...or, they do nasty stuff when the satellites ARE overhead...
Plus, who is to say that there is not some secret back-door channels to "the terrorists", China, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, etc., or anyone else with the information but a need for Junior to have a new PS3 that a few dollars, yuan, roobles, etc. won't help lubricate?
Well, the Columbia had a lot of hydrazine tanks on it for all of its Orbital Manouvering System rockets. Once the Shuttle lost hull integrity, they probably cooked off pretty fast. Can't remember hearing of any innocent kids who were harmed inadvertently by playing soccer with a cool-looking metallic soccer ball...
Uh...no. You're assuming that the satellite's optics are staring straight down. Well, they might be, but they might also be looking rather obliquely at something, too.
Making largish telescopes isn't all that difficult for a government to do or commission, either secretly or as part of an "academic project". The US and USSR have done a lot of the hard engineering work on them. So...
Who's going to be the first to make and sell a green laser detector, in the hopes of detecting any optical adaptive focusing system's lasers shining down from above?
NAVSTAR was a separate program by the Navy, used only by the Navy. The current GPS system was set up later by the Air Force for all of Dept of Defense.
OK, yes, Tom Clancy has written about "the bad guys" hiding things in most of his books. Of course, what is left out is we do it to thwart the Soviet/Russians/Chinese too (who probably release some of the information as they deem fit to suit their clients' purposes, too). It is completely (but not righteously) disingenuous for the NRO and other govment types to get their underwear in a bunch about what these people do, because the govment types are ALL playing the same game, too.
Yes, but they used dynamite on it. They probably should have used a low-velocity explosive, like ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate+Fuel Oil). Less sharp shock waves, but probably would have broken the sorry thing into better managed chunks less far away.
The reporter who covered it, Paul Linnman (sp), is still on the morning show on 1190 AM KEX in Portland.
Well, much like DNS had its problems scaling initially when it was just one root table that was forwarded around to every network until they came up with a scheme to break it up and distribute the load, how come there isn't a "distributed DTD-lookup" service similar to this, that could be distributed to Akamai, ISP's, web hosting services, etc.?
Or, how about web servers (IIS, Apache, etc) are built to fetch the first request for a given W3 DTD, but it then it caches it on itself?
Well, and Washington has this big prick named Tim Eyman who loves to muck things up as much as possible.
To see one of the major things that holds Puget Sound transportation back, just look into the squeaky wheels that are slowing down (and making more expensive...) the SR-520 Bridge expansion project, and have been for at least 30 years (read: the rather high net worth individuals who live in Montlake, Medina, Yarrow Point, west Bellevue and south Redmond.
Sure, they'd be impacted a bit by it, as is anyone already living next to a multi-lane highway. And I suppose many of them aren't too terribly impacted by the charley-foxtrot that is the daily commute across that bridge, because, well, they probably don't have to go across it daily to work like the slave wages that live outside of their exclusive enclaves. But if they really wanted to be bluebloods, they should just move to Vashon Island, Bainbridge Island, Alki Pt & West Seattle.
OK, to be fair, Montlake is a bit more eglatarian than Medina is, unless it's a Saturday with a UW football game. I'm suprised there aren't a few passive-aggressive snipers with long-range pellet guns who live there waiting to pop out the windows of unsuspecting interlopers who infiltrate their idyllic neighborhood (it really is a nice neighborhood).
But, both ends of this project are anchored by vociferous, politically connected groups that have long grown accustomed to having their cake, being able to choose the frosting, filling, etc., and eating it, too.
Contrast this to how the I-90 project was finally finished in the late 80's-early 90's through Rainier Beach, etc., how some of the same squeaky wheels resented some of the efforts of those neighborhood leaders to mitigate some of the increased road noise with "caps", while no one blinked an eye to the poor souls in Mercer Island who got the same deal.
Well, the first thing I did when my now ex-wife filed a restraining order on me (more or less standard dirty trick procedure in divorces these days) was turn ON the active GPS tracking on my cell phone. I need to have some sort of alibi available to me in case she decides to do it again.
Well, in the 90's, the software industry went through what the music industry is facing. Companies came up with all sorts of interesting tweaks to prevent their softwares from being duplicated or installed on multiple machines. Such measures included deliberately screwed up directory structures, deliberate "bad blocks" installed on floppies, special files that had to exist on the floppy to allow installation (e.g., Lotus 123), but that could only be put back on the floppy by the approved "uninstall" process, or Aldus' trick of license management enforcement over AppleTalk.
It got to the point that as each new technique was put into place, the marketplace got more and more pissed off, to the point that people who did want to comply were increasingly forced to "crack" the techniques just to legitimately use what they'd paid for because said techniques didn't work on their legitimate computer systems.
Software companies eventually saw the light, and relented on their tactics. And Microsoft coyly encouraged "piracy" to get Windows and Office virally installed virtually everywhere, only later cracking down and actually enforcing license counts, etc. (Remember when the registration card for MS software had no place to put like a serial number, registration key, etc. on it?) once they needed to start rattling everyone's cages for $$$...er, I mean, upgrade.
Eventually, it did get to the point where AutoCad, for example, realized that it wasn't a big deal if random user could get a copy of its system for free. The $$$ was in add-ons, support contracts, books, training, etc., things that legitimate users would still need to pay for. Most of the people copying the software weren't CAD or architecture firms. They were people doing it just to do it, or wanting to get a copy of it to improve their skills to someday be in a position to "go legit".
Only the computer gaming industry seems to be stuck in "copy protection" (i.e., SecureROM) these days, but today's techniques are usually overcome easily enough anyways, with the right software and occaisionally right (forgiving) hardware. At least most of the techniques used now don't wreck your computer, such as by thrashing the disk head, etc. And the attempts to try these measures have failed rather publicly once people catch on to it, thanks to the Interblags.
It finally seems like the music industry is finally waking up to the inevitability of failure for what they've been trying to do. The ones that will grasp onto not worrying about all the freddy freeloaders, and cater to those who are still willing to pay for stuff by providing things worth paying for, will move on. Those stuck in the old models will die their fitting deaths.
Me, personally, I find it frustrating that they spend so much energy on trying to stop the "1000 papercuts" of file sharing, while doing little or nothing about global counterfeiting (true piracy) of their products, or trying to honestly get back to figuring out new ways to provide value to people willing to pay for it instead of trying to milk a dying business model for all its worth.
Hmm... I think places like the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot in San Diego would be better than roadways for this, as well as shopping centers, parking garages, etc.
Hmm... what about the possibilities of people developing new and creative hardware for use with the OLPC? If it has an open interface bus, maybe a clever farmer could utilize several of them and wire his farming operation, and do things that cost US farmers significant chunks of change. No, not a GPS-guided ox plow (really straight rows you got there, Ngebe!), but maybe the farmer being able to use an OLPC to grid out different crop areas.
Is the keyboard maker suing the OLPC maker going to try and support the OLPC, or is their bread buttered by the few who can afford western computing equipment?
OLPC should just refuse to respond to the issue, and not sell them to Nigeria. Will Nigeria then refuse any well-funded NGOs from distributing them in Nigeria, as opposed to selling them? If they are, then Nigeria's government is simply stupid.
So let them be stupid. It's not worth fighting about. Let one of its neighbors benefit greatly from OLPC and start reaping some other benefits from it that Nigeria pissed all over.
Yep. I work in a crowd of people who say the same thing. "*nix is so old tech"...
It's rather depressing, actually. Just like MySQL fanboys being oh-so-happy when "features" get added to it that are in just about every other RDBMS, including MS Access. Or SQL Server fanboys being happy when stuff gets added to it that has been in just about every other big iron RDBMS since...forever.
Imagine this scenario. Someone scans your HD. They find encryption telltales (like, say,.Net framework, pgp, etc.). They decide you might have encrypted files. They run 'strings' on every file that isn't a known binary file (i.e.,.exe,.com,.dll,.bin,.mp3,.jpg, etc). They find a few files that strings doesn't like. Hmm... They might be encrypted. Maybe there are "magic" characters at the beginning of the file that indicate the file was protected by something like pgp.
Suddenly, you're given a free flight to Kazakhstan [sp], to meet with Borat. Oh, yeah. you've now become a non-entity while they waterboard you to try to get your passphrase out of you.
Like others have said, waterboarding is great for extracting a confession. Or, if you are so hard-core, they decide that they just need to kill you or let you rot in a hole somewhere far, far away.
Or, less sinister, they just pass laws that say, "failure to surrender encryption keys or passphrases is determined by law to be an admission of guilt", just like not submitting to a breathalyzer or blood test is treated as admission of guilt in DUI in some states, which works just fine in a civil or administrative court. And conviction of certain civil or administrative crimes suddenly allows you to be tried later for new criminal laws where the administrative/civil judgments are used as justification to throw you into prison big time.
But, they just might take the easy way out: while investigating certain crimes (child porn, white collar crime, conspiracy, "terrorism", etc.), discovery of encryption products on your computer results in automatic civil seizure and forfeiture of computer hardware.
Well, anyone following instructions on MSDN can easily throw together programs that encrypt files using the encryption facilities in the.Net Framework, which is installed in one form or another on XP, Vista, et al...
Actually, no, you can subpoena the hardware, so that the drives can be ghosted by a 3rd party, gone over by a forensic examiner, etc. Doesn't mean that that the hardware has to leave the facility... If it is a specific hardware device, more or less unique or too expensive to duplicate, then the hardware can be possessed until information has been retrieved from it or it is no longer required to be used to extract the data.
It's not illegal to destroy documents via shredding, as long as it is done consistently per policy that also conforms to whatever regulatory requirements are in place. Same goes for e-mail retention. Of course, nothing is more terrific for a company involved in a lawsuit in discovery feeling confident that a particular e-mail thread being looked for was erased per said e-mail retention policy, only for it to show up in one of the employee's (maybe the jerk's administrative assistant's) local e-mail archive or saved off to the filespace...
This was one of the lame defenses used in the Arthur Anderson/Enron case, that the local partner handling the account was "only" destroying documents per policy/GAAP, to which everyone else said, yeahright, and I don't think that AA ever really publicly released any records showing that, yes, he was just doing his job correctly.
But doing it after you've been served, or having a strong suspicion that you're going to be sued is...bad. And the suing attorneys live for exposing it.
Kind of like the CIA torture tapes. Whoever did it probably did it for the "good" of the CIA, or did an Olly North (i.e., did it intentionally, will say to Congress, "So?", serve his two-four years in prison, and then make beaucoup money later on as a FoxNews news host.
I think the problem with all of our miracle grains is that to get the high yields we get from them they need irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, etc. in order to get the most out of them. Otherwise, if raised in the typical fashion, they're about as productive as the traditional grains.
I think the obvious bad thing about colonialism is that it provided the environments for the typical sicko dictator to prosper. Instead of the tribal chiefs in some sort of balance with their tribal members, the same mentality doesn't seem to work at all for a nation-state. Our colonial forefathers tried to leverage this aspect for their own benefit, and look where we're at now: peoples that expect nothing more than to be continuously butt-fucked by their leaders-for-life du jour, a military/police elite that helps perpetuate the condition (and is as willing to off its head to grow a new one as anything), etc.
Our NGOs are continuously at risk by trying to provide for the untermenschen, while at best having to pay some sort of graft that benefits the Powers That Be to being outright put in the same situation as those they're trying to help.
And then there's Robert Mugabe. And Islamic fascism/colonialism. Funny how they only seem to have targeted the oil-producing African states (I'm calling Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt as "old" Islamic states. Nigeria, Sudan, and a couple of others, are "new" Islamic states...they happen to be oil-producing countries as well).
...if something like this does develop off the US Pacific coast, and (ok, let's pick on furriners) as wild salmon stocks keep getting lower and lower, and the US military distracted by stupid presidents, and a Russian, Japanese or Korean wildcat fish trawler or long-line boat follows a school of whatever they're going after, snags a couplefew of the bouys, and manages to somehow pull out or damage a good number of the units?
Would the US get pissed off at Russia these days? Would Korea or Japan essentially say, "tell it to the hand" to the US?
Even better, what if said countries deployed their own versions (say, Russia deploying vast numbers of them on their northern continental shelf, and a US submarine gets snagged in them on a spy mission?
Not as bad in PDX as it is up in Seattle, the coast, Vernonia, Tillamook or Clatsop counties, or Centralia/Chehalis WA. I live outside of McMinnville...
Uh, I think they had a GPS unit in the car, oddly enough. Would it have saved him? No, probably knowing which road he was on, and the "Oregon Gazeteer" book by DeLorme, he could have dead-reckoned from the map, even though it's 1:150,000.
Hey, it could have been 99% of most Americans. Stressed husband, stressed wife, running late might lose reservation at the inn, wife bitching about how he didn't/wouldn't stop for directions, him saying, "I am pretty sure this is the right way to go" but feeling bad because she's right, heavy snow fall can't see shit, it's night time, the kids freaking out because mom and dad are bitching at each other; lather, rinse, repeat. GPS unit showing them this cool looking road (but no topo lines possibly indicating that maybe it's not the best road to go on)...
Maybe a hand-held HAM radio could have saved him. Or a CB. But maybe not.
Sometimes we're all just wrong-lucky at the wrong time/wrong side of the bell curve.
well, what happens if Iron Mountain screws up your company's backup tapes, loses them, they get destroyed in transit between IM and your company, etc.?
actually, most of the state, at least by county, is "red". But Multnomah and Washington Counties, Lane Co and more or less Marion County (good chunks of Portland Metro, Eugene and Salem), are "blue", which is more than 50% of the state's population. The rest of Oregon is pretty red, although it is a wide variety of "red", from Fightin' Fundies (clackamas Co), to your basic conservative farmer/rancher/logger, to a good chunk of white trash-supremists in southern oregon.
Slashdot Mirror
...or, they do nasty stuff when the satellites ARE overhead...
Plus, who is to say that there is not some secret back-door channels to "the terrorists", China, Russia, France, Germany, Japan, etc., or anyone else with the information but a need for Junior to have a new PS3 that a few dollars, yuan, roobles, etc. won't help lubricate?
Well, the Columbia had a lot of hydrazine tanks on it for all of its Orbital Manouvering System rockets. Once the Shuttle lost hull integrity, they probably cooked off pretty fast. Can't remember hearing of any innocent kids who were harmed inadvertently by playing soccer with a cool-looking metallic soccer ball...
Uh...no. You're assuming that the satellite's optics are staring straight down. Well, they might be, but they might also be looking rather obliquely at something, too.
Making largish telescopes isn't all that difficult for a government to do or commission, either secretly or as part of an "academic project". The US and USSR have done a lot of the hard engineering work on them. So...
Who's going to be the first to make and sell a green laser detector, in the hopes of detecting any optical adaptive focusing system's lasers shining down from above?
NAVSTAR was a separate program by the Navy, used only by the Navy. The current GPS system was set up later by the Air Force for all of Dept of Defense.
OK, yes, Tom Clancy has written about "the bad guys" hiding things in most of his books. Of course, what is left out is we do it to thwart the Soviet/Russians/Chinese too (who probably release some of the information as they deem fit to suit their clients' purposes, too). It is completely (but not righteously) disingenuous for the NRO and other govment types to get their underwear in a bunch about what these people do, because the govment types are ALL playing the same game, too.
Yes, but they used dynamite on it. They probably should have used a low-velocity explosive, like ANFO (Ammonium Nitrate+Fuel Oil). Less sharp shock waves, but probably would have broken the sorry thing into better managed chunks less far away.
The reporter who covered it, Paul Linnman (sp), is still on the morning show on 1190 AM KEX in Portland.
Well, much like DNS had its problems scaling initially when it was just one root table that was forwarded around to every network until they came up with a scheme to break it up and distribute the load, how come there isn't a "distributed DTD-lookup" service similar to this, that could be distributed to Akamai, ISP's, web hosting services, etc.?
Or, how about web servers (IIS, Apache, etc) are built to fetch the first request for a given W3 DTD, but it then it caches it on itself?
Doesn't need to go to Milwaukee, unless it's to help Miller ship out beer, so, be realistic and end it in Chicago.
Well, and Washington has this big prick named Tim Eyman who loves to muck things up as much as possible.
To see one of the major things that holds Puget Sound transportation back, just look into the squeaky wheels that are slowing down (and making more expensive...) the SR-520 Bridge expansion project, and have been for at least 30 years (read: the rather high net worth individuals who live in Montlake, Medina, Yarrow Point, west Bellevue and south Redmond.
Sure, they'd be impacted a bit by it, as is anyone already living next to a multi-lane highway. And I suppose many of them aren't too terribly impacted by the charley-foxtrot that is the daily commute across that bridge, because, well, they probably don't have to go across it daily to work like the slave wages that live outside of their exclusive enclaves. But if they really wanted to be bluebloods, they should just move to Vashon Island, Bainbridge Island, Alki Pt & West Seattle.
OK, to be fair, Montlake is a bit more eglatarian than Medina is, unless it's a Saturday with a UW football game. I'm suprised there aren't a few passive-aggressive snipers with long-range pellet guns who live there waiting to pop out the windows of unsuspecting interlopers who infiltrate their idyllic neighborhood (it really is a nice neighborhood).
But, both ends of this project are anchored by vociferous, politically connected groups that have long grown accustomed to having their cake, being able to choose the frosting, filling, etc., and eating it, too.
Contrast this to how the I-90 project was finally finished in the late 80's-early 90's through Rainier Beach, etc., how some of the same squeaky wheels resented some of the efforts of those neighborhood leaders to mitigate some of the increased road noise with "caps", while no one blinked an eye to the poor souls in Mercer Island who got the same deal.
except in most states the ovals have to be large enough to accept the dots left by Bingo markers.
Well, the first thing I did when my now ex-wife filed a restraining order on me (more or less standard dirty trick procedure in divorces these days) was turn ON the active GPS tracking on my cell phone. I need to have some sort of alibi available to me in case she decides to do it again.
Divorce sucks.
Actually, it's a variety of viruses that more or less cause most of the same symptoms. And they mutate rapidly.
Well, in the 90's, the software industry went through what the music industry is facing. Companies came up with all sorts of interesting tweaks to prevent their softwares from being duplicated or installed on multiple machines. Such measures included deliberately screwed up directory structures, deliberate "bad blocks" installed on floppies, special files that had to exist on the floppy to allow installation (e.g., Lotus 123), but that could only be put back on the floppy by the approved "uninstall" process, or Aldus' trick of license management enforcement over AppleTalk.
It got to the point that as each new technique was put into place, the marketplace got more and more pissed off, to the point that people who did want to comply were increasingly forced to "crack" the techniques just to legitimately use what they'd paid for because said techniques didn't work on their legitimate computer systems.
Software companies eventually saw the light, and relented on their tactics. And Microsoft coyly encouraged "piracy" to get Windows and Office virally installed virtually everywhere, only later cracking down and actually enforcing license counts, etc. (Remember when the registration card for MS software had no place to put like a serial number, registration key, etc. on it?) once they needed to start rattling everyone's cages for $$$...er, I mean, upgrade.
Eventually, it did get to the point where AutoCad, for example, realized that it wasn't a big deal if random user could get a copy of its system for free. The $$$ was in add-ons, support contracts, books, training, etc., things that legitimate users would still need to pay for. Most of the people copying the software weren't CAD or architecture firms. They were people doing it just to do it, or wanting to get a copy of it to improve their skills to someday be in a position to "go legit".
Only the computer gaming industry seems to be stuck in "copy protection" (i.e., SecureROM) these days, but today's techniques are usually overcome easily enough anyways, with the right software and occaisionally right (forgiving) hardware. At least most of the techniques used now don't wreck your computer, such as by thrashing the disk head, etc. And the attempts to try these measures have failed rather publicly once people catch on to it, thanks to the Interblags.
It finally seems like the music industry is finally waking up to the inevitability of failure for what they've been trying to do. The ones that will grasp onto not worrying about all the freddy freeloaders, and cater to those who are still willing to pay for stuff by providing things worth paying for, will move on. Those stuck in the old models will die their fitting deaths.
Me, personally, I find it frustrating that they spend so much energy on trying to stop the "1000 papercuts" of file sharing, while doing little or nothing about global counterfeiting (true piracy) of their products, or trying to honestly get back to figuring out new ways to provide value to people willing to pay for it instead of trying to milk a dying business model for all its worth.
Hmm... I think places like the Qualcomm Stadium parking lot in San Diego would be better than roadways for this, as well as shopping centers, parking garages, etc.
Hmm... what about the possibilities of people developing new and creative hardware for use with the OLPC? If it has an open interface bus, maybe a clever farmer could utilize several of them and wire his farming operation, and do things that cost US farmers significant chunks of change. No, not a GPS-guided ox plow (really straight rows you got there, Ngebe!), but maybe the farmer being able to use an OLPC to grid out different crop areas.
Is the keyboard maker suing the OLPC maker going to try and support the OLPC, or is their bread buttered by the few who can afford western computing equipment?
OLPC should just refuse to respond to the issue, and not sell them to Nigeria. Will Nigeria then refuse any well-funded NGOs from distributing them in Nigeria, as opposed to selling them? If they are, then Nigeria's government is simply stupid.
So let them be stupid. It's not worth fighting about. Let one of its neighbors benefit greatly from OLPC and start reaping some other benefits from it that Nigeria pissed all over.
Yep. I work in a crowd of people who say the same thing. "*nix is so old tech"...
It's rather depressing, actually. Just like MySQL fanboys being oh-so-happy when "features" get added to it that are in just about every other RDBMS, including MS Access. Or SQL Server fanboys being happy when stuff gets added to it that has been in just about every other big iron RDBMS since...forever.
*sigh*
Imagine this scenario. Someone scans your HD. They find encryption telltales (like, say, .Net framework, pgp, etc.). They decide you might have encrypted files. They run 'strings' on every file that isn't a known binary file (i.e., .exe, .com, .dll, .bin, .mp3, .jpg, etc). They find a few files that strings doesn't like. Hmm... They might be encrypted. Maybe there are "magic" characters at the beginning of the file that indicate the file was protected by something like pgp.
.Net Framework, which is installed in one form or another on XP, Vista, et al...
Suddenly, you're given a free flight to Kazakhstan [sp], to meet with Borat. Oh, yeah. you've now become a non-entity while they waterboard you to try to get your passphrase out of you.
Like others have said, waterboarding is great for extracting a confession. Or, if you are so hard-core, they decide that they just need to kill you or let you rot in a hole somewhere far, far away.
Or, less sinister, they just pass laws that say, "failure to surrender encryption keys or passphrases is determined by law to be an admission of guilt", just like not submitting to a breathalyzer or blood test is treated as admission of guilt in DUI in some states, which works just fine in a civil or administrative court. And conviction of certain civil or administrative crimes suddenly allows you to be tried later for new criminal laws where the administrative/civil judgments are used as justification to throw you into prison big time.
But, they just might take the easy way out: while investigating certain crimes (child porn, white collar crime, conspiracy, "terrorism", etc.), discovery of encryption products on your computer results in automatic civil seizure and forfeiture of computer hardware.
Well, anyone following instructions on MSDN can easily throw together programs that encrypt files using the encryption facilities in the
Actually, no, you can subpoena the hardware, so that the drives can be ghosted by a 3rd party, gone over by a forensic examiner, etc. Doesn't mean that that the hardware has to leave the facility... If it is a specific hardware device, more or less unique or too expensive to duplicate, then the hardware can be possessed until information has been retrieved from it or it is no longer required to be used to extract the data.
It's not illegal to destroy documents via shredding, as long as it is done consistently per policy that also conforms to whatever regulatory requirements are in place. Same goes for e-mail retention. Of course, nothing is more terrific for a company involved in a lawsuit in discovery feeling confident that a particular e-mail thread being looked for was erased per said e-mail retention policy, only for it to show up in one of the employee's (maybe the jerk's administrative assistant's) local e-mail archive or saved off to the filespace...
This was one of the lame defenses used in the Arthur Anderson/Enron case, that the local partner handling the account was "only" destroying documents per policy/GAAP, to which everyone else said, yeahright, and I don't think that AA ever really publicly released any records showing that, yes, he was just doing his job correctly.
But doing it after you've been served, or having a strong suspicion that you're going to be sued is...bad. And the suing attorneys live for exposing it.
Kind of like the CIA torture tapes. Whoever did it probably did it for the "good" of the CIA, or did an Olly North (i.e., did it intentionally, will say to Congress, "So?", serve his two-four years in prison, and then make beaucoup money later on as a FoxNews news host.
I think the problem with all of our miracle grains is that to get the high yields we get from them they need irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, etc. in order to get the most out of them. Otherwise, if raised in the typical fashion, they're about as productive as the traditional grains.
I think the obvious bad thing about colonialism is that it provided the environments for the typical sicko dictator to prosper. Instead of the tribal chiefs in some sort of balance with their tribal members, the same mentality doesn't seem to work at all for a nation-state. Our colonial forefathers tried to leverage this aspect for their own benefit, and look where we're at now: peoples that expect nothing more than to be continuously butt-fucked by their leaders-for-life du jour, a military/police elite that helps perpetuate the condition (and is as willing to off its head to grow a new one as anything), etc.
Our NGOs are continuously at risk by trying to provide for the untermenschen, while at best having to pay some sort of graft that benefits the Powers That Be to being outright put in the same situation as those they're trying to help.
And then there's Robert Mugabe. And Islamic fascism/colonialism. Funny how they only seem to have targeted the oil-producing African states (I'm calling Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Egypt as "old" Islamic states. Nigeria, Sudan, and a couple of others, are "new" Islamic states...they happen to be oil-producing countries as well).
...if something like this does develop off the US Pacific coast, and (ok, let's pick on furriners) as wild salmon stocks keep getting lower and lower, and the US military distracted by stupid presidents, and a Russian, Japanese or Korean wildcat fish trawler or long-line boat follows a school of whatever they're going after, snags a couplefew of the bouys, and manages to somehow pull out or damage a good number of the units?
Would the US get pissed off at Russia these days? Would Korea or Japan essentially say, "tell it to the hand" to the US?
Even better, what if said countries deployed their own versions (say, Russia deploying vast numbers of them on their northern continental shelf, and a US submarine gets snagged in them on a spy mission?
Not as bad in PDX as it is up in Seattle, the coast, Vernonia, Tillamook or Clatsop counties, or Centralia/Chehalis WA. I live outside of McMinnville...
Uh, I think they had a GPS unit in the car, oddly enough. Would it have saved him? No, probably knowing which road he was on, and the "Oregon Gazeteer" book by DeLorme, he could have dead-reckoned from the map, even though it's 1:150,000.
Hey, it could have been 99% of most Americans. Stressed husband, stressed wife, running late might lose reservation at the inn, wife bitching about how he didn't/wouldn't stop for directions, him saying, "I am pretty sure this is the right way to go" but feeling bad because she's right, heavy snow fall can't see shit, it's night time, the kids freaking out because mom and dad are bitching at each other; lather, rinse, repeat. GPS unit showing them this cool looking road (but no topo lines possibly indicating that maybe it's not the best road to go on)...
Maybe a hand-held HAM radio could have saved him. Or a CB. But maybe not.
Sometimes we're all just wrong-lucky at the wrong time/wrong side of the bell curve.
well, what happens if Iron Mountain screws up your company's backup tapes, loses them, they get destroyed in transit between IM and your company, etc.?
actually, most of the state, at least by county, is "red". But Multnomah and Washington Counties, Lane Co and more or less Marion County (good chunks of Portland Metro, Eugene and Salem), are "blue", which is more than 50% of the state's population. The rest of Oregon is pretty red, although it is a wide variety of "red", from Fightin' Fundies (clackamas Co), to your basic conservative farmer/rancher/logger, to a good chunk of white trash-supremists in southern oregon.