Maybe this is what happens in the US military, though the Australian defence forces, you show even an ounce of 'willingness' to kill anyone, you'll be shown the door before you even get through the first interview. Even grunts have to pass through an array of psychological tests. I spent a long time in the Australian Navy, mainly doing ELINT and COMINT, never once did anyone, at all, ever try and condition us that our targets were 'the enemy' - they were just targets. Morality and emotions, you deal with that on your own, there is no guide book, no conditioning.
I'm not sure how good his chances would be in court, though how is this any different than people scraping the train or bus timetables and such - after all, it's just a bunch of 'facts' when you get down to it. If facebook didn't want that stuff to be public, then maybe they'd put a little more effort in to their privacy mechanisms.
I wasn't implying 'pencil width' in a literal sense, but rather an illumination footprint several meters across. Perhaps I used a bad choice of words. My background is in satellite communications - pencil beam obviously doesn't mean quite the same thing in the optical world I guess.
Although I don't really think it's a good idea given how much of my life I spend indoors, who is actually saying the satellite needs to illuminate 100's of miles of coastline all at once? Wouldn't it be more logical to pan the laser back and forward along the danger areas?
You don't need a huge amount of energy for a pencil beam to be visible, particularly at night, though obviously in the day time it'd require 11 on the dial.
From one of the linked articles: "She used cocaine again the night before the accident"
Quite a few sites also mention that her body still had traces of cocaine - some even go so far as to deny that it was 'only her second time' and that she was actually a frequent user.
We don't allow pilots to be distracted, cockpit voice recorders and a myriad of other sensors take pretty good care of that, would you argue this is wrong? They fuck up and 100+ people die. If they get away with it they kiss their job goodbye.
Why do we treat pilots differently? Scale? Who really cares about scale if the victim happens to be someone you care about. More people die on the roads than they do in aircraft accidents, something should be done to reduce accident statistics on the road. Just because evidence might exist to show people can do something, doesn't mean they should do it.
If you don't already do this, I'd suggest you stick your backside on a motorbike for a couple of months so you can get a better sense of how distracted drivers really are in general. If you get it wrong it gets real - real quick.
Motorcycle safety courses tend to tell you that it is wise to ride such that you can stop within the distance you can see as well, though this vastly simplifies a rather complex subject. You're definitely not alone, making a bit of a generalization here, most drivers are stupid, they are also terribly bad at driving:-) They zone out and think this task is so easy that it's possible to talk the cell phone, suck down starbucks, catch up on personal grooming, and read the newspaper all at the same time. I never really appreciated just how careless a driver I was myself until I started doing it on two wheels.
Well, if they piss off their user base too much, said user base will up and move to the next social networking site that does have a modicum of stability and privacy. Simple as that.
We should be talking about curing my non-existent sense of smell too:-(
At least with color blindness people go "oh, how many fingers am I holding up?", but you tell someone you have no sense of smell, they go off and consume the most vile crap they can find just to let rip with a dirty sloppy arsed fart in the interests of testing the aforementioned anosmia. Now don't get me wrong, the entire planet smells exactly the same to me no matter my location, but farting on me...
Very user unfriendly, but if you edit/etc/network/interfaces you can give yourself a static IP address that ignores the whole gnome network manager annoyance.
You mean as opposed to the many inevitable solar flares that have already been and gone in the last 15 years without actually knocking out any GPS satellites at all?
Perhaps you don't really understand the problem then. Assuming you are a US citizen with US passport, and you're wandering around in some foreign country, you are still, legally, an American citizen under US law.
Someone, for whatever reason, decides to shove your name on a top 10 target list. Your nationality doesn't matter beyond the convenient fact that you are no longer on US soil. So what you say? They were making bombs to kill US soldiers - well, in that particular instance I would agree with you if caught in the act of doing that, but what if the person is just walking along a remote mountain top soaking up the sunshine.
You are okay with this? Simply being on a target list makes it okay for your country to disown you? Okay, look at it another way, you (figuratively speaking) travel to a foreign country and sleep with a minor, on your return home you are prosecuted as a pedophile. Sometimes your country will disown you to death just because you stand atop foreign dirt, other times they will prosecute you for your actions while there.
You might be right, I might be wrong, who knows, but I think the wise course of action is to take a closer look at what is actually going on.
Radar, been around for a tad over 100 years now in various forms. These days the world is bathed in it. Not only that, but near on every Radar spills radiation out in to space with a narrow high energy lobe, generally in the kilowatt range, some higher, some lower. Most of this is unintentional, but some of it is done on purpose.
For sure we are figuring out better ways to pack information in to limited amounts of spectrum, but, and this point seems to escape most people, this efficiency in conveying information does not mean we are using less radiated power to achieve the end goal. That analogue television station that was pumping out a megawatt still needs to pump out about the same amount of power for its digital transmission to maintain the same coverage area.
The Clark belt, littered with geo-stationary satellites. Every functional satellite has many (many) thousands of signals present on each transponder - just about every single one of those signals also has a corresponding uplink. This is done using a very narrow beam width, a pencil beam if you will. Uplink power is generally anywhere from milliwatts through to kilowatts. A lot of that signal spills past the satellite. This isn't going away any time soon.
I think you have a bit of a misunderstanding about how SETI works. It doesn't matter whether the signal is encrypted or what kind of modulation it might be using - the search itself is simply to detect an energy lobe above the noise floor of the receive equipment. If you're pumping out 40 watts at 300MHz to talk to your buddy on the other side of the city over AM / FM / Whatever, you're going to need the same, or perhaps even a little more power, if you convert your analogue transmission to digital.
Just detecting a radio signal from deep space would be of tremendous interest all on its own.
I do wish SETI would give themselves a little more bandwidth to work with though. 1420MHz, the hydrogen line. That's pretty narrow.
Back when I was military, from time to time on a boring night watch I would occasionally swing the search dish away from the Clark belt and sit glued to the spectrum analyzer. DC to 80 GHz. I never found anything that wasn't "human" though I never really expected to anyway.
DNA was right, space is big. Even a 30 meter satellite dish pointed at a bird just 36,000 kilometers away, you move that bad boy by so much as a tenth of a degree and your signal goes to crap. A signal 'light years' away, now that's a pretty damn big haystack.
Some people like driving, but to define driving as unskilled labor anyone could do? That's absurd.
It took me a bunch of years smashing up old farm vehicles as a kid along with a few formal lessons before I was competent enough to sit the driving test. At 18 years old I was legally allowed to drive, though I'd honestly say it took me many months of solid driving before I felt like the car wasn't controlling me. It would still be about another 7 years before the insurance companies trusted me enough as a driver to lower my rates.
Flying, another 'unskilled' driving job right? Point A to Point B on a map. Most people go solo somewhere between 7 and 20 hours - about the same as in a car really. Piece of cake? Hardly. I've been at it for a bit over 20 years and I'm still learning with every single flight.
Next time you jump in a taxi, think about how much this underpaid and unskilled driver truly cares about your life. He (or she) doesn't care about you, they want you out of the taxi as quickly as possible so they can get the next person out as quickly as possible too, and the next, and the next - hopefully at the end of the month they make enough to pay the bills.
So, do tell, what exactly ~should~ be a good job in your opinion. Or does the world require a cattle class of people who are less fortunate or just plain old stupid, all so you can delude yourself in to feeling better about who or whatever it is you think you are.
Feature for Feature you say? Staroffice started life as "StarWriter" way back when 8 bit processors were cutting edge. I'd say there was and still is quite a lot of 'feature' copying happening on all sides. Probably a lot of what you think of as copying is just common sense GUI design, some of it accidental, but either way, someone has to write the code, it's not like Microsoft released the source.
I learned BASIC as a young kid in the very early 1980's. All thanks go to Mattel (Aquarius) and some little known company called Microsoft! When I got to secondary school they exposed us to Turbo Pascal - I completely failed to wrap my head around this crazy language that had no need for line numbering. Even assembly (micromon on the C64) had what I thought were line numbers at the time. I was 10 years old! I spent close on 4 months looking over shoulders and copying work before it all started to sink in.
I'm not really sure if BASIC was a good thing for me or not. C and C++ were though - that's where I really learned how little I actually knew:-)
And, just in case you weren't aware, there are cases where networking exists outside of the internet. True story!
And being a former secret 3 letter agency drone doing the digital communications intercept thing, I can tell you that most of those have porn on them too:-)
WTF is wrong with having some information public, some information accessible to your friends, other information only for your family, etc. The parent said nothing at all about wanting a social network that is entirely private. He wants a social network that honors its privacy protocols and access controls. For the duration. Is that too much to ask? Apparently you are incapable of comprehending there might just be an option B somewhere between A and C.
Since when did social networks have to be everything or nothing?
Slashdot Mirror
They have helmet mounted optics, these provide much better clarity than the cockpit displays.
Maybe this is what happens in the US military, though the Australian defence forces, you show even an ounce of 'willingness' to kill anyone, you'll be shown the door before you even get through the first interview. Even grunts have to pass through an array of psychological tests. I spent a long time in the Australian Navy, mainly doing ELINT and COMINT, never once did anyone, at all, ever try and condition us that our targets were 'the enemy' - they were just targets. Morality and emotions, you deal with that on your own, there is no guide book, no conditioning.
I'm not sure how good his chances would be in court, though how is this any different than people scraping the train or bus timetables and such - after all, it's just a bunch of 'facts' when you get down to it. If facebook didn't want that stuff to be public, then maybe they'd put a little more effort in to their privacy mechanisms.
I wasn't implying 'pencil width' in a literal sense, but rather an illumination footprint several meters across. Perhaps I used a bad choice of words. My background is in satellite communications - pencil beam obviously doesn't mean quite the same thing in the optical world I guess.
Although I don't really think it's a good idea given how much of my life I spend indoors, who is actually saying the satellite needs to illuminate 100's of miles of coastline all at once? Wouldn't it be more logical to pan the laser back and forward along the danger areas?
You don't need a huge amount of energy for a pencil beam to be visible, particularly at night, though obviously in the day time it'd require 11 on the dial.
From one of the linked articles: "She used cocaine again the night before the accident"
Quite a few sites also mention that her body still had traces of cocaine - some even go so far as to deny that it was 'only her second time' and that she was actually a frequent user.
The Philippines abolished the death penalty in 2006.
I think you missed the point.
We don't allow pilots to be distracted, cockpit voice recorders and a myriad of other sensors take pretty good care of that, would you argue this is wrong? They fuck up and 100+ people die. If they get away with it they kiss their job goodbye.
Why do we treat pilots differently? Scale? Who really cares about scale if the victim happens to be someone you care about. More people die on the roads than they do in aircraft accidents, something should be done to reduce accident statistics on the road. Just because evidence might exist to show people can do something, doesn't mean they should do it.
If you don't already do this, I'd suggest you stick your backside on a motorbike for a couple of months so you can get a better sense of how distracted drivers really are in general. If you get it wrong it gets real - real quick.
All of it is a rumor, including the denial.
Motorcycle safety courses tend to tell you that it is wise to ride such that you can stop within the distance you can see as well, though this vastly simplifies a rather complex subject. You're definitely not alone, making a bit of a generalization here, most drivers are stupid, they are also terribly bad at driving :-) They zone out and think this task is so easy that it's possible to talk the cell phone, suck down starbucks, catch up on personal grooming, and read the newspaper all at the same time. I never really appreciated just how careless a driver I was myself until I started doing it on two wheels.
Well, if they piss off their user base too much, said user base will up and move to the next social networking site that does have a modicum of stability and privacy. Simple as that.
We should be talking about curing my non-existent sense of smell too :-(
At least with color blindness people go "oh, how many fingers am I holding up?", but you tell someone you have no sense of smell, they go off and consume the most vile crap they can find just to let rip with a dirty sloppy arsed fart in the interests of testing the aforementioned anosmia. Now don't get me wrong, the entire planet smells exactly the same to me no matter my location, but farting on me...
Another one is going to Mars next year apparently - the Mars Science Laboratory
You can even put your name on it.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/mission/overview/index.cfm
Very user unfriendly, but if you edit /etc/network/interfaces you can give yourself a static IP address that ignores the whole gnome network manager annoyance.
You mean as opposed to the many inevitable solar flares that have already been and gone in the last 15 years without actually knocking out any GPS satellites at all?
Perhaps you don't really understand the problem then. Assuming you are a US citizen with US passport, and you're wandering around in some foreign country, you are still, legally, an American citizen under US law.
Someone, for whatever reason, decides to shove your name on a top 10 target list. Your nationality doesn't matter beyond the convenient fact that you are no longer on US soil. So what you say? They were making bombs to kill US soldiers - well, in that particular instance I would agree with you if caught in the act of doing that, but what if the person is just walking along a remote mountain top soaking up the sunshine.
You are okay with this? Simply being on a target list makes it okay for your country to disown you? Okay, look at it another way, you (figuratively speaking) travel to a foreign country and sleep with a minor, on your return home you are prosecuted as a pedophile. Sometimes your country will disown you to death just because you stand atop foreign dirt, other times they will prosecute you for your actions while there.
You might be right, I might be wrong, who knows, but I think the wise course of action is to take a closer look at what is actually going on.
We are getting more 'noisy' not less.
Radar, been around for a tad over 100 years now in various forms. These days the world is bathed in it. Not only that, but near on every Radar spills radiation out in to space with a narrow high energy lobe, generally in the kilowatt range, some higher, some lower. Most of this is unintentional, but some of it is done on purpose.
For sure we are figuring out better ways to pack information in to limited amounts of spectrum, but, and this point seems to escape most people, this efficiency in conveying information does not mean we are using less radiated power to achieve the end goal. That analogue television station that was pumping out a megawatt still needs to pump out about the same amount of power for its digital transmission to maintain the same coverage area.
The Clark belt, littered with geo-stationary satellites. Every functional satellite has many (many) thousands of signals present on each transponder - just about every single one of those signals also has a corresponding uplink. This is done using a very narrow beam width, a pencil beam if you will. Uplink power is generally anywhere from milliwatts through to kilowatts. A lot of that signal spills past the satellite. This isn't going away any time soon.
I think you have a bit of a misunderstanding about how SETI works. It doesn't matter whether the signal is encrypted or what kind of modulation it might be using - the search itself is simply to detect an energy lobe above the noise floor of the receive equipment. If you're pumping out 40 watts at 300MHz to talk to your buddy on the other side of the city over AM / FM / Whatever, you're going to need the same, or perhaps even a little more power, if you convert your analogue transmission to digital.
Just detecting a radio signal from deep space would be of tremendous interest all on its own.
I do wish SETI would give themselves a little more bandwidth to work with though. 1420MHz, the hydrogen line. That's pretty narrow.
Back when I was military, from time to time on a boring night watch I would occasionally swing the search dish away from the Clark belt and sit glued to the spectrum analyzer. DC to 80 GHz. I never found anything that wasn't "human" though I never really expected to anyway.
DNA was right, space is big. Even a 30 meter satellite dish pointed at a bird just 36,000 kilometers away, you move that bad boy by so much as a tenth of a degree and your signal goes to crap. A signal 'light years' away, now that's a pretty damn big haystack.
Some people like driving, but to define driving as unskilled labor anyone could do? That's absurd.
It took me a bunch of years smashing up old farm vehicles as a kid along with a few formal lessons before I was competent enough to sit the driving test. At 18 years old I was legally allowed to drive, though I'd honestly say it took me many months of solid driving before I felt like the car wasn't controlling me. It would still be about another 7 years before the insurance companies trusted me enough as a driver to lower my rates.
Flying, another 'unskilled' driving job right? Point A to Point B on a map. Most people go solo somewhere between 7 and 20 hours - about the same as in a car really. Piece of cake? Hardly. I've been at it for a bit over 20 years and I'm still learning with every single flight.
Next time you jump in a taxi, think about how much this underpaid and unskilled driver truly cares about your life. He (or she) doesn't care about you, they want you out of the taxi as quickly as possible so they can get the next person out as quickly as possible too, and the next, and the next - hopefully at the end of the month they make enough to pay the bills.
So, do tell, what exactly ~should~ be a good job in your opinion. Or does the world require a cattle class of people who are less fortunate or just plain old stupid, all so you can delude yourself in to feeling better about who or whatever it is you think you are.
Feature for Feature you say? Staroffice started life as "StarWriter" way back when 8 bit processors were cutting edge. I'd say there was and still is quite a lot of 'feature' copying happening on all sides. Probably a lot of what you think of as copying is just common sense GUI design, some of it accidental, but either way, someone has to write the code, it's not like Microsoft released the source.
If you want to get all technical about it, it was actually his step ~daughter~ that accidentally shot herself.
I learned BASIC as a young kid in the very early 1980's. All thanks go to Mattel (Aquarius) and some little known company called Microsoft! When I got to secondary school they exposed us to Turbo Pascal - I completely failed to wrap my head around this crazy language that had no need for line numbering. Even assembly (micromon on the C64) had what I thought were line numbers at the time. I was 10 years old! I spent close on 4 months looking over shoulders and copying work before it all started to sink in.
I'm not really sure if BASIC was a good thing for me or not. C and C++ were though - that's where I really learned how little I actually knew :-)
And, just in case you weren't aware, there are cases where networking exists outside of the internet. True story!
And being a former secret 3 letter agency drone doing the digital communications intercept thing, I can tell you that most of those have porn on them too :-)
WTF is wrong with having some information public, some information accessible to your friends, other information only for your family, etc. The parent said nothing at all about wanting a social network that is entirely private. He wants a social network that honors its privacy protocols and access controls. For the duration. Is that too much to ask? Apparently you are incapable of comprehending there might just be an option B somewhere between A and C.
Since when did social networks have to be everything or nothing?
Yes, so everyone keeps saying - so what, exactly, is the non-retarded solution?