowest Line."
Can we get some people who actually understand this magical thing called "logic" to start editing Slashdot?
While we're at it, I'd like peace in the middle east, and a pony.
... the whole thing could move about twice as fast if people didn't get old.
Pardon my summarizing, but I don't see that changing any time soon.
I once worked at a grocery store for two years. It had nine checkout lines, and in that time all of them were manned once that I saw. Don't remember when it was, but most likely it was before the 4th of July or Thanksgiving.
You must have never been in a grocery store when there's news of a snowstorm.
... putting people out of work.
Please educate yourself.
In particular, if you find yourself making protectionist arguments or anti-technology arguments, these are not necessarily based on a zero-sum premise, but they are certainly very prone to it.
The reason the self-checkout lines don't cost jobs is because they allow the store to do more business. Having someone make a list of what's in a cart instead of having a machine do it means:
Spending a year putting stuff in a cart means that next year the employee will have no new qualifications, so their next job isn't going to be much better. That means they're not going to supply as much to the economy, and will demand less from it.
Because the employees are idle when the store is slow, they're not getting paid much. Less pay means less demand for goods and services.
For the customers, it means peak times involve longer waiting. They'll have to make decisions about how to utilize their time, e.g. an hour standing in line vs. an hour with the family. Generally, they'll buy less stuff, meaning the store will do less business.
In any individual case, it doesn't seem like it makes a huge difference. Just a few hours here and there wasted, but in aggregate it means that capital investment allows everyone involved to simply do more stuff; you actually expand the economy. And it doesn't expand "at the top" and "trickle down," rather, the expansion is happening at the lowest level, people buying and selling goods, more demand for qualified employees, and the results of that trickle up to the larger investors.
You can see the difference quite dramatically if you visit a third world country. Everything they do is via teams of dozens of guys, the results are usually inconsistent and slow, so it just means that getting anything done takes forever. There is less business done, people don't have qualifications for good jobs, and the whole place is poor. (But not poor like we understand poverty here, poor as in dying in the streets during a bad winter poor.)
And if the one group of soldiers would harm or through inaction allow harm to another, then I wouldn't want them in the military.
Not to be pedantic, but I'll assume you meant something like "then they ought not be in the military."
And I think this is hard to dispute: all soldiers are human, so as a group they are subject to fear and so they could, through inaction, allow someone to die.
Homophobia is a manifestation of fear. (I make no pretense of being a psychologist, though.) And the natural objection is that it's hardly the same as being afraid of bullets, but in my experience fear doesn't work in such a rational manner.
Is there something wrong with me because I can jump out of an airplane, but I can't stand snakes and spiders? And, while I've got about 25 jumps under my belt, I've never been the first jumper. It's *much* harder to be the first because you spend a good few minutes staring down at the empty sky and can lock up with panic. If you're even second in line you're inside the plane and just have to follow the guy in front, hand off your reserve, turn and just "push" through the emptiness. If I had been the first guy, it's entirely possible I could have been a jump refusal and then I would have probably lost my wings.
So, even for a case where fear is a clear disqualifier for a eminently practical reason, and even when that fear is tested repeatedly, it's extremely difficult to determine who has "too much" fear with any reliability, let alone to the point where you can say there is a "group" that shouldn't be allowed to perform some activity.
If anything, I know I've worked with people who are racist and in some cases didn't like me because they didn't like white people. Similarly, I knew people who certainly expressed prejudice against gays, but I also knew there were a few closeted gays in the unit. Given that they didn't take any action but possibly could have, should they have been disqualified from service?
On a more practical note, how would you make a policy out of this? Would we be able to find enough people to form a military? And would you be able to sell that policy to people who were suspicious that you were trying to shrink the military?
Sorry, but using a physical world analogy for a virtual world concept = FAIL.
Go back and think about it, and you will see that as soon as you are dealing with a easily replicated key (such as a combination lock) the number of key holders increases over time, making lock replacement necessary.
Passwords aren't limited to the virtual world; they are routinely used in military and intelligence scenarios in meatspace.
But you're missing the point, as are most of the responses I got.
I'm not using keys as an analogy to say that users are responsible with passwords and can be trusted with them.
I'm saying that users aren't necessarily the weak point; that they can in fact employ a security device and do so on a regular basis.
But it has to be a security device that actually works. Passwords are broken.
To use the kind of analogy you despise, can you imagine lugging around a key that weighed five pounds?
Of course not. You would probably not want to dig it out of your closet, so it would be left lying about somewhere obvious. You could only keep four or five on you on a regular basis.
The human brain isn't good at storing random data. The brain's budget for purely random data varies greatly but it's probably around 200 bits or so. A typical good password should have 40 bits of entropy.
So we can typically store maybe four or five passwords. We wind up reusing them, writing them down, etc.
If you're trying to devise a security device, just like any device, you have to work with the limitations of the user. Passwords, fundamentally, don't work and the only reason we use them ubiquitously is that we blame the user instead of designing a better device.
Users are the weakest link.
Really? How often do people leave their keys lying around? Or blindly hand them to a stranger?
People can be pretty responsible with secure tokens when they understand the protocol to use them.
That infographic is silly enough to be rejected by the editors of USA Today.
To put that in perspective, to be rejected by USA Today we're talking about Monty Python levels of silly, easily.
For the record, that wasn't my math, I was responding to it by pointing out (rather obliquely I guess) that the larger radius of contamination can be used to greater effect than by trying to blast every individual person to smithereens.
The *only* evidence your article produces is an affidavit that refers to a "listening device placed in the cellular telephone," which it says could be software or hardware.
Either way, they had to either put something in there physically or upload some software. They can't just switch any phone's mic on.
Let me change one word in your first sentence (in italics):
This has got to be one of the stupidest moves they could make. Make and repeal all the laws you want, but there's no getting around the fact that there are some people that just hate blacks.
Which was very true when the army was first integrated, and it's still true today.
Nope, integration actually worked in the military, far more than it ever did in broader society. One of the reasons I suspect liberals hate the military is that we actually did what liberals paid lip service to.
The army survived integration, though, and it's fine. It'll survive the end of Don't Ask Don't Tell, and it'll still be fine
The better comparison, though, would be including women in the ranks. There's never been an honest assessment of the impact, especially since all the services avoided allowing women in combat arms. In the Army, and from what I've heard it's true in other services, the non-combat arms jobs are becoming more like civilian jobs. I was attached to a support company while in Iraq, and they had constant disciplinary problems due to sex. NCOs who were combat arms and who were put in charge in support units have all said it's a nightmare dealing with all the issues that come up. 18-25 year old gay males are going to be fucking like rabbits; most gay guys consider that to be the number one selling point of being gay.
You won't hear much about it, just like you don't hear about the problems with integrating females. After all, all units have disciplinary problems, and they deal with them all the time. The difference is simply that when there are more problems, your command spends more time doing legal paperwork and less time working on training. You have more soldiers who are not pulling their weight. You lose camaraderie and get bickering and politics. I think that's been a major problem with our support units and, notably, we have been moving towards using contractors for support jobs far more than we used to. I can't see how we're going to insulate our combat units from this change.
The bottom line is that this is a social experiment being performed that will result in people dying. It's a privilege to serve, not a right, and not one that's worth a single person dying.
I'd rather have the gays in the military than the homophobes. At least then they'd all believe in the freedom they're fighting for.
Most American enlisted men, when it really comes down to it, are fighting more for each other than any abstract cause. They're not generally ideologues.