That video is probably the worst Wikileaks example you could bring up! Let's talk about it.
1) I think this was a good video to have released. This is a real leak, and something that probably should be in the open and not hidden, especially when you consider the details of the situation. However...
2) It was an internationally legal military engagement, even without considering the greater context of the incident.
3) Wikileaks released an edited version of this video as its MAIN release (making the unedited version secondary), introducing blatant spin on the editor's part. It's even in the title, calling it "Collateral Murder"! If someone really thinks the edited video is just for brevity and not for spin, you aren't looking at it with ANY sort of objective eye.
I had been a real supporter of Wikileaks up until the release of that video. I didn't agree with the prior leaking of the gate guard and force protection SOPs for Guantanamo Bay or the release of the US Army's equipment manifest for Afghanistan, but I still felt Wikileaks held an important place. None of those things are whistle-blowing actions, but they weren't overly harmful to these parties, either. Yet when they finally get a REAL whistle-blowing video of Reuters reporters to release, they couldn't help but put spin on it. I was shocked at that release and no longer supported Wikileaks after the fact. This ended up being good timing, because then they released two SIGACTS databases and then the diplomatic cables in their entirety, which I couldn't possibly support. You don't release thousands of confidential documents just to get a few dozen risquè cables to the public. That is just irresponsibility or naivety to the extreme.
I call myself a skeptic and an objective person with strong critical thinking skills. I have an open mind, and I really, truly want to see these crimes that are in the diplomatic cables. I'm not talking about "scandalous stuff that you and I both know is going on behind closed doors during US diplomacy"! I want to see actual examples in cables. You have an opportunity to broaden my mind.
All that is mass media's (apparently successful) attempt to divert attention away from the leaks and to focus more on the "crimes" of the leakers.
What crimes? All I've seen on the Slashdot comments was a report saying that the government of Iraq requested information on a rumor they received stating that US forces bombed an Iraqi house to cover up a massacre by ground troops. There is no substantive evidence that this is what occurred, and the Iraqi government was requesting information on the rumor.
So even if we ignore that disputed incident, what other crimes were recorded in the diplomatic cables and released by Wikileaks? I want to see them for myself so I can expand my own worldview.
Can you come up and say that wikileaks hasnt done anything useful now ?
Are you kidding? These are a bunch of company brochures and a few publicly released reports from 160 intelligence contractors. Where is the leak? It's convenient that they put these all in one place for us, but these were already readily available. Wikileaks is now leaking public documents to the public.
No... you're just dumb. I've always wondered this, too. Not just about Voyagers, but all space exploration probes. No states have an interest in sending these false commands, but I wonder if it is possible or practical.
Edit: I just reread the grandparent's reply, and the way he posed the question makes him out to be an idiot. I won't suggest modding him up, but his question is at least valid. Anyone know about how secure communications with space probes is accomplished?:)
Wow. I know you were going for prose, but this must be an off-day for you. You should have written just the first sentence and link and then submitted the post like that. You would have been modded up to parent's level.
You never know when such research will pay off. The US and EU is scrapping programs now while China, India and a few others try to get into space, you can bet that a lot of cool research will be coming from that side of the globe in the next 30 years.
Imagine if we could launch a probe now with what we have available. We could cheaply launch 10's of much faster probes with incrementally better sensors for the price of the voyager program (~$3B in today's dollars).
As a side related note, I have heard nothing about New Horizons' after-rendezvous plans other than a possible second Kuiper belt flyby, but I'll bet you a million bucks that they've over-engineered this probe to later provide the kind of science that 1970s' Voyager is doing for us still today.
And I suppose people who illegally download music, games, and movies aren't "pirates". Get a grip. Language changes, the word "hacker" no longer means "somebody who sits and hacks away at a keyboard programming things", and you know it as well as I do. Even on Slashdot the old meaning is rare to encounter.
Maybe bombing yes, but a ground force invasion of Iran won't happen. It's too big and Iran's military is too rich and powerful. If we think the US messed up in Iraq and Afghanistan - I mean, what a mess! - those would be nothing compared to the huge disaster that would result from an invasion of Iran.
Really? Iraq's army was routed in weeks, and Afghanistan (which had a rag-tag army) was routed in a couple months with only a few hundred US operators in country, working with a few thousand indigenous troops belonging to that country's warlords. Iraq and Afghanistan are a mess because the political leaders of the time thought everything would work out fine even if they ignored years of pre-invasion occupation planning.
Iran's army wouldn't stand a chance against the US military and a regional coalition. The fact that you say their military is "too rich and powerful" is nothing in the face of U.S. defense spending. That money doesn't just go into a blackhole of contractor pockets. These programs churn out extremely effective weaponry and force multipliers built with a focus on today's battles and the future, and all of Iran's military might wouldn't be able to contain a multi-national invasion spearheaded by the U.S.
The FBI (or rather, a group of people from it) is investigating a small problem, because it looks like the kind of small problem that can become a big problem later. Perhaps it's now a local water pump in Illinois, but next time it will be a coolant pump at a power plant. Logs from this incident may provide more information about an attack that the "real deal", if this is a practice intrusion.
Given that the investigators knowledgeable about water control systems aren't likely to be the investigators knowledgeable about risk-management accounting, human trafficking, civil rights politics, or the latest tactics for successfully negotiating with irrational group-thinking mobs, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they spend their time doing what they know. The federal officials aren't universally-adaptable masters of all things investigative. Each person has a particular set of skills, so it makes sense that they be split up doing many different things.
No. I want these FBI agents working on a cure for cancer, and I want them on it yesterday!
You are grasping at straws and your post is still wrong. What was their timing discrepancy with the neutrinos? On the order of 60 nanoseconds. Typical internet pingtimes are on the order of 10ms, or 10,000,000 nanoseconds, and fluctuate WILDLY. And to say "there is probably a direct fiber connection between the locations", well, I wonder if I should just stop here or keep going on. First of all, there is NO direct fiber connection between these two locations. Secondly, even if their were, it wouldn't be a STRAIGHT LINE shot, which wouldn't matter because it wouldn't have been installed for accurate light distance measuring. And I'm going to stop here instead of bothering to type out the rest... you're deadset on not accepting that you are flat out wrong, and none of the posts before yours have changed your mind. It's unlikely any more detailed explanations will.
They used fiber optics. The speed down the link is pretty well determined, as is the length. If it confirms the other measurements, then you know there is either a really serious problem with your physics or your other measurements were reliable. Wouldn't work too well by itself but as a check, it's a good idea.
I searched around, and can't find ANY place that says they used a fiber optic link during the experiment for any purpose like this. It would be silly to the extreme if they drilled a several-hundred-mile-long tunnel using and filled it with fiber optics to check the straight-line distance to the other end, because we have DECADES of experience in getting centimeter and sub-centimeter accuracy using all sort of other methods, whether it's differential GPS or special radio beacons at known geo points. The parent and GGP posts are both wrong. They didn't use any photons to check the distance, instead they used other methods that are known to be reliable.
Ummm, no? They didn't just use GPS clocks, they physically carried atomic clocks from one location to the other. Look up the actual science behind what they did, it's pretty interesting. Oh, and relativistic factors of GPS systems is pretty standard learning in basic science. Maybe there was a compounding effect that they missed... but I doubt it. That article is 100% pure speculation. And it's bullshit, quite frankly. Check out this: Ars article for what the team did. (They also ran photons between the sites to check the time, in addition to GPS and portable atomic clocks.)
Huh? How did they send regular photons through hundreds of miles of solid rock? They don't have the equipment to send and receive ultra-long radio wavelengths that could do this.
Neutrinos don't have to have a single velocity. They can have much slower relative speeds. Unfortunately, since neutrinos barely interact with matter as it is, we just can't detect anything but high-velocity neutrinos. This fact doesn't really have to do with this experiment, however.
You got it! My uncle is now a security officer in the military. he's a highly skilled Linux Programmer, and knows how to attack the network if he needs/wants to. the only reason he got in the military and is now in security is because he had a 96% accuracy at 300 yards. After all this time, the military still values killing over technical skills. While they should be on equal footing.
If an Iranian Nuclear power plant can be attacked by a virus, which could have caused major damage we are just lucky it didn't, you'd think the military would take a better look at their skill requirements. But they rely on their current ranks, the NSA/FBI/CIA to foot for when they can't make up. (and the majority of their skills are about as good as the Military) we need a skill refresh, its long over due.
I don't think you really know much about the military, or your Uncle is pulling your leg. That's not how the armed forces work in the U.S.
He also misrepresents the entire process of modern agriculture - namely, none of the inputs are implicitly dependent on the active production of more CO2. All of them could be done more efficiently, or utilizing alternative power sources. Of course, he's also not covering the rather considerable issue that high-energy-driven intensive farming is doing a lot of long term damage to arable lands all over the world, and actively reducing their productive capacity. Changes to more sustainable farming methods would reduce the dependence of fertilizers and follow effects on marine ecosystems from run-off.
But there's no sense letting any of that get in the way of trying to co-opt global hunger as a perverse argument *against* doing anything about climate change.
Hi. My argument isn't that we shouldn't do something about climate change. It's that we won't, at least not until preventative measures are useless. We'll be left to do something more exciting, like increasing the earth's albedo.
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
I already know what will happen. Policy measures will be introduced to barely limit emissions worldwide. Eventually this will become a looming problem, and a reasonably sized international body will decide that we will use active measures to counteract the climate change problems.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way because it will mean literal death for large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods, and it will also mean a reduction in the standard of living for everyone else. You know as well as I do that we won't do anything until the last minute, which will be active climate measures.
Or how about finally facing the fact that we are not the chosen ones. That we are not in the center of the universe. And that we are not special?
My grandma still believes that humans aren't animals. Some people still believe that non-whites are inferior. And some even still believe the sun rotates around the earth.
Admit it. Cause I’m the only god here!
.
.:P
God/religion don't have anything to do with the notion of us or the universe being "tuned" for each other. We're talking about 1) evolution, and 2) space that may have such a warped set of physical laws that life is literally impossible.
c is the maximum speed. Things with no inertia, obviously, travel at this speed. This is why it's the speed of light in a vacuum for example. The "mechanism" that determines c is space-time, the speed c, is a null (zero) metric in space-time. Other than defining what it is (299792458 m/s for example), it doesn't have an arbitrary value. Our understanding of space-time could be wrong, but what would the value of c vary against? It's the maximum speed by definition. What (constant) speed could we compare it to?
No... things with no inertia travel at 0m/sec and are stationary to an observer. Things with no rest mass travel at the speed of light.
Try taking a classified military radio (in a properly marked courier bag with all the paperwork) through security. Between what the xray of the bag showed, his truthful answer to "did you pack this bag yourself" and his response to requests to open the bag (he correctly said that he couldn't do that nor allow it to happen) he spent the night with airport security and only got out when someone from the base personally came to get him and told the TSA that he had done everything correctly.
Good for him, but it sounds like he could have been more assertive to get through security in a timely fashion. Ask to speak to their TSA supervisors, call his issuing S2 back on base, etc. Very interesting story, nonetheless!
Good for them! Finally, some common sense and rational planning, instead of letting the market get our power from anywhere without regard to the consequences!
Slashdot Mirror
That video is probably the worst Wikileaks example you could bring up! Let's talk about it.
1) I think this was a good video to have released. This is a real leak, and something that probably should be in the open and not hidden, especially when you consider the details of the situation. However...
2) It was an internationally legal military engagement, even without considering the greater context of the incident.
3) Wikileaks released an edited version of this video as its MAIN release (making the unedited version secondary), introducing blatant spin on the editor's part. It's even in the title, calling it "Collateral Murder"! If someone really thinks the edited video is just for brevity and not for spin, you aren't looking at it with ANY sort of objective eye.
I had been a real supporter of Wikileaks up until the release of that video. I didn't agree with the prior leaking of the gate guard and force protection SOPs for Guantanamo Bay or the release of the US Army's equipment manifest for Afghanistan, but I still felt Wikileaks held an important place. None of those things are whistle-blowing actions, but they weren't overly harmful to these parties, either. Yet when they finally get a REAL whistle-blowing video of Reuters reporters to release, they couldn't help but put spin on it. I was shocked at that release and no longer supported Wikileaks after the fact. This ended up being good timing, because then they released two SIGACTS databases and then the diplomatic cables in their entirety, which I couldn't possibly support. You don't release thousands of confidential documents just to get a few dozen risquè cables to the public. That is just irresponsibility or naivety to the extreme.
I call myself a skeptic and an objective person with strong critical thinking skills. I have an open mind, and I really, truly want to see these crimes that are in the diplomatic cables. I'm not talking about "scandalous stuff that you and I both know is going on behind closed doors during US diplomacy"! I want to see actual examples in cables. You have an opportunity to broaden my mind.
They weren't leaked. They were ALL publicly available, Wikileaks has just consolidated them into one convenient location.
All that is mass media's (apparently successful) attempt to divert attention away from the leaks and to focus more on the "crimes" of the leakers.
What crimes? All I've seen on the Slashdot comments was a report saying that the government of Iraq requested information on a rumor they received stating that US forces bombed an Iraqi house to cover up a massacre by ground troops. There is no substantive evidence that this is what occurred, and the Iraqi government was requesting information on the rumor.
So even if we ignore that disputed incident, what other crimes were recorded in the diplomatic cables and released by Wikileaks? I want to see them for myself so I can expand my own worldview.
Can you come up and say that wikileaks hasnt done anything useful now ?
Are you kidding? These are a bunch of company brochures and a few publicly released reports from 160 intelligence contractors. Where is the leak? It's convenient that they put these all in one place for us, but these were already readily available. Wikileaks is now leaking public documents to the public.
Obvious troll is obvious
No... you're just dumb. I've always wondered this, too. Not just about Voyagers, but all space exploration probes. No states have an interest in sending these false commands, but I wonder if it is possible or practical.
:)
Edit: I just reread the grandparent's reply, and the way he posed the question makes him out to be an idiot. I won't suggest modding him up, but his question is at least valid. Anyone know about how secure communications with space probes is accomplished?
Wow. I know you were going for prose, but this must be an off-day for you. You should have written just the first sentence and link and then submitted the post like that. You would have been modded up to parent's level.
You never know when such research will pay off. The US and EU is scrapping programs now while China, India and a few others try to get into space, you can bet that a lot of cool research will be coming from that side of the globe in the next 30 years.
Imagine if we could launch a probe now with what we have available. We could cheaply launch 10's of much faster probes with incrementally better sensors for the price of the voyager program (~$3B in today's dollars).
As a side related note, I have heard nothing about New Horizons' after-rendezvous plans other than a possible second Kuiper belt flyby, but I'll bet you a million bucks that they've over-engineered this probe to later provide the kind of science that 1970s' Voyager is doing for us still today.
And I suppose people who illegally download music, games, and movies aren't "pirates". Get a grip. Language changes, the word "hacker" no longer means "somebody who sits and hacks away at a keyboard programming things", and you know it as well as I do. Even on Slashdot the old meaning is rare to encounter.
Maybe bombing yes, but a ground force invasion of Iran won't happen. It's too big and Iran's military is too rich and powerful. If we think the US messed up in Iraq and Afghanistan - I mean, what a mess! - those would be nothing compared to the huge disaster that would result from an invasion of Iran.
Really? Iraq's army was routed in weeks, and Afghanistan (which had a rag-tag army) was routed in a couple months with only a few hundred US operators in country, working with a few thousand indigenous troops belonging to that country's warlords. Iraq and Afghanistan are a mess because the political leaders of the time thought everything would work out fine even if they ignored years of pre-invasion occupation planning.
Iran's army wouldn't stand a chance against the US military and a regional coalition. The fact that you say their military is "too rich and powerful" is nothing in the face of U.S. defense spending. That money doesn't just go into a blackhole of contractor pockets. These programs churn out extremely effective weaponry and force multipliers built with a focus on today's battles and the future, and all of Iran's military might wouldn't be able to contain a multi-national invasion spearheaded by the U.S.
How do you know the CIA donates money to Facebook? Because "it's obvious"? I'd like to see anything substantial to back up that claim.
The FBI (or rather, a group of people from it) is investigating a small problem, because it looks like the kind of small problem that can become a big problem later. Perhaps it's now a local water pump in Illinois, but next time it will be a coolant pump at a power plant. Logs from this incident may provide more information about an attack that the "real deal", if this is a practice intrusion.
Given that the investigators knowledgeable about water control systems aren't likely to be the investigators knowledgeable about risk-management accounting, human trafficking, civil rights politics, or the latest tactics for successfully negotiating with irrational group-thinking mobs, I think it's perfectly reasonable that they spend their time doing what they know. The federal officials aren't universally-adaptable masters of all things investigative. Each person has a particular set of skills, so it makes sense that they be split up doing many different things.
No. I want these FBI agents working on a cure for cancer, and I want them on it yesterday!
You are grasping at straws and your post is still wrong. What was their timing discrepancy with the neutrinos? On the order of 60 nanoseconds. Typical internet pingtimes are on the order of 10ms, or 10,000,000 nanoseconds, and fluctuate WILDLY. And to say "there is probably a direct fiber connection between the locations", well, I wonder if I should just stop here or keep going on. First of all, there is NO direct fiber connection between these two locations. Secondly, even if their were, it wouldn't be a STRAIGHT LINE shot, which wouldn't matter because it wouldn't have been installed for accurate light distance measuring. And I'm going to stop here instead of bothering to type out the rest... you're deadset on not accepting that you are flat out wrong, and none of the posts before yours have changed your mind. It's unlikely any more detailed explanations will.
> ...didn't use any photons to check the distance...
I wouldn't say that. GPS uses photons (microwave ones) and modern surveying makes extensive use of lasers.
Did you read the original poster a couple lines up? Because here is what he said:
They also ran photons between the sites to check the time, in addition to GPS and portable atomic clocks.
They used fiber optics. The speed down the link is pretty well determined, as is the length. If it confirms the other measurements, then you know there is either a really serious problem with your physics or your other measurements were reliable. Wouldn't work too well by itself but as a check, it's a good idea.
I searched around, and can't find ANY place that says they used a fiber optic link during the experiment for any purpose like this. It would be silly to the extreme if they drilled a several-hundred-mile-long tunnel using and filled it with fiber optics to check the straight-line distance to the other end, because we have DECADES of experience in getting centimeter and sub-centimeter accuracy using all sort of other methods, whether it's differential GPS or special radio beacons at known geo points. The parent and GGP posts are both wrong. They didn't use any photons to check the distance, instead they used other methods that are known to be reliable.
Ummm, no? They didn't just use GPS clocks, they physically carried atomic clocks from one location to the other. Look up the actual science behind what they did, it's pretty interesting. Oh, and relativistic factors of GPS systems is pretty standard learning in basic science. Maybe there was a compounding effect that they missed... but I doubt it. That article is 100% pure speculation. And it's bullshit, quite frankly. Check out this: Ars article for what the team did. (They also ran photons between the sites to check the time, in addition to GPS and portable atomic clocks.)
Huh? How did they send regular photons through hundreds of miles of solid rock? They don't have the equipment to send and receive ultra-long radio wavelengths that could do this.
Neutrinos don't have to have a single velocity. They can have much slower relative speeds. Unfortunately, since neutrinos barely interact with matter as it is, we just can't detect anything but high-velocity neutrinos. This fact doesn't really have to do with this experiment, however.
Someone modded you flamebait, which is what I was thinking until I got to the end of your post and meditated on it. ;)
The US is not encumbered by the the need to observe international treaties.
1) Yes, they most certainly are, in every practical sense.
2) Judging from this and other posts, you're just short of being a moron.
You got it! My uncle is now a security officer in the military. he's a highly skilled Linux Programmer, and knows how to attack the network if he needs/wants to. the only reason he got in the military and is now in security is because he had a 96% accuracy at 300 yards. After all this time, the military still values killing over technical skills. While they should be on equal footing.
If an Iranian Nuclear power plant can be attacked by a virus, which could have caused major damage we are just lucky it didn't, you'd think the military would take a better look at their skill requirements. But they rely on their current ranks, the NSA/FBI/CIA to foot for when they can't make up. (and the majority of their skills are about as good as the Military) we need a skill refresh, its long over due.
I don't think you really know much about the military, or your Uncle is pulling your leg. That's not how the armed forces work in the U.S.
He also misrepresents the entire process of modern agriculture - namely, none of the inputs are implicitly dependent on the active production of more CO2. All of them could be done more efficiently, or utilizing alternative power sources. Of course, he's also not covering the rather considerable issue that high-energy-driven intensive farming is doing a lot of long term damage to arable lands all over the world, and actively reducing their productive capacity. Changes to more sustainable farming methods would reduce the dependence of fertilizers and follow effects on marine ecosystems from run-off.
But there's no sense letting any of that get in the way of trying to co-opt global hunger as a perverse argument *against* doing anything about climate change.
Hi. My argument isn't that we shouldn't do something about climate change. It's that we won't, at least not until preventative measures are useless. We'll be left to do something more exciting, like increasing the earth's albedo.
Note that the US, who in principle did not sign the Kyoto protocol, actually reduced emissions significantly (not just reduction in growth, but actual reduction) since 2007 due to the economic recession.
So, we don't want to reduce carbon emissions because it will hurt our economy - but hurt the economy and emissions automatically reduce. Sounds like a vicious cycle that needs a technological exit strategy to me.
I already know what will happen. Policy measures will be introduced to barely limit emissions worldwide. Eventually this will become a looming problem, and a reasonably sized international body will decide that we will use active measures to counteract the climate change problems.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way because it will mean literal death for large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods, and it will also mean a reduction in the standard of living for everyone else. You know as well as I do that we won't do anything until the last minute, which will be active climate measures.
Or how about finally facing the fact that we are not the chosen ones. That we are not in the center of the universe. And that we are not special?
My grandma still believes that humans aren't animals. Some people still believe that non-whites are inferior. And some even still believe the sun rotates around the earth.
Admit it. Cause I’m the only god here! . . :P
God/religion don't have anything to do with the notion of us or the universe being "tuned" for each other. We're talking about 1) evolution, and 2) space that may have such a warped set of physical laws that life is literally impossible.
c is the maximum speed. Things with no inertia, obviously, travel at this speed. This is why it's the speed of light in a vacuum for example. The "mechanism" that determines c is space-time, the speed c, is a null (zero) metric in space-time. Other than defining what it is (299792458 m/s for example), it doesn't have an arbitrary value. Our understanding of space-time could be wrong, but what would the value of c vary against? It's the maximum speed by definition. What (constant) speed could we compare it to?
No... things with no inertia travel at 0m/sec and are stationary to an observer. Things with no rest mass travel at the speed of light.
Try taking a classified military radio (in a properly marked courier bag with all the paperwork) through security. Between what the xray of the bag showed, his truthful answer to "did you pack this bag yourself" and his response to requests to open the bag (he correctly said that he couldn't do that nor allow it to happen) he spent the night with airport security and only got out when someone from the base personally came to get him and told the TSA that he had done everything correctly.
Good for him, but it sounds like he could have been more assertive to get through security in a timely fashion. Ask to speak to their TSA supervisors, call his issuing S2 back on base, etc. Very interesting story, nonetheless!
Good for them! Finally, some common sense and rational planning, instead of letting the market get our power from anywhere without regard to the consequences!
I like your sarcasm. :)