This is not about the muslim worlds rightueos struggle against the oppression of the imperial west. If they wanted to struggle for a just cause, maybe they should be fighting against there despotic regimes that use Islam to justify oppression and violent suppression of dissenters and women. Also those same regimes are the ones actually "exploiting" the oil they're sitting on top of, in the sense that the oil extraction is state-run, ineffective and wasteful and *only* benefit the ruling elites, either by financing their extravagant life styles (how many palaces did Saddam build?) or ambitious military projects (atom bomb, any one?) or a enourmos secret police (hello saudi arabia, syria, lybia!).
Wow. You really need to study your history.
I sincerely suggest you take a look into the following topics: - what happened with the US, the Shah of Iran, and the CIA - the history of Halliburton and Bechtel and their - the House of Saud and its role in OPEC - the role OPEC played in the 1970s oil crisis and the American response
All of this is a matter of public record and you can read it all in an afternoon at your public library.
You seem to think that from the days of Lawrence of Arabia up until now have been an unbroken line of inefficient despots just waiting for the US to come and civilize (or "stabilize" in your words) their backwards nations.
The reality is that the people in those countries got fucked over by a bunch of con artists, paving the way for radical, militant religion (it is always the last refuge of the oppressed) to rise to power. Please do not think that I am confusing explanation for justification in this case--I do not condone terrorism or oppressive regimes.
But on the other hand, my country created these particular bugbears. The oppression of women in those countries has as much to do with Islam as it does with American involvement. You ought to consider these things before you pronounce judgement.
I think you might be ignorant of the history of the debate. Look at the history of the European colonial powers in the Middle East up until WW2, and the behavior of American oil interests afterwards. There was a point where the people (although not their leaders) were asking us quite calmly to leave, and we responded with intimidation, assassinations, espionage, economic warfare, and direct military intervention. Now there are a few insanely wealthy people in those countries and a lot of people who have next to nothing, and let me tell you, they are pissed.
Your analogy is a good one, but I would say that recent (few years ago?) movie with Denzel Washington taking over the hospital would be more apt. Taking hostages is not right, just like suicide bombings are not right. But the situation developed because of injustice, and so we can't really say we are fighting injustice (or responding to inappropriate violence with more violence) by applying force.
Ok, but what I'm saying is, that is the point you should be making, not the point you are (or were) trying to make.
Lethal force in self-defense I have no problem with.
But justifying it by saying "They don't listen to reason, so it's ok to shoot them" just doesn't fly because they can use the exact same justification.
I haven't got his argument wrong at all. The way you stated it is exactly how I understood it. What I disagree with is justifying violence by characterizing the violent as animals or by implying that when they do violence, it's bad, but when we do it, it's ok (after all, if we do violence to them, doesn't that make us animals? Is it possible that they are doing violence because WE won't listen to reason?).
It's one thing to say you're going to defend yourself, with lethal force if necessary; what you are suggesting is something else entirely.
You specified nothing to qualify your argument (such "We should respond to violence with lethal force in order to protect ourselves"), so what am I to assume other than what you stated? --That is, "Unreasonable people are violent, so we should visit violence upon them." By your own lights that would make us also unreasonable and also deserve violence.
Honestly it looks as though you put up a knee-jerk post without checking your own argument for internal consistency. Everyone does this at some point. If you want to argue the point further, be my guest, but I have better things to do today than watch you paint yourself into a corner.
You all need to listen up to what the Dickhead is saying.
The US (well, perhaps the West in general) pursues its interests in three ways:
1. By using economic warfare to make a target country beholden to you.
2. By using the cloak-and-dagger services to influence or topple governments through assassination and psyops.
3. Direct military intervention.
This is the history of all of the US's involvement in Latin America and the Middle East. We are currently trying it on China as well but it's hard to say if it's working (I don't think it is). It is highly plausible that the cartoons were a planned event; after all, it's hard to justify the need for Empire and perpetual war unless you have a fierce enemy you can never defeat...
Just sayin'...this isn't crazy talk, this how we roll.
If you're going to comment this late, it would behoove you to read all the replies up to this point since this has already been addressed.
The fact that the State will take responsibility for an infant and then compel the taxpayers to support it for some time indicates that the State believes the infant is a person and has human rights. That is, the consensus is that an infant has rights even though it not viable (cannot fend for itself), nor has a personality that anyone can detect, nor intelligence. Nor has it finished "developing" yet.
That your state takes a dim view of babies in garbage cans only supports my point: If a fetus is only a "potential" person, then so is a newborn. So you either advocate infanticide (like Singer does) or you give a fetus human rights.
Wrong. Ever hear of adoption? No child has a right to a parent and no parent is compelled to raise a child.
Adoption only proves my point: until a child is adopted, the state acts in lieu of parents because a baby (born) is considered to be a person and therefore has rights. For this reason along ALL of us are compelled to help raise the child (via tax dollars). If this were not the case then they would be left on hillsides.
But you say in a later post: As medical technology improves, the question of viability is less "Can we save it?" and more "Do we WANT to save it?" Before you argue that what is in the future has no bearing on what is happening now--understand that we are in the middle of this process, right now.
This is a great solution for all parties. Women that don't want to be compelled by the State to carry a fetus to term can give that fetus up for adoption right at conception/fertilization. Women that want to carry fetuses to term but don't care about their own genetic longevity can still enjoy pregnancy. The farms of artificial wombs (and the orphanages to handle the 'surpluses') will require vast bueracracies and tremendous tax-expenditures. Everyone wins! Except of course all the millions of orphans we will already have (and small-government tax-payers).:-) And then there's all those 'snowflakes' just waiting in their frozen tombs for imlpantation -- potential lives on ice.
Full disclosure, my wife was an orphan.
In my opinion there is no moral argument that a embryo or zygote is a human being ("person")
Fine, I mostly just want it understood that this is the focal point of the debate--how we define "person." Every time this topic comes up I try to make that clear and try to understand why people define it the way they do, and people always throw up some kind of smokescreen to disguise the fact that they consider a fetus to be a nonperson. I'm not sure exactly why this is. The definition is currently up in the air, so people should just come out and say it, you know?
...but that aside, there is no pragmatic reason to consider them such. Calling a fetus a human being is less problematic, but requires an arbitrary (and thus consensus-based) decision on where an embryo becomes a baby. For a very long time this has been birth, but in America at least, the line is being pushed back.
This also supports my point: that people do not believe that "humanity" is an intrinsic value that we have, but rather that it is based on pragmatism or some form of utility (this entity is a person because it is useful; that one is not because it is useless to me, or a burden).
There are problems with this as well. If absolutely no-one on Earth wants me to live, I still have the right to live. That's what the Bill of Rights, says, anyhow. If I am attacked nobody will come to my aid, under those circumstances, but I may live if I can defend myself. To me, such a view boils down to "You are a person if you can force other people to recognize that you are a person." If this is true then abortion is little more than war against the weak...which America is pretty good at, these days, come to think of it.
I think you're a little confused. I'm not interested in making some perfect moral argument. I'm interested in reality. If such technology ever becomes reality, then we'll have to revisit the issue. I doubt my position would change. Life sucks, and sometimes there isn't a right answer. This is one of those cases.
This merely assumes that "what is" is the same as "what should be." Furthermore, I pointed out that we are not talking about technology "in the future," since medical technology has already advanced to the point where viability considerations made yesterday do not hold true today.
It seems as if you are not interesting in making any moral argument whatsoever, aside from "I am happy with the way things are and I'm sticking to it."
So, tell me--what's it like being a status quo conservative?
But neither does "viability" carry any moral weight. It is a function of the state of medical science; what was impossible fifty years ago (lifesaving treatment for preemies, for example) is now commonplace. Suppose that, over the next fifty years, uterine replicators leave the world of science fiction, so that from the time of conception and barring life-threatening and incurable congenital birth defects, any foetus was "viable." As medical technology improves, the question of viability is less "Can we save it?" and more "Do we WANT to save it?" Before you argue that what is in the future has no bearing on what is happening now--understand that we are in the middle of this process, right now.
Also consider this: An infant is, itself, "nonviable" after birth. Babies are helpless and rather stupid. So, why then do its rights assert themselves over the mother's, when before birth, they do not?
Well, the State compels you to support your children for some period of time after they're born, as well. Is that also absurd? If not, then you need to explain why a fetus has no claim on the support of its parent(s) but a child outside the womb does. The only difference with any moral implications is that one is considered a "person" and one is not.
Assume for a second that the fetus is a person with moral standing and therefore deserving of human rights. It makes no sense to say "The woman can do what she wants with her body," because someone else's body is also involved. The whole argument is based on the idea that other people don't have the right to affect your body, but if that's the case then the fetus would have that right as well. How do you decide whose rights should be enforced when both people have an equal claim? Implicit in your argument is the premise that the fetus is a nonperson (in fact, the language of Roe v. Wade depends upon it). In the end this is all it comes down to, it is the centerpiece of the debate, and in my experience those in favor of abortion rarely wish to address it (with some notable exceptions such as Singer).
Speaking of whom, Singer, again, is a good resource on this topic. He address it with a peculiar analogy--what if you woke up one morning and had been kidnapped by a group of music lovers, and grafted onto you was this famous musician, and you had to act as his kidneys for nine months or else he'd die? Would you have the right to say "Disconnect me?" Singer says no, regardless of whether you volunteered for the duty or not. In any case, Practical Ethics is a good read.
Have his views changed much since Practical Ethics? He spends quite a bit of time demonstrating first why it is necessary to redefine what a "person" is. How he defines it is less important than the fact that he saw the need to justify (e.g.) abortion, euthanasia, and so forth, and redefined the concept of person to suit his needs.
Singer (who is no friend to the pro-life movement) demolishes all of the arguments in favor of abortion on merely logical grounds: When you make moral statements, the premises must have some kind of moral content, such as whether or not a person has done something wrong. Skin color, ethnic background, socio-economic background, level of intelligence or "development," ability to survive without assistance--none of these things have any moral content. So it makes as much logical sense to say "You can enslave blacks because they have dark skin" as to say "You can destroy a foetus because it is not intelligent."
In order to justify abortion, you need to redefine "person" such that it disincludes people below a certain developmental level, or people who require a significant amount of assistance to survive from day to day. Singer has acknowledged that this would permit infanticide, involuntary euthanasia, and the "mercy killing" of the mentally handicapped and aged, and he's pretty much ok with that.
It's been a while since I read it, but isn't this exactly what happened to the print media in Snow Crash?
Ie, they could not adapt to the new technology, tried and failed to challenge it in the courts, and then gradually became obsolete, to be replaced by the aggregations of thousands of independent news agents?
I better go get "Greatest swordsman in the world" appended to my business cards pronto!
The US military seeks the capability to knock out every telephone, every networked computer, every radar system on the planet.
This makes more sense if you replace "every telephone" etc. with "specific devices in order to accomplish tactical objectives," and append "knock out" with "manipulate" or "eavesdrop upon."
Which is not to say that it's necessarily a good thing...but it's probably not even likely to happen. The US military establishment spends a lot of time talking about doing things like this, but rarely actually takes the proper steps to accomplish its goals.
You're just not getting it, are you?
Oh well...while you continue to complain, some of us with a little less cynicism will keep an eye out for more news. This has a good chance at improving the quality of life in the third world considerably.
All of that is true, but from experience I can say that he has gotten about 3/4 of the work done already. Organizing people for this kind of thing is like herding cats, therefore every announcement of progress for this project is a good thing.
As for the dot commers...excuse me? I can understand hype over a content-free product, but this is hardly "vaporware." Or do you feel the same way about AIDS research which has yet to develop a cure?
It doesn't sound like you have ever had to manage a project like this. Otherwise, I think you would understand what successes they have already made (hint: you mentioned two, the article mentions more).
Now...if you can't say anything constructive...well, you know the rest.
Certainly, but consider this: while money can be moved from project to project, the unique drive, vision, and skillset posessed by those guys from MIT who led this project are less portable.
It required strong leadership to get the project off the ground and through the UN. It is probably not likely that the same guys could have found a solution within their area of expertise to those other problems you mentioned. So, while those problems might be worse, and efforts to solve them might be in more need of the money, the confluence of skills and drive and circumstance in this particular place & time have led to the success of this project, which incidentally is quite a good thing, so maybe show a little support, eh?
I've been able to implement just that using simple open-source tools, so I don't really see what the problem has been. The difficulty (aside from warehousing everything) is not really in gathering the data, but rather in what you want to get out of it, and how you analyze it...I have some automated tools I wrote myself to do simple data mining and anomaly detection on the data, but as you pointed out, for most companies the analysis side is underwhelming (top 10 lists and the like).
I think there needs to be a marraige of data mining types with security device designers before these systems are really going to be useful.
I disagree. As long as there are nogoodniks on the internet, you will need some people trained in IT security.
What gets me is that so many services provided by the security goons should be taken care of by good sysadmins, such as maintaining up-to-date inventories of network devices, or knowing what "normal" traffic for the network is. I rarely find this to be the case, and so security consultants get hired on to do device discovery, network mapping, patch management, and traffic analysis. There WOULD be fewer consultants if local network admins were doing their job right, so perhaps we have a vested interest in their ignorance.
On the other hand, if I didn't have to spend all my time explaining to admins getting paid $60k/year how to implement a DNS blackhole or how to use grep to find an IP in their firewall logs, then perhaps I could spend my time concentrating more on prevention than on mitigation (predictive analysis, etc.).
Slashdot Mirror
This is not about the muslim worlds rightueos struggle against the oppression of the imperial west. If they wanted to struggle for a just cause, maybe they should be fighting against there despotic regimes that use Islam to justify oppression and violent suppression of dissenters and women. Also those same regimes are the ones actually "exploiting" the oil they're sitting on top of, in the sense that the oil extraction is state-run, ineffective and wasteful and *only* benefit the ruling elites, either by financing their extravagant life styles (how many palaces did Saddam build?) or ambitious military projects (atom bomb, any one?) or a enourmos secret police (hello saudi arabia, syria, lybia!).
Wow. You really need to study your history.
I sincerely suggest you take a look into the following topics:
- what happened with the US, the Shah of Iran, and the CIA
- the history of Halliburton and Bechtel and their
- the House of Saud and its role in OPEC
- the role OPEC played in the 1970s oil crisis and the American response
All of this is a matter of public record and you can read it all in an afternoon at your public library.
You seem to think that from the days of Lawrence of Arabia up until now have been an unbroken line of inefficient despots just waiting for the US to come and civilize (or "stabilize" in your words) their backwards nations.
The reality is that the people in those countries got fucked over by a bunch of con artists, paving the way for radical, militant religion (it is always the last refuge of the oppressed) to rise to power. Please do not think that I am confusing explanation for justification in this case--I do not condone terrorism or oppressive regimes.
But on the other hand, my country created these particular bugbears. The oppression of women in those countries has as much to do with Islam as it does with American involvement. You ought to consider these things before you pronounce judgement.
I think you might be ignorant of the history of the debate. Look at the history of the European colonial powers in the Middle East up until WW2, and the behavior of American oil interests afterwards. There was a point where the people (although not their leaders) were asking us quite calmly to leave, and we responded with intimidation, assassinations, espionage, economic warfare, and direct military intervention. Now there are a few insanely wealthy people in those countries and a lot of people who have next to nothing, and let me tell you, they are pissed.
Your analogy is a good one, but I would say that recent (few years ago?) movie with Denzel Washington taking over the hospital would be more apt. Taking hostages is not right, just like suicide bombings are not right. But the situation developed because of injustice, and so we can't really say we are fighting injustice (or responding to inappropriate violence with more violence) by applying force.
Ok, but what I'm saying is, that is the point you should be making, not the point you are (or were) trying to make.
Lethal force in self-defense I have no problem with.
But justifying it by saying "They don't listen to reason, so it's ok to shoot them" just doesn't fly because they can use the exact same justification.
I haven't got his argument wrong at all. The way you stated it is exactly how I understood it. What I disagree with is justifying violence by characterizing the violent as animals or by implying that when they do violence, it's bad, but when we do it, it's ok (after all, if we do violence to them, doesn't that make us animals? Is it possible that they are doing violence because WE won't listen to reason?).
It's one thing to say you're going to defend yourself, with lethal force if necessary; what you are suggesting is something else entirely.
You specified nothing to qualify your argument (such "We should respond to violence with lethal force in order to protect ourselves"), so what am I to assume other than what you stated? --That is, "Unreasonable people are violent, so we should visit violence upon them." By your own lights that would make us also unreasonable and also deserve violence.
Honestly it looks as though you put up a knee-jerk post without checking your own argument for internal consistency. Everyone does this at some point. If you want to argue the point further, be my guest, but I have better things to do today than watch you paint yourself into a corner.
You all need to listen up to what the Dickhead is saying.
The US (well, perhaps the West in general) pursues its interests in three ways:
1. By using economic warfare to make a target country beholden to you.
2. By using the cloak-and-dagger services to influence or topple governments through assassination and psyops.
3. Direct military intervention.
This is the history of all of the US's involvement in Latin America and the Middle East. We are currently trying it on China as well but it's hard to say if it's working (I don't think it is). It is highly plausible that the cartoons were a planned event; after all, it's hard to justify the need for Empire and perpetual war unless you have a fierce enemy you can never defeat...
Just sayin'...this isn't crazy talk, this how we roll.
I have an idea... let's refuse to tolerate violence
So you're going to shoot people...to show them that it's wrong to be violent.
The mind boggles.
If you're going to comment this late, it would behoove you to read all the replies up to this point since this has already been addressed.
The fact that the State will take responsibility for an infant and then compel the taxpayers to support it for some time indicates that the State believes the infant is a person and has human rights. That is, the consensus is that an infant has rights even though it not viable (cannot fend for itself), nor has a personality that anyone can detect, nor intelligence. Nor has it finished "developing" yet.
That your state takes a dim view of babies in garbage cans only supports my point: If a fetus is only a "potential" person, then so is a newborn. So you either advocate infanticide (like Singer does) or you give a fetus human rights.
Wrong. Ever hear of adoption? No child has a right to a parent and no parent is compelled to raise a child.
:-) And then there's all those 'snowflakes' just waiting in their frozen tombs for imlpantation -- potential lives on ice.
...but that aside, there is no pragmatic reason to consider them such. Calling a fetus a human being is less problematic, but requires an arbitrary (and thus consensus-based) decision on where an embryo becomes a baby. For a very long time this has been birth, but in America at least, the line is being pushed back.
Adoption only proves my point: until a child is adopted, the state acts in lieu of parents because a baby (born) is considered to be a person and therefore has rights. For this reason along ALL of us are compelled to help raise the child (via tax dollars). If this were not the case then they would be left on hillsides.
But you say in a later post: As medical technology improves, the question of viability is less "Can we save it?" and more "Do we WANT to save it?" Before you argue that what is in the future has no bearing on what is happening now--understand that we are in the middle of this process, right now.
This is a great solution for all parties. Women that don't want to be compelled by the State to carry a fetus to term can give that fetus up for adoption right at conception/fertilization. Women that want to carry fetuses to term but don't care about their own genetic longevity can still enjoy pregnancy. The farms of artificial wombs (and the orphanages to handle the 'surpluses') will require vast bueracracies and tremendous tax-expenditures. Everyone wins! Except of course all the millions of orphans we will already have (and small-government tax-payers).
Full disclosure, my wife was an orphan.
In my opinion there is no moral argument that a embryo or zygote is a human being ("person")
Fine, I mostly just want it understood that this is the focal point of the debate--how we define "person." Every time this topic comes up I try to make that clear and try to understand why people define it the way they do, and people always throw up some kind of smokescreen to disguise the fact that they consider a fetus to be a nonperson. I'm not sure exactly why this is. The definition is currently up in the air, so people should just come out and say it, you know?
This also supports my point: that people do not believe that "humanity" is an intrinsic value that we have, but rather that it is based on pragmatism or some form of utility (this entity is a person because it is useful; that one is not because it is useless to me, or a burden).
There are problems with this as well. If absolutely no-one on Earth wants me to live, I still have the right to live. That's what the Bill of Rights, says, anyhow. If I am attacked nobody will come to my aid, under those circumstances, but I may live if I can defend myself. To me, such a view boils down to "You are a person if you can force other people to recognize that you are a person." If this is true then abortion is little more than war against the weak...which America is pretty good at, these days, come to think of it.
I think you're a little confused. I'm not interested in making some perfect moral argument. I'm interested in reality. If such technology ever becomes reality, then we'll have to revisit the issue. I doubt my position would change. Life sucks, and sometimes there isn't a right answer. This is one of those cases.
This merely assumes that "what is" is the same as "what should be." Furthermore, I pointed out that we are not talking about technology "in the future," since medical technology has already advanced to the point where viability considerations made yesterday do not hold true today.
It seems as if you are not interesting in making any moral argument whatsoever, aside from "I am happy with the way things are and I'm sticking to it."
So, tell me--what's it like being a status quo conservative?
But neither does "viability" carry any moral weight. It is a function of the state of medical science; what was impossible fifty years ago (lifesaving treatment for preemies, for example) is now commonplace. Suppose that, over the next fifty years, uterine replicators leave the world of science fiction, so that from the time of conception and barring life-threatening and incurable congenital birth defects, any foetus was "viable." As medical technology improves, the question of viability is less "Can we save it?" and more "Do we WANT to save it?" Before you argue that what is in the future has no bearing on what is happening now--understand that we are in the middle of this process, right now.
Also consider this: An infant is, itself, "nonviable" after birth. Babies are helpless and rather stupid. So, why then do its rights assert themselves over the mother's, when before birth, they do not?
Well, the State compels you to support your children for some period of time after they're born, as well. Is that also absurd? If not, then you need to explain why a fetus has no claim on the support of its parent(s) but a child outside the womb does. The only difference with any moral implications is that one is considered a "person" and one is not.
Assume for a second that the fetus is a person with moral standing and therefore deserving of human rights. It makes no sense to say "The woman can do what she wants with her body," because someone else's body is also involved. The whole argument is based on the idea that other people don't have the right to affect your body, but if that's the case then the fetus would have that right as well. How do you decide whose rights should be enforced when both people have an equal claim? Implicit in your argument is the premise that the fetus is a nonperson (in fact, the language of Roe v. Wade depends upon it). In the end this is all it comes down to, it is the centerpiece of the debate, and in my experience those in favor of abortion rarely wish to address it (with some notable exceptions such as Singer).
Speaking of whom, Singer, again, is a good resource on this topic. He address it with a peculiar analogy--what if you woke up one morning and had been kidnapped by a group of music lovers, and grafted onto you was this famous musician, and you had to act as his kidneys for nine months or else he'd die? Would you have the right to say "Disconnect me?" Singer says no, regardless of whether you volunteered for the duty or not. In any case, Practical Ethics is a good read.
Have his views changed much since Practical Ethics? He spends quite a bit of time demonstrating first why it is necessary to redefine what a "person" is. How he defines it is less important than the fact that he saw the need to justify (e.g.) abortion, euthanasia, and so forth, and redefined the concept of person to suit his needs.
Do I really need to make a list of innovations that originated outside of the military and then adopted by the military?
I think you should (excluding of course any item that was driven in any way by military necessity).
Check out Peter Singer on abortion.
Singer (who is no friend to the pro-life movement) demolishes all of the arguments in favor of abortion on merely logical grounds: When you make moral statements, the premises must have some kind of moral content, such as whether or not a person has done something wrong. Skin color, ethnic background, socio-economic background, level of intelligence or "development," ability to survive without assistance--none of these things have any moral content. So it makes as much logical sense to say "You can enslave blacks because they have dark skin" as to say "You can destroy a foetus because it is not intelligent."
In order to justify abortion, you need to redefine "person" such that it disincludes people below a certain developmental level, or people who require a significant amount of assistance to survive from day to day. Singer has acknowledged that this would permit infanticide, involuntary euthanasia, and the "mercy killing" of the mentally handicapped and aged, and he's pretty much ok with that.
Under this view you cannot kill cows, but you can have sex with them.
No, really. I'm serious. Check it out for yourself:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer
Shit, no. I just want to cash in on the future version of domain squatting before anyone else!
"Are you HIRO PROTAGONIST? Purchase your identity back for the low low fee of $5,000..."
It's been a while since I read it, but isn't this exactly what happened to the print media in Snow Crash?
Ie, they could not adapt to the new technology, tried and failed to challenge it in the courts, and then gradually became obsolete, to be replaced by the aggregations of thousands of independent news agents?
I better go get "Greatest swordsman in the world" appended to my business cards pronto!
Well, I could tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
This makes more sense if you replace "every telephone" etc. with "specific devices in order to accomplish tactical objectives," and append "knock out" with "manipulate" or "eavesdrop upon."
Which is not to say that it's necessarily a good thing...but it's probably not even likely to happen. The US military establishment spends a lot of time talking about doing things like this, but rarely actually takes the proper steps to accomplish its goals.
You're just not getting it, are you?
n ce
Oh well...while you continue to complain, some of us with a little less cynicism will keep an eye out for more news. This has a good chance at improving the quality of life in the third world considerably.
Oh, and for you: http://wiki.cotch.net/index.php/Invincible_Ignora
All of that is true, but from experience I can say that he has gotten about 3/4 of the work done already. Organizing people for this kind of thing is like herding cats, therefore every announcement of progress for this project is a good thing.
As for the dot commers...excuse me? I can understand hype over a content-free product, but this is hardly "vaporware." Or do you feel the same way about AIDS research which has yet to develop a cure?
It doesn't sound like you have ever had to manage a project like this. Otherwise, I think you would understand what successes they have already made (hint: you mentioned two, the article mentions more). Now...if you can't say anything constructive...well, you know the rest.
Certainly, but consider this: while money can be moved from project to project, the unique drive, vision, and skillset posessed by those guys from MIT who led this project are less portable.
It required strong leadership to get the project off the ground and through the UN. It is probably not likely that the same guys could have found a solution within their area of expertise to those other problems you mentioned. So, while those problems might be worse, and efforts to solve them might be in more need of the money, the confluence of skills and drive and circumstance in this particular place & time have led to the success of this project, which incidentally is quite a good thing, so maybe show a little support, eh?
I've been able to implement just that using simple open-source tools, so I don't really see what the problem has been. The difficulty (aside from warehousing everything) is not really in gathering the data, but rather in what you want to get out of it, and how you analyze it...I have some automated tools I wrote myself to do simple data mining and anomaly detection on the data, but as you pointed out, for most companies the analysis side is underwhelming (top 10 lists and the like). I think there needs to be a marraige of data mining types with security device designers before these systems are really going to be useful.
I disagree. As long as there are nogoodniks on the internet, you will need some people trained in IT security.
What gets me is that so many services provided by the security goons should be taken care of by good sysadmins, such as maintaining up-to-date inventories of network devices, or knowing what "normal" traffic for the network is. I rarely find this to be the case, and so security consultants get hired on to do device discovery, network mapping, patch management, and traffic analysis. There WOULD be fewer consultants if local network admins were doing their job right, so perhaps we have a vested interest in their ignorance.
On the other hand, if I didn't have to spend all my time explaining to admins getting paid $60k/year how to implement a DNS blackhole or how to use grep to find an IP in their firewall logs, then perhaps I could spend my time concentrating more on prevention than on mitigation (predictive analysis, etc.).