Except that Diebold's CEO is a member of the Republican party, and one of George Bush's Rangers, a class of high donation supporters for his election campaigns. Money doesn't buy loyalty when your target is already paying off someone else he supports.
I fondly remember crafting that line in response to the opening of Anarchy Online, the game that proves that Funcom is unfit to ever make an MMO again. I will not, under any circumstances ever touch Age of Conan or any other f0cktarded piece of drivel they throw out of their development studio.
In library science, Fantasy is classed under sci-fi due to its explainations of the supernatural through magic and/or religious superstition. Speculative Fiction is seperated by its use of technology and science to explain seemingly supernatural circumstances.
Long time to 40? There are a dozen servers now with characters that are Draenai or Blood Elf level 70. The first of which took 9 days of play, from creation to max level. Through casual play over three months I've hit 60 on 2 different characters and two weeks after the expansion I'm closing on 70 with only 2 hours of play a night and 3-4 hours on Sunday.
Guild Wars is a single player game pretending to have multiplayer. It prides itself on "find the random skill/gear drop" grinds just so you can watch an unbalanced Warrior-Monk n00b walk into a guild match and take down four or five people at a time.
No, he really is insane. He believes in the mystical sky pixie that martyred itself not once, but twice according to the LDS folks to save both native Americans and a bunch of genocidal, patriarchal ex-slave tribals in the arm pit of the Mediterranean. Such a disconnect from an otherwise banal and logically consistant universe is clear evidence that OSC, like most folk today, are legally insane.
The stock market consists of small winners, but their winnings are large compared to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of workers who recieve a fraction of a cent of their companies share prices. These workers around the globe are far in excess of those who can afford to play on the stock markets, and who are thus in turn the losers at the capitalists' gains.
Soviet propaganda did a really good job of pumping up their apparent strength, but their economy was in dire straits since the mid-1970s. By the time Carter and Reagan had maneuvered the US into backing Iraq vs. the nominally Soviet supported Iran, the Soviets were already well on their way to bankruptcy. The Star Wars program and the resultant Soviet reaction to it probably only hastened the demise of the country by a year at most, according to many economists.
"...you give up your rights when you take it upon yourself to play with little kids bottoms..."
These sex crime blacklistings extend to anything from someone who did a date rape 30 years ago to a pedophile or serial rapist. I doubt most who find someone on the list will take the time to differentiate though.
"...it kinda flies right in the face of concepts of rehabilitation..."
The idea of penal rehabilitation has been on its way out in the US since the late 70s and early 80s. The war on drugs could be considered the first major sign of this change. The war has been waged for the purposes of stamping out the non-medicinal drug trade altogether, and heroin/crack/etc. addicts are incredibly hard to council and reform. As a result those dealing with addicts, rather than risk repeat jail sentences of a revolving door nature, have tended towards longer and longer sentences even for nonviolent offenders.
This leads up to the rise of the 3 strikes laws, as well as hard-core authoritarian policies like zero tolerance in schools, and it becomes quite clear that our society considers it far cheaper to exile or imprison its more troubling members than reforming them. As anyone living in a capitalist society can tell you, the cheapest short term solution to a problem is generally more favored.
Glen Larson, the primary guy behind Battlestar Galactica (and Knight Rider), is a member of the LDS. LDS didn't go after the show because Glen probably had their tacit approval. After all what better way to spread the faith than have some of its harder to swallow elements enter into the public consciousness through a highly hyped TV show.
No. This way leads to madness. This is how police states get started. If we had armed guards and cameras on every corner, I'm sure there would be less violent crime, but I wouldn't want to live here. The best defense to lower crime AND protect liberties, is to have STRONG deterents to commiting crime.
So what you're saying that you'd like to prevent crime by providing deterents? Isn't prevention of crime exactly what you were also saying "leads to madness"?
The problem in modern america, is that if you commit a crime, even if you're caught, likely you won't serve very long because we have a wussy legal system.
The real problem with modern America is that our propaganda and nationalist demagogury promises the world to people, yet many of them live continually on the edge of poverty or in poverty despite constant hard and dedicated work. Their children grow up disillusioned and decide that the risks associated with robbing a 7-11 or dealing crack on a street corner are less than the rewards of respect from their peers and the cash that stands available. Why should they care if they kill someone in the process of robbery if their society continually depicts itself as the ultimate socially darwinistic state? Their greed and passion can drive them to overrun their fellow humans and come out on top. Jail is meaningless to these people because in many cases, jail time is a guranteed future in which they know they'll be adequately taken care of. That is often times a step up from their current position in life.
The problem is even worse when you begin looking at white collar crimes like hacking and cracking. Corporate loyalty, if it ever existed, is almost certainly dead this day in age. With Enron and countless other companies demonstrating that workers are best served governing their own interest without respect for the good of the company, is it a wonder that internal hacking indicidents are on the rise? If your office manager just recieved an X-mas bonus that doubles his reported annual income, and you could likely be fired next quarter because earnings on the dollar were a penny short of Wall Street expectations, why shouldn't you create your own X-mas bonus by fencing your employer's trade secrets and code to the nearest competitor? The company means nothing to you, and the damage to society is negligible since in your eyes the company is only serving the interests of a few dozen shareholders you've never seen or heard of. You'll be out of jail in under a decade (even serving a full sentence without parole) and with proper planning, you'll retire to a nice condo in the Caribbean isles and never have to run the corporate rat race again. The other category of hackers, the high school/college students see infamous individuals like Mitnick coming out of jail and ready to start their own network security firms with the name and reputation to help get them started.
The commission of the crimes has nothing to do with the legal system being "wussy" in either of these cases. The crimes committed aren't severe enough to warrant tougher sentences since they're not violent and very little real damage was ever done (inflated monetary claims by involved companies are almost certainly a joke). These crimes have to do with more fundamental reasons of economics and societal ethics. Individuals have few reasons to be loyal or dutiful to companies or their fellow citizens, since its been made clear to them that those companies and citizens have no loyalty or sense of duty towards them. Their crimes aren't severe enough to get them sentences longer than a decade, with half that given good behavior in jail. If they plan it right they'll be able to leave jail and retire and never again have to rely on society for income.
If you want to see these sorts of crimes stop, you need to give these people real chances for rewards that far outweigh what they gain by committing a crime. You need to give the teenage hackers positions where they can learn the computer skills they're curious about while earning the respect of people in the field. You need to give the workers the job security and retirement benefits that will convince them that their company won't abandon them the moment some CEO's performance bonus is threatened by a sagging Asian market.
The funny bit is, all interfaces are technically using that predictive element, since thats exactly how experiments in psych indicate your head operates. A decision is made and you begin taking action fractions of a second before you're ever aware of those actions....
NASA's budget always seems to be the one that can be cut.
Why shouldn't it be? An embarassingly large portion of NASA is completely unable to live within a budget. Take a look at ISS if you don't believe me--the total costs for ISS are expected to top $100 billion. It was originally pitched for just a couple of billion. When NASA has a factor-of-20 budget overrun, you're damn straight I want NASA's budget cut!
This ain't rocket science. If a governmental agency shows itself to be perpetually incapable of reigning in cost overruns, you slash their budget and tell them to learn how to live within their means. Period.
Sounds like an excellent way to achieve a positive feedback loop... 1. Agency doesn't have enough money. Agency runs over budget. 2. Bureaucrats say we need more money for [Social Security, Education, Pursuing thinly disguised personal vendettas against foreign nations]. 3. Bureaucrats cut Agency budget. 4. Return to one until the Agency has a public relations nightmare occur, ala Columbia.
The same way we test many medical experiments intended for future human use: animal testing. The mechanisms that control aging are, as far as we know, identical in underlying structure in insects and mammals. The difficulty in translating the results of one to the other is insuring that a treatment for insects can actually be applied systemically to the vastly more complex mammalian body. If you're cloning, you can give yourself a very very high certainty that any systemic treatment has worked across the entire organism simply by applying the treatment to the initial fertilized egg. Any treatment is likely going to involve introduction of genome changes either by retrovirus or even direct application, and as the egg goes into its development cycle it should pass all genome changes down to its produced cells.
Until we reach the point that we have a treatment, we'll continue to experiment on lower order complexity lifeforms and periodically test our methods on animals like sheep or cattle. This leads to the economic side of things, where a successful treatment for cloned livestock will be approved fairly quickly by the FDA, leading to a revenue stream that can support the end run to applying the treatment on humans.
The DNA they use from the parent to seed the host egg are taken straight from mature cells. The egg itself is simply a normal egg from the species (I believe some work in using eggs from other species is being done as well) that has had all its genetic material removed. The defects in the parent DNA from mutations and from the natural aging process (primarily telomere loss), are carried along with the expected genes. In effect the new embryo is given a legacy code base rife with bugs and a timing mechanism set to that of the age of the parent. Its not that the cloned offspring age faster, its that they simply start their aging well ahead of where they should be.
The theory behind this is pretty well developed, since a large number of asexual creatures essentially clone themselves to reproduce in nature. They don't have the issues with the telomeres that cloning in complex animals has, but they are known to have a higher overall rate of mutations transmitted to offspring. It would have been far more unsettling to current theory if Dolly had been born healthy and lived out full life cycle of a normal sheep.
Re:Oh boy...
on
Goodbye, Dolly
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
There is good reason those zealots will have a ball with this. Shortly after Dolly was born lots of individuals familiar with the science had already predicted she'd suffer from advanced and premature aging. This has been the primary reason why the scientific community has wanted to forestall human cloning, since even when we get the successful clones they'll have decades hacked off their lives and be prone to numerous diseases seen primarily in geriatrics.
I fully support the use of cloning, both human and animal for whatever reasons, but only when we can first correct this very severe problem that exists in the process. The zealots, however, will use this legitimate ammo to get laws passed in a few years that will take decades, if not longer, to overturn. Thats why I oppose any mandatory bans on cloning research.
Does the cost implications completely prohibit this or do the performance benefits tail off too quickly. SUN seem to able to achieve impressive performance with lower far lower Mhz (I know its different architecture) but I get the impression the large amounts of cache (2-4 MB) they use contributes significantly to performance.
Yes, cache is terribly expensive to place on chips in large amounts. It tends to be much harder to shrink than the rest of the transistors on the chip, and the design work necessary to scale the cache to meet the ever shrinking die size is complex and harsh. Overall, with consumer chips that need to be under a certain price threshold to be purchased, Intel and AMD have both found its far cheaper to keep increasing clock speed while decreasing die size than it is to increase cache.
My guess is that this latest move by AMD is an update to that mentality. It proceeds along their realization that they might be unable to compete solely on the grounds of clockspeed. However, with the decreasing performance returns for clockspeed increases, this is less of an issue for AMD than one would think. This new core seems to indicate its becoming cheaper for their engineers to spend more time on chip design as well as use the limited die space for cache rather than other components.
I had a complete set of the original figures (mail away Anakin, et al.). Paid for my first year of private college here in NY, thanks to eBay. I have no regrets about selling them.
You have thus struck upon the one truth of the human condition: only your condition and those you rely upon matter, despite what the millions of hypocrites out there continue to believe. Hate to be the cynic, but someone had to say it. Entertainment matters because it makes these people happy; a war with a bunch of people who were better off as tribal nomads than as slaves to Western oil interests doesn't make anyone happy...well, maybe Bush and Cheney, but we can scarcely count them as humans, let alone people.
Well, hate to break the bad news but such a movie was already made, starring Keanu Reaves. No, it wasn't the Matrix. It was that abomination called Johnny Mnemonic.
Re:So will they blame terrorists...
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 1
Until a guy on the ground sees something supposedly wrong and intervenes, right?
Re:requisite paranoid response
on
Droning On
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Remember, 9/11 was a result of a low-tech, low-cost, guerilla style attack requiring next to zero social engineering to accomplish. The guys just entered the country with appropriate looking papers, got on planes without any remarkable weapons, and hijacked them.
Hacking a remote drone would almost certainly have to involve an inside job, where protocols were known and encrypted communications channels were decoded previous to the flight. It would be relatively easy, however, to throw together a DoS attack by flooding all carrier channels with useless static and cause the drone to fail.
The only thing that prevents this from happening with military drones is the large amount of available spectrum dedicated exclusively to the military, as well as the amount of power the military can use to power their comm signals.
So I guess because Top Secret clearance is "restricted" from unauthorized personal, I'm not absolutely prohibited from accessing it? It's just standard political double speak where the government says a much softened version of what they and everyone else knows they mean.
Kind of like "material breach" meaning "we're launching a few hundred cruise missles at your cities and infrastructure if you're primarily of Persian descent and Islamic persuasion, and offering you free food and oil if you're primarily of Asian descent" in the scope of UN politics.
You've misplaced Walker Lindh. The only mistake the guy made was not filling out the state department forms that would give him expatriate status, while thinking that his status as a soldier in a foreign military would do so, as stated on every US passport.
Considering that the US government up until the last weeks of August 2001 was still holding open negotiations with the Taliban on a number of issues such as where to put a large, regional oil pipeline, it amazes me how stupid the American people were post-9/11 in sucking down Bush's stories without any evidence presented to the public at large. If the US government was treating the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, to the point of holding economic negotiations with them, how is it that the Taliban's military didn't qualify as a foreign service that would result in Walker's immediate expatriation upon joining?
As far as this government has shown, Lindh apparently made no effort to embark on terror missions against the US, and in some accounts even turned down such offers. The only intent he's been shown to have was the one to serve as a soldier in Afghanistan in the name of his religion. Whether or not his choice to serve his choice to work with the Taliban was misguided is an entirely different question from whether he was actively working against the US government. We'll likely never know any details of his time in Afghanistan, since El Dictator Bush forced a plea bargain down Walker's throat and thus avoided the entire mess a public trial would have brought. Say what you will about the Taliban, in the last year I've seen the Bush administration scarcely act any better than them, and Walker's choice between service to his religion versus service to a country he had no choice to be born in seems like a negligable one.
Similar reasoning and patterns of reactions are behind this MIT situation. Bush singled out a bunch of otherwise intelligent people who aren't actively working against the US government simply because they were connected to a foreign power that he, personally, didn't rank very highly on his binary scale of black and white. He presented zero evidence of any of these individuals deserving their new status, and simply thinks the US populace will place blind faith in his decision in the name of the sacred homeland security. I'm glad the folks at MIT remembered this was the US and that tolerating such a policy, regardless of security concerns, is reprehensible.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that Diebold's CEO is a member of the Republican party, and one of George Bush's Rangers, a class of high donation supporters for his election campaigns. Money doesn't buy loyalty when your target is already paying off someone else he supports.
I fondly remember crafting that line in response to the opening of Anarchy Online, the game that proves that Funcom is unfit to ever make an MMO again. I will not, under any circumstances ever touch Age of Conan or any other f0cktarded piece of drivel they throw out of their development studio.
In library science, Fantasy is classed under sci-fi due to its explainations of the supernatural through magic and/or religious superstition. Speculative Fiction is seperated by its use of technology and science to explain seemingly supernatural circumstances.
Long time to 40? There are a dozen servers now with characters that are Draenai or Blood Elf level 70. The first of which took 9 days of play, from creation to max level. Through casual play over three months I've hit 60 on 2 different characters and two weeks after the expansion I'm closing on 70 with only 2 hours of play a night and 3-4 hours on Sunday.
Guild Wars is a single player game pretending to have multiplayer. It prides itself on "find the random skill/gear drop" grinds just so you can watch an unbalanced Warrior-Monk n00b walk into a guild match and take down four or five people at a time.
No, he really is insane. He believes in the mystical sky pixie that martyred itself not once, but twice according to the LDS folks to save both native Americans and a bunch of genocidal, patriarchal ex-slave tribals in the arm pit of the Mediterranean. Such a disconnect from an otherwise banal and logically consistant universe is clear evidence that OSC, like most folk today, are legally insane.
The stock market consists of small winners, but their winnings are large compared to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of workers who recieve a fraction of a cent of their companies share prices. These workers around the globe are far in excess of those who can afford to play on the stock markets, and who are thus in turn the losers at the capitalists' gains.
Therefore your point is false.
Soviet propaganda did a really good job of pumping up their apparent strength, but their economy was in dire straits since the mid-1970s. By the time Carter and Reagan had maneuvered the US into backing Iraq vs. the nominally Soviet supported Iran, the Soviets were already well on their way to bankruptcy. The Star Wars program and the resultant Soviet reaction to it probably only hastened the demise of the country by a year at most, according to many economists.
This leads up to the rise of the 3 strikes laws, as well as hard-core authoritarian policies like zero tolerance in schools, and it becomes quite clear that our society considers it far cheaper to exile or imprison its more troubling members than reforming them. As anyone living in a capitalist society can tell you, the cheapest short term solution to a problem is generally more favored.
Glen Larson, the primary guy behind Battlestar Galactica (and Knight Rider), is a member of the LDS. LDS didn't go after the show because Glen probably had their tacit approval. After all what better way to spread the faith than have some of its harder to swallow elements enter into the public consciousness through a highly hyped TV show.
No. This way leads to madness. This is how police states get started. If we had armed guards and cameras on every corner, I'm sure there would be less violent crime, but I wouldn't want to live here. The best defense to lower crime AND protect liberties, is to have STRONG deterents to commiting crime.
So what you're saying that you'd like to prevent crime by providing deterents? Isn't prevention of crime exactly what you were also saying "leads to madness"?
The problem in modern america, is that if you commit a crime, even if you're caught, likely you won't serve very long because we have a wussy legal system.
The real problem with modern America is that our propaganda and nationalist demagogury promises the world to people, yet many of them live continually on the edge of poverty or in poverty despite constant hard and dedicated work. Their children grow up disillusioned and decide that the risks associated with robbing a 7-11 or dealing crack on a street corner are less than the rewards of respect from their peers and the cash that stands available. Why should they care if they kill someone in the process of robbery if their society continually depicts itself as the ultimate socially darwinistic state? Their greed and passion can drive them to overrun their fellow humans and come out on top. Jail is meaningless to these people because in many cases, jail time is a guranteed future in which they know they'll be adequately taken care of. That is often times a step up from their current position in life.
The problem is even worse when you begin looking at white collar crimes like hacking and cracking. Corporate loyalty, if it ever existed, is almost certainly dead this day in age. With Enron and countless other companies demonstrating that workers are best served governing their own interest without respect for the good of the company, is it a wonder that internal hacking indicidents are on the rise? If your office manager just recieved an X-mas bonus that doubles his reported annual income, and you could likely be fired next quarter because earnings on the dollar were a penny short of Wall Street expectations, why shouldn't you create your own X-mas bonus by fencing your employer's trade secrets and code to the nearest competitor? The company means nothing to you, and the damage to society is negligible since in your eyes the company is only serving the interests of a few dozen shareholders you've never seen or heard of. You'll be out of jail in under a decade (even serving a full sentence without parole) and with proper planning, you'll retire to a nice condo in the Caribbean isles and never have to run the corporate rat race again. The other category of hackers, the high school/college students see infamous individuals like Mitnick coming out of jail and ready to start their own network security firms with the name and reputation to help get them started.
The commission of the crimes has nothing to do with the legal system being "wussy" in either of these cases. The crimes committed aren't severe enough to warrant tougher sentences since they're not violent and very little real damage was ever done (inflated monetary claims by involved companies are almost certainly a joke). These crimes have to do with more fundamental reasons of economics and societal ethics. Individuals have few reasons to be loyal or dutiful to companies or their fellow citizens, since its been made clear to them that those companies and citizens have no loyalty or sense of duty towards them. Their crimes aren't severe enough to get them sentences longer than a decade, with half that given good behavior in jail. If they plan it right they'll be able to leave jail and retire and never again have to rely on society for income.
If you want to see these sorts of crimes stop, you need to give these people real chances for rewards that far outweigh what they gain by committing a crime. You need to give the teenage hackers positions where they can learn the computer skills they're curious about while earning the respect of people in the field. You need to give the workers the job security and retirement benefits that will convince them that their company won't abandon them the moment some CEO's performance bonus is threatened by a sagging Asian market.
The funny bit is, all interfaces are technically using that predictive element, since thats exactly how experiments in psych indicate your head operates. A decision is made and you begin taking action fractions of a second before you're ever aware of those actions....
NASA's budget always seems to be the one that can be cut.
Why shouldn't it be? An embarassingly large portion of NASA is completely unable to live within a budget. Take a look at ISS if you don't believe me--the total costs for ISS are expected to top $100 billion. It was originally pitched for just a couple of billion. When NASA has a factor-of-20 budget overrun, you're damn straight I want NASA's budget cut!
This ain't rocket science. If a governmental agency shows itself to be perpetually incapable of reigning in cost overruns, you slash their budget and tell them to learn how to live within their means. Period.
Sounds like an excellent way to achieve a positive feedback loop...
1. Agency doesn't have enough money. Agency runs over budget.
2. Bureaucrats say we need more money for [Social Security, Education, Pursuing thinly disguised personal vendettas against foreign nations].
3. Bureaucrats cut Agency budget.
4. Return to one until the Agency has a public relations nightmare occur, ala Columbia.
Let the war between Microsoft and OpenSource TCP/IP brain drivers begin!
The same way we test many medical experiments intended for future human use: animal testing. The mechanisms that control aging are, as far as we know, identical in underlying structure in insects and mammals. The difficulty in translating the results of one to the other is insuring that a treatment for insects can actually be applied systemically to the vastly more complex mammalian body. If you're cloning, you can give yourself a very very high certainty that any systemic treatment has worked across the entire organism simply by applying the treatment to the initial fertilized egg. Any treatment is likely going to involve introduction of genome changes either by retrovirus or even direct application, and as the egg goes into its development cycle it should pass all genome changes down to its produced cells.
Until we reach the point that we have a treatment, we'll continue to experiment on lower order complexity lifeforms and periodically test our methods on animals like sheep or cattle. This leads to the economic side of things, where a successful treatment for cloned livestock will be approved fairly quickly by the FDA, leading to a revenue stream that can support the end run to applying the treatment on humans.
The DNA they use from the parent to seed the host egg are taken straight from mature cells. The egg itself is simply a normal egg from the species (I believe some work in using eggs from other species is being done as well) that has had all its genetic material removed. The defects in the parent DNA from mutations and from the natural aging process (primarily telomere loss), are carried along with the expected genes. In effect the new embryo is given a legacy code base rife with bugs and a timing mechanism set to that of the age of the parent. Its not that the cloned offspring age faster, its that they simply start their aging well ahead of where they should be.
The theory behind this is pretty well developed, since a large number of asexual creatures essentially clone themselves to reproduce in nature. They don't have the issues with the telomeres that cloning in complex animals has, but they are known to have a higher overall rate of mutations transmitted to offspring. It would have been far more unsettling to current theory if Dolly had been born healthy and lived out full life cycle of a normal sheep.
There is good reason those zealots will have a ball with this. Shortly after Dolly was born lots of individuals familiar with the science had already predicted she'd suffer from advanced and premature aging. This has been the primary reason why the scientific community has wanted to forestall human cloning, since even when we get the successful clones they'll have decades hacked off their lives and be prone to numerous diseases seen primarily in geriatrics.
I fully support the use of cloning, both human and animal for whatever reasons, but only when we can first correct this very severe problem that exists in the process. The zealots, however, will use this legitimate ammo to get laws passed in a few years that will take decades, if not longer, to overturn. Thats why I oppose any mandatory bans on cloning research.
Does the cost implications completely prohibit this or do the performance benefits tail off too quickly. SUN seem to able to achieve impressive performance with lower far lower Mhz (I know its different architecture) but I get the impression the large amounts of cache (2-4 MB) they use contributes significantly to performance.
Yes, cache is terribly expensive to place on chips in large amounts. It tends to be much harder to shrink than the rest of the transistors on the chip, and the design work necessary to scale the cache to meet the ever shrinking die size is complex and harsh. Overall, with consumer chips that need to be under a certain price threshold to be purchased, Intel and AMD have both found its far cheaper to keep increasing clock speed while decreasing die size than it is to increase cache.
My guess is that this latest move by AMD is an update to that mentality. It proceeds along their realization that they might be unable to compete solely on the grounds of clockspeed. However, with the decreasing performance returns for clockspeed increases, this is less of an issue for AMD than one would think. This new core seems to indicate its becoming cheaper for their engineers to spend more time on chip design as well as use the limited die space for cache rather than other components.
I had a complete set of the original figures (mail away Anakin, et al.). Paid for my first year of private college here in NY, thanks to eBay. I have no regrets about selling them.
You have thus struck upon the one truth of the human condition: only your condition and those you rely upon matter, despite what the millions of hypocrites out there continue to believe. Hate to be the cynic, but someone had to say it. Entertainment matters because it makes these people happy; a war with a bunch of people who were better off as tribal nomads than as slaves to Western oil interests doesn't make anyone happy...well, maybe Bush and Cheney, but we can scarcely count them as humans, let alone people.
Well, hate to break the bad news but such a movie was already made, starring Keanu Reaves. No, it wasn't the Matrix. It was that abomination called Johnny Mnemonic.
Until a guy on the ground sees something supposedly wrong and intervenes, right?
Remember, 9/11 was a result of a low-tech, low-cost, guerilla style attack requiring next to zero social engineering to accomplish. The guys just entered the country with appropriate looking papers, got on planes without any remarkable weapons, and hijacked them.
Hacking a remote drone would almost certainly have to involve an inside job, where protocols were known and encrypted communications channels were decoded previous to the flight. It would be relatively easy, however, to throw together a DoS attack by flooding all carrier channels with useless static and cause the drone to fail.
The only thing that prevents this from happening with military drones is the large amount of available spectrum dedicated exclusively to the military, as well as the amount of power the military can use to power their comm signals.
So I guess because Top Secret clearance is "restricted" from unauthorized personal, I'm not absolutely prohibited from accessing it? It's just standard political double speak where the government says a much softened version of what they and everyone else knows they mean.
Kind of like "material breach" meaning "we're launching a few hundred cruise missles at your cities and infrastructure if you're primarily of Persian descent and Islamic persuasion, and offering you free food and oil if you're primarily of Asian descent" in the scope of UN politics.
You've misplaced Walker Lindh. The only mistake the guy made was not filling out the state department forms that would give him expatriate status, while thinking that his status as a soldier in a foreign military would do so, as stated on every US passport.
Considering that the US government up until the last weeks of August 2001 was still holding open negotiations with the Taliban on a number of issues such as where to put a large, regional oil pipeline, it amazes me how stupid the American people were post-9/11 in sucking down Bush's stories without any evidence presented to the public at large. If the US government was treating the Taliban as the government of Afghanistan, to the point of holding economic negotiations with them, how is it that the Taliban's military didn't qualify as a foreign service that would result in Walker's immediate expatriation upon joining?
As far as this government has shown, Lindh apparently made no effort to embark on terror missions against the US, and in some accounts even turned down such offers. The only intent he's been shown to have was the one to serve as a soldier in Afghanistan in the name of his religion. Whether or not his choice to serve his choice to work with the Taliban was misguided is an entirely different question from whether he was actively working against the US government. We'll likely never know any details of his time in Afghanistan, since El Dictator Bush forced a plea bargain down Walker's throat and thus avoided the entire mess a public trial would have brought. Say what you will about the Taliban, in the last year I've seen the Bush administration scarcely act any better than them, and Walker's choice between service to his religion versus service to a country he had no choice to be born in seems like a negligable one.
Similar reasoning and patterns of reactions are behind this MIT situation. Bush singled out a bunch of otherwise intelligent people who aren't actively working against the US government simply because they were connected to a foreign power that he, personally, didn't rank very highly on his binary scale of black and white. He presented zero evidence of any of these individuals deserving their new status, and simply thinks the US populace will place blind faith in his decision in the name of the sacred homeland security. I'm glad the folks at MIT remembered this was the US and that tolerating such a policy, regardless of security concerns, is reprehensible.
Well, technically Henry Ford came up with the idea of using humans as interchangable parts on an assembly line....