Kudos to the folks at NASA and JPL for a job well done. Hopefully we'll get some great science out of it.
All of this just shows what a huge mistake was made in cutting the budget for planetary science and future Mars missions. Tonight, NASA did everything that they are supposed to do. They pushed us further out into the solar system, giving us the most detailed view yet of another world. They pushed scientific boundaries, sending an entire laboratory to another planet to look for extraterrestrial life. They pushed the limits of engineering. And they showed the world what we look like at our best- an America that is innovative, pioneering, and willing to take risks.
Times are tough, but of all the things to cut from the budget, why cut planetary missions? The cuts mean that we don't have anything in the works; we've got Curiosity but we have no plans to follow up. I find myself deeply disappointed that the White House would do something so short-sighted. The thing is, what happened tonight was genuinely inspiring. I felt truly proud of what my country had done. And I tried to remember the last time I had felt like that, and then it hit me. It was when Obama was elected.
Not only that, but it is critical that not only can you do something like rotate the observer several different ways, but those ways are all different ways of doing it. In other words, you want redundant systems that will survive whatever tempest took out the main system.
True, there are certain phases of the mission where you can recover from a malfunction. If there's a software problem en route to Mars, or a hardware malfunction once the rover is on the ground, you can try to find a way to fix or work around the problem. The problem with the landing, obviously, is that you've just got one shot. If the pulleys jam or the cables tangle, if the explosives don't cut the skycrane free, if it selects a bad landing spot or comes in too fast... and it's all happening 15 light-minutes away, so by the time NASA figures out something is wrong, it's already too late to do anything. If something fails during that phase, that's $2.5 billion spent adding another crater to the surface of Mars.
. The whole thing has an amazingly sci-fi feel to it, like it's the opening scene of a sci-fi blockbuster movie. We really do live in amazing times when you think about it.
The skycrane/rover detach from the parachute at around 2:00 and you can watch as the sky crane lowers the rover at 2:48. It does seem a little too elaborate, and my gut feeling watching it is that using such a complicated landing mechanism is just asking for something to go wrong. But then again... well, think about it. Pulleys are pretty simple machines, and we've been using them for thousands of years. There are a lot of machines on this rover that are vastly more complicated than pulleys and cables- the heat shield, the parachute, the nuclear reactor, the onboard computer, the antenna, the camera that finds the landing site, the rocket motors, the software.
I sure as hell hope it all works, though. Unlike the last mission, there's just the one rover, and there's a hell of a lot riding on it. With the cuts to NASA's planetary science program, we won't be headed back to Mars for a long, long time, and it will be a lot harder to get the program started again if Curiosity fails.
The shift to drones is already happening. Right now there are three UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles) in development. These are the General Atomics Avenger (Predator C), which is a jet-powered answer to the Predator, the Boeing Phantom Ray, and the Northrop-Grumman X-47B. All three have undergone flight testing, and the X-47B is scheduled for carrier testing in 2013 and then will undergo aerial refuelling tests. These are all subsonic aircraft, and the Phantom Ray and X-47B both use a flying wing design which is designed for long range and stealth, not maneuverability. But it means that within a few years, the U.S. will have three different unmanned aircraft capable of filling the strike role currently filled by planes like the F-15E, F-16, and F/A-18.
The obvious next step is to make a UAV with supersonic capability, vectored thrust and large control surfaces for improved maneuverability, and a powerful radar to track aircraft- basically, an F-22 minus the pilot.
The US military is counting on the F-22 (with upgrades along the way) to completely dominate the skies anywhere and everywhere in the world for the next 20-30 years.
Couple issues here. First, the U.S. currently has air superiority and isn't in danger of losing it anytime soon. The F-15 can shoot down anything flying, and the other thing is that the U.S. has a lot of other capabilities that go into maintaining air superiority- AWACs planes, refuelling capabilities, air bases situated around the world, carriers, and so forth. It's not enough to build a fifth-generation plane without the technology and infrastructure to wage an air war. Even if the Chinese J-20 or the Russian PAK-FA do enter production in the next five or ten years, they're a long way from being able to challenge U.S. air superiority. No other non-allied country would even come close to posing a threat.
Second, how likely are we to get in an air war with Russia or China? Probably not very, and the reason is the same reason we haven't already gone to war. When both sides have nuclear weapons, they're going to do everything in their power to avoid a direct confrontation. While it's entirely possible that we'll find ourselves on the opposite side of a fight like we did in Vietnam or Afghanistan, the odds that we'll see American F-22s dogfighting Russian Sukhois or Chinese J-20s are pretty remote. The odds of a war with China are even lower- China makes all our favorite high-tech gadgets and cheap Wal-Mart stuff; a shooting war would do so much damage to the Chinese and American economies that both sides will do everything in their power to avoid a direct fight.
Finally, the F-22 and F-35 are going to be obsolete soon enough. The Economist called the F-35 "the last generation of manned fighter". The Predator has already been used successfully for air-to-ground strike and close air support, and (with somewhat less success) in air-to-air combat over Iraq. It's shown the ability to do a lot of the missions that manned aircraft do, and a lot of missions that manned aircraft can't do. Building a plane without a pilot or cockpit means less drag and weight, which means longer range, better speed, more payload. Plus, the computer doesn't black out in high-G maneuvers, or need to sleep, or need to get rescued if it's shot down. So if maintaining air superiority is the goal, then we should invest in developing an unmanned air superiority fighter.
Look at Libya. In early 2011, the Predator is sent into action conducting airstrikes against Gaddafi loyalists. Meanwhile the F-22 ends up grounded for months because of these oxygen issues. That pretty much says it all.
The notion that the M16 is unreliable got started with the shaky roll out in Vietnam. The normal teething problems of any system
C.J. Chivers covers this in "The Gun", his history of the AK-47. The inherent reliability of the AK-47 goes back all the way to the prototypes. There are a couple of design decisions that make the AK-47 very reliable. One is that the gas piston reloading mechanism that ejects the spent casing has heavier components
and has a much forceful action, it just hammers the spent shells out, so it is harder to jam. Another is that the components were deliberately made to fit together loosely, if the rifle gets dirty or is dropped in sand or mud, it can still fire. The rife was also protected by chrome, which made it corrosion resistant. And the other thing is, they field-tested the prototypes. They didn't settle on the AK-47 design and then start field-testing, they had a number of different designs they were experimenting with and they were rolling them all around in the mud to see which would hold up well under combat conditions.The AK-47 was the design that emerged from this Darwinian design process.
The M-16 has more moving parts, they fit together closely and, critically, the Armalite company never did the kind of field-testing that the Soviet design bureau did. The GIs sent to Vietnam did the field-testing, and when the reports came back that there were problems, the company and the Army were slow to respond. One of the biggest issues is that the M-16 was sent to wet, humid Vietnam without chroming the barrel to protect it against rust. Eventually they worked a lot of the kinks out, but a lot of GIs died in the process. There's an excerpt from the book talking about this you can read online http://www.esquire.com/features/ak-47-history-1110-3.
I think the comparison of this oxygen system to the premature rollout of the M-16 is a valid one. In both cases, contractors fielded a system before it was ready, jeopardizing people's lives. And given the cost of the F-22, I think the design philosophy behind the AK-47 is also worth talking about. The Soviet approach was to create a gun that had several key features- it was lightweight, it had a rapid rate of fire, it was cheap enough to produce in vast numbers, and it was simple and rugged enough that it didn't require a lot of training and maintenance to use. They emphasized quantity over quality. An enemy with accurate weapons and superior training could be overcome if you just rounded up a whole bunch of peasants and gave every one of them a gun that shot 600 rounds per minute. And all you have to do is look at the American experience in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to see that there's a lot to this philosophy. Because of planes like the F-22, nobody can possibly defeat the U.S. in a head-to-head contest for air superiority, but that doesn't guarantee victory any more than it did in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
I think the point is that the benefits of these beasts don't outweigh their finickiness. We didn't need an M-16. An AK-47 would do the job. And we don't need an F-22 because there's not even a job for it currently.
The problem is that the extraordinary sophistication of modern combat aircraft means a longer design cycle. Here's some numbers from Wikipedia: The P-51 Mustang is widely regarded as one of the best planes of WWII, and it took just four years, 1938-1942, to go from concept to combat. The F-4 Phantom II took seven years, 1953-1960, to go from initial designs to entering service. The F-15 takes 11 years, 1965-1976, to enter service. The F-22 takes 24 years, 1981-2005. Maybe you could shorten that cycle a bit with better project management and less bureaucracy, but the trend isn't specific to the U.S. The Soviet Yak-3 goes from concept to service in 3 years (!), 1941-1944, but the Mig-29 takes 11 years, 1971-1983. Development of Russia's fifth-generation fighter, the Pak-Fa, begins in the late 1980s and it should enter service in 2015-2016.
The end result? The F-22 is an anachronism. It's something out of a time warp, a throwback to an era that's long past. Sort of the Austin Powers of fighter jets. First, it's designed to deal with a radically different strategic picture. In 1981, when design began on the F-22, the major threat was a large, sophisticated, Soviet military. Now the real threat is a guerrilla with an AK-47 and an IED. Conflict with an advanced nation like Russia or China isn't impossible, but it's unlikely. Second, the technological picture has changed as well. In 1981 the cutting edge in computing was a 1MHZ Apple II with 48k of memory; now computing hardware and software have advanced to the point where an onboard computer can take off, fly, and land the plane, so the pilot is increasingly redundant. The F-22 is an expensive, obsolete solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35 are an expensive throwback. We've seen what the Predator can do, and it's been revealing. If you're familiar with military history you probably know about the 1921 battleship bombing trials. That was when bombs dropped by aircraft were used to destroy a dreadnought; it signalled that the era of battleships was over and that future naval battles would be conducted by and decided by air power; it signalled the rise of the carrier. We're seeing something similar now, with Predator UAVs being armed with Hellfire and Stinger missiles and used for precision ground attacks, close-air-support, and air-to-air. It's only a matter of time before UAVs take over missions traditionally left to manned aircraft. So instead of trying to refight the Cold War, a more realistic plan would be to maintain air superiority against Russia and China by upgrading fourth-generation aircraft like the F-15 and F-16 over the next decade, while leapfrogging past fifth-generation fighters to sixth-generation fighters- unmanned fighters. Eliminating the pilot isn't without it's issues (as the loss of the RQ-170 Sentinel over Iran shows), but eliminating the pilot and cockpit makes for a lighter, more streamlined aircraft which improves speed and range. Survivability also becomes less of an issue, so you don't need as many backups, the airframe doesn't have to be as tough, and stealthiness is less of an issue. Again, that means longer range and better speed. Eliminating the pilot and all the systems associated with his survival also means a cheaper aircraft, and one that takes less time to develop. Most importantly, without a pilot to worry about, you can carry out risky missions without worrying about the political implications of having a pilot shot down in Iran or the tribal areas of Pakistan.
Actually this should read thousands. There are about 8,000 gun deaths per year. And obviously, even a total ban on firearms isn't going to stop all of them. Still, Canadian-style gun laws could probably save thousands of lives per year.
Because taking away legal firearm ownership clearly reduces the chances of getting shot... (That was sarcasm for the slow among us)
Here are the stats on gun deaths for the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., from Wikipedia:
United States: 10.27 per 100,000 people
Canada: 4.78 per 100,000 people
England:.46 per 10,0000 people.
The United States, obviously, has the least gun control. Canada has more regulation. Rifles are limited to 5 round magazines, pistols to 10 rounds; licenses required for pistols. The U.K. has effectively outlawed semiautomatic weapons and pistols. Overall homicide rates follow these patterns, so it's not the case that people will just find other ways to commit murder. Making guns more available and making rapid-fire weapons more available makes murder easier, and therefore more common. I've shot assault rifles and.50 caliber sniper rifles, and yeah, they're pretty awesome. But personally, I'd be willing to have stricter licensing requirements, gun registration, background checks, and limits on clip size to save tens of thousands of lives a year.
It'll just add to the political football match we've had for decades. Nutjobs will still kill people with weapons bought legally, with ammo bought leagally and nothing illegal done until they day they act.
I'm waiting for the first 3D printed bomb
That's entirely true, as long as there are human beings, people will go insane and kill people. But when certain classes of weapons become illegal or are made more difficult to obtain, the outcome of these events would be rather different. The most recent headlines would probably read something like "man goes on insane rampage, kills six with bolt-action hunting rifle", as opposed to a dozen. The NRA likes to say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Which is true. But guns are tools people use to do a job, and when you can't get the right tools for the job (in this case, murdering people), then you can't do your job as well. Canada, for instance, places restrictions on the size of the magazine (5 rounds for rifles, 10 for handguns) are requires that you take a test and get a license called a Possession and Acquisition License before you can buy a handgun. Their rate of firearms-related deaths (4.78 per 100,000 people) is about half that of the United States (10.27 per 100,000 people). The U.K. has effectively banned semiautomatic rifles and handguns and has an even lower rate of firearm related deaths (.46 per 10,000). All else being equal, the more restrictions are placed on handguns, the fewer deaths there are. Obviously, people can and will resort to other tools, but it's a lot less efficient to stab, poison, strangle or bludgeon people to death. Canada still has a lower murder rate (1.7 murders per 100,000 people) than the U.S. (4.7 per 100,000) and the U.K. is even lower (1.23 per 100,000). These stats are all off Wikipedia, incidentally.
Think of it this way. We already have gun control; you can't buy a fully automatic assault rifle. What if there wasn't any restriction on what you could buy? If you could buy anything you wanted, you wouldn't conduct a massacre with a semiautomatic AR-15, you'd buy a fully automatic AK-47. For one thing, on automatic an AK can fire 600 rounds per minute. The other thing is that they're simple, rugged and reliable, designed for use by untrained peasants fighting in the hills. The AR-15/M-16 was notorious for being finicky and jamming at the wrong moment, particularly when the rifle was first fielded in Viet Nam. It's better these days, but the fact that the AR-15 used in the Colorado killing jammed is the only reason more people didn't die. The bottom line is here, gun control (as limited as it is) saved lives during this massacre, more gun control would save more lives.
As a business plan, it's somewhere between very, very stupid and completely insane. $150 million is a staggering amount of money, and the number of people who would have that kind of money to burn is pretty limited. A billionaire could spend that kind of cash and not feel it. According to Wikipedia, there are a grand total of 1,226 of them; so it's a pretty limited market we're talking about. And even for a billionaire, that's a price tag that's gonna hurt. If you were worth a billion dollars, you'd be giving up 1/6 of your entire fortune, just for a vacation. And that's gonna be a hard sell. I'm going to take a wild guess that most of these guys did not become billionaires by being spendthrifts.
It's not a crime for them to purify uranium below 29% purity.
No, it's not a crime... but it's just a teensy weensy bit difficult to explain why a peaceful nuclear program would need to enrich their peaceful uranium to peaceful weapons grade, to peacefully conceal the existence of their peaceful nuclear facilities, and bury these peaceful nuclear facilities hundreds of feet under a peaceful mountain in facilities hardened against bunker-busting bombs. Which is what the Iranian regime has done.
Seriously, what's with all the love for Iran's totalitarian regime ? Why do you rush to defend a dictatorship that refuses to recognize the rights of the people to elect their own leaders? Iran's people turned out in the streets by the thousands to protest the rule of the mullahs and demand the right to choose their government, even when the regime beat and killed them, and you act like Iran's theocracy is just misunderstood. Yes, regime change in Iraq was a bad call, but the failures of the Bush administration don't mean we should suddenly start giving the benefit of the doubt to brutal, anti-democratic regimes. Yes, it's simplistic and naive to assume that the U.S. is the good guy and our enemies are the bad guys. But it's equally simplistic to assume that because the U.S. has been a bad guy in recent years, Iran is suddenly the good guy. You've rejected a naive and simplistic right-wing narrative where the foreigners are the Bad Guys for a naive simplistic left-wing one where the U.S. is the Bad Guys. You've switched your villains and heroes around, but you haven't gained a more nuanced view of the world. You've only continued to see it through a black-and-white Hollywood morality. You can only see a Good Guy, and a Bad Guy, and since the U.S. is a Bad Guy, in your story the Iranian regime must be good.
I don't have anything against the people of Iran. It's a country with a rich history, a rich culture, and hopefully a rich future, if the people can find a way to take control of their country back, and they can work to develop the country instead of developing nukes. And I deeply believe that the U.S. owes the people of Iran a formal apology for the way we screwed them over by supporting the Shah. But you dickheads, you idiots, you tools rushing to defend the Iranian regime- you're not supporting the Iranian people, you're supporting the assholes who are trying to hold them down. And for that, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves, if you have a single ounce of honesty and integrity left.
Participators need to understand the culture of Iran.
Yes, let's all gather around, share our feelings, get to really know each other, sing "Kumbaya" around the campfire, and peace will follow. F***ing A.
The U.S. and Iran aren't preparing for war because we don't understand each other. We're preparing for war because we *do* understand each other. Iran understands that without a nuclear bomb, they will be vulnerable to regime change by invasion (like the U.S. did in Iraq) or by outside support for a popular uprising (like the U.S. did in Libya). The U.S. understands that Iran wants a nuclear deterrent, and is willing to set off a regional arms race to get it. We are fundamentally at odds.
I'm glad at least one person on Slashdot gets it. It's not "Fox News Lies!" or "MSNBC Lies!," "RT Lies!," "BBC Lies!," etc. They all have skin in the game and they have a particular mindset and worldview to which they want to cater. You're not going be able to go out there and verify everything they say, so all you can do is try to get as many angles on an issue as you can in order to grasp the reality of the situation.
If you want to know how old the earth is, you don't go out and ask a dozen people off the street to "get as many angles on an issue as you can", you try to find a reliable source. In this case, that means you find a scientist, and if you want a precise answer, you find a geologist. That's because reality isn't a compromise; it either happened or it didn't. You don't go, "some people say the earth is 3 billion years old, some people say it's 6,000 years old, let's meet somewhere in between and call it an even million."
Similarly, if you want to be informed about the world, you find a reliable source. Some of them are simply more reliable than others- NPR has very good news, the Wall Street Journal's reporting is very good (I'm less a fan of their op-ed pages), the Economist provides good news as well. This isn't a question of political slant; these news organizations cover the spectrum (NPR on the left, Economist center-right, Journal on the right). But in each case, the people working as reporters for these organizations are capable of putting their political agendas to the side and reporting on what really happened. The Journal, for instance, is owned by Rupert Murdoch and so they have an op-ed section which works as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party just like Fox News, but they've actually managed to keep their reporting separate from that. I'd argue that getting your news exclusively from any one of these sources would make you more informed than listening to both Fox News (a terrible right-wing channel) and CNN (a terrible left-wing channel) and then trying to triangulate the truth.
If there were a thousand bootleg copies of the software for every legitimate one, that government might not bother to go through 10 million documents for about the same haul, as most of the bootleg copies won't be producing anything worth that much.
Wait, so the problem is that the Chinese are stealing people's blueprints, and your "solution" is to have people steal software? That's got to be the most twisted defense of piracy I've ever seen. I mean, if it's morally acceptable to take a piece of software that retails for $4000 without paying for it, then isn't it also morally acceptable for the Chinese to steal those blueprints? If it's okay to steal software, movies, and music because "information wants to be free" then its okay for the Chinese to, say, swipe the design for an American manufactured wind turbine because "information wants to be free". The whole argument that it's not really theft when you download an MP3 because you're not depriving them of an actual object would also apply to the manufacturer. The Chinese didn't actually take anything from them, all they did was rip off the design. It seems to me that either the creator has the right to control the distribution of the intellectual property or they don't.
This hasnt been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Even though we all think US/Isreal are the curprits, all articles should start with an appropriate preface. This really needs to stop.
The allegation that the United States used a worm to secretly infect and then attack an Iranian nuclear facility is a very serious one... so if the U.S. really was innocent, wouldn't the government officially deny involvement? Instead, when asked about Stuxnet, administration officials say things such as "we're glad they are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them," which is what the White House Coordinator for Arms Control had to say in 2011. That's just short of taking credit for the attack.
Now we have allegations published in the New York times where unnamed White House officials claim that Stuxnet was started in the later part of the Bush Administration and then continued by Obama. The account is very detailed, down to details of the conversations taking place in White House meetings. Again, serious allegations. So how does the Obama Administration respond? Not by denying involvement. Instead, they have Attorney General Eric Holder assign two prosecutors to look into leaks coming from the White House. Here's what Holder has to say: "The unauthorized disclosure of classified information can compromise the security of this country and all Americans, and it will not be tolerated." This response- to treat the reports in the Times as a national security issue, rather than to deny them- tells you all you need to know.
It seems to me that if the employee refused to sell her an iPad because she was going to send it to a cousin in Iran, then he was doing the right thing, or at least, acting in accordance with U.S. law. This is what the employee showed her:
PROHIBITED DESTINATIONS
The U.S. holds complete embargoes against Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria
The exportation, reexportation, sale or supply, directly or indirectly, from the United States, or by a U.S. person wherever located, of any Apple goods, software, technology (including technical data), or services to any of these countries is strictly prohibited without prior authorization by the U.S. Government. This prohibition also applies to any Apple owned subsidiary or any subsidiary employee worldwide.
So the Apple Store was acting in accordance with U.S. policy. But the real issue, in my mind, is that there are western companies that sell hardware and software directly to repressive regimes that let them spy on their citizens. For instance, the Silicon Valley based company NetApp sold a storage system to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. The system allows Syria to archive and search through emails they intercept from their citizens. Assad has been engaged in a brutal war against his own people that has resulted in the loss of 10,000 lives, including the slaughter of women of children by regime-backed paramilitary organizations. This system helps Assad continue to repress his people by spying on the dissidents. That kind of technology transfer clearly does help a repressive regime and clearly does act in a way that's contrary to American values.
Dunno. there's just something f***ed up about U.S. policy when it's illegal for a teenager to buy an iPad for her cousin in one country, but somehow a U.S. company was able to sell equipment that helps the Assad regime pull citizens off the street to be tortured and killed.
It was not an assault rifle. Stop listening to a bunch of policemen (in this case), reporters and politicians who do not know the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and an assault weapon. The weapon in this case was the former. Just because it has a plastic and aluminum stock doesn't mean its an assault rifle or that its only purpose is killing people, en masse or otherwise.
The weapon he was carrying was reported to be a PS90 http://www.fnhusa.com/le/products/firearms/family.asp?fid=FNF009, which is the civilian model of the FN P90. The FN P90 is bullpup-style automatic weapon
described by Wikipedia as "designed as a compact but powerful firearm for vehicle crews, operators of crew-served weapons, support personnel, special forces and counter-terrorist groups." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_P90 The PS90 is semiautomatic instead of fully automatic, although that's hardly the kind of thing some Utahn mom dragging her kids to the mall can be expected to appreciate, two weeks after Gabrielle Giffords and a whole crowd of people were gunned down in public (to put a little perspective on things). It's still a very dangerous weapon- it's semiautomatic, described by the manufacturer as capable of taking a 10- or 30-round clip, and fires a high-velocity round. The PS90 also has a higher muzzle velocity than the military version because it has a longer barrel. So perhaps it's not technically an "assault rife", but whatever you want to call it, the bottom line is that if you wanted to take out a crowd of unarmed civilians, this would probably be a pretty good weapon to use.
As far as purpose, automatic weapons were designed for one purpose: antipersonnel. From the Gatling gun, to the Maxim, to the submachine gun, to the German Sturmgewehr 44, the first modern assault rifle, and then to compact bullpup automatics like the FN P90, the evolution of these weapons has been driven by one thing and one thing only. And that's killing other human beings.
This is a propaganda war as much as anything, and I don't have any evidence to believe either side.
Comments like this really, really piss me off. The thing is, you *do* have information, or rather, you have information if you want it. You have what the Syrian people do not have- free access to the internet- which means that you can go to Google News, type in something like "Syria Internet Surveillance" and in a second have all the information you want, and then think critically about what it all means. There are lots of articles about Syria spying on its citizens, there are dozens of articles about Western companies (including U.S. based companies like NetApp) selling Syria the equipment to monitor and censor the internet and cell phone messages. We have tons of information all telling the same story- Syria has gone to incredible lengths to monitor and censor its citizens' communication. That doesn't mean this story is true, but it does make these allegations credible.
Now, if you don't know anything about that, that's because of your own choices. You've made a choice not to be an informed citizen, and not to follow international news, and not to think critically. If you want to be uninformed, fine. You have that right. But don't go around being ignorant of the news and then pretending like you're far too clever to be taken in by propaganda.
It may well be correct to say that the number of amateur scientists has increased, and the tools available to an amateur scientist are pretty impressive (compare the computing power and software of an average laptop to a university machine 50 years ago). But the trend is clear- amateurs are playing less and less of a role.
The biggest reason is that it's simply harder to make a discovery now than it was 100 or 200 years ago. Back in the time of Galileo, you could do cutting-edge physics research by dropping two wooden balls of different masses. The total cost of the research would be trivial and it would take you a few minutes to conduct. These days, cutting-edge physics means an experimental device like the Large Hadron Collider, hundreds of people, years of time, and billions of dollars. Cutting edge was within the reach of anybody in 1564, now it can only be accomplished with the support of a large nation. The same goes for astronomy. Galileo was able to build a telescope that was more powerful than anything out there, point it at the moon and planets, and see things people had never seen before. These days, doing cutting-edge astronomy research requires a space telescope or an observatory, again costing millions or billions of dollars, putting cutting-edge astronomy research beyond the reach of an amateur. The amount of expertise has also gone up- science has advanced so much that it may take 10 years of higher education just to become familiar with the science that has already been done, before you can start actually making major discoveries yourself. That kind of time commitment is difficult for an amateur working in their off-hours to match.
As a result, the vast majority of scientific discoveries are made by full-time scientists employed by universities, research institutions, or corporations, working in teams, and supported by their institutions or large granting agencies. It's not unique to science, we see this with technology as well. Back in the day, Orville and Wilbur Wright put together the world's most advanced aircraft in their bicycle workshop; these days huge teams of engineers labor at Boeing or Skunkworks to put together the newest plane. The Apple I was put together by hobbyists, the latest iPad involves huge teams of designers and programmers working in collaboration with Chinese factories. As a field advances, it's harder and harder for someone with limited resources and limited time to make a major contribution.
... or they just paid/threatened Microsoft. Much simpler and easier.
The problem with the claim put forward in the article is that it is *not* the logical conclusion of what we know about Stuxnet and Flame. What we know about Flame is that (i) it's the most advanced piece of malware ever created (that we know about), (ii) it has connections to Stuxnet, (iii) it's primarily targeting Iran, but it's also targeting Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. That information tells us a lot about who was behind it.
Okay, so first off, Flame is very large and extremely advanced. That implies a country with an advanced cyber-warfare program. That list is fairly short, and the big names on it are the United States, Russia, China, and Israel.
Second, the people behind Flame were also involved in Stuxnet. The people analyzing Stuxnet came to the conclusion that it was the work of two different countries, with suspicion falling on the U.S. and Israel. In the New York Times article, it's reported that Stuxnet is designed by the U.S., but the Israelis helped out. The Obama Administration has not denied anything published in that article.
Third, Flame is primarily targeting Iran, again that points to the U.S. and Israel, Iran's primary enemies. However, Flame's secondary targets are all areas that are potential threats to Israel (Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) but this list does not include countries that pose security threats to the U.S. but not to Israel (Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea). Finally, there are also some Flame infections in Israel itself. Given that one of the purposes of an intelligence organization is (unfortunately) to spy on their own citizens, that also fits the idea that Flame is written by the Israelis.
If Flame is Israeli, then the idea that the U.S. is planting spies in Microsoft is not the "logical conclusion" of the facts at all. So does this mean that the Mossad has penetrated Microsoft? Well, I suppose it's possible. It would antagonize the U.S. to learn that our ally has spies in our corporations, but it's also been alleged that Israel has moles in the Pentagon, so it wouldn't be entirely surprising, either.
What the F are you yammering on about, you nob? It is completely common to have a completely free(from a libertarian perspective) and uncensored internet connection from a plethora of ISP in the United States and the United Kingdom. Genuine issues abound in many countries, including Ethiopia and the risk of the erosion of freedoms in many other places does exist. But, you hyperbolic patent falsifications erode people's willingness to take these matters seriously. In the long run, you are doing far more harm than good.
Please feel free to STFU!
Seconded. There are real issues, but saying "OMG teh USA is just like China!" is really not helpful. The situation is a lot more complex than that. The United States has actually done a pretty amazing job promoting free speech on some fronts- the U.S. government invented the internet after all, and private U.S. companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook have provided the means for people to engage in free speech. The article mentions Ethiopia trying to block Tor... well, the Tor anonymity network was actually developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
At the same time, you have to ask where all of the technology to censor the internet is coming from in the first place. China doesn't really need any help, but for countries like Syria, Iran, and Ethiopia to monitor the internet, they need outside help. The answer is that this help comes from the west- there are companies in Silicon Valley and in Europe that are willing to sell the equipment and software needed to hack into, store, and analyze the communications of their citizens. They make a profit, and they don't ask too many questions about whether this technology might lead to the arrest and torture of dissidents.
The article mentions that Ethiopia is using Deep Packet Inspection to filter out the internet and block Tor. The question becomes, who's providing them with this technology? If we want to make a difference that's how we could do it- figure out where this technology is coming from and then apply pressure to the company selling this technology. If the companies selling this technology are held up to public scrutiny and faced with the prospect of boycotts and negative press, a lot of them will back off.
I felt that your post on internet censorship makes a refreshingly reasonable, coherent, and well-informed argument, without resorting to ridiculous exaggerations or references to 1984 and the Nazis. It suggests a nuanced worldview that goes beyond simple black-and-white thinking about complicated issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos to the folks at NASA and JPL for a job well done. Hopefully we'll get some great science out of it.
All of this just shows what a huge mistake was made in cutting the budget for planetary science and future Mars missions. Tonight, NASA did everything that they are supposed to do. They pushed us further out into the solar system, giving us the most detailed view yet of another world. They pushed scientific boundaries, sending an entire laboratory to another planet to look for extraterrestrial life. They pushed the limits of engineering. And they showed the world what we look like at our best- an America that is innovative, pioneering, and willing to take risks.
Times are tough, but of all the things to cut from the budget, why cut planetary missions? The cuts mean that we don't have anything in the works; we've got Curiosity but we have no plans to follow up. I find myself deeply disappointed that the White House would do something so short-sighted. The thing is, what happened tonight was genuinely inspiring. I felt truly proud of what my country had done. And I tried to remember the last time I had felt like that, and then it hit me. It was when Obama was elected.
There's more than a little irony to that.
Not only that, but it is critical that not only can you do something like rotate the observer several different ways, but those ways are all different ways of doing it. In other words, you want redundant systems that will survive whatever tempest took out the main system.
True, there are certain phases of the mission where you can recover from a malfunction. If there's a software problem en route to Mars, or a hardware malfunction once the rover is on the ground, you can try to find a way to fix or work around the problem. The problem with the landing, obviously, is that you've just got one shot. If the pulleys jam or the cables tangle, if the explosives don't cut the skycrane free, if it selects a bad landing spot or comes in too fast... and it's all happening 15 light-minutes away, so by the time NASA figures out something is wrong, it's already too late to do anything. If something fails during that phase, that's $2.5 billion spent adding another crater to the surface of Mars.
. The whole thing has an amazingly sci-fi feel to it, like it's the opening scene of a sci-fi blockbuster movie. We really do live in amazing times when you think about it.
The skycrane/rover detach from the parachute at around 2:00 and you can watch as the sky crane lowers the rover at 2:48. It does seem a little too elaborate, and my gut feeling watching it is that using such a complicated landing mechanism is just asking for something to go wrong. But then again... well, think about it. Pulleys are pretty simple machines, and we've been using them for thousands of years. There are a lot of machines on this rover that are vastly more complicated than pulleys and cables- the heat shield, the parachute, the nuclear reactor, the onboard computer, the antenna, the camera that finds the landing site, the rocket motors, the software.
I sure as hell hope it all works, though. Unlike the last mission, there's just the one rover, and there's a hell of a lot riding on it. With the cuts to NASA's planetary science program, we won't be headed back to Mars for a long, long time, and it will be a lot harder to get the program started again if Curiosity fails.
a tremendous drain on resources over time for potentially no benefit
Well, isn't that exactly what Wall Street specializes in?
The obvious next step is to make a UAV with supersonic capability, vectored thrust and large control surfaces for improved maneuverability, and a powerful radar to track aircraft- basically, an F-22 minus the pilot.
The US military is counting on the F-22 (with upgrades along the way) to completely dominate the skies anywhere and everywhere in the world for the next 20-30 years.
Couple issues here. First, the U.S. currently has air superiority and isn't in danger of losing it anytime soon. The F-15 can shoot down anything flying, and the other thing is that the U.S. has a lot of other capabilities that go into maintaining air superiority- AWACs planes, refuelling capabilities, air bases situated around the world, carriers, and so forth. It's not enough to build a fifth-generation plane without the technology and infrastructure to wage an air war. Even if the Chinese J-20 or the Russian PAK-FA do enter production in the next five or ten years, they're a long way from being able to challenge U.S. air superiority. No other non-allied country would even come close to posing a threat.
Second, how likely are we to get in an air war with Russia or China? Probably not very, and the reason is the same reason we haven't already gone to war. When both sides have nuclear weapons, they're going to do everything in their power to avoid a direct confrontation. While it's entirely possible that we'll find ourselves on the opposite side of a fight like we did in Vietnam or Afghanistan, the odds that we'll see American F-22s dogfighting Russian Sukhois or Chinese J-20s are pretty remote. The odds of a war with China are even lower- China makes all our favorite high-tech gadgets and cheap Wal-Mart stuff; a shooting war would do so much damage to the Chinese and American economies that both sides will do everything in their power to avoid a direct fight.
Finally, the F-22 and F-35 are going to be obsolete soon enough. The Economist called the F-35 "the last generation of manned fighter". The Predator has already been used successfully for air-to-ground strike and close air support, and (with somewhat less success) in air-to-air combat over Iraq. It's shown the ability to do a lot of the missions that manned aircraft do, and a lot of missions that manned aircraft can't do. Building a plane without a pilot or cockpit means less drag and weight, which means longer range, better speed, more payload. Plus, the computer doesn't black out in high-G maneuvers, or need to sleep, or need to get rescued if it's shot down. So if maintaining air superiority is the goal, then we should invest in developing an unmanned air superiority fighter.
Look at Libya. In early 2011, the Predator is sent into action conducting airstrikes against Gaddafi loyalists. Meanwhile the F-22 ends up grounded for months because of these oxygen issues. That pretty much says it all.
The notion that the M16 is unreliable got started with the shaky roll out in Vietnam. The normal teething problems of any system
C.J. Chivers covers this in "The Gun", his history of the AK-47. The inherent reliability of the AK-47 goes back all the way to the prototypes. There are a couple of design decisions that make the AK-47 very reliable. One is that the gas piston reloading mechanism that ejects the spent casing has heavier components and has a much forceful action, it just hammers the spent shells out, so it is harder to jam. Another is that the components were deliberately made to fit together loosely, if the rifle gets dirty or is dropped in sand or mud, it can still fire. The rife was also protected by chrome, which made it corrosion resistant. And the other thing is, they field-tested the prototypes. They didn't settle on the AK-47 design and then start field-testing, they had a number of different designs they were experimenting with and they were rolling them all around in the mud to see which would hold up well under combat conditions.The AK-47 was the design that emerged from this Darwinian design process.
The M-16 has more moving parts, they fit together closely and, critically, the Armalite company never did the kind of field-testing that the Soviet design bureau did. The GIs sent to Vietnam did the field-testing, and when the reports came back that there were problems, the company and the Army were slow to respond. One of the biggest issues is that the M-16 was sent to wet, humid Vietnam without chroming the barrel to protect it against rust. Eventually they worked a lot of the kinks out, but a lot of GIs died in the process. There's an excerpt from the book talking about this you can read online http://www.esquire.com/features/ak-47-history-1110-3.
I think the comparison of this oxygen system to the premature rollout of the M-16 is a valid one. In both cases, contractors fielded a system before it was ready, jeopardizing people's lives. And given the cost of the F-22, I think the design philosophy behind the AK-47 is also worth talking about. The Soviet approach was to create a gun that had several key features- it was lightweight, it had a rapid rate of fire, it was cheap enough to produce in vast numbers, and it was simple and rugged enough that it didn't require a lot of training and maintenance to use. They emphasized quantity over quality. An enemy with accurate weapons and superior training could be overcome if you just rounded up a whole bunch of peasants and gave every one of them a gun that shot 600 rounds per minute. And all you have to do is look at the American experience in Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan to see that there's a lot to this philosophy. Because of planes like the F-22, nobody can possibly defeat the U.S. in a head-to-head contest for air superiority, but that doesn't guarantee victory any more than it did in Vietnam or Afghanistan.
I think the point is that the benefits of these beasts don't outweigh their finickiness. We didn't need an M-16. An AK-47 would do the job. And we don't need an F-22 because there's not even a job for it currently.
The problem is that the extraordinary sophistication of modern combat aircraft means a longer design cycle. Here's some numbers from Wikipedia: The P-51 Mustang is widely regarded as one of the best planes of WWII, and it took just four years, 1938-1942, to go from concept to combat. The F-4 Phantom II took seven years, 1953-1960, to go from initial designs to entering service. The F-15 takes 11 years, 1965-1976, to enter service. The F-22 takes 24 years, 1981-2005. Maybe you could shorten that cycle a bit with better project management and less bureaucracy, but the trend isn't specific to the U.S. The Soviet Yak-3 goes from concept to service in 3 years (!), 1941-1944, but the Mig-29 takes 11 years, 1971-1983. Development of Russia's fifth-generation fighter, the Pak-Fa, begins in the late 1980s and it should enter service in 2015-2016.
The end result? The F-22 is an anachronism. It's something out of a time warp, a throwback to an era that's long past. Sort of the Austin Powers of fighter jets. First, it's designed to deal with a radically different strategic picture. In 1981, when design began on the F-22, the major threat was a large, sophisticated, Soviet military. Now the real threat is a guerrilla with an AK-47 and an IED. Conflict with an advanced nation like Russia or China isn't impossible, but it's unlikely. Second, the technological picture has changed as well. In 1981 the cutting edge in computing was a 1MHZ Apple II with 48k of memory; now computing hardware and software have advanced to the point where an onboard computer can take off, fly, and land the plane, so the pilot is increasingly redundant. The F-22 is an expensive, obsolete solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 and F-35 are an expensive throwback. We've seen what the Predator can do, and it's been revealing. If you're familiar with military history you probably know about the 1921 battleship bombing trials. That was when bombs dropped by aircraft were used to destroy a dreadnought; it signalled that the era of battleships was over and that future naval battles would be conducted by and decided by air power; it signalled the rise of the carrier. We're seeing something similar now, with Predator UAVs being armed with Hellfire and Stinger missiles and used for precision ground attacks, close-air-support, and air-to-air. It's only a matter of time before UAVs take over missions traditionally left to manned aircraft. So instead of trying to refight the Cold War, a more realistic plan would be to maintain air superiority against Russia and China by upgrading fourth-generation aircraft like the F-15 and F-16 over the next decade, while leapfrogging past fifth-generation fighters to sixth-generation fighters- unmanned fighters. Eliminating the pilot isn't without it's issues (as the loss of the RQ-170 Sentinel over Iran shows), but eliminating the pilot and cockpit makes for a lighter, more streamlined aircraft which improves speed and range. Survivability also becomes less of an issue, so you don't need as many backups, the airframe doesn't have to be as tough, and stealthiness is less of an issue. Again, that means longer range and better speed. Eliminating the pilot and all the systems associated with his survival also means a cheaper aircraft, and one that takes less time to develop. Most importantly, without a pilot to worry about, you can carry out risky missions without worrying about the political implications of having a pilot shot down in Iran or the tribal areas of Pakistan.
tens of thousands of lives a year.
Actually this should read thousands. There are about 8,000 gun deaths per year. And obviously, even a total ban on firearms isn't going to stop all of them. Still, Canadian-style gun laws could probably save thousands of lives per year.
Because taking away legal firearm ownership clearly reduces the chances of getting shot... (That was sarcasm for the slow among us)
Here are the stats on gun deaths for the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., from Wikipedia:
The United States, obviously, has the least gun control. Canada has more regulation. Rifles are limited to 5 round magazines, pistols to 10 rounds; licenses required for pistols. The U.K. has effectively outlawed semiautomatic weapons and pistols. Overall homicide rates follow these patterns, so it's not the case that people will just find other ways to commit murder. Making guns more available and making rapid-fire weapons more available makes murder easier, and therefore more common. I've shot assault rifles and .50 caliber sniper rifles, and yeah, they're pretty awesome. But personally, I'd be willing to have stricter licensing requirements, gun registration, background checks, and limits on clip size to save tens of thousands of lives a year.
It'll just add to the political football match we've had for decades. Nutjobs will still kill people with weapons bought legally, with ammo bought leagally and nothing illegal done until they day they act.
I'm waiting for the first 3D printed bomb
That's entirely true, as long as there are human beings, people will go insane and kill people. But when certain classes of weapons become illegal or are made more difficult to obtain, the outcome of these events would be rather different. The most recent headlines would probably read something like "man goes on insane rampage, kills six with bolt-action hunting rifle", as opposed to a dozen. The NRA likes to say, guns don't kill people, people kill people. Which is true. But guns are tools people use to do a job, and when you can't get the right tools for the job (in this case, murdering people), then you can't do your job as well. Canada, for instance, places restrictions on the size of the magazine (5 rounds for rifles, 10 for handguns) are requires that you take a test and get a license called a Possession and Acquisition License before you can buy a handgun. Their rate of firearms-related deaths (4.78 per 100,000 people) is about half that of the United States (10.27 per 100,000 people). The U.K. has effectively banned semiautomatic rifles and handguns and has an even lower rate of firearm related deaths (.46 per 10,000). All else being equal, the more restrictions are placed on handguns, the fewer deaths there are. Obviously, people can and will resort to other tools, but it's a lot less efficient to stab, poison, strangle or bludgeon people to death. Canada still has a lower murder rate (1.7 murders per 100,000 people) than the U.S. (4.7 per 100,000) and the U.K. is even lower (1.23 per 100,000). These stats are all off Wikipedia, incidentally.
Think of it this way. We already have gun control; you can't buy a fully automatic assault rifle. What if there wasn't any restriction on what you could buy? If you could buy anything you wanted, you wouldn't conduct a massacre with a semiautomatic AR-15, you'd buy a fully automatic AK-47. For one thing, on automatic an AK can fire 600 rounds per minute. The other thing is that they're simple, rugged and reliable, designed for use by untrained peasants fighting in the hills. The AR-15/M-16 was notorious for being finicky and jamming at the wrong moment, particularly when the rifle was first fielded in Viet Nam. It's better these days, but the fact that the AR-15 used in the Colorado killing jammed is the only reason more people didn't die. The bottom line is here, gun control (as limited as it is) saved lives during this massacre, more gun control would save more lives.
You're still missing one: lasers can be used to calibrate sarcasm detectors to sub-micron accuracy.
Oh yeah, that would really be useful.
As a business plan, it's somewhere between very, very stupid and completely insane. $150 million is a staggering amount of money, and the number of people who would have that kind of money to burn is pretty limited. A billionaire could spend that kind of cash and not feel it. According to Wikipedia, there are a grand total of 1,226 of them; so it's a pretty limited market we're talking about. And even for a billionaire, that's a price tag that's gonna hurt. If you were worth a billion dollars, you'd be giving up 1/6 of your entire fortune, just for a vacation. And that's gonna be a hard sell. I'm going to take a wild guess that most of these guys did not become billionaires by being spendthrifts.
It's not a crime for them to purify uranium below 29% purity.
No, it's not a crime... but it's just a teensy weensy bit difficult to explain why a peaceful nuclear program would need to enrich their peaceful uranium to peaceful weapons grade, to peacefully conceal the existence of their peaceful nuclear facilities, and bury these peaceful nuclear facilities hundreds of feet under a peaceful mountain in facilities hardened against bunker-busting bombs. Which is what the Iranian regime has done.
Seriously, what's with all the love for Iran's totalitarian regime ? Why do you rush to defend a dictatorship that refuses to recognize the rights of the people to elect their own leaders? Iran's people turned out in the streets by the thousands to protest the rule of the mullahs and demand the right to choose their government, even when the regime beat and killed them, and you act like Iran's theocracy is just misunderstood. Yes, regime change in Iraq was a bad call, but the failures of the Bush administration don't mean we should suddenly start giving the benefit of the doubt to brutal, anti-democratic regimes. Yes, it's simplistic and naive to assume that the U.S. is the good guy and our enemies are the bad guys. But it's equally simplistic to assume that because the U.S. has been a bad guy in recent years, Iran is suddenly the good guy. You've rejected a naive and simplistic right-wing narrative where the foreigners are the Bad Guys for a naive simplistic left-wing one where the U.S. is the Bad Guys. You've switched your villains and heroes around, but you haven't gained a more nuanced view of the world. You've only continued to see it through a black-and-white Hollywood morality. You can only see a Good Guy, and a Bad Guy, and since the U.S. is a Bad Guy, in your story the Iranian regime must be good.
I don't have anything against the people of Iran. It's a country with a rich history, a rich culture, and hopefully a rich future, if the people can find a way to take control of their country back, and they can work to develop the country instead of developing nukes. And I deeply believe that the U.S. owes the people of Iran a formal apology for the way we screwed them over by supporting the Shah. But you dickheads, you idiots, you tools rushing to defend the Iranian regime- you're not supporting the Iranian people, you're supporting the assholes who are trying to hold them down. And for that, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves, if you have a single ounce of honesty and integrity left.
Participators need to understand the culture of Iran.
Yes, let's all gather around, share our feelings, get to really know each other, sing "Kumbaya" around the campfire, and peace will follow. F***ing A.
The U.S. and Iran aren't preparing for war because we don't understand each other. We're preparing for war because we *do* understand each other. Iran understands that without a nuclear bomb, they will be vulnerable to regime change by invasion (like the U.S. did in Iraq) or by outside support for a popular uprising (like the U.S. did in Libya). The U.S. understands that Iran wants a nuclear deterrent, and is willing to set off a regional arms race to get it. We are fundamentally at odds.
I'm glad at least one person on Slashdot gets it. It's not "Fox News Lies!" or "MSNBC Lies!," "RT Lies!," "BBC Lies!," etc. They all have skin in the game and they have a particular mindset and worldview to which they want to cater. You're not going be able to go out there and verify everything they say, so all you can do is try to get as many angles on an issue as you can in order to grasp the reality of the situation.
If you want to know how old the earth is, you don't go out and ask a dozen people off the street to "get as many angles on an issue as you can", you try to find a reliable source. In this case, that means you find a scientist, and if you want a precise answer, you find a geologist. That's because reality isn't a compromise; it either happened or it didn't. You don't go, "some people say the earth is 3 billion years old, some people say it's 6,000 years old, let's meet somewhere in between and call it an even million."
Similarly, if you want to be informed about the world, you find a reliable source. Some of them are simply more reliable than others- NPR has very good news, the Wall Street Journal's reporting is very good (I'm less a fan of their op-ed pages), the Economist provides good news as well. This isn't a question of political slant; these news organizations cover the spectrum (NPR on the left, Economist center-right, Journal on the right). But in each case, the people working as reporters for these organizations are capable of putting their political agendas to the side and reporting on what really happened. The Journal, for instance, is owned by Rupert Murdoch and so they have an op-ed section which works as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party just like Fox News, but they've actually managed to keep their reporting separate from that. I'd argue that getting your news exclusively from any one of these sources would make you more informed than listening to both Fox News (a terrible right-wing channel) and CNN (a terrible left-wing channel) and then trying to triangulate the truth.
If there were a thousand bootleg copies of the software for every legitimate one, that government might not bother to go through 10 million documents for about the same haul, as most of the bootleg copies won't be producing anything worth that much.
Wait, so the problem is that the Chinese are stealing people's blueprints, and your "solution" is to have people steal software? That's got to be the most twisted defense of piracy I've ever seen. I mean, if it's morally acceptable to take a piece of software that retails for $4000 without paying for it, then isn't it also morally acceptable for the Chinese to steal those blueprints? If it's okay to steal software, movies, and music because "information wants to be free" then its okay for the Chinese to, say, swipe the design for an American manufactured wind turbine because "information wants to be free". The whole argument that it's not really theft when you download an MP3 because you're not depriving them of an actual object would also apply to the manufacturer. The Chinese didn't actually take anything from them, all they did was rip off the design. It seems to me that either the creator has the right to control the distribution of the intellectual property or they don't.
This hasnt been proven beyond reasonable doubt. Even though we all think US/Isreal are the curprits, all articles should start with an appropriate preface. This really needs to stop.
The allegation that the United States used a worm to secretly infect and then attack an Iranian nuclear facility is a very serious one... so if the U.S. really was innocent, wouldn't the government officially deny involvement? Instead, when asked about Stuxnet, administration officials say things such as "we're glad they are having trouble with their centrifuge machine and that we – the US and its allies – are doing everything we can to make sure that we complicate matters for them," which is what the White House Coordinator for Arms Control had to say in 2011. That's just short of taking credit for the attack.
Now we have allegations published in the New York times where unnamed White House officials claim that Stuxnet was started in the later part of the Bush Administration and then continued by Obama. The account is very detailed, down to details of the conversations taking place in White House meetings. Again, serious allegations. So how does the Obama Administration respond? Not by denying involvement. Instead, they have Attorney General Eric Holder assign two prosecutors to look into leaks coming from the White House. Here's what Holder has to say: "The unauthorized disclosure of classified information can compromise the security of this country and all Americans, and it will not be tolerated." This response- to treat the reports in the Times as a national security issue, rather than to deny them- tells you all you need to know.
PROHIBITED DESTINATIONS
The U.S. holds complete embargoes against Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria
The exportation, reexportation, sale or supply, directly or indirectly, from the United States, or by a U.S. person wherever located, of any Apple goods, software, technology (including technical data), or services to any of these countries is strictly prohibited without prior authorization by the U.S. Government. This prohibition also applies to any Apple owned subsidiary or any subsidiary employee worldwide.
So the Apple Store was acting in accordance with U.S. policy. But the real issue, in my mind, is that there are western companies that sell hardware and software directly to repressive regimes that let them spy on their citizens. For instance, the Silicon Valley based company NetApp sold a storage system to Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. The system allows Syria to archive and search through emails they intercept from their citizens. Assad has been engaged in a brutal war against his own people that has resulted in the loss of 10,000 lives, including the slaughter of women of children by regime-backed paramilitary organizations. This system helps Assad continue to repress his people by spying on the dissidents. That kind of technology transfer clearly does help a repressive regime and clearly does act in a way that's contrary to American values.
Dunno. there's just something f***ed up about U.S. policy when it's illegal for a teenager to buy an iPad for her cousin in one country, but somehow a U.S. company was able to sell equipment that helps the Assad regime pull citizens off the street to be tortured and killed.
It was not an assault rifle. Stop listening to a bunch of policemen (in this case), reporters and politicians who do not know the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and an assault weapon. The weapon in this case was the former. Just because it has a plastic and aluminum stock doesn't mean its an assault rifle or that its only purpose is killing people, en masse or otherwise.
The weapon he was carrying was reported to be a PS90 http://www.fnhusa.com/le/products/firearms/family.asp?fid=FNF009, which is the civilian model of the FN P90. The FN P90 is bullpup-style automatic weapon described by Wikipedia as "designed as a compact but powerful firearm for vehicle crews, operators of crew-served weapons, support personnel, special forces and counter-terrorist groups." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FN_P90 The PS90 is semiautomatic instead of fully automatic, although that's hardly the kind of thing some Utahn mom dragging her kids to the mall can be expected to appreciate, two weeks after Gabrielle Giffords and a whole crowd of people were gunned down in public (to put a little perspective on things). It's still a very dangerous weapon- it's semiautomatic, described by the manufacturer as capable of taking a 10- or 30-round clip, and fires a high-velocity round. The PS90 also has a higher muzzle velocity than the military version because it has a longer barrel. So perhaps it's not technically an "assault rife", but whatever you want to call it, the bottom line is that if you wanted to take out a crowd of unarmed civilians, this would probably be a pretty good weapon to use.
As far as purpose, automatic weapons were designed for one purpose: antipersonnel. From the Gatling gun, to the Maxim, to the submachine gun, to the German Sturmgewehr 44, the first modern assault rifle, and then to compact bullpup automatics like the FN P90, the evolution of these weapons has been driven by one thing and one thing only. And that's killing other human beings.
This is a propaganda war as much as anything, and I don't have any evidence to believe either side.
Comments like this really, really piss me off. The thing is, you *do* have information, or rather, you have information if you want it. You have what the Syrian people do not have- free access to the internet- which means that you can go to Google News, type in something like "Syria Internet Surveillance" and in a second have all the information you want, and then think critically about what it all means. There are lots of articles about Syria spying on its citizens, there are dozens of articles about Western companies (including U.S. based companies like NetApp) selling Syria the equipment to monitor and censor the internet and cell phone messages. We have tons of information all telling the same story- Syria has gone to incredible lengths to monitor and censor its citizens' communication. That doesn't mean this story is true, but it does make these allegations credible.
Now, if you don't know anything about that, that's because of your own choices. You've made a choice not to be an informed citizen, and not to follow international news, and not to think critically. If you want to be uninformed, fine. You have that right. But don't go around being ignorant of the news and then pretending like you're far too clever to be taken in by propaganda.
The biggest reason is that it's simply harder to make a discovery now than it was 100 or 200 years ago. Back in the time of Galileo, you could do cutting-edge physics research by dropping two wooden balls of different masses. The total cost of the research would be trivial and it would take you a few minutes to conduct. These days, cutting-edge physics means an experimental device like the Large Hadron Collider, hundreds of people, years of time, and billions of dollars. Cutting edge was within the reach of anybody in 1564, now it can only be accomplished with the support of a large nation. The same goes for astronomy. Galileo was able to build a telescope that was more powerful than anything out there, point it at the moon and planets, and see things people had never seen before. These days, doing cutting-edge astronomy research requires a space telescope or an observatory, again costing millions or billions of dollars, putting cutting-edge astronomy research beyond the reach of an amateur. The amount of expertise has also gone up- science has advanced so much that it may take 10 years of higher education just to become familiar with the science that has already been done, before you can start actually making major discoveries yourself. That kind of time commitment is difficult for an amateur working in their off-hours to match.
As a result, the vast majority of scientific discoveries are made by full-time scientists employed by universities, research institutions, or corporations, working in teams, and supported by their institutions or large granting agencies. It's not unique to science, we see this with technology as well. Back in the day, Orville and Wilbur Wright put together the world's most advanced aircraft in their bicycle workshop; these days huge teams of engineers labor at Boeing or Skunkworks to put together the newest plane. The Apple I was put together by hobbyists, the latest iPad involves huge teams of designers and programmers working in collaboration with Chinese factories. As a field advances, it's harder and harder for someone with limited resources and limited time to make a major contribution.
... or they just paid/threatened Microsoft. Much simpler and easier.
The problem with the claim put forward in the article is that it is *not* the logical conclusion of what we know about Stuxnet and Flame. What we know about Flame is that (i) it's the most advanced piece of malware ever created (that we know about), (ii) it has connections to Stuxnet, (iii) it's primarily targeting Iran, but it's also targeting Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia. That information tells us a lot about who was behind it.
Okay, so first off, Flame is very large and extremely advanced. That implies a country with an advanced cyber-warfare program. That list is fairly short, and the big names on it are the United States, Russia, China, and Israel.
Second, the people behind Flame were also involved in Stuxnet. The people analyzing Stuxnet came to the conclusion that it was the work of two different countries, with suspicion falling on the U.S. and Israel. In the New York Times article, it's reported that Stuxnet is designed by the U.S., but the Israelis helped out. The Obama Administration has not denied anything published in that article.
Third, Flame is primarily targeting Iran, again that points to the U.S. and Israel, Iran's primary enemies. However, Flame's secondary targets are all areas that are potential threats to Israel (Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia) but this list does not include countries that pose security threats to the U.S. but not to Israel (Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea). Finally, there are also some Flame infections in Israel itself. Given that one of the purposes of an intelligence organization is (unfortunately) to spy on their own citizens, that also fits the idea that Flame is written by the Israelis.
If Flame is Israeli, then the idea that the U.S. is planting spies in Microsoft is not the "logical conclusion" of the facts at all. So does this mean that the Mossad has penetrated Microsoft? Well, I suppose it's possible. It would antagonize the U.S. to learn that our ally has spies in our corporations, but it's also been alleged that Israel has moles in the Pentagon, so it wouldn't be entirely surprising, either.
What the F are you yammering on about, you nob? It is completely common to have a completely free(from a libertarian perspective) and uncensored internet connection from a plethora of ISP in the United States and the United Kingdom. Genuine issues abound in many countries, including Ethiopia and the risk of the erosion of freedoms in many other places does exist. But, you hyperbolic patent falsifications erode people's willingness to take these matters seriously. In the long run, you are doing far more harm than good.
Please feel free to STFU!
Seconded. There are real issues, but saying "OMG teh USA is just like China!" is really not helpful. The situation is a lot more complex than that. The United States has actually done a pretty amazing job promoting free speech on some fronts- the U.S. government invented the internet after all, and private U.S. companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook have provided the means for people to engage in free speech. The article mentions Ethiopia trying to block Tor... well, the Tor anonymity network was actually developed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
At the same time, you have to ask where all of the technology to censor the internet is coming from in the first place. China doesn't really need any help, but for countries like Syria, Iran, and Ethiopia to monitor the internet, they need outside help. The answer is that this help comes from the west- there are companies in Silicon Valley and in Europe that are willing to sell the equipment and software needed to hack into, store, and analyze the communications of their citizens. They make a profit, and they don't ask too many questions about whether this technology might lead to the arrest and torture of dissidents.
The article mentions that Ethiopia is using Deep Packet Inspection to filter out the internet and block Tor. The question becomes, who's providing them with this technology? If we want to make a difference that's how we could do it- figure out where this technology is coming from and then apply pressure to the company selling this technology. If the companies selling this technology are held up to public scrutiny and faced with the prospect of boycotts and negative press, a lot of them will back off.
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