plenty of jobs where people on the ground are working with kit worth more than that. Easy for a forklift or truck driver to cause a lot of damage when moving stuff around.
It happened where I worked once.
Auto company using a "Sel 32" computer as the central tool for automating distributor testing-calibration. Systems Engineering Labs warned them that they were going to discontinue the line so they needed to stock any spares while production was still happening, so the company they were leasing it from jacked up the price to pay for stocking a bunch of spares.
Company decided to buy their own to save a few bucks and be sure the plant kept running and wasn't hostage to future price rises on an irreplacable, mission-critical machine. Cost was a few hundred short of a million. (The 98 cents pricing phenomenon, no doubt.)
Box showed up on the loading dock. One rack, floor to ceiling. Forklift operator picked it up, took it down the asile, took a corner too fast, and it fell off the forklift. Hit so hard it not only set off the tip/shock detectors but BENT THE RACK.
SEL, of course, wouldn't warranty it. The auto company was self-insured. So they buoght ANOTHER one (and kept the "clunker" for spare boards if anything failed in the future.)
Forklift driver was NOT fired. (Union, hadn't been notified he was toting a megabuck this time, and lift drivers are allowed a quota of oopsies.)
Re:Godwin's law, misstated - convenient for neo-NA
on
1984 Comes To Boston
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· Score: 1
Ok. Simplified and paraphrased, it states that a thread, if it does not die off, eventually it provoke a NAZI reference.
Sounds like common sense, to me at least. If a thread dies, the law holds, regardless of a mention of NAZI's or not, via the "if it did not die first" statement.
You missed the point of the rule: One way for a thread to die is to just stop. Another is to have the active end sucked away from the original subject and into a stock infinite-loop. Mention of NAZIs is a sign that the latter has happened.
ok, lets update the rule then. if you say "meme" or "paradigm" or any other buzzword, you lose.
All words were buzzwords when they were young. This is how useful new words happen.
Abandoning any conversation when a buzzword shows up cuts you out of all conversations about subjects where an important generalization has been made recently (in language-evolutionary timescales).
Godwin's law, misstated - convenient for neo-NAZIs
on
1984 Comes To Boston
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· Score: 5, Informative
If you make a Nazi or 1984 reference, you lose.
Wrong.
Godwin's law, as originally stated, was (approximately) that any discussion thread on usenet (and similar systems), if it did not die first, would eventually warp into something that would provoke a mention of NAZIs - and that the NAZI reference indicated that it had wandered from interesting topics to topics that had been rehashed so many times that they were no longer interesting - at least to old hands (such as Godwin) who had other things to spend their time and internet access on.
Of course, this was quicky misstated into the "Folk Godwins Law" - warped forms like "Mention NAZIs and the thread is dead. You can all drop the discussion and go home now." or "First one to mention NAZIs loses." These forms have been used to systematically shut down debate, whenever someone makes a posting propagating any totalitarian meme that happens to have been used by the NAZIs and someone else points out how the meme had been used to aid oppression.
Such misuse is not merely misinformed, but dangerous. It leads to the increased spread of totalitarian memes and the suppression of counter-memes in the form of historical evidence of the memes' horrendous effects. "Those who do not understand history are condemed to repeat it." And this misstatement of Godwin's law is a prime example of an enabling meme - which selects against learning history and promotes "improved" cover-versions of its worst disasters.
Godwin himself has pointed out the misstatement. But he also asserts that his original law holds - because discussions of the downside of the Folk version (such as this one), though they point out the misuse, do NOT put the thread back on the subject - instead diverting it down the rathole of discussing the misstatement of Godwin's law. So the damaage due to the misuse still occurs.
But venues like Slashdot allow branching. This can take asides aside - so the main thread can continue.
Since you have been so nice as to make the Folk Godwin's Law posting as the FIRST (still above threshold) post, perhaps we can pull that discussion aside RIGHT HERE, and head off repeated Folk Godwin cites in the rest of the comments.
Perhaps that way we can ACTUALLY DEAL WITH the important business at hand: Defending freedom from yet another totalitarian encroachment.
So I STRONGLY suggest that anyone who has read this far STOP following this thread and GET BACK TO that more life-critical task.
I'm not a complete continuity freak, so I can't tell if the movie violated any of Asimov's universe, but from what I can remember, it fits pretty well (if you ignore Dr. Calvin's age) and might even explain a few things.
I haven't seen it yet so I'm not sure when it's set. But I can think of two reasons (besides easy-on-the-eyes) to cast a young-appearing Dr. Calvin:
1) Wasn't she young when she did her early work?
2) Medical tech is ALREADY making big headway on keeping people looking young - as is the general improvement in stress levels and reduction in skin exposure to damaging influences (especially with broader general knowlege about UV skin damage). Even if the lifespan cap isn't improved much yet, people are looking young much longer. (Example: Cher! B-) ) Why should this trend not continue?
Further, if medical tech DOES crack life-extension, would you expect, say, a 90 year old with an expected lifespan of 800 years to look like a 90 year old when people passing threescore-and-ten are rare?
So I expect future people to look younger at a given age than they do now. At first they'll appear as young as technology can manage. Later they might chose cosmetic age as a business uniform, to smooth interpersonal communication (much as car horns are chosen to be in proportion to the mass of the car, so you can identify problems more accurately). Still later it might become a fashion statement.
That makes it a perfect fit, since Asimov himself was not a complete continuity freak and was not concerned if one of his stories violated incidental issues in any of his previous stories.
Assuming it actually isn't a misfit.
(He quoted Emerson "A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds.".)
There I must disagree with both Asimov and Emmerson. Asimov may have used the quote for a valid purpose. But most of those quoting Emmerson are using it to avoid admitting a mistake in a debate or changing opinions when they're inconsistent with facts. Often this is used to continue oppressive behavior once it's identified, without even bothering to find a new and less transparent excuse.
IMHO "A foolish INconsistency is the small mind of hobgobblins." But it just doesn't have the ring of Emmerson's line.
[...] the New York Times is among the most reliable individual sources of news there is.
I can't agree with that.
The New York Times is engaged in propaganda by systematic omission, cost-benefit distortion by selective coverage, use of loaded terms, occasional outright lies, and a number of other classic propaganda techniques. They are doing this, at least, on several important issues where I have both a strong opinion different from theirs and enough knowlege of the facts to recognize their misreporting.
Then there are the string of reporters caught "embelishing, exaggerating, and outright lying". Their own Jayson Blair and Mike Finkel are poster-boys for this. But other major outlets have had similar problems with their reporters and other writers recently: Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe, Jay Forman in Slate, and Stephen Glass of the New Republic to name just four.
Given that I can SEE that the New York Times systematically and deliberately misreports issues important to me, and has an editorial and personnel policy that resulted in employing multiple reporters who were fabricating news, how can I POSSIBLY consider them a reliable source on anything? Let alone "among the most reliable"?
NO news source is reliable. You ALWAYS have to go to multiple sources and resolve any conflicts if you want to get to the truth.
And given my personal experience I must rate the New York Times quite low on my reliability scale.
We have freedom of the press. That means anybody can say anything. Being a big, successful paper doesn't say a DAMNED THING about its reliability. It just tells you they have a good business model. (Even their FORMER reliability is only an indication, since personnel or ownership turnovers can change them significantly in reasonably short order.)
Given that anybody who can afford a press can print anything, the fact that anybody can do it on the internet for less money up front means very little about reliability (but a lot about breadth of coverage). You still have to evaluate your news sources, whether paper, broadcast, or new-medium.
Lately, on all the issues I'm interested in, the establishment media has uniformly fallen short in reliability, while reliable sources ARE available on the Internet - and virtually nowhere else (short of becoming an investigative reporter onself).
The Japanese Fair Trade Commission has ordered Microsoft to cut a restrictive contract clause, designed to protect the software giant from patent-related lawsuits by PC manufacturers that sell products using Microsoft's Window operating systems. Under such provision, Japanese makers would be unable to sue Microsoft even if the software giant's technologies are deemed to violate their patents.
Assuming that's a fair characterization of the contract provisions, I'd have to side with Microsoft on this one. (Egad! End of the World!)
Consider this scenario:
- Some random branch of Sony (or some other japanese conglomerate) gets a JP patent on some random software/hardware thingie.
- Sony builds it into their laptops and wants Microsoft to support it.
- Microsoft supports it, and includes it in their mainline product (even if it doesn't work on non-Sony platforms). Now every copy of their software shipped on a non-Sony platform is infringing.
- Some Sony competitor clones the hardware. Suddenly the patented-in-japan feature starts running on THEIR platform.
- Sony sues Microsoft. And wins. And collects big bucks for ALL the copies of the software that went out (which WERE infringing...).
So Microsoft gets beaten up for being a good guy and supporting Sony's gimmick.
Of course Microsoft wants to head off this scenario. So they write this clause into their contract. Sony (and every other HW vendor) now has a choice: Let MS use their patents, or don't have MS support of their platform.
What's "unfair" about that? How much is it worth to Sony to have Microsoft support their products? This is the set of terms under which Microsoft is willing to do it. They can take it, leave it, or negotiate a clarifying modification.
IMHO even their defacto monopoly power isn't being misused in this case.
(Besides: If Sony {or whomever} doesn't like it, they can always drop Microsoft and ship Linux, BSD, or what-have-you. B-) )
The Drudge Report proved that the internet is better and more reliable than the New York Times?
Yes.
Because the Drudge Report proved that the New York Times was suppressing relevant news, which the Internet broke.
If "reliable" means you can count on it to report news, rather than suppress it to further a political agenda, then that makes the internet more reliable.
If "reliable" means "more likely to contain truth than falsehood" it's a different discussion. But mainstream papers - including ESPECIALLY the New York Times of late - have been repeatedly caught in falsehoods, and not just omissions. So you ALWAYS have to do your own investigation on ANY report in ANY medium, to determine for yourself whether it's gospel or bogus.
As Fox News says: "We report. You decide." If you punt that decision to the operators of ANY medium - especially on the basis of their own propaganda about their accuracy and that they cover "all the news that's fit to print" - you've just put the ring in your own nose and the lead in someone else's hand.
When it comes to the domestic animals' interests versus the farmer's, which way will the decision go?
My uncle, on the other hand, takes a different view. In his view, if he can't see pro-conservative remarks in an article, it's liberal trash.
Your uncle may be making a very important point.
The MAIN tool of propoganda is not the lie. It's the omission of truth. Selective reporting creates a false image, and THAT is the lie.
By carefully omitting one side of an issue while focusing coverage on another, the covered side can be made to appear objective truth or the popular viewpoint, rather than an off-the-wall speculation (perhaps long disproved) or some far-out splinter opinion.
Scientific results can be hidden from decision-makers. Health frauds can be propagated. Cost-benefit tradeoffs can appear massively reversed. Far-out political factions (at home or abroad) can be made to appear large or universal, while mainstream movements can appear to be splinters or nonexistant. Genocidal regimes can be made to look reasonable, opposition to them marginalized.
This misreporting can convince a lot of public opinion, converting people from one side to another and sometimes swaying elections. But the real power comes from fooling legislators and executive-branch decision-makers about the opinions of their constitutents - leading them by the nose in their lawmaking, regulation-making, enforcement decisions, and judicial appointments.
Because omission of a popular viewpoint (even if it's not popular with YOU) from allegedly "objective" news is such a powerful propaganda tool, it's also a powerful indicator that the outlet IS engaged in propaganda.
So your uncle has a point - and I don't mean on the TOP of his head.
how long has it been since the Times was really a relevant source of information in the real world?
Since computerized communication provided open sources of news that made it painfully obvious the Times had let ideology lead them into draconian self-censorship, bias, and occasional (but systematic) outright lies, rather than news coverage, to spread a political agenda.
It's tempting to say since they started that policy. But that still left them "relevant" - like the propaganda machine of ANY ideology with major political power is relevant. What killed their relevance is the availablility of sources they and their ilk couldn't suppress or ridicule into irrevelance.
This was starting to happen in the early days of netnews and bulletin-board systems. But the explosion of home-computer connectivity and web-based interfaces brought it to the general public with a vengance.
I'd say the watershed event was the Drudge Report's breaking of the Lewinsky scandal. People had been switching off mainstream media news for some time. But this made it clear to the broad public that the internet was not just a good source of news, but a BETTER and MORE RELIABLE one, than the broadcaster/newspaper/magazine axis. In particular, it brought the latter's self-censorship and bias into the public eye.
Relax. This is bogus and happens all the time.
on
Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
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· Score: 3, Informative
Isn't it just grand how thousands of very intelligent geeks spent countless hours creating and improving Linux and Red Hat, and now a bunch of doughy, pasty-faced vultures at "Goodkind Labaton Rudoff & Sucharow LLP" will rake in an assload of cash from this?
Naw.
There are a number of sleazebag outfits like "Dewey, Sooem, and Howe" who file class action suits every time a stock takes a major dive, and advertise for some (possibly former) stockholder to sign on as lead plantif. (Expect several more before this is over.)
Usually what happens is they get before a judge and get pitched out on their ear. Occasionally the company screwed up, in which case they MIGHT get some judgement - of which Dewey et. al. split a big chunk and a bunch of stockholders maybe get pennies per share. It's like playing the lottery, for law firms with some small-change time on their hands.
They almost never get anywhere. But when a whale truly IS wounded the shark's chunk is SO big that every time there's blood in the water the sharks circulate in hopes of a feed.
Red Hat will no doubt slap these guys down in due course - at which point you will see a small note in the stock's news page. That's part of why corporations keep at least one attorney on staff. Partyl to make sure they stay squeaky-clean - partly to lead the coutner-attack when somebody says they're dirty.
Pushing forward is a temptation but also bad.
on
Red Hat Vs. The Lawyers
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Microsoft held back signifigant portions of their Windows 2000/Office 2000 era earnings in a "cookie jar" that was supposed to level out revenue after the dot com bubble burst.
Which also cheats investors - the ones who had and sold stock that DIDN'T go up - or didn't go up as much as it should - because Microsoft understated their earnings. Investors are trading stock all the time, and while investment is not zero-sum a market distortion reified by a transaction during the distortion IS. It helps some investors by hurting others by defrauding them out of their money. Even if NOT reified by a transaction it may have produced an opportunity cost - as someone held stock they could have liquidated for more money to sieze some other opportunity.
There are tight rules on this.
Managers believe that investors like stocks that show steady upward growth rather than a roller-coaster revenue chart - even if the area under the roller-coaster is much larger. So some of them try to even things out by pushing parts of windfalls into the next quarter, rather than taking it when it comes and creating future expectations they can't meet.
My preference would be to take the money and run - then in the post-report conference call tell the analysts that's what we did, what the numbers WOULD have been if we'd fudged, but that if another windfall happens (and we don't get beaten up in the market THIS time) we'll take the money and run again because it's stupid to leave it on the table. Then the analysts can set reasonable expectations for the next quarter.
- Attacks the immune (i.e. antivirus) system directly.
- Goes dormant until the infected cell is activated for other purposes.
- Mutates "rapidly" for a virus (though slowly on reproductive cycle time scales), resulting in mutiple strains from a single infection after a few years.
- Infects slowly enough that it doesn't create a tight cluster of infected individuals.
This enables it to spread widely before the occasional activation of the immune system cells carrying it expand its infection in an exponential cascade taking out the doomed host.
Birthday viruses / easter eggs are a simple mechanism to allow wide spread of computer viruses before they take out their hosts - and the hosts that are down at that time provide a reinfection reservoir. But it's primitive compared to AIDS.
A highly damaging virus could be made which makes random choices on when to utterly trash its host.
They aim for control, not damage. It's about money, not vandalism.
Unfortunately, while there are several criminal enterpises spreading worms/trojans/viruses whose intent is to create DDoS zombies, spam remailers, or keylogger/filters looking for bank account access or other sensitive information, there are still plenty of virus authors chasing other things - including those who will vandalize machines for the fun of it.
And there are power groups with significant membership whose agendas would be advanced by taking out as much as possible of the IT infrastructure of the world - the more widespread and more lasting the damage, the better for their purposes. A family of worms with AIDS-like properites would serve their interests nicely.
Finally - while diseases evolve to be relatively benign, they do so randomly (and designed programs often don't do quite what was intended, especially on first release). Sometimes you get one that strikes a balance between spread and damage that results in a massive, widespread dieoff among the host populatin before the combined evolution of the disease and hosts contain its remanents. Classic example: Bubonic Plague.
So let's not be lulled by analogies to the common cold and childhood diseases. They're the result of a lot of death and misery before the diseases found a stable niche. And while computer viruses share much of the math of disease spread they are designed, not evolved, and can easily have properties rarely seen in nature.
As I understand it, the open gateways are gone. SMS messages now all require a fee.
If that's true (or even if it's not but these guys aren't using some free gateway), that would mean they're paying per-message, the same as the rest of us.
I've always had my doubts about the claims that charging a per-email fee could be used to stop spam. (After all, the SPAMMERS are charging for the spam, aren't they?) It might make some impact - but would also hit legitimate users. Any setpoint for the fee would block some legitimate email messages and pass some spam. And since spam earns money I betcha if you cranked it up to where it stopped MOST legit email there'd still be lots of spam.
But if the spammers are paying per-message for SMS we've got the test case right here, don't we?
10MW won't make a dent I think, but it's a good idea as an experiment. It would be barely 1% of the capacity of one of the nuclear plants up the road.
But $2/watt is a good price. Last time I looked solar panels were going for about $10/watt.
Also: Around here solar panels generate the equivalent of about 5 hours worth of their rating per day and I bet a tidal generator would do significantly more than that.
What's (24 / PI) * integral[0 = x pi] (sin(x)**3)? It should beat that because it would flat-top rather than being 10 Mw at the minute of peak flow.
I think the stuff reflects the microwaves back through the food, to effectively double the cooking speed.
No, the previous poster had it right.
Your basic microwave heats the food where there's water or resistive material (like carbon). So it tends to make crispy materia soggy (by "steaming" it with the water evaporated from the wet places). And if you heat it long enough to dry it out, some spots heat enough to become burned - at which point they absorb more microwaves and become MORE burned - in a positive feedback that makes spotty burns rather than a crispy crust.
The material is very thinly coated with metal and quite resistive. So it absorbs a portion of the microwaves and becomes very hot. The infrared is used to crisp the surface of the material, like a broiler would.
Getting the packaging balanced - so the food is thawed, frozen, and crisped properly in the oven - takes some work. (Resistive cookware is available for do-it-yourselfers who want to broil in a microwave oven.)
Such resistive packaging would make a rotten reflector. It's more like a "stealth" coating on an aircraft than a microwave mirror. (It might be useful, though, to make a microwave absorbing wall between your antenna and a nearby interference source.)
Sun has a long history of vacilating on whether and how to open their products. Hardware interfaces, SPARC-based hardware cloning, various software packages, and so on. Often this means half-opening, licensing and failing to renew, and so on.
It seems to be different every time. But the common thread is that they never commit. (I think the closest they came is Open Office where at least we have a fork.)
It was due to their refusal to open things sufficiently for me to hack my Sun hardware and software that I switched to Linux a few years back (and swore off anything but open source for my home machines), rather than trying to upgrade my Sun systems for the coming millenium.
Came Y2K not a lot of stuff broke. But I shut down the last two anyhow. Too late, guys!
(And too late for me too, apparently. Things have been so busy in the day job that I haven't had a chance to actually DO any hacking at home - except on the houses themselves. B-( )
Indicates the percentage of scans that resulted in a found infection (e.g. 1% means that in 10.000 virus scans, 1.000 of these scans resulted in found infections).
They did this twice, too. So does 1% equal one percent of machines infected, or ten percent?
(I refer to this as "Oakland School Administration math" because a high administrator of the Oakland California schools, while testifying before the state legislature, cited the percentages of black teachers in Oakland schools vs. black people in the US population, with the percentage far lower for the teachers. But in the same testimony she gave the actual numbers of black teachers and total teachers, and in fact the percentage of black teachers in their schools was far HIGHER than blacks in the general population. She'd blown the percentage computation. Doubly funny, since she was testifying about how the new teacher certification tests were unfair because they required far too much arithmetic.)
Here is a link explaining how Moore's alleged stance on copyright issues is being used to damage the profitability of the film:
Oh, teriffic.
Now if his box office numbers tank he can blame the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (TM) rather than word-of-mouth from the first viewers about the quality and/or accuracy (or lack thereof) of the film.
He gets his message out, money, to blame his opposition, and to help the RIAA with its flamewar on techno-"Pirates", all in one swell foop.
And that means we'll probably be hearing ANOTHER round of media hype for ANOTHER of his hit pieces next year.
Funny, but this person is not far off from what would thoroughly discourage the Chinese authorities. What if everyone starts sending bullshit revolutionary messages? Let 'em try to lock the whole country up.
What if thousands of people demonstrated in opposition to the government, and stood up to tanks?
Well it happened. They KILLED them. End of problem for the government.
What you need to understand about China: They've got a LOT of people. They can kill MILLIONS of them and not make a serious dent in their "human resources".
And they have done so. Repeatedly.
It kept the population in check for generations. It brought them back INTO check when they started to work their way out after Mao died.
Do that often enough, hard enough, and getting a critical mass together to oppose the government becomes essentially impossible - especially when the government is actively watching for such things to get started - in order to nip them in the bud.
Passive resistance doesn't do the whole job - despite the establishment media's constant pushing of it as the solution to tyrrany. It has a long history of leading people, in mass, to the slaughter. (Even its two claimed victories - India and the US Civil Rights movement - are illusory. The Brits were trying to dump India and Ghandi gave them an excuse. The US civil rights movement didn't produce REAL gains until the riots of the '60s.)
Non-violent resistance DOES have a function - claiming the moral high-ground, in case violent resistance is needed later.
But to overthrow or reform a tyrrany that is doing active suppression of opposition, you need a Shelling point - a moment where people all KNOW that the target is achievable and the moment is NOW, WITHOUT having to plan it in advance. (It's a Shelling point when the frog hits the boiling water.) The major thrust of government's internal policies is to eliminate Shelling points.
And the main effect of massive civil disobedience in the form of bogus anti-government internet messages in China would be to identify the low-grade malcontents for mass punishment, "disappearance", or show-trials as object lessons for the rest, before they become high-grade revolutionaries.
Back in the days of telephone cables and communication satellites the NSA was tapping pretty much all communication in and out of the US.
Comsats were easy: Just point a big dish at 'em.
The transatlantic cable hit the coast and immediately took a microwave hop. NSA had a big instalation right under that hop. What a coincidence. (I'm not sure what they did about transPacific cables. But I'd be surprised if they weren't on the job.)
And now it has come out that one of the main jobs of the US nuclear sub fleet during the cold war was to tap Russian undersea cables - under the sea.
With the NSA tapping US and Russian communication, do you want to take any bets on other country's comm being tapped?
IMHO the only thing that's new is that pieces of it are leaking into the public news channels.
1.the CIA used to be prevented from spying on US citizens, not the NSA.
2.Patriot act I and II (which was quietly approved on the day that we announced the "capture" of Sadaam) stripped all that pretense away. Any
group is allowed to spy on us, with any group being (NSA, CIA, Fatherland Defense, and DOJ).
There's plenty of misbehavior to point at on both sides. But let's understand it.
From at least the mid '70s to about the mid '90s (as far as us outside the "security community" wall can tell) the breakdown was this:
- FBI was responsible for investigations involving interstate lawbreaking, kidnapping (assumed to involve intestate flight), and domestic security (including investigating spy rings and conducting security clearance investigations). Their operations often lead to prosecutions and are intermittently subjected to court scrutiny and on-the-record congressional investigation. So they must meet strong constitutional tests, or risk losing cases, injunctions, and civil-rights suits.
- CIA was responsible for spying and covert operation. Their operations are compartmentalized for security - which limits oversight and control - and are often outside the law in the areas where they operate. They were prohibited from operating inside the US at all - due to constitunal-authorization concerns, practical concerns (like coups, political sabotage,...), potential legal issues if their information is used in a criminal investigation , and to preempt inter-departmental turf wars by clearly defining the boundaries.
- The NSA was charged with signals intelligence - both decoding to hunt for enemy action and protecting US communications - government, corporate, and personal - from foreign spying. As a side-effect they end up intercepting lots of private domestic communication content that the government isn't authorized to use. So they held it tightly (which also helped protect their methods) and dribbled it out pretty much only to the intelligence community (because a drop of it in a criminal case could blow the case). (Indeed, for decades the US claimed they didn't exist. Joke: NSA = No Such Agency.)
Info from NSA (apparently) fed mainly into CIA (which had the political/military implication analysis section). CIA would give info to FBI when appropriate, mainly stuff related to domestic spying and security clearances. (CIA and NSA info generally could NOT be used in criminal cases, because it's collected without probable cause or warrant. The constitutional protections would get stretched by using it to generate a "tip", telling the FBI where to look for something - but the info they developed had to come from open observation -> probable cause or warrants to be used in court.)
During the Clinton administration the wall between CIA and FBI was raised: ALL communication between them had to go up a bureaucratic red-tape chain and be handed over through a special office headed by a Clinton appointee (after approval by that office). The same set of Clinton administration officials came up with the idea that terrorism should be treated as a criminal offences rather than acts of war.
The result: No information was passed through the red-tape gauntlet from NSA and CIA to FBI. First fallout: The "nuclear secrets for campaign contributions" investigation was gutted (leading to leaks from frustrated agents.) (Some speculate that gutting this was the reason for the change.) Second fallout: Info about Bin Laden's activity didn't reach the FBI. The Clinton administration had several offers from Middle Eastern powers to hand over Bin Laden, which they turned down because the FBI couldn't make a criminal case against him. Third fallout: The mechanism hadn't been dismantled by 9/11.
The Bush administration went overboard the other direction. The Constitution's protections of the accused are relaxed in wars and the like - apparently because holding a trial in the middle of a battlefield is impractica
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I agree with this law, but lawmakers probably see mod chips as analogous to mounting guns on your car.
I take it you've never been to the Roy Rogers Museum. One of the exhibits is his parade car, which has hundreds of guns mounted on it.
As handles for the shift lever, door handles, hood ornament, and just decorating everything in sight.
plenty of jobs where people on the ground are working with kit worth more than that. Easy for a forklift or truck driver to cause a lot of damage when moving stuff around.
It happened where I worked once.
Auto company using a "Sel 32" computer as the central tool for automating distributor testing-calibration. Systems Engineering Labs warned them that they were going to discontinue the line so they needed to stock any spares while production was still happening, so the company they were leasing it from jacked up the price to pay for stocking a bunch of spares.
Company decided to buy their own to save a few bucks and be sure the plant kept running and wasn't hostage to future price rises on an irreplacable, mission-critical machine. Cost was a few hundred short of a million. (The 98 cents pricing phenomenon, no doubt.)
Box showed up on the loading dock. One rack, floor to ceiling. Forklift operator picked it up, took it down the asile, took a corner too fast, and it fell off the forklift. Hit so hard it not only set off the tip/shock detectors but BENT THE RACK.
SEL, of course, wouldn't warranty it. The auto company was self-insured. So they buoght ANOTHER one (and kept the "clunker" for spare boards if anything failed in the future.)
Forklift driver was NOT fired. (Union, hadn't been notified he was toting a megabuck this time, and lift drivers are allowed a quota of oopsies.)
Ok. Simplified and paraphrased, it states that a thread, if it does not die off, eventually it provoke a NAZI reference.
Sounds like common sense, to me at least. If a thread dies, the law holds, regardless of a mention of NAZI's or not, via the "if it did not die first" statement.
You missed the point of the rule: One way for a thread to die is to just stop. Another is to have the active end sucked away from the original subject and into a stock infinite-loop. Mention of NAZIs is a sign that the latter has happened.
ok, lets update the rule then. if you say "meme" or "paradigm" or any other buzzword, you lose.
All words were buzzwords when they were young. This is how useful new words happen.
Abandoning any conversation when a buzzword shows up cuts you out of all conversations about subjects where an important generalization has been made recently (in language-evolutionary timescales).
If you make a Nazi or 1984 reference, you lose.
Wrong.
Godwin's law, as originally stated, was (approximately) that any discussion thread on usenet (and similar systems), if it did not die first, would eventually warp into something that would provoke a mention of NAZIs - and that the NAZI reference indicated that it had wandered from interesting topics to topics that had been rehashed so many times that they were no longer interesting - at least to old hands (such as Godwin) who had other things to spend their time and internet access on.
Of course, this was quicky misstated into the "Folk Godwins Law" - warped forms like "Mention NAZIs and the thread is dead. You can all drop the discussion and go home now." or "First one to mention NAZIs loses." These forms have been used to systematically shut down debate, whenever someone makes a posting propagating any totalitarian meme that happens to have been used by the NAZIs and someone else points out how the meme had been used to aid oppression.
Such misuse is not merely misinformed, but dangerous. It leads to the increased spread of totalitarian memes and the suppression of counter-memes in the form of historical evidence of the memes' horrendous effects. "Those who do not understand history are condemed to repeat it." And this misstatement of Godwin's law is a prime example of an enabling meme - which selects against learning history and promotes "improved" cover-versions of its worst disasters.
Godwin himself has pointed out the misstatement. But he also asserts that his original law holds - because discussions of the downside of the Folk version (such as this one), though they point out the misuse, do NOT put the thread back on the subject - instead diverting it down the rathole of discussing the misstatement of Godwin's law. So the damaage due to the misuse still occurs.
But venues like Slashdot allow branching. This can take asides aside - so the main thread can continue.
Since you have been so nice as to make the Folk Godwin's Law posting as the FIRST (still above threshold) post, perhaps we can pull that discussion aside RIGHT HERE, and head off repeated Folk Godwin cites in the rest of the comments.
Perhaps that way we can ACTUALLY DEAL WITH the important business at hand: Defending freedom from yet another totalitarian encroachment.
So I STRONGLY suggest that anyone who has read this far STOP following this thread and GET BACK TO that more life-critical task.
I won't watch a minute unless they cover the shooting events.
To watch US coverage of the olympics you'd think there WEREN'T any such events - even though the US does exceptionally well in them.
I'm not a complete continuity freak, so I can't tell if the movie violated any of Asimov's universe, but from what I can remember, it fits pretty well (if you ignore Dr. Calvin's age) and might even explain a few things.
I haven't seen it yet so I'm not sure when it's set. But I can think of two reasons (besides easy-on-the-eyes) to cast a young-appearing Dr. Calvin:
1) Wasn't she young when she did her early work?
2) Medical tech is ALREADY making big headway on keeping people looking young - as is the general improvement in stress levels and reduction in skin exposure to damaging influences (especially with broader general knowlege about UV skin damage). Even if the lifespan cap isn't improved much yet, people are looking young much longer. (Example: Cher! B-) ) Why should this trend not continue?
Further, if medical tech DOES crack life-extension, would you expect, say, a 90 year old with an expected lifespan of 800 years to look like a 90 year old when people passing threescore-and-ten are rare?
So I expect future people to look younger at a given age than they do now. At first they'll appear as young as technology can manage. Later they might chose cosmetic age as a business uniform, to smooth interpersonal communication (much as car horns are chosen to be in proportion to the mass of the car, so you can identify problems more accurately). Still later it might become a fashion statement.
That makes it a perfect fit, since Asimov himself was not a complete continuity freak and was not concerned if one of his stories violated incidental issues in any of his previous stories.
Assuming it actually isn't a misfit.
(He quoted Emerson "A foolish consistancy is the hobgoblin of little minds.".)
There I must disagree with both Asimov and Emmerson. Asimov may have used the quote for a valid purpose. But most of those quoting Emmerson are using it to avoid admitting a mistake in a debate or changing opinions when they're inconsistent with facts. Often this is used to continue oppressive behavior once it's identified, without even bothering to find a new and less transparent excuse.
IMHO "A foolish INconsistency is the small mind of hobgobblins." But it just doesn't have the ring of Emmerson's line.
I agree with much of what you say. But:
[...] the New York Times is among the most reliable individual sources of news there is.
I can't agree with that.
The New York Times is engaged in propaganda by systematic omission, cost-benefit distortion by selective coverage, use of loaded terms, occasional outright lies, and a number of other classic propaganda techniques. They are doing this, at least, on several important issues where I have both a strong opinion different from theirs and enough knowlege of the facts to recognize their misreporting.
Then there are the string of reporters caught "embelishing, exaggerating, and outright lying". Their own Jayson Blair and Mike Finkel are poster-boys for this. But other major outlets have had similar problems with their reporters and other writers recently: Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, Patricia Smith of the Boston Globe, Jay Forman in Slate, and Stephen Glass of the New Republic to name just four.
Given that I can SEE that the New York Times systematically and deliberately misreports issues important to me, and has an editorial and personnel policy that resulted in employing multiple reporters who were fabricating news, how can I POSSIBLY consider them a reliable source on anything? Let alone "among the most reliable"?
NO news source is reliable. You ALWAYS have to go to multiple sources and resolve any conflicts if you want to get to the truth.
And given my personal experience I must rate the New York Times quite low on my reliability scale.
We have freedom of the press. That means anybody can say anything. Being a big, successful paper doesn't say a DAMNED THING about its reliability. It just tells you they have a good business model. (Even their FORMER reliability is only an indication, since personnel or ownership turnovers can change them significantly in reasonably short order.)
Given that anybody who can afford a press can print anything, the fact that anybody can do it on the internet for less money up front means very little about reliability (but a lot about breadth of coverage). You still have to evaluate your news sources, whether paper, broadcast, or new-medium.
Lately, on all the issues I'm interested in, the establishment media has uniformly fallen short in reliability, while reliable sources ARE available on the Internet - and virtually nowhere else (short of becoming an investigative reporter onself).
The Japanese Fair Trade Commission has ordered Microsoft to cut a restrictive contract clause, designed to protect the software giant from patent-related lawsuits by PC manufacturers that sell products using Microsoft's Window operating systems. Under such provision, Japanese makers would be unable to sue Microsoft even if the software giant's technologies are deemed to violate their patents.
Assuming that's a fair characterization of the contract provisions, I'd have to side with Microsoft on this one. (Egad! End of the World!)
Consider this scenario:
- Some random branch of Sony (or some other japanese conglomerate) gets a JP patent on some random software/hardware thingie.
- Sony builds it into their laptops and wants Microsoft to support it.
- Microsoft supports it, and includes it in their mainline product (even if it doesn't work on non-Sony platforms). Now every copy of their software shipped on a non-Sony platform is infringing.
- Some Sony competitor clones the hardware. Suddenly the patented-in-japan feature starts running on THEIR platform.
- Sony sues Microsoft. And wins. And collects big bucks for ALL the copies of the software that went out (which WERE infringing...).
So Microsoft gets beaten up for being a good guy and supporting Sony's gimmick.
Of course Microsoft wants to head off this scenario. So they write this clause into their contract. Sony (and every other HW vendor) now has a choice: Let MS use their patents, or don't have MS support of their platform.
What's "unfair" about that? How much is it worth to Sony to have Microsoft support their products? This is the set of terms under which Microsoft is willing to do it. They can take it, leave it, or negotiate a clarifying modification.
IMHO even their defacto monopoly power isn't being misused in this case.
(Besides: If Sony {or whomever} doesn't like it, they can always drop Microsoft and ship Linux, BSD, or what-have-you. B-) )
The Drudge Report proved that the internet is better and more reliable than the New York Times?
Yes.
Because the Drudge Report proved that the New York Times was suppressing relevant news, which the Internet broke.
If "reliable" means you can count on it to report news, rather than suppress it to further a political agenda, then that makes the internet more reliable.
If "reliable" means "more likely to contain truth than falsehood" it's a different discussion. But mainstream papers - including ESPECIALLY the New York Times of late - have been repeatedly caught in falsehoods, and not just omissions. So you ALWAYS have to do your own investigation on ANY report in ANY medium, to determine for yourself whether it's gospel or bogus.
As Fox News says: "We report. You decide." If you punt that decision to the operators of ANY medium - especially on the basis of their own propaganda about their accuracy and that they cover "all the news that's fit to print" - you've just put the ring in your own nose and the lead in someone else's hand.
When it comes to the domestic animals' interests versus the farmer's, which way will the decision go?
My uncle, on the other hand, takes a different view. In his view, if he can't see pro-conservative remarks in an article, it's liberal trash.
Your uncle may be making a very important point.
The MAIN tool of propoganda is not the lie. It's the omission of truth. Selective reporting creates a false image, and THAT is the lie.
By carefully omitting one side of an issue while focusing coverage on another, the covered side can be made to appear objective truth or the popular viewpoint, rather than an off-the-wall speculation (perhaps long disproved) or some far-out splinter opinion.
Scientific results can be hidden from decision-makers. Health frauds can be propagated. Cost-benefit tradeoffs can appear massively reversed. Far-out political factions (at home or abroad) can be made to appear large or universal, while mainstream movements can appear to be splinters or nonexistant. Genocidal regimes can be made to look reasonable, opposition to them marginalized.
This misreporting can convince a lot of public opinion, converting people from one side to another and sometimes swaying elections. But the real power comes from fooling legislators and executive-branch decision-makers about the opinions of their constitutents - leading them by the nose in their lawmaking, regulation-making, enforcement decisions, and judicial appointments.
Because omission of a popular viewpoint (even if it's not popular with YOU) from allegedly "objective" news is such a powerful propaganda tool, it's also a powerful indicator that the outlet IS engaged in propaganda.
So your uncle has a point - and I don't mean on the TOP of his head.
Think about it.
how long has it been since the Times was really a relevant source of information in the real world?
Since computerized communication provided open sources of news that made it painfully obvious the Times had let ideology lead them into draconian self-censorship, bias, and occasional (but systematic) outright lies, rather than news coverage, to spread a political agenda.
It's tempting to say since they started that policy. But that still left them "relevant" - like the propaganda machine of ANY ideology with major political power is relevant. What killed their relevance is the availablility of sources they and their ilk couldn't suppress or ridicule into irrevelance.
This was starting to happen in the early days of netnews and bulletin-board systems. But the explosion of home-computer connectivity and web-based interfaces brought it to the general public with a vengance.
I'd say the watershed event was the Drudge Report's breaking of the Lewinsky scandal. People had been switching off mainstream media news for some time. But this made it clear to the broad public that the internet was not just a good source of news, but a BETTER and MORE RELIABLE one, than the broadcaster/newspaper/magazine axis. In particular, it brought the latter's self-censorship and bias into the public eye.
Isn't it just grand how thousands of very intelligent geeks spent countless hours creating and improving Linux and Red Hat, and now a bunch of doughy, pasty-faced vultures at "Goodkind Labaton Rudoff & Sucharow LLP" will rake in an assload of cash from this?
Naw.
There are a number of sleazebag outfits like "Dewey, Sooem, and Howe" who file class action suits every time a stock takes a major dive, and advertise for some (possibly former) stockholder to sign on as lead plantif. (Expect several more before this is over.)
Usually what happens is they get before a judge and get pitched out on their ear. Occasionally the company screwed up, in which case they MIGHT get some judgement - of which Dewey et. al. split a big chunk and a bunch of stockholders maybe get pennies per share. It's like playing the lottery, for law firms with some small-change time on their hands.
They almost never get anywhere. But when a whale truly IS wounded the shark's chunk is SO big that every time there's blood in the water the sharks circulate in hopes of a feed.
Red Hat will no doubt slap these guys down in due course - at which point you will see a small note in the stock's news page. That's part of why corporations keep at least one attorney on staff. Partyl to make sure they stay squeaky-clean - partly to lead the coutner-attack when somebody says they're dirty.
Microsoft held back signifigant portions of their Windows 2000/Office 2000 era earnings in a "cookie jar" that was supposed to level out revenue after the dot com bubble burst.
Which also cheats investors - the ones who had and sold stock that DIDN'T go up - or didn't go up as much as it should - because Microsoft understated their earnings. Investors are trading stock all the time, and while investment is not zero-sum a market distortion reified by a transaction during the distortion IS. It helps some investors by hurting others by defrauding them out of their money. Even if NOT reified by a transaction it may have produced an opportunity cost - as someone held stock they could have liquidated for more money to sieze some other opportunity.
There are tight rules on this.
Managers believe that investors like stocks that show steady upward growth rather than a roller-coaster revenue chart - even if the area under the roller-coaster is much larger. So some of them try to even things out by pushing parts of windfalls into the next quarter, rather than taking it when it comes and creating future expectations they can't meet.
My preference would be to take the money and run - then in the post-report conference call tell the analysts that's what we did, what the numbers WOULD have been if we'd fudged, but that if another windfall happens (and we don't get beaten up in the market THIS time) we'll take the money and run again because it's stupid to leave it on the table. Then the analysts can set reasonable expectations for the next quarter.
Highly damaging viruses don't spread far.
Unless the damage is delayed and/or random.
Big counterexample is AIDS:
- Attacks the immune (i.e. antivirus) system directly.
- Goes dormant until the infected cell is activated for other purposes.
- Mutates "rapidly" for a virus (though slowly on reproductive cycle time scales), resulting in mutiple strains from a single infection after a few years.
- Infects slowly enough that it doesn't create a tight cluster of infected individuals.
This enables it to spread widely before the occasional activation of the immune system cells carrying it expand its infection in an exponential cascade taking out the doomed host.
Birthday viruses / easter eggs are a simple mechanism to allow wide spread of computer viruses before they take out their hosts - and the hosts that are down at that time provide a reinfection reservoir. But it's primitive compared to AIDS.
A highly damaging virus could be made which makes random choices on when to utterly trash its host.
They aim for control, not damage. It's about money, not vandalism.
Unfortunately, while there are several criminal enterpises spreading worms/trojans/viruses whose intent is to create DDoS zombies, spam remailers, or keylogger/filters looking for bank account access or other sensitive information, there are still plenty of virus authors chasing other things - including those who will vandalize machines for the fun of it.
And there are power groups with significant membership whose agendas would be advanced by taking out as much as possible of the IT infrastructure of the world - the more widespread and more lasting the damage, the better for their purposes. A family of worms with AIDS-like properites would serve their interests nicely.
Finally - while diseases evolve to be relatively benign, they do so randomly (and designed programs often don't do quite what was intended, especially on first release). Sometimes you get one that strikes a balance between spread and damage that results in a massive, widespread dieoff among the host populatin before the combined evolution of the disease and hosts contain its remanents. Classic example: Bubonic Plague.
So let's not be lulled by analogies to the common cold and childhood diseases. They're the result of a lot of death and misery before the diseases found a stable niche. And while computer viruses share much of the math of disease spread they are designed, not evolved, and can easily have properties rarely seen in nature.
1)Collect hot pocket wrappers
2)?????????^Wcover car
3)Don't get speeding tickets
You'd have to stand the wrappers off the car by at least a quarter-wave or so.
(I wonder if the guys working on the stealth projects have designed any car bodies? B-) )
As I understand it, the open gateways are gone. SMS messages now all require a fee.
If that's true (or even if it's not but these guys aren't using some free gateway), that would mean they're paying per-message, the same as the rest of us.
I've always had my doubts about the claims that charging a per-email fee could be used to stop spam. (After all, the SPAMMERS are charging for the spam, aren't they?) It might make some impact - but would also hit legitimate users. Any setpoint for the fee would block some legitimate email messages and pass some spam. And since spam earns money I betcha if you cranked it up to where it stopped MOST legit email there'd still be lots of spam.
But if the spammers are paying per-message for SMS we've got the test case right here, don't we?
10MW won't make a dent I think, but it's a good idea as an experiment. It would be barely 1% of the capacity of one of the nuclear plants up the road.
But $2/watt is a good price. Last time I looked solar panels were going for about $10/watt.
Also: Around here solar panels generate the equivalent of about 5 hours worth of their rating per day and I bet a tidal generator would do significantly more than that.
What's (24 / PI) * integral[0 = x pi] (sin(x)**3)? It should beat that because it would flat-top rather than being 10 Mw at the minute of peak flow.
I think the stuff reflects the microwaves back through the food, to effectively double the cooking speed.
No, the previous poster had it right.
Your basic microwave heats the food where there's water or resistive material (like carbon). So it tends to make crispy materia soggy (by "steaming" it with the water evaporated from the wet places). And if you heat it long enough to dry it out, some spots heat enough to become burned - at which point they absorb more microwaves and become MORE burned - in a positive feedback that makes spotty burns rather than a crispy crust.
The material is very thinly coated with metal and quite resistive. So it absorbs a portion of the microwaves and becomes very hot. The infrared is used to crisp the surface of the material, like a broiler would.
Getting the packaging balanced - so the food is thawed, frozen, and crisped properly in the oven - takes some work. (Resistive cookware is available for do-it-yourselfers who want to broil in a microwave oven.)
Such resistive packaging would make a rotten reflector. It's more like a "stealth" coating on an aircraft than a microwave mirror. (It might be useful, though, to make a microwave absorbing wall between your antenna and a nearby interference source.)
so, we are assured of a and !a ???
Sun has a long history of vacilating on whether and how to open their products. Hardware interfaces, SPARC-based hardware cloning, various software packages, and so on. Often this means half-opening, licensing and failing to renew, and so on.
It seems to be different every time. But the common thread is that they never commit. (I think the closest they came is Open Office where at least we have a fork.)
It was due to their refusal to open things sufficiently for me to hack my Sun hardware and software that I switched to Linux a few years back (and swore off anything but open source for my home machines), rather than trying to upgrade my Sun systems for the coming millenium.
Came Y2K not a lot of stuff broke. But I shut down the last two anyhow. Too late, guys!
(And too late for me too, apparently. Things have been so busy in the day job that I haven't had a chance to actually DO any hacking at home - except on the houses themselves. B-( )
From Secunia Virus Statistics web page:
Indicates the percentage of scans that resulted in a found infection (e.g. 1% means that in 10.000 virus scans, 1.000 of these scans resulted in found infections).
They did this twice, too. So does 1% equal one percent of machines infected, or ten percent?
(I refer to this as "Oakland School Administration math" because a high administrator of the Oakland California schools, while testifying before the state legislature, cited the percentages of black teachers in Oakland schools vs. black people in the US population, with the percentage far lower for the teachers. But in the same testimony she gave the actual numbers of black teachers and total teachers, and in fact the percentage of black teachers in their schools was far HIGHER than blacks in the general population. She'd blown the percentage computation. Doubly funny, since she was testifying about how the new teacher certification tests were unfair because they required far too much arithmetic.)
Here is a link explaining how Moore's alleged stance on copyright issues is being used to damage the profitability of the film:
Oh, teriffic.
Now if his box office numbers tank he can blame the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (TM) rather than word-of-mouth from the first viewers about the quality and/or accuracy (or lack thereof) of the film.
He gets his message out, money, to blame his opposition, and to help the RIAA with its flamewar on techno-"Pirates", all in one swell foop.
And that means we'll probably be hearing ANOTHER round of media hype for ANOTHER of his hit pieces next year.
Funny, but this person is not far off from what would thoroughly discourage the Chinese authorities. What if everyone starts sending bullshit revolutionary messages? Let 'em try to lock the whole country up.
What if thousands of people demonstrated in opposition to the government, and stood up to tanks?
Well it happened. They KILLED them. End of problem for the government.
What you need to understand about China: They've got a LOT of people. They can kill MILLIONS of them and not make a serious dent in their "human resources".
And they have done so. Repeatedly.
It kept the population in check for generations. It brought them back INTO check when they started to work their way out after Mao died.
Do that often enough, hard enough, and getting a critical mass together to oppose the government becomes essentially impossible - especially when the government is actively watching for such things to get started - in order to nip them in the bud.
Passive resistance doesn't do the whole job - despite the establishment media's constant pushing of it as the solution to tyrrany. It has a long history of leading people, in mass, to the slaughter. (Even its two claimed victories - India and the US Civil Rights movement - are illusory. The Brits were trying to dump India and Ghandi gave them an excuse. The US civil rights movement didn't produce REAL gains until the riots of the '60s.)
Non-violent resistance DOES have a function - claiming the moral high-ground, in case violent resistance is needed later.
But to overthrow or reform a tyrrany that is doing active suppression of opposition, you need a Shelling point - a moment where people all KNOW that the target is achievable and the moment is NOW, WITHOUT having to plan it in advance. (It's a Shelling point when the frog hits the boiling water.) The major thrust of government's internal policies is to eliminate Shelling points.
And the main effect of massive civil disobedience in the form of bogus anti-government internet messages in China would be to identify the low-grade malcontents for mass punishment, "disappearance", or show-trials as object lessons for the rest, before they become high-grade revolutionaries.
Back in the days of telephone cables and communication satellites the NSA was tapping pretty much all communication in and out of the US.
Comsats were easy: Just point a big dish at 'em.
The transatlantic cable hit the coast and immediately took a microwave hop. NSA had a big instalation right under that hop. What a coincidence. (I'm not sure what they did about transPacific cables. But I'd be surprised if they weren't on the job.)
And now it has come out that one of the main jobs of the US nuclear sub fleet during the cold war was to tap Russian undersea cables - under the sea.
With the NSA tapping US and Russian communication, do you want to take any bets on other country's comm being tapped?
IMHO the only thing that's new is that pieces of it are leaking into the public news channels.
1.the CIA used to be prevented from spying on US citizens, not the NSA.
...), potential legal issues if their information is used in a criminal investigation , and to preempt inter-departmental turf wars by clearly defining the boundaries.
2.Patriot act I and II (which was quietly approved on the day that we announced the "capture" of Sadaam) stripped all that pretense away. Any
group is allowed to spy on us, with any group being (NSA, CIA, Fatherland Defense, and DOJ).
There's plenty of misbehavior to point at on both sides. But let's understand it.
From at least the mid '70s to about the mid '90s (as far as us outside the "security community" wall can tell) the breakdown was this:
- FBI was responsible for investigations involving interstate lawbreaking, kidnapping (assumed to involve intestate flight), and domestic security (including investigating spy rings and conducting security clearance investigations). Their operations often lead to prosecutions and are intermittently subjected to court scrutiny and on-the-record congressional investigation. So they must meet strong constitutional tests, or risk losing cases, injunctions, and civil-rights suits.
- CIA was responsible for spying and covert operation. Their operations are compartmentalized for security - which limits oversight and control - and are often outside the law in the areas where they operate. They were prohibited from operating inside the US at all - due to constitunal-authorization concerns, practical concerns (like coups, political sabotage,
- The NSA was charged with signals intelligence - both decoding to hunt for enemy action and protecting US communications - government, corporate, and personal - from foreign spying. As a side-effect they end up intercepting lots of private domestic communication content that the government isn't authorized to use. So they held it tightly (which also helped protect their methods) and dribbled it out pretty much only to the intelligence community (because a drop of it in a criminal case could blow the case). (Indeed, for decades the US claimed they didn't exist. Joke: NSA = No Such Agency.)
Info from NSA (apparently) fed mainly into CIA (which had the political/military implication analysis section). CIA would give info to FBI when appropriate, mainly stuff related to domestic spying and security clearances. (CIA and NSA info generally could NOT be used in criminal cases, because it's collected without probable cause or warrant. The constitutional protections would get stretched by using it to generate a "tip", telling the FBI where to look for something - but the info they developed had to come from open observation -> probable cause or warrants to be used in court.)
During the Clinton administration the wall between CIA and FBI was raised: ALL communication between them had to go up a bureaucratic red-tape chain and be handed over through a special office headed by a Clinton appointee (after approval by that office). The same set of Clinton administration officials came up with the idea that terrorism should be treated as a criminal offences rather than acts of war.
The result: No information was passed through the red-tape gauntlet from NSA and CIA to FBI. First fallout: The "nuclear secrets for campaign contributions" investigation was gutted (leading to leaks from frustrated agents.) (Some speculate that gutting this was the reason for the change.) Second fallout: Info about Bin Laden's activity didn't reach the FBI. The Clinton administration had several offers from Middle Eastern powers to hand over Bin Laden, which they turned down because the FBI couldn't make a criminal case against him. Third fallout: The mechanism hadn't been dismantled by 9/11.
The Bush administration went overboard the other direction. The Constitution's protections of the accused are relaxed in wars and the like - apparently because holding a trial in the middle of a battlefield is impractica