A large part of it is that we like to portray ISIL, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest as primitives, so we over-estimate their "cyber skills" because we expect them to treat a computer like a gorilla would treat a Lamborghini.
Kill the enemy hackers. Slit their throats, bomb their homes, shoot them in the chest twice and once through the brain. You don't fight on the enemy's level, you fight on yours. You make them fear for their lives, all the time. You don't work very well when you know you could be burned to death in an instant, torn to pieces by bombs or shells, be pumped full of high-velocity bullets, wake up to feel the cold sharpness of a blade on your neck in the middle of the night. War is violence. Wage it accordingly.
I'm guessing you're an ex-Navy Seal with over 300 confirmed kills?
The age of nation-states waging war against nation-states is largely over
If this was true, you could reduce the size of the world's armies standing dramatically, not to mention scrapping most Navies and Nuclear Deterrents completely.
Groups like ISIL are never going to be an existential threat to a country with a moderate police/military presence.
But somehow, I don't see countries like the US, Russia and China suddenly slashing their defence spending.
And you think that has not been tried? You just insulted all the engineers working on ATMs as utterly stupid morons.
You must be new here.
Every slashdot story contains a few comments on the lines of "I may not be an expert in scientific/engineering discipline X, but as a computer science graduate, it seems obvious to me that you should just do Y and here's a link to a small PERL script to do exactly that."
There are a few people that organize their money using envelopes. They have a specific limit and envelope for each category and when they pay for things they take it out of the proper envelope. When there's no more money in that envelope, no more buying of those types of things.
So if your food envelope's empty, you starve, even if the booze and hookers one is still full up?
Look at a remote tropical island that doesn't have any of these species. They exist. And guess what... they're fine.
On that basis there's no problem with getting rid of elephants, big cats, giraffes, monkeys, parrots, polar bears, blue whales or whatever, as obviously there are places on earth where they don't live.
I thought I'd check, and in their 2014 annual accounts, Apple showed tax payable of $14 billion on a net profit of $40 billion. Unless this is just some totally fictitious accounting entry, I'm not sure where you get the idea that they don't pay any tax.
But the point is that Apple's profit is extremely high and so it should be paying a proportionately large amount in tax.
It's not some dodgy set up like Amazon, which has huge turnover but genuinely makes losses and so pays minimal or no tax. (Which in any other industry would mean it was bankrupt).
Think of the issues that the UK had with Irish insurgency during The Troubles, where appearances were similar even though accents were vastly different
Yes, in Northern Ireland all those terrorists with Northern Irish accents really stood out like a sore thumb.
The Privacy Policy I read long before the phone or TV states if you have legal issues with Samsung, they claim jurisdiction in some province in South Korea, which you have previously agreed to.
That's meaningless; your local laws will still apply. Microsoft couldn't get out of paying fines in the EU for monopolistic behaviour by saying "tough, you'll have to sue us in Washington". (Well, they could, but then they wouldn't be allowed to trade in the EU).
We already have a working example: The human brain. So, of course it is possible, unless you believe that the human mind is based on some sort of magic.
The whole "it's just a question of understanding and then engineering" argument does not acknowledge that something like human consciousness may not be magic, but it might be unreproducable due to acting at a lower level than we can perceive or manipulate.
I know Roger Penrose gets a lot of stick here, but there may be something in his idea that at the quantum level we will simply never be able to model a human brain fully.
The easiest way to disprove this would, of course, be to build an artificial conscious entity.
And a strong AI will certainly need a lot of input data (humans need at least ~16 years of input before being considered employable
But only 2 years to walk and talk, so I think using "we will have to wait 16 years even if we do develop AI" is a bit of a feeble excuse. (Never mind that there is no obvious reason why an AI should have to follow human development exactly).
Slashdot Mirror
A large part of it is that we like to portray ISIL, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the rest as primitives, so we over-estimate their "cyber skills" because we expect them to treat a computer like a gorilla would treat a Lamborghini.
We were supposedly liberating the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator and his circle of evil, not trying to defeat a whole country.
They learned the importance of cyber warfare in Afghanistan? My head hurts.
If it hadn't been for those pesky Taliban hackers we'd have won a glorious victory!
Kill the enemy hackers. Slit their throats, bomb their homes, shoot them in the chest twice and once through the brain. You don't fight on the enemy's level, you fight on yours. You make them fear for their lives, all the time. You don't work very well when you know you could be burned to death in an instant, torn to pieces by bombs or shells, be pumped full of high-velocity bullets, wake up to feel the cold sharpness of a blade on your neck in the middle of the night. War is violence. Wage it accordingly.
I'm guessing you're an ex-Navy Seal with over 300 confirmed kills?
The age of nation-states waging war against nation-states is largely over
If this was true, you could reduce the size of the world's armies standing dramatically, not to mention scrapping most Navies and Nuclear Deterrents completely.
Groups like ISIL are never going to be an existential threat to a country with a moderate police/military presence.
But somehow, I don't see countries like the US, Russia and China suddenly slashing their defence spending.
A perfect example of Poe's Law. Modded +5 funny, but just as likely to be serious.
And you think that has not been tried? You just insulted all the engineers working on ATMs as utterly stupid morons.
You must be new here.
Every slashdot story contains a few comments on the lines of "I may not be an expert in scientific/engineering discipline X, but as a computer science graduate, it seems obvious to me that you should just do Y and here's a link to a small PERL script to do exactly that."
I'm just going to check my COCK out, Sir.
There are a few people that organize their money using envelopes. They have a specific limit and envelope for each category and when they pay for things they take it out of the proper envelope. When there's no more money in that envelope, no more buying of those types of things.
So if your food envelope's empty, you starve, even if the booze and hookers one is still full up?
Crazy talk.
Look at a remote tropical island that doesn't have any of these species. They exist. And guess what... they're fine.
On that basis there's no problem with getting rid of elephants, big cats, giraffes, monkeys, parrots, polar bears, blue whales or whatever, as obviously there are places on earth where they don't live.
Thanks for this message, sponsored by Monsanto, the friendly face of capitalism.
Yes, it will die out, it's guaranteed.
Best said in a mad scientist voice with a "mwah hah hah" at the end.
Yes, because a model of a ball in a bowl fully reflects the complexities of the entire fucking planet's eco system..
And if you don't approve of what the government spends its money on, you have two choices: vote for someone else or start a revolution.
maybe the governments need to get with the times
Yeah, they should, like, disrupt themselves and adopt a paradigm shift to a leaner, more agile model.
Tax is just so Twentieth Century.
That still doesn't answe the questiom, does half of the US constitute a "cult"?
A cult is devoted to worshipping something specific: its followers don't necessarily have to be a minority of the population.
For example, in ancient Greece, the Cult of Apollo was quite widespread.
I thought I'd check, and in their 2014 annual accounts, Apple showed tax payable of $14 billion on a net profit of $40 billion. Unless this is just some totally fictitious accounting entry, I'm not sure where you get the idea that they don't pay any tax.
It's not some dodgy set up like Amazon, which has huge turnover but genuinely makes losses and so pays minimal or no tax. (Which in any other industry would mean it was bankrupt).
Some of us still believe in ethics. Old fashioned, I know.
I've got 20 inches and it's still going
Hmmm...
Think of the issues that the UK had with Irish insurgency during The Troubles, where appearances were similar even though accents were vastly different
Yes, in Northern Ireland all those terrorists with Northern Irish accents really stood out like a sore thumb.
This will change nothing. If you want to convince people that individual lives matter...collectivism is not the way to go about it.
You embrace godless communism nearly the entire world over (economy & education)...what did you expect would happen?
Yes, it certainly works better if you let God-fearing Roman Catholic priests do the work.
The Privacy Policy I read long before the phone or TV states if you have legal issues with Samsung, they claim jurisdiction in some province in South Korea, which you have previously agreed to.
That's meaningless; your local laws will still apply. Microsoft couldn't get out of paying fines in the EU for monopolistic behaviour by saying "tough, you'll have to sue us in Washington". (Well, they could, but then they wouldn't be allowed to trade in the EU).
We already have a working example: The human brain. So, of course it is possible, unless you believe that the human mind is based on some sort of magic.
The whole "it's just a question of understanding and then engineering" argument does not acknowledge that something like human consciousness may not be magic, but it might be unreproducable due to acting at a lower level than we can perceive or manipulate.
I know Roger Penrose gets a lot of stick here, but there may be something in his idea that at the quantum level we will simply never be able to model a human brain fully.
The easiest way to disprove this would, of course, be to build an artificial conscious entity.
And a strong AI will certainly need a lot of input data (humans need at least ~16 years of input before being considered employable
But only 2 years to walk and talk, so I think using "we will have to wait 16 years even if we do develop AI" is a bit of a feeble excuse. (Never mind that there is no obvious reason why an AI should have to follow human development exactly).