Anyone who spends enough money on Google ads can tell you the first name of their sales rep at Google. You know, the person who helps you fine tune for AdSense keywords, and offers you swell deals. How about if that person, who is already also helping you with localized ad placement through AdSense, could guarantee you some airtime in your local market, as well? Or, how about making sure that people sitting in their cubes at work listening to the radio and typing in some regionally interesting search term ("pizza delivery Sterling, VA") could be shown normal AdSense ads that, for the window of time that Joe's Pizza is running broadcast ads in that ZIP code, give extra weight to his AdSense ads for localized search?
Come on, folks, there's more to this than meets the eye. And don't forget the side-band stuff that handles traditional pager traffic, too. That can be used for all sorts of exotic ad-related things.
Yes. My point was that he, personally, was not only running a copy shop. He spent many hours of his life creating content to please a recurring audience, and then making money off of the sales of that material. The earlier comment implied, essentially, that he had no interest in making money off of the work of his mind (i.e., his woodstove), and I'm refuting that. He wasn't some creative-arts altruist.
Besides, Franklin was only into publishing because it was lucrative at the time (and gave him an easy way to get his ideas out).
He started setting up other publising houses, and taking percentages of those shops' revenue expressly to make money, not to "get his ideas out." His own writings (not his essential political stuff, later in life) included what he thought would sell. He wasn't getting paid to copy his own work, he was creating work so that he could sell it. He wrote sonnets, produced his famously humorous almanac, etc., all so that he could profit from the creation and distribution of his work. Sure, he also ran off advertisements, bank documents, and anything else that someone wanted put on paper... but he actively sought out projects and personally created content so that he could win a larger paying audience for his writing. He carefully crafted his material (like the almanac) so that when people were aware that it was time for another, there would all the more people anxious to pay to own their own edition of his witty work.
Do we have loads of tales about people being legally hounded for ripping him off? No. It wasn't as convenient back then to do so. But you're making it sound like convenience in ripping off an artist (or an almanac writer) changes the ethics of the situation. That's crap, and in dealing with the concepts of copyrights in some of the country's earliest foundational documents, that was as plain back then as it is today.
That said, speaking as an Indian, the positive spin over ISRO is nauseating at times; the Indian press, in particular, loves to fawn over those guys for no apparent reason. I suppose every country needs its heroes and positive-news-generators.
You are right on all counts. I think my comment needs a little more context than I thought it did. My larger point was that reporting on a conceptual-stage idea about a possible plan for a program isn't really news, in that such concepts are forwarded by all sorts of people, all the time. ISRO may have more resources and a more likely shot at actually doing something about their space shuttle, but I think I'd prefer a program just a little farther along before it's treated as news and discussed, on slashdot, as a measure of India's wisdom. Whether or not India does it (or starts to do it) will be worth talking about. Otherwise, I want equal coverage on my concepts (to wit, I own a dog that can almost reach escape veolocty... hmmmm).
Also of note for those who follow intellectual property issues, when he invented the "Franklin stove," he refused the offered patent preferring that the design be available to anyone.
Lest anyone suddenly get the idea that Ben Franklin was an early "information wants to be free" sort of guy, don't forget that the only way he was able, in his early forties, to "retire" from the daily grind and turn his attention towards science, diplomacy, and nation-building was because he made himself relatively wealthy as a publisher. He set up printing franchises that made money off of publishing private works, and he took a share of the proceeds in his capacity as the guy helping to finance the operations and marketing thereof. He was very "modern" in that sense - a literary agent, a publisher/distributer, an investor in potentially lucrative creative material... intellectual property was exactly how he became wealthy. The "healthy and wise" part was how he lived long enough and well enough to put his proceeds to work for him, rather working for them. But without an early career in the sale of creative works, there would have been no Ben Franklin, Founding Father.
I've got a productive relationship with peers/partners/co-workers (and even some big-ticket customers) that, despite years of working together, I have never met in person. We make excellent use of (get this!) the telephone. I know, it's quaint.
But the most important thing is that we keep those calls short, and don't need to use them to convey basic information to each other because we do that all the time using e-mail, IM, and a rich portally-intranet-ish web presence.
But the only thing that really makes those supporting technologies a viable replacement for endless facetime is decent communications skills. Being able to cogently write what's on your mind, provide a usable spreadsheet or document that illuminates the matter at hand... even being able to use IM without it decaying into a meandering social tarpit.. those things require a little bit of practice and discipline. But they buy you productive, asynchronous communication that liberates you to work on your actual job on your own schedule.
In-person meetings are saved for when it really matters: gaining and keeping paying customers. Oh, and free food.
I bet those 'high school nerds' better research their comments rather than propagate speculation rooted in inherent bias.
Leaving aside, for the moment, any sense of humor that you may or may not actually have, try to see my comment in some context. It's not a question of whether or not India has a space program (they do) or the capacity to build a shuttle (they do), but whether or not the conceptualizing mentioned in the summary (and the way it was mentioned) is news, per se. The point is that if every time an entity got Slashdot coverage when they had a conceptual notion of how they might tackle a particular space flight challenge, that's all we'd read about. Everyone has conceptual approaches to it, and most will not take place. My personal opinion is that the concept described is only of marginal use, but hey - it's Indian money, and they can and should pursue whatever concepts they think make sense. But I'd rather read it as "news" when the, say, award a contract to someone to actually start up such a program... or start actually training and simulating around a particular project's actual finalized design.
Really! Got kids? Maybe a niece or nephew? Perhaps a cute neighbor kid next door? I'm sure you'd be cool with putting their pictures, names, home address, IM handles, school info (with a link to their class and recreational schedules), and everything else about their lives up in a public space. Once you've got that web page put together, just put that link up here, OK? Since that information wants to be free, no doubt only utopian wonder-hippies will view the information, and use it to send positive vibes and flowers their way.
...and then, "This is only in its conceptual stage."
Huh. No offense to India (really!) but, there are high school nerds in New Jersey who are also at this stage of work on their own personal space programs.
Sorry, but this is just a misinformed bit of BS. Having grown up in past-1968 Germany, I know that we're doing incredibly much working up and reflecting on what happened during WWII.
Hmmm. I guess I must not be able to understand my wife as well as I thought (though she has spoken German and English since she was a child). She was born in Frankfurt in 1959, and still loves Germany and Austria (she also lived outside Vienna for some time). She worries that those countries are quickly losing their cultures. And as her parents' generation grows old and dies, she's worried that not enough people will remember the good and the bad that happened there in the last 50 years.
Beyond my wife's personal observations, though, I'm referring to the infamous web bans on certain items and types of content, as required by German law (and in other ways, EU-wide). In the US, we tend to favor exposing ridiculous people (like neo-Nazis) by letting them make fools of themselves, and allowing as much talk (including web sites, etc) as anybody wants to offer, both for and against any idealogy. Pretending that something didn't happen by trying to hide it isn't very helpful. Pretending that you're going to make people think differently by banning web sites that talk about it isn't going to accomplish anything. Banning information, if anything, just makes some people that much more curious about what's being banned.
Do your kids learn about Hiroshima in school?
Of course. Depending on how thorough the history class is, they also learn that ending the war with Japan by destroying two industrial centers in which the empire was still able to move, manufacture, and store the heavy equpiment items required to continue the war was essential. Why? Because the only alternative was a protracted, brutal, devastating invasion of mainland Japan - which would have resulted in many, many times more deaths and deprivation over a much longer period of time. Ending the war ended the war, with many lives saved. You surely can't be implying that ending the war with fewer dead is a bad thing, so in bringing up Hiroshima, you must be trying to say that you're upset by how people died there, even though it was fewer of them. Would you really prefer that many times more people tied while being burned alive or torn apart by "conventional" weapons? Was months and months of events like Dresden really better for Japan than ending the war in a few days, leaving most of their cities and people intact and more able to rebuild their society more quickly?
That sort of information is indeed important to keep out in the open - otherwise some people may only hear that people died in the bombing, and have no context whatsoever. You know, context: like the fact that conventional (non-nuclear) attacks aimed at ending the war resulted only in untold thousands of deaths as Japanese cities (like Tokyo) burned. Those attacks only caused the Japanese military to insist that they could resist any invasion, and would until the last citizen died doing so. They were arming villagers to repel an invasion, and fortifying their entire coastline. Such as invasion would have been far, far worse for the people of Japan. The only alternative was to allow the Japanese military to continue to take over the Pacific, enslave people from China through Malaysia and elsewhere, and continue on, taking more resources as they went. At least the people of Germany realized that their war(s) of aggression were over, and they stopped rather than see more of their country damaged and people killed. The Japanese military would have sacrificed its citizens in enormous numbers, and for nothing. They had already shown a willingness to do so, and that was a factor in deciding how to end the war. I'm glad that hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of more of their people, and allied troops, didn't have to die in a grinding, months-long invasion. I find it interesting that Japan regularly memorializes their
There's just something slightly unseemly about this. Government-coordinated search just chafes, I guess - though much of Europe is presumably used to communicating over state-owned infrastructure anyway. But at least they'll have no trouble keeping pages about German WWII relics from being indexed, this way.
So, in this case, not having admin privledges reduces the damage by 80%. Is that not "substantial"?
I don't think that's a reasonable measure. If the one-fifth of the family's data that got snooped happened to include information providing access to bank accounts, personal financial data, etc., then the damage to the entire family's well being could be ruinous. Is a twelve year old losing her MySpace bookmarks and P2P downloads really no different, to you, than someone having their doctoral thesis or college application essay trashed? Because no, not everyone backs up like they're supposed to, not even the Really Important Stuff.
So, how does this help Poland, or Italy, etc., of the other members of the EU don't think the same thing that those countries think about when and how it should disabled/dumbed-down in the event of hostilities aimed against EU member interests? Saying that "the EU" is now better off because they don't have to depend on the US's long-standing GPS system doesn't mean that there's no longer a clash of interests. I don't see the EU as one big happy mutual-interest zone when it comes to transportation, telecommunications, and conflict engagement. I'm betting that the people in Eastern Europe feel somewhat differently about such policy issues than do, say, the politicians in France, Spain, Denmark, etc.
The jury who awarded this prize don't understand this, or they do, and have themselves some interest, therefore are not impartial.
Of course a jury from that industry/discipline dealing with industrial design has an interest in preserving intellectual property rights. Professional industrial designers, who might spend years on a project that actually sees production - and thus are spending/costing a lot of money in the process - wouldn't have those jobs or be able to do that sort of work if the people hiring them had no expectation of being able to recoup, protect, and generate income from their investment. Meaning, if Apple couldn't find any recourse against someone making perfect knock-offs of their iPod products, they'd certainly change how (and whether) they spend money innovating along those lines... knowing that someone else gets to run off and make low-overhead money off of their high-overhead innovation and design work.
It's scarcely a conflict of interest when people from that background, judging entries by people who also are or want to be in that line of work, recognize - however indirectly - that ownership of work is and should be as much of an issue as the creator of that work wants to make it. Happily, if their notion of ownership gets too much in the way of making good use of the product, people can just buy something else.
Personally, I find the project cited to be somewhat pretentious, and not something I'd really want to own. And... no one basing a real product around that design is going to get my money. They can take that into account or not, since that's how the market works.
Got it: you're pretending that it's too difficult because it's your team breaking the law. Way to piss on the constitution you neo-fascist loving ideologue.
I always love it when people mis-use the word fascist. I won't even bother with that one. On your other point, though:
It's not "my team" that's lazy and wishing it wasn't "difficult," and thus breaking laws. It's any agency and administration facing these circumstances. The framework doesn't realistically deal with situations like this, which can result in (as a network) thousands of calls over a short period of time... calls which are thereafter not repeated, and for which a retro-active warrant is totally meaningless. I don't think it's helpful to ask sitting judges to be intelligence analysts looking through thousands of one-time communications that won't need warrants under FISA because the numbers won't continue to be surveiled anyway. The process for ongoing, but 72-hour windowed, warrants still makes sense when the people being watched actually stick with related forms of communication for several or more days... but intelligence gathering from the large groups that revolve around the foreign contacts we're worried about are completely moving targets. And they use things like bags of 50 cell phones, one time each, for exactly that reason. No warrant process, even the delayed variety called for in FISA, even bears on such a situation. That's exactly what the NSA is for, and that's exactly what they're doing, and what they've asked the CinC (with briefings of both "teams", as you put it, in Congress) to continue to authorize.
The Constitution calls for the defense of the country just as it calls for personal liberty. The founding fathers were all too familiar with spies living domestically (what with many of them being caught and executed during the conflicts that formed this nation). Subsequent administrations, especially including those on what I guess you'd have to call "your" team, did things way, way more grievous than monitoring communications to and from known foreign terrorist connections. You know, things like rounding up thousands of people, including US citizens, based on race, and putting them in camps during WWII? Classic anti-Constitutional "prior restraint." Ah, such a liberating feeling, having a Democrat as a president! What? That's overblown rhetoric? Right. Just like yours.
You mean like the government saying there's an elevated risk of a terror attack?
No, people have taken that in stride. I'm talking about people glued to CNN watching people who got showered with cesium being hosed down on a Wall Street sidewalk, or maybe three or four simultaneous events like what happened at that school in Beslan, Russia... that would, indeed, Completely Freak People Out.
It's like one commercial after another. 'See how great we are!!'
Right... it's always more interesting to read article after article about only unsuccessful operations run by people who aren't proud of what they do, and don't face huge, global challenges.
You're cranky because it's MS. If exactly the same article ran, substituting "gmail" and "google" for all of the other names, you'd say, "cool!"
This is certainly useful, in that it makes the product available to Federal users at a known (and, since it's on a GSA schedule, typically better-than-average) price. But when a reseller negotiates to be the GSA dealer for an item, that's all they've accomplished. That's NOT the same as actually talking an agency into using the product. We also want to be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. When they say that NASA is using it, that means it's one more tool in NASA's toolbox. Some people might get the impression that they're using in lieu of other DB engines, rather than along side of such.
Terrorism is the single most overrated threat there is. How many people in the entire world have ever died from a terrorist attack ever?
Sorry, man, but you're missing the larger picture. How many businesses were ruined in the months following 9/11? How many jobs, and benefits, and careers lost or ruined? How many retirement accounts trashed when various stocks tanked? How about the staggering loss in personal, family, educational, and on-the-job productivity because of fear, stress, and distraction? How many dollars spent by schools, counties, cities, states... taxpayers everywhere, because of this threat? The economic impact - in the countless billions - impacts everything that the country is and does. But that's still nothing compared the thousands of families ruined. If you knew any of them, or know people that did, you'd have a different take on it.
All that being said... how about if the next thing that happens includes something not all that physically damaging, but which will Completely Freak People Out. You know, something bio, or something radiological in half a dozen cities at the same time. Can you think through the implications for day to day life for millions of people? Direct bodily harm from a terrorist (so far) is indeed less of a blow than that from drunk drivers... but it's not actually the direct harm that terrorists seek to inflict. Ask the people in Madrid, or Bali, or Israel, or Egypt, or Jordan.
Oh, lighten up a bit. My point was to illustrate that we are not without some peril along these lines, and that people who loudly proclaim their intent to kill heretics, and also make phone calls into the US are worth a listen-to, despite what the previous commenter implied. It's not "the president" who's sucking around looking for power in this area - it's the NSA's JOB.
I'm scarcely "licking my lips" at prospect of something like this. I live in the DC suburbs, and have family around town. Good friends lost their own friends in the Pentagon. I don't want to see direct damage, or the indirect damage caused by panicky people in the wake of any terrorist theatrics. But I also dislike people implying that there's simply no risk at all. There is.
So, we are conducting the "war on terror" using the same time proven tactics as the "war on drugs".
There may be (mysteriously - I just don't get it, personally) an ongoing demand for more meth, crack, heroin, etc. But I think it's safe to say that we don't have a big domestic demand for more blown up office buildings, destroyed embassies, damaged Naval vessels, etc.
If you point and you previous point, welded together, are that we should just arrest each person we stumble across (rather than waiting until we can get the larger food chain, like we do when we can with the drug distribution types), then you're guaranteeing no ability to break up cells like they did in Madrid. Or is your point is that there will always be more terrorists, so we might as well just let it go and "legalize" bombings like some people say we should all drugs? I don't think your analogy is holding up too well, here.
If we know who they are, why are we tapping their phones instead of picking them up?
Because finding out who they're talking to, what the larger group is planning, and following the money/support trail back to the source is very, very valuable. You take out one foot soldier, you have not only not stopped that person's several buddies, you've tipped your hand as to how/when you found out about the cell or network of cells they're a part of, and probably driven them into deeper cover.
If the people monitoring a particular bad guy have reason to think that person is about to directly act, they arrest them. Just like Spain after they lost all those people in the train bombs. The Spanish intel people knew who the bombers' associates were, and were watching them very closely... and you'll recall that when they had followed up all the leads they could, they moved in on all of them at once. They arrested some, but others blew themselves up in their apartment rather than be arrested. But if they arrested them one at a time as they uncovered them, they'd end up ultimately missing out on a lot of the rest of them.
For what it's worth, by the way, you've actually identified exactly why it's important to have "black" facilities where they can stash someone like that... so that his associates don't hear through the grapevine that Ahmed is being held in lockup somewhere when they do have no choice but to arrest him. Most of them (the cells) are getting too smart for that now, though - they assume anyone not in touch has been apprehended, and then they have to regroup. But if, for a few days, say, they can work with what that person knows before his team is aware he's been picked up, the whole team may go down. The problem (back to your original question) is that sometimes it takes longer to run down all of that person's communications, contacts, financial records, travel, etc... and before the analysts have learned the big picture, his cell is aware he's busted. So, they let them move around and talk (the more the better), and work on getting the bigger picture. It's exactly the same way they deal with organized crime, pedophile rings, etc... except, in this case, some of the contacts are making calls from Pakistan or Indonesia, etc., and the NSA is in the perfect position to connect the dots.
The problem I have is that we are NOT at war. While you can say it and imply it as much as you want, we are neither technically nor legally at war.
That's what makes this difficult. We are very much involved in the sort of DoD work that amounts to war... but the entity(ies) we're dealing with are not the sort (an indentifiably hostile foreign government, uniformed soldiers, etc) that the war powers act takes into consideration. Hell, even though the Taliban was effectively running parts of Afghanistan, they weren't recoginized as a government, per se.
So, we've got the intense need to watch out for (and react to) attacks here and abroad, we have communications to monitor and act upon, we have emergency preparedness and logistics to hash out and pay for... but we don't have an enemy sitting in a capital city that we can point to and say, "we declare war on X because of their overt acts or support of such" (a la Japan following Pearl Harbor).
I don't envy any administration trying to protect the country using the legislative instruments of "classical" wars in the face of hostility from loosely-organized non-national franchise operations. To the extent that the administration's critics trot out the "we didn't declare war" argument, they're either being disengenuous or ignorant of the basic facts. Pretending that there's no threat or consequence just because Al Queda doesn't hang its hat in one particular country suitable for a war declaration misses the point (though a glance at the New York skyline should be a reminder that we don't have to have an enemy "country" to suffer a grievous attack). To the extent that they're being disengenuous, each of those complaints just rings more and more hollow - except to the ignorant audience at whom those comments are really aimed (specifically, the uninformed that none the less vote, or the uninformed that have a celebrity pulpit from which to regurgitate the rhetoric).
Neither this administration or the next will ever be able to ask Congress formally declare war on a non-nation. It's not for lack of willingness - it's that the act wouldn't have any meaning (or target). Hence the very awkwardly named "war on terror." What the hell else do we call it? The best that can happen is continued Congressional authorization to act against those that are acting and plan to act against us. We already had that conversation, immediately after 9/11, and the resulting authority has been put to work in a lot of ways - some more effective than others. This NSA business is one of them. We'll have to keep revisiting, as a society, how to define who we're up against until it's plain that there aren't well funded organizations having their "death to America" videos aired on Al Jazeera as if they were real diplomatic press conferences of some sort. You can't really say "war against militant jihaddi wack jobs" because that smacks of an at-the-fringes culture war... something we can't acknowledge, real though it is.
So, oddly, the current administration's political opponents have a vested interest in not helping to craft a new framework in which to face these sorts of threats/conflicts... because by being able to say that the administration is "violating" the current framework, they get to score craven political points. Meanwhile, whoever has the executive job has to actually, really do what they can to actually really prevent coordinated, ugly events like 9/11... or get pillaried for not doing enough.
What conflict? Seriously, are we in such peril that we should allow the President such power?
Yes.
Let's say that the next Jose Padilla is not dumb enough to get caught, and does manage to work with some people to scrounge up some radiological material from some used dental x-ray machines or industrial hardware. Let's say he and some buddies, living in Queens, have bought a few pounds of black powder or other modest explosive/propellant, and are now chit-chatting with their spiritual coach back in Amsterdam (who in turn is chatting, via Germany and then Jordan, with someone who gets his playbook from a guy that makes phone calls to suburban Karachi, where that guy gets regular foot-traffic messages from a certain guy on a Pakastani/Afghanistan borderland poppy farm.
If our clue that something relatively small and easily produced, waiting in a backpack in a studio apartment in Queens, is about to be used is because the NSA detected a pattern of communication that leads back to a mobile phone purchased with a questionable credit card account earlier that day, then we must must must act. Can you imagine (compared to 9/11) the economic chaos and fright-fest that would happen in the wake of even a single sidewalk near Wall Street or near the Capital in DC getting contaminated by cesium residue in a suicide bombing? Or if, just like Madrid, half a dozen trains pulling into Grand Central Station were bombed?
Remember: the intent in Madrid was to have all of those bombs go off at once, in the station - in the hopes of bringing the station roof down on thousands of people. Remember the cost of the transit strike in NY in December? That was a peaceful loss of some infrastructure for three days... and it cost the city of NY hundreds of millions of dollars, impacted jobs and livelihoods, etc. That's nothing compared to the fear and panic that even a cheesy dirty-bomb attack would produce. Now, imagine that there were five or six of these guys, using cell phones to coordinate similar events in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Miami, New York, and DC. That it has not happened is not dumb luck, and preventing it means that the plans for the next round will be that much more dire and designed to be mentally shocking in a way that will make 9/11 seem quaint. It doesn't have to involve airplanes, skyscrapers, or even thousands of lives... it's the media fest they're after. It's why they burn hundreds of people alive in Bali bars, and blow up crowds of children getting candy in Baghdad... mental impact.
The "peril" (which is a good word) may not be directly to life and limb for the vast majority of Americans - but the impact on their lives, jobs, bank accounts, etc., could be gigantic. My bet: they'll time the next serious domestic attempt for just before the next presidential election, trying to pull off another bit of Spanish election engineering.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who spends enough money on Google ads can tell you the first name of their sales rep at Google. You know, the person who helps you fine tune for AdSense keywords, and offers you swell deals. How about if that person, who is already also helping you with localized ad placement through AdSense, could guarantee you some airtime in your local market, as well? Or, how about making sure that people sitting in their cubes at work listening to the radio and typing in some regionally interesting search term ("pizza delivery Sterling, VA") could be shown normal AdSense ads that, for the window of time that Joe's Pizza is running broadcast ads in that ZIP code, give extra weight to his AdSense ads for localized search?
Come on, folks, there's more to this than meets the eye. And don't forget the side-band stuff that handles traditional pager traffic, too. That can be used for all sorts of exotic ad-related things.
Yes. My point was that he, personally, was not only running a copy shop. He spent many hours of his life creating content to please a recurring audience, and then making money off of the sales of that material. The earlier comment implied, essentially, that he had no interest in making money off of the work of his mind (i.e., his woodstove), and I'm refuting that. He wasn't some creative-arts altruist.
Besides, Franklin was only into publishing because it was lucrative at the time (and gave him an easy way to get his ideas out).
He started setting up other publising houses, and taking percentages of those shops' revenue expressly to make money, not to "get his ideas out." His own writings (not his essential political stuff, later in life) included what he thought would sell. He wasn't getting paid to copy his own work, he was creating work so that he could sell it. He wrote sonnets, produced his famously humorous almanac, etc., all so that he could profit from the creation and distribution of his work. Sure, he also ran off advertisements, bank documents, and anything else that someone wanted put on paper... but he actively sought out projects and personally created content so that he could win a larger paying audience for his writing. He carefully crafted his material (like the almanac) so that when people were aware that it was time for another, there would all the more people anxious to pay to own their own edition of his witty work.
Do we have loads of tales about people being legally hounded for ripping him off? No. It wasn't as convenient back then to do so. But you're making it sound like convenience in ripping off an artist (or an almanac writer) changes the ethics of the situation. That's crap, and in dealing with the concepts of copyrights in some of the country's earliest foundational documents, that was as plain back then as it is today.
Blame the spin, not the intent.
That said, speaking as an Indian, the positive spin over ISRO is nauseating at times; the Indian press, in particular, loves to fawn over those guys for no apparent reason. I suppose every country needs its heroes and positive-news-generators.
You are right on all counts. I think my comment needs a little more context than I thought it did. My larger point was that reporting on a conceptual-stage idea about a possible plan for a program isn't really news, in that such concepts are forwarded by all sorts of people, all the time. ISRO may have more resources and a more likely shot at actually doing something about their space shuttle, but I think I'd prefer a program just a little farther along before it's treated as news and discussed, on slashdot, as a measure of India's wisdom. Whether or not India does it (or starts to do it) will be worth talking about. Otherwise, I want equal coverage on my concepts (to wit, I own a dog that can almost reach escape veolocty... hmmmm).
Also of note for those who follow intellectual property issues, when he invented the "Franklin stove," he refused the offered patent preferring that the design be available to anyone.
Lest anyone suddenly get the idea that Ben Franklin was an early "information wants to be free" sort of guy, don't forget that the only way he was able, in his early forties, to "retire" from the daily grind and turn his attention towards science, diplomacy, and nation-building was because he made himself relatively wealthy as a publisher. He set up printing franchises that made money off of publishing private works, and he took a share of the proceeds in his capacity as the guy helping to finance the operations and marketing thereof. He was very "modern" in that sense - a literary agent, a publisher/distributer, an investor in potentially lucrative creative material... intellectual property was exactly how he became wealthy. The "healthy and wise" part was how he lived long enough and well enough to put his proceeds to work for him, rather working for them. But without an early career in the sale of creative works, there would have been no Ben Franklin, Founding Father.
I've got a productive relationship with peers/partners/co-workers (and even some big-ticket customers) that, despite years of working together, I have never met in person. We make excellent use of (get this!) the telephone. I know, it's quaint.
But the most important thing is that we keep those calls short, and don't need to use them to convey basic information to each other because we do that all the time using e-mail, IM, and a rich portally-intranet-ish web presence.
But the only thing that really makes those supporting technologies a viable replacement for endless facetime is decent communications skills. Being able to cogently write what's on your mind, provide a usable spreadsheet or document that illuminates the matter at hand... even being able to use IM without it decaying into a meandering social tarpit.. those things require a little bit of practice and discipline. But they buy you productive, asynchronous communication that liberates you to work on your actual job on your own schedule.
In-person meetings are saved for when it really matters: gaining and keeping paying customers. Oh, and free food.
I bet those 'high school nerds' better research their comments rather than propagate speculation rooted in inherent bias.
Leaving aside, for the moment, any sense of humor that you may or may not actually have, try to see my comment in some context. It's not a question of whether or not India has a space program (they do) or the capacity to build a shuttle (they do), but whether or not the conceptualizing mentioned in the summary (and the way it was mentioned) is news, per se. The point is that if every time an entity got Slashdot coverage when they had a conceptual notion of how they might tackle a particular space flight challenge, that's all we'd read about. Everyone has conceptual approaches to it, and most will not take place. My personal opinion is that the concept described is only of marginal use, but hey - it's Indian money, and they can and should pursue whatever concepts they think make sense. But I'd rather read it as "news" when the, say, award a contract to someone to actually start up such a program... or start actually training and simulating around a particular project's actual finalized design.
Information wants to be free, deal with it.
Really! Got kids? Maybe a niece or nephew? Perhaps a cute neighbor kid next door? I'm sure you'd be cool with putting their pictures, names, home address, IM handles, school info (with a link to their class and recreational schedules), and everything else about their lives up in a public space. Once you've got that web page put together, just put that link up here, OK? Since that information wants to be free, no doubt only utopian wonder-hippies will view the information, and use it to send positive vibes and flowers their way.
...and then, "This is only in its conceptual stage."
Huh. No offense to India (really!) but, there are high school nerds in New Jersey who are also at this stage of work on their own personal space programs.
Sorry, but this is just a misinformed bit of BS. Having grown up in past-1968 Germany, I know that we're doing incredibly much working up and reflecting on what happened during WWII.
Hmmm. I guess I must not be able to understand my wife as well as I thought (though she has spoken German and English since she was a child). She was born in Frankfurt in 1959, and still loves Germany and Austria (she also lived outside Vienna for some time). She worries that those countries are quickly losing their cultures. And as her parents' generation grows old and dies, she's worried that not enough people will remember the good and the bad that happened there in the last 50 years.
Beyond my wife's personal observations, though, I'm referring to the infamous web bans on certain items and types of content, as required by German law (and in other ways, EU-wide). In the US, we tend to favor exposing ridiculous people (like neo-Nazis) by letting them make fools of themselves, and allowing as much talk (including web sites, etc) as anybody wants to offer, both for and against any idealogy. Pretending that something didn't happen by trying to hide it isn't very helpful. Pretending that you're going to make people think differently by banning web sites that talk about it isn't going to accomplish anything. Banning information, if anything, just makes some people that much more curious about what's being banned.
Do your kids learn about Hiroshima in school?
Of course. Depending on how thorough the history class is, they also learn that ending the war with Japan by destroying two industrial centers in which the empire was still able to move, manufacture, and store the heavy equpiment items required to continue the war was essential. Why? Because the only alternative was a protracted, brutal, devastating invasion of mainland Japan - which would have resulted in many, many times more deaths and deprivation over a much longer period of time. Ending the war ended the war, with many lives saved. You surely can't be implying that ending the war with fewer dead is a bad thing, so in bringing up Hiroshima, you must be trying to say that you're upset by how people died there, even though it was fewer of them. Would you really prefer that many times more people tied while being burned alive or torn apart by "conventional" weapons? Was months and months of events like Dresden really better for Japan than ending the war in a few days, leaving most of their cities and people intact and more able to rebuild their society more quickly?
That sort of information is indeed important to keep out in the open - otherwise some people may only hear that people died in the bombing, and have no context whatsoever. You know, context: like the fact that conventional (non-nuclear) attacks aimed at ending the war resulted only in untold thousands of deaths as Japanese cities (like Tokyo) burned. Those attacks only caused the Japanese military to insist that they could resist any invasion, and would until the last citizen died doing so. They were arming villagers to repel an invasion, and fortifying their entire coastline. Such as invasion would have been far, far worse for the people of Japan. The only alternative was to allow the Japanese military to continue to take over the Pacific, enslave people from China through Malaysia and elsewhere, and continue on, taking more resources as they went. At least the people of Germany realized that their war(s) of aggression were over, and they stopped rather than see more of their country damaged and people killed. The Japanese military would have sacrificed its citizens in enormous numbers, and for nothing. They had already shown a willingness to do so, and that was a factor in deciding how to end the war. I'm glad that hundreds of thousands (probably millions) of more of their people, and allied troops, didn't have to die in a grinding, months-long invasion. I find it interesting that Japan regularly memorializes their
There's just something slightly unseemly about this. Government-coordinated search just chafes, I guess - though much of Europe is presumably used to communicating over state-owned infrastructure anyway. But at least they'll have no trouble keeping pages about German WWII relics from being indexed, this way.
Egads. A "Zaroz" reference in your sig. Someone else did see that movie!
So, in this case, not having admin privledges reduces the damage by 80%. Is that not "substantial"?
I don't think that's a reasonable measure. If the one-fifth of the family's data that got snooped happened to include information providing access to bank accounts, personal financial data, etc., then the damage to the entire family's well being could be ruinous. Is a twelve year old losing her MySpace bookmarks and P2P downloads really no different, to you, than someone having their doctoral thesis or college application essay trashed? Because no, not everyone backs up like they're supposed to, not even the Really Important Stuff.
So, how does this help Poland, or Italy, etc., of the other members of the EU don't think the same thing that those countries think about when and how it should disabled/dumbed-down in the event of hostilities aimed against EU member interests? Saying that "the EU" is now better off because they don't have to depend on the US's long-standing GPS system doesn't mean that there's no longer a clash of interests. I don't see the EU as one big happy mutual-interest zone when it comes to transportation, telecommunications, and conflict engagement. I'm betting that the people in Eastern Europe feel somewhat differently about such policy issues than do, say, the politicians in France, Spain, Denmark, etc.
The jury who awarded this prize don't understand this, or they do, and have themselves some interest, therefore are not impartial.
Of course a jury from that industry/discipline dealing with industrial design has an interest in preserving intellectual property rights. Professional industrial designers, who might spend years on a project that actually sees production - and thus are spending/costing a lot of money in the process - wouldn't have those jobs or be able to do that sort of work if the people hiring them had no expectation of being able to recoup, protect, and generate income from their investment. Meaning, if Apple couldn't find any recourse against someone making perfect knock-offs of their iPod products, they'd certainly change how (and whether) they spend money innovating along those lines... knowing that someone else gets to run off and make low-overhead money off of their high-overhead innovation and design work.
It's scarcely a conflict of interest when people from that background, judging entries by people who also are or want to be in that line of work, recognize - however indirectly - that ownership of work is and should be as much of an issue as the creator of that work wants to make it. Happily, if their notion of ownership gets too much in the way of making good use of the product, people can just buy something else.
Personally, I find the project cited to be somewhat pretentious, and not something I'd really want to own. And... no one basing a real product around that design is going to get my money. They can take that into account or not, since that's how the market works.
Got it: you're pretending that it's too difficult because it's your team breaking the law. Way to piss on the constitution you neo-fascist loving ideologue.
I always love it when people mis-use the word fascist. I won't even bother with that one. On your other point, though:
It's not "my team" that's lazy and wishing it wasn't "difficult," and thus breaking laws. It's any agency and administration facing these circumstances. The framework doesn't realistically deal with situations like this, which can result in (as a network) thousands of calls over a short period of time... calls which are thereafter not repeated, and for which a retro-active warrant is totally meaningless. I don't think it's helpful to ask sitting judges to be intelligence analysts looking through thousands of one-time communications that won't need warrants under FISA because the numbers won't continue to be surveiled anyway. The process for ongoing, but 72-hour windowed, warrants still makes sense when the people being watched actually stick with related forms of communication for several or more days... but intelligence gathering from the large groups that revolve around the foreign contacts we're worried about are completely moving targets. And they use things like bags of 50 cell phones, one time each, for exactly that reason. No warrant process, even the delayed variety called for in FISA, even bears on such a situation. That's exactly what the NSA is for, and that's exactly what they're doing, and what they've asked the CinC (with briefings of both "teams", as you put it, in Congress) to continue to authorize.
The Constitution calls for the defense of the country just as it calls for personal liberty. The founding fathers were all too familiar with spies living domestically (what with many of them being caught and executed during the conflicts that formed this nation). Subsequent administrations, especially including those on what I guess you'd have to call "your" team, did things way, way more grievous than monitoring communications to and from known foreign terrorist connections. You know, things like rounding up thousands of people, including US citizens, based on race, and putting them in camps during WWII? Classic anti-Constitutional "prior restraint." Ah, such a liberating feeling, having a Democrat as a president! What? That's overblown rhetoric? Right. Just like yours.
You mean like the government saying there's an elevated risk of a terror attack?
No, people have taken that in stride. I'm talking about people glued to CNN watching people who got showered with cesium being hosed down on a Wall Street sidewalk, or maybe three or four simultaneous events like what happened at that school in Beslan, Russia... that would, indeed, Completely Freak People Out.
It's like one commercial after another. 'See how great we are!!'
Right... it's always more interesting to read article after article about only unsuccessful operations run by people who aren't proud of what they do, and don't face huge, global challenges.
You're cranky because it's MS. If exactly the same article ran, substituting "gmail" and "google" for all of the other names, you'd say, "cool!"
This is certainly useful, in that it makes the product available to Federal users at a known (and, since it's on a GSA schedule, typically better-than-average) price. But when a reseller negotiates to be the GSA dealer for an item, that's all they've accomplished. That's NOT the same as actually talking an agency into using the product. We also want to be careful not to draw the wrong conclusions. When they say that NASA is using it, that means it's one more tool in NASA's toolbox. Some people might get the impression that they're using in lieu of other DB engines, rather than along side of such.
Terrorism is the single most overrated threat there is. How many people in the entire world have ever died from a terrorist attack ever?
Sorry, man, but you're missing the larger picture. How many businesses were ruined in the months following 9/11? How many jobs, and benefits, and careers lost or ruined? How many retirement accounts trashed when various stocks tanked? How about the staggering loss in personal, family, educational, and on-the-job productivity because of fear, stress, and distraction? How many dollars spent by schools, counties, cities, states... taxpayers everywhere, because of this threat? The economic impact - in the countless billions - impacts everything that the country is and does. But that's still nothing compared the thousands of families ruined. If you knew any of them, or know people that did, you'd have a different take on it.
All that being said... how about if the next thing that happens includes something not all that physically damaging, but which will Completely Freak People Out. You know, something bio, or something radiological in half a dozen cities at the same time. Can you think through the implications for day to day life for millions of people? Direct bodily harm from a terrorist (so far) is indeed less of a blow than that from drunk drivers... but it's not actually the direct harm that terrorists seek to inflict. Ask the people in Madrid, or Bali, or Israel, or Egypt, or Jordan.
Oh, lighten up a bit. My point was to illustrate that we are not without some peril along these lines, and that people who loudly proclaim their intent to kill heretics, and also make phone calls into the US are worth a listen-to, despite what the previous commenter implied. It's not "the president" who's sucking around looking for power in this area - it's the NSA's JOB.
I'm scarcely "licking my lips" at prospect of something like this. I live in the DC suburbs, and have family around town. Good friends lost their own friends in the Pentagon. I don't want to see direct damage, or the indirect damage caused by panicky people in the wake of any terrorist theatrics. But I also dislike people implying that there's simply no risk at all. There is.
So, we are conducting the "war on terror" using the same time proven tactics as the "war on drugs".
There may be (mysteriously - I just don't get it, personally) an ongoing demand for more meth, crack, heroin, etc. But I think it's safe to say that we don't have a big domestic demand for more blown up office buildings, destroyed embassies, damaged Naval vessels, etc.
If you point and you previous point, welded together, are that we should just arrest each person we stumble across (rather than waiting until we can get the larger food chain, like we do when we can with the drug distribution types), then you're guaranteeing no ability to break up cells like they did in Madrid. Or is your point is that there will always be more terrorists, so we might as well just let it go and "legalize" bombings like some people say we should all drugs? I don't think your analogy is holding up too well, here.
If we know who they are, why are we tapping their phones instead of picking them up?
Because finding out who they're talking to, what the larger group is planning, and following the money/support trail back to the source is very, very valuable. You take out one foot soldier, you have not only not stopped that person's several buddies, you've tipped your hand as to how/when you found out about the cell or network of cells they're a part of, and probably driven them into deeper cover.
If the people monitoring a particular bad guy have reason to think that person is about to directly act, they arrest them. Just like Spain after they lost all those people in the train bombs. The Spanish intel people knew who the bombers' associates were, and were watching them very closely... and you'll recall that when they had followed up all the leads they could, they moved in on all of them at once. They arrested some, but others blew themselves up in their apartment rather than be arrested. But if they arrested them one at a time as they uncovered them, they'd end up ultimately missing out on a lot of the rest of them.
For what it's worth, by the way, you've actually identified exactly why it's important to have "black" facilities where they can stash someone like that... so that his associates don't hear through the grapevine that Ahmed is being held in lockup somewhere when they do have no choice but to arrest him. Most of them (the cells) are getting too smart for that now, though - they assume anyone not in touch has been apprehended, and then they have to regroup. But if, for a few days, say, they can work with what that person knows before his team is aware he's been picked up, the whole team may go down. The problem (back to your original question) is that sometimes it takes longer to run down all of that person's communications, contacts, financial records, travel, etc... and before the analysts have learned the big picture, his cell is aware he's busted. So, they let them move around and talk (the more the better), and work on getting the bigger picture. It's exactly the same way they deal with organized crime, pedophile rings, etc... except, in this case, some of the contacts are making calls from Pakistan or Indonesia, etc., and the NSA is in the perfect position to connect the dots.
The problem I have is that we are NOT at war. While you can say it and imply it as much as you want, we are neither technically nor legally at war.
That's what makes this difficult. We are very much involved in the sort of DoD work that amounts to war... but the entity(ies) we're dealing with are not the sort (an indentifiably hostile foreign government, uniformed soldiers, etc) that the war powers act takes into consideration. Hell, even though the Taliban was effectively running parts of Afghanistan, they weren't recoginized as a government, per se.
So, we've got the intense need to watch out for (and react to) attacks here and abroad, we have communications to monitor and act upon, we have emergency preparedness and logistics to hash out and pay for... but we don't have an enemy sitting in a capital city that we can point to and say, "we declare war on X because of their overt acts or support of such" (a la Japan following Pearl Harbor).
I don't envy any administration trying to protect the country using the legislative instruments of "classical" wars in the face of hostility from loosely-organized non-national franchise operations. To the extent that the administration's critics trot out the "we didn't declare war" argument, they're either being disengenuous or ignorant of the basic facts. Pretending that there's no threat or consequence just because Al Queda doesn't hang its hat in one particular country suitable for a war declaration misses the point (though a glance at the New York skyline should be a reminder that we don't have to have an enemy "country" to suffer a grievous attack). To the extent that they're being disengenuous, each of those complaints just rings more and more hollow - except to the ignorant audience at whom those comments are really aimed (specifically, the uninformed that none the less vote, or the uninformed that have a celebrity pulpit from which to regurgitate the rhetoric).
Neither this administration or the next will ever be able to ask Congress formally declare war on a non-nation. It's not for lack of willingness - it's that the act wouldn't have any meaning (or target). Hence the very awkwardly named "war on terror." What the hell else do we call it? The best that can happen is continued Congressional authorization to act against those that are acting and plan to act against us. We already had that conversation, immediately after 9/11, and the resulting authority has been put to work in a lot of ways - some more effective than others. This NSA business is one of them. We'll have to keep revisiting, as a society, how to define who we're up against until it's plain that there aren't well funded organizations having their "death to America" videos aired on Al Jazeera as if they were real diplomatic press conferences of some sort. You can't really say "war against militant jihaddi wack jobs" because that smacks of an at-the-fringes culture war... something we can't acknowledge, real though it is.
So, oddly, the current administration's political opponents have a vested interest in not helping to craft a new framework in which to face these sorts of threats/conflicts... because by being able to say that the administration is "violating" the current framework, they get to score craven political points. Meanwhile, whoever has the executive job has to actually, really do what they can to actually really prevent coordinated, ugly events like 9/11... or get pillaried for not doing enough.
What conflict? Seriously, are we in such peril that we should allow the President such power?
Yes.
Let's say that the next Jose Padilla is not dumb enough to get caught, and does manage to work with some people to scrounge up some radiological material from some used dental x-ray machines or industrial hardware. Let's say he and some buddies, living in Queens, have bought a few pounds of black powder or other modest explosive/propellant, and are now chit-chatting with their spiritual coach back in Amsterdam (who in turn is chatting, via Germany and then Jordan, with someone who gets his playbook from a guy that makes phone calls to suburban Karachi, where that guy gets regular foot-traffic messages from a certain guy on a Pakastani/Afghanistan borderland poppy farm.
If our clue that something relatively small and easily produced, waiting in a backpack in a studio apartment in Queens, is about to be used is because the NSA detected a pattern of communication that leads back to a mobile phone purchased with a questionable credit card account earlier that day, then we must must must act. Can you imagine (compared to 9/11) the economic chaos and fright-fest that would happen in the wake of even a single sidewalk near Wall Street or near the Capital in DC getting contaminated by cesium residue in a suicide bombing? Or if, just like Madrid, half a dozen trains pulling into Grand Central Station were bombed?
Remember: the intent in Madrid was to have all of those bombs go off at once, in the station - in the hopes of bringing the station roof down on thousands of people. Remember the cost of the transit strike in NY in December? That was a peaceful loss of some infrastructure for three days... and it cost the city of NY hundreds of millions of dollars, impacted jobs and livelihoods, etc. That's nothing compared to the fear and panic that even a cheesy dirty-bomb attack would produce. Now, imagine that there were five or six of these guys, using cell phones to coordinate similar events in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Miami, New York, and DC. That it has not happened is not dumb luck, and preventing it means that the plans for the next round will be that much more dire and designed to be mentally shocking in a way that will make 9/11 seem quaint. It doesn't have to involve airplanes, skyscrapers, or even thousands of lives... it's the media fest they're after. It's why they burn hundreds of people alive in Bali bars, and blow up crowds of children getting candy in Baghdad... mental impact.
The "peril" (which is a good word) may not be directly to life and limb for the vast majority of Americans - but the impact on their lives, jobs, bank accounts, etc., could be gigantic. My bet: they'll time the next serious domestic attempt for just before the next presidential election, trying to pull off another bit of Spanish election engineering.