I'm afraid you missed the point entirely. The purpose of the Geneva Convention is not to ensure that people under your control are treated the way you would want yours to be treated; it is to ensure that your captured people are treated well by the enemy. That's why it only applies to soldiers of a nation-state that has signed the convention.
If your enemy is not a soldier of a nation-state, or if the enemy nation-state has not signed the convention or is violating it, then it does not apply to your nation-state's soldiers. This was done intentionally to give the enemy nation-state a reason to adopt the convention and obey it - they know that you have no obligation to treat their soldiers well if they aren't treating yours well. If you say that you will treat enemy soldiers well no matter what they do, then they have no incentive to treat yours well.
That's why, under the Geneva Convention, terrorists and insurgents have no rights. They are subject to summary execution or torture or pretty much whatever you feel like doing.
That's not to say that you should be doing those things - just that it is not prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Depending on the circumstances, you can gain other benefits from treating captured combatants well.
Why not use some VNC solution instead? I don't like using Microsoft remote services that much because it's all tied into your Windows password for security, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to beef it up. So I can either set a really strong system password that I have to re-enter every time I boot the system, or use UltraVNC with it's encryption plugins and get RSA key based authentication.
Good analysis. The only thing I would dispute is that I don't think there's much evidence that North Korea has reliable, high-yield nukes mounted to reliable, well-targeted long-range missiles in large numbers located in hardened silos. I think millions of casualties from NK nuclear attack is very unlikely. But then, conventional and possible nuclear attacks against South Korea, especially Seoul, would be quite bad enough.
Very true, but with one caveat: You have to be able to recognize which jobs/managers/companies will reward your hard work with raises, promotions, days off, and other benefits or forms of good treatment, and which ones will pat you on the head and lay you off a week later. The latter type of job is definitely out there, and you're a fool if you do any extra work at it besides looking for a better job. I've known people who had jobs like that, who went way above and beyond for lousy pay, and their reward was to be fired as soon as the manager learned that they were looking for a new job. If you have the former type, which you clearly do, then by all means go above and beyond, use your intelligence and creativity, etc, and enjoy the rewards.
I'm with you on everyone but the guy who did it. Did you read the emails? And the dates on all of them? This isn't an outburst, bad day, roid rage, ADHD, etc. This guy is a 100% pure bullshit artist. If you've never met this type in real life, consider yourself lucky. Every word out of their mouths is bullshit meant to improve their image and make themselves seem more important, and there isn't the slightest bit of substance to any of it. They will not genuinely reform or recant because of something like this, they'll just spew even more bullshit. He seems to be backing down for now only because there is a virtual gun to his head. He will behave well exactly as long as that gun is there and not one second longer. He deserves everything he's getting and then some more. He might genuinely reform some day, but don't believe it without lots of hard evidence from multiple people other than him.
I feel a little sorry also for the wife and kid who may not have known what they were getting into by getting involved with this guy, but hopefully they'll learn what he's really like now.
It seems a bit early for that, since there's nothing (based in any sort of reality) that we know of capable of doing any of these things. We're going to need a lot more hard science before we have a shot at even thinking seriously about it. Let's stick with the LHC and similar projects and see where that gets us.
One would assume that even a crappy old-tech carrier would provide lots of useful lessons in how a Chinese-designed carrier should and should not be built. It's a huge, complex machine, and it may take them several generations of designs and active operation to have a really good one, and a really good crew to run it. The US has the most effective carriers in the world because we've had the most continuous experience in building and operating carriers. China might well need to fight at least one war using carriers of their own design against an enemy that has a fighting chance of actually sinking them and learn their lessons from it well before they have a carrier fleet that can really compete with the US fleet.
I think that exactly how effective these missiles really are against modern, well-deployed carriers is going to be one of the big questions of 21st century warfare. Of course the nations and companies making them are crowing about how effective they are, but as far as I know, they've never actually been fired against a large warship deployed for combat with modern missile-defense gear, not to mention the problem of figuring out where the carriers are in the first place. I'm a bit skeptical that they will be quite as effective as they are claimed to be.
The carrier's biggest defense is it's mobility and striking range. They can strike enemy ports while staying far enough offshore that figuring out exactly where they are with enough precision to launch a missile is pretty difficult. Sure, you can launch them from hard to find places on land, but can you target them without easily detectable and highly vulnerable ground or airborne radar? Can you do it in a way that can't be easily spoofed by the enemy?
Not to mention how good the damage control is on these things. You can get a mission-kill on a carrier (can't launch or recover aircraft) with one missile, maybe. Sinking them or rendering them immobile is pretty tough, though, and would probably take multiple direct hits from missiles and/or torpedoes.
The real point of the carrier is to control the seas, and no number of missiles, no matter how fancy, can get you that or negate the effect of it. If it was, say, China vs the US, then maybe they have enough good anti-ship missiles to keep the carriers far enough away that they can't attack anything on land effectively. Even if that's the case, the carrier fleet could still close the sea lanes and keep them from shipping or receiving anything from overseas. If they want to keep the sea lanes open, they have to have their own carrier fleet, no way around it.
That could be considered an act of war. But then again, some might also consider a terrorist mass-murderer, engineer of an attack killing over 3,000 civilians and some unknown number of other attacks, living in a supposedly allied country, apparently with their implicit permission, to be an act of war as well. While we're at it, allowing "protesters" to attack an embassy in your country and hold everyone inside hostage for years is also generally considered to be an act of war. So is sponsoring attacks against the armed forces of another country.
Basically, there's plenty of acts of war to go around in this area.
Mostly agree, though you seem to be more cynical than I am about the nature of the human race. All I would add is that it would be a good idea to not go out of our way to advertise ourselves to such races, such as by transmitting high-powered directional radio signals at them. We have no idea what their nature or motivation might be; all we know is that if they can get here, then they are probably more powerful than we could possibly imagine and could wipe us out in the blink of an eye.
It was my understanding that intercepting SMS was extremely difficult, barring things such as stealing or hacking the phone itself or getting the carrier to transfer the number to your SIM card, as they apparently did here. Again IIRC, GSM (and the other cellular variants) are encrypted, and the only hack of that I've heard of was when somebody at a security conference set up a man in the middle attack with a hacked GSM cell that tricked the phone into running in unencrypted mode, so you'd have to get close to the intended victim and transmit with enough power to get the phone to associate with your cell over the real cell.
Thanks for the help, sounds like it'll fix that problem. I'll try it when I get back home. But the real problem isn't any of the particular problems I mentioned. The real problem is that every time I install a version of Linux, I get weird one-off problems like those, and usually there's no information anywhere on how to fix them. Even if there is a hint, I seem to end up spending hours finding it and figuring out how to make it work, especially if I end up having to look for the instructions on my phone because the computer is unusable. I've never had this degree of problems with Windows.
I'm feeling the Linux upgrade churn, somewhat. My system is a Gigabyte motherboard (don't remember the model, and I'm not at home) with integrated graphics and a Phenom II processor. I don't care about video games, I just want to surf the web, read email, play music and movies, organize and sometimes edit my photos, and occasionally fiddle with programming and servers.
I originally installed Ubuntu 9.10 and was more or less satisfied, except that the "accelerated" video card drivers didn't work - they'd make the screen flicker madly. Nobody could ever give me any idea why or even what to look at, so I made due with the default drivers. I upgraded to 10.04, and magically the accelerated video drivers worked right. I didn't bother with the next upgrade, but I tried 11.04 and I hated Unity and even the regular Gnome environment was much slower and more memory-intensive, so I went back to 10.04. Took a number of installs and fiddling to get both of them working right - it seems surprisingly hard to deal with mapping a pre-existing home partition to home in the installers. And then the grub setup got messed up and I had to fix it. Having older versions of everything in 10.04 is still a headache once in a while. And then the updates started giving me new kernel versions, only the ones after -33 would freeze right after I select them in grub.
As to the other problems, the fstab setup seems pretty tough to get right. I have a second hard drive for backups, with backups performed by Simple Backup. I have that hard drive listed in fstab, mounted to Hard Drive 2. But still, if I don't manually access something on that hard drive after booting, it doesn't seem to mount, and if the automatic backup goes off, then it creates a folder on the main hard drive and does all of the backups there, even if I manually mount the backup drive later. If I do mount the backup drive later, then it gets assigned a different name, which screws up various other things. I've never had Windows do anything this weird.
Also, the audio skips and stutters once a minute or so if I'm playing any audio. No idea why, and all of the docs on Linux audio seem to be about how many different systems there are, how complex they all are, and how they interact. And file transfers start out fast, and then slow down after a minute or so, and I have no idea why or how to fix it.
And Ubuntu doesn't seem like much of an option for the future, since they're trying to give up Gnome entirely in favor of Unity. Thanks guys, but if I want a tablet, then I'll buy one. I bought a computer, and I want to keep using it like one.
Meanwhile, I've been using Windows 7 on my work computer for a few months, and it's starting to seem pretty nice in comparison. I don't really have any complaints, except that Windows can still be a pain in the ass to set up if you don't already have all the drivers for everything - but then, at least for Windows, the drivers are usually there. I just hope that Windows 8 release isn't as bad as the developer preview. If I ever get around to it, I might just reformat some drives and install a unlicensed Win7 to see how well it works on this system before I think about actually buying it. (I know I could probably pirate it if I really wanted to, but I'm trying to actually pay for all of the software that I use)
I've been running Ubuntu for a while and am starting to get tired of it, so I will express my opinion here in a rant that doesn't have much to do with the original post, except to exploit it for humor.
Free as in beer: True, but not much of a point if you have a job that pays at least minimum wage. I think I'd rather install Windows and have it work than try to figure out which of hundreds of distros and versions to use and getting one of them to actually work right on my system.
As in speech: Don't care. I'm a software engineer and I have better things to do when I get home than set up build environments and compile my major apps and OS components, much less actually try to understand the code and make changes to it.
Open: Also don't care, same reason.
Secure: Eh, not so much. Windows seems to be perfectly secure if you don't do stupid stuff like use IE (especially IE6), download every toolbar, screensaver, and smiley set known to man, and run attachments from random emails. And if you're doing that, you'll find some way to get your Linux install hacked too.
Stable and efficient: I'll believe that when somebody tells me why no kernel later than -33 will boot my system, file transfers mysteriously slow down to painful speeds, getting graphics to work right is pretty much a shot in the dark, getting multiple hard drives to work right is a ridiculous pain in the ass, audio mysteriously stutters at random, etc. Compared to all this, my Windows computers are easy.
I've been thinking that the real problem is that to get really good design and architecture ahead of time, you have to have a person creating the architecture who is both an expert at the task that the software is supposed to do, in all aspects of it, and also skilled enough at software development to have a good idea of what's possible and not possible, and what's good and bad architecture. A few days looking over somebody's shoulder doesn't cut it for either one. There are very few projects where people like this exist. Agile accepts that the right person doesn't exist and tries to make it work anyways.
I'm not absolutely against tax increases - I can agree that some sort of tax increases will be necessary to cut the debt down. What I want is to see real spending cuts first, THEN we can talk about tax increases. I don't trust these guys to ultimately cut the debt if they don't prove that they can really cut spending first. I don't want to let them increase taxes and then watch them turn around and spend all of the extra money from the tax increases and then some more besides, resulting in an even higher debt. After Bush and Obama's spending sprees, that seems all too likely to me if we let them increase taxes while making a token cut in the rate of increase of a few programs.
Says who? Every time we get into one of these debt crises, people say we have to cut spending and raise taxes. And in the end, the taxes get raised, but the spending never actually gets cut, and so the Government just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's gotta stop somewhere. That's why I say no tax increases until we've really cut spending. Like not a small decrease in the rate of future increases, more like 10% actual cuts across the board, including both entitlement programs and the military.
Who says that these things (Stuxnet and Duqu) are inspiring the arms race? Like China or Iran or whoever else are only capable of copying what the US (or whoever it was) does? The technology is out there, and it's going to be picked up eventually by every country that cares enough to influence world affairs. China sure looks to be more than capable of figuring out how to hack things regardless of what we or anyone else does. If these things were infact made by us - that looks like the way to bet, though it's far from proven - we might as well be happy that we're getting a few knocks in early in the game, because "the next stage" will probably happen no matter what we do.
Could you please tell our manufacturing guys downstairs that they don't manufacture anything? I heard the total output is worth a few tens of millions, but it must all be a mistake. I'm sure you'll clear it up for them, though.
Agree somewhat. In a way, we really should have moved against Saddam when the uprising occurred, like we promised them that we would, though it's arguable that it wouldn't really have worked out in the end. Because we didn't do anything when Saddam slaughtered them, they would never trust us again, and would never attempt another uprising while counting on foreign support to back them up. And so Saddam could never be removed without a foreign invasion and occupation.
I think that one of the big lessons of WWII is that if your country tries the isolationist mode and sits around in your own borders minding your own business while a ideology that is actively hostile to your own spreads around the world, then you only set yourself up for a bigger and more deadly war later as that ideology grows and spreads from a minor annoyance to a major threat, and potentially to an unbeatable one. It sure looks now like millions of lives could have been saved if, say, Nazi Germany was confronted before they became so big and powerful that if wasn't certain whether we could defeat them at all.
I know the US has a long history of trying to export Democracy, but I don't think all of those efforts can be directly compared as there were several different reasons behind them. Most of the regimes set up during the Cold War, what was important was that they were friendly to us and hostile to the Soviet Union so as to prevent the spread of Soviet style Communism, not so much that they were legitimate democracies. It doesn't look so good when the regime you helped overthrow was arguably more democratic than the new friendly one, but the end result was the defeat of Communism and the overall worldwide acceptance of Democracy as the only form of legitimate Government. What I mean by that is that only a few hundred years ago, most countries in the world were ruled by some sort of dictator, and anyone who objected to the idea that they were entitled to rule however they felt like would be laughed at or shot. Now, even the nastiest dictators feel the need to at least pretend to have real elections to legitimize themselves.
As for what I consider surrender, what surrender essentially means is giving the other side everything they want so that they give up fighting. But what does the other side in this war really want? Some people think that what they are fundamentally upset at is our throwing our weight around in the middle east, generally interfering with things, and they really just want to be left alone. If you think this is true, then isolationism certainly looks more appealing. But I don't think that's what they really want.
Every world power since pretty much the beginning of recorded history has been interfering with foreign countries, especially in the middle east. Why were none of them ever the focus of international terrorism from radical Islam? To get closer to the truth, look at what Osama was saying way back at the beginning of their campaign, before they started trying to manipulate the western media. What they demanded then, and what I think they still really want, is to completely stop all foreign influence by media, music, movies, literature, ideas, everything into the middle east. These religious zealots were already mad enough that we were flouting the laws of their religion and yet were far more successful than their more pious countries, and now all of the horrible, godless, hedonist culture that we produce leaks into their countries and addicts their own citizens, who they think should be following their radical interpretation of Islam instead. In their view, they had no choice but to lash out against us until we made it stop. But we can't really make it stop, because we were never actively trying to reach their people in the first place - they actively sought out our culture because they liked it better than Sharia law and the so-called pious life these guys were selling.
I think their real endgame goes even further than that - they aspire to no less than world conquest. These guys have long been experts at concealing what they really want to manipulate westerners. Look at what the Palestinians say in English to the west compared to what they say in Arabic to their own people. In English, they all talk about how much they want peace, and in Arabic, they never stopped calling for the total destruction of Israel and the death of all of the Jews there. There's lots of literature supporting that radical Muslims believe that conquering and rul
Okay, you are at least showing signs of sanity. Let's see, first off...
Looks like you think that nothing at all is simple... except of course for your political opponents. Clearly anyone who disagrees with you is either, let's see, a dumb tard, an idiot, or propagandized. I've refrained from direct insults against you, even though I believe your views are misguided. Is your supposed non-simple viewpoint in which people are people capable of understanding that some smart people have looked at the facts and read the arguments on their own, and independently came to a conclusion different than yours?
Our response most certainly isn't "killing everything that moves". If you really believe that, then you aren't paying any attention to what's going on. If we actually wanted to kill everything that moves, we would have launched lots of nukes, the war would have been over in a few hours, and no Americans would have risked their lives. I very much don't want to do that, as I'll explain below.
To really get to the bottom of this war, what you have to do is decide what overall strategy you want to employ in response to the many terrorist attacks of steadily increasing lethality that have been carried out against us. I see the possible strategies as (in order of what I consider the least desirable to the most):
Surrender. Become a radical islamic country. I really hope you understand why this is unacceptable. If you don't, look up how the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, etc run their countries, and tell me if you'd like to live there.
Total Destruction. Lots of nukes. Actually kill everything in every country that we think is part of this. Also a terrible option. Last I checked, the list of countries that have killed the most people is topped by Communist China, with 50 Million, right alongside Nazi Germany (~13 million directly, not counting the wars they started), and Soviet Russia (supposed to be 20 million or so IIRC). I really don't want to see the USA take a spot on the top of this list.
Terrorist Whack-A-Mole. They blow up some or our stuff, we blow up some of their stuff, with varying levels of intensity. You mostly don't kill the actual people responsible for the acts, and nothing really gets solved or improved. Senseless killing, albeit mostly in small numbers, for God only knows how long. This was pretty much our strategy before September 11th, through the course of multiple Presidential administrations of both parties.
Create Democracy. Actively try to get rid of the dictators that are making life in the Middle East so terrible and creating the overall pissed-offedness, mostly to distract their citizens from how badly they are running their own countries. This is what we're doing, well, at least what Bush was doing. Some will have to happen directly through warfare and occupation (see Iraq), others will hopefully happen through diplomacy. This is extremely risky - I don't think it's possible to even make a meaningful estimate of how likely this is to really succeed. It involves a hell of a lot of Americans and allies risking their lives, and many have already been killed and maimed. It's also the only option I see capable of really solving the problem long-term without truly massive numbers of people getting killed. There are some signs of hope - Iraq seems to be a more-or-less functional Democracy, at least for now. The Arab Spring revolutions are a good sign too - do you really think any of them would have happened if we hadn't created a Democratic government in Iraq? There's no telling how Libya, Egypt, or Syria will turn out in the end, but at least there's a chance that they'll be better than they were before.
That's it. If you have any other ideas for what our overall response to Islamic Terrorism should look like, do tell. I sure haven't heard any. It would be nice if you have something specific, not just a statement of the obvious like that the world is not simple and the USA is not perfect.
What really worries me is the possibility that one of these radical groups
Will somebody please repeat this about 10,000 times? I'm tired of seeing all of these debates where people try to apply the same obscurity theory that works for cryptography to every kind of security in the world, including physical security. Arguments about whether security guard patrol schedules are the key or not, good grief.
I wondered for a minute why your post takes such a vauge style, spouting meaningless and unrelated platitudes, almost as if you're dancing around what you believe the real issue is. Something that completely changes the whole debate, yet that you apparently don't want to clearly state. There's only one thing I can think of that fits the description, so in turn I ask you:
Who do you believe planned and executed the attacks of September 11th? What was the end goal of that group? Why did that group decide that the attack plan executed on September 11th was the best way to achieve that goal?
I'd bet that even Amazon themselves couldn't produce a meaningful figure for what any particular one costs to make. They're probably buying enough parts from enough suppliers that all of their deals are changing all the time for each particular part. Not to mention the cost of the design process and creating and maintaining the custom software, production line shakeouts, estimated value of future purchases, estimated value of having control over some percent of the market, etc etc. Some department somewhere probably uses lots of Excel formulas and a little black magic to figure out that they'll do all right overall selling them for $199.
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I'm afraid you missed the point entirely. The purpose of the Geneva Convention is not to ensure that people under your control are treated the way you would want yours to be treated; it is to ensure that your captured people are treated well by the enemy. That's why it only applies to soldiers of a nation-state that has signed the convention.
If your enemy is not a soldier of a nation-state, or if the enemy nation-state has not signed the convention or is violating it, then it does not apply to your nation-state's soldiers. This was done intentionally to give the enemy nation-state a reason to adopt the convention and obey it - they know that you have no obligation to treat their soldiers well if they aren't treating yours well. If you say that you will treat enemy soldiers well no matter what they do, then they have no incentive to treat yours well.
That's why, under the Geneva Convention, terrorists and insurgents have no rights. They are subject to summary execution or torture or pretty much whatever you feel like doing.
That's not to say that you should be doing those things - just that it is not prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Depending on the circumstances, you can gain other benefits from treating captured combatants well.
Why not use some VNC solution instead? I don't like using Microsoft remote services that much because it's all tied into your Windows password for security, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to beef it up. So I can either set a really strong system password that I have to re-enter every time I boot the system, or use UltraVNC with it's encryption plugins and get RSA key based authentication.
Good analysis. The only thing I would dispute is that I don't think there's much evidence that North Korea has reliable, high-yield nukes mounted to reliable, well-targeted long-range missiles in large numbers located in hardened silos. I think millions of casualties from NK nuclear attack is very unlikely. But then, conventional and possible nuclear attacks against South Korea, especially Seoul, would be quite bad enough.
Very true, but with one caveat: You have to be able to recognize which jobs/managers/companies will reward your hard work with raises, promotions, days off, and other benefits or forms of good treatment, and which ones will pat you on the head and lay you off a week later. The latter type of job is definitely out there, and you're a fool if you do any extra work at it besides looking for a better job. I've known people who had jobs like that, who went way above and beyond for lousy pay, and their reward was to be fired as soon as the manager learned that they were looking for a new job. If you have the former type, which you clearly do, then by all means go above and beyond, use your intelligence and creativity, etc, and enjoy the rewards.
I'm with you on everyone but the guy who did it. Did you read the emails? And the dates on all of them? This isn't an outburst, bad day, roid rage, ADHD, etc. This guy is a 100% pure bullshit artist. If you've never met this type in real life, consider yourself lucky. Every word out of their mouths is bullshit meant to improve their image and make themselves seem more important, and there isn't the slightest bit of substance to any of it. They will not genuinely reform or recant because of something like this, they'll just spew even more bullshit. He seems to be backing down for now only because there is a virtual gun to his head. He will behave well exactly as long as that gun is there and not one second longer. He deserves everything he's getting and then some more. He might genuinely reform some day, but don't believe it without lots of hard evidence from multiple people other than him.
I feel a little sorry also for the wife and kid who may not have known what they were getting into by getting involved with this guy, but hopefully they'll learn what he's really like now.
It seems a bit early for that, since there's nothing (based in any sort of reality) that we know of capable of doing any of these things. We're going to need a lot more hard science before we have a shot at even thinking seriously about it. Let's stick with the LHC and similar projects and see where that gets us.
One would assume that even a crappy old-tech carrier would provide lots of useful lessons in how a Chinese-designed carrier should and should not be built. It's a huge, complex machine, and it may take them several generations of designs and active operation to have a really good one, and a really good crew to run it. The US has the most effective carriers in the world because we've had the most continuous experience in building and operating carriers. China might well need to fight at least one war using carriers of their own design against an enemy that has a fighting chance of actually sinking them and learn their lessons from it well before they have a carrier fleet that can really compete with the US fleet.
I think that exactly how effective these missiles really are against modern, well-deployed carriers is going to be one of the big questions of 21st century warfare. Of course the nations and companies making them are crowing about how effective they are, but as far as I know, they've never actually been fired against a large warship deployed for combat with modern missile-defense gear, not to mention the problem of figuring out where the carriers are in the first place. I'm a bit skeptical that they will be quite as effective as they are claimed to be.
The carrier's biggest defense is it's mobility and striking range. They can strike enemy ports while staying far enough offshore that figuring out exactly where they are with enough precision to launch a missile is pretty difficult. Sure, you can launch them from hard to find places on land, but can you target them without easily detectable and highly vulnerable ground or airborne radar? Can you do it in a way that can't be easily spoofed by the enemy?
Not to mention how good the damage control is on these things. You can get a mission-kill on a carrier (can't launch or recover aircraft) with one missile, maybe. Sinking them or rendering them immobile is pretty tough, though, and would probably take multiple direct hits from missiles and/or torpedoes.
The real point of the carrier is to control the seas, and no number of missiles, no matter how fancy, can get you that or negate the effect of it. If it was, say, China vs the US, then maybe they have enough good anti-ship missiles to keep the carriers far enough away that they can't attack anything on land effectively. Even if that's the case, the carrier fleet could still close the sea lanes and keep them from shipping or receiving anything from overseas. If they want to keep the sea lanes open, they have to have their own carrier fleet, no way around it.
That could be considered an act of war. But then again, some might also consider a terrorist mass-murderer, engineer of an attack killing over 3,000 civilians and some unknown number of other attacks, living in a supposedly allied country, apparently with their implicit permission, to be an act of war as well. While we're at it, allowing "protesters" to attack an embassy in your country and hold everyone inside hostage for years is also generally considered to be an act of war. So is sponsoring attacks against the armed forces of another country.
Basically, there's plenty of acts of war to go around in this area.
Mostly agree, though you seem to be more cynical than I am about the nature of the human race. All I would add is that it would be a good idea to not go out of our way to advertise ourselves to such races, such as by transmitting high-powered directional radio signals at them. We have no idea what their nature or motivation might be; all we know is that if they can get here, then they are probably more powerful than we could possibly imagine and could wipe us out in the blink of an eye.
It was my understanding that intercepting SMS was extremely difficult, barring things such as stealing or hacking the phone itself or getting the carrier to transfer the number to your SIM card, as they apparently did here. Again IIRC, GSM (and the other cellular variants) are encrypted, and the only hack of that I've heard of was when somebody at a security conference set up a man in the middle attack with a hacked GSM cell that tricked the phone into running in unencrypted mode, so you'd have to get close to the intended victim and transmit with enough power to get the phone to associate with your cell over the real cell.
Thanks for the help, sounds like it'll fix that problem. I'll try it when I get back home. But the real problem isn't any of the particular problems I mentioned. The real problem is that every time I install a version of Linux, I get weird one-off problems like those, and usually there's no information anywhere on how to fix them. Even if there is a hint, I seem to end up spending hours finding it and figuring out how to make it work, especially if I end up having to look for the instructions on my phone because the computer is unusable. I've never had this degree of problems with Windows.
I'm feeling the Linux upgrade churn, somewhat. My system is a Gigabyte motherboard (don't remember the model, and I'm not at home) with integrated graphics and a Phenom II processor. I don't care about video games, I just want to surf the web, read email, play music and movies, organize and sometimes edit my photos, and occasionally fiddle with programming and servers.
I originally installed Ubuntu 9.10 and was more or less satisfied, except that the "accelerated" video card drivers didn't work - they'd make the screen flicker madly. Nobody could ever give me any idea why or even what to look at, so I made due with the default drivers. I upgraded to 10.04, and magically the accelerated video drivers worked right. I didn't bother with the next upgrade, but I tried 11.04 and I hated Unity and even the regular Gnome environment was much slower and more memory-intensive, so I went back to 10.04. Took a number of installs and fiddling to get both of them working right - it seems surprisingly hard to deal with mapping a pre-existing home partition to home in the installers. And then the grub setup got messed up and I had to fix it. Having older versions of everything in 10.04 is still a headache once in a while. And then the updates started giving me new kernel versions, only the ones after -33 would freeze right after I select them in grub.
As to the other problems, the fstab setup seems pretty tough to get right. I have a second hard drive for backups, with backups performed by Simple Backup. I have that hard drive listed in fstab, mounted to Hard Drive 2. But still, if I don't manually access something on that hard drive after booting, it doesn't seem to mount, and if the automatic backup goes off, then it creates a folder on the main hard drive and does all of the backups there, even if I manually mount the backup drive later. If I do mount the backup drive later, then it gets assigned a different name, which screws up various other things. I've never had Windows do anything this weird.
Also, the audio skips and stutters once a minute or so if I'm playing any audio. No idea why, and all of the docs on Linux audio seem to be about how many different systems there are, how complex they all are, and how they interact. And file transfers start out fast, and then slow down after a minute or so, and I have no idea why or how to fix it.
And Ubuntu doesn't seem like much of an option for the future, since they're trying to give up Gnome entirely in favor of Unity. Thanks guys, but if I want a tablet, then I'll buy one. I bought a computer, and I want to keep using it like one.
Meanwhile, I've been using Windows 7 on my work computer for a few months, and it's starting to seem pretty nice in comparison. I don't really have any complaints, except that Windows can still be a pain in the ass to set up if you don't already have all the drivers for everything - but then, at least for Windows, the drivers are usually there. I just hope that Windows 8 release isn't as bad as the developer preview. If I ever get around to it, I might just reformat some drives and install a unlicensed Win7 to see how well it works on this system before I think about actually buying it. (I know I could probably pirate it if I really wanted to, but I'm trying to actually pay for all of the software that I use)
I've been running Ubuntu for a while and am starting to get tired of it, so I will express my opinion here in a rant that doesn't have much to do with the original post, except to exploit it for humor.
Free as in beer: True, but not much of a point if you have a job that pays at least minimum wage. I think I'd rather install Windows and have it work than try to figure out which of hundreds of distros and versions to use and getting one of them to actually work right on my system.
As in speech: Don't care. I'm a software engineer and I have better things to do when I get home than set up build environments and compile my major apps and OS components, much less actually try to understand the code and make changes to it.
Open: Also don't care, same reason.
Secure: Eh, not so much. Windows seems to be perfectly secure if you don't do stupid stuff like use IE (especially IE6), download every toolbar, screensaver, and smiley set known to man, and run attachments from random emails. And if you're doing that, you'll find some way to get your Linux install hacked too.
Stable and efficient: I'll believe that when somebody tells me why no kernel later than -33 will boot my system, file transfers mysteriously slow down to painful speeds, getting graphics to work right is pretty much a shot in the dark, getting multiple hard drives to work right is a ridiculous pain in the ass, audio mysteriously stutters at random, etc. Compared to all this, my Windows computers are easy.
I've been thinking that the real problem is that to get really good design and architecture ahead of time, you have to have a person creating the architecture who is both an expert at the task that the software is supposed to do, in all aspects of it, and also skilled enough at software development to have a good idea of what's possible and not possible, and what's good and bad architecture. A few days looking over somebody's shoulder doesn't cut it for either one. There are very few projects where people like this exist. Agile accepts that the right person doesn't exist and tries to make it work anyways.
I'm not absolutely against tax increases - I can agree that some sort of tax increases will be necessary to cut the debt down. What I want is to see real spending cuts first, THEN we can talk about tax increases. I don't trust these guys to ultimately cut the debt if they don't prove that they can really cut spending first. I don't want to let them increase taxes and then watch them turn around and spend all of the extra money from the tax increases and then some more besides, resulting in an even higher debt. After Bush and Obama's spending sprees, that seems all too likely to me if we let them increase taxes while making a token cut in the rate of increase of a few programs.
Says who? Every time we get into one of these debt crises, people say we have to cut spending and raise taxes. And in the end, the taxes get raised, but the spending never actually gets cut, and so the Government just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It's gotta stop somewhere. That's why I say no tax increases until we've really cut spending. Like not a small decrease in the rate of future increases, more like 10% actual cuts across the board, including both entitlement programs and the military.
Who says that these things (Stuxnet and Duqu) are inspiring the arms race? Like China or Iran or whoever else are only capable of copying what the US (or whoever it was) does? The technology is out there, and it's going to be picked up eventually by every country that cares enough to influence world affairs. China sure looks to be more than capable of figuring out how to hack things regardless of what we or anyone else does. If these things were infact made by us - that looks like the way to bet, though it's far from proven - we might as well be happy that we're getting a few knocks in early in the game, because "the next stage" will probably happen no matter what we do.
Could you please tell our manufacturing guys downstairs that they don't manufacture anything? I heard the total output is worth a few tens of millions, but it must all be a mistake. I'm sure you'll clear it up for them, though.
Agree somewhat. In a way, we really should have moved against Saddam when the uprising occurred, like we promised them that we would, though it's arguable that it wouldn't really have worked out in the end. Because we didn't do anything when Saddam slaughtered them, they would never trust us again, and would never attempt another uprising while counting on foreign support to back them up. And so Saddam could never be removed without a foreign invasion and occupation.
All right, no problem.
I think that one of the big lessons of WWII is that if your country tries the isolationist mode and sits around in your own borders minding your own business while a ideology that is actively hostile to your own spreads around the world, then you only set yourself up for a bigger and more deadly war later as that ideology grows and spreads from a minor annoyance to a major threat, and potentially to an unbeatable one. It sure looks now like millions of lives could have been saved if, say, Nazi Germany was confronted before they became so big and powerful that if wasn't certain whether we could defeat them at all.
I know the US has a long history of trying to export Democracy, but I don't think all of those efforts can be directly compared as there were several different reasons behind them. Most of the regimes set up during the Cold War, what was important was that they were friendly to us and hostile to the Soviet Union so as to prevent the spread of Soviet style Communism, not so much that they were legitimate democracies. It doesn't look so good when the regime you helped overthrow was arguably more democratic than the new friendly one, but the end result was the defeat of Communism and the overall worldwide acceptance of Democracy as the only form of legitimate Government. What I mean by that is that only a few hundred years ago, most countries in the world were ruled by some sort of dictator, and anyone who objected to the idea that they were entitled to rule however they felt like would be laughed at or shot. Now, even the nastiest dictators feel the need to at least pretend to have real elections to legitimize themselves.
As for what I consider surrender, what surrender essentially means is giving the other side everything they want so that they give up fighting. But what does the other side in this war really want? Some people think that what they are fundamentally upset at is our throwing our weight around in the middle east, generally interfering with things, and they really just want to be left alone. If you think this is true, then isolationism certainly looks more appealing. But I don't think that's what they really want.
Every world power since pretty much the beginning of recorded history has been interfering with foreign countries, especially in the middle east. Why were none of them ever the focus of international terrorism from radical Islam? To get closer to the truth, look at what Osama was saying way back at the beginning of their campaign, before they started trying to manipulate the western media. What they demanded then, and what I think they still really want, is to completely stop all foreign influence by media, music, movies, literature, ideas, everything into the middle east. These religious zealots were already mad enough that we were flouting the laws of their religion and yet were far more successful than their more pious countries, and now all of the horrible, godless, hedonist culture that we produce leaks into their countries and addicts their own citizens, who they think should be following their radical interpretation of Islam instead. In their view, they had no choice but to lash out against us until we made it stop. But we can't really make it stop, because we were never actively trying to reach their people in the first place - they actively sought out our culture because they liked it better than Sharia law and the so-called pious life these guys were selling.
I think their real endgame goes even further than that - they aspire to no less than world conquest. These guys have long been experts at concealing what they really want to manipulate westerners. Look at what the Palestinians say in English to the west compared to what they say in Arabic to their own people. In English, they all talk about how much they want peace, and in Arabic, they never stopped calling for the total destruction of Israel and the death of all of the Jews there. There's lots of literature supporting that radical Muslims believe that conquering and rul
Okay, you are at least showing signs of sanity. Let's see, first off...
Looks like you think that nothing at all is simple... except of course for your political opponents. Clearly anyone who disagrees with you is either, let's see, a dumb tard, an idiot, or propagandized. I've refrained from direct insults against you, even though I believe your views are misguided. Is your supposed non-simple viewpoint in which people are people capable of understanding that some smart people have looked at the facts and read the arguments on their own, and independently came to a conclusion different than yours?
Our response most certainly isn't "killing everything that moves". If you really believe that, then you aren't paying any attention to what's going on. If we actually wanted to kill everything that moves, we would have launched lots of nukes, the war would have been over in a few hours, and no Americans would have risked their lives. I very much don't want to do that, as I'll explain below.
To really get to the bottom of this war, what you have to do is decide what overall strategy you want to employ in response to the many terrorist attacks of steadily increasing lethality that have been carried out against us. I see the possible strategies as (in order of what I consider the least desirable to the most):
Surrender. Become a radical islamic country. I really hope you understand why this is unacceptable. If you don't, look up how the Taliban, Saudi Arabia, etc run their countries, and tell me if you'd like to live there.
Total Destruction. Lots of nukes. Actually kill everything in every country that we think is part of this. Also a terrible option. Last I checked, the list of countries that have killed the most people is topped by Communist China, with 50 Million, right alongside Nazi Germany (~13 million directly, not counting the wars they started), and Soviet Russia (supposed to be 20 million or so IIRC). I really don't want to see the USA take a spot on the top of this list.
Terrorist Whack-A-Mole. They blow up some or our stuff, we blow up some of their stuff, with varying levels of intensity. You mostly don't kill the actual people responsible for the acts, and nothing really gets solved or improved. Senseless killing, albeit mostly in small numbers, for God only knows how long. This was pretty much our strategy before September 11th, through the course of multiple Presidential administrations of both parties.
Create Democracy. Actively try to get rid of the dictators that are making life in the Middle East so terrible and creating the overall pissed-offedness, mostly to distract their citizens from how badly they are running their own countries. This is what we're doing, well, at least what Bush was doing. Some will have to happen directly through warfare and occupation (see Iraq), others will hopefully happen through diplomacy. This is extremely risky - I don't think it's possible to even make a meaningful estimate of how likely this is to really succeed. It involves a hell of a lot of Americans and allies risking their lives, and many have already been killed and maimed. It's also the only option I see capable of really solving the problem long-term without truly massive numbers of people getting killed. There are some signs of hope - Iraq seems to be a more-or-less functional Democracy, at least for now. The Arab Spring revolutions are a good sign too - do you really think any of them would have happened if we hadn't created a Democratic government in Iraq? There's no telling how Libya, Egypt, or Syria will turn out in the end, but at least there's a chance that they'll be better than they were before.
That's it. If you have any other ideas for what our overall response to Islamic Terrorism should look like, do tell. I sure haven't heard any. It would be nice if you have something specific, not just a statement of the obvious like that the world is not simple and the USA is not perfect.
What really worries me is the possibility that one of these radical groups
Will somebody please repeat this about 10,000 times? I'm tired of seeing all of these debates where people try to apply the same obscurity theory that works for cryptography to every kind of security in the world, including physical security. Arguments about whether security guard patrol schedules are the key or not, good grief.
I wondered for a minute why your post takes such a vauge style, spouting meaningless and unrelated platitudes, almost as if you're dancing around what you believe the real issue is. Something that completely changes the whole debate, yet that you apparently don't want to clearly state. There's only one thing I can think of that fits the description, so in turn I ask you:
Who do you believe planned and executed the attacks of September 11th?
What was the end goal of that group?
Why did that group decide that the attack plan executed on September 11th was the best way to achieve that goal?
I'd bet that even Amazon themselves couldn't produce a meaningful figure for what any particular one costs to make. They're probably buying enough parts from enough suppliers that all of their deals are changing all the time for each particular part. Not to mention the cost of the design process and creating and maintaining the custom software, production line shakeouts, estimated value of future purchases, estimated value of having control over some percent of the market, etc etc. Some department somewhere probably uses lots of Excel formulas and a little black magic to figure out that they'll do all right overall selling them for $199.