I think you meant "perceived" wisdom. But in fact, I've installed Linux on several friend's PCs who had never used a computer before (Mandriva 8 IIRC). None of them have had any trouble whatever using it. In fact, I get fewer "how do I" phone calls from them with Linux/KDE than I did when their new machines were running Windows.
Uh huh. And how do you answer when they call up and ask how to run Word and Excel?
I'm running Vista on a two-year-old PC I picked up from the bargain bin at Fry's (two years ago). It's hard to believe you won't be able to run Vista on a subnotebook in another year, especially if all you're doing is checking email and surfing the web.
You won't be able to run Crysis, but you can't do that on the Linux version either.
None of the laws in place that force carriers to play ball with the FBI were passed without the support of the Democrats. And I think it's quite reasonable. Whether or not you believe they always do so legitimately, the FBI needs the capability installing wiretaps as part of its mission. If they do so too often, the remedy is legislative, not technical.
And demonizing Bush is wrong and counterproductive. He isn't "evil", and he's not stupid. The guy is focused on preventing the next 9/11. Legitimate arguments can be made over policy, over whether the government ought to be doing this or that, but there are truly evil people in the world, and Bush isn't one of them.
No. But when shopkeepers drive you away from their shops, and school children keep poking to make sure your son too is a human being does.
I've had many (caucasian) friends go to Japan, and none of them reported the problems you describe. Do you have three eyes or something?
The joke is on them. In 100 years, the whole country would be ruled by robots.
I doubt it. It doesn't take long for a detemined subpopulation to tip the demographic scales back in the positive direction. A Mormon friend of mine had more than forty grandchildren at the age of 55. In a hundred years Japan will have more people than it does today, it's just that those people will be descended from a relatively small subset of the current population.
I'm not sure I accept your contention Japanese corporate interests are more powerful relative to their respective government. Here in the US a pretty solid 70% of Americans want to see illegal immigration stopped, and yet the government makes almost no effort to stop it.
In Japan, the corporate interests may love cheap foreign labor, but they don't seem to have much success actually importing it in substantial numbers. According to the CIA World Factbook, Japan is 98.5% ethnic Japanese and has a 0% net migration.
I don't know why attempts to preserve one's own culture are seen by others as "paranoia and deep hatred of foreigners". Does the fact I lock my door at night speak of my "paranoia and deep hatred" of people who don't live in my house?
It seems pretty reasonable to me Japanese people would want to speak the Japanese language. To have some predictability in relations with other people due to a common culture.
Personally, I think future generations of Americans and Europeans will curse this generation for saddling them with a bunch of hostile cultures trying in vain to live together in harmony. This multi-culti crap was supposed to be "It's a Small World", but in reality the Western world is turning into Lebanon writ large. Kudos to the Japanese for rejecting the great stupidity of our age.
This is silly. Japan doesn't have Mexico, but they do have China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, which together have ten times the population of Mexico and far less money per capita.
The Japanese don't have immigrants because they don't want immigrants, whereas the US contains powerful business and social interests intent on as much immigration as possible.
Yeah, not only is it abundant, but all the aluminum that gets used is still here - we're not transmuting it into lead or firing it into the sun. We'd never run out of stuff to recycle even if it wasn't so common.
Declared nuclear states (and states like Israel that are unofficially declared) are just fine. If the Israelis lob a nuke at the Russians, they know they have only twenty minutes or so to make peace with whomever they worship. India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed countries that have, what, seven wars under their collective belt haven't nuked each other. Fear is a wonderful demotivator.
But terrorism is different. Let's say Al Queda gets ahold of a nuclear bomb. What, exactly, is their downside to actually using it? Who would we retaliate against if they used it to blow up New York? Hell, they might not care if we went on a big bombing spree, since all the dead Muslims are gonna get their virgins.
And why are you so sanguine about their chances of actually acquiring one? The technology is over sixty years old - you can get plans off the internet. People have been caught selling stolen Russian fissionables now on more than one occasion. And terrorist groups don't seem to have a big problem attracting engineers. Sure, they probably couldn't build a fusion bomb, and a crude fission bomb might be large and have a yield of "only" 50kt or so. That would be enough to kill millions.
Personally, I don't think nuclear terrorism is an "if" question. It's a "when" question. But short of a verifyable, complete international ban on all nuclear devices, including power stations, I don't see how it can be prevented.
But there IS no perfect candidate for torture. The same effects of torturing an innocent person come into effect. You have no clue at what point you're getting no new, valid information as the subject will respond the same way
First off, just because you don't know when you've got everything doesn't mean you're not gonna get anything. Secondly, the problem with innocent people is you don't know if they know anything. But with a person you're sure has information, you don't have that problem. Of course he's not going to give you information to questions you don't ask, but nobody's smart enough to piece together a false story with no holes. What made KSM the perfect candidate for waterboarding was we already knew he had the information we wanted.
And besides, you can't argue with results. We were able to roll up a huge financial network based on information we got from him after a few minutes of pouring water up his nose. I'm not arguing a moral position here - all I'm saying is sometimes torture works.
Spies often work by using people that do NOT know anything of value. Hell if I was a spy I'd set shit up and call the damn interrogators just to keep them busy. Torture is a crude tactic in the intelligence game - it only works against those that are bad at playing the game. What's more, is if your enemy is bad at playing the game, why do you need it?
I think you would find it very difficult to set up a wild goose chase that would fool a reasonably intelligent interrogator. There's all sorts of physical evidence that would be difficult to get ahold of and plant. Depending on the nature of what you're doing, you might not be able to set anything up because the story would involve areas not under your control.
In any event you're missing a crucial point: Not everyone is intelligent. You might not get anything off a FSB-trained spy who's got an IQ of 150. But your average "militant" is probably not that smart. Indeed, he may be too dumb to realize he's gonna get caught eventually. The jails are full of criminals that thought they would never get caught.
Like any kind of police work, the most efficient use of your time is taking advantage of the weak points of your enemy's organization, i.e. the dumb people and the ignorant people. You know Osama bin Laden used an unencrypted satellite phone for years? That most terrorist plots fail because they don't take basic operational security measures?
On the contrary -- people who say torture works watch too many movies. Ditto for people who think lie detectors work. You do realize the CIA has admitted to never actually outing an agent with a lie detector, right?
The CIA is hopelessly bound by bureaucracy. I'd be seriously surprised if they actual found out anything of any value and managed to communicate it to people who need to know. Lie detectors can work, but they don't usually. I would certainly investigate someone who failed a polygraph test, but a pass tells you nothing. Which the CIA knows very well thanks to Aldrich Ames.
Torture is a useful way to justify your own actions and beliefs, and it may be a way to get information from someone IF they have that information but it is NOT a good reliable way of ascertaining if they even know that information nor if the information they give you is accurate.
I addressed this in my post. I agree - if you have no way to corroborate anything it's not likely to yield anything useful. And it doesn't tell you what people might know. But someone like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for instance, was a perfect candidate. There was no question he knew lots of things we wanted to know. And we had ways of corroborating what he said - bank records, phone records, evidence from police raids, etc. So of course torture will work in that situation. And it did, assuming that's how you characterize waterboarding.
This is the guy that planned 9/11, so certainly deserves all the pain he got and more. The only valid arguments I can see against torture in his case are based on it's effect on our national character.
By the way, "justify[ing] your own actions and beliefs" doesn't really enter into it. That's what religion is for (well, or the NYT if you're on the left).
My concern with this angle in the discussion is this: There are valid reasons to have a policy against torture. But this one is weak, and it tends to make the people making the argument look like they're debating in bad faith. In certain situations it works. We know it works. The question really is, knowing that, do we want to forgo it's use anyway?
The trouble with torture is ultimately there is no real way to tell the difference between some who is supressing information and someone who simply doesn't know. Either will deny knowing. And either will give you false information -- the former in defiance, the latter because that's all they've got, and you don't let up until they give you SOMETHING.
And that's why it's not effective in every situation. Yes, you need some way of corroborating the data. As you pointed out, in the case of bombs it's pretty easy, since you can just go look to see if there's a bomb. And yeah, if you pick up a guy who doesn't know anything it's gonna be a long couple weeks, especially for him. But that's the way intelligence works in general - you put lot of time and effort into finding things out and most of the time you're in a blind alley.
Torturing people until they confess crimes is stupid. There's no court in the world that would take that kind of evidence unless the whole thing is a show trial anyway.
In the case of conspiracies, though, I think you're wrong. Conspiracies have all sorts of physical evidence. In a bomb plot, depending on how far along it is you'll have bomb-making materials, receipts, phone calls, residues, funny smells remembered by the neighbors, weapons, bank transactions, and maybe even actual explosives. You can't have a bomb plot without physical evidence. The point isn't to bring in the guys your victim names and torture them too - that would be pointless. It's that you now have a place to look for physical evidence.
People who say torture doesn't work watch too many movies. Sure, it doesn't work the way Hollywood protrays it, but then again neither would many of MacGuyver's little creations. Virtually every government in the world uses torture, or has used it in the past. There may be lots of reasons not to do it, but "it doesn't work" isn't a valid one in my opinion.
Okay, so you're undermining your own position here. Your house is smaller but you have enough extra income to pay it off early. Doesn't that imply you could have gotten a bigger house and paid it off in the same timeframe your dad did? And "no extra pay channels" isn't the same thing as "no cable, no internet, and no cellphone".
Sure, I was making assumptions. But it still sounds like you spend more on lifestyle maintenence than your folks did. And even if that's not true, the fact that you aren't doing as well as your parents doesn't mean the average person isn't. The numbers simply don't support that position.
Apparently the Chinese have stolen all the information they want on how to do things. Now they're down to stealing information on how not to do a space program.
Baloney. I do roughly the same thing my dad did too, and I have quite more "stuff" than he could have dreamed of at my age. I'll bet if you sit down and talk to your old man he'll be able to point out all kinds of things you spend money on he couldn't possibly have afforded.
Ask him if he would have gone to a place like Starbucks to buy coffee when he was your age. Or if he paid someone else to change the oil and do simple repairs on the car. Ask him how many cars the family had - my parents only had one, which wasn't at all uncommon, while every young couple I know has two. How many square feet was your father's house at your age? The square footage in housing has gone up 50% in the last 30 years. How much did your parents spend (as a percentage of income) on Christmas gifts every year, compared to what you spend? How about coupon clipping - my mother spent hours every week clipping coupons so she could get the best deal on stuff like food and toilet paper. Do you?
If you give up your 150 channels and live with the five or so you get over the air you'll have what your parents had in terms of television? And give up your internet connection along with your WoW subscription. And the cell phone. All told, that's probably a couple hundred bucks your parents didn't spend every month.
Do you do your own yard work? In my neighborhood nobody, but nobody, mows his own lawn. In 1960 that would have been considered a pretentious luxury.
There's no empirical measurement that shows the current generation of young people are worse off than their parents. The reason you can't back your "just look around" argument up with actual numbers is people are better off than their parents, but their expectations in terms of lifestyle are out of whack.
By the way, the two-income argument is hokum. It's not any harder to survive on a single income than it was in the 1960s if you're willing to have the standard of living they had. That means different things depending on your actual income, of course. My dad bought his first new car at the tender young age of 36. When did you buy your first new car?
The exception to all this, of course, is blue collar manufacturing. But there's no secret what happened there - the good jobs moved to other countries where people make a couple bucks for a twelve hour shift. The difference between what people in the third world made and what Americans made for unskilled labor was just too great to be sustainable.
Oh, I'm sure Linux boxes are subject to attacks as well. I just think, as a nefarious writer of cracking software, you'd have to believe your time is better spent cracking Windows than Linux. And I don't believe servers are the most profitable boxes to hack anymore - keyloggers to swindle online banking users are probably the big moneymakers.
I'm sure China would love to keep the cost of it's maglev down, but they can't. That's why they've already cancelled future extensions in favor of conventional high-speed rail. Apparently they couldn't get the cost below $70m/km. Not only that, but roads allow you to skip that extra step of changing modes of transportatino to get to and from the train station.
The maglev near Shanghai goes from the airport to the outskirts of the city. For a fraction of the cost, both in terms of money and time, you can take a taxi directly from the airport to the city center. And that's with the government heavily subsidizing the train. It's not practical mass transportation - it's a ride. A vanity project.
I agree trains can be more efficient than road traffic in certain situations, but we're not starting with empty land. Building out a high-speed rail system only makes sense if you're looking out generations into the future, because the building costs for the road network are sunk already.
Lack of profit, actually. The vast majority of freight applications don't benefit enough from high-speed rail to justify the cost, and passenger trains have to compete with air travel. Sure, if it was 1945 again it would make more sense to build rail than roads, but anything you build now is gonna have competition from existing networks, including conventional rail.
Even if it were the most secure, Vista would be first. I'm sure there are kits you can buy from shady groups in Eastern Europe or Russia that will do the trick immediately. If Vista doesn't already have the highest market share, it will at some point. So if you make hacking kits for organizations that make botnets you're gonna crack Vista first.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep. Anarchists set off a bomb on Wall Street in 1920. Things really haven't changed that much in 100 years.
I don't see how it's any different than FedEx in that respect.
I'm running Vista on a two-year-old PC I picked up from the bargain bin at Fry's (two years ago). It's hard to believe you won't be able to run Vista on a subnotebook in another year, especially if all you're doing is checking email and surfing the web.
You won't be able to run Crysis, but you can't do that on the Linux version either.
None of the laws in place that force carriers to play ball with the FBI were passed without the support of the Democrats. And I think it's quite reasonable. Whether or not you believe they always do so legitimately, the FBI needs the capability installing wiretaps as part of its mission. If they do so too often, the remedy is legislative, not technical.
And demonizing Bush is wrong and counterproductive. He isn't "evil", and he's not stupid. The guy is focused on preventing the next 9/11. Legitimate arguments can be made over policy, over whether the government ought to be doing this or that, but there are truly evil people in the world, and Bush isn't one of them.
I've had many (caucasian) friends go to Japan, and none of them reported the problems you describe. Do you have three eyes or something?
I doubt it. It doesn't take long for a detemined subpopulation to tip the demographic scales back in the positive direction. A Mormon friend of mine had more than forty grandchildren at the age of 55. In a hundred years Japan will have more people than it does today, it's just that those people will be descended from a relatively small subset of the current population.I'm not sure I accept your contention Japanese corporate interests are more powerful relative to their respective government. Here in the US a pretty solid 70% of Americans want to see illegal immigration stopped, and yet the government makes almost no effort to stop it.
In Japan, the corporate interests may love cheap foreign labor, but they don't seem to have much success actually importing it in substantial numbers. According to the CIA World Factbook, Japan is 98.5% ethnic Japanese and has a 0% net migration.
I don't know why attempts to preserve one's own culture are seen by others as "paranoia and deep hatred of foreigners". Does the fact I lock my door at night speak of my "paranoia and deep hatred" of people who don't live in my house?
It seems pretty reasonable to me Japanese people would want to speak the Japanese language. To have some predictability in relations with other people due to a common culture.
Personally, I think future generations of Americans and Europeans will curse this generation for saddling them with a bunch of hostile cultures trying in vain to live together in harmony. This multi-culti crap was supposed to be "It's a Small World", but in reality the Western world is turning into Lebanon writ large. Kudos to the Japanese for rejecting the great stupidity of our age.
This is silly. Japan doesn't have Mexico, but they do have China, the Philippines, and Indonesia, which together have ten times the population of Mexico and far less money per capita.
The Japanese don't have immigrants because they don't want immigrants, whereas the US contains powerful business and social interests intent on as much immigration as possible.
Yeah, not only is it abundant, but all the aluminum that gets used is still here - we're not transmuting it into lead or firing it into the sun. We'd never run out of stuff to recycle even if it wasn't so common.
I was wondering about that. Isn't that, well, criminal? Shouldn't somebody be getting a "notice to appear" from the DA?
Declared nuclear states (and states like Israel that are unofficially declared) are just fine. If the Israelis lob a nuke at the Russians, they know they have only twenty minutes or so to make peace with whomever they worship. India and Pakistan, both nuclear armed countries that have, what, seven wars under their collective belt haven't nuked each other. Fear is a wonderful demotivator.
But terrorism is different. Let's say Al Queda gets ahold of a nuclear bomb. What, exactly, is their downside to actually using it? Who would we retaliate against if they used it to blow up New York? Hell, they might not care if we went on a big bombing spree, since all the dead Muslims are gonna get their virgins.
And why are you so sanguine about their chances of actually acquiring one? The technology is over sixty years old - you can get plans off the internet. People have been caught selling stolen Russian fissionables now on more than one occasion. And terrorist groups don't seem to have a big problem attracting engineers. Sure, they probably couldn't build a fusion bomb, and a crude fission bomb might be large and have a yield of "only" 50kt or so. That would be enough to kill millions.
Personally, I don't think nuclear terrorism is an "if" question. It's a "when" question. But short of a verifyable, complete international ban on all nuclear devices, including power stations, I don't see how it can be prevented.
First off, just because you don't know when you've got everything doesn't mean you're not gonna get anything. Secondly, the problem with innocent people is you don't know if they know anything. But with a person you're sure has information, you don't have that problem. Of course he's not going to give you information to questions you don't ask, but nobody's smart enough to piece together a false story with no holes. What made KSM the perfect candidate for waterboarding was we already knew he had the information we wanted.
And besides, you can't argue with results. We were able to roll up a huge financial network based on information we got from him after a few minutes of pouring water up his nose. I'm not arguing a moral position here - all I'm saying is sometimes torture works.
I think you would find it very difficult to set up a wild goose chase that would fool a reasonably intelligent interrogator. There's all sorts of physical evidence that would be difficult to get ahold of and plant. Depending on the nature of what you're doing, you might not be able to set anything up because the story would involve areas not under your control.
In any event you're missing a crucial point: Not everyone is intelligent. You might not get anything off a FSB-trained spy who's got an IQ of 150. But your average "militant" is probably not that smart. Indeed, he may be too dumb to realize he's gonna get caught eventually. The jails are full of criminals that thought they would never get caught.
Like any kind of police work, the most efficient use of your time is taking advantage of the weak points of your enemy's organization, i.e. the dumb people and the ignorant people. You know Osama bin Laden used an unencrypted satellite phone for years? That most terrorist plots fail because they don't take basic operational security measures?
The CIA is hopelessly bound by bureaucracy. I'd be seriously surprised if they actual found out anything of any value and managed to communicate it to people who need to know. Lie detectors can work, but they don't usually. I would certainly investigate someone who failed a polygraph test, but a pass tells you nothing. Which the CIA knows very well thanks to Aldrich Ames.
I addressed this in my post. I agree - if you have no way to corroborate anything it's not likely to yield anything useful. And it doesn't tell you what people might know. But someone like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, for instance, was a perfect candidate. There was no question he knew lots of things we wanted to know. And we had ways of corroborating what he said - bank records, phone records, evidence from police raids, etc. So of course torture will work in that situation. And it did, assuming that's how you characterize waterboarding.
This is the guy that planned 9/11, so certainly deserves all the pain he got and more. The only valid arguments I can see against torture in his case are based on it's effect on our national character.
By the way, "justify[ing] your own actions and beliefs" doesn't really enter into it. That's what religion is for (well, or the NYT if you're on the left).
My concern with this angle in the discussion is this: There are valid reasons to have a policy against torture. But this one is weak, and it tends to make the people making the argument look like they're debating in bad faith. In certain situations it works. We know it works. The question really is, knowing that, do we want to forgo it's use anyway?
And that's why it's not effective in every situation. Yes, you need some way of corroborating the data. As you pointed out, in the case of bombs it's pretty easy, since you can just go look to see if there's a bomb. And yeah, if you pick up a guy who doesn't know anything it's gonna be a long couple weeks, especially for him. But that's the way intelligence works in general - you put lot of time and effort into finding things out and most of the time you're in a blind alley.
Torturing people until they confess crimes is stupid. There's no court in the world that would take that kind of evidence unless the whole thing is a show trial anyway.
In the case of conspiracies, though, I think you're wrong. Conspiracies have all sorts of physical evidence. In a bomb plot, depending on how far along it is you'll have bomb-making materials, receipts, phone calls, residues, funny smells remembered by the neighbors, weapons, bank transactions, and maybe even actual explosives. You can't have a bomb plot without physical evidence. The point isn't to bring in the guys your victim names and torture them too - that would be pointless. It's that you now have a place to look for physical evidence.
People who say torture doesn't work watch too many movies. Sure, it doesn't work the way Hollywood protrays it, but then again neither would many of MacGuyver's little creations. Virtually every government in the world uses torture, or has used it in the past. There may be lots of reasons not to do it, but "it doesn't work" isn't a valid one in my opinion.
Okay, so you're undermining your own position here. Your house is smaller but you have enough extra income to pay it off early. Doesn't that imply you could have gotten a bigger house and paid it off in the same timeframe your dad did? And "no extra pay channels" isn't the same thing as "no cable, no internet, and no cellphone".
Sure, I was making assumptions. But it still sounds like you spend more on lifestyle maintenence than your folks did. And even if that's not true, the fact that you aren't doing as well as your parents doesn't mean the average person isn't. The numbers simply don't support that position.
Apparently the Chinese have stolen all the information they want on how to do things. Now they're down to stealing information on how not to do a space program.
Baloney. I do roughly the same thing my dad did too, and I have quite more "stuff" than he could have dreamed of at my age. I'll bet if you sit down and talk to your old man he'll be able to point out all kinds of things you spend money on he couldn't possibly have afforded.
Ask him if he would have gone to a place like Starbucks to buy coffee when he was your age. Or if he paid someone else to change the oil and do simple repairs on the car. Ask him how many cars the family had - my parents only had one, which wasn't at all uncommon, while every young couple I know has two. How many square feet was your father's house at your age? The square footage in housing has gone up 50% in the last 30 years. How much did your parents spend (as a percentage of income) on Christmas gifts every year, compared to what you spend? How about coupon clipping - my mother spent hours every week clipping coupons so she could get the best deal on stuff like food and toilet paper. Do you?
If you give up your 150 channels and live with the five or so you get over the air you'll have what your parents had in terms of television? And give up your internet connection along with your WoW subscription. And the cell phone. All told, that's probably a couple hundred bucks your parents didn't spend every month.
Do you do your own yard work? In my neighborhood nobody, but nobody, mows his own lawn. In 1960 that would have been considered a pretentious luxury.
There's no empirical measurement that shows the current generation of young people are worse off than their parents. The reason you can't back your "just look around" argument up with actual numbers is people are better off than their parents, but their expectations in terms of lifestyle are out of whack.
By the way, the two-income argument is hokum. It's not any harder to survive on a single income than it was in the 1960s if you're willing to have the standard of living they had. That means different things depending on your actual income, of course. My dad bought his first new car at the tender young age of 36. When did you buy your first new car?
The exception to all this, of course, is blue collar manufacturing. But there's no secret what happened there - the good jobs moved to other countries where people make a couple bucks for a twelve hour shift. The difference between what people in the third world made and what Americans made for unskilled labor was just too great to be sustainable.
Oh, I'm sure Linux boxes are subject to attacks as well. I just think, as a nefarious writer of cracking software, you'd have to believe your time is better spent cracking Windows than Linux. And I don't believe servers are the most profitable boxes to hack anymore - keyloggers to swindle online banking users are probably the big moneymakers.
I'm sure China would love to keep the cost of it's maglev down, but they can't. That's why they've already cancelled future extensions in favor of conventional high-speed rail. Apparently they couldn't get the cost below $70m/km. Not only that, but roads allow you to skip that extra step of changing modes of transportatino to get to and from the train station.
The maglev near Shanghai goes from the airport to the outskirts of the city. For a fraction of the cost, both in terms of money and time, you can take a taxi directly from the airport to the city center. And that's with the government heavily subsidizing the train. It's not practical mass transportation - it's a ride. A vanity project.
I agree trains can be more efficient than road traffic in certain situations, but we're not starting with empty land. Building out a high-speed rail system only makes sense if you're looking out generations into the future, because the building costs for the road network are sunk already.
What would stop private industry from doing it?
Lack of profit, actually. The vast majority of freight applications don't benefit enough from high-speed rail to justify the cost, and passenger trains have to compete with air travel. Sure, if it was 1945 again it would make more sense to build rail than roads, but anything you build now is gonna have competition from existing networks, including conventional rail.
I have to believe Boston's Big Dig falls into that category, even if it's not as sexy as the Chunnel. We (taxpayers) sure as hell paid enough for it.
Even if it were the most secure, Vista would be first. I'm sure there are kits you can buy from shady groups in Eastern Europe or Russia that will do the trick immediately. If Vista doesn't already have the highest market share, it will at some point. So if you make hacking kits for organizations that make botnets you're gonna crack Vista first.