My laptop mouse (laser + bluetooth, major brand name) has more processing power than the space shuttle. Retailed for 40 bucks plus shipping. Included is a tiny a Bluetooth transmitter that is 2mm larger than the USB-plug which almost require need a pair of pliers to remove from the USB port, so small is it.
An 64mb mp3-player / USB-stick device plus earbuds can be had for nothing, so the store doesn't have to pay for its disposal.
Hearing aids may be smaller and more complicated than an el-cheapo mp3-player, but I doubt there's more electronic magic going on inside than in a Bluetooth-cordless miniature laser mouse. In comparison with the two devices I mentioned, I would expect the price for hearing aids to be somewhere between 0 and 100 bucks. (dollars, euros)
If they cost 3700 USD, they represent the worth of 100 major brand name Bluetooth laser mice or 500 small mp3-players or 2 quality ULV-based laptops - or 10 iPhones. That is preposterous.
But it is simple as heck to read two pedal sensors and make sure the result is either acceleration or deceleration.
It is even simpler to have the brake pedal always take precedence over whatever other settings and systems say.
That's what I said about bad system architecture: when you cannot separate a simple but crucial part and have the entire code en bloc, you will kill people if that code is responsible for driving a car.
NASA verifies everything, so it CAN be done. But for cheap cars, we don't need to verify everything, but the framework of components ("brake takes precedence over everything") and two crucial components ("make sure, human pedal input and brake actuators correspond").
We don't want to have Therac-25 deaths in every branch where software is introduced. I can live with restarting my Windows computer every other day, but for my cars, my x-ray machines and my nuclear reactors I expect meticulously verified software.
Software engineers that cannot manage or think of a solution for this have no place in automotive engineering and that's my final word.
Producing life-critical software in the millions of lines of code that cannot be verified even in the most crucial parts. or Employing that software knowing full well that it isn't verified and cannot ever be verified in a life-threatening application or Shrugging off your responsibility for human deaths caused by your product by presenting software failures to be as natural as night and day.
I always held Toyota in high esteem for their environmental efforts, but the mindset in their current line of failures expresses laziness, stupidity, criminal neglect and an insolent attitude.
The only thing worse than that is knowing all other manufactures would've swept it under the rug and not even publicly accepted any failure at all. Toyota may be one-eyed king of the blind, but it's still a pity.
Given the simplicity of processing the inputs from two pedals for accelerator and brake, I think the time requirement for a formal verification is perfectly affordable for a company the size of Toyota.
As human lives are immediately threatened in even slight and short malfunctions of these devices, and with human lives worth significant amounts of money either through moral obligations or payouts after successful lawsuits, mentioning money and time constraints is an inappropriate way of dealing with criticism and an unsustainable way of doing business.
The entire car system is often quoted as containing 10 million lines of code run on a dozen processors at once and in real-time. Even if this is true, it is not a valid presentation of an intractably large problem or an unaffordable and undue burden on a manufacturer.
10 million lines of code executed on 12 different processors aren't all tasked with monitoring brake and accelerator pedals. If the software was designed properly, it will be compartmentalized, allowing a rigorous verification of the life-threatening functions like accelerator and brake pedal and a simple heuristic testing on non-critical functions like the air conditioning, navigation settings.
On proper software, it is possible to completely verify the software that is necessary for people to survive in the car - accelerator, brake, airbag deployment, power steering and signaling lights. It could be useful economically to also verify the software that is necessary for the car to not damage itself or violate laws and ordinances - valve actuators, engine sensors, additional lights, but that's much less of a priority.
If the software and control system of a modern passenger car does not allow for a complete verification of 2 pedal and 1 steering sensors, 4 brake and 1 steering actuator and 2 brake lights, then this software is unfit for its intended purpose. If the system does not allow specific subset of commands to be scientifically, mathematically verified to work as intended even in cases where non-verified parts of the software return any combination of valid and invalid values, then the subsetting structure of that system must be regarded as a complete failure.
Auditing 10 million lines of code is intractable. Having 1 million of these lines of code to control 3 simple sensors and 5 equally simple actuators is bloated. Not refactoring these parts of the code until they become tractable is lazy. Not compartmentalizing the system to allow the verification of 3 major functions is unclever and equally lazy. But employing unverified, non-compartmentalized, bloated and intractably large software in autonomous systems at high kinetic energies is criminal neglect bordering on fraud.
The best authentication relies on two factors, what you have and what you know.
A rooted client gives the attacker access to at least one part of that.
A separate physical RSA token is probably the only thing to prevent that, since they work without being attached to the authenticating system and even full scale keylogging monitored by a squad of hackers in rotating shifts will not really suffice.
I rather notice an increasing trend of throwing money at a problem instead of addressing it properly.
After giving The Management Consultant's answer ("pay for it"), you ironically mentioned the complete solution that is free as in beer to implement and succinct to explain: ignore the fire side of the firewall and concentrate logging on the servers (or the DMZ) it is protecting.
Which is the best you can do in this regard without having dedicated staff (admins in rotating shifts even) and overly complex blocking scenarios that can can bite you harder than the attacker ever could (DOSing yourself through fail2ban or portknocking that is constantly interrupted by outside attacks).
Add a fitting real-world metaphor and even management will understand you. What about:
"You wouldn't monitor the water outside the ship's hull, so start watching the water inside and prepare to act quickly if that happens"
It's already in TFS: 1 million attempts over one year. Disregarding leap years and leap seconds and assuming a constant attack rate, we are looking at 1 attack for every 31.536 seconds.
A setting a block time of as low as 30 seconds would mean DOS'ing yourself without really reducing the risk of a break in. Even 10 seconds could be a major hassle in this scenario.
With 1 million attempts, you even run the risk of your attackers successfully completing portknocking schemes purely by chance. (Or preventing the completion of any portknocking sequences of your legitimate users simply because the next attack will be faster than the portknocking can complete)
Banning attacking subnets is prone to knocking yourself out when people spoof the hell out of their packets. Portknocking could work, but with an attack storm underway, no one can login since the sequences are interrupted all the time.
The only thing you can do is set up strong authentication, limits on the CPU load that sshd can cause and then just factor in the wasted clock cycles into the performance requirements of your machine.
Make sure you get in all the time, make sure no one else can break in, make sure your server has enough resources fulfill its intended goals and then just let them hammer away on the SSH port.
fail2ban firewalls off the port for a time you specify
So I've essentially enabled anyone with a telnet client to DOS the hell out of my server - and taken out the first D of a DDOS. As TFA reported 1 million failed SSH login attempts, statistically speaking, the port will always be firewalled off, even if the blocking cool down is less than a minute.
Someone using their PC for word processing, Web browsing and email will see significant gains in overall system responsiveness, load times and above all system boot times.
If you ever witnessed a common Vista32 laptop booting in under 40 seconds, you know the use of SSDs.
The same reason why Google Earth is online-only: you could have 20 Terabytes of content, as long as only a small chunk of it is visible at any given frame.
So you take preventive measures then, with jackbooted soldiers armed with assault rifles.
Because that is the only way you can do it.
You will have to build some internment camps then. Like every socialist did before you. Dissidents, free thinkers, outcasts - why not also intellectuals, maybe some Jews? Call it re-education, concentration, Schutzhaftlager, Archipel Gulag, prison, labor camp whatever.
You need force, you will need to make current lives miserable, you will need to disappropriate people.
First, you define a footprint. Second, you define a large footprint immoral. Third, you connect a large footprint with disease, poverty and death of innocents. Fourth, you increase the shadow of the future with many deaths and in poverty. Fifth, you equal resource use outside the footprint with murder. Sixth, you serve justice. Seventh, you shrink the footprint. Eight, you control everyone.
A) you need to monitor everyone's footprint B) you need to control everyone's behavior C) you need to maintain everyone's footprint D) you. have. no. practical. limits. on. ruling. over. anyone.
That's a fine plan you have there.
Saving countless millions of nameless innocent lives in the future by monitoring, controlling, restricting the present day humans. All in the name of the greater good.
What are a thousand measly pursuits of earthly happiness today compared to untold BILLIONS of lives in the distant future?
You are advocating the total control of non-conforming individuals to the greater good. You are declaring abstinence today to be an indispensable way of earning the future and afterlife. And only the righteous know the true meaning of all that.
You know where this leads. I do. How much wood will you need for building the stakes?
Trust me, you DO have a favorite activity that needlessly wastes resources that could be used to feed an entire village in Elbonia. And they will come for you to stop doing it, just wait a few years.
Until everyone wears cheap sustainable clothing, lives in cheap sustainable housing, eats cheap sustainable greens we can always reappriopriate something for the needy in Elbonia. The world will never run out of mouths to feed and people to shelter, so sharing with the World means sharing your bottle of water with all the oceans of the planet. You can pour in as much as you like for as long as you live, but you will not achieve anything.
The vast majority of people in the West don't believe in anything. They abstain from having kids because it takes away money that could be invested in self-pleasuring. They abstain from having kids because they know their West is going to Hell in a handbasket.
And something else: The people in the West are doing everything they can to accommodate an unlimited number of immigrants, with no reduction or slowing down in sight. Immigrants that bring children, bear children, and then bear some more.
The number of children of immigrants rapidly approach the level of the natives after a few generation, but on every given day you look at Europe and the USA, there are more new immigrants than on every day before that.
The population in the West does not decline, not even in the slightest. It's just the Westerners that die out.
“I say the debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat. And we know the time for action is now.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, 2008
So the science may not be settled, but all findings to the contrary of AGW are deniers, lobbyists and so on. Useful idiots if they are against AGW, level-headed scientists if they are in favor.
Talk about double standards.
Unfortunately, I don't remember when there ever WAS the allowed time for debate. I only remember opposing views being booed, ridiculed or at best ignored.
That is not true: resources have been scarce and finite for as long as humanity can remember.
There was not much coal left in Britain 1900, there was no silver left in Southeastern Germany 1800, there is not much oil left in Texas 1970.
And there are not much trees left in Greece, 500BC.
Rationing scarce resources is a dead-serious way to lose them. Increasing their price is an equally viable way to replenish them or find substitutes.
I have to thank you for exposing the communist mindset that lies beyond the "footprint" debate with a fresh and live example: "the sports car uses up a chunk of resources that are non-renewable".
First, it's wrong: biomass-to-liquid may not be viable now, but they're on track. When scarcity has reached 5 EUR/liter for unleaded gasoline, BtL will be perfectly economical.
Second, resources are used up all the time. If you (or an authority) are able to decide what resource usage is appropriate and acceptable, then you have brought coercion, force and of course the police into the fray.
When law enforcement is called to prevent the non-threatening use of a luxury item, paid-for in full through lawfully acquired funds to protect a fuzzy definition of Community Shared Resources, it is pretty much jackbooted communism.
When "authority" decides upon the proper use of a certain resource, not for simple efficiency (as in Miles-Per-Gallon), but for the reasons behind it ("no driving expensive sports cars just for fun, ever"), we will have broken the pursuit of happiness as the basis of our society.
The same line of arguments *could* then be used to deny expensive paintings, big screen TVs, large outdoor pools, ski tours, long distance vacations and so on and so on.
When you cross the border to meddle in other people's property, deciding for better use of THEIR resources, or even abolish the private property of resources altogether, you are in Communistic territory.
Because nothing separates "saving fuel for future generations" from "saving precious metals for future generations" or "saving *anything*".
This has nothing to do with the Gnu Public License. GPL'ed stuff is private welfare, donated by well-meaning individuals. Other than that, a copy of Firefox can be multiplied endlessly, so it's an unlimited resource after all.
Denying people to drive (safely) with their sports cars to save fuel is the same as mandating a maximum room temperature for everyone, so they don't burn too much fuel in their stoves just to feel good. If you ever start rationing resources and prohibit resource that is "just for fun", I will take up arms.
Why? Because the reason of our nations is the pursuit of happiness, with liberty and justice for all. Take away the happiness and liberty part, and our nations become work camps. And since people want to flee work camps, you will have to rebuild The Wall. Complete with the mine traps, dogs and all that.
Brussels is hugely diverse, I've been there: 60% are people from diverse countries around Europe. Three-piece suit, fine shoes, looking important. 40% of Them, from diverse Muslim countries. Looking for trouble.
If you live in Molenbeek and feel perfectly safe in the multicultural diverse area, try one of these things: Level 1: carry a small but visible cross pendant while riding the subway Level 2: ride the No. 5 subway direction Erasme. Level 3: ride the No. 5 subway direction Erasme, alone. Level 4: ride the No. 5 subway direction Erasme on a Friday evening.
For additional thrill, you can always combine the subway rides with a Bible in hand or a cross around your neck. Bringing a non-veiled girl along adds even more action.
If that all went well, try this:
Level 99: be in the middle of Grand Place (the middle of Brussels, the center of Belgium, so to speak). Put on a Jewish Kippa. In the middle of the day. Don't be shy, don't go hugging Policemen, be brave, stand somewhere alone. Wear a concealed knife-protection vest and a loud whistle, just in case.
In a multiculturalist Europe, with thousands of visible Muslims, being a visible Jew or Christian should not be a death sentence, should it?
You have to have ID, but not on person all the time. They can take you to the police station if you don't have ID on your person to establish a clear identification.
Having an ID is mandatory, carrying it around is not. It can make a police encounter (ie. a routine check on motorways Saturday night to catch some drunkards) a lot easier, though.
The UK takes drastic measures to prepare for the coming storm when immigrants and natives start the final countdown. The writing's on the wall for several years now and they are starting to shit their pants.
English Defence League got arrested, left in prison for a few days to be beaten to a pulp by Muslim prison inmates. Hate speech laws now apply to numerical truths. CCTV cameras are everywhere. Multicultural apologists are fighting harder and harder to keep the lid on, but I doubt it will take much more than 5-8 years for sustained and open fights in some quarters of London.
We have several years to prepare for our own, nice, friendly, peaceful homemade Intifada.
Expect open WiFi to be cut, with anonymous Internet cafe access next. After that, it's passports. Then passports to be carried on person, all the time. And then it's IngSoc.
I don't wish anyone's death. I apologize if that was ambiguous. I just wanted to point out that people who believe in population reduction are impossible to express their beliefs consistently and behave consequently without killing themselves or killing others.
Malthusians that live are contradicting their entire belief system in a truly ironic fashion. Belief systems that cannot be consequentially demonstrated and lead by example not only violate Kant's Categorical imperative, but simply are utterly moronic.
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
This single sentence is the axiom out of which all our constitutions are derived. Everything else is just clarification (criminal and tort law) and protection of the framework (ie. US amendments).
The underlying question is how you allocate a finite resource to an unlimited number of humans.
I wrote on that subject before, because it is deeply concerning to me that the allocation mode for finite resources I prefer is currently under more pressure than ever before. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1545358&cid=31097186
The West is closer to a Communist society than it ever was, including 1968. Every angle of discussion always leads to more control from authority, more sharedness, more equalness, more restraint, more force, more coercion.
This is troubling.
Finite resources are finite. The number of human is infinite.
This has been true for a dozens millenia, this is the situation we've been living in since the apes came down from their trees. This isn't new or revolutionary stuff, not in the least.
Whenever people talk about scarcity of resources and the need of sharing these equally, peacefully among an arbitrary number of people from an arbitrary large "community", I listen up. Maybe my past in East Germany has given me a better understanding of the beginnings of totalitarism.
Of course the have-nots will not sit there and watch us having wealth. They never have. Again, this isn't new stuff we've discovered somewhere in the last decade. Not even in the last millennium.
As I've said before, we will never get all living humans to the standard of living of an average US American or German or Swiss or Japanese person today, in 2010. Oil, tantalum, copper will not suffice for the number of people TODAY, and there are 200.000 people MORE tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow, world population has increased by another 200.000 and the speed of increasing is increasing itself.
We have several questions to answer: 1.) Why do we want all living humans to live in equal standards of living? 2.) How do we prevent differences from re-occuring once we've equalized everything? 3.) How is this beneficial to us? 4.) Will this stop Rome from being ransacked by the Vandals this time around?
The simple preference for equality relies on questionable assumptions and requires velvety coercion at first and jackbooted authoritarianism in the end.
Equalness in this sense always implies "allocation based on need", with "need" defined by the number of mouths to feed. And just like today's welfare states, the world will never run out of mouths to feed.
The difference between a free country and Somalia is the protection of the individual. In a free country, you can opt out of everything except paying taxes and the police will protect you. In Libertarian Anarchy (ie Somalia, The Slums), no one protects you from the warlords. (Except the US Marine Infantry unless a Clinton is in office)
In The Free West, you could opt out of everything unless you harm somebody. In the Slum and in Somalia, you are part of Gang A or B or you're a victim.
Slashdot Mirror
My laptop mouse (laser + bluetooth, major brand name) has more processing power than the space shuttle. Retailed for 40 bucks plus shipping. Included is a tiny a Bluetooth transmitter that is 2mm larger than the USB-plug which almost require need a pair of pliers to remove from the USB port, so small is it.
An 64mb mp3-player / USB-stick device plus earbuds can be had for nothing, so the store doesn't have to pay for its disposal.
Hearing aids may be smaller and more complicated than an el-cheapo mp3-player, but I doubt there's more electronic magic going on inside than in a Bluetooth-cordless miniature laser mouse. In comparison with the two devices I mentioned, I would expect the price for hearing aids to be somewhere between 0 and 100 bucks. (dollars, euros)
If they cost 3700 USD, they represent the worth of 100 major brand name Bluetooth laser mice or 500 small mp3-players or 2 quality ULV-based laptops - or 10 iPhones. That is preposterous.
Of course not.
But it is simple as heck to read two pedal sensors and make sure the result is either acceleration or deceleration.
It is even simpler to have the brake pedal always take precedence over whatever other settings and systems say.
That's what I said about bad system architecture: when you cannot separate a simple but crucial part and have the entire code en bloc, you will kill people if that code is responsible for driving a car.
NASA verifies everything, so it CAN be done. But for cheap cars, we don't need to verify everything, but the framework of components ("brake takes precedence over everything") and two crucial components ("make sure, human pedal input and brake actuators correspond").
We don't want to have Therac-25 deaths in every branch where software is introduced. I can live with restarting my Windows computer every other day, but for my cars, my x-ray machines and my nuclear reactors I expect meticulously verified software.
Software engineers that cannot manage or think of a solution for this have no place in automotive engineering and that's my final word.
I don't know what is worse:
Producing life-critical software in the millions of lines of code that cannot be verified even in the most crucial parts.
or
Employing that software knowing full well that it isn't verified and cannot ever be verified in a life-threatening application
or
Shrugging off your responsibility for human deaths caused by your product by presenting software failures to be as natural as night and day.
I always held Toyota in high esteem for their environmental efforts, but the mindset in their current line of failures expresses laziness, stupidity, criminal neglect and an insolent attitude.
The only thing worse than that is knowing all other manufactures would've swept it under the rug and not even publicly accepted any failure at all. Toyota may be one-eyed king of the blind, but it's still a pity.
Given the simplicity of processing the inputs from two pedals for accelerator and brake, I think the time requirement for a formal verification is perfectly affordable for a company the size of Toyota.
As human lives are immediately threatened in even slight and short malfunctions of these devices, and with human lives worth significant amounts of money either through moral obligations or payouts after successful lawsuits, mentioning money and time constraints is an inappropriate way of dealing with criticism and an unsustainable way of doing business.
The entire car system is often quoted as containing 10 million lines of code run on a dozen processors at once and in real-time. Even if this is true, it is not a valid presentation of an intractably large problem or an unaffordable and undue burden on a manufacturer.
10 million lines of code executed on 12 different processors aren't all tasked with monitoring brake and accelerator pedals. If the software was designed properly, it will be compartmentalized, allowing a rigorous verification of the life-threatening functions like accelerator and brake pedal and a simple heuristic testing on non-critical functions like the air conditioning, navigation settings.
On proper software, it is possible to completely verify the software that is necessary for people to survive in the car - accelerator, brake, airbag deployment, power steering and signaling lights. It could be useful economically to also verify the software that is necessary for the car to not damage itself or violate laws and ordinances - valve actuators, engine sensors, additional lights, but that's much less of a priority.
If the software and control system of a modern passenger car does not allow for a complete verification of 2 pedal and 1 steering sensors, 4 brake and 1 steering actuator and 2 brake lights, then this software is unfit for its intended purpose. If the system does not allow specific subset of commands to be scientifically, mathematically verified to work as intended even in cases where non-verified parts of the software return any combination of valid and invalid values, then the subsetting structure of that system must be regarded as a complete failure.
Auditing 10 million lines of code is intractable.
Having 1 million of these lines of code to control 3 simple sensors and 5 equally simple actuators is bloated.
Not refactoring these parts of the code until they become tractable is lazy.
Not compartmentalizing the system to allow the verification of 3 major functions is unclever and equally lazy.
But employing unverified, non-compartmentalized, bloated and intractably large software in autonomous systems at high kinetic energies is criminal neglect bordering on fraud.
The best authentication relies on two factors, what you have and what you know.
A rooted client gives the attacker access to at least one part of that.
A separate physical RSA token is probably the only thing to prevent that, since they work without being attached to the authenticating system and even full scale keylogging monitored by a squad of hackers in rotating shifts will not really suffice.
I rather notice an increasing trend of throwing money at a problem instead of addressing it properly.
After giving The Management Consultant's answer ("pay for it"), you ironically mentioned the complete solution that is free as in beer to implement and succinct to explain: ignore the fire side of the firewall and concentrate logging on the servers (or the DMZ) it is protecting.
Which is the best you can do in this regard without having dedicated staff (admins in rotating shifts even) and overly complex blocking scenarios that can can bite you harder than the attacker ever could (DOSing yourself through fail2ban or portknocking that is constantly interrupted by outside attacks).
Add a fitting real-world metaphor and even management will understand you. What about:
"You wouldn't monitor the water outside the ship's hull, so start watching the water inside and prepare to act quickly if that happens"
It's already in TFS: 1 million attempts over one year. Disregarding leap years and leap seconds and assuming a constant attack rate, we are looking at 1 attack for every 31.536 seconds.
A setting a block time of as low as 30 seconds would mean DOS'ing yourself without really reducing the risk of a break in. Even 10 seconds could be a major hassle in this scenario.
With 1 million attempts, you even run the risk of your attackers successfully completing portknocking schemes purely by chance. (Or preventing the completion of any portknocking sequences of your legitimate users simply because the next attack will be faster than the portknocking can complete)
Banning attacking subnets is prone to knocking yourself out when people spoof the hell out of their packets. Portknocking could work, but with an attack storm underway, no one can login since the sequences are interrupted all the time.
The only thing you can do is set up strong authentication, limits on the CPU load that sshd can cause and then just factor in the wasted clock cycles into the performance requirements of your machine.
Make sure you get in all the time, make sure no one else can break in, make sure your server has enough resources fulfill its intended goals and then just let them hammer away on the SSH port.
fail2ban firewalls off the port for a time you specify
So I've essentially enabled anyone with a telnet client to DOS the hell out of my server - and taken out the first D of a DDOS. As TFA reported 1 million failed SSH login attempts, statistically speaking, the port will always be firewalled off, even if the blocking cool down is less than a minute.
You don't know what the benefits are. Maybe he gets to bone supermodels. Many men would accept a negative hourly rate for that.
Nice assumption on the gender.
Male supermodels are usually men who have sex with men. And there are definitely men who would pay to have sex with them.
So, nice (and wrong) assumption on the sexual orientation, pal.
Someone using their PC for word processing, Web browsing and email will see significant gains in overall system responsiveness, load times and above all system boot times.
If you ever witnessed a common Vista32 laptop booting in under 40 seconds, you know the use of SSDs.
The same reason why Google Earth is online-only: you could have 20 Terabytes of content, as long as only a small chunk of it is visible at any given frame.
If the realness of scientists is defined by their pro or anti stance to AGW, I doubt your definition of science.
If "real" scientists can only be in *favor* of AGW, then the science is in fact settled. (or hoped to be)
So you take preventive measures then, with jackbooted soldiers armed with assault rifles.
Because that is the only way you can do it.
You will have to build some internment camps then. Like every socialist did before you. Dissidents, free thinkers, outcasts - why not also intellectuals, maybe some Jews? Call it re-education, concentration, Schutzhaftlager, Archipel Gulag, prison, labor camp whatever.
You need force, you will need to make current lives miserable, you will need to disappropriate people.
Been there, done that. A couple of times.
"From my cold dead hands", you know.
This is exactly what I meant.
First, you define a footprint.
Second, you define a large footprint immoral.
Third, you connect a large footprint with disease, poverty and death of innocents.
Fourth, you increase the shadow of the future with many deaths and in poverty.
Fifth, you equal resource use outside the footprint with murder.
Sixth, you serve justice.
Seventh, you shrink the footprint.
Eight, you control everyone.
A) you need to monitor everyone's footprint
B) you need to control everyone's behavior
C) you need to maintain everyone's footprint
D) you. have. no. practical. limits. on. ruling. over. anyone.
That's a fine plan you have there.
Saving countless millions of nameless innocent lives in the future by monitoring, controlling, restricting the present day humans. All in the name of the greater good.
What are a thousand measly pursuits of earthly happiness today compared to untold BILLIONS of lives in the distant future?
You are advocating the total control of non-conforming individuals to the greater good. You are declaring abstinence today to be an indispensable way of earning the future and afterlife. And only the righteous know the true meaning of all that.
You know where this leads. I do. How much wood will you need for building the stakes?
Trust me, you DO have a favorite activity that needlessly wastes resources that could be used to feed an entire village in Elbonia. And they will come for you to stop doing it, just wait a few years.
Until everyone wears cheap sustainable clothing, lives in cheap sustainable housing, eats cheap sustainable greens we can always reappriopriate something for the needy in Elbonia. The world will never run out of mouths to feed and people to shelter, so sharing with the World means sharing your bottle of water with all the oceans of the planet. You can pour in as much as you like for as long as you live, but you will not achieve anything.
The vast majority of people in the West don't believe in anything. They abstain from having kids because it takes away money that could be invested in self-pleasuring. They abstain from having kids because they know their West is going to Hell in a handbasket.
And something else: The people in the West are doing everything they can to accommodate an unlimited number of immigrants, with no reduction or slowing down in sight. Immigrants that bring children, bear children, and then bear some more.
The number of children of immigrants rapidly approach the level of the natives after a few generation, but on every given day you look at Europe and the USA, there are more new immigrants than on every day before that.
The population in the West does not decline, not even in the slightest. It's just the Westerners that die out.
You are right, the correct quote was
"The time for debate is over".
http://chge.med.harvard.edu/media/letters/documents/01_08_07_nyt_chivian.pdf
“I say the debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat. And we know the time for action is now.” Arnold Schwarzenegger, Governor of California, 2008
So the science may not be settled, but all findings to the contrary of AGW are deniers, lobbyists and so on. Useful idiots if they are against AGW, level-headed scientists if they are in favor.
Talk about double standards.
Unfortunately, I don't remember when there ever WAS the allowed time for debate. I only remember opposing views being booed, ridiculed or at best ignored.
"Hello Americans, welcome to the end of your idea of a free country".
There, fixed that for you.
That is not true: resources have been scarce and finite for as long as humanity can remember.
There was not much coal left in Britain 1900, there was no silver left in Southeastern Germany 1800, there is not much oil left in Texas 1970.
And there are not much trees left in Greece, 500BC.
Rationing scarce resources is a dead-serious way to lose them. Increasing their price is an equally viable way to replenish them or find substitutes.
I have to thank you for exposing the communist mindset that lies beyond the "footprint" debate with a fresh and live example: "the sports car uses up a chunk of resources that are non-renewable".
First, it's wrong: biomass-to-liquid may not be viable now, but they're on track. When scarcity has reached 5 EUR/liter for unleaded gasoline, BtL will be perfectly economical.
Second, resources are used up all the time. If you (or an authority) are able to decide what resource usage is appropriate and acceptable, then you have brought coercion, force and of course the police into the fray.
When law enforcement is called to prevent the non-threatening use of a luxury item, paid-for in full through lawfully acquired funds to protect a fuzzy definition of Community Shared Resources, it is pretty much jackbooted communism.
When "authority" decides upon the proper use of a certain resource, not for simple efficiency (as in Miles-Per-Gallon), but for the reasons behind it ("no driving expensive sports cars just for fun, ever"), we will have broken the pursuit of happiness as the basis of our society.
The same line of arguments *could* then be used to deny expensive paintings, big screen TVs, large outdoor pools, ski tours, long distance vacations and so on and so on.
When you cross the border to meddle in other people's property, deciding for better use of THEIR resources, or even abolish the private property of resources altogether, you are in Communistic territory.
Because nothing separates "saving fuel for future generations" from "saving precious metals for future generations" or "saving *anything*".
This has nothing to do with the Gnu Public License. GPL'ed stuff is private welfare, donated by well-meaning individuals. Other than that, a copy of Firefox can be multiplied endlessly, so it's an unlimited resource after all.
Denying people to drive (safely) with their sports cars to save fuel is the same as mandating a maximum room temperature for everyone, so they don't burn too much fuel in their stoves just to feel good. If you ever start rationing resources and prohibit resource that is "just for fun", I will take up arms.
Why? Because the reason of our nations is the pursuit of happiness, with liberty and justice for all. Take away the happiness and liberty part, and our nations become work camps. And since people want to flee work camps, you will have to rebuild The Wall. Complete with the mine traps, dogs and all that.
Free will or force. You decide.
Brussels is hugely diverse, I've been there: 60% are people from diverse countries around Europe. Three-piece suit, fine shoes, looking important. 40% of Them, from diverse Muslim countries. Looking for trouble.
If you live in Molenbeek and feel perfectly safe in the multicultural diverse area, try one of these things:
Level 1: carry a small but visible cross pendant while riding the subway
Level 2: ride the No. 5 subway direction Erasme.
Level 3: ride the No. 5 subway direction Erasme, alone.
Level 4: ride the No. 5 subway direction Erasme on a Friday evening.
For additional thrill, you can always combine the subway rides with a Bible in hand or a cross around your neck. Bringing a non-veiled girl along adds even more action.
If that all went well, try this:
Level 99: be in the middle of Grand Place (the middle of Brussels, the center of Belgium, so to speak). Put on a Jewish Kippa. In the middle of the day. Don't be shy, don't go hugging Policemen, be brave, stand somewhere alone. Wear a concealed knife-protection vest and a loud whistle, just in case.
In a multiculturalist Europe, with thousands of visible Muslims, being a visible Jew or Christian should not be a death sentence, should it?
Until 1989.
You have to have ID, but not on person all the time. They can take you to the police station if you don't have ID on your person to establish a clear identification.
Having an ID is mandatory, carrying it around is not. It can make a police encounter (ie. a routine check on motorways Saturday night to catch some drunkards) a lot easier, though.
The UK takes drastic measures to prepare for the coming storm when immigrants and natives start the final countdown. The writing's on the wall for several years now and they are starting to shit their pants.
English Defence League got arrested, left in prison for a few days to be beaten to a pulp by Muslim prison inmates. Hate speech laws now apply to numerical truths. CCTV cameras are everywhere. Multicultural apologists are fighting harder and harder to keep the lid on, but I doubt it will take much more than 5-8 years for sustained and open fights in some quarters of London.
They are now shooting with AK47 rifles at the police in Brussels and Paris:
http://www.libertiesalliance.org/2010/02/02/ak47-discharged-on-the-streets-of-belgium-yet-the-mayor-of-brussels-seems-to-pour-cold-water-on-effective-remedies/
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/henrysamuel/9846869/French_police_under_Kalashnikov_fire_early_riot_warning/
We have several years to prepare for our own, nice, friendly, peaceful homemade Intifada.
Expect open WiFi to be cut, with anonymous Internet cafe access next. After that, it's passports. Then passports to be carried on person, all the time. And then it's IngSoc.
But the Ummah will explode before that.
I don't wish anyone's death. I apologize if that was ambiguous. I just wanted to point out that people who believe in population reduction are impossible to express their beliefs consistently and behave consequently without killing themselves or killing others.
Malthusians that live are contradicting their entire belief system in a truly ironic fashion. Belief systems that cannot be consequentially demonstrated and lead by example not only violate Kant's Categorical imperative, but simply are utterly moronic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law."
This single sentence is the axiom out of which all our constitutions are derived. Everything else is just clarification (criminal and tort law) and protection of the framework (ie. US amendments).
The underlying question is how you allocate a finite resource to an unlimited number of humans.
I wrote on that subject before, because it is deeply concerning to me that the allocation mode for finite resources I prefer is currently under more pressure than ever before.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1545358&cid=31097186
The West is closer to a Communist society than it ever was, including 1968. Every angle of discussion always leads to more control from authority, more sharedness, more equalness, more restraint, more force, more coercion.
This is troubling.
Finite resources are finite. The number of human is infinite.
This has been true for a dozens millenia, this is the situation we've been living in since the apes came down from their trees. This isn't new or revolutionary stuff, not in the least.
Whenever people talk about scarcity of resources and the need of sharing these equally, peacefully among an arbitrary number of people from an arbitrary large "community", I listen up. Maybe my past in East Germany has given me a better understanding of the beginnings of totalitarism.
Of course the have-nots will not sit there and watch us having wealth. They never have. Again, this isn't new stuff we've discovered somewhere in the last decade. Not even in the last millennium.
As I've said before, we will never get all living humans to the standard of living of an average US American or German or Swiss or Japanese person today, in 2010. Oil, tantalum, copper will not suffice for the number of people TODAY, and there are 200.000 people MORE tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow, world population has increased by another 200.000 and the speed of increasing is increasing itself.
We have several questions to answer:
1.) Why do we want all living humans to live in equal standards of living?
2.) How do we prevent differences from re-occuring once we've equalized everything?
3.) How is this beneficial to us?
4.) Will this stop Rome from being ransacked by the Vandals this time around?
The simple preference for equality relies on questionable assumptions and requires velvety coercion at first and jackbooted authoritarianism in the end.
Equalness in this sense always implies "allocation based on need", with "need" defined by the number of mouths to feed. And just like today's welfare states, the world will never run out of mouths to feed.
The difference between a free country and Somalia is the protection of the individual. In a free country, you can opt out of everything except paying taxes and the police will protect you. In Libertarian Anarchy (ie Somalia, The Slums), no one protects you from the warlords. (Except the US Marine Infantry unless a Clinton is in office)
In The Free West, you could opt out of everything unless you harm somebody. In the Slum and in Somalia, you are part of Gang A or B or you're a victim.