Nobody knows for sure that he did. If his actions were limited to publishing documents provided by a third party he hasn't broken any American laws. If he proactively encouraged third parties to break the law on his behalf, well, that's a different matter entirely and he'd be in a world of trouble.
Leaker: "Here are the Pentagon Papers, some classified State Department Cables, and the complete blueprints for a thermonuclear device."
Reporter: "Thanks, I'll use them in the story I'm writing." <--- The reporter has not broken the law, his actions are protected by the 1st Amendment and long standing legal precedent.
Reporter: "Will you obtain these documents for me so I can publish them?" <--- The reporter has broken the law by inducing a third party to break the law his behalf. It's even worse if he offers some sort of quid-pro-quo (e.g., "I'll pay you." or "I'll tell your story.") to the third party.
Leaker: "Sure."
It's a subtle difference but a meaningful one as far as the American legal system is concerned. People without security clearances have no legal obligation to protect the secrecy of classified material that they may come into possession of. That notwithstanding, they can't actively encourage other people to break the law or offer them a quid-pro-quo for doing so.
Incidentally, why is Mr. Assange so fearful that Sweden will turn him over to the American authorities? The UK has a much closer relationship to the US but I've yet to hear him express the fear that London might hand him over to Washington. A cynical observer might wonder if there isn't some validity to the Swedish allegations.
I'm not an expert on the iPhone but if you want to talk about encryption in general there are a lot of side channel attacks available to law enforcement. They range from the mundane (a well placed camera with a view of the keyboard) to the relatively sophisticated (hardware keystroke loggers) and very few criminals are going to be proactive enough to protect themselves against such surveillance. Taking it a step further, if one wants to be really paranoid, the only safe way to roll is would be to purchase the computer directly off the retail floor. No mail orders allowed. One would then need to keep physical control over the computer 24/7 to ensure that nobody else has the opportunity to compromise the hardware. If we're willing to shift gears from "paranoid, but still grounded in reality" to "Hollywood", one would also have to be trained and willing to resist rubber hose cryptography.
The reality of the situation is that cryptography is only as good as the implementation. Having a password with 256 bits-of-entropy is utterly meaningless if you can't control who has physical access to your hardware, or if your hardware leaks potentially compromising information to the outside world (Google "Tempest"). Few people, criminal or otherwise, will ever need to operate at this level of paranoia; it would come into play primarily at the levels of international organized crime, corporate espionage and national security.
Now this was a state highway patrol guy and not an NSA analyst, and maybe the higher-up guys have access to emergency use stuff they're not talking about, but my takeaway was that the state-level police really don't have any way to defeat the encryption.
Without talking about bad implementation (e.g., weak passwords) or side channel attacks (keystroke loggers and the like) it seems exceedingly unlikely that any law enforcement agency would have the ability to defeat modern encryption algorithms. Even if the NSA has such an ability (the math geeks can comment on the likelihood of this) it would be far too valuable to waste on something as mundane as a criminal prosecution. National Security concerns trump the incarceration of child molesters, drug dealers, murderers, and other common criminals.
Far more interesting than the technical aspect will be the evolution of 5th amendment case law as it relates to encryption. There is no definitive legal precedent in the United States as to whether or not you can be compelled to disclose an encryption password. There have been a few cases that have danced around the edge of this question, but none have directly addressed it, nor have they made it to SCOTUS.
Harry potter would be a simple movie to do. There is nothing in that could not be done with some plastic models, and a little time painting negatives. Would it look like it does today, nope, but it would perfectly clear to the audience what is happening and they would have no trouble understanding what stuff was "supposed to be".
So essentially you are arguing against progress because the movies of yesteryear told the story just as good as the movies of today? You got modded up for it too; on what other subject could an argument against technology get a positive moderation on/.?
BTW, I'd love to see how you'd bring this scene to the big screen with negative printing.
If Ealing Studios had made it in the 50s it would have cost less than a million dollars in today's money even with Alec Guinness playing one of the leads.
Bridge on the River Kwai had a budget of $3,000,000 in 1950s money. That's 24 million and change in 2012 dollars. Got another bad argument you want shot down?
And, frankly, a future where movies were based more on characters and story than fancy effects wouldn't be a bad one.
They aren't mutually exclusive you know. I'd love to see you tell the story of Harry Potter without "fancy effects" and I doubt you can say that story isn't character based.
or we can accept it and make a world that the artists (not corporate middlemen) can make a living.
That's a great theory where music is concerned and any start up band can get going with a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment and a broadband connection. I'm not so certain how it translates into movies though. To pick one of my favorite bits of modern culture, do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio? All of the special effects, the editing, the cinematographers, the actors, director, stunt performers, etc, etc? How do you propose to see that the "artists" in this example get paid without having some sort of corporate middleman?
If you accept that movies are a part of our culture then there has to be a sane middle ground between "information wants to be free!" and "we are going to control where and when you can watch the movie you paid for"
Blame Napster for making file sharing main stream. Back in the day when we had to walk uphill to school both ways the only way to pirate stuff was to be a geek or know someone who was. In the glory days most piracy happened on BBS'es, IRC and USENET. The former two were generally only available to those "in the know" while the latter was mostly used by people seeking pornography (who remembers working on PCs and finding gigabyte sized Free Agent cache directories?)
In the end even the RIAA/MPAA types know that they will never stop piracy. Driving it further underground and returning it to the domain of the technically informed would stem their perceived losses though. I'm not sure if this is an obtainable goal with the internet being what it is but you can bet they will keep trying as long as they draw breath. The only thing that will stop this is the rise of meaningful (read: cheap and easy to use) online services that make piracy more trouble than it's worth. A lot of people think that iTunes did this for music, though I would argue that Pandora has done more to negate music piracy than iTunes. I don't think you can directly translate Pandora into movies though.
Would having wireless carriers be dumb pipes really be so bad?
Minor nitpick: If they were "dumb pipes" they wouldn't have to subsidize the cost of the iPhone. You'd pay full price for it and obtain service without a contract.
You realize I never actually endorsed the guy nor said I'd be voting for him, right? All I said was that his foreign policy platform is properly classified as non-interventionist, not anti-war.
Actually Pearl Harbor can be laid square at the feet of FDR who ignored the will of the people to start a war, sound familiar? I would urge everyone to read Herbert Hoover's biography, its free and online in several places, where he lays out how FDR went out of his way to insult the Japanese at every turn and give them NO way out that would allow them to save face
Even if you accept that FDR was trying to bully the Japanese into a war (a conclusion I found doubtful given that the official policy of his administration was Europe First, read the Plan Dog memo) they still had a way out. Had they simply attacked the Dutch East Indies and Singapore it's exceedingly unlikely that FDR would have brought the United States into the war. The American people would not have marched to war over European colonial possessions in the Far East. Instead they opted to sneak attack a country with eleven times their GDP/industrial plant and were rightfully bitch slapped for it.
instead he simply ignored how they repeatedly said they did not want their sons dying in Europe and the Pacific and kept bitchslapping both Germany and Japan until they got tired of it. Hoover also lays out how many were telling FDR including him that getting involved at that time in any capacity was not only foolish but gave Stalin all the cards because if the USA would have stayed out Stalin and Hitler would have wiped each other out and Japan was buried in a quagmire in China that was keeping the factions all turned on each other and keeping the communists from gaining an upper hand. Read the book, its quite enlightening.
And thank god he did in hindsight. Do you really think world history would be better if the United States had remained on the sidelines? You really think that without lend-lease the Soviets could have fought the Germans to a stalemate? Unlikely -- research the logistics of the Eastern Front sometime. Lend-lease is the only thing that kept the Soviets in the war and ultimately enabled them to defeat Nazi Germany. Why don't you ponder how many more Americans would ultimately have died if the United States wound up fighting a Nazi Germany that had successfully conquered European Russia. While you're at it, read Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan for the Slavs. It would have made the Jewish holocaust look like a warm up by comparison.
FDR brought us into the war at the right time and place. Our casualties were among the lowest of any country involved in the war. That would not have happened if Germany had attained superiority over the Soviet Union and we had to fight the German Army on our own. Do you honestly think that the United States could have peacefully co-existed with the Thousand Year Reich?
That would be Paul who is running as a Republican in the primaries. But traditionally you think as Democrats as anti-war, but yet Obama is a very pro-war president.
If Paul were somehow to win he'd rightfully be classed as a non-interventionist. Were the United States directly attacked I have no doubt that he would respond forcefully and decisively. Interventionism is an entirely different animal and much harder to classify than simply saying someone is "pro" or "anti" war. For better or worse both major parties have been interventionists since FDR and WW2. Pearl Harbor and the specter of Communism after WW2 conspired to neuter the isolationist/non-interventionist wing of both major parties. I doubt that's likely to change in the next generation or so.
I think you are underestimating the United States Navy. The last time Iran tried to mess with freedom of navigation it didn't end very well for them nor were they particularly effective at disrupting commerce. Fighting the United States at sea is the dumbest idea ever; you cater to all of our strengths and none of our weaknesses. You may as well fight the Roman Army in an open field for all the good it's going to do you.
If they decided to get sneaky they could give us a bloody nose, e.g., attack out of the blue while high value ships (a super-carrier) are in the confined waterway. They'd pay dearly for it though and in the end they'd be unable to disrupt navigation for any significant amount of time. The United States and our Allies have kept the high seas open for trade against significantly more powerful adversaries than Iran. You can play with sea denial and fleets-in-being all you want but in the end both strategies have proven to be completely ineffective against a real navy.
... and Iran was part of that agreement. If Iran wants to gut that international framework and take the world back to the days of arms races they'll come out on the losing end of the equation; all of Iran's conceivable enemies have GDPs many times greater than hers. That's the whole reason why arms control treaties are negotiated in the first place; they are cheaper in the long run than trying to out build potential adversaries with bigger economies. FYI, this isn't unique to nuclear weapons, look up the Washington Naval Treaties sometime.
Personally, I don't see this so much a race issue so much as a "let's stop nuclear proliferation, it dilutes our own power, and it is scary in the hands of non-allies'.
Iran didn't start shit in the Strait of Hormuz; the US and Israel have been threatening to attack them. They're just responding to that.
By cutting off global trade that countries whom aren't threatening them depend on. Yeah, that makes sense -- Mexico attacks the United States so we seize the Panama Canal and refuse to let Chinese flagged ships use it. That's essentially what they are threatening to do. Actually I'd love to see them try and close Hormuz -- that would bring the Chinese around to our side of this issue. China is far more dependent upon oil from the Arabian Gulf than the United States is. Contrary to popular belief the United States doesn't receive the majority of her oil from the Middle East; most of it comes from the Western Hemisphere.
As far as the rest of your post, I'm not going to be drawn into an argument on the merits or lack thereof of our policy with regards to Israel. It's interesting that you decline the mention the nervousness of the Arab states that border Iran though. If it was purely about Israel one would think that the Saudis and their neighbors would be cheering the Iranian nuclear program on. Of course they aren't; the prospect bothers them just as much as it bothers the Western World.
A better question would be will they ever approach what's possible with nuclear warheads? Little Boy was 15 kilotons or 640,152,000,000,000 joules of energy released in less than the blink of an eye. Modern nuclear weapons are much more powerful and can be scaled up indefinitely using the Teller–Ulam design. The largest American weapon ever tested was 15 megatons -- 6.40152e+17 joules. The largest Russian weapon ever tested was three times as powerful. It will be a long time before you see a directed energy weapon that comes close to those energy levels.
.... it has nothing to do with "brown people" or white superiority. The Chinese have nuclear weapons and you don't see the Western World freaking the fuck out about that. Why is that? Because for all of their flaws the Chinese actually behave like adults in the global community. They don't sponsor terrorism, they don't threaten freedom of navigation on the high seas and they don't have an openly racist high level politician that denies the right of one of his neighbors to exist. If Iran wants to be treated like a grown up perhaps it should start acting like one.
BTW, I like the subject "Typical American". Do you realize that Europe is just as freaked out by the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran as the United States is? Actually it probably bothers them more; we aren't within range of Iranian missiles but most of Europe is.
For my part, the cloud is probably fine to use if you want to store anything that is not security or financially related
Or anything you are afraid of having read back to you in a courtroom one day. Your data can be subpoenaed off a cloud service and you might not even realize it.
I'm not certain how I feel about this either but this wasn't done by a private entity; it was done by the Federal Government. Those involved will receive due process of law and will be provided with legal counsel if they are unable to afford their own. The first is debatable in the civil actions brought by RIAA/MPAA while the second doesn't apply in civil cases.
In any case, this is the price you pay when you rely on cloud computing. Those of us who were skeptical about it have been saying this from the very beginning. If you entrust the sole copy of important data to someone else you've got nobody to blame but yourself when they go out of business/get shutdown/change their policies/etc. There's a reason why I don't use my G-mail account for anything other than New York Times/similar sites that make me register.
I'm curious why you went to phone calls when I never mentioned them in my initial post?
That said, some of us do appreciate the value of hearing an actual voice and knowing we have someone's (relatively) undivided attention. Phone calls don't need to "interrupt" your day nor do they need to endure for hours on end. I can communicate more to someone with a five minute phone call than I can with five hours of texting.
Speaking of fucking annoying that's how I view text messages. They are fine for "Hey, I'm running a few minutes late" but utterly useless for real conversation. They are slower than IM, less meaningful than e-mail and entirely too prone to the misunderstandings that a danger in all forms of non-verbal/in-person communication. Vocal inflections and body language make up a significant portion of human interaction; you are missing a great deal when you remove them both from the equation.
I'm skeptical of online dating as well but I'm at a loss for what's better these days. I'm not into the bar/clubbing scene, so cross that off the list. I've always maintained boundaries at work and refuse to date co-workers. What does that leave? I've tried activity groups (hiking clubs and the like) but most of the people who attend those are already paired off. Church may be an option for some people but the median age at my church is around 60 so that's not going to work either.
I've actually met a few friends through OKCupid. Nothing that panned out as relationship material but if you troll through that site long enough you'll actually find decent human beings mixed in with the fake profiles/spammers and the extremely desperate. I think I've met seven or eight people through OKC and only one of them turned out to be psycho. That's probably comparable odds to meeting people in person -- anybody can pretend to be sane for the initial conversation! Sucks that you got banned from there. I wouldn't regard E-Harmony as any real loss; it's overpriced and hasn't quite escaped it's Christian roots. Unless you are a fairly religious person looking for your future spouse E-Harmony isn't likely to prove fruitful.
The only new thing here is that it happens to girls
I've recently had the "privilege" of venturing back into the dating market after more than a year of being single. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it's virtually impossible to date these days without an unlimited texting package. Nobody knows (or at least nobody I've dated) how to talk anymore. It's as if asking for conversation in more than 160 character bites is too much. The distressing thing is that this trait seems to be independent of education and background. I've dated women with backgrounds ranging from GED to Ph.D candidate and have encountered this with all of them.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I'm a techno geek who still appreciates the value of a good handshake and eye contact. The lack of these skills doesn't just screw you with dating; it screws you in the business world as well.
Circa pre-9/11, 1999 I think, I found equivalent blue-prints online for the Fat Man bomb. It was a large color scan image, probably 3000x4000 with clear dimensions and references of the interior. Wikipedia says such blueprints are still classified. Those were the net golden years, weren't they?
Those blueprints are classified. What that means under American law is that it's a crime for someone with a security clearance to leak those blueprints. It is not a crime for a third party (e.g., newspaper, website, t-shirt printer, etc.) to publish those blueprints if they come into possession of them or manage to duplicate Fat Man on their own. This is why for all the bluster against him it's quite unlikely that Julian Assange could be convicted of anything (related to Wikileaks anyway) under American law.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody knows for sure that he did. If his actions were limited to publishing documents provided by a third party he hasn't broken any American laws. If he proactively encouraged third parties to break the law on his behalf, well, that's a different matter entirely and he'd be in a world of trouble.
Leaker: "Here are the Pentagon Papers, some classified State Department Cables, and the complete blueprints for a thermonuclear device."
Reporter: "Thanks, I'll use them in the story I'm writing." <--- The reporter has not broken the law, his actions are protected by the 1st Amendment and long standing legal precedent.
Reporter: "Will you obtain these documents for me so I can publish them?" <--- The reporter has broken the law by inducing a third party to break the law his behalf. It's even worse if he offers some sort of quid-pro-quo (e.g., "I'll pay you." or "I'll tell your story.") to the third party.
Leaker: "Sure."
It's a subtle difference but a meaningful one as far as the American legal system is concerned. People without security clearances have no legal obligation to protect the secrecy of classified material that they may come into possession of. That notwithstanding, they can't actively encourage other people to break the law or offer them a quid-pro-quo for doing so.
Incidentally, why is Mr. Assange so fearful that Sweden will turn him over to the American authorities? The UK has a much closer relationship to the US but I've yet to hear him express the fear that London might hand him over to Washington. A cynical observer might wonder if there isn't some validity to the Swedish allegations.
I'm not an expert on the iPhone but if you want to talk about encryption in general there are a lot of side channel attacks available to law enforcement. They range from the mundane (a well placed camera with a view of the keyboard) to the relatively sophisticated (hardware keystroke loggers) and very few criminals are going to be proactive enough to protect themselves against such surveillance. Taking it a step further, if one wants to be really paranoid, the only safe way to roll is would be to purchase the computer directly off the retail floor. No mail orders allowed. One would then need to keep physical control over the computer 24/7 to ensure that nobody else has the opportunity to compromise the hardware. If we're willing to shift gears from "paranoid, but still grounded in reality" to "Hollywood", one would also have to be trained and willing to resist rubber hose cryptography.
The reality of the situation is that cryptography is only as good as the implementation. Having a password with 256 bits-of-entropy is utterly meaningless if you can't control who has physical access to your hardware, or if your hardware leaks potentially compromising information to the outside world (Google "Tempest"). Few people, criminal or otherwise, will ever need to operate at this level of paranoia; it would come into play primarily at the levels of international organized crime, corporate espionage and national security.
Now this was a state highway patrol guy and not an NSA analyst, and maybe the higher-up guys have access to emergency use stuff they're not talking about, but my takeaway was that the state-level police really don't have any way to defeat the encryption.
Without talking about bad implementation (e.g., weak passwords) or side channel attacks (keystroke loggers and the like) it seems exceedingly unlikely that any law enforcement agency would have the ability to defeat modern encryption algorithms. Even if the NSA has such an ability (the math geeks can comment on the likelihood of this) it would be far too valuable to waste on something as mundane as a criminal prosecution. National Security concerns trump the incarceration of child molesters, drug dealers, murderers, and other common criminals.
Far more interesting than the technical aspect will be the evolution of 5th amendment case law as it relates to encryption. There is no definitive legal precedent in the United States as to whether or not you can be compelled to disclose an encryption password. There have been a few cases that have danced around the edge of this question, but none have directly addressed it, nor have they made it to SCOTUS.
Harry potter would be a simple movie to do. There is nothing in that could not be done with some plastic models, and a little time painting negatives. Would it look like it does today, nope, but it would perfectly clear to the audience what is happening and they would have no trouble understanding what stuff was "supposed to be".
So essentially you are arguing against progress because the movies of yesteryear told the story just as good as the movies of today? You got modded up for it too; on what other subject could an argument against technology get a positive moderation on /.?
BTW, I'd love to see how you'd bring this scene to the big screen with negative printing.
If Ealing Studios had made it in the 50s it would have cost less than a million dollars in today's money even with Alec Guinness playing one of the leads.
Bridge on the River Kwai had a budget of $3,000,000 in 1950s money. That's 24 million and change in 2012 dollars. Got another bad argument you want shot down?
And, frankly, a future where movies were based more on characters and story than fancy effects wouldn't be a bad one.
They aren't mutually exclusive you know. I'd love to see you tell the story of Harry Potter without "fancy effects" and I doubt you can say that story isn't character based.
or we can accept it and make a world that the artists (not corporate middlemen) can make a living.
That's a great theory where music is concerned and any start up band can get going with a couple hundred bucks worth of equipment and a broadband connection. I'm not so certain how it translates into movies though. To pick one of my favorite bits of modern culture, do you think you can bring Harry Potter onto the big screen without the resources of big budget movie studio? All of the special effects, the editing, the cinematographers, the actors, director, stunt performers, etc, etc? How do you propose to see that the "artists" in this example get paid without having some sort of corporate middleman?
If you accept that movies are a part of our culture then there has to be a sane middle ground between "information wants to be free!" and "we are going to control where and when you can watch the movie you paid for"
I now accept requests for files over the phone or via hand-written letter
You might want to look up the definitions of wire and mail fraud in the United States. ;)
Blame Napster for making file sharing main stream. Back in the day when we had to walk uphill to school both ways the only way to pirate stuff was to be a geek or know someone who was. In the glory days most piracy happened on BBS'es, IRC and USENET. The former two were generally only available to those "in the know" while the latter was mostly used by people seeking pornography (who remembers working on PCs and finding gigabyte sized Free Agent cache directories?)
In the end even the RIAA/MPAA types know that they will never stop piracy. Driving it further underground and returning it to the domain of the technically informed would stem their perceived losses though. I'm not sure if this is an obtainable goal with the internet being what it is but you can bet they will keep trying as long as they draw breath. The only thing that will stop this is the rise of meaningful (read: cheap and easy to use) online services that make piracy more trouble than it's worth. A lot of people think that iTunes did this for music, though I would argue that Pandora has done more to negate music piracy than iTunes. I don't think you can directly translate Pandora into movies though.
Would having wireless carriers be dumb pipes really be so bad?
Minor nitpick: If they were "dumb pipes" they wouldn't have to subsidize the cost of the iPhone. You'd pay full price for it and obtain service without a contract.
You realize I never actually endorsed the guy nor said I'd be voting for him, right? All I said was that his foreign policy platform is properly classified as non-interventionist, not anti-war.
The US being attacked directly just isn't part of the equation, because it hasn't happened within most peoples' lifetimes
9/11 happened ten years and some change ago. Are you ten years old?
Actually Pearl Harbor can be laid square at the feet of FDR who ignored the will of the people to start a war, sound familiar? I would urge everyone to read Herbert Hoover's biography, its free and online in several places, where he lays out how FDR went out of his way to insult the Japanese at every turn and give them NO way out that would allow them to save face
Even if you accept that FDR was trying to bully the Japanese into a war (a conclusion I found doubtful given that the official policy of his administration was Europe First, read the Plan Dog memo) they still had a way out. Had they simply attacked the Dutch East Indies and Singapore it's exceedingly unlikely that FDR would have brought the United States into the war. The American people would not have marched to war over European colonial possessions in the Far East. Instead they opted to sneak attack a country with eleven times their GDP/industrial plant and were rightfully bitch slapped for it.
instead he simply ignored how they repeatedly said they did not want their sons dying in Europe and the Pacific and kept bitchslapping both Germany and Japan until they got tired of it. Hoover also lays out how many were telling FDR including him that getting involved at that time in any capacity was not only foolish but gave Stalin all the cards because if the USA would have stayed out Stalin and Hitler would have wiped each other out and Japan was buried in a quagmire in China that was keeping the factions all turned on each other and keeping the communists from gaining an upper hand. Read the book, its quite enlightening.
And thank god he did in hindsight. Do you really think world history would be better if the United States had remained on the sidelines? You really think that without lend-lease the Soviets could have fought the Germans to a stalemate? Unlikely -- research the logistics of the Eastern Front sometime. Lend-lease is the only thing that kept the Soviets in the war and ultimately enabled them to defeat Nazi Germany. Why don't you ponder how many more Americans would ultimately have died if the United States wound up fighting a Nazi Germany that had successfully conquered European Russia. While you're at it, read Generalplan Ost, the Nazi plan for the Slavs. It would have made the Jewish holocaust look like a warm up by comparison.
FDR brought us into the war at the right time and place. Our casualties were among the lowest of any country involved in the war. That would not have happened if Germany had attained superiority over the Soviet Union and we had to fight the German Army on our own. Do you honestly think that the United States could have peacefully co-existed with the Thousand Year Reich?
That would be Paul who is running as a Republican in the primaries. But traditionally you think as Democrats as anti-war, but yet Obama is a very pro-war president.
If Paul were somehow to win he'd rightfully be classed as a non-interventionist. Were the United States directly attacked I have no doubt that he would respond forcefully and decisively. Interventionism is an entirely different animal and much harder to classify than simply saying someone is "pro" or "anti" war. For better or worse both major parties have been interventionists since FDR and WW2. Pearl Harbor and the specter of Communism after WW2 conspired to neuter the isolationist/non-interventionist wing of both major parties. I doubt that's likely to change in the next generation or so.
but it would take months to reopen that waterway
I think you are underestimating the United States Navy. The last time Iran tried to mess with freedom of navigation it didn't end very well for them nor were they particularly effective at disrupting commerce. Fighting the United States at sea is the dumbest idea ever; you cater to all of our strengths and none of our weaknesses. You may as well fight the Roman Army in an open field for all the good it's going to do you.
If they decided to get sneaky they could give us a bloody nose, e.g., attack out of the blue while high value ships (a super-carrier) are in the confined waterway. They'd pay dearly for it though and in the end they'd be unable to disrupt navigation for any significant amount of time. The United States and our Allies have kept the high seas open for trade against significantly more powerful adversaries than Iran. You can play with sea denial and fleets-in-being all you want but in the end both strategies have proven to be completely ineffective against a real navy.
... and Iran was part of that agreement. If Iran wants to gut that international framework and take the world back to the days of arms races they'll come out on the losing end of the equation; all of Iran's conceivable enemies have GDPs many times greater than hers. That's the whole reason why arms control treaties are negotiated in the first place; they are cheaper in the long run than trying to out build potential adversaries with bigger economies. FYI, this isn't unique to nuclear weapons, look up the Washington Naval Treaties sometime.
Personally, I don't see this so much a race issue so much as a "let's stop nuclear proliferation, it dilutes our own power, and it is scary in the hands of non-allies'.
Iran didn't start shit in the Strait of Hormuz; the US and Israel have been threatening to attack them. They're just responding to that.
By cutting off global trade that countries whom aren't threatening them depend on. Yeah, that makes sense -- Mexico attacks the United States so we seize the Panama Canal and refuse to let Chinese flagged ships use it. That's essentially what they are threatening to do. Actually I'd love to see them try and close Hormuz -- that would bring the Chinese around to our side of this issue. China is far more dependent upon oil from the Arabian Gulf than the United States is. Contrary to popular belief the United States doesn't receive the majority of her oil from the Middle East; most of it comes from the Western Hemisphere.
As far as the rest of your post, I'm not going to be drawn into an argument on the merits or lack thereof of our policy with regards to Israel. It's interesting that you decline the mention the nervousness of the Arab states that border Iran though. If it was purely about Israel one would think that the Saudis and their neighbors would be cheering the Iranian nuclear program on. Of course they aren't; the prospect bothers them just as much as it bothers the Western World.
A better question would be will they ever approach what's possible with nuclear warheads? Little Boy was 15 kilotons or 640,152,000,000,000 joules of energy released in less than the blink of an eye. Modern nuclear weapons are much more powerful and can be scaled up indefinitely using the Teller–Ulam design. The largest American weapon ever tested was 15 megatons -- 6.40152e+17 joules. The largest Russian weapon ever tested was three times as powerful. It will be a long time before you see a directed energy weapon that comes close to those energy levels.
.... it has nothing to do with "brown people" or white superiority. The Chinese have nuclear weapons and you don't see the Western World freaking the fuck out about that. Why is that? Because for all of their flaws the Chinese actually behave like adults in the global community. They don't sponsor terrorism, they don't threaten freedom of navigation on the high seas and they don't have an openly racist high level politician that denies the right of one of his neighbors to exist. If Iran wants to be treated like a grown up perhaps it should start acting like one.
BTW, I like the subject "Typical American". Do you realize that Europe is just as freaked out by the prospect of a nuclear armed Iran as the United States is? Actually it probably bothers them more; we aren't within range of Iranian missiles but most of Europe is.
For my part, the cloud is probably fine to use if you want to store anything that is not security or financially related
Or anything you are afraid of having read back to you in a courtroom one day. Your data can be subpoenaed off a cloud service and you might not even realize it.
I'm not certain how I feel about this either but this wasn't done by a private entity; it was done by the Federal Government. Those involved will receive due process of law and will be provided with legal counsel if they are unable to afford their own. The first is debatable in the civil actions brought by RIAA/MPAA while the second doesn't apply in civil cases.
In any case, this is the price you pay when you rely on cloud computing. Those of us who were skeptical about it have been saying this from the very beginning. If you entrust the sole copy of important data to someone else you've got nobody to blame but yourself when they go out of business/get shutdown/change their policies/etc. There's a reason why I don't use my G-mail account for anything other than New York Times/similar sites that make me register.
I'm curious why you went to phone calls when I never mentioned them in my initial post?
That said, some of us do appreciate the value of hearing an actual voice and knowing we have someone's (relatively) undivided attention. Phone calls don't need to "interrupt" your day nor do they need to endure for hours on end. I can communicate more to someone with a five minute phone call than I can with five hours of texting.
Speaking of fucking annoying that's how I view text messages. They are fine for "Hey, I'm running a few minutes late" but utterly useless for real conversation. They are slower than IM, less meaningful than e-mail and entirely too prone to the misunderstandings that a danger in all forms of non-verbal/in-person communication. Vocal inflections and body language make up a significant portion of human interaction; you are missing a great deal when you remove them both from the equation.
I'm skeptical of online dating as well but I'm at a loss for what's better these days. I'm not into the bar/clubbing scene, so cross that off the list. I've always maintained boundaries at work and refuse to date co-workers. What does that leave? I've tried activity groups (hiking clubs and the like) but most of the people who attend those are already paired off. Church may be an option for some people but the median age at my church is around 60 so that's not going to work either.
I've actually met a few friends through OKCupid. Nothing that panned out as relationship material but if you troll through that site long enough you'll actually find decent human beings mixed in with the fake profiles/spammers and the extremely desperate. I think I've met seven or eight people through OKC and only one of them turned out to be psycho. That's probably comparable odds to meeting people in person -- anybody can pretend to be sane for the initial conversation! Sucks that you got banned from there. I wouldn't regard E-Harmony as any real loss; it's overpriced and hasn't quite escaped it's Christian roots. Unless you are a fairly religious person looking for your future spouse E-Harmony isn't likely to prove fruitful.
The only new thing here is that it happens to girls
I've recently had the "privilege" of venturing back into the dating market after more than a year of being single. Imagine my surprise when I learned that it's virtually impossible to date these days without an unlimited texting package. Nobody knows (or at least nobody I've dated) how to talk anymore. It's as if asking for conversation in more than 160 character bites is too much. The distressing thing is that this trait seems to be independent of education and background. I've dated women with backgrounds ranging from GED to Ph.D candidate and have encountered this with all of them.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but I'm a techno geek who still appreciates the value of a good handshake and eye contact. The lack of these skills doesn't just screw you with dating; it screws you in the business world as well.
Circa pre-9/11, 1999 I think, I found equivalent blue-prints online for the Fat Man bomb. It was a large color scan image, probably 3000x4000 with clear dimensions and references of the interior. Wikipedia says such blueprints are still classified. Those were the net golden years, weren't they?
Those blueprints are classified. What that means under American law is that it's a crime for someone with a security clearance to leak those blueprints. It is not a crime for a third party (e.g., newspaper, website, t-shirt printer, etc.) to publish those blueprints if they come into possession of them or manage to duplicate Fat Man on their own. This is why for all the bluster against him it's quite unlikely that Julian Assange could be convicted of anything (related to Wikileaks anyway) under American law.
See United States v. The Progressive and New York Times Co. v. United States for some of the relevant case law.