I think it is rather a sort of a continuation of McCrystal's mutiny. The highest but elderly echelons of D.C. cannot get accustomed to new realities and rebel against their Chief in Command.
They cannot accept that one can have relations with other countries without violence and domination. And seeing some people of Russian origin having some money makes them jealous.
There have been 20 years in Russia of market economy. Of course there are rich people in Russia by now. And, by the way, the US government all the time pays to journalists in Russia all sorts of premiums and grants. Openly.
The FSU is flooded with the US spies. All these NGOs, Peace Corps, Human Rights Groups, etc. But they will not be expeled as they pay people good salaries and hardly do any damage.
Much worse is when people are without jobs and without an income. Such people are even more dangerous.
Now when a lot of people in the USA are without jobs does it make sense to take away this too? Production moved overseas, so what people have to do?
There is a good book on this topic: "Overload" by Arthur Hailey. It is a novel but Hailey's syle, with true technical details.
There are three options for the power generating companies: reducing voltage, reducing frequency, or blackout of a city district. All three are bad.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to reduce power needed to heat or air-condition a building, except of making it either smaller, or improving thermal isolation of walls, windows, doors, etc.
My father in law had exactly the same problem with an CISCO ADSL modem. He had it for about 2 years. He called ISP, thought that neighbors switch on in the evening some heavy radio-electronic equipment, etc.
I told him measure voltage in the morning when ADSL works and in the evening when it does not work sometimes. Finally he bought a voltmeter and measured. In the morning it was 220 V AC, as it should be, but in the evening - only 205 V AC.
He bought a stabilizer for about USD 50.- and the problem was gone. For good, in the thin air. Never happened again. But he had to endure unstable Internet access for many months, spending his time and others'.
ISP people were taking his modem to their office to check, gave him their own modem temporarily, which worked without problems, etc. There were a lot of problems, calls, but the actual problem was with the AC grid voltage, not with the Internet.
Check the voltage in the AC electricity supply network with a digital voltmeter during these hours.
If it drops down during these hours, then buy a stabilizer. Usually when people get how they switch on various electricity consuming devices. And if a transformer in your neighborhood has not enough capacity the voltage or frequency of AC may drop down.
It may manifest itself especially when it is hoot or cold outside, because heating and air-conditioning takes a lot of power.
Spam kills our businesses in FSU because colleagues spend a lot of working time on dealing with it. Spam filters do not help anymore. This is an area where the RF government should be interested in cooperation with the US authorities to reduce the amount of spam incoming into our businesses. Without an international effort this problem can not be solved.
I guess there could be criminals who may use ICQ, but I know for sure that there are criminals who flood our servers with spam. Significant part of this spam has the US origin. So there is a vast field for law enforcement agencies to cooperate.
For example, a mobile police team from Russia could bust a spam kings, say, in Alabama, destroy spam servers and go home in Russia. It is much harder task to do for local cops. And vice-versa. A team of the US police officers could bust, say, a soft pirates' sweetshop somewhere in Siberia and go home after destroying the illegal production and equipment. Again it is not an easy task for local police to come and destroy a business, even an illegal one.
Nowadays when we are in one and the same network it would be more productive to cooperate than to confront.
Wind is sort of a nice idea for future, but there are things, which can be done right now. I mean producing by reducing consumption.
For example, limiting the weight of a personal car by a universal international law.
Now there are cars, which weigh 3000 kilograms and more. It can be limited, say, by 1500 kg. Still it can be quite a comfortable car.
Limiting area of a air-conditioned (heated) house or apartment by 100 square meters per one person. There are houses of hundreds of rooms, tens of thousand of square meters, where only a couple of persons live. 100 square meters per person is enough for a comfortable apartment or house.
Overweight people could be mildly, but unequivocally, taxed via increased medical insurance payments, because large amounts of food mean large amount of energy. Besides additional medical care for overweight people also takes a lot of energy. And also via 2-tickets rule for any mode of public transportation.
There should be a enforceable legal ban on any form of forbidding of drying clothing and linen on the sun at the fresh air. Drying wet clothing in the sun is the most efficient solar energy and wind device ever.
Enormous, geological amounts of energy are being spent on drying clothing and linen in the electrical dryers. And in some districts and even entire cities it is forbidden to dry clothing outdoors.
The sidewalks and walking should be promoted as a state policy, not laughed out, as it is the case now, especially in the USA, where it is close to incident to walk.
There should be process in media and in societal conversations to stop billions of women to shave legs (and other parts) nearly daily. A huge quantities of energy is being spent on this pointless exercise. Now it is also close to incident to look like a human female should look.
These are the real things, which can be and should be done. Otherwise energy consumption will be only increasing and no windmills will help us.
By the way, I know why all this talk about windmills. I've heard from a source in BP, that there is no way to stop the spill, the pressure in this well is absolutely too high. It may reach New York and further. So that is why this talk about windmills' New Course.
They talk of Internet start-ups? Do we need another tweeter or facebook? Internet revolution is over. Everything is there: communication, JPGs, videos, shopping carts, databases, maps, etc.
Now we have to put products and services online in earnest, it means hard tedious work at the existing physical businesses.
But the new revolution is commencing in robotics. Computers are getting sensors (web-cams, mikes, etc.) and begin to move.
I recently started learn to to program a Parallax's educational robot. This thing is already robust. However programming a moving physical object, moving in the real (not game) world, is quite different form screen programming. One has to learn new things: servos, chips, sensors, etc.
That is where start-ups are needed. Not making funny buttons on the screen or another type of e-mail, but stepping out into the real world.
It is not possible to solve security problems only with passive measures.
The role of the Internet in business and in social life is increasing and will continue to increase. The next step of this revolution is robotics. It will overshadow everything we saw until now.
Schools and universities, which train police officers, judges, correction institution officers, should start to include programming and robotics courses into curriculum.
When everything is done via net and by robots, there is no use of police officers and judges, who can not even understand what a culprit has committed in a technical terms, how malicious was an intent.
When these public servants and society in general understand the mechanics of this crime, it will be able to start to work to eliminate it.
But if we stop only SQl injection attacks, the criminal minds will find some other way to harm servers. It is an illusion that security can be achieved only by technical means.
I would argue that a wide condemnation by the society and its defense institutions is needed. But if society continues to rely on the network, on computers, on robots more and more without understanding underlying technologies deeply, without ability to understand what is going on inside the system, it would be a recipe for a disaster.
[quote]Your description of that part of the world in the 15th century is generally correct, but it would also be valid for the centuries before when it was the center of Christendom.[/quote]
Norman Davies writes in "Europe: a History" (ISBN 0-19-820171-0) about leadership of Islamic countries in all spheres of science and technology just up to 1450, when Johannes Guttenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg invented the movable type printing.
Before this some peasants in Europe sometimes could not even find their village after selling farm products in a remote town market and had to start a new life in a new place. There were no maps on hands, they had been too expensive before printing press.
But after 1450 books, maps, pictures, etc. were sold em mass on all sorts of markets, even along roads. It was an explosion of printing.
There were negative aspects too: "adult" materials, terrible reformation wars, which were in a way a result of the best-selling Martin Luther's essays http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther , etc.
But all in all it was the movable type printing Revolution, which catapulted Europe into the leadership role in the whole world.
And it is exactly what societies in such countries as Turkey, Iran, China, former USSR (partly), do not get, by prohibiting a global access to the information.
Turkey was a world leading country by 15th century in mathematics, medicine, architecture, etc.
But while Europe experienced the movable type printing revolution in 15th - 16th centuries, in Muslim countries the movable type print was banned for 200 years for "moral" reason.
Certainly, as any human invention, printing was also used for producing "adult" materials. But it was also used to produce maps, textbooks, literature, etc.
So as a result the Europe moved into a modernity, but the countries, where printing was banned, stayed behind. The "moral" reasons were rather an attempt of the patriarchal leaders of society to guard their power.
In the long run this ban did not benefit the society. Nowadays many Turks have to move to Germany, Austria, etc. to find a job. This is a result of the error, which was made by the Islamic countries' society five hundred years ago.
Many medieval churches in Europe were build by architects, who learned architecture from Islam mosques' builders. We still use Arabic numerals for mathematics. But now the Islam world is well behind in technology and science, including human science.
Unfortunately they step on the same rake again, because it is not possible for culture to develop without free discussions, without free access to information.
I do not get it. Oil and natural gas are lighter than water and rise up to surface. Why not to build a giant steel cone and lower it on the oil well?
Not a pathetic white box, which BP built by 2 welders, but a well engineered industrial device.
Louisiana is being destroyed in real. Why the US government could not build this giant cone itself? It is also partly to blame as its inspectors were accepting bribes. So it is not only BP's fault.
This cone would cost less that an aircraft carrier. They had to start welding it a month ago.
One should be careful of what he/she dreams, because dreams come true. As in a fairy tale where a man wished to become the richest person in the land, and it was fulfilled by impoverishment of the whole population.
Some wished to get a lot of oil, if my memory does not fail me, and got a lot of oil. It literally came to the shores in abundance.
As far as I know the US army cannot act on the territory of the United States. But the spam is destroying our businesses. Colleagues have to spend a lot of time to deal with spam. Even filters do not help anymore.
It it the police, not army, who has to deal with cyber criminals. And also there is a role for Interpol and ITU.
How can we know that it is true? One may tell me that it is Mach-7 and I will have to believe.
Could Air Force do something simpler? Could Air Force develop a system to stop oil from gushing from the tube on the ocean floor? This oil spill may soon reach Europe and Africa and there is no technology to stop it. Let alone what is happening in Louisiana.
This how weak the technology really is. There are pseudo-patriotic lies and there is the reality. As Mao said: "Wisdom begins with accepting the reality."
The only purpose of this Star Wars system was to involve Russian Federation into an exhausting arms race. But they will not step on the same rake again.
The real threat of the 21st century is miniaturization and robotics. Why shoot a heavy expensive traceable missile if it is possible to send an underwater robot through the ocean, right into an estuary.
Not possible for an underwater robot to cross an ocean? It was done already. Not once.
I do not appreciate that Firefox changed the tab order for the new tabs. Now I have to change the tab order on every my computer via about:config.
Firefox, please, do not follow example of Microsoft and Chrome, do not fix what is not broken. Please, do not introduce a ribbon as in IE and Chrome. I do not like this ribbon. I cannot even get accustomed to it.
IE and MS Office ceased to exist for me after the ribbon appearance. It is so damn fluid, it takes a lot of time to find anything on it. The same about MS Player and Windows 7. Nothing is fixed and solid anymore. Everything moves to somewhere on the screen where it is convenient to some usability PhD.
Now imagine that a car is shipped with a virus in the firmware. And at the same moment of time millions of cars on highways suddenly become unmanageable.
This article reminds again that computers more and more run our civilization. We are to begin to regard an unlawful interference into computer systems as a very serious life-threatening crime.
A certain shift in mentality is required. We shall not be amused by "black hat", "white hat", or other "hacking" subculture phenomena, but view malicious code writers as what they are, - vicious, or even murderous criminals.
Future police officers and judges should be trained at schools to understand ideas and intents in the programming code.
I can imagine a judge, specializing, say, in C++ domain, or PHP&MySQL domain, Java, etc. To lock up a criminal for good a police officer and judge are at least to understand the code which this criminal wrote. Otherwise they cannot be sure.
When a slave labor is used on a massive scale there will be a pressure on police and courts to provide qualified people into the system not just some bums unable to work well.
It was the case with the GULAG. Thieves, crooks, etc. are what they are because they cannot and do not like to work.
It is not that difficult to get an engineer or a skilled worker into a jail, since about 50% of prisoners are locked up due to an error anyway.
I think it is the only real way to support some resemblance of good order in the Internet. I mean an international cooperation in prosecution of cyber-thieves, spammers, bot-net owners, virus writers, etc.
The ideas from IT industry can be well used in this area. For example, outsourcing. Building vast camps in the North of Russia for cyber-crimianls, sort of the New Int'l Cyber-GULAG, but this time a human one. There a camp does not need an expensive fencing and guard-towers, as there is not way to walk out from there due to long distances, weather, marshes, wolfs, etc.
Cyber-criminals could acquire in the camp a new non-computer profession: joinery, tailoring, etc. under supervision of an UN correctional officers. And it could be a good business for Russian North, and it will be still cheaper than to keep a criminal, say, in Arizona for 10 - 15 years.
It is impossible to maintain an order in the Internet only by passive defensive measures (firewalls, anti-virus soft, etc.). It is like trying to keep an order in a city only by distributing bullet-resistant vests and helmets to the population, but not actually policing and locking criminals up.
10 millions, 15 millions, 20 millions in such camps is OK; as many as it takes. But it is impossible for a modern society to function in an environment where it is at the mercy of spammers, cyber-thieves, etc. and is on the knees.
Obvious solutions do not always work. For example, if one has a high temperature it does not mean that pouring a cold water of him/her will bring the high temperature down.
The illegal immigration can be stopped only by stopping any border visa control. There will be less immigrants because they will be able to return back to home countries.
Now they stay put, working, collecting money, to buy the residence papers. And after that they will never leave. Because they have invested in these residence papers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is rather a sort of a continuation of McCrystal's mutiny. The highest but elderly echelons of D.C. cannot get accustomed to new realities and rebel against their Chief in Command.
They cannot accept that one can have relations with other countries without violence and domination. And seeing some people of Russian origin having some money makes them jealous.
There have been 20 years in Russia of market economy. Of course there are rich people in Russia by now. And, by the way, the US government all the time pays to journalists in Russia all sorts of premiums and grants. Openly.
The FSU is flooded with the US spies. All these NGOs, Peace Corps, Human Rights Groups, etc. But they will not be expeled as they pay people good salaries and hardly do any damage.
Much worse is when people are without jobs and without an income. Such people are even more dangerous.
Now when a lot of people in the USA are without jobs does it make sense to take away this too? Production moved overseas, so what people have to do?
I've bought 2 mice from a company in Michigan www.quietmouse.com
This mouse is soundless. Literally soundless, there is only tactile clicks feedback, no sound at all.
It si very good for telecommuters. I can work even in a library now.
There is a good book on this topic: "Overload" by Arthur Hailey. It is a novel but Hailey's syle, with true technical details.
There are three options for the power generating companies: reducing voltage, reducing frequency, or blackout of a city district. All three are bad.
Unfortunately there is no easy way to reduce power needed to heat or air-condition a building, except of making it either smaller, or improving thermal isolation of walls, windows, doors, etc.
My father in law had exactly the same problem with an CISCO ADSL modem. He had it for about 2 years. He called ISP, thought that neighbors switch on in the evening some heavy radio-electronic equipment, etc.
I told him measure voltage in the morning when ADSL works and in the evening when it does not work sometimes. Finally he bought a voltmeter and measured. In the morning it was 220 V AC, as it should be, but in the evening - only 205 V AC.
He bought a stabilizer for about USD 50.- and the problem was gone. For good, in the thin air. Never happened again. But he had to endure unstable Internet access for many months, spending his time and others'.
ISP people were taking his modem to their office to check, gave him their own modem temporarily, which worked without problems, etc. There were a lot of problems, calls, but the actual problem was with the AC grid voltage, not with the Internet.
Check the voltage in the AC electricity supply network with a digital voltmeter during these hours.
If it drops down during these hours, then buy a stabilizer. Usually when people get how they switch on various electricity consuming devices. And if a transformer in your neighborhood has not enough capacity the voltage or frequency of AC may drop down.
It may manifest itself especially when it is hoot or cold outside, because heating and air-conditioning takes a lot of power.
ICQ is used in FSU via a convenient client "Qip" http://qip.ru/ Almost nobody is using an original ICQ client.
I think the US and RF governments should fight cyber-crime together.
Businesses in the FSU usually have a low profit margin. At the same time, the USA is one of the top spam generating countries http://www.projecthoneypot.org/spam_server_top_countries.php
Spam kills our businesses in FSU because colleagues spend a lot of working time on dealing with it. Spam filters do not help anymore. This is an area where the RF government should be interested in cooperation with the US authorities to reduce the amount of spam incoming into our businesses. Without an international effort this problem can not be solved.
I guess there could be criminals who may use ICQ, but I know for sure that there are criminals who flood our servers with spam. Significant part of this spam has the US origin. So there is a vast field for law enforcement agencies to cooperate.
For example, a mobile police team from Russia could bust a spam kings, say, in Alabama, destroy spam servers and go home in Russia. It is much harder task to do for local cops. And vice-versa. A team of the US police officers could bust, say, a soft pirates' sweetshop somewhere in Siberia and go home after destroying the illegal production and equipment. Again it is not an easy task for local police to come and destroy a business, even an illegal one.
Nowadays when we are in one and the same network it would be more productive to cooperate than to confront.
With all these malicious worms which were coming on the solid state disks to call a SSD technology a "WORM"? Was not possible to select another name?
Wind is sort of a nice idea for future, but there are things, which can be done right now. I mean producing by reducing consumption.
For example, limiting the weight of a personal car by a universal international law.
Now there are cars, which weigh 3000 kilograms and more. It can be limited, say, by 1500 kg. Still it can be quite a comfortable car.
Limiting area of a air-conditioned (heated) house or apartment by 100 square meters per one person. There are houses of hundreds of rooms, tens of thousand of square meters, where only a couple of persons live. 100 square meters per person is enough for a comfortable apartment or house.
Overweight people could be mildly, but unequivocally, taxed via increased medical insurance payments, because large amounts of food mean large amount of energy. Besides additional medical care for overweight people also takes a lot of energy. And also via 2-tickets rule for any mode of public transportation.
There should be a enforceable legal ban on any form of forbidding of drying clothing and linen on the sun at the fresh air. Drying wet clothing in the sun is the most efficient solar energy and wind device ever.
Enormous, geological amounts of energy are being spent on drying clothing and linen in the electrical dryers. And in some districts and even entire cities it is forbidden to dry clothing outdoors.
The sidewalks and walking should be promoted as a state policy, not laughed out, as it is the case now, especially in the USA, where it is close to incident to walk.
There should be process in media and in societal conversations to stop billions of women to shave legs (and other parts) nearly daily. A huge quantities of energy is being spent on this pointless exercise. Now it is also close to incident to look like a human female should look.
These are the real things, which can be and should be done. Otherwise energy consumption will be only increasing and no windmills will help us.
By the way, I know why all this talk about windmills. I've heard from a source in BP, that there is no way to stop the spill, the pressure in this well is absolutely too high. It may reach New York and further. So that is why this talk about windmills' New Course.
They talk of Internet start-ups? Do we need another tweeter or facebook? Internet revolution is over. Everything is there: communication, JPGs, videos, shopping carts, databases, maps, etc.
Now we have to put products and services online in earnest, it means hard tedious work at the existing physical businesses.
But the new revolution is commencing in robotics. Computers are getting sensors (web-cams, mikes, etc.) and begin to move.
I recently started learn to to program a Parallax's educational robot. This thing is already robust. However programming a moving physical object, moving in the real (not game) world, is quite different form screen programming. One has to learn new things: servos, chips, sensors, etc.
That is where start-ups are needed. Not making funny buttons on the screen or another type of e-mail, but stepping out into the real world.
It is not possible to solve security problems only with passive measures.
The role of the Internet in business and in social life is increasing and will continue to increase. The next step of this revolution is robotics. It will overshadow everything we saw until now.
Schools and universities, which train police officers, judges, correction institution officers, should start to include programming and robotics courses into curriculum.
When everything is done via net and by robots, there is no use of police officers and judges, who can not even understand what a culprit has committed in a technical terms, how malicious was an intent.
When these public servants and society in general understand the mechanics of this crime, it will be able to start to work to eliminate it.
But if we stop only SQl injection attacks, the criminal minds will find some other way to harm servers. It is an illusion that security can be achieved only by technical means.
I would argue that a wide condemnation by the society and its defense institutions is needed. But if society continues to rely on the network, on computers, on robots more and more without understanding underlying technologies deeply, without ability to understand what is going on inside the system, it would be a recipe for a disaster.
But of course, exotic sexuality was part of the colonization drive. I've listened to a talk of a historian on this subject.
[quote]Your description of that part of the world in the 15th century is generally correct, but it would also be valid for the centuries before when it was the center of Christendom.[/quote]
Norman Davies writes in "Europe: a History" (ISBN 0-19-820171-0) about leadership of Islamic countries in all spheres of science and technology just up to 1450, when Johannes Guttenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg invented the movable type printing.
Before this some peasants in Europe sometimes could not even find their village after selling farm products in a remote town market and had to start a new life in a new place. There were no maps on hands, they had been too expensive before printing press.
But after 1450 books, maps, pictures, etc. were sold em mass on all sorts of markets, even along roads. It was an explosion of printing.
There were negative aspects too: "adult" materials, terrible reformation wars, which were in a way a result of the best-selling Martin Luther's essays http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther , etc.
But all in all it was the movable type printing Revolution, which catapulted Europe into the leadership role in the whole world.
And it is exactly what societies in such countries as Turkey, Iran, China, former USSR (partly), do not get, by prohibiting a global access to the information.
Turkey was a world leading country by 15th century in mathematics, medicine, architecture, etc.
But while Europe experienced the movable type printing revolution in 15th - 16th centuries, in Muslim countries the movable type print was banned for 200 years for "moral" reason.
Certainly, as any human invention, printing was also used for producing "adult" materials. But it was also used to produce maps, textbooks, literature, etc.
So as a result the Europe moved into a modernity, but the countries, where printing was banned, stayed behind. The "moral" reasons were rather an attempt of the patriarchal leaders of society to guard their power.
In the long run this ban did not benefit the society. Nowadays many Turks have to move to Germany, Austria, etc. to find a job. This is a result of the error, which was made by the Islamic countries' society five hundred years ago.
Many medieval churches in Europe were build by architects, who learned architecture from Islam mosques' builders. We still use Arabic numerals for mathematics. But now the Islam world is well behind in technology and science, including human science.
Unfortunately they step on the same rake again, because it is not possible for culture to develop without free discussions, without free access to information.
I do not get it. Oil and natural gas are lighter than water and rise up to surface. Why not to build a giant steel cone and lower it on the oil well?
Not a pathetic white box, which BP built by 2 welders, but a well engineered industrial device.
Louisiana is being destroyed in real. Why the US government could not build this giant cone itself? It is also partly to blame as its inspectors were accepting bribes. So it is not only BP's fault.
This cone would cost less that an aircraft carrier. They had to start welding it a month ago.
One should be careful of what he/she dreams, because dreams come true. As in a fairy tale where a man wished to become the richest person in the land, and it was fulfilled by impoverishment of the whole population.
Some wished to get a lot of oil, if my memory does not fail me, and got a lot of oil. It literally came to the shores in abundance.
"Hypocrite! First get rid of the log in your own eye; then you will see well enough to deal with the speck in your friend's eye."
The good old US of A is the leading spam generating country by May 24, 2010: http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso . It's got on the first place spam-wise in the world.
As far as I know the US army cannot act on the territory of the United States. But the spam is destroying our businesses. Colleagues have to spend a lot of time to deal with spam. Even filters do not help anymore.
It it the police, not army, who has to deal with cyber criminals. And also there is a role for Interpol and ITU.
How can we know that it is true? One may tell me that it is Mach-7 and I will have to believe.
Could Air Force do something simpler? Could Air Force develop a system to stop oil from gushing from the tube on the ocean floor? This oil spill may soon reach Europe and Africa and there is no technology to stop it. Let alone what is happening in Louisiana.
This how weak the technology really is. There are pseudo-patriotic lies and there is the reality. As Mao said: "Wisdom begins with accepting the reality."
The only purpose of this Star Wars system was to involve Russian Federation into an exhausting arms race. But they will not step on the same rake again.
The real threat of the 21st century is miniaturization and robotics. Why shoot a heavy expensive traceable missile if it is possible to send an underwater robot through the ocean, right into an estuary.
Not possible for an underwater robot to cross an ocean? It was done already. Not once.
I do not appreciate that Firefox changed the tab order for the new tabs. Now I have to change the tab order on every my computer via about:config.
Firefox, please, do not follow example of Microsoft and Chrome, do not fix what is not broken. Please, do not introduce a ribbon as in IE and Chrome. I do not like this ribbon. I cannot even get accustomed to it.
IE and MS Office ceased to exist for me after the ribbon appearance. It is so damn fluid, it takes a lot of time to find anything on it. The same about MS Player and Windows 7. Nothing is fixed and solid anymore. Everything moves to somewhere on the screen where it is convenient to some usability PhD.
Now imagine that a car is shipped with a virus in the firmware. And at the same moment of time millions of cars on highways suddenly become unmanageable.
This article reminds again that computers more and more run our civilization. We are to begin to regard an unlawful interference into computer systems as a very serious life-threatening crime.
A certain shift in mentality is required. We shall not be amused by "black hat", "white hat", or other "hacking" subculture phenomena, but view malicious code writers as what they are, - vicious, or even murderous criminals.
Future police officers and judges should be trained at schools to understand ideas and intents in the programming code.
I can imagine a judge, specializing, say, in C++ domain, or PHP&MySQL domain, Java, etc. To lock up a criminal for good a police officer and judge are at least to understand the code which this criminal wrote. Otherwise they cannot be sure.
When a slave labor is used on a massive scale there will be a pressure on police and courts to provide qualified people into the system not just some bums unable to work well.
It was the case with the GULAG. Thieves, crooks, etc. are what they are because they cannot and do not like to work.
It is not that difficult to get an engineer or a skilled worker into a jail, since about 50% of prisoners are locked up due to an error anyway.
I think it is the only real way to support some resemblance of good order in the Internet. I mean an international cooperation in prosecution of cyber-thieves, spammers, bot-net owners, virus writers, etc.
The ideas from IT industry can be well used in this area. For example, outsourcing. Building vast camps in the North of Russia for cyber-crimianls, sort of the New Int'l Cyber-GULAG, but this time a human one. There a camp does not need an expensive fencing and guard-towers, as there is not way to walk out from there due to long distances, weather, marshes, wolfs, etc.
Cyber-criminals could acquire in the camp a new non-computer profession: joinery, tailoring, etc. under supervision of an UN correctional officers. And it could be a good business for Russian North, and it will be still cheaper than to keep a criminal, say, in Arizona for 10 - 15 years.
It is impossible to maintain an order in the Internet only by passive defensive measures (firewalls, anti-virus soft, etc.). It is like trying to keep an order in a city only by distributing bullet-resistant vests and helmets to the population, but not actually policing and locking criminals up.
10 millions, 15 millions, 20 millions in such camps is OK; as many as it takes. But it is impossible for a modern society to function in an environment where it is at the mercy of spammers, cyber-thieves, etc. and is on the knees.
I would advise to the IE designers and engineers to listen to Elaine Wherry' talk:
"What Web Application Design Can Learn from the Harpsichord" http://chi.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4404.html
Sometimes one has to stop to do a fancier and fancier design, but make things really functional and understandable.
Obvious solutions do not always work. For example, if one has a high temperature it does not mean that pouring a cold water of him/her will bring the high temperature down.
The illegal immigration can be stopped only by stopping any border visa control. There will be less immigrants because they will be able to return back to home countries.
Now they stay put, working, collecting money, to buy the residence papers. And after that they will never leave. Because they have invested in these residence papers.
The market will regulate the immigration itself.
Such a rocket is sort of a robot. I can envision a robot-fish, which reaches a shore and explodes right on the city beach.
Using robots as a weapon should be banned or limited by agreements.