May not have been your intention but it was the result, and you fell in to the same brand of rhetoric the Bush administration falls into when they want to win a point without risk of debate, just invoke 9/11 and Pearl Harbor and you can rationalize every government excess and accuse anyone who argues a counterpoint of being weak or unpatriotic.
Uh, I was trying to provide information, not win a debate. As I said, that's the mindset among the people who classify information. Since you don't know me well enough to read my mind, please stick to commenting on what I'm writing without adding your own political baggage.
I wasn't referring to the 9/11 committee report. I was referring to the Congressional report which was harder hitting and laid some of the blame where it belonged on Saudi Arabia. The entire lengthy section on Saudi involvement with the plot was censored by the White House over the objections of Congressmen in both parties.
I'm so glad you have specific information about what was censored in that report. Perhaps you can share?
As nearly as I can tell Able Danger was a case of people with an agenda making something out of nothing. They are trying to con the nation in to legalizing and funding massive computerized spying on America by the Pentagon, and the easiest way to do it in the face of stiff opposition is to claim it would have prevented 9/11.
No, what they're trying to do is figure out how it is the military could have figured out Atta was a terrorist but didn't think it was important enough to pass on to the FBI. The idea the 9/11 commission could ommit any mention of Abel Danger from the report and maintain a shred of dignity or credibility is patently ridiculous. That's the point I was trying to make.
I know Atta and a couple other hijackers were well known to the CIA as being potential Al Qaeda members.
You know that? How? I've never seen anything along those lines except for pure speculation. I doubt they knew, since the CIA doesn't seem to actually do anything these days beyond selectively releasing classified data in an effort to affect domestic politics. In any event it's irrelevent - they don't have the authority to do anything on US soil, so if they don't pass this kind of information on to the FBI they may as well not exist at all.
The more disturbing thing is the President had a briefing paper in August about Al Qaeda attacking the U.S. with airplanes and he didn't even bother to have the FBI follow up on it. If they had it might registered that field agents had red flagged Arabs in U.S. flight schools training to fly but not land airliners.
First of all, the president gets briefed on thousands of those kinds of possibilities - plots to poison reservoirs, blow up oil refineries, ram oil tankers into bridges - you name it. If there's no specific information it doesn't rise above the noise floor. It doesn't bother me that he didn't take action to address any one specifically - it's not his job to micro-manage the FBI, and if he tries he'll just make things worse.
Secondly, the FBI doesn't need direct presidential authority to put potential terrorists under surveilance, and they don't wait for it in other cases. They may need a warrant, but that's not the President's office.
I don't think any leaked classified data made any contribution to Pearl Harbor or 9/11 though it is clever on your part to invoke those two traumas to win points for your argument.
I'm not trying to "win points" for anything. I'm just trying to address a bureaucratic mindset. I never said the classification system had anything to do with either tragedy, and I didn't mean to imply it either. The point I was trying to make is while over-classifying data doesn't make sense from the country's perspective, from the low-level bureaucrat's perspective it's the easiest, safest thing to do.
Unfortunately classification is CONSTANTLY abused by people in government to conceal their failures and the failure of the government to do its job, and worse to hide some of its malevolent schemes. It's also integral in a government's creation of a false picture of the world in the minds of the population in order to manipulate them. Classification and propaganda go hand in hand.
Oh, I agree completely. Based on what I've read in the paper over the years you can tell how well a weapon system works by looking at the classification. The more problems and cost overruns the system had the more secret it was. But having worked in that environment I can tell you the amount of stuff classified for political purposes is insignificant compared to the mountains of documents classified because nobody wants to be responsible for releasing it.
As to the 9/11 report, if you thought it was ever intended to contain anything embarrassing to anyone you didn't understand the purpose. The whole point of the 9/11 commission was to spread the blame around so thinly the public wouldn't blame either party for all the dropped balls. I would think this is obvious after all the Abel Danger stuff that's been coming out in the past couple of weeks.
I hope people will wake up and realize not every 60-year-problem is Bush's fault.
If you ever work with classified data you'll realize it's almost impossible to get something declassified, since nobody wants to be the one who releases data that turns out to help an enemy launch the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack. When you're a civil servant, the key to advancing is to not do anything that hurts your career, as opposed to businessmen (and to some extent, military) who advance their careers by doing something.
Also, not classifying sensitive data is a career-ending mistake, while over-classifying unimportant data is, well, nothing that will ever get you into trouble. Who's gonna know? So when in doubt you always err on the side of extra security.
Sometime in the '80s they made a change to the rules where if you classified something you had to put a date upon which the item becomes declassified automatically. Unfortunately, there's warehouses full of classified data dating back to the second world war (think Raiders of the Lost Ark here) that nobody has the time to look at, so it will never be declassified.
I suspect most of the old stuff will eventually be destroyed for lack of money, which is a shame from the historical perspective.
I mean, the industry doesn't care about a few geeks. But when Joe Sixpack has enough of all those restrictions, that's when it'll hurt the industry. The question is, how much will it take?
The problem is, from their perspective, Joe Sixpack isn't an early adopter. He already has a DVD player, so he won't buy Blu-Ray until movies don't come out on DVD anymore. Movies still come out on tape, so I'm not too worried about that. He'll need it to play those HDTV-format movies, but one thing that's clear in recent years is he doesn't really care about high definition.
The industry will be depending on those geeky first-adopters to get the market penetration they need to bring along Joe, so we have more market clout than you'd expect on first glance. I figure an unorganized boycott might work - an organized boycott will surely work.
"Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces" which would cover all Taliban foot soldiers (an army of Taliban-controlled Afganistan) and all Iraqi "insurgents" who were members of the Saddam's Ba'ath army.
As far as I'm aware Taliban foot soldiers have been considered prisoners of war. It takes some association with Al Queda to land you in Cuba. And while I would agree somebody who launches a rocket at a US base is a resistance fighter entitled to protection as a POW, a guy who blows up a polling station full of civilians is not.
If you were to take your reasoning to its logical conclusion, the Chech partisans who assassinated the Reinhard Heidrich - the German Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia would be terrorists and the Germans would be entitled to do with them as they please. I do not even want to consider looking into the the dark sewers of relative morality such an opinion could only dwell in.
Leaving aside the fact the Germans probably would have done exactly that, you can't equate the assasination of a leader of an occupying power with the bombing of a street full of children.
The Geneva Conventions are a result of that agreement as they were signed after the Nuremburg trials.
The preamble of first convention of 1949:
The undersigned Plenipotentiaries of the Governments represented at the Diplomatic Conference held at Geneva from April 21 to August 12, 1949, for the purpose of revising the Geneva Convention for the Relief of the Wounded and Sick in Armies in the Field of July 27, 1929, have agreed as follows:
What we refer to as "The Geneva Conventions" is older than WWII.
NO! If they are "violating the rules of war" that determination is to be made by the court in Hague not by the US! You can't appoint yourself judge, jury and executioner.
The US didn't sign the treaty that would recognize the permanent international war crimes court in the Hague. In fact, every such court has been authorized separately by conflict and expires with the completion of its work. As far as I'm aware the US is bound by the following verbage in the same treaty quoted above(emphasis mine):
Each High Contracting Party shall be under the obligation to search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, such grave breaches, and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality,
before its own courts.
Again, the standard is "competant tribunal", not civilian courts, and certainly not international courts. I'll admit there's certainly room for reasonable people to disagree about what that means.
I disagree if you think gathering innocuous near-open source information isn't important. In the article it stated "these hackers wanted all the files they could find." It's obvious now that the Chinese way of collecting information is to throw a massive net into various geographical realms (including cyberspace) and gain as much information as possible. Who knows what data these guys are getting. The data may seem innocuous to us but to the Chinese it may be pertinent competitive information. In a worst case scenario this information gathering could be a reconnaissance for future cyber covert action.
Yes, I understand there may be some value to the information they've acquired. It's impossible to cover every "shadow" thrown by a military project. The problem is, from the Chinese perspective, is these kinds of large data dumps are much more trouble to analyze than they're worth. That's why the data isn't classified. It's far less effort to develop agents with access to clearly valueable data (like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen) than to engage every statistician and analyst in the country to piece together valuable information in a sea of data. This is why the FBI didn't consider it worth the effort to pursue with their own resources. The is the same situation Cliff Stoll was confronted with when German hackers broke into his university system looking for military secrets.
While that is so, it's a pretty sophomoric view of CI. Usually CI runs through a couple of stages:
...
Well you've given some nice guidelines about what data should be considered important, but it doesn't bear on the question of what to do when an intrusion is detected.
The American CI have a pretty good idea about the Chinese hackers technical means, their operational means and what information the Chinese are exactly getting-hence why they are worried. So to publicly out this through the press really isn't a big deal because they know everything they need to know, they now need to assess their vulnerabilities and run through the CI cycle again.
It would be the height of arrogance for the FBI to assume they "know everything they need to know". The proper response to an incident like this would be to try to figure out names, techniques to go with those names, and lines of authority in China. That way you wouldn't get caught flat-footed when they try something new. Maybe that doesn't fall under "means and methods", but it's something they should be doing. The fact the attackers know they've been discovered makes it that much more difficult.
The correct response for this kind of thing is for the CIA to penetrate the relevant Chinese organization, but these days I don't think the CIA actually does anything but play US domestic politics.
In which case the US is not at war and they are merely criminals to be tried in accrodance with international law standards. You cannot have it both ways! Either they are para-military caught during military operations or they are criminal suspects.
By convention irregulars are understood to be POWs if captured (although they don't technically qualify based on the four part test in Article 4). However, the conventions clearly state combatants who violate the rules of war lose their POW status and can be tried by a "competant tribunal". While the meaning of that phrase isn't defined, in the past it has meant military tribunals (of which the Nuremberg trials are the most famous).Every prisoner in Guantanamo has come before a military tribunal, fulfilling the treaty requirement.
While the Geneva conventions prohibit the trial of POWs for the act of making war, they can be tried, by US military tribunal, for violations of rules of war. We are perfectly within our rights, under international law, to execute these people if they are judged to be war criminals.
That being the case, we can't torture them under any circumstances. The question of whether or not loud music or sleep deprevation is torture isn't so clear cut.
The writer tries to dance around it, but if you read between the lines you see reason these servers are connected to the internet is they don't hold classified data. Every day the DoD produces an unthinkable amount of documentation, and only a small portion of it actually matters to anyone (including DoD).
Oh, and this guy is a moron. Part of the counter-intelligence game is to make sure the enemy doesn't know he's been caught. This guy is such a bull in the china shop he's destroyed any chance we'll be able to learn "means and methods" information from this ring.
My guess is that we're still a good twenty years off at least, and that the positive solution will have something to do with how neutrinos work/are produced
Bah. We're always twenty years from nuclear fusion. We were in the '70s. Is there some kind of conspiracy among physicists to only develop fusion devices that are good for getting grants, but no good for scaling up to commercial power?
It just plays perfect poker (statistically.) And against most players, that is a sure win over time. Even against great players, it doesn't lose over time (think Las Vegas house.)
This is clearly wrong. There isn't any such thing as "perfect poker (statistically.)" The best players tailor their game to other players around the table, both in live games and on sites like PartyPoker.com.
Statistical poker isn't that hard to play. Most books on the subject include handy tables to figure out how likely you are to make your hand based on the number of "outs" you have. Throw in a little hand groupings for preflop play and you're all set to play "statistically". You should be ready to have your ass handed to you, though, since every professional poker player in the world can beat a "statistical" player.
From a professional's point of view, the poker bots will ruin the game, though. Not because the pros can't beat the bots. The problem is the bots will drive out the truly bad players, which is where most of the money comes from. A pro playing bots all the time will make a small profit, but it's a lot of work for the amount of effort. I predict if this bot is good enough it will simply drive out the fish, and the sharks will move back into the local card clubs where they were making a comfortable living two or three years ago.
The research on this is pretty solid. This also explains why men are grossly over-represented in the top rungs of hard-science academia as well as Nobel prize winners (for the hard sciences). A larger standard deviation implies more Einsteins as well as more fools.
When you have 3 million dollars worth of stuff you can just tell her "I'm a businessman" and that'll be good enough for 99% of the women in the dating scene.
Good post. One other thing you might consider too:
When "Star Wars" was heavily funded in the '80s, the Russians did a little bit of investigation into what it would take to thwart both kinetic vehicles and energy weapons. The actually deployed the Topol-M, which has a lower arc and "jinks" in-flight, makeing it almost impossible to hit with another missile. It takes so long for your interceptor to get to the intercept point that a really tiny course deflection on the part of the target means you'll miss by a hundred miles.
On the energy side they came up with ablatives (which could be refitted to existing missiles) with, literally, a twist.
Since you have to hold the laser on a specific spot for some length of time (governed by the power of the laser, atmospherics, etc), you could significantly enhance the survivability of the missile by having it slowly rotate during the launch phase. We're talkin' about a reasonably simple software change that makes it 10x harder to shoot down with a laser.
I don't see why so many people think this is aimed at people doing massively parallel processing. It's not.
I'm thinking of my own employer, who's got hardware up the wazoo that mostly just sits around heating the building. Take payroll, for instance. They probably run some payroll batch job a couple times a month, then the rest of the time the computer that does payroll is just sitting around. Sure, you could run other stuff on it, but then when it came time to do the payroll everything would run slow and people would be upset.
The way I see it, this is perfect for all kinds of periodic batch-type business applications where you really want to have a dedicated machine but it won't be utilized all the time.
Also, machines that mostly sit around have about the same maintennence requirements as heavily-used hardware. They still need OS patches, security patches, backups, etc. And they need to get modified when the new head of IT decides logs should go in/var/tmp/messages instead of/var/adm/messages or whatever. I know my employer could probably get rid of 2/3 of its data center and a corresponding fraction of the high-priced administrators currently making everything run smoothly.
You could argue companies can do the same thing by balancing existing hardware, i.e. have one box host multiple "bursty" applications so the CPU doesn't have much idle time. But that takes lots of effort to manage, and it doesn't leave you any spare capacity when you need it. This way you don't need any spare capacity, and when your business grows you never have to worry about running out of rack space or lead times for new hardware.
The downside, of course, is you're trusting Sun to have the capacity available when you need it. In a way, it really is like a utility - Sun will be hoping its customers "bursts" will all average out to some managable load. I wonder if it's true.
I'm not missing the point. I just think it's silly to single out the Republicans on this when the Democrats proved they didn't have any stomach for Kyoto either. I think it's a little more clear than the Dems "would probably" do the same thing. They certainly had the chance to do something different when they were in power, especally in 1999 and 2000 when Clinton was still in office. Did you go around saying
But Democrats apparently believe that the environment is nothing more than an infinitely exploitable resource, so while 153 countries do their part, the world's #1 greenhouse gas polluter continues to belch out 25% of the world's CO2
until the Republicans took power in 2002?
My point is it's useless to criticise only the party in power over an issue upon which both parties are aligned. You simply have nowhere to go when it comes time to vote and they know it.
Why do people keep saying things like this? There are only 2 countries in the UN that refuse to join the Kyoto Protocol: the US and Australia.
Yeah, I suppose the easy way for the US to deal with this is to actually sign the treaty, then ignore it... like the Europeans.
But Republicans apparently believe that the environment is nothing more than an infinitely exploitable resource, so while 153 countries do their part, the world's #1 greenhouse gas polluter continues to belch out 25% of the world's CO2.
Time for a little history lesson, isn't it? Perhaps you'll recall the Democrats controlled the Senate for three years after Kyoto was signed, and it never came up for a vote because the Democrat-controlled Senate wouldn't ratify it. You see, neither party is really itching to commit political suicide. If the Dems regain control of the Senate in 2006, one thing you can be sure of is Kyoto still won't come up for a vote unless it's substantially modified.
But this fails to address the one place that the shuttle was good at: maintance of satellites.
That's was one of the shuttle's original selling points. Unfortunately, the cost of the shuttle flight is more than the cost of simply replacing the satellite in almost every case (Hubble being the one exception). And yet there's a more fundemental problem.
The shuttle doesn't go high enough. It can only get to low earth orbit, which is thousands of miles below the fast majority of satellites (in geosynchronous orbit). It was supposed to go to GEO orignally, and when they realized that wouldn't be possible they proposed a "space tug" to ferry the satellite back and forth. That never materialized. So we're stuck with a ship that, even if it could be operated cheaply enough to be worthwhile, couldn't actually get to the repair job for most satellites.
Good material for solar powered airships/blimps to jumpstart super cheap air-cargo. nough power to get a good clip and even replenish bouency with hydrogen from ocean/lake.
There's no need for that. Modern airships only need to be topped off about once a year or so, so there's no reason not to use helium. In any event, airships aren't economic for cargo because they're too slow, and I don't see any reason CNT cloth would change that.
This just shows you how dangerous anonymous gaming is. How was the bot owner supposed to know Ulong the Unmerciful was a cop playing a computer game at work?
There are no big bird swarms in the desert. It's not like pigeons in Venice (Italy, that is). Plus self-cleaning glass coatings ("lotus effect").
Well, the smog is pretty bad there, and there's lots of dust. Self cleaning glass would do the trick, though. Pretty cool if it doesn't cost too much.
A test unit with a 10 W output last August passed an operating landmark, more than 87,600 hours of continuous service, or 10 years' running with no maintenance or decline in performance."
Holy crap! I need one of these for my car. In all seriousness, though, is that a reasonable figure for a commercial system? Anyhow, it's pretty impressive.
The jury most certainly is not out.. Look at iTunes if you want to see a successful distributor. Then go back and look at Steam. Steam has clearly failed in a most catastrophic way. It may not be dead, but it has certainly failed..
I would accept Steam as a failure under the following conditions:
Half Life II made less money as a result of people not buying it because of Steam, offset by the number of people who bought a copy of the game because Steam made it more difficult to play a pirated version, and also offset by the number of people who bought it because they also got Valve's back catalog. Oh, and by "make less money" I mean you also have to consider Valve's profit on each sale through Steam is probably about 4x what they make when someone buys one at a retail store.
Valve is unable to successfully recoup the development cost of Steam with current or future revenues (valve or third party).
I don't see any reason to believe either of those two points applies. If you have some financial numbers relating to either point, I'd be interested in seeing them.
Steam doesn't have to be as ubiquitous as iTunes to be successful - it just has to make money, either now or in the future. From all appearances Half Life II was a rousing success, and every copy someone bought directly from valve made them what, four times the profit? Do you have some reason to believe they actually lost money because of Steam?
It was stupid, it may have been due to "contractual arrangements" but that just means it was either a) stupid that they signed the contract or b) stupid that they tried to use Half Life II to launch Steam.
It's hard to second-guess the signing of a distribution contract when a) they're all the same and b) you don't have another distribution channel (except maybe a vague idea of something you might put together in the future). As to using HLII to launch Steam, it makes some sense to start with a product you know will be popular, as people will be much more forgiving.
Tell you what, mark this post, write down my username, mark the date, whatever you want, then come back when Steam is a huge success and tell me how stupid I am. I just wouldn't hold my breath if I were you, you'll probably find it is dangerous for your health..
It doesn't have to be a "huge" success to be successfull. It's a success, in my book, if they make more money than they would have made otherwise. By that metric, for all you and I know it may already be a success. In that case future profits for distribution of third-party games is gravy.
So although I'm sure some people will get bent out of shape, I don't see the land area requirements as a big deal. If these things are truly economically competitive, as the article suggests, watch out.
I don't see how they can be competitive. There used to be a solar tower in southern California (called "Solar II") that used mirrors to focus light on a collector filled with sodium salts. They ran it for a couple of years, but found they'd have to charge every family served something like $270,000/yr for the power.
The big cost driver was keeping all those mirrors clean (I've always had this picture of 500 grad students with truckfulls of old tee-shirts and Windex). The mirrors collect dust, soot, birdshit, etc, which reduces their reflectivity. In Solar II all the mirrors were focused on one spot, so at least they only had one "reactor".
In this scheme they're gonna have 20,000 of these dishes. Each one has it's own Sterling engine. I'm not sure how they're gonna keep 20,000 dishes clean and 20,000 Stirling engines running cheaply enough to make the power economical. Not saying it's impossible, just a little skeptical.
First of all, I don't know why either of you think Steam "failed". I suspect it resulted in extra revenue for Valve, and they're planning to release a third-party game this fall, so the jury is still out. We would have to know how much it cost to implement and what the long-term revenue curves are to know whether or not it "failed".
As to why I responded to you post, it probably was where you said "stupid" instead of "due to contractual arrangements".
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Uh, I was trying to provide information, not win a debate. As I said, that's the mindset among the people who classify information. Since you don't know me well enough to read my mind, please stick to commenting on what I'm writing without adding your own political baggage.
I wasn't referring to the 9/11 committee report. I was referring to the Congressional report which was harder hitting and laid some of the blame where it belonged on Saudi Arabia. The entire lengthy section on Saudi involvement with the plot was censored by the White House over the objections of Congressmen in both parties.
I'm so glad you have specific information about what was censored in that report. Perhaps you can share?
As nearly as I can tell Able Danger was a case of people with an agenda making something out of nothing. They are trying to con the nation in to legalizing and funding massive computerized spying on America by the Pentagon, and the easiest way to do it in the face of stiff opposition is to claim it would have prevented 9/11.
No, what they're trying to do is figure out how it is the military could have figured out Atta was a terrorist but didn't think it was important enough to pass on to the FBI. The idea the 9/11 commission could ommit any mention of Abel Danger from the report and maintain a shred of dignity or credibility is patently ridiculous. That's the point I was trying to make.
I know Atta and a couple other hijackers were well known to the CIA as being potential Al Qaeda members.
You know that? How? I've never seen anything along those lines except for pure speculation. I doubt they knew, since the CIA doesn't seem to actually do anything these days beyond selectively releasing classified data in an effort to affect domestic politics. In any event it's irrelevent - they don't have the authority to do anything on US soil, so if they don't pass this kind of information on to the FBI they may as well not exist at all.
The more disturbing thing is the President had a briefing paper in August about Al Qaeda attacking the U.S. with airplanes and he didn't even bother to have the FBI follow up on it. If they had it might registered that field agents had red flagged Arabs in U.S. flight schools training to fly but not land airliners.
First of all, the president gets briefed on thousands of those kinds of possibilities - plots to poison reservoirs, blow up oil refineries, ram oil tankers into bridges - you name it. If there's no specific information it doesn't rise above the noise floor. It doesn't bother me that he didn't take action to address any one specifically - it's not his job to micro-manage the FBI, and if he tries he'll just make things worse.
Secondly, the FBI doesn't need direct presidential authority to put potential terrorists under surveilance, and they don't wait for it in other cases. They may need a warrant, but that's not the President's office.
I'm not trying to "win points" for anything. I'm just trying to address a bureaucratic mindset. I never said the classification system had anything to do with either tragedy, and I didn't mean to imply it either. The point I was trying to make is while over-classifying data doesn't make sense from the country's perspective, from the low-level bureaucrat's perspective it's the easiest, safest thing to do.
Unfortunately classification is CONSTANTLY abused by people in government to conceal their failures and the failure of the government to do its job, and worse to hide some of its malevolent schemes. It's also integral in a government's creation of a false picture of the world in the minds of the population in order to manipulate them. Classification and propaganda go hand in hand.
Oh, I agree completely. Based on what I've read in the paper over the years you can tell how well a weapon system works by looking at the classification. The more problems and cost overruns the system had the more secret it was. But having worked in that environment I can tell you the amount of stuff classified for political purposes is insignificant compared to the mountains of documents classified because nobody wants to be responsible for releasing it.
As to the 9/11 report, if you thought it was ever intended to contain anything embarrassing to anyone you didn't understand the purpose. The whole point of the 9/11 commission was to spread the blame around so thinly the public wouldn't blame either party for all the dropped balls. I would think this is obvious after all the Abel Danger stuff that's been coming out in the past couple of weeks.
If you ever work with classified data you'll realize it's almost impossible to get something declassified, since nobody wants to be the one who releases data that turns out to help an enemy launch the next Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack. When you're a civil servant, the key to advancing is to not do anything that hurts your career, as opposed to businessmen (and to some extent, military) who advance their careers by doing something.
Also, not classifying sensitive data is a career-ending mistake, while over-classifying unimportant data is, well, nothing that will ever get you into trouble. Who's gonna know? So when in doubt you always err on the side of extra security.
Sometime in the '80s they made a change to the rules where if you classified something you had to put a date upon which the item becomes declassified automatically. Unfortunately, there's warehouses full of classified data dating back to the second world war (think Raiders of the Lost Ark here) that nobody has the time to look at, so it will never be declassified.
I suspect most of the old stuff will eventually be destroyed for lack of money, which is a shame from the historical perspective.
The problem is, from their perspective, Joe Sixpack isn't an early adopter. He already has a DVD player, so he won't buy Blu-Ray until movies don't come out on DVD anymore. Movies still come out on tape, so I'm not too worried about that. He'll need it to play those HDTV-format movies, but one thing that's clear in recent years is he doesn't really care about high definition.
The industry will be depending on those geeky first-adopters to get the market penetration they need to bring along Joe, so we have more market clout than you'd expect on first glance. I figure an unorganized boycott might work - an organized boycott will surely work.
Er... that Europeans don't mind paying much higher gas taxes than Americans will tolerate?
As far as I'm aware Taliban foot soldiers have been considered prisoners of war. It takes some association with Al Queda to land you in Cuba. And while I would agree somebody who launches a rocket at a US base is a resistance fighter entitled to protection as a POW, a guy who blows up a polling station full of civilians is not.
If you were to take your reasoning to its logical conclusion, the Chech partisans who assassinated the Reinhard Heidrich - the German Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia would be terrorists and the Germans would be entitled to do with them as they please. I do not even want to consider looking into the the dark sewers of relative morality such an opinion could only dwell in.
Leaving aside the fact the Germans probably would have done exactly that, you can't equate the assasination of a leader of an occupying power with the bombing of a street full of children.
The Geneva Conventions are a result of that agreement as they were signed after the Nuremburg trials.
The preamble of first convention of 1949:
What we refer to as "The Geneva Conventions" is older than WWII.NO! If they are "violating the rules of war" that determination is to be made by the court in Hague not by the US! You can't appoint yourself judge, jury and executioner.
The US didn't sign the treaty that would recognize the permanent international war crimes court in the Hague. In fact, every such court has been authorized separately by conflict and expires with the completion of its work. As far as I'm aware the US is bound by the following verbage in the same treaty quoted above(emphasis mine):
Again, the standard is "competant tribunal", not civilian courts, and certainly not international courts. I'll admit there's certainly room for reasonable people to disagree about what that means.Yes, I understand there may be some value to the information they've acquired. It's impossible to cover every "shadow" thrown by a military project. The problem is, from the Chinese perspective, is these kinds of large data dumps are much more trouble to analyze than they're worth. That's why the data isn't classified. It's far less effort to develop agents with access to clearly valueable data (like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen) than to engage every statistician and analyst in the country to piece together valuable information in a sea of data. This is why the FBI didn't consider it worth the effort to pursue with their own resources. The is the same situation Cliff Stoll was confronted with when German hackers broke into his university system looking for military secrets.
While that is so, it's a pretty sophomoric view of CI. Usually CI runs through a couple of stages:
Well you've given some nice guidelines about what data should be considered important, but it doesn't bear on the question of what to do when an intrusion is detected.
The American CI have a pretty good idea about the Chinese hackers technical means, their operational means and what information the Chinese are exactly getting-hence why they are worried. So to publicly out this through the press really isn't a big deal because they know everything they need to know, they now need to assess their vulnerabilities and run through the CI cycle again.
It would be the height of arrogance for the FBI to assume they "know everything they need to know". The proper response to an incident like this would be to try to figure out names, techniques to go with those names, and lines of authority in China. That way you wouldn't get caught flat-footed when they try something new. Maybe that doesn't fall under "means and methods", but it's something they should be doing. The fact the attackers know they've been discovered makes it that much more difficult.
The correct response for this kind of thing is for the CIA to penetrate the relevant Chinese organization, but these days I don't think the CIA actually does anything but play US domestic politics.
By convention irregulars are understood to be POWs if captured (although they don't technically qualify based on the four part test in Article 4). However, the conventions clearly state combatants who violate the rules of war lose their POW status and can be tried by a "competant tribunal". While the meaning of that phrase isn't defined, in the past it has meant military tribunals (of which the Nuremberg trials are the most famous).Every prisoner in Guantanamo has come before a military tribunal, fulfilling the treaty requirement.
While the Geneva conventions prohibit the trial of POWs for the act of making war, they can be tried, by US military tribunal, for violations of rules of war. We are perfectly within our rights, under international law, to execute these people if they are judged to be war criminals.
That being the case, we can't torture them under any circumstances. The question of whether or not loud music or sleep deprevation is torture isn't so clear cut.
Oh, and this guy is a moron. Part of the counter-intelligence game is to make sure the enemy doesn't know he's been caught. This guy is such a bull in the china shop he's destroyed any chance we'll be able to learn "means and methods" information from this ring.
Bah. We're always twenty years from nuclear fusion. We were in the '70s. Is there some kind of conspiracy among physicists to only develop fusion devices that are good for getting grants, but no good for scaling up to commercial power?
This is clearly wrong. There isn't any such thing as "perfect poker (statistically.)" The best players tailor their game to other players around the table, both in live games and on sites like PartyPoker.com.
Statistical poker isn't that hard to play. Most books on the subject include handy tables to figure out how likely you are to make your hand based on the number of "outs" you have. Throw in a little hand groupings for preflop play and you're all set to play "statistically". You should be ready to have your ass handed to you, though, since every professional poker player in the world can beat a "statistical" player.
From a professional's point of view, the poker bots will ruin the game, though. Not because the pros can't beat the bots. The problem is the bots will drive out the truly bad players, which is where most of the money comes from. A pro playing bots all the time will make a small profit, but it's a lot of work for the amount of effort. I predict if this bot is good enough it will simply drive out the fish, and the sharks will move back into the local card clubs where they were making a comfortable living two or three years ago.
The research on this is pretty solid. This also explains why men are grossly over-represented in the top rungs of hard-science academia as well as Nobel prize winners (for the hard sciences). A larger standard deviation implies more Einsteins as well as more fools.
You are correct - Teledesic alone (at 288+ birds) has more than all the GEOs put together. Learn something new everyday.
I still suspect the most expensive, and thus the best candidates for repair, are in GEO, though.
When you have 3 million dollars worth of stuff you can just tell her "I'm a businessman" and that'll be good enough for 99% of the women in the dating scene.
When "Star Wars" was heavily funded in the '80s, the Russians did a little bit of investigation into what it would take to thwart both kinetic vehicles and energy weapons. The actually deployed the Topol-M, which has a lower arc and "jinks" in-flight, makeing it almost impossible to hit with another missile. It takes so long for your interceptor to get to the intercept point that a really tiny course deflection on the part of the target means you'll miss by a hundred miles.
On the energy side they came up with ablatives (which could be refitted to existing missiles) with, literally, a twist.
Since you have to hold the laser on a specific spot for some length of time (governed by the power of the laser, atmospherics, etc), you could significantly enhance the survivability of the missile by having it slowly rotate during the launch phase. We're talkin' about a reasonably simple software change that makes it 10x harder to shoot down with a laser.
I'm thinking of my own employer, who's got hardware up the wazoo that mostly just sits around heating the building. Take payroll, for instance. They probably run some payroll batch job a couple times a month, then the rest of the time the computer that does payroll is just sitting around. Sure, you could run other stuff on it, but then when it came time to do the payroll everything would run slow and people would be upset.
The way I see it, this is perfect for all kinds of periodic batch-type business applications where you really want to have a dedicated machine but it won't be utilized all the time.
Also, machines that mostly sit around have about the same maintennence requirements as heavily-used hardware. They still need OS patches, security patches, backups, etc. And they need to get modified when the new head of IT decides logs should go in /var/tmp/messages instead of /var/adm/messages or whatever. I know my employer could probably get rid of 2/3 of its data center and a corresponding fraction of the high-priced administrators currently making everything run smoothly.
You could argue companies can do the same thing by balancing existing hardware, i.e. have one box host multiple "bursty" applications so the CPU doesn't have much idle time. But that takes lots of effort to manage, and it doesn't leave you any spare capacity when you need it. This way you don't need any spare capacity, and when your business grows you never have to worry about running out of rack space or lead times for new hardware.
The downside, of course, is you're trusting Sun to have the capacity available when you need it. In a way, it really is like a utility - Sun will be hoping its customers "bursts" will all average out to some managable load. I wonder if it's true.
But Democrats apparently believe that the environment is nothing more than an infinitely exploitable resource, so while 153 countries do their part, the world's #1 greenhouse gas polluter continues to belch out 25% of the world's CO2
until the Republicans took power in 2002?
My point is it's useless to criticise only the party in power over an issue upon which both parties are aligned. You simply have nowhere to go when it comes time to vote and they know it.
Yeah, I suppose the easy way for the US to deal with this is to actually sign the treaty, then ignore it... like the Europeans.
But Republicans apparently believe that the environment is nothing more than an infinitely exploitable resource, so while 153 countries do their part, the world's #1 greenhouse gas polluter continues to belch out 25% of the world's CO2.
Time for a little history lesson, isn't it? Perhaps you'll recall the Democrats controlled the Senate for three years after Kyoto was signed, and it never came up for a vote because the Democrat-controlled Senate wouldn't ratify it. You see, neither party is really itching to commit political suicide. If the Dems regain control of the Senate in 2006, one thing you can be sure of is Kyoto still won't come up for a vote unless it's substantially modified.
That's was one of the shuttle's original selling points. Unfortunately, the cost of the shuttle flight is more than the cost of simply replacing the satellite in almost every case (Hubble being the one exception). And yet there's a more fundemental problem.
The shuttle doesn't go high enough. It can only get to low earth orbit, which is thousands of miles below the fast majority of satellites (in geosynchronous orbit). It was supposed to go to GEO orignally, and when they realized that wouldn't be possible they proposed a "space tug" to ferry the satellite back and forth. That never materialized. So we're stuck with a ship that, even if it could be operated cheaply enough to be worthwhile, couldn't actually get to the repair job for most satellites.
There's no need for that. Modern airships only need to be topped off about once a year or so, so there's no reason not to use helium. In any event, airships aren't economic for cargo because they're too slow, and I don't see any reason CNT cloth would change that.
This just shows you how dangerous anonymous gaming is. How was the bot owner supposed to know Ulong the Unmerciful was a cop playing a computer game at work?
Well, the smog is pretty bad there, and there's lots of dust. Self cleaning glass would do the trick, though. Pretty cool if it doesn't cost too much.
A test unit with a 10 W output last August passed an operating landmark, more than 87,600 hours of continuous service, or 10 years' running with no maintenance or decline in performance."
Holy crap! I need one of these for my car. In all seriousness, though, is that a reasonable figure for a commercial system? Anyhow, it's pretty impressive.
I would accept Steam as a failure under the following conditions:
- Half Life II made less money as a result of people not buying it because of Steam, offset by the number of people who bought a copy of the game because Steam made it more difficult to play a pirated version, and also offset by the number of people who bought it because they also got Valve's back catalog. Oh, and by "make less money" I mean you also have to consider Valve's profit on each sale through Steam is probably about 4x what they make when someone buys one at a retail store.
- Valve is unable to successfully recoup the development cost of Steam with current or future revenues (valve or third party).
I don't see any reason to believe either of those two points applies. If you have some financial numbers relating to either point, I'd be interested in seeing them.Steam doesn't have to be as ubiquitous as iTunes to be successful - it just has to make money, either now or in the future. From all appearances Half Life II was a rousing success, and every copy someone bought directly from valve made them what, four times the profit? Do you have some reason to believe they actually lost money because of Steam?
It was stupid, it may have been due to "contractual arrangements" but that just means it was either a) stupid that they signed the contract or b) stupid that they tried to use Half Life II to launch Steam.
It's hard to second-guess the signing of a distribution contract when a) they're all the same and b) you don't have another distribution channel (except maybe a vague idea of something you might put together in the future). As to using HLII to launch Steam, it makes some sense to start with a product you know will be popular, as people will be much more forgiving.
Tell you what, mark this post, write down my username, mark the date, whatever you want, then come back when Steam is a huge success and tell me how stupid I am. I just wouldn't hold my breath if I were you, you'll probably find it is dangerous for your health..
It doesn't have to be a "huge" success to be successfull. It's a success, in my book, if they make more money than they would have made otherwise. By that metric, for all you and I know it may already be a success. In that case future profits for distribution of third-party games is gravy.
I don't see how they can be competitive. There used to be a solar tower in southern California (called "Solar II") that used mirrors to focus light on a collector filled with sodium salts. They ran it for a couple of years, but found they'd have to charge every family served something like $270,000/yr for the power.
The big cost driver was keeping all those mirrors clean (I've always had this picture of 500 grad students with truckfulls of old tee-shirts and Windex). The mirrors collect dust, soot, birdshit, etc, which reduces their reflectivity. In Solar II all the mirrors were focused on one spot, so at least they only had one "reactor".
In this scheme they're gonna have 20,000 of these dishes. Each one has it's own Sterling engine. I'm not sure how they're gonna keep 20,000 dishes clean and 20,000 Stirling engines running cheaply enough to make the power economical. Not saying it's impossible, just a little skeptical.
As to why I responded to you post, it probably was where you said "stupid" instead of "due to contractual arrangements".