This is a reasonably good outcome. Yes, it increases Russian influence in the Middle East, but so what? The U.S. now imports 36% of the oil it uses, down from 60% in 2006. The Middle East is losing its strategic importance to the US.
ROFLMAO at you for thinking that.
Syria just got away with using nerve gas on their own civilian population - which will encourage other nations to obtain and use such weapons.
Really? And be invaded by Russian and US inspectors? So far, Assad has gotten away with nothing. No deals, no ifs ands or buts. Sure, he's trying - you expect that, but the Russians aren't terribly happy with their idiot friend - having him there is a good foil for Russian's' interests but having him further destabilize the region is not. So, who is next? North Korea? New Jersey?
Oh, but they're going to have to give them up? Yeah, really? Like when? After all the stalling and negotiating? Hell, maybe they do give up some or even all of their current stockpile of chemical weapons. Then they just turn around and make more.
Spin it all you want - Obama totally fucked this one up.
See above. Yes, Obama's foreign policy has the grace of a drunken sailor but sometimes you get lucky. You're dribbling on your bib again. It's not pretty.
While you have a good point, you have to understand that this whole project is the ultimate kludge. We do what we must because we can.
1 - If / When it doesn't work, you now have a reason to go beat up Assad in whatever form you think you can get away with. It's almost as good as a UN resolution, perhaps better because Russia is behind it.
2 - It puts foreign, armed boots on the ground. And not little pansy assed blue helmets. Nasty troops with the appropriate backup. Now, this can backfire (as can anything else here) by having lots of Russian boots that act as a deterrent to the rebels but if you have both US and Russian inspectors on the ground, you will likely have both countries represented. The implied command and control needed for that can really stabilize the situation since neither country wants things to accelerate.
3 - You have the chance of getting the vast majority of the stocks out off the underground arms bazaar. This is the problem with Assad's chemical weapons. When he loses control over them (and apparently he has) you have all the nasties trying to get some. Sarin is a wonderful terrorist device. In some ways better than a nuc.
The world has apparently dodged a bullet with the USSR nuclear stockpile - it didn't get handed out to everyone with an agenda and a budget. We need to do the same for idiot Assad's chemical weapons. Unfortunately, the parallels between Irag and Syria are way too close for comfort. While Assad might not be as batshit insane as Hussein was, he's not all that far off. We don't have all that much freedom of movement in the Middle East and Russia has a bit more. For once, our interests are aligned a bit.
You're most likely correct, however getting from here to there is going to take a leap of faith or fiat that is very likely impossible short of direct alien intervention (which, for other reasons, is very likely impossible).
Guaranteed minimum wage. Get a job if you want more.(and note, this would be a livable wage, not our current BS minimum)
Please explain how that solution is unworkable, given it's a VERY slight expansion from traditional welfare/SS/etc. The only change is now robots are doing all the menial tasks instead of humans, who are paid anyway.
Please explain how this is workable when a very modest move in this direction would head off much of the social unrest in this country. Imagine, for example, if everyone in Detroit were to be given a living wage simply for existing. The blight and destruction of the city and the people inside it would vanish. Buildings could be rebuilt just for the fun of it. The costs would likely be less than the daily rate for keeping an aircraft carrier battle group afloat.
If it were that easy, it would have been done by now.
"Slight" - I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Mine is tastefully retrograded to the XP UI theme,
"Tasteful" and "XP UI" have, heretofore, never been seen as linked concepts. Typically, the comments are more along the line of 'my eyes bleed' and 'Turn it off!!!".
Hate to break it to you but people have put crummy old spinning rust hard drives in computers that have been all over the planet, in space and under water for some time. Yes, SSDs are preferred these days, but it's not like ruggedized computers just appeared four years ago.
Hell, I remember field portables with FLOPPY DRIVES. And we liked them.
On a side note, I used to do IT for Boulder County and installed several systems at the Boulder EOC, which contrary to a comment above is actually on the top of a hill in the floodplain and conveniently situated directly adjacent to Boulder Airport.
That's good to hear. It used to be at the PD which was spitting distance from the Creek. Communications used to have a bunch of school buses that they could hop into, drive up to the Betasso Water Treatment Plant (which overlooks Boulder) and set up stuff from there. Unless Boulder Canyon was flooded.
So it must have only taken them 20 years or so to move their butts, but progress is progress.
But even then, Boulder was really prepared for this sort of thing. They had flood gauges all over the mountains that linked to the EOC. I recall one lazy summer day when a couple of us in one of the local VFDs were hanging around a station (near one of the gauges) and idily wondered what they would think if we turned up one the 2 1/2 inch hoses and drenched the gauge..... We figured we had gotten into enough trouble that week so we let it lie.
Cue the eurotrash telling us how we are so stupid for building so close to the coast, where floods are a problem.
Boulder County has been in FEMA's 'disasters waiting to happen' for decades. One of the more entertaining factoids is that the major communication center, the Police Department is located, wait for it, in a flood plain, in a building that was supposed to be used for a hotel but the developer could not approval from the city to complete the structure.
You missed the part about the hash. You understand the part about a (salted) hash, right? Unless Apple releases the keys (unlikely, but possible) the EvilOrganization has to break that. Then figure out the specifics of the output sensor (likely not the same as the one the FBI uses), then spend all that work to get a useless bit of information.
Uh, everything's under control. Situation normal. What happened? Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you? We're sending a squad up. Uh, uh... negative, negative. We had a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak, very dangerous. Who is this? What's your operating number? Han Solo: Uh...
Yeah, not something to look forward to, and it would undoubtedly cause worldwide effects, but I don't think it's on the order of mass starvation outside of the areas of humanity which are already on the brink.
For billions to die from starvation isn't even going to require a 'nuclear winter' scenario. A single, near worldwide season of crop failures would put vast numbers of people at risk. Coupled with the inevitable fallout (so to speak) of a nuclear war, the disruption of supply lines and infrastructure would be the icing on the cake (bad choice of words, I suppose).
We've tried this on commercial grade fingerprint locks - even using medical grade silicon gel it doesn't work. I don't know the specifics of scanner, but at least ones that cost $1000 a pop can be hardened against this sort of thing.
"smeared all over" is probably the problem there – at least with my touchscreens, I tend to leave inch-long smears that, while annoyingly visible, hardly leave anything that can be considered a proper fingerprint. Put it into a pocket and all you have is a thin film of whatever. Good if you need DNA, less if you want a fingerprint you can actually copy.
Will be interesting to see just hard fingerprint recovery will be for real-life scenarios.
Take some fine powder and sprinkle it over a cell phone screen and back. You'll get a fingerprint or two. Remember, the nice, nonporous rest of the phone is a perfect place to pick up a print.
And now the NSA will have a finger print database for all iphone users with minimum effort.
Stop this. Stop it this very instant. The NSA (or any other nefarious creature / corporation / government entity / evil deity) is not interested in a user's fingerprint.
First, as has been mentioned ad nauseaum, you don't get a fingerprint - you get a hash of an output off a sensor that relates to a fingerprint.
Second, even if you could reconstruct the loops and whorls of the fingerprint then so what? You leave a veritable trail of fingerprints (and DNA and a host of other things we don't want to talk about here) everywhere you haul your ugly bit of meatspace around to. Nobody cares about a single fingerprint. The only valid concern is whether or not someone can take an existing copy of your fingerprint and gain access to the device. We shall see.
IF it works (big if) then it's a fine bit of biometrics to allow you to play Angry Birds. If you are carrying more sensitive information on your iPhone and you don't have it encrypted separately from phone access, sucks to be you.
Not every bit of security has to be able to foil three letter government agencies.
If you look up what the Royal Navy typically ate in Darwin's day (rats, weevil infested everything else), Tortoise might well have been really high up on the delight list. Today, not so much.
You conflate 'scientists' with small groups of people interested in one aspect off an enormous topic.
"Science" does not have an opinion on what reintroduction off burrowing worms on the NA continent will do. Some people researching the field may have some observations and possibly opinions about the desirability or lack thereof of a particular issue, but that isn't some giant statist conspiracy that you're trying to make it into.
And yes, you CAN make the argument that 'slowing down' or avoiding changes might be beneficial - those arguments may or may not be true (or relevant in the long run) but they are reasonable and important items of discussion. You are unsuccessfully trying to toss any concerns about environmental change into the tree hugger basket. Sorry, the basket isn't big enough. Yes, at times we have to embrace change but when you have several billion people living at the ragged edge of existence you might want to look very carefully at what the changes are likely to be and what we might do to avoid them.
Some of those billions of people might end up being interested in your breakfast.
Seriously, we all need to do (a lot) more to avoid poisoning ourselves. Yes the planet is warming. Yes we are contributing to it. Yes we need to work toward ways to mitigate this. The planet has been here for 4.5 billion years. I find it a little disingenuous to look at the temperatures from the last 1500 years and claim the sky is falling.
They sky isn't falling but the roof is getting pretty leaky. The difference between a couple of thousand proto humans chasing herbivores off cliffs a couple of thousand years ago and 7 billion of the annoying creatures burning anything they can get their paws on is ecologically profound.
The planet will be here long after we're gone. But at the rate we're going it's likely that the entire human experience will be a narrow band of sediment trapped inside an alien archeologist's core sample.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a reasonably good outcome. Yes, it increases Russian influence in the Middle East, but so what? The U.S. now imports 36% of the oil it uses, down from 60% in 2006. The Middle East is losing its strategic importance to the US.
ROFLMAO at you for thinking that.
Syria just got away with using nerve gas on their own civilian population - which will encourage other nations to obtain and use such weapons.
Really? And be invaded by Russian and US inspectors? So far, Assad has gotten away with nothing. No deals, no ifs ands or buts. Sure, he's trying - you expect that, but the Russians aren't terribly happy with their idiot friend - having him there is a good foil for Russian's' interests but having him further destabilize the region is not. So, who is next? North Korea? New Jersey?
Oh, but they're going to have to give them up? Yeah, really? Like when? After all the stalling and negotiating? Hell, maybe they do give up some or even all of their current stockpile of chemical weapons. Then they just turn around and make more.
Spin it all you want - Obama totally fucked this one up.
See above. Yes, Obama's foreign policy has the grace of a drunken sailor but sometimes you get lucky. You're dribbling on your bib again. It's not pretty.
But getting them into field proven artillery shells, ones in use all over the planet is a new thing. And something the Syrians have managed to do.
Also, scale matters....
While you have a good point, you have to understand that this whole project is the ultimate kludge. We do what we must because we can.
1 - If / When it doesn't work, you now have a reason to go beat up Assad in whatever form you think you can get away with. It's almost as good as a UN resolution, perhaps better because Russia is behind it.
2 - It puts foreign, armed boots on the ground. And not little pansy assed blue helmets. Nasty troops with the appropriate backup. Now, this can backfire (as can anything else here) by having lots of Russian boots that act as a deterrent to the rebels but if you have both US and Russian inspectors on the ground, you will likely have both countries represented. The implied command and control needed for that can really stabilize the situation since neither country wants things to accelerate.
3 - You have the chance of getting the vast majority of the stocks out off the underground arms bazaar. This is the problem with Assad's chemical weapons. When he loses control over them (and apparently he has) you have all the nasties trying to get some. Sarin is a wonderful terrorist device. In some ways better than a nuc.
The world has apparently dodged a bullet with the USSR nuclear stockpile - it didn't get handed out to everyone with an agenda and a budget. We need to do the same for idiot Assad's chemical weapons. Unfortunately, the parallels between Irag and Syria are way too close for comfort. While Assad might not be as batshit insane as Hussein was, he's not all that far off. We don't have all that much freedom of movement in the Middle East and Russia has a bit more. For once, our interests are aligned a bit.
You're most likely correct, however getting from here to there is going to take a leap of faith or fiat that is very likely impossible short of direct alien intervention (which, for other reasons, is very likely impossible).
We're doomed.
Or he could be describing the obvious:
Guaranteed minimum wage. Get a job if you want more.(and note, this would be a livable wage, not our current BS minimum)
Please explain how that solution is unworkable, given it's a VERY slight expansion from traditional welfare/SS/etc. The only change is now robots are doing all the menial tasks instead of humans, who are paid anyway.
Please explain how this is workable when a very modest move in this direction would head off much of the social unrest in this country. Imagine, for example, if everyone in Detroit were to be given a living wage simply for existing. The blight and destruction of the city and the people inside it would vanish. Buildings could be rebuilt just for the fun of it. The costs would likely be less than the daily rate for keeping an aircraft carrier battle group afloat.
If it were that easy, it would have been done by now.
"Slight" - I don't think that word means what you think it means.
There is a Hentai joke in here somewhere, but I'm too scared to try.
Mine is tastefully retrograded to the XP UI theme,
"Tasteful" and "XP UI" have, heretofore, never been seen as linked concepts. Typically, the comments are more along the line of 'my eyes bleed' and 'Turn it off!!!".
I do not want to see what your room looks like.
Hate to break it to you but people have put crummy old spinning rust hard drives in computers that have been all over the planet, in space and under water for some time. Yes, SSDs are preferred these days, but it's not like ruggedized computers just appeared four years ago.
Hell, I remember field portables with FLOPPY DRIVES. And we liked them.
>> 1.) Current iPhones have 2GB RAM, not 1GB.
the iPhone 5 has 1 GB of RAM. Do you have any source about 2GB of RAM in any of the new iPhones?
In the Unicorn Universe, everything is double 64 bit, 2 GB, 8 inches ....
On a side note, I used to do IT for Boulder County and installed several systems at the Boulder EOC, which contrary to a comment above is actually on the top of a hill in the floodplain and conveniently situated directly adjacent to Boulder Airport.
That's good to hear. It used to be at the PD which was spitting distance from the Creek. Communications used to have a bunch of school buses that they could hop into, drive up to the Betasso Water Treatment Plant (which overlooks Boulder) and set up stuff from there. Unless Boulder Canyon was flooded.
So it must have only taken them 20 years or so to move their butts, but progress is progress.
But even then, Boulder was really prepared for this sort of thing. They had flood gauges all over the mountains that linked to the EOC. I recall one lazy summer day when a couple of us in one of the local VFDs were hanging around a station (near one of the gauges) and idily wondered what they would think if we turned up one the 2 1/2 inch hoses and drenched the gauge..... We figured we had gotten into enough trouble that week so we let it lie.
Cue the eurotrash telling us how we are so stupid for building so close to the coast, where floods are a problem.
Boulder County has been in FEMA's 'disasters waiting to happen' for decades. One of the more entertaining factoids is that the major communication center, the Police Department is located, wait for it, in a flood plain, in a building that was supposed to be used for a hotel but the developer could not approval from the city to complete the structure.
So it was taken over by the City and County.
Strong work, there.....
You missed the part about the hash. You understand the part about a (salted) hash, right? Unless Apple releases the keys (unlikely, but possible) the EvilOrganization has to break that. Then figure out the specifics of the output sensor (likely not the same as the one the FBI uses), then spend all that work to get a useless bit of information.
Uh, everything's under control. Situation normal.
What happened?
Uh, we had a slight weapons malfunction, but uh... everything's perfectly all right now. We're fine. We're all fine here now, thank you. How are you?
We're sending a squad up.
Uh, uh... negative, negative. We had a reactor leak here now. Give us a few minutes to lock it down. Large leak, very dangerous.
Who is this? What's your operating number?
Han Solo: Uh...
Depending, of course, of your definition of 'more or less'.
Yeah, not something to look forward to, and it would undoubtedly cause worldwide effects, but I don't think it's on the order of mass starvation outside of the areas of humanity which are already on the brink.
For billions to die from starvation isn't even going to require a 'nuclear winter' scenario. A single, near worldwide season of crop failures would put vast numbers of people at risk. Coupled with the inevitable fallout (so to speak) of a nuclear war, the disruption of supply lines and infrastructure would be the icing on the cake (bad choice of words, I suppose).
The veneer of civilization is thin.
Hey, wait... This is Samsung we're talking about. No more Touch Wiz.
Maybe Dennis Rodman is right.
Whoa there! Back to the decaf.
Then you would be holding it wrong.
We've tried this on commercial grade fingerprint locks - even using medical grade silicon gel it doesn't work. I don't know the specifics of scanner, but at least ones that cost $1000 a pop can be hardened against this sort of thing.
"smeared all over" is probably the problem there – at least with my touchscreens, I tend to leave inch-long smears that, while annoyingly visible, hardly leave anything that can be considered a proper fingerprint. Put it into a pocket and all you have is a thin film of whatever. Good if you need DNA, less if you want a fingerprint you can actually copy.
Will be interesting to see just hard fingerprint recovery will be for real-life scenarios.
Take some fine powder and sprinkle it over a cell phone screen and back. You'll get a fingerprint or two. Remember, the nice, nonporous rest of the phone is a perfect place to pick up a print.
And now the NSA will have a finger print database for all iphone users with minimum effort.
Stop this. Stop it this very instant. The NSA (or any other nefarious creature / corporation / government entity / evil deity) is not interested in a user's fingerprint.
First, as has been mentioned ad nauseaum, you don't get a fingerprint - you get a hash of an output off a sensor that relates to a fingerprint.
Second, even if you could reconstruct the loops and whorls of the fingerprint then so what? You leave a veritable trail of fingerprints (and DNA and a host of other things we don't want to talk about here) everywhere you haul your ugly bit of meatspace around to. Nobody cares about a single fingerprint. The only valid concern is whether or not someone can take an existing copy of your fingerprint and gain access to the device. We shall see.
IF it works (big if) then it's a fine bit of biometrics to allow you to play Angry Birds. If you are carrying more sensitive information on your iPhone and you don't have it encrypted separately from phone access, sucks to be you.
Not every bit of security has to be able to foil three letter government agencies.
If you look up what the Royal Navy typically ate in Darwin's day (rats, weevil infested everything else), Tortoise might well have been really high up on the delight list. Today, not so much.
You conflate 'scientists' with small groups of people interested in one aspect off an enormous topic.
"Science" does not have an opinion on what reintroduction off burrowing worms on the NA continent will do. Some people researching the field may have some observations and possibly opinions about the desirability or lack thereof of a particular issue, but that isn't some giant statist conspiracy that you're trying to make it into.
And yes, you CAN make the argument that 'slowing down' or avoiding changes might be beneficial - those arguments may or may not be true (or relevant in the long run) but they are reasonable and important items of discussion. You are unsuccessfully trying to toss any concerns about environmental change into the tree hugger basket. Sorry, the basket isn't big enough. Yes, at times we have to embrace change but when you have several billion people living at the ragged edge of existence you might want to look very carefully at what the changes are likely to be and what we might do to avoid them.
Some of those billions of people might end up being interested in your breakfast.
Seriously, we all need to do (a lot) more to avoid poisoning ourselves. Yes the planet is warming. Yes we are contributing to it. Yes we need to work toward ways to mitigate this. The planet has been here for 4.5 billion years. I find it a little disingenuous to look at the temperatures from the last 1500 years and claim the sky is falling.
They sky isn't falling but the roof is getting pretty leaky. The difference between a couple of thousand proto humans chasing herbivores off cliffs a couple of thousand years ago and 7 billion of the annoying creatures burning anything they can get their paws on is ecologically profound.
The planet will be here long after we're gone. But at the rate we're going it's likely that the entire human experience will be a narrow band of sediment trapped inside an alien archeologist's core sample.
You must be new here.
The NSA telling the 'truth' to the biggest pack of lairs in the country would bring up some scary philosophical issues.