Somehow I don't think the campaign slogan "VOTE FOR ME - And I'll stick a nuclear power plant in your area" will catch on
So it's more like, would you like to live on welfare or would you rather we build a nuclear power plant in your area? There really is no alternative to the economic / jobs problem besides building nuclear power plants.
I agree with you that we should focus on decentralized power generation. But before we can make solar generators cheap, we have to build nuclear power plants. If we don't build the nuclear power plants we wont get out of the economic recession or depression with 10% unemployment, and if we stay in this state we will never be able to afford to fund anything with tax dollars because the government wont have anybody left to tax.
Think so? I think you are not considering a few facts.
Nuclear energy is not going to help replace the oil in plastics, fertilizers, adhesives, coatings, paints, cleaning products (did you know Dawn has oil products in it?), fabrics, lubricants, and countless other products.
You are aware as well that oil provides relatively little of our electricity, right?
But it's a good start. If we go nuclear we'd be well on our way. There is no better option to produce the same results for the price.
Oil provides about 2% of the electricity we use in the US. We get five times more electricity from hydro than from oil and coal provides about half the electricity used. Most oil is used for transportation and for various products. I like the thought of electric cars but those aren't going to do away with the need for oil anytime soon.
When electricity is cheap enough, we'll be able to plug our cars into our walls, along with our robot maid.
Building nuclear plants takes time. Lots of time. Even if we started today we couldn't bring enough nuclear plants online fast enough to service the anticipated need for electricity solely with nuclear during the next 15 years.
Thats not necessarily true. The time it takes to build is relative to the cost it takes to build it and the expertise. It could be built in 5 years if we saw it as an emergency. You see how fast all that surveillance technology got built but they can't built nuclear power plants? Please!
If these smaller plants were to work (no idea if they would) that might help but then you have a distribution, cleanup and security problem with nuclear fuels.
If you think people are opposed to a coal plant in their backyard, try putting a nuclear plant there. People are quite fearful of nuclear. Sometimes with good reason and sometimes not but they are fearful nonetheless.
Not all nuclear plants are bad designs. Some have the cleanup as part of the design. Some are designed to require mininmal cleanup. And they are all more clean than coal.
Let's see. First, what coast did you have in mind that is unoccupied yet close to major metropolitan areas? How do you propose to convince the taxpayers that might be fearful of nuclear that it is a good idea? How do you propose to transport the electricity economically to places far from the coast?
New York, Boston, California, Florida, All the coasts. Build a large floating island on the coast, put the nuclear power plant on these islands just like we put our trash on floating islands. Float the islands far enough out so people don't see it and don't think about it.
First the coast and now the desert. Have you really given this any thought at all? No one lives in the desert and it's expensive to get the power out of the desert. Not to mention that cooling becomes a bigger problem there. While there are nuclear plants that don't require water, most use it because it is cheap and abundant. The entire advantage of a small nuclear plant is that you can place it where it is needed but no one wants to live near a nuclear reactor if they can help it.
Dig holes deep underground like a sandworm into the desert. Build the nuclear power plants under the desert sand so deep that nobody even notices they are there. This makes it easier to secure from terrorists because it's in the desert and this also puts it out of sight, out of mind.
I'm all for a stable energy source but there are several issues with nuclear facilities:
1. People tend to live on the coasts, & people tend to disapprove of any nuclear plants near their homes.(note I lived near( 2. Various security agencies see nuclear facilities as potential targets. (plane + nuclear plant = Chernobyl)
3. You need to store the spent fuel somewhere; no one wants to live near a nuclear dump. Even if it is out in the middle of nowhere you still have to transport the fuel there (through citys? on major highways?)
Put the floating power plant far enough away from the coast that people feel safe. This would cost a bit more but if people are really scared they wont mind higher taxes in exchange.
Exactly what I was thinking.I was actually thinking about building huge ships or floating nuclear islands in the ocean to lower the fear of radiation exposure but thats close enough.
Our options are very limited. We have to solve the energy crisis immediately, by any means necessary, because if we don't it will cost us more lives than if we do.
If we go nuclear the risk of a nuclear meltdown or radiation being unleashed is a lot less than the risk of another terrorist attack, another middle east war, another oil spill. I don't understand why people would fear something that hasn't happened over something that has.
We should pass an energy bill to fund nuclear energy. We should spent 100 billion on the energy bill and spend half of that on nuclear energy. We should use the other half on biofuels, on solar, on wind, but we need nuclear energy because it will solve the problem immediately in the short term while we need to fund the other 50 billion on the long term.
For 100 billion dollars we could solve the energy crisis in the USA. Of course we'd need to invest another 100 billion improving the grid and building the electronet but these investments would pay for themselves and it might be the only solution to get out of the economic crisis.
So basically we either go nuclear or we are going to die in poverty. There aren't going to be jobs for us if we don't lower the price of energy drastically, and make the energy as clean as possible.
Re:Why is there no cost/benefit analysis?
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Top Secret America
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If we weigh the cost, in lives and dollars, of our "War on Terror", against the benefit of preventing one 9/11 a year, how would that expenditure compare with what we spend to prevent death and property damage from things like highway accidents, hurricanes, cancer, pollution, earth threatening asteroids, etc. Is it just me, or on that basis does it seem the "War on Terror" consumes way too much resources.
I'd love to see numbers on this if anyone knows of any.
What about happiness? can that be measured? or are we robots that seek to protect lives and earn dollars?
Nuclear energy is probably the best chance we have are breaking our addiction to oil. Nuclear energy is also relatively clean. I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere. We could generate enough power to power the entire country, not to mention we could probably put hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants in the desert.
.."probably wear glasses or have other issues which will completely rule them out from the military service"
wearing glasses does not disqualify you from military service.
I know that, I just chose a bad example. Having asthma on the other hand will disqualify you and a lot of people who live in urban areas and who have skills have asthma.
The only reason 1 out of ever 1000 is a murderer and why theres less killing than in earlier times in human history is because of the consequences.
If life in prison or death were not a consequence for murder, meaning if people could get away with murder, a lot more people than you think would be murderers. People would be murdering each other for money, for corporate profits, over women, over sporting events. you just don't have a clue how people really are.
I'm not saying the majority of humanity is like this, but it's more like 10 or 20 out of every 100, not 1 out of 1000. Somewhere between 10 and 20% of humanity. If you think this number is a bit too large I'm willing to accept that it's 5%, but the point is it's only 1 out of ever 1000 because we have people who track murderers down and punish them with life in prison or death.
If they actually had a cyber warrior bootcamp where they take a script kiddie and train them to be a cyber warrior, they'd probably have hundreds of thousands of people sign up. The reason they can't find anyone might be because they aren't actively recruiting.
People who are typically drawn to computers are often not very good canidates for the military lifestyle. And to become good at Securing systems or hacking them.. you need be breath, eat and sleep computers (especially hacking them).
Hacking skills are not taught in schools and working for the goverment pays c@rp.. why would someone who spent years developing highly saught after skills work for the latest cyberwarfare agency when they could make big bucks in the private sector.
There are plenty of highly skilled security folks out there "Defend the nation" to. I dont see any real recruitment efforts going on that are worth while.
The government does have the advantage of a weak economy. This means that the vast majority of hackers you mention will be unemployed. No the private sector is not hiring hackers because the private sector is looking for people with relevant work experience, not just skill and talent.
And you are right there are no recruitment efforts at all. That is probably the main reason they cannot find anyone. If they go to IRC they'd probably find some people, theres chatrooms they could go to if they want to recruit people. It's not difficult to find script kiddies, they are literally everywhere.
Are they going to be a world class hacker? Probably not, but thats because being a world class hacker leads to a prison cell. This is why even when people have the talent to be world class hackers, they don't actually want to become world class hackers. The US government in my opinion will have no problem finding individuals who have the technical skill to be cyber warriors, as thats not going to be difficult to find. What will be difficult to find is people who can handle the top secret security clearance.
As far as the job goes, it's probably stuff an ordinary script kiddie can do, and if the script kiddie can't do it they can be trained by experienced cyber warriors in how to do it. I don't see it as a big deal finding people unless there is some political concern. And I'm not buying the idea that there aren't enough bright people on the internet, as that assumption isn't based on reality.
In fact getting into the military is very difficult right now precisely because there is no shortage of people trying to enlist. So to tell people to enlist or talk to a recruiter is not that simple. Also most hackers probably wear glasses or have other issues which will completely rule them out from the military service. So unless the military somehow makes exceptions, the vast majority of hackers just aren't going to get accepted into the army nevermind the airforce.
USA jobs? That's useless as well. Unless they are lucky enough to come from a military family and be born with top secret clearance, they aren't going to have top secret clearance and without that they wont be hired for the vast majority of jobs at USAjobs. On top of that, veterans have preference at USAjobs so even if the job does not require clearance if someone is a veteran they'll be chosen for the job instead. On top of all of this there is no shortage of people trying to get jjobs on USA jobs. So there is a very slim possibility of getting a job from USA jobs and probably not worth the time of applying unless you want to take a gamble.
well DUH, the 'cyber warriors' that the government wants are hard to find. mostly because they are either trained IT security professionals or a kid who figured out how to hack his school to change his grades. the first of the 2 will be easy to get with the increase in IT students. however unlike china, there is sever punishment for committing cyber crimes. china and other countries have the right idea of hiring the hackers instead of locking them away like we used to do
There is almost always a script kiddie in there somewhere. They can take these kids and train them to be cyber warriors. You can take a script kiddie and train them to be an elite hacker. This is probably easier than expecting elite hackers to work for the government which spends all its time trying to arrest them.
It's simple, most of the time if a hacker is bold enough to change their grades they've already broken federal laws. The difference between the script kiddie and the elite hacker is a difference in scope and goals. The elite hacker wants to hack elite entities like big corporations, or very important individuals, while the script kiddie just defaces websites and hacks people over IRC or whatever.
The point is the government has the resources to take every script kiddie in America and train them to be a cyber warrior if it were as necessary as they make it out to be. You don't learn to be a script kiddie in school, you don't learn to be a hacker in school, but if you have the instinct to be either one of these you can be trained to become an elite cyber warrior. It's about finding the people who have the instinct.
A CI is as close as a hacker ever will get to working for the government. Nobody volunteers to be a CI so they are forced into it. The option is usually to continue getting raped in prison, or become a CI. The problem is the life of a CI generally sucks.
So no hacker is going to be able to really become a government employee. The hackers broke a federal law and this disqualifies them from ever serving in an official capacity. Why? It's so difficult to get security clearance that felons have no chance.
So the government still has options. They can approach the hackers who never committed a felony. They can approach the ones who were smart enough to never get caught. They can approach individuals who have a lot of experience programming, or doing the type of work they need, or they can just take talented young individuals and train them just like the marine corps and army does.
I think if they are serious they should train the cyber warriors themselves.
The economy as it is right now has plenty of talented individuals just waiting to get hired. Theres 10% unemployment so there is no shortage of the labor force, as for qualifications these are skills which aren't learned in school so the government must already know who does what, they have enough fbi informants and others who gather information on anybody with any shred of credibility as far as computer skills go.
So either they people they want to hire would rather remain unemployed than work for them (which means the job must suck and not pay well), or they are using this shortage as an excuse to raise the pay rates. The fact is theres plenty of people from the dot com bubble or from before that, who would be qualified to do most of this. Most of the people on slashdot have the skills to do the job, now the security clearance on the other hand thats where there will be shortages of qualified individuals.
The real world is not "cold, brutal and cruel", and beheading people is not "the true nature of mankind". Most people can't commit murder under normal circumstances and become distressed watching murder or violence. That's not a question of "perspective", it's something innate to most humans. People are generally non-violent and cooperative. Human society wouldn't work if many people operated like you think they do.
All your statements make me think that there is something wrong with you and that you have trust and empathy issues.
Watching a video of murder should not be equated to actually committing murder or being violent. I said I could watch the video and remain calm. Being capable of empathy and having an inability to control your empathy are two different things. Just like some videos might make me angry, or make me laugh, but if I watch them over and over again, I feel less angry, and it's less funny each time. It's the exact same thing with violence.
Also who says human society works? Have you ever looked at how f*cked up society is? This is exactly what I'm talking about by sheltered. Human society does not work on the global level or even in this country. You can feel all the empathy you want, you can cry, you can scream, you can get angry, it's not going to stop millions of people from dying in foreign countries or in this country, and a lot of them die in violent ways, in genocide, in shootings, in all kinds of sad ways, and many of them are children.
The emotions don't help you deal with society. You cannot feel this world without eventually being driven insane. So the solution is that some people shut their feelings off, because it's necessary to do that. Just as if you have to save lives and you are scared, but you shut your fear off and you do something heroic or great it's the same thing. It's not that they don't feel fear, they just learn to process and interpret it differently. Fear becomes merely an adrenal response.
But you can believe something is wrong with me as you have the right to your opinion, but I can confirm that I do have empathy and it's just a matter of self control as to when and where to express it. You watch a video of people who are already dead, there is no reason to feel anything, especially if you've seen people die in that manner before and you don't know the people in the video.
Just reading your description made me feel ill. I agree, anyone who could watch that and not be affected is probably a psychopath/sociopath.
Will you please stop saying crap like this? It's insulting and unnecessary. I thought we are supposed to be better than the people doing the beheadings in those videos? I watched one of the video and I think it's a shame that people have to die in such a painful fashion, but I don't really feel anything towards the people in the video.
If anything it allows someone to know they aren't like the people they see in the video doing the beheading. It's not the act of killing that I'm talking about because people get killed all the time, it's the act of killing someone in an unnecessarily gruesome fashion.
If you insist on thinking everyone who can watch this videos and remain unaffected is a psychopath, you are free to believe that but I know you are wrong.
Speaking as a sociopath (which I am - I can cut off anything even vaguely resembling emotion at will), I don't have any deep issues to deal with (unless you count the current state of the economy). I don't consider my "condition" as a liability. I am capable of love, dedication, grief (someone very close to me died, and I only found out about it early this morning, and I'm pissed-off and "upset" about the it, even though I realize the world ain't fair and no one ever told me it would be), happiness, anger, the full spectrum of human emotion. I can also quite calmly bleed you, leave your body lying behind a dumpster, and walk off - given a good reason, of course.
Logically speaking, that kind of capability is evidence of a higher level of being (I'm speaking in terms of both cognitive ability and emotional stability) than all the silly hand-wringing and "I'm like this because my parents were alcoholics/abused me/I wasn't popular/I hate to watch bad people doing bad things on a screening service/whatever" bullshit that keeps head-shrinkers in business and your mental halters firmly in place.
I don't believe you are capable of love, at least not in the way that empaths are. You love them because they can do something for you or because they are useful to you, but thats not really love. It's only love if you are willing to look out for their best interest, which sociopaths typically don't do.
As most medical students wont be able to get work and it's good training for what they'll probably be facing, if they happen to see anything gross and violent.
Nice double-standard you've got there. You label me as sheltered and overly sensitive because I didn't respond the way you did, and then you turn around and cry foul when I give you a label in return.
Nothing is wrong with being sensitive or sheltered, unless you take a job which requires in specific that you not be. It's one thing if I call you sensitive and sheltered if you are doing an ordinary job but if you are being paid to look at disgusting images, you lose the right to complain about it because you chose that profession.
If you choose a profession you should know what you are getting into. If you don't like looking at Rotten.com then you probably wont want to look at Rotten.com all day everyday.
What ever happened to being qualified for a job? Any other job and we expect people to receive training and be qualified but somehow being a moderator/image screener requires no qualification or training at all, just take random kids off the street from random backrounds and hope they can last 6 months without losing it?
I'm sorry but this isn't even about me or labels. This is about the industry and the hiring practices that don't even attempt to determine the sensitivity level of the individuals who take the job. Any other job and you'd have 5 applicants for the 1 who gets hired and usually the 1 who gets hired has the precise traits they look for. Why can't they do the same with these sorts of jobs and only hire people who don't mind seeing disgusting images?
There are plenty of people who can handle it. Why not find some medical students, or some psychologists, or just people in general who have the backround or who might be able to be trained to see the human body in distorted forms?
It's gross yes, but it's a job people can be trained to do. The proof is the fact that people do other jobs which give them more intimate contact with death and victims, jobs which I probably couldn't do and would be labeled a wimp by some of tho people trained to do it.
So it's not about labels it's a spectrum and the people who cannot handle images fall on the opposite extreme of the spectrum with doctors and morticians at the other end of the spectrum, and neither of these individuals have to be assholes, or have some syndrome, or mental disorder.
No its not. Its cockheaded idiots that purposefully go out of their way to make it brutal and cruel that make it so. Every terrorist that chops off a head, every engineeer that thinks he knows the rules of the game and picks on the weakest in the group to make sure its not him, every sales rep and marketroid told by mammy that the only way to thrive is on the backs of your fellow. Fools all.
I agree it is those individuals. What do you want to do about it? If you would like to do something about it, the first step is accepting that these individuals exist in mass and are doing what they are doing. Videos such as these are evidence, and yes you might get emotional about it but it's still evidence.
An example of a video which upset a lot of people was that Youtube video where the teenage girls attacked Victoria Lindsay. Many people responded emotionally about how they want to kick their asses, and sent death threats to the girls responsible for the Youtube attack. Many individuals cried, were disgusted, and there was a range of emotional responses.
I saw that video and did not have much of an emotional response, but I knew what I was seeing shouldn't be happening and shouldn't be allowed to happen. Feeling a situation isn't necessary to determine that it's wrong. And feeling a situation does not help you investigate, it does not help you convict, it does not help you make the world safer. The only way to make the world safer is through reason.
You need to have a sense of empathy because it helps, but ultimately reason is what decide the best choice from a list of choices, and reason ultimately decides how to handle situations. Emotional reactions don't solve problems, and don't get the job done.
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The benefits are immeasurable. It's a relaxing drink, just like green tea.
Somehow I don't think the campaign slogan "VOTE FOR ME - And I'll stick a nuclear power plant in your area" will catch on
So it's more like, would you like to live on welfare or would you rather we build a nuclear power plant in your area? There really is no alternative to the economic / jobs problem besides building nuclear power plants.
I agree with you that we should focus on decentralized power generation. But before we can make solar generators cheap, we have to build nuclear power plants. If we don't build the nuclear power plants we wont get out of the economic recession or depression with 10% unemployment, and if we stay in this state we will never be able to afford to fund anything with tax dollars because the government wont have anybody left to tax.
Generate power first, and then decentralize it.
Think so? I think you are not considering a few facts.
But it's a good start. If we go nuclear we'd be well on our way. There is no better option to produce the same results for the price.
Oil provides about 2% of the electricity we use in the US. We get five times more electricity from hydro than from oil and coal provides about half the electricity used. Most oil is used for transportation and for various products. I like the thought of electric cars but those aren't going to do away with the need for oil anytime soon.
When electricity is cheap enough, we'll be able to plug our cars into our walls, along with our robot maid.
Building nuclear plants takes time. Lots of time. Even if we started today we couldn't bring enough nuclear plants online fast enough to service the anticipated need for electricity solely with nuclear during the next 15 years.
Thats not necessarily true. The time it takes to build is relative to the cost it takes to build it and the expertise. It could be built in 5 years if we saw it as an emergency. You see how fast all that surveillance technology got built but they can't built nuclear power plants? Please!
If these smaller plants were to work (no idea if they would) that might help but then you have a distribution, cleanup and security problem with nuclear fuels.
If you think people are opposed to a coal plant in their backyard, try putting a nuclear plant there. People are quite fearful of nuclear. Sometimes with good reason and sometimes not but they are fearful nonetheless.
Not all nuclear plants are bad designs. Some have the cleanup as part of the design. Some are designed to require mininmal cleanup. And they are all more clean than coal.
Let's see. First, what coast did you have in mind that is unoccupied yet close to major metropolitan areas? How do you propose to convince the taxpayers that might be fearful of nuclear that it is a good idea? How do you propose to transport the electricity economically to places far from the coast?
New York, Boston, California, Florida, All the coasts. Build a large floating island on the coast, put the nuclear power plant on these islands just like we put our trash on floating islands. Float the islands far enough out so people don't see it and don't think about it.
First the coast and now the desert. Have you really given this any thought at all? No one lives in the desert and it's expensive to get the power out of the desert. Not to mention that cooling becomes a bigger problem there. While there are nuclear plants that don't require water, most use it because it is cheap and abundant. The entire advantage of a small nuclear plant is that you can place it where it is needed but no one wants to live near a nuclear reactor if they can help it.
Dig holes deep underground like a sandworm into the desert. Build the nuclear power plants under the desert sand so deep that nobody even notices they are there. This makes it easier to secure from terrorists because it's in the desert and this also puts it out of sight, out of mind.
I'm all for a stable energy source but there are several issues with nuclear facilities:
1. People tend to live on the coasts, & people tend to disapprove of any nuclear plants near their homes.(note I lived near(
2. Various security agencies see nuclear facilities as potential targets. (plane + nuclear plant = Chernobyl)
3. You need to store the spent fuel somewhere; no one wants to live near a nuclear dump. Even if it is out in the middle of nowhere you still have to transport the fuel there (through citys? on major highways?)
Put the floating power plant far enough away from the coast that people feel safe. This would cost a bit more but if people are really scared they wont mind higher taxes in exchange.
Exactly what I was thinking.I was actually thinking about building huge ships or floating nuclear islands in the ocean to lower the fear of radiation exposure but thats close enough.
Our options are very limited. We have to solve the energy crisis immediately, by any means necessary, because if we don't it will cost us more lives than if we do.
If we go nuclear the risk of a nuclear meltdown or radiation being unleashed is a lot less than the risk of another terrorist attack, another middle east war, another oil spill. I don't understand why people would fear something that hasn't happened over something that has.
We should pass an energy bill to fund nuclear energy. We should spent 100 billion on the energy bill and spend half of that on nuclear energy. We should use the other half on biofuels, on solar, on wind, but we need nuclear energy because it will solve the problem immediately in the short term while we need to fund the other 50 billion on the long term.
For 100 billion dollars we could solve the energy crisis in the USA. Of course we'd need to invest another 100 billion improving the grid and building the electronet but these investments would pay for themselves and it might be the only solution to get out of the economic crisis.
So basically we either go nuclear or we are going to die in poverty. There aren't going to be jobs for us if we don't lower the price of energy drastically, and make the energy as clean as possible.
If we weigh the cost, in lives and dollars, of our "War on Terror", against the benefit of preventing one 9/11 a year, how would that expenditure compare with what we spend to prevent death and property damage from things like highway accidents, hurricanes, cancer, pollution, earth threatening asteroids, etc. Is it just me, or on that basis does it seem the "War on Terror" consumes way too much resources.
I'd love to see numbers on this if anyone knows of any.
What about happiness? can that be measured? or are we robots that seek to protect lives and earn dollars?
Nuclear energy is probably the best chance we have are breaking our addiction to oil. Nuclear energy is also relatively clean. I don't know why the government doesn't just fund the development of a bunch of nuclear power plants and put them on the coast or on the ocean somewhere. We could generate enough power to power the entire country, not to mention we could probably put hundreds of thousands of nuclear power plants in the desert.
.."probably wear glasses or have other issues which will completely rule them out from the military service"
wearing glasses does not disqualify you from military service.
I know that, I just chose a bad example. Having asthma on the other hand will disqualify you and a lot of people who live in urban areas and who have skills have asthma.
The only reason 1 out of ever 1000 is a murderer and why theres less killing than in earlier times in human history is because of the consequences.
If life in prison or death were not a consequence for murder, meaning if people could get away with murder, a lot more people than you think would be murderers. People would be murdering each other for money, for corporate profits, over women, over sporting events. you just don't have a clue how people really are.
I'm not saying the majority of humanity is like this, but it's more like 10 or 20 out of every 100, not 1 out of 1000. Somewhere between 10 and 20% of humanity. If you think this number is a bit too large I'm willing to accept that it's 5%, but the point is it's only 1 out of ever 1000 because we have people who track murderers down and punish them with life in prison or death.
If they actually had a cyber warrior bootcamp where they take a script kiddie and train them to be a cyber warrior, they'd probably have hundreds of thousands of people sign up. The reason they can't find anyone might be because they aren't actively recruiting.
People who are typically drawn to computers are often not very good canidates for the military lifestyle. And to become good at Securing systems or hacking them.. you need be breath, eat and sleep computers (especially hacking them).
Hacking skills are not taught in schools and working for the goverment pays c@rp.. why would someone who spent years developing highly saught after skills work for the latest cyberwarfare agency when they could make big bucks in the private sector.
There are plenty of highly skilled security folks out there "Defend the nation" to. I dont see any real recruitment efforts going on that are worth while.
The government does have the advantage of a weak economy. This means that the vast majority of hackers you mention will be unemployed. No the private sector is not hiring hackers because the private sector is looking for people with relevant work experience, not just skill and talent.
And you are right there are no recruitment efforts at all. That is probably the main reason they cannot find anyone. If they go to IRC they'd probably find some people, theres chatrooms they could go to if they want to recruit people. It's not difficult to find script kiddies, they are literally everywhere.
Are they going to be a world class hacker? Probably not, but thats because being a world class hacker leads to a prison cell. This is why even when people have the talent to be world class hackers, they don't actually want to become world class hackers. The US government in my opinion will have no problem finding individuals who have the technical skill to be cyber warriors, as thats not going to be difficult to find. What will be difficult to find is people who can handle the top secret security clearance.
As far as the job goes, it's probably stuff an ordinary script kiddie can do, and if the script kiddie can't do it they can be trained by experienced cyber warriors in how to do it. I don't see it as a big deal finding people unless there is some political concern. And I'm not buying the idea that there aren't enough bright people on the internet, as that assumption isn't based on reality.
In fact getting into the military is very difficult right now precisely because there is no shortage of people trying to enlist. So to tell people to enlist or talk to a recruiter is not that simple. Also most hackers probably wear glasses or have other issues which will completely rule them out from the military service. So unless the military somehow makes exceptions, the vast majority of hackers just aren't going to get accepted into the army nevermind the airforce.
USA jobs? That's useless as well. Unless they are lucky enough to come from a military family and be born with top secret clearance, they aren't going to have top secret clearance and without that they wont be hired for the vast majority of jobs at USAjobs. On top of that, veterans have preference at USAjobs so even if the job does not require clearance if someone is a veteran they'll be chosen for the job instead. On top of all of this there is no shortage of people trying to get jjobs on USA jobs. So there is a very slim possibility of getting a job from USA jobs and probably not worth the time of applying unless you want to take a gamble.
We don't have sufficiently bright people
well DUH, the 'cyber warriors' that the government wants are hard to find. mostly because they are either trained IT security professionals or a kid who figured out how to hack his school to change his grades. the first of the 2 will be easy to get with the increase in IT students. however unlike china, there is sever punishment for committing cyber crimes. china and other countries have the right idea of hiring the hackers instead of locking them away like we used to do
There is almost always a script kiddie in there somewhere. They can take these kids and train them to be cyber warriors. You can take a script kiddie and train them to be an elite hacker. This is probably easier than expecting elite hackers to work for the government which spends all its time trying to arrest them.
It's simple, most of the time if a hacker is bold enough to change their grades they've already broken federal laws. The difference between the script kiddie and the elite hacker is a difference in scope and goals. The elite hacker wants to hack elite entities like big corporations, or very important individuals, while the script kiddie just defaces websites and hacks people over IRC or whatever.
The point is the government has the resources to take every script kiddie in America and train them to be a cyber warrior if it were as necessary as they make it out to be. You don't learn to be a script kiddie in school, you don't learn to be a hacker in school, but if you have the instinct to be either one of these you can be trained to become an elite cyber warrior. It's about finding the people who have the instinct.
A CI is as close as a hacker ever will get to working for the government. Nobody volunteers to be a CI so they are forced into it. The option is usually to continue getting raped in prison, or become a CI. The problem is the life of a CI generally sucks.
So no hacker is going to be able to really become a government employee. The hackers broke a federal law and this disqualifies them from ever serving in an official capacity. Why? It's so difficult to get security clearance that felons have no chance.
So the government still has options. They can approach the hackers who never committed a felony. They can approach the ones who were smart enough to never get caught. They can approach individuals who have a lot of experience programming, or doing the type of work they need, or they can just take talented young individuals and train them just like the marine corps and army does.
I think if they are serious they should train the cyber warriors themselves.
The economy as it is right now has plenty of talented individuals just waiting to get hired. Theres 10% unemployment so there is no shortage of the labor force, as for qualifications these are skills which aren't learned in school so the government must already know who does what, they have enough fbi informants and others who gather information on anybody with any shred of credibility as far as computer skills go.
So either they people they want to hire would rather remain unemployed than work for them (which means the job must suck and not pay well), or they are using this shortage as an excuse to raise the pay rates. The fact is theres plenty of people from the dot com bubble or from before that, who would be qualified to do most of this. Most of the people on slashdot have the skills to do the job, now the security clearance on the other hand thats where there will be shortages of qualified individuals.
So I guess its not traditional employment because its an offer the hacker cannot refuse.
The real world is not "cold, brutal and cruel", and beheading people is not "the true nature of mankind". Most people can't commit murder under normal circumstances and become distressed watching murder or violence. That's not a question of "perspective", it's something innate to most humans. People are generally non-violent and cooperative. Human society wouldn't work if many people operated like you think they do.
All your statements make me think that there is something wrong with you and that you have trust and empathy issues.
Watching a video of murder should not be equated to actually committing murder or being violent. I said I could watch the video and remain calm. Being capable of empathy and having an inability to control your empathy are two different things. Just like some videos might make me angry, or make me laugh, but if I watch them over and over again, I feel less angry, and it's less funny each time. It's the exact same thing with violence.
Also who says human society works? Have you ever looked at how f*cked up society is? This is exactly what I'm talking about by sheltered. Human society does not work on the global level or even in this country. You can feel all the empathy you want, you can cry, you can scream, you can get angry, it's not going to stop millions of people from dying in foreign countries or in this country, and a lot of them die in violent ways, in genocide, in shootings, in all kinds of sad ways, and many of them are children.
The emotions don't help you deal with society. You cannot feel this world without eventually being driven insane. So the solution is that some people shut their feelings off, because it's necessary to do that. Just as if you have to save lives and you are scared, but you shut your fear off and you do something heroic or great it's the same thing. It's not that they don't feel fear, they just learn to process and interpret it differently. Fear becomes merely an adrenal response.
But you can believe something is wrong with me as you have the right to your opinion, but I can confirm that I do have empathy and it's just a matter of self control as to when and where to express it. You watch a video of people who are already dead, there is no reason to feel anything, especially if you've seen people die in that manner before and you don't know the people in the video.
Just reading your description made me feel ill. I agree, anyone who could watch that and not be affected is probably a psychopath/sociopath.
Will you please stop saying crap like this? It's insulting and unnecessary. I thought we are supposed to be better than the people doing the beheadings in those videos? I watched one of the video and I think it's a shame that people have to die in such a painful fashion, but I don't really feel anything towards the people in the video.
If anything it allows someone to know they aren't like the people they see in the video doing the beheading. It's not the act of killing that I'm talking about because people get killed all the time, it's the act of killing someone in an unnecessarily gruesome fashion.
If you insist on thinking everyone who can watch this videos and remain unaffected is a psychopath, you are free to believe that but I know you are wrong.
Speaking as a sociopath (which I am - I can cut off anything even vaguely resembling emotion at will), I don't have any deep issues to deal with (unless you count the current state of the economy). I don't consider my "condition" as a liability. I am capable of love, dedication, grief (someone very close to me died, and I only found out about it early this morning, and I'm pissed-off and "upset" about the it, even though I realize the world ain't fair and no one ever told me it would be), happiness, anger, the full spectrum of human emotion. I can also quite calmly bleed you, leave your body lying behind a dumpster, and walk off - given a good reason, of course.
Logically speaking, that kind of capability is evidence of a higher level of being (I'm speaking in terms of both cognitive ability and emotional stability) than all the silly hand-wringing and "I'm like this because my parents were alcoholics/abused me/I wasn't popular/I hate to watch bad people doing bad things on a screening service/whatever" bullshit that keeps head-shrinkers in business and your mental halters firmly in place.
I don't believe you are capable of love, at least not in the way that empaths are. You love them because they can do something for you or because they are useful to you, but thats not really love. It's only love if you are willing to look out for their best interest, which sociopaths typically don't do.
As most medical students wont be able to get work and it's good training for what they'll probably be facing, if they happen to see anything gross and violent.
The people hiring are the ones to blame for that.
They should hire people who are qualified in the first place and this would not happen.
Nice double-standard you've got there. You label me as sheltered and overly sensitive because I didn't respond the way you did, and then you turn around and cry foul when I give you a label in return.
Nothing is wrong with being sensitive or sheltered, unless you take a job which requires in specific that you not be. It's one thing if I call you sensitive and sheltered if you are doing an ordinary job but if you are being paid to look at disgusting images, you lose the right to complain about it because you chose that profession.
If you choose a profession you should know what you are getting into. If you don't like looking at Rotten.com then you probably wont want to look at Rotten.com all day everyday.
What ever happened to being qualified for a job? Any other job and we expect people to receive training and be qualified but somehow being a moderator/image screener requires no qualification or training at all, just take random kids off the street from random backrounds and hope they can last 6 months without losing it?
I'm sorry but this isn't even about me or labels. This is about the industry and the hiring practices that don't even attempt to determine the sensitivity level of the individuals who take the job. Any other job and you'd have 5 applicants for the 1 who gets hired and usually the 1 who gets hired has the precise traits they look for. Why can't they do the same with these sorts of jobs and only hire people who don't mind seeing disgusting images?
There are plenty of people who can handle it. Why not find some medical students, or some psychologists, or just people in general who have the backround or who might be able to be trained to see the human body in distorted forms?
It's gross yes, but it's a job people can be trained to do. The proof is the fact that people do other jobs which give them more intimate contact with death and victims, jobs which I probably couldn't do and would be labeled a wimp by some of tho people trained to do it.
So it's not about labels it's a spectrum and the people who cannot handle images fall on the opposite extreme of the spectrum with doctors and morticians at the other end of the spectrum, and neither of these individuals have to be assholes, or have some syndrome, or mental disorder.
The real world is cold, brutal and cruel
No its not. Its cockheaded idiots that purposefully go out of their way to make it brutal and cruel that make it so. Every terrorist that chops off a head, every engineeer that thinks he knows the rules of the game and picks on the weakest in the group to make sure its not him, every sales rep and marketroid told by mammy that the only way to thrive is on the backs of your fellow. Fools all.
I agree it is those individuals. What do you want to do about it? If you would like to do something about it, the first step is accepting that these individuals exist in mass and are doing what they are doing. Videos such as these are evidence, and yes you might get emotional about it but it's still evidence.
An example of a video which upset a lot of people was that Youtube video where the teenage girls attacked Victoria Lindsay. Many people responded emotionally about how they want to kick their asses, and sent death threats to the girls responsible for the Youtube attack. Many individuals cried, were disgusted, and there was a range of emotional responses.
I saw that video and did not have much of an emotional response, but I knew what I was seeing shouldn't be happening and shouldn't be allowed to happen. Feeling a situation isn't necessary to determine that it's wrong. And feeling a situation does not help you investigate, it does not help you convict, it does not help you make the world safer. The only way to make the world safer is through reason.
You need to have a sense of empathy because it helps, but ultimately reason is what decide the best choice from a list of choices, and reason ultimately decides how to handle situations. Emotional reactions don't solve problems, and don't get the job done.