They could probably ban encryption for the little people the same way the ban child porn (which is ultimately, after all, just data). Make possessing encryption tools a crime subject to harsh penalties, as well as dissemination of techniques and practices. Actively infiltrate and destroy groups seeking to break the law. Monitor external web sites and arrest anyone who seems to be actively searching for ways to encrypt his data. They could never completely stamp it out, but they could certainly make encryption tools difficult and risky to get ahold of.
Of course the infrastructure to support the prohibition would be huge and a foot in the door to banning all sorts of other things, but to FBI-types that's a feature, not a bug.
Aha. What? In the US if your banking credentials get out on your end the bank is under no legal obligation to make your account whole. They'll try to reverse transactions, but if the money's gone the money's gone and it's your problem. The fact that the money can be traced to an organized crime syndicate in far-away country where nobody cares is not going to help you much.
In the US there's such a legal minefield companies have to make sure they can justify hiring decisions based on "objective" criteria. Furthermore they put themselves in legal peril by giving tests or putting much weight on the interview. So more and more hiring decisions are based almost purely on what your major was, where you went to college, and what your grades were (in that order). If you got some kind of roll-your-own education you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. Clever and motivated people can make it work, but that's not the norm.
The legal environment explains why top colleges can pretty much charge whatever they want and still find students willing to pay.
Did you ever stop to wonder why you can get consensus in Finland whereas in other places when you try to govern that way the government just locks up and does nothing?
Might have something to do with the fact that ethnic Fins comprise 93.4% of Finland's population, don't you think? And that the rest is mostly culturally-very-similar Swedes? The reason Finland's culture looks homogeneous "from the outside" is that it is homogeneous by any rational definition of the word.
Lots of people placed happiness above money and couldn't get the happiness job when they graduated because so many other people did the same thing. Now they have neither a happiness job nor money.
Well, okay, I see your point, but if the harshness of the response to corruption is the deciding factor, surely China would have less corruption that the US?
True, but this is all pre-maneuvering for a treaty vote nobody cares about... because they have no idea what's in the treaty. TPA, like cloture, allows Congress to vote for something and later pretend they're voting against it.
I think circletimessquare is right: the solution is to enact tough laws against corruption (i.e., bribery.)
If that were true China would have one of the least corrupt governments instead of one of the most corrupt. The Government routinely rounds up a few hundred corrupt mid-level bureaucrats and has them shot. That's about as tough as you can get, wouldn't you agree? And yet it doesn't seem to have any effect on the level of corruption.
But if the government does less it matters less if they can successfully bribe someone. It's no coincidence you have to bribe congressmen to stay in business today when you didn't have to thirty years ago.
I was expecting this to happen at some point. Most people think of NASA as a space program, but to Congress it's just a fund to be used for political horse trading. I need a few more votes to pass the budget? Then this representative gets farm subsidies, that representative gets funding for a new highway, and the other rep gets a piece of a NASA program.
What that means is they want Constellation, even though it's going to be waaaaaaaay more expensive than comparable SpaceX offerings. What Congress doesn't want is for people to start wondering "Hey, if SpaceX can give us what we need for a fraction of the price, why do we need Constellation?"
Where have you been? This is a dog-bites-man story.
Ultimately it's a big waste of money and time. Computer classes are pointless for kids who aren't interested, and kids who are interested won't have any trouble getting access to a computer - you can hardly avoid them anymore. Cliff Stoll was on target when he addressed the topic in Silicon Snake Oil.
The big advantage to playing games like Skyrim and Fallout on the PC is you have access to the console, which allows you to manipulate the game in all sorts of ways, including setting quests completed.
Oh, I have no doubt they could retrofit with new technologies if sufficiently motivated. But in the real world you're not going to get a peacetime first world military procurement bureaucracy to do anything significant in less than a decade.
Particularly anything involving these kind of expensive flagship vessels. They spent a lot of time considering things like noise signatures and surviveablilty when they designed it, and all that stuff would have to be gone through again.
I used to think the same thing until I started watching twitch. There are a whole lot of clever people out there, and particularly with "builder" type games (KSP, in my case), it's kinda fun to see how other people approach the same problems and what solutions they end up with. I doubt I'd bother watching someone play an FPS, but I like watching Starcraft, DoTA, and KSP.
One of the big problems with steam is you can't keep launching aircraft at the max rate indefinitely. At some point you've drawn down the pressure enough that you have to decrease the launch frequency until you get in a break in the action so the reactors can catch up. Apparently with EMALS that's not a problem - you can launch as fast as you can position the aircraft. Seems like it would be more efficient to use the steam directly than to run it through a generator first, but apparently that's not the case.
Whether or not you need a catapult is more a function of lift and takeoff weight than what class the aircraft falls into. The Navy is definitely planning to launch drones with cats - they cat launched an X-45B last year.
No chance. That's only eight years from now. Those two carriers have been in the works for over fifteen years - there's no way you're going to see large changes without a correspondingly large war to propel them. It's more likely they'll go into service for a handful of years and then get mothballed for lack of operating funds.
They busted him for "Structuring", which is to arrange cash transactions for the purposes of evading currency reporting laws. The idea was if the government required reporting for $10k transactions, drug dealers could evade those requirements by using a bunch of different banks and making all their transactions less than $10k. The law only requires intent, so in theory they could charge you for withdrawing ten bucks from your account. Guess who gets to decide what your intent was? If ever there was a law ripe for abuse it's this one.
It became a crime in 1986, the same year Hastert was elected to Congress. Since he wouldn't have taken office until 1987 we can't blame him for the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. On the other hand, he was speaker for long enough to have done something about it if he wanted to.
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They could probably ban encryption for the little people the same way the ban child porn (which is ultimately, after all, just data). Make possessing encryption tools a crime subject to harsh penalties, as well as dissemination of techniques and practices. Actively infiltrate and destroy groups seeking to break the law. Monitor external web sites and arrest anyone who seems to be actively searching for ways to encrypt his data. They could never completely stamp it out, but they could certainly make encryption tools difficult and risky to get ahold of.
Of course the infrastructure to support the prohibition would be huge and a foot in the door to banning all sorts of other things, but to FBI-types that's a feature, not a bug.
Aha. What? In the US if your banking credentials get out on your end the bank is under no legal obligation to make your account whole. They'll try to reverse transactions, but if the money's gone the money's gone and it's your problem. The fact that the money can be traced to an organized crime syndicate in far-away country where nobody cares is not going to help you much.
I suspect their security is actually pretty good. Just not perfect.
Paying people the market value of their labor isn't "exploitation".
In the US there's such a legal minefield companies have to make sure they can justify hiring decisions based on "objective" criteria. Furthermore they put themselves in legal peril by giving tests or putting much weight on the interview. So more and more hiring decisions are based almost purely on what your major was, where you went to college, and what your grades were (in that order). If you got some kind of roll-your-own education you're putting yourself at a huge disadvantage. Clever and motivated people can make it work, but that's not the norm.
The legal environment explains why top colleges can pretty much charge whatever they want and still find students willing to pay.
Did you ever stop to wonder why you can get consensus in Finland whereas in other places when you try to govern that way the government just locks up and does nothing?
Might have something to do with the fact that ethnic Fins comprise 93.4% of Finland's population, don't you think? And that the rest is mostly culturally-very-similar Swedes? The reason Finland's culture looks homogeneous "from the outside" is that it is homogeneous by any rational definition of the word.
Lots of people placed happiness above money and couldn't get the happiness job when they graduated because so many other people did the same thing. Now they have neither a happiness job nor money.
Sure, laws have to be effective. What does that mean, exactly, in terms of policy?
Well, okay, I see your point, but if the harshness of the response to corruption is the deciding factor, surely China would have less corruption that the US?
True, but this is all pre-maneuvering for a treaty vote nobody cares about... because they have no idea what's in the treaty. TPA, like cloture, allows Congress to vote for something and later pretend they're voting against it.
If that were true China would have one of the least corrupt governments instead of one of the most corrupt. The Government routinely rounds up a few hundred corrupt mid-level bureaucrats and has them shot. That's about as tough as you can get, wouldn't you agree? And yet it doesn't seem to have any effect on the level of corruption.
But if the government does less it matters less if they can successfully bribe someone. It's no coincidence you have to bribe congressmen to stay in business today when you didn't have to thirty years ago.
For better or worse the civil war ended that experiment in the US.
It'll be a nonstarter in Nordic countries very soon as well. For that kind of state to actually work you need a homogeneous culture.
Yeah, but they might care if they were allowed to know what's actually in the proposed treaty.
If this is really about "looking to America for economic leadership" is should pass handily, shouldn't it?
I was expecting this to happen at some point. Most people think of NASA as a space program, but to Congress it's just a fund to be used for political horse trading. I need a few more votes to pass the budget? Then this representative gets farm subsidies, that representative gets funding for a new highway, and the other rep gets a piece of a NASA program.
What that means is they want Constellation, even though it's going to be waaaaaaaay more expensive than comparable SpaceX offerings. What Congress doesn't want is for people to start wondering "Hey, if SpaceX can give us what we need for a fraction of the price, why do we need Constellation?"
Where have you been? This is a dog-bites-man story.
Ultimately it's a big waste of money and time. Computer classes are pointless for kids who aren't interested, and kids who are interested won't have any trouble getting access to a computer - you can hardly avoid them anymore. Cliff Stoll was on target when he addressed the topic in Silicon Snake Oil.
The big advantage to playing games like Skyrim and Fallout on the PC is you have access to the console, which allows you to manipulate the game in all sorts of ways, including setting quests completed.
Oh, I have no doubt they could retrofit with new technologies if sufficiently motivated. But in the real world you're not going to get a peacetime first world military procurement bureaucracy to do anything significant in less than a decade.
Particularly anything involving these kind of expensive flagship vessels. They spent a lot of time considering things like noise signatures and surviveablilty when they designed it, and all that stuff would have to be gone through again.
I used to think the same thing until I started watching twitch. There are a whole lot of clever people out there, and particularly with "builder" type games (KSP, in my case), it's kinda fun to see how other people approach the same problems and what solutions they end up with. I doubt I'd bother watching someone play an FPS, but I like watching Starcraft, DoTA, and KSP.
One of the big problems with steam is you can't keep launching aircraft at the max rate indefinitely. At some point you've drawn down the pressure enough that you have to decrease the launch frequency until you get in a break in the action so the reactors can catch up. Apparently with EMALS that's not a problem - you can launch as fast as you can position the aircraft. Seems like it would be more efficient to use the steam directly than to run it through a generator first, but apparently that's not the case.
Whether or not you need a catapult is more a function of lift and takeoff weight than what class the aircraft falls into. The Navy is definitely planning to launch drones with cats - they cat launched an X-45B last year.
No chance. That's only eight years from now. Those two carriers have been in the works for over fifteen years - there's no way you're going to see large changes without a correspondingly large war to propel them. It's more likely they'll go into service for a handful of years and then get mothballed for lack of operating funds.
They busted him for "Structuring", which is to arrange cash transactions for the purposes of evading currency reporting laws. The idea was if the government required reporting for $10k transactions, drug dealers could evade those requirements by using a bunch of different banks and making all their transactions less than $10k. The law only requires intent, so in theory they could charge you for withdrawing ten bucks from your account. Guess who gets to decide what your intent was? If ever there was a law ripe for abuse it's this one.
It became a crime in 1986, the same year Hastert was elected to Congress. Since he wouldn't have taken office until 1987 we can't blame him for the Money Laundering Control Act of 1986. On the other hand, he was speaker for long enough to have done something about it if he wanted to.