There is a great Iridium satellite app for the iPhone, too. Just search for "Iridium" on the App Store. It uses your current location and has a few cool features (like showing the "flare" track overlaid on Google Maps imagery so you can figure out whose front yard would be the best, Jerry, the BEST to view it from.)
Just thought I'd say... I was taking a trip to Japan, and ordered some gifts from Amazon to give to my friends when I met them in Tokyo. Two of the books were damaged. I got on the internet customer support they have on Amazon, and explained they were damaged but that I didn't have time to wait for replacements... they gave me full refunds on the two books (about $30 total, I think.)
Totally. I was from the American middle class but had the opportunity, due to my high performance, to attend (and graduate with the degree from) an elitist private school. For the first four months I was the hottest thing on campus and showing my peers, who were from CEO/VP/millionaire/upper military/big time familes, the ropes (14th out of a class of ~350 after first quarter, same rank halfway into second... and then...). My peers decided that I would be much less of a star performer if they would pawn the local goose-egging (0.0 GPA, doesn't go to class, whines and complains and prevents you from getting anything done) wannabe frat girl off on me--push her towards me to get us to hook up together. The fallout from that situation closed almost all doors on campus and even made a couple of real good enemies for me in the administration; look, I made mistakes, they were being hard-noses, and the bottom line is that I was all of eighteen and they were 40-60 year old multi-Ph.D. engineers and scientists in the admin and faculty. Do not try to tell me that they didn't see that I had been set up to crash. Setting the "unfavorite" up to crash is 90% of office games in corporate America.
It took me an extra two quarters to recover from that. I had a hard time sophomore year, junior year wasn't any more fun, and senior year I was just praying to be able to finish. I graduated with a 3.2 overall, 3.1 in my major (chemistry), and corporate America treated me like a reject from a community college. Now I have been homeless for five years. Even when I was in corporate America I do not believe that I was making anywhere close to the median salary for graduates of my class and no where near the average for my grade performance level.
Wow... if you ask me, it sounds like you have some serious issues taking responsibility for your actions.
But organic is the way to go! If it's natural, it's good for you
Why do so many people think this is the case? That something manufactured is "not as good" as something natural. I'm sure there are as many cases where this is true as there are where this is false. Yet look at how organic foods have been taking off... I'd rather eat food that was kept bug-free by pesticides, and used fertilizer to make the plants grow to their maximum extent, and had preservatives added to keep the fruit at its tip-top freshness. (I know some organic food companies just add "organic" as a label that doesn't mean anything, but most organic producers follow some (if not all) of those rules.) Oh well... I guess people can eat what they choose, no matter what their rationale may be.
Their nuclear bomb fizzled and their ICBM fell in the sea well short of its target.
You want to know what I think about their ICBM? I think the US shot it down. North Korea relies on a good deal of foreign aid from sales of its ICBM tech to countries like Iran. I think the US would have shot it down purposefully to trick the world into thinking that North Korean missiles are unreliable.
How could you do this when several nations plus North Korea are reading telemetry and tracking this using radar/OOH methods? Stealth missiles or lasers.
The NK Army never lost a war, just battles. Don't forget that bit either.
This is completely false. The North Korean military was completely and utterly routed to the Chinese side of the border in almost every single China-DPRK border province. North Korea was entirely defeated when 300,000 Chinese troops moved at night under orders of strict silence to repel the joint American and South Korean forces that were standing just on the south side of the Yalu and Tumen rivers.
Then there are the Crab Wars of the 1990s between South Korea and North Korea. There were a small number of victories on the littoral seas in the beginning for North Korea, but they soon began losing every skirmish they started and had to stop provoking the losses of their own ships. The DPRK lost this entire campaign.
from my innocent point of view the us has done nothing but provoke north korea.
for example in that recent news about a more powerful test of a railgun prototype there was a neat little graphic showing the ranges of available weapon types and the new railgun once it's finished over a map of north korea.
basically the us has been publicly preparing for a war against north korea for decades and no body seems to be too unsettled by their aggression.
I'm really worried about you guys over there.
I did a little bit of an experiment. See if you can figure out "what I did there":
o In 1950 the US sent it troops across the 38th parallel in a surprise attack against North Korea.
o In 1958 pro-US agents hijack a North Korean jetliner and force it to land in Seoul.
o In 1968 the US sent a small group of 30 exceedingly well-trained commandos to attack Kim Il-sung's residence in Pyongyang.
o In 1969 two US jets attack a North Korean reconnaissance airplane in North Korean airspace, destroying it at 31 personnel aboard.
o In 1970 and 1974 the US captures or sinks several North Korean fishing vessels, resulting in the deaths of several dozen North Koreans.
o In 1976, a North Korean working detachment came to trim a Poplar tree that was blocking visibility between North Korean CPs. After a short argument, the US side attacked the unarmed North Korean working detachment with wooden 2x4s and axe handles, killing two North Korean workers.
o Between 1979-1984, there were a number of recorded instances of US operatives kill trying to infiltrate into the North.
o From 1995-2002 were the so-called "Crab Wars", a series of a couple dozen naval skirmishes each caused when US boats crossed the UN-mandated demarcation line into North Korean waters. The US gave up when it was clear they were no match for the North Korean navy and were losing more than they were gaining.
o In 2003, a US fighter plane crosses seven miles north of the demarcation line, and returns south after being intercepted by six North Korean planes.
o In March 2010, a US submarine fires a torpedo at a North Korean corvette in a brazen sneak attack, claiming the lives of 46 North Korean sailors.
o In November 2010, the US fires over a hundred artillery rounds onto a disputed North Korean island, destroying approximately 70 North Korean homes.
And what is the North Korean side doing in response to the US' heinous provocations?
o North Korea still routinely provides massive amounts of aid and gasoline/diesel fuel to South Korea, at times withdrawing its aid for various reasons.
o North Korea conducts massive yearly military exercises involving a large percentage of its armed forces to ensure readiness in the event of hostilities.
o North Korea refers to South Korea and the US as being part of an "Axis of Evil" that are working against global human interests.
o North Korea has begun conducting large and complex naval drills in 2010 in response to the sinking of a corvette ship from a surprise US torpedo attack.
o The North Korean Navy tests an advanced rail gun, capable of striking hundreds of kilometers inland, that is expected to become operational on naval vessels around 2025. An independent North Korean newspaper releases a neat little graphic showing the gun's range over a map of South Korea.
They probably put the entire OCRed diplomatic cable archive from the last few decades on there, or more likely the State Department just put the "historic" cables on there.
I think the original author's point still stands. The number of times you read in an article "the U.S. government has asked NYT to hold off on releasing this article for the past six months" is pretty high. I chalk this one up for the newspapers, rather than WikiLeaks, because as much as the mass media has been transformed into an ineffectual mess, it at least shows a considerable level of responsibility and weighing of the possible damages and outcomes.
A responsible newspaper will send teams searching through the diplomatic cables and release only the scandals. Limiting inappropriate damage unrelated to corruptions and scandals is what responsibility means. I don't think anybody doubts that WikiLeaks is going to hold off on releasing even a single one of the cables when it comes down to it.
I also want to say if it's true that WikiLeaks is taking advice from the media on what to redact, at least that helps.
You know, if I wanted to discredit Wikileaks for some reason, I'd arrange a situation where Wikileaks needed to establish mirrors, such as DDOS'ing the main site and getting the DNS entry removed.
Then I'd set up my own Wikileaks mirror and pepper the files with plausible disinformation. When you look at a Wikileaks mirror, how do you know you're looking at the real thing?
Next, I'd spam the torrent sites with dozens of "Wikileaks" torrents, all containing my disinformation. When you download one of these torrents, how do you know it's real?
Finally I'd make sure that everyone was aware of the disinformation I'd planted. Job done - nobody can tell which files are genuine and which are fake.
Why, it would be just like the time those rightwingnuts faked FOIA.zip to make it look like the most brilliant scientists of our time were actually all a bit dodgy.
There are probably much better ways of doing what you are talking about... why not submit false files and then once Wikileaks releases them, you have your government discredit them publicly? It's called the "poisoning the well" approach.
Unfortunately, NONE so far. The only good things the diplo leaks have brought us is transparency in the government, which is NEAT to look at and read but is disruptive to our country's ability to conduct strategic relations.
2. Korean Police Action - Do you think North Koreans or Chinese have more freedoms today? Is there more suffering in rural China than in the DPRK?
That's a very, very good list, however this point is almost like a troll. I wish you would take it back or rewrite it. Obviously almost all of Korea was united under a capitalist and western overseer, but China stepped in to prevent that influence on its doorstep. The US never had intentions of seriously invading beyond the Yalu.
From what I've read, he's not the dictatorial leader of wikileaks that everyone imagines. I wish there was both a way to verify this and a way to disseminate the info so that everybody else would realise, but maybe just replying to you will be enough to make me feel better for now. It seems like we all sort of assume he's the boss, and the people on the news certainly use words that make it sound that way, but actually the facts are that wikileaks has a nine member advisory board and stuff and Assange is just the front-guy for taking shit from the press and so on.
"The BBC are reporting that PayPal is the latest company to abandon WikiLeaks. The list now includes their DNS providers (EveryDNS) and their hosts (Amazon). PayPal's move is unlikely to result in many more people boycotting the company, as most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them for years for a wide variety of abusive practices."
There are lots of Paypal horror stories, and Paypal is clearly a bank that is not a bank which gives them way too much power to do whatever they like.
But come on Slashdot, you are clearly trolling your userbase... and I guess I responded.
Who's panicking? Did you even look at the source for the "The US State Dept has started to warn potential recruits"? This is one of the most blatantly false things I've seen at Slashdot in a while. The source is an Arab blog which says that a State Dept employee sent a message to his Alumni recommending they do not post links to or otherwise comment on the documents online. This is not official, and it was one anonymous recommendation to a small group of people the employee felt he should give advice to.
Thanks for your post. And in answer to "who's panicking"? Everyone who doesn't scroll halfway down the comments to read yours. This article will be quoted as truth for the next few months, and there is nothing you can do about it.
And to throw up an opposing viewpoint, apparently public SPAWARE computers (free web cafes offered to deployed army soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan) are posting a "you are breaking the law by introducing classified info on an unclassified system" message when trying to view certain sites, even news sites such as Fox News or CNN or NYT.
Assange will eventually release the insurance file. I personally think the insurance file are the diplomatic cables. In the past, Assange has stated in interviews to the effect that it would be a waste not to eventually release the insurance file information.
Who said a carte blanche? There is some level of trust inherent in any relationship, such as with your wife or your friends or your company or your government. It is foolish to assume that the American public has the right to know every bit of knowledge in the possession of the American government. To start with an extreme, there is no reasonable circumstance where detailed nuclear weapon designs should be revealed. You have to strike the right balance between secrecy and openness, and that was what the original poster was expressing.
There is a big difference between "whistleblowing" to uncover domestic corruption and leaking state secrets of multiple nations.
What if the state secrets are all about state corruption?
Obviously everybody wants corruption scandals leaked. I believe he's talking about real secrets that the government has the right and responsibility to keep classified for a certain amount of time.
Slashdot Mirror
How many flights did it take to compile this footage? What the max range/time that this platform is capable of?
There is a great Iridium satellite app for the iPhone, too. Just search for "Iridium" on the App Store. It uses your current location and has a few cool features (like showing the "flare" track overlaid on Google Maps imagery so you can figure out whose front yard would be the best, Jerry, the BEST to view it from.)
You mean the Good Samaritan Law, that thing they got George, Jerry, Elaine, and Kosmo on.
Just thought I'd say... I was taking a trip to Japan, and ordered some gifts from Amazon to give to my friends when I met them in Tokyo. Two of the books were damaged. I got on the internet customer support they have on Amazon, and explained they were damaged but that I didn't have time to wait for replacements... they gave me full refunds on the two books (about $30 total, I think.)
They run a decent service over at Amazon...
Totally. I was from the American middle class but had the opportunity, due to my high performance, to attend (and graduate with the degree from) an elitist private school. For the first four months I was the hottest thing on campus and showing my peers, who were from CEO/VP/millionaire/upper military/big time familes, the ropes (14th out of a class of ~350 after first quarter, same rank halfway into second... and then...). My peers decided that I would be much less of a star performer if they would pawn the local goose-egging (0.0 GPA, doesn't go to class, whines and complains and prevents you from getting anything done) wannabe frat girl off on me--push her towards me to get us to hook up together. The fallout from that situation closed almost all doors on campus and even made a couple of real good enemies for me in the administration; look, I made mistakes, they were being hard-noses, and the bottom line is that I was all of eighteen and they were 40-60 year old multi-Ph.D. engineers and scientists in the admin and faculty. Do not try to tell me that they didn't see that I had been set up to crash. Setting the "unfavorite" up to crash is 90% of office games in corporate America.
It took me an extra two quarters to recover from that. I had a hard time sophomore year, junior year wasn't any more fun, and senior year I was just praying to be able to finish. I graduated with a 3.2 overall, 3.1 in my major (chemistry), and corporate America treated me like a reject from a community college. Now I have been homeless for five years. Even when I was in corporate America I do not believe that I was making anywhere close to the median salary for graduates of my class and no where near the average for my grade performance level.
Wow... if you ask me, it sounds like you have some serious issues taking responsibility for your actions.
But organic is the way to go! If it's natural, it's good for you
Why do so many people think this is the case? That something manufactured is "not as good" as something natural. I'm sure there are as many cases where this is true as there are where this is false. Yet look at how organic foods have been taking off... I'd rather eat food that was kept bug-free by pesticides, and used fertilizer to make the plants grow to their maximum extent, and had preservatives added to keep the fruit at its tip-top freshness. (I know some organic food companies just add "organic" as a label that doesn't mean anything, but most organic producers follow some (if not all) of those rules.) Oh well... I guess people can eat what they choose, no matter what their rationale may be.
Their nuclear bomb fizzled and their ICBM fell in the sea well short of its target.
You want to know what I think about their ICBM? I think the US shot it down. North Korea relies on a good deal of foreign aid from sales of its ICBM tech to countries like Iran. I think the US would have shot it down purposefully to trick the world into thinking that North Korean missiles are unreliable.
How could you do this when several nations plus North Korea are reading telemetry and tracking this using radar/OOH methods? Stealth missiles or lasers.
The NK Army never lost a war, just battles. Don't forget that bit either.
This is completely false. The North Korean military was completely and utterly routed to the Chinese side of the border in almost every single China-DPRK border province. North Korea was entirely defeated when 300,000 Chinese troops moved at night under orders of strict silence to repel the joint American and South Korean forces that were standing just on the south side of the Yalu and Tumen rivers.
Then there are the Crab Wars of the 1990s between South Korea and North Korea. There were a small number of victories on the littoral seas in the beginning for North Korea, but they soon began losing every skirmish they started and had to stop provoking the losses of their own ships. The DPRK lost this entire campaign.
from my innocent point of view the us has done nothing but provoke north korea. for example in that recent news about a more powerful test of a railgun prototype there was a neat little graphic showing the ranges of available weapon types and the new railgun once it's finished over a map of north korea. basically the us has been publicly preparing for a war against north korea for decades and no body seems to be too unsettled by their aggression. I'm really worried about you guys over there.
I did a little bit of an experiment. See if you can figure out "what I did there":
o In 1950 the US sent it troops across the 38th parallel in a surprise attack against North Korea.
o In 1958 pro-US agents hijack a North Korean jetliner and force it to land in Seoul.
o In 1968 the US sent a small group of 30 exceedingly well-trained commandos to attack Kim Il-sung's residence in Pyongyang.
o In 1969 two US jets attack a North Korean reconnaissance airplane in North Korean airspace, destroying it at 31 personnel aboard.
o In 1970 and 1974 the US captures or sinks several North Korean fishing vessels, resulting in the deaths of several dozen North Koreans.
o In 1976, a North Korean working detachment came to trim a Poplar tree that was blocking visibility between North Korean CPs. After a short argument, the US side attacked the unarmed North Korean working detachment with wooden 2x4s and axe handles, killing two North Korean workers.
o Between 1979-1984, there were a number of recorded instances of US operatives kill trying to infiltrate into the North.
o From 1995-2002 were the so-called "Crab Wars", a series of a couple dozen naval skirmishes each caused when US boats crossed the UN-mandated demarcation line into North Korean waters. The US gave up when it was clear they were no match for the North Korean navy and were losing more than they were gaining.
o In 2003, a US fighter plane crosses seven miles north of the demarcation line, and returns south after being intercepted by six North Korean planes.
o In March 2010, a US submarine fires a torpedo at a North Korean corvette in a brazen sneak attack, claiming the lives of 46 North Korean sailors.
o In November 2010, the US fires over a hundred artillery rounds onto a disputed North Korean island, destroying approximately 70 North Korean homes.
And what is the North Korean side doing in response to the US' heinous provocations?
o North Korea still routinely provides massive amounts of aid and gasoline/diesel fuel to South Korea, at times withdrawing its aid for various reasons.
o North Korea conducts massive yearly military exercises involving a large percentage of its armed forces to ensure readiness in the event of hostilities.
o North Korea refers to South Korea and the US as being part of an "Axis of Evil" that are working against global human interests.
o North Korea has begun conducting large and complex naval drills in 2010 in response to the sinking of a corvette ship from a surprise US torpedo attack.
o The North Korean Navy tests an advanced rail gun, capable of striking hundreds of kilometers inland, that is expected to become operational on naval vessels around 2025. An independent North Korean newspaper releases a neat little graphic showing the gun's range over a map of South Korea.
Note: This page requires Chrome to view. There are alternatives available, but nothing for pre 4.0 beta Firefox.
They probably put the entire OCRed diplomatic cable archive from the last few decades on there, or more likely the State Department just put the "historic" cables on there.
Is this different from being cold-blooded? I imagine so, as this sounds like an animal analogue of photosynthesis.
I think the original author's point still stands. The number of times you read in an article "the U.S. government has asked NYT to hold off on releasing this article for the past six months" is pretty high. I chalk this one up for the newspapers, rather than WikiLeaks, because as much as the mass media has been transformed into an ineffectual mess, it at least shows a considerable level of responsibility and weighing of the possible damages and outcomes.
A responsible newspaper will send teams searching through the diplomatic cables and release only the scandals. Limiting inappropriate damage unrelated to corruptions and scandals is what responsibility means. I don't think anybody doubts that WikiLeaks is going to hold off on releasing even a single one of the cables when it comes down to it.
I also want to say if it's true that WikiLeaks is taking advice from the media on what to redact, at least that helps.
You know, if I wanted to discredit Wikileaks for some reason, I'd arrange a situation where Wikileaks needed to establish mirrors, such as DDOS'ing the main site and getting the DNS entry removed.
Then I'd set up my own Wikileaks mirror and pepper the files with plausible disinformation. When you look at a Wikileaks mirror, how do you know you're looking at the real thing?
Next, I'd spam the torrent sites with dozens of "Wikileaks" torrents, all containing my disinformation. When you download one of these torrents, how do you know it's real?
Finally I'd make sure that everyone was aware of the disinformation I'd planted. Job done - nobody can tell which files are genuine and which are fake.
Why, it would be just like the time those rightwingnuts faked FOIA.zip to make it look like the most brilliant scientists of our time were actually all a bit dodgy.
There are probably much better ways of doing what you are talking about... why not submit false files and then once Wikileaks releases them, you have your government discredit them publicly? It's called the "poisoning the well" approach.
Two options:
1) They are a CIA front and are going to let Assange be "captured" before more than a few hundred cables are released, or
2) They are really at their processing limit for redacting names.
And I didn't think the CIA conspiracy had much wind before, but now I'm giving it a little more thought...
What corruption has been exposed thus far?
Unfortunately, NONE so far. The only good things the diplo leaks have brought us is transparency in the government, which is NEAT to look at and read but is disruptive to our country's ability to conduct strategic relations.
2. Korean Police Action - Do you think North Koreans or Chinese have more freedoms today? Is there more suffering in rural China than in the DPRK?
That's a very, very good list, however this point is almost like a troll. I wish you would take it back or rewrite it. Obviously almost all of Korea was united under a capitalist and western overseer, but China stepped in to prevent that influence on its doorstep. The US never had intentions of seriously invading beyond the Yalu.
From what I've read, he's not the dictatorial leader of wikileaks that everyone imagines. I wish there was both a way to verify this and a way to disseminate the info so that everybody else would realise, but maybe just replying to you will be enough to make me feel better for now. It seems like we all sort of assume he's the boss, and the people on the news certainly use words that make it sound that way, but actually the facts are that wikileaks has a nine member advisory board and stuff and Assange is just the front-guy for taking shit from the press and so on.
So he's the Zaphod Beeblebrox of Wikileaks?
"The BBC are reporting that PayPal is the latest company to abandon WikiLeaks. The list now includes their DNS providers (EveryDNS) and their hosts (Amazon). PayPal's move is unlikely to result in many more people boycotting the company, as most knowledgeable on-line users will have been refusing to use them for years for a wide variety of abusive practices."
There are lots of Paypal horror stories, and Paypal is clearly a bank that is not a bank which gives them way too much power to do whatever they like.
But come on Slashdot, you are clearly trolling your userbase... and I guess I responded.
Who's panicking? Did you even look at the source for the "The US State Dept has started to warn potential recruits"? This is one of the most blatantly false things I've seen at Slashdot in a while. The source is an Arab blog which says that a State Dept employee sent a message to his Alumni recommending they do not post links to or otherwise comment on the documents online. This is not official, and it was one anonymous recommendation to a small group of people the employee felt he should give advice to.
Thanks for your post. And in answer to "who's panicking"? Everyone who doesn't scroll halfway down the comments to read yours. This article will be quoted as truth for the next few months, and there is nothing you can do about it.
And to throw up an opposing viewpoint, apparently public SPAWARE computers (free web cafes offered to deployed army soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan) are posting a "you are breaking the law by introducing classified info on an unclassified system" message when trying to view certain sites, even news sites such as Fox News or CNN or NYT.
You can mark "I don't know" and why you don't know something on your clearance form.
Assange will eventually release the insurance file. I personally think the insurance file are the diplomatic cables. In the past, Assange has stated in interviews to the effect that it would be a waste not to eventually release the insurance file information.
Who said a carte blanche? There is some level of trust inherent in any relationship, such as with your wife or your friends or your company or your government. It is foolish to assume that the American public has the right to know every bit of knowledge in the possession of the American government. To start with an extreme, there is no reasonable circumstance where detailed nuclear weapon designs should be revealed. You have to strike the right balance between secrecy and openness, and that was what the original poster was expressing.
Great summary, thank you sir. :)
There is a big difference between "whistleblowing" to uncover domestic corruption and leaking state secrets of multiple nations.
What if the state secrets are all about state corruption?
Obviously everybody wants corruption scandals leaked. I believe he's talking about real secrets that the government has the right and responsibility to keep classified for a certain amount of time.