It will be a sad day when our corporations get all the money they want and NASA has to publish a sponshorship opportunity to run a website.
Corporations don't 'get' money (in the way that NASA does), they have to do something in exchange for it (like, sell something) or talk investors into delivering it. NASA, on the other hand, works on tax dollars, which means that everybody in the country (at least, the part of the country that pays taxes, anyway) funds their programs. I think they should have a much bigger budget, but a lot of people don't.
Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense to avoid a potentially more bruising budget fight in front of the administration and congress when some donors (who will very carefully think about who the audience is for these events, and will only provide resources if it makes sense for their business model) are willing to take up some of the slack. Episodic events (like shuttle launches) are ideal for this sort of sponsorship because the need for that overhead is fleeting, and can be tied to a date on a calendar. That works well for people in the PR/marketing side of things, and allows NASA to focus more on actually safely hurling people and equipment into space and have to worry less about which project to extend or kill.
Well, I can see how you might think that, given your approach to things. Your phrase, "You are a fucking tool" is declaritive, and presumes some set of standards upon which you're making that judgement. Given the actual subject at hand (someone complimenting MS for contributing to the anti-kiddiepr0n effort), we have to assume that your standards include either a rabid dislike of anything MS does, or that you're pro-kiddiepr0n. I'd like to think it's not the latter, so then it has to be the former. That means that the best way you can summon up to point out what you don't like about MS contributing the open source tools at hand is to call some who actually talked about it constructively a "fucking tool." So, you can see how my take on how you prop up (or don't) your position on the matter is that it's weak, and not likely to get anyone to take you seriously. You must know that, and must know that 6th-grade-quality ad hominem attacks are the last resort of the guy with a broken point of view. So, I'd say that my (obviously sarcastic) comment said pretty much exactly what I meant, and I'm not at all surprised that you didn't get it. If you got it, you'd have had something more intelligent to say in the first place, I guess, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
OK, then. My last comment on this, and thanks for your indulgence, and for pushing me to be clearer on a couple of points.
believe that the use of substantial force in the world is an acceptable means of achieving peace, and I believe that using force in such a way is a dangerous and ultimately futile way to try to achieve peace, causing more people to rise up and try to attack you than not.
I just can't see any way that anything less than substantial force would have rolled back imperial Japan's brutal march across the Pacific basin, Nazi Germany's attempt at owning Europe (and Africa, and so on), etc. "Dangerous," yes - but completely unavoidable. Likewise with guys like Saddam - he would have had absolutely no reason to leave Kuwait (and for that matter, not to make Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and everything else that was on his shopping list) without something literally, physically forcing the issue. Sanctions, as we saw, were actually a laughing matter to him, his sons, Iraq's well-fed Republican Guard, and the rest of the Baathists.
You believe that using dictators to wage proxy wars, or supporting dictators in general, is acceptable because the end of destroying a greater enemy is more important than the means, I believe that supporting a tyrant when he's your freind only to destroy him when it's convenient is the most direct manifestation of hypocrisy there is, and that as the civilized good guys, we should hold our behaviour to higher standards than the bad guys we oppose.
I never said Saddam was our "friend," any more than Stalin was. The proxy war was already being waged by the communists, just like it was in Vietnam or Korea. If the choices are: do nothing at all (and let millions of people come under the influence of, and through subjugation, prop up for a little longer the hollow shell of totalitarian communism), bypass all proxies and directly engage the actual culprits (and truly risk the end of the world as the Soviets' last gasp becomes nuclear instead of death-by-cumbling credibility and no-more-client-states-to-loot), or lastly (and what actually happened), put up every roadblock possible to stop the expansion of that doomed bit of tyranny, even it means holding your nose while two local bullies smack each other around. I don't mean to trivialize the taint that comes from wading through those swamps - I mean only to differentiate the ideal solution (somehow persuading the top dogs in the USSR to... what? change their minds about how or whether to feed the failing engine of their rather villainous "revolution"?) from the solutions that were driven by the actual events and cultures in play.
To rule out the option of force under any circumstances is no different at the international scale than it is at the local scale, in ruling out, say, the option for police to physically restrain a guy that mugs little old ladies on the same street corner every afternoon. Stopping a criminal through force, even if it means that his fellow gang members "rise up" in a show of defiance and commit more crimes (actually, this does happen, even in my own neighborhood), doesn't mean that little old ladies should simply be left to being victims. Not that Kuwait was a little old lady, but the analogy holds. At some point, the people that are willing to use force to simply take what they want, or impose a cruelly oppressive regime (a la the Taliban, etc) on unwilling and unrepresented people simply cannot be talked out of expanding what (for them) works. What works for them has to stop working, and depriving them of the tools of their violence, physically if necessary, is sometimes the only choice (other than allowing them to continue). This is exactly what transpired in the Balkans, and every month that NATO cajoled, pleaded, talked sanctions, and did every other non-physical thing to cease those hostilities, thousands more innocent people died, often just for being from one ethnic group or another. We removed the weapons from the picture (physically, through very focused and directed violence), and are not seeing Serbs, Croats, and their neighbors "rise up" in anger against the NATO countries. Because what we did, rather than being futile, worked, where everything else failed.
The rest of your comment suggests that you're thinking through what is actually happening and re-evaluating at least a couple of preconceptions. I guess I'm just a little perplexed by the implied taking-as-fact that Gates considers open source, per se, as "evil." It seems that he's pretty agnostic about it, in and of itself, but comments more passionately about how he thinks it plays in the commercial sector where developers' careers are big factor. I'm not commenting on whether he's right or wrong about some of the conclusions he draws, but it seems appropriate to point out that he's never really taken the stand (so commonly wrapped up in other arguments/discussions by inference as fact, as above) that OSS is, as a concept or in certain practices, an inherently bad thing. But the notion that he has said something that sweeping sure seems to fuel a lot biases that then taint issues like the one being discussed in the original post.
Your view of the world is unfortunately, completely at odds with mine. The differences are irreconcilable. Have a good day, it was nice talking to you.
Happily, neither my view of the world nor yours change any actual facts. But the way that enough people in the US interpret the facts is what dictates how our tax dollars are spent (see the actual original post we're talking about, here). If you want to influence the way that people like me make decisions based on the facts, you're just going to need to do better than saying that we're irreconcilably wrong. Because I'm basing my points on what I'd say are irreducibly appropriate use of military power in the face of malice and totalitarian thuggery. If your understanding of the facts are that it's not worth opposing those elements, then we definately don't have anything else to discuss, you're right.
Saddam Hussein was supported by the US government in his bid to take over Iraq, because he was going to attack Iran
So? The issue was that Iran was shaping up as serious proxy for the Soviets (still very much in territory acquisition mode), the last thing the world needed even closer to the middle east oil supply. Just because we can benefit from local rivalries and politics to help suppress the encroachment of a totalitarian regime that killed millions of people doesn't mean we should hold off doing so until every last player is someone we truly like. There were no Boy Scouts to be had in that part of the world - and the Soviet clock was ticking. A lot like the Nazi clock was ticking in Europe, and we sided up with the Soviets (while holding our noses) to end the European piece of WWII. Just like cops use shady informants to catch even worse guys. If Saddam was even more rotten than we expected (no question), then, of course, there was nothing for it but to deal with him in turn once he decided to start annexing Kuwait, etc.
So you used force... which lead to the use of force once again.
And why? See above. The very real approach of a completely corrupt ideology and oppressive totalitarian state (the USSR et al) demanded a lot more than toothless UN sanctions and hand wringing. I don't believe that's responsible for the the upswing in militant extremist Islamists looking to set the clock back a thousand years, though.
we've put dangerous men into seats of power
Appropriate use of the past tense, there. Unless you're suggesting that the new presidents of Afghanistan and Iraq in the same league as Saddam, or that representative Democracies are the same as the Stalinist Baath party? I'm sure that the many administrations that have cycled through Germany and Japan would probably also prefer not to be considered "dangerous men."
don't complain when others feel justified in the use of retaliatory force
If by "retaliatory force" you mean people from other countries, funded by people from even different countries, driving cars full of explosives up to mosques or police stations to kill as many people as possible in a vain attempt to show that democracy is "un-Islamic"... well, we don't complain, we try to do something about it.
what you're saying is that you need more war to make more peace
Actually, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that aggression and threats (from, say, Saddam or in the Balkans, etc) already are war. We need to use our tools, people, blood, money, and expertise to meet that aggression and stop it in order to have peace. Which we've been doing for a long time. And which, per the entire message of this thread, we're trying to do with better technology, less cost, and fewer lives lost when the need arises.
Except that what used to take an entire military to accomplish (killing lots of civilians) is, pretty much from now on, only going to take a few well-equipped terrorists. Our military, used in the classical sense, won't be stopping those guys in particular, but can box in or remove those states that explicitly support (harbor, finance, etc) the bad guys. We may also have to intercede when countries like China look to militarily take control of endangered democracies like Taiwan, or when North Korea - in some desparate last gasp as they crumble from within - decides to use their growing missile fleet and/or crude nukes to get pissy with South Korea (or Japan, etc).
Certainly the traditional threat of a marching army of invaders trying to take over Western Europe (as happened twice, requiring our help) is pretty much gone. But the prospects of problems in the Pacific and central Asia are far from gone. And, of course, the folks in the region damaged by the recent tsunami were certainly happy that we had huge ships, dozens of cargo helicopters, and thousands of trained men and women able to provide relief to areas completely cut off from help by their local governments. That sort of mobility, huge carrying capacity, and expertise is exactly what the military does best, regardless of the mission. And, in keeping with the ORIGINAL purpose of this thread, the whole point is that new technolgies allow the military to meet these tasks with fewer people and less spending over time.
The US isn't uniquely bad, they've just taken the baton of being a superpower from the UK and run with it.
Except that where Britain historically left colonies behind, we leave democracies and busy economies with which we have to compete. See Germany, or Japan as examples. See the newly chosen presidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Being a "super power" is nice, except that everyone wants everything from us, hates us when we do anything, hates us when we do nothing, hates us even when we do what they want, and: still come by the millions to live here because they like it better than where they're from. Oh well.
Really there's not too much difference between any religion if you're looking at the fundementalist version. Similarly, there is little connection between the fundementalist flavour and the vast majority of the followers of the religion as a whole. No-one literally does the `eye for an eye` thing, and in very few places are the more extreme aspects of Islam (for instance) carried out.
I guess you weren't watching much of the video out of Taliban-era Afghanistan. Women hauled out before large audiences in what used to be a soccer field (before game playing of any sort, including traditional kite-flying by children was banned as being un-Islamic) and shot. Typically for things like not wearing their burkha correctly in front of men, or - heaven forbid - working to make a living, since their husband had been executed for some other religious offense.
Or, check in with places where Wahabism rules the local culture, and you get things like dozens of school girls dying in a fire because the local religious enforcers would not let them run out of a building without the proper headcoverings on. Nothing like the faithful locking the door of a burning building so that young girls can die a horrible death (rather than upset Allah, of course). It's people that think like this that are busy blowing up bus stops and police barracks in Iraq, because they know that peaceful open society thriving under a democracy doesn't long tolerate that crazy dark-ages religious crap. But those guys are willing to kill innocent people in a futile attempt to stop that sort of liberty. Amazing. And technologically modern outlets like Al Jazeera make heros out of the ones that get killed (or kill themselves) trying to make this backwards vision a reality.
oh, you forgot the 'backed by guys like Bush 1, Rumsfeld
Not at all. When you've got Soviet-backed Iran trying to flex muscle in the middle east, and you've got Saddam - definately a jerk, but not wanting Iran to take over his little gangster playground - you have to make a call. Allowing the Soviets - a dying regime but still dangerous - to set up another puppet state in the middle east would have been another huge setback in putting that communist beast out of everyone's misery. We don't have to like the enemies of our enemies to know that they're still at least temporarily useful. Much like the Soviets were temporarily allies in dealing with Nazi Germany in WWII. That didn't make Stalinism any less horrible, but it was expedient, and there really wasn't a choice.
I'm afraid if you're using the phrase 'humanitarian aid' to mean other than weapons and money to Israel, Egypt and Turkey then you're misleading yourself
Well obviously we're not going to just hand buckets of cash over to, say, Hezbollah via the corrupt Syrian government. But have you noticed that now that the Palestinians are finally out from under the jerk that was pocketing so much of the aid going to them, that there's now even more flowing from the US, and from elsewhere? Or, you could look back to 2002, when Mohammad Khatami (Iran's president) decided, after initially refusing it, to accept substantial US aid in dealing with earthquake relief. Or, again in December 2003, when the US airlifted hundreds of thousands of pounds of relief supplies to Bam, in Iran when they suffered an even worse quake. The richer G
But you're implying it. The reason we had to go into Afghanistan is because the (mostly foreign, and foreign-funded) group of extremist Islamist punks (remember the Taliban?) that was running the country through killings and oppression refused to cough up the guy that was responsible for those attacks. They weren't just temporarily hiding him, they were in a mutually supportive relationship with him. The Taliban and Al Queda were both parasites on the people of Afghanistan, and were getting more and more entrenched. They knew that turning over Bin Laden would appear weak, so they chose to assume that they could run off a determined force, as they had been done with the Soviets. Weeks later, owing to the very type of military technology that we're talking about in this thread, we were able to eliminate anything resembling organized military power in the hands of the Taliban, without having to carpet bomb villages.
If Brazil had bombed the US because a Greek guy had been in Florida at the time a French guy had committed a 9/11-style attack in Brazil, would you be applying the same logic?
Come on now, you're embarassing yourself. If we had an international terrorist hanging out in Florida, and Brazil wanted him, we'd be all over it. We'd hardly spend weeks (as the Taliban did) calling Brazil the Great White Satan, etc., and playing stalling-for-the-cameras games while trying to decide what village to hide the guy in. Bin Laden didn't "happen" to be Afghanistan, he and other foreign Arabs (using a lot of his money, and more), had completely purchased what passed for government in the form of the Taliban, and with Mullah Omar, had a very cozy long-term relationship. Nor was it just a few "training camps." Remember the labs, with libraries of videos of dogs being gassed, documents on bomb building and flight manuals, etc?
You'll be more pursuasive if you keep all of that stuff in perspective while saying why we should have left Afghanistan to the Taliban. Oh, and throw in a few helpful quotes from local women who were threatened with public execution for doing things like, say, working.
last 100 or so years of history in the middle east
Well, if you're going to include the last 100 years, you'd probably want to consider the influence of Britain, France, Germany, the Soviets, and so on. The current state of affairs is driven as much or more by the untidy un-doing of post-(European)-colonial effects than anything else. Obviously, if the the region didn't have so much oil (which Europe, Asia, and everybody else also like to buy), the parties at each others' throats in that region wouldn't have as much to fight with (or for) or have, historically, been proxies for attempts at communist Soviet expansion. The re-emergence of dark-ages fundamentalist Islam in the back corners of that region wouldn't even matter (other than, say, to the poor women that would have to live under it), if those same modernity-hating medievalists weren't actually trying to become oil merchants themselves. Nothing wrong with some local self-determination, of course, but guys like Saddam (more of a Stalinist than a fundamentalist Muslim) decided that local self-determination should include things like annexing Kuwait, and lobbing missiles at Tel Aviv while being kicked back out. Yes, the US has a huge vested interest in a stable, non-medieval middle east. Just like Europe, Asia, and everyone else does. The difference is the capacity to do something about it (not the least of which is the pumping of more humanitarian aid and other support into that part of the world than anyone else does).
Anyone who believes taht making the American armed forces more efficient will result in less violence and less risked lives has clearly been living in another universe for the last 50 odd years.
You're confusing tools and technology with the policies that put them to work. I think those policies are largely correct, but that's a different discussion. Once a policy decision has been made (say, to step in an help end the ethnic clensing of thousands of people in the Balkans), the newer tools and tactics of the US military achieved exactly what I'm talking about: effective use against the intended targets, and a great decrease in the side effects. If we had not spent so much money on developing those tools and training our people in their use, we'd still be having to use the approaches used in WWII. In fact, the US has so raised the threshold for expectations of minimal collateral damage as we do things like help disable the militants in Serbia and Croatia, that any slip-up of any kind is now seen as horrible. Any unintended loss of life is horrible - but we're able now to disable bad guys (even those who set up shop in mosques and schools) with a previously inconceivable surgical skill. This is different, of course, than, say, blowing up trainloads of commuters in Spain, or burning partiers alive in Bali nightclubs. But the same tools that allow us to keep equipment working in the combat field also allowed us to ferry supplies and support into the recent tsunami-damaged area well before any other sort of major relief could have helped there.
prefer the modern military of Denmark, Canada etc, not that of the Americans, who spent more on their military than the rest of the world combined.
So you obviously aren't expecting the Danes or the Canadians to jump up and deal with, say, large scale armed conflicts in the middle east? Say, when someone like Saddam invades Kuwait to grab oil fields and coastline? The point is, when Danish or Canadian forces are involved in those conflicts, they rely on communications and logistics infrastructure provided by the US. As does the rest of the European military, such as it is, through NATO. I'm not picking on the members of the armed forces from any of those countries - I'm responding to your comment about what those countries "spend" as opposed to what the US spends. Those other countries avoid huge, huge expenses because the US has already spent (and continues to spend) it. There's a reason that places like the Balkans just smolder away, with thousands of civilians being killed on all sides, until NATO (powered primarily by US technology and spending) gets involved. Local Euro forces simply weren't able (and their politicians didn't have the backbone) to deal with it.
Part of my family is Danish, and I generally like the culture, but they're getting the easy end of the deal, that's for sure. They keep an army for those rare domestic reasons they might need one, and they sign treaties so that they can be involved with the US (or expect help from the US) when something more alarming comes up. But they avoid the large cost of being ready for bigger things, while US taxpayers foot the bill. But that's an expense we've been paying through both world wars and the cold war, and even though we've sharply reduced the size of our military since the end of that war, we're still the folks that Danes, Canadians, and everyone else turn to for high-end field logistics, equipment, IT, communications, and everything else that's used to minimize the loss of life (on all sides).
Many, many more civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military than were killed in the 9/11 attacks
Unfortunately, the sort of people that are trying to keep the wider middle east running as one big mysoginistic, medieval, brutality-fest have a bad habit of keeping their insurgents and weapons in schoolyards, mosques, and behind women and children. Rooting these thugs out the hard way has cost a lot more soldiers and marines than it would have if we simply leveled every neighborhood where these guys had a foothold. But that WWII way of doing things is long past, and despite Al Jazeera's gleeful film-looping every bit of (one side of) the misery involved, the results are fantastically more surgical than at any time in the history of such actions. Oh, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, those places that served as strongholds for these guys have newer buildings, roads, schools, utilities, and so on than they've ever had. That work is being safeguarded and funded, of course, by US (including its military people and tax dollars).
After the Second World War was the Cold War. This was a conflict, sometimes "hot," over, essentially, the future of civilization. It involved the more democratic west facing down oppressive, totalitarian communism, and succeeding. The US military is now, as a function of the US population and economy, much, much smaller than it was while being built up to stare down the Soviets and their attempts to make the rest of the world operate under the thumb of their happy, prosperous socialist wonderland.
The paychecks of the military and secret agencies depend on violence
As do the paychecks of police officers, prison cooks, many psychologists, and so on. Just like firefighters "depend" on fires (both those set maliciously and those set by accident). Check in with the people in the region recently hit by the Indian Ocean tsumani, by the way. The only infrastructure with the capacity to get relief to many of those poor people was that of the US military. Ships, aircraft, trained personnel, and of course thousands of tons of supplies and equipment were there almost immediately, courtesy of the US military. Actions like that don't square with your version of things. Just like yesterday's selection of a new Iraqi president (from the part of the country that was used to getting slaughtered by Saddam) doesn't quite smell the same as some mythical US imperialism. You're also conveniently avoiding, as you talk about violence in that country, the concept of who is causing it. Well financed (mostly by Iran, via Syria) foreign terrorists trying desparately to avoid the inevitable democracy (and resulting peace) that is taking hold in Iraq. Why are you not complaining about them, the people who are actually bent on killing civilians and preventing things like free speech, elections, and an open society?
Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.
That's some pretty lame rhetoric, since it's just so demonstrably false. Ignore, for the moment, that we (the US taxpayers) have put more money and effort into establishing democracy, disaster relief, feeding and medicating poor countries, and so on, than any other economy in history. Let's focus instead on the technology mentioned in this article. Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence. The whole point is that as we get more precise, better informed, and more surgical in how we deal with bad actors, we don't have to use as many heavy duty, indiscriminate weapons. People wail and moan about the collateral damage from doing things like kicking Iraq out of Kuwait... but that conflict saw the debut of our military carefully avoiding older (much more violent) tactics and weapons. If we'd still been using the WWII/Korea/Vietnam style weapons and tactics, we'd have been much more "violent" to accomplish the same required result. Every time we trot out these new tools, we cut down on how heavy handed we have to be, and the bad guys (who read this site, too), are more and more aware of how difficult it is to conduct various murderous affairs.
In this particular case, a tool like this that helps the Coast Guard or Navy take a closer look a ship before sending men and women over in person will absolutely reduce the risk of ambush, suicide attacks, and other problems that have killed our people in the past. Since so many other comments here point out the obvious non-conflict uses for this technology, I won't repeat those (great as they are), but I will close by saying that force used to put a stop to someone else's violence is a perfectly rational use of our military. As long as there are regimes like North Korea shipping out boatloads of missiles and explosives to places like Syria for sale to malicious third parties, superior military technology on our part will continue to reduce violence and save lives.
hey, people can fly from Canada to airports all over the US, we should be able to check peoples' papers anywhere
Come on, now - coming and going through an airport already takes care of the border problem. It's driving/walking/floating that's the problem, and places that surrounded by lots of boarder roads, open terrain, coastline - it makes sense to think more in terms of border area then, I think. That being said, actual border patrol work needs to be way, way picked up.
Where's the "treating like criminals" part, exactly? Since when is showing your ID punative in some way? I have to show my ID when I travel to other places in the world, and I don't feel like a criminal at all. I supposed it's possible that criminals might feel like criminals, though. Gosh, that would suck.
Shouldn't be too long before interstate travel in the US requires a passport.
Well, of course you're being sarcastic, but for those that don't get the joke and are actually thinking that this is somehow bad or shocking... why is it alarming to treat traveling to and from Canada any different than, say, France? If anything, the physical ease with which it's done (driving) makes it all the more meaningful to raise the stakes for illegals.
For what it's worth, I've traveled to and from Canada before... and had my car practically taken apart at the border into Nova Scotia. Just looked the part, I suppose. Oh: that was 15 years ago. Lighten up, everybody.
Um, OK... so that's not really about interstate traffic then, is it? Obviously that's about international travel, and concern about who is and who isn't doing it an hour or so from the border. Canada is just as international as Mexico is, and one could argue that it's just as likely a source of smuggling and ne'er-do-wells as south of the border. Extrapolating that anecdote to interstate travel document checking is just a speculative bash, methinks.
Without basic science research, we would not have the Internet as we know it
Lest we forget, that was basic research in military/defense-oriented vein. Or, really, technological development to better facilitate the researchers in that area. A lot of people at the time protested every dollar spent in that area as being philosophically bankrupt. Still, here we are publicly using it to have largely the same conversation.
For what it's worth: I think they should find a happy medium and spend more for a couple of years to automate some of the Voyager data collection, and thus be able to throttle back that human time through 2015. Whatever tools they develop or adapt for that purpose would probably help out in other areas, too. That's definately better than pulling the plug, and we have a better chance of being aware of when Voyager becomes Veeger.
So do I, but only to a point. Here in the slashdot echo chamber, and to a larger degree in the anarchy-between-designer-coffee-breaks crowd, the issue isn't a healthy, informed urge to supervise/monitor the federal law enforcement structure, but the assignation of profound, malignant malice to all of the people within those institutions.
I live in the DC area. Many acquaintences are employed within the intel/spooky/DHS/justice universes. They are, to a person, some of the most honest, earnest, hard working people I know, and they earn squat compared to what they would make in the private sector. A lot of them looked at careers in those areas as stepping stones to bigger ticket jobs elsewhere, but saw 9/11 and much of the resulting tumult as a serious reason to stick it out for a while. Some are annoyed (to the point of quitting) by bureaucratic foot dragging, and others are truly energized by new found budgets, livelier management, tangible missions that matter, and (despite what you read here), a population that generally is more appreciative of the work than they used to be.
Spending time (as many have done here) dwelling on how a given institution (say, the FBI) has "earned" our deep suspicion because of now-gone policies and management implies a bad case of not getting it. At the risk of getting a Godwin Mod, I'd say that we can pretty much get past saying that the Germans (or Japanese for that matter), as a people, are still earning our deep mistrust. Likewise, the sterotypical police officer south of the Mason-Dixon line is not firehosing peaceful protesters. Similarly, the people currently staffing the FBI aren't anymore inherently malicious working for the current administration than they were for the last one (remember their helpful delivery of private profile info into the last administration's offices?) That is to say, most of the back-office paper pushers and info-clerks don't operate with enough of a big picture to meaningfully participate in anything like the fanciful conspiracies so popularly attributed to everyone with a federal badge. Those people farther up the food chain of those agencies/bureaus have never operated under more scrutiny, or with more at stake. They are acutely aware of it, and I know this because when you live in this town, you have dinner with people like that.
Eternal vigilance must indeed be part of the picture - but let's not forget that FBI agents, managers, directors... these people all have families, a personal longing for liberty, and a general sense of decency that gets them through their crappy days dealing with the world's true, hateful, death-dealing creeps. There are always bad eggs in every group, including PTAs, religious organizations, universities, bridge clubs, paintball teams, eco-activist groups, and so on. The difference, at the FBI, CIA, and elsewhere, is that the real loons don't generally do too well on the polygraph/psych exams or pass the basic smell-test that more experienced personnel immediately give them. I'm glad that the parent poster considers the slashdot cynicism healthy, but I think it's a little too X-Files driven, motivated by political partisanship, and would benefit from more personal friendships with people who do the jobs they're carping about. Honestly, it's like we need Take A Nerd To Work Day or something, and see how many of those ridiculous myths break down over a lunch of the cheap sandwiches that your average fed can afford to eat.
Do I admire every federal employee, or think everything the government does is just swell? Not in the least. But I do feel some obligation to the good people I know in these areas to back them up a bit. It's a shame that popular entertainment doing the same is considered corny propoganda, while anything at all (no matter how ridiculous on closer inspection) that tears them down is seen as a clever, cool, righteous bit of art.
The reactionary policy excesses that spring from recent events and technological developments
Ah, modded as a troll. Slashdot moderators showing their true colors: +5 funny a rant calling for the death of sales people, and -1 troll for a comment that points out that the original ranter's web site is offering up t-shirts in exchange for donations. It's looking more and more like Troll = Truth some days.
It's so cool that Bill was able to make a living without anything he did or produced having to be actually sold or otherwise introduced to the people who actually paid his way. I find it so wonderfully delicious that his memorial web site, which quotes an MP's motion to recognize that Hick's talent was a "...bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism..." pitches t-shirts as a come-on for donations. Why, that's almost... marketing.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be a sad day when our corporations get all the money they want and NASA has to publish a sponshorship opportunity to run a website.
Corporations don't 'get' money (in the way that NASA does), they have to do something in exchange for it (like, sell something) or talk investors into delivering it. NASA, on the other hand, works on tax dollars, which means that everybody in the country (at least, the part of the country that pays taxes, anyway) funds their programs. I think they should have a much bigger budget, but a lot of people don't.
Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense to avoid a potentially more bruising budget fight in front of the administration and congress when some donors (who will very carefully think about who the audience is for these events, and will only provide resources if it makes sense for their business model) are willing to take up some of the slack. Episodic events (like shuttle launches) are ideal for this sort of sponsorship because the need for that overhead is fleeting, and can be tied to a date on a calendar. That works well for people in the PR/marketing side of things, and allows NASA to focus more on actually safely hurling people and equipment into space and have to worry less about which project to extend or kill.
Your reply made absolutely no sense
Well, I can see how you might think that, given your approach to things. Your phrase, "You are a fucking tool" is declaritive, and presumes some set of standards upon which you're making that judgement. Given the actual subject at hand (someone complimenting MS for contributing to the anti-kiddiepr0n effort), we have to assume that your standards include either a rabid dislike of anything MS does, or that you're pro-kiddiepr0n. I'd like to think it's not the latter, so then it has to be the former. That means that the best way you can summon up to point out what you don't like about MS contributing the open source tools at hand is to call some who actually talked about it constructively a "fucking tool." So, you can see how my take on how you prop up (or don't) your position on the matter is that it's weak, and not likely to get anyone to take you seriously. You must know that, and must know that 6th-grade-quality ad hominem attacks are the last resort of the guy with a broken point of view. So, I'd say that my (obviously sarcastic) comment said pretty much exactly what I meant, and I'm not at all surprised that you didn't get it. If you got it, you'd have had something more intelligent to say in the first place, I guess, and we wouldn't be having this conversation.
OK, then. My last comment on this, and thanks for your indulgence, and for pushing me to be clearer on a couple of points.
believe that the use of substantial force in the world is an acceptable means of achieving peace, and I believe that using force in such a way is a dangerous and ultimately futile way to try to achieve peace, causing more people to rise up and try to attack you than not.
I just can't see any way that anything less than substantial force would have rolled back imperial Japan's brutal march across the Pacific basin, Nazi Germany's attempt at owning Europe (and Africa, and so on), etc. "Dangerous," yes - but completely unavoidable. Likewise with guys like Saddam - he would have had absolutely no reason to leave Kuwait (and for that matter, not to make Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and everything else that was on his shopping list) without something literally, physically forcing the issue. Sanctions, as we saw, were actually a laughing matter to him, his sons, Iraq's well-fed Republican Guard, and the rest of the Baathists.
You believe that using dictators to wage proxy wars, or supporting dictators in general, is acceptable because the end of destroying a greater enemy is more important than the means, I believe that supporting a tyrant when he's your freind only to destroy him when it's convenient is the most direct manifestation of hypocrisy there is, and that as the civilized good guys, we should hold our behaviour to higher standards than the bad guys we oppose.
I never said Saddam was our "friend," any more than Stalin was. The proxy war was already being waged by the communists, just like it was in Vietnam or Korea. If the choices are: do nothing at all (and let millions of people come under the influence of, and through subjugation, prop up for a little longer the hollow shell of totalitarian communism), bypass all proxies and directly engage the actual culprits (and truly risk the end of the world as the Soviets' last gasp becomes nuclear instead of death-by-cumbling credibility and no-more-client-states-to-loot), or lastly (and what actually happened), put up every roadblock possible to stop the expansion of that doomed bit of tyranny, even it means holding your nose while two local bullies smack each other around. I don't mean to trivialize the taint that comes from wading through those swamps - I mean only to differentiate the ideal solution (somehow persuading the top dogs in the USSR to... what? change their minds about how or whether to feed the failing engine of their rather villainous "revolution"?) from the solutions that were driven by the actual events and cultures in play.
To rule out the option of force under any circumstances is no different at the international scale than it is at the local scale, in ruling out, say, the option for police to physically restrain a guy that mugs little old ladies on the same street corner every afternoon. Stopping a criminal through force, even if it means that his fellow gang members "rise up" in a show of defiance and commit more crimes (actually, this does happen, even in my own neighborhood), doesn't mean that little old ladies should simply be left to being victims. Not that Kuwait was a little old lady, but the analogy holds. At some point, the people that are willing to use force to simply take what they want, or impose a cruelly oppressive regime (a la the Taliban, etc) on unwilling and unrepresented people simply cannot be talked out of expanding what (for them) works. What works for them has to stop working, and depriving them of the tools of their violence, physically if necessary, is sometimes the only choice (other than allowing them to continue). This is exactly what transpired in the Balkans, and every month that NATO cajoled, pleaded, talked sanctions, and did every other non-physical thing to cease those hostilities, thousands more innocent people died, often just for being from one ethnic group or another. We removed the weapons from the picture (physically, through very focused and directed violence), and are not seeing Serbs, Croats, and their neighbors "rise up" in anger against the NATO countries. Because what we did, rather than being futile, worked, where everything else failed.
Gates' view that open source is evil
The rest of your comment suggests that you're thinking through what is actually happening and re-evaluating at least a couple of preconceptions. I guess I'm just a little perplexed by the implied taking-as-fact that Gates considers open source, per se, as "evil." It seems that he's pretty agnostic about it, in and of itself, but comments more passionately about how he thinks it plays in the commercial sector where developers' careers are big factor. I'm not commenting on whether he's right or wrong about some of the conclusions he draws, but it seems appropriate to point out that he's never really taken the stand (so commonly wrapped up in other arguments/discussions by inference as fact, as above) that OSS is, as a concept or in certain practices, an inherently bad thing. But the notion that he has said something that sweeping sure seems to fuel a lot biases that then taint issues like the one being discussed in the original post.
Excellent rhetoric, there. I can see how you expect people to look at things from your perspective and agree with you, as persuasive as you are.
Your view of the world is unfortunately, completely at odds with mine. The differences are irreconcilable. Have a good day, it was nice talking to you.
Happily, neither my view of the world nor yours change any actual facts. But the way that enough people in the US interpret the facts is what dictates how our tax dollars are spent (see the actual original post we're talking about, here). If you want to influence the way that people like me make decisions based on the facts, you're just going to need to do better than saying that we're irreconcilably wrong. Because I'm basing my points on what I'd say are irreducibly appropriate use of military power in the face of malice and totalitarian thuggery. If your understanding of the facts are that it's not worth opposing those elements, then we definately don't have anything else to discuss, you're right.
Saddam Hussein was supported by the US government in his bid to take over Iraq, because he was going to attack Iran
... which lead to the use of force once again.
So? The issue was that Iran was shaping up as serious proxy for the Soviets (still very much in territory acquisition mode), the last thing the world needed even closer to the middle east oil supply. Just because we can benefit from local rivalries and politics to help suppress the encroachment of a totalitarian regime that killed millions of people doesn't mean we should hold off doing so until every last player is someone we truly like. There were no Boy Scouts to be had in that part of the world - and the Soviet clock was ticking. A lot like the Nazi clock was ticking in Europe, and we sided up with the Soviets (while holding our noses) to end the European piece of WWII. Just like cops use shady informants to catch even worse guys. If Saddam was even more rotten than we expected (no question), then, of course, there was nothing for it but to deal with him in turn once he decided to start annexing Kuwait, etc.
So you used force
And why? See above. The very real approach of a completely corrupt ideology and oppressive totalitarian state (the USSR et al) demanded a lot more than toothless UN sanctions and hand wringing. I don't believe that's responsible for the the upswing in militant extremist Islamists looking to set the clock back a thousand years, though.
we've put dangerous men into seats of power
Appropriate use of the past tense, there. Unless you're suggesting that the new presidents of Afghanistan and Iraq in the same league as Saddam, or that representative Democracies are the same as the Stalinist Baath party? I'm sure that the many administrations that have cycled through Germany and Japan would probably also prefer not to be considered "dangerous men."
don't complain when others feel justified in the use of retaliatory force
If by "retaliatory force" you mean people from other countries, funded by people from even different countries, driving cars full of explosives up to mosques or police stations to kill as many people as possible in a vain attempt to show that democracy is "un-Islamic"... well, we don't complain, we try to do something about it.
what you're saying is that you need more war to make more peace
Actually, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that aggression and threats (from, say, Saddam or in the Balkans, etc) already are war. We need to use our tools, people, blood, money, and expertise to meet that aggression and stop it in order to have peace. Which we've been doing for a long time. And which, per the entire message of this thread, we're trying to do with better technology, less cost, and fewer lives lost when the need arises.
so afraid of a paper tiger(in military terms)
Except that what used to take an entire military to accomplish (killing lots of civilians) is, pretty much from now on, only going to take a few well-equipped terrorists. Our military, used in the classical sense, won't be stopping those guys in particular, but can box in or remove those states that explicitly support (harbor, finance, etc) the bad guys. We may also have to intercede when countries like China look to militarily take control of endangered democracies like Taiwan, or when North Korea - in some desparate last gasp as they crumble from within - decides to use their growing missile fleet and/or crude nukes to get pissy with South Korea (or Japan, etc).
Certainly the traditional threat of a marching army of invaders trying to take over Western Europe (as happened twice, requiring our help) is pretty much gone. But the prospects of problems in the Pacific and central Asia are far from gone. And, of course, the folks in the region damaged by the recent tsunami were certainly happy that we had huge ships, dozens of cargo helicopters, and thousands of trained men and women able to provide relief to areas completely cut off from help by their local governments. That sort of mobility, huge carrying capacity, and expertise is exactly what the military does best, regardless of the mission. And, in keeping with the ORIGINAL purpose of this thread, the whole point is that new technolgies allow the military to meet these tasks with fewer people and less spending over time.
The US isn't uniquely bad, they've just taken the baton of being a superpower from the UK and run with it.
Except that where Britain historically left colonies behind, we leave democracies and busy economies with which we have to compete. See Germany, or Japan as examples. See the newly chosen presidents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Being a "super power" is nice, except that everyone wants everything from us, hates us when we do anything, hates us when we do nothing, hates us even when we do what they want, and: still come by the millions to live here because they like it better than where they're from. Oh well.
Really there's not too much difference between any religion if you're looking at the fundementalist version. Similarly, there is little connection between the fundementalist flavour and the vast majority of the followers of the religion as a whole. No-one literally does the `eye for an eye` thing, and in very few places are the more extreme aspects of Islam (for instance) carried out.
I guess you weren't watching much of the video out of Taliban-era Afghanistan. Women hauled out before large audiences in what used to be a soccer field (before game playing of any sort, including traditional kite-flying by children was banned as being un-Islamic) and shot. Typically for things like not wearing their burkha correctly in front of men, or - heaven forbid - working to make a living, since their husband had been executed for some other religious offense.
Or, check in with places where Wahabism rules the local culture, and you get things like dozens of school girls dying in a fire because the local religious enforcers would not let them run out of a building without the proper headcoverings on. Nothing like the faithful locking the door of a burning building so that young girls can die a horrible death (rather than upset Allah, of course). It's people that think like this that are busy blowing up bus stops and police barracks in Iraq, because they know that peaceful open society thriving under a democracy doesn't long tolerate that crazy dark-ages religious crap. But those guys are willing to kill innocent people in a futile attempt to stop that sort of liberty. Amazing. And technologically modern outlets like Al Jazeera make heros out of the ones that get killed (or kill themselves) trying to make this backwards vision a reality.
oh, you forgot the 'backed by guys like Bush 1, Rumsfeld
Not at all. When you've got Soviet-backed Iran trying to flex muscle in the middle east, and you've got Saddam - definately a jerk, but not wanting Iran to take over his little gangster playground - you have to make a call. Allowing the Soviets - a dying regime but still dangerous - to set up another puppet state in the middle east would have been another huge setback in putting that communist beast out of everyone's misery. We don't have to like the enemies of our enemies to know that they're still at least temporarily useful. Much like the Soviets were temporarily allies in dealing with Nazi Germany in WWII. That didn't make Stalinism any less horrible, but it was expedient, and there really wasn't a choice.
I'm afraid if you're using the phrase 'humanitarian aid' to mean other than weapons and money to Israel, Egypt and Turkey then you're misleading yourself
Well obviously we're not going to just hand buckets of cash over to, say, Hezbollah via the corrupt Syrian government. But have you noticed that now that the Palestinians are finally out from under the jerk that was pocketing so much of the aid going to them, that there's now even more flowing from the US, and from elsewhere? Or, you could look back to 2002, when Mohammad Khatami (Iran's president) decided, after initially refusing it, to accept substantial US aid in dealing with earthquake relief. Or, again in December 2003, when the US airlifted hundreds of thousands of pounds of relief supplies to Bam, in Iran when they suffered an even worse quake. The richer G
But who's saying it? I didn't.
But you're implying it. The reason we had to go into Afghanistan is because the (mostly foreign, and foreign-funded) group of extremist Islamist punks (remember the Taliban?) that was running the country through killings and oppression refused to cough up the guy that was responsible for those attacks. They weren't just temporarily hiding him, they were in a mutually supportive relationship with him. The Taliban and Al Queda were both parasites on the people of Afghanistan, and were getting more and more entrenched. They knew that turning over Bin Laden would appear weak, so they chose to assume that they could run off a determined force, as they had been done with the Soviets. Weeks later, owing to the very type of military technology that we're talking about in this thread, we were able to eliminate anything resembling organized military power in the hands of the Taliban, without having to carpet bomb villages.
If Brazil had bombed the US because a Greek guy had been in Florida at the time a French guy had committed a 9/11-style attack in Brazil, would you be applying the same logic?
Come on now, you're embarassing yourself. If we had an international terrorist hanging out in Florida, and Brazil wanted him, we'd be all over it. We'd hardly spend weeks (as the Taliban did) calling Brazil the Great White Satan, etc., and playing stalling-for-the-cameras games while trying to decide what village to hide the guy in. Bin Laden didn't "happen" to be Afghanistan, he and other foreign Arabs (using a lot of his money, and more), had completely purchased what passed for government in the form of the Taliban, and with Mullah Omar, had a very cozy long-term relationship. Nor was it just a few "training camps." Remember the labs, with libraries of videos of dogs being gassed, documents on bomb building and flight manuals, etc?
You'll be more pursuasive if you keep all of that stuff in perspective while saying why we should have left Afghanistan to the Taliban. Oh, and throw in a few helpful quotes from local women who were threatened with public execution for doing things like, say, working.
last 100 or so years of history in the middle east
Well, if you're going to include the last 100 years, you'd probably want to consider the influence of Britain, France, Germany, the Soviets, and so on. The current state of affairs is driven as much or more by the untidy un-doing of post-(European)-colonial effects than anything else. Obviously, if the the region didn't have so much oil (which Europe, Asia, and everybody else also like to buy), the parties at each others' throats in that region wouldn't have as much to fight with (or for) or have, historically, been proxies for attempts at communist Soviet expansion. The re-emergence of dark-ages fundamentalist Islam in the back corners of that region wouldn't even matter (other than, say, to the poor women that would have to live under it), if those same modernity-hating medievalists weren't actually trying to become oil merchants themselves. Nothing wrong with some local self-determination, of course, but guys like Saddam (more of a Stalinist than a fundamentalist Muslim) decided that local self-determination should include things like annexing Kuwait, and lobbing missiles at Tel Aviv while being kicked back out. Yes, the US has a huge vested interest in a stable, non-medieval middle east. Just like Europe, Asia, and everyone else does. The difference is the capacity to do something about it (not the least of which is the pumping of more humanitarian aid and other support into that part of the world than anyone else does).
Anyone who believes taht making the American armed forces more efficient will result in less violence and less risked lives has clearly been living in another universe for the last 50 odd years.
You're confusing tools and technology with the policies that put them to work. I think those policies are largely correct, but that's a different discussion. Once a policy decision has been made (say, to step in an help end the ethnic clensing of thousands of people in the Balkans), the newer tools and tactics of the US military achieved exactly what I'm talking about: effective use against the intended targets, and a great decrease in the side effects. If we had not spent so much money on developing those tools and training our people in their use, we'd still be having to use the approaches used in WWII. In fact, the US has so raised the threshold for expectations of minimal collateral damage as we do things like help disable the militants in Serbia and Croatia, that any slip-up of any kind is now seen as horrible. Any unintended loss of life is horrible - but we're able now to disable bad guys (even those who set up shop in mosques and schools) with a previously inconceivable surgical skill. This is different, of course, than, say, blowing up trainloads of commuters in Spain, or burning partiers alive in Bali nightclubs. But the same tools that allow us to keep equipment working in the combat field also allowed us to ferry supplies and support into the recent tsunami-damaged area well before any other sort of major relief could have helped there.
prefer the modern military of Denmark, Canada etc, not that of the Americans, who spent more on their military than the rest of the world combined.
So you obviously aren't expecting the Danes or the Canadians to jump up and deal with, say, large scale armed conflicts in the middle east? Say, when someone like Saddam invades Kuwait to grab oil fields and coastline? The point is, when Danish or Canadian forces are involved in those conflicts, they rely on communications and logistics infrastructure provided by the US. As does the rest of the European military, such as it is, through NATO. I'm not picking on the members of the armed forces from any of those countries - I'm responding to your comment about what those countries "spend" as opposed to what the US spends. Those other countries avoid huge, huge expenses because the US has already spent (and continues to spend) it. There's a reason that places like the Balkans just smolder away, with thousands of civilians being killed on all sides, until NATO (powered primarily by US technology and spending) gets involved. Local Euro forces simply weren't able (and their politicians didn't have the backbone) to deal with it.
Part of my family is Danish, and I generally like the culture, but they're getting the easy end of the deal, that's for sure. They keep an army for those rare domestic reasons they might need one, and they sign treaties so that they can be involved with the US (or expect help from the US) when something more alarming comes up. But they avoid the large cost of being ready for bigger things, while US taxpayers foot the bill. But that's an expense we've been paying through both world wars and the cold war, and even though we've sharply reduced the size of our military since the end of that war, we're still the folks that Danes, Canadians, and everyone else turn to for high-end field logistics, equipment, IT, communications, and everything else that's used to minimize the loss of life (on all sides).
Many, many more civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US military than were killed in the 9/11 attacks
Unfortunately, the sort of people that are trying to keep the wider middle east running as one big mysoginistic, medieval, brutality-fest have a bad habit of keeping their insurgents and weapons in schoolyards, mosques, and behind women and children. Rooting these thugs out the hard way has cost a lot more soldiers and marines than it would have if we simply leveled every neighborhood where these guys had a foothold. But that WWII way of doing things is long past, and despite Al Jazeera's gleeful film-looping every bit of (one side of) the misery involved, the results are fantastically more surgical than at any time in the history of such actions. Oh, and hundreds of millions of dollars later, those places that served as strongholds for these guys have newer buildings, roads, schools, utilities, and so on than they've ever had. That work is being safeguarded and funded, of course, by US (including its military people and tax dollars).
since the end of the Second World War
After the Second World War was the Cold War. This was a conflict, sometimes "hot," over, essentially, the future of civilization. It involved the more democratic west facing down oppressive, totalitarian communism, and succeeding. The US military is now, as a function of the US population and economy, much, much smaller than it was while being built up to stare down the Soviets and their attempts to make the rest of the world operate under the thumb of their happy, prosperous socialist wonderland.
The paychecks of the military and secret agencies depend on violence
As do the paychecks of police officers, prison cooks, many psychologists, and so on. Just like firefighters "depend" on fires (both those set maliciously and those set by accident). Check in with the people in the region recently hit by the Indian Ocean tsumani, by the way. The only infrastructure with the capacity to get relief to many of those poor people was that of the US military. Ships, aircraft, trained personnel, and of course thousands of tons of supplies and equipment were there almost immediately, courtesy of the US military. Actions like that don't square with your version of things. Just like yesterday's selection of a new Iraqi president (from the part of the country that was used to getting slaughtered by Saddam) doesn't quite smell the same as some mythical US imperialism. You're also conveniently avoiding, as you talk about violence in that country, the concept of who is causing it. Well financed (mostly by Iran, via Syria) foreign terrorists trying desparately to avoid the inevitable democracy (and resulting peace) that is taking hold in Iraq. Why are you not complaining about them, the people who are actually bent on killing civilians and preventing things like free speech, elections, and an open society?
Any amount of taxpayer money for violence. None for peace.
That's some pretty lame rhetoric, since it's just so demonstrably false. Ignore, for the moment, that we (the US taxpayers) have put more money and effort into establishing democracy, disaster relief, feeding and medicating poor countries, and so on, than any other economy in history. Let's focus instead on the technology mentioned in this article. Stuff like this, that makes our armed forces more efficient and risks fewer lives in the course of doing their business, reduces violence. The whole point is that as we get more precise, better informed, and more surgical in how we deal with bad actors, we don't have to use as many heavy duty, indiscriminate weapons. People wail and moan about the collateral damage from doing things like kicking Iraq out of Kuwait... but that conflict saw the debut of our military carefully avoiding older (much more violent) tactics and weapons. If we'd still been using the WWII/Korea/Vietnam style weapons and tactics, we'd have been much more "violent" to accomplish the same required result. Every time we trot out these new tools, we cut down on how heavy handed we have to be, and the bad guys (who read this site, too), are more and more aware of how difficult it is to conduct various murderous affairs.
In this particular case, a tool like this that helps the Coast Guard or Navy take a closer look a ship before sending men and women over in person will absolutely reduce the risk of ambush, suicide attacks, and other problems that have killed our people in the past. Since so many other comments here point out the obvious non-conflict uses for this technology, I won't repeat those (great as they are), but I will close by saying that force used to put a stop to someone else's violence is a perfectly rational use of our military. As long as there are regimes like North Korea shipping out boatloads of missiles and explosives to places like Syria for sale to malicious third parties, superior military technology on our part will continue to reduce violence and save lives.
hey, people can fly from Canada to airports all over the US, we should be able to check peoples' papers anywhere
Come on, now - coming and going through an airport already takes care of the border problem. It's driving/walking/floating that's the problem, and places that surrounded by lots of boarder roads, open terrain, coastline - it makes sense to think more in terms of border area then, I think. That being said, actual border patrol work needs to be way, way picked up.
Where's the "treating like criminals" part, exactly? Since when is showing your ID punative in some way? I have to show my ID when I travel to other places in the world, and I don't feel like a criminal at all. I supposed it's possible that criminals might feel like criminals, though. Gosh, that would suck.
Shouldn't be too long before interstate travel in the US requires a passport.
Well, of course you're being sarcastic, but for those that don't get the joke and are actually thinking that this is somehow bad or shocking... why is it alarming to treat traveling to and from Canada any different than, say, France? If anything, the physical ease with which it's done (driving) makes it all the more meaningful to raise the stakes for illegals.
For what it's worth, I've traveled to and from Canada before... and had my car practically taken apart at the border into Nova Scotia. Just looked the part, I suppose. Oh: that was 15 years ago. Lighten up, everybody.
Um, OK... so that's not really about interstate traffic then, is it? Obviously that's about international travel, and concern about who is and who isn't doing it an hour or so from the border. Canada is just as international as Mexico is, and one could argue that it's just as likely a source of smuggling and ne'er-do-wells as south of the border. Extrapolating that anecdote to interstate travel document checking is just a speculative bash, methinks.
Without basic science research, we would not have the Internet as we know it
Lest we forget, that was basic research in military/defense-oriented vein. Or, really, technological development to better facilitate the researchers in that area. A lot of people at the time protested every dollar spent in that area as being philosophically bankrupt. Still, here we are publicly using it to have largely the same conversation.
For what it's worth: I think they should find a happy medium and spend more for a couple of years to automate some of the Voyager data collection, and thus be able to throttle back that human time through 2015. Whatever tools they develop or adapt for that purpose would probably help out in other areas, too. That's definately better than pulling the plug, and we have a better chance of being aware of when Voyager becomes Veeger.
I find it refreshing
So do I, but only to a point. Here in the slashdot echo chamber, and to a larger degree in the anarchy-between-designer-coffee-breaks crowd, the issue isn't a healthy, informed urge to supervise/monitor the federal law enforcement structure, but the assignation of profound, malignant malice to all of the people within those institutions.
I live in the DC area. Many acquaintences are employed within the intel/spooky/DHS/justice universes. They are, to a person, some of the most honest, earnest, hard working people I know, and they earn squat compared to what they would make in the private sector. A lot of them looked at careers in those areas as stepping stones to bigger ticket jobs elsewhere, but saw 9/11 and much of the resulting tumult as a serious reason to stick it out for a while. Some are annoyed (to the point of quitting) by bureaucratic foot dragging, and others are truly energized by new found budgets, livelier management, tangible missions that matter, and (despite what you read here), a population that generally is more appreciative of the work than they used to be.
Spending time (as many have done here) dwelling on how a given institution (say, the FBI) has "earned" our deep suspicion because of now-gone policies and management implies a bad case of not getting it. At the risk of getting a Godwin Mod, I'd say that we can pretty much get past saying that the Germans (or Japanese for that matter), as a people, are still earning our deep mistrust. Likewise, the sterotypical police officer south of the Mason-Dixon line is not firehosing peaceful protesters. Similarly, the people currently staffing the FBI aren't anymore inherently malicious working for the current administration than they were for the last one (remember their helpful delivery of private profile info into the last administration's offices?) That is to say, most of the back-office paper pushers and info-clerks don't operate with enough of a big picture to meaningfully participate in anything like the fanciful conspiracies so popularly attributed to everyone with a federal badge. Those people farther up the food chain of those agencies/bureaus have never operated under more scrutiny, or with more at stake. They are acutely aware of it, and I know this because when you live in this town, you have dinner with people like that.
Eternal vigilance must indeed be part of the picture - but let's not forget that FBI agents, managers, directors... these people all have families, a personal longing for liberty, and a general sense of decency that gets them through their crappy days dealing with the world's true, hateful, death-dealing creeps. There are always bad eggs in every group, including PTAs, religious organizations, universities, bridge clubs, paintball teams, eco-activist groups, and so on. The difference, at the FBI, CIA, and elsewhere, is that the real loons don't generally do too well on the polygraph/psych exams or pass the basic smell-test that more experienced personnel immediately give them. I'm glad that the parent poster considers the slashdot cynicism healthy, but I think it's a little too X-Files driven, motivated by political partisanship, and would benefit from more personal friendships with people who do the jobs they're carping about. Honestly, it's like we need Take A Nerd To Work Day or something, and see how many of those ridiculous myths break down over a lunch of the cheap sandwiches that your average fed can afford to eat.
Do I admire every federal employee, or think everything the government does is just swell? Not in the least. But I do feel some obligation to the good people I know in these areas to back them up a bit. It's a shame that popular entertainment doing the same is considered corny propoganda, while anything at all (no matter how ridiculous on closer inspection) that tears them down is seen as a clever, cool, righteous bit of art.
The reactionary policy excesses that spring from recent events and technological developments
An excellent peice, but isn't he... you know... pretty much marketing suicide?
Not only that, he's posthumously marketing t-shirts on his web site, the irony of which is fantastic.
Ah, modded as a troll. Slashdot moderators showing their true colors: +5 funny a rant calling for the death of sales people, and -1 troll for a comment that points out that the original ranter's web site is offering up t-shirts in exchange for donations. It's looking more and more like Troll = Truth some days.
What a hoot! Funny. Really.
It's so cool that Bill was able to make a living without anything he did or produced having to be actually sold or otherwise introduced to the people who actually paid his way. I find it so wonderfully delicious that his memorial web site, which quotes an MP's motion to recognize that Hick's talent was a "...bullet in the heart of consumerism, capitalism..." pitches t-shirts as a come-on for donations. Why, that's almost... marketing.