This seems to be just bad luck. You likely had cards from a bad batch.)
I dunno if its a bad batch, but since BFG overclocked the chips and ran them outside of the spec its conceivable that caused a higher than normal failure rate. The majority of failures I see are failed fans. Very rarely do I see what looks like failed memory without evidence of overheating such as a stuck fan.
It seems like the only people only motorcycles nowadays are fat, bald, have a hair-dyed goatee, and ride while wearing shorts and fucking sandals!
Those guys are a different type of menace. They're the ones with the mid-life crisis who go out and buy a bike that's way to big for a beginner. It's kinda like going out and trying to drive a semi when you haven't mastered the toyota yet.
I see guys on crotch-rockets take incredibly insane risks at 100+ mph weaving in and out of traffic or sliding up and down on/off ramps or wheeling through the breakdown lanes all the fucking time.
Fortunately those jack-off are not the majority of the motorcyclist on the road. Unfortunately they perpetuate the stereotype of motorcyclists as either suicidal or Harley dirt bags.
is one thing that bothers me. $70-125 to install and another $70-110 per month isn't cheap, especially on top of the major bump in car insurance that they already ate. Given that drunk driving convictions skew to lower income, this has real potential to put even first-time offenders into bankruptcy.
The fact that it triggers on as little as 1/3 of the legal limit is also troubling. Maybe they should trigger at slightly below the legal limit, but 1/3? They couldn't get convicted of a DWI at that number, and yet you're going to shut off their car?
I'm just waiting for the day when the "reenact prohibition" assholes get enough power to try to make these things mandatory in all cars. After all, if it "saves lives", why not make everyone blow into the damn box to start the car, and at random times?
Insert obligatory "won't someone think of the children" bullcrap here too.
That's $70-$125 a month to rent the device, plus $100 to install, plus $100 to remove. That's highway robbery. I guess the company that makes these things has a good lobbyist. We'll ignore the fact that this has been a dismal FAILURE in New Mexico as less than half of the people that would normally be required to have one, avoided it by simply telling the judge they don't drive or don't own a car.
I'd much rather focus on the idiots driving with the cell phones glued to their ear. Statistics show they cause far more accidents. Some moron next to me at the lite yesterday was yaking away on the phone. When the lane next to him started up, he hit the gas and pulled out into the intersection. Only problem is that it was the turn lane that started and he still had a red light. Even after nearly getting creamed, he still didn't put the phone down. He just gave that little ooopsie-my-bad wave. To bad Darwin was asleep that day or we could have cleaned the gene pool a bit.
That the machine does randomly prompt for a retest to me is a safety hazard all by itself.
I've seen a network brought down when a student (or employee) plugged their toy windows 2000 server into the campus network. Said "server" was configured as a domain controller (or whatever they called it before active directory, it's been a while). Toss in DHCP and their box got DOS'd as the entire campus tried using them for authentication.
Good times. Can you even do that kind of thing these days?
Sure you can still do that today. All it takes is a poorly setup network and clueless sysadmin, just as it did back then.
The damage of a rogue DHCP server isn't an instantaneous problem everyone describes it, as clients normally go try to go back to the previous DHCP server to renew their lease. Many OSs (though not all) will remember that server through a reboot, but most devices don't and they will disappear as they get rebooted.
Cisco switches have a wonderful feature called dhcp snooping.
Not supported on many of the lower end Cisco edge switches. It believe it also interferes with DHCP relaying.
Another great tool is "ip verify source vlan dhcp-snooping " which can be used to block traffic from IPs/macs that did not obtain their IP from the DHCP server. This nicely prevents users from statically assigning addresses and/or spoofing their mac address.
The mess we have where potentially-useful information is kept secret and proprietary, in the name of profit or even just potential profit.
The problem is that research only gets corporately funded if the corporation believes it can make a long term profit from the research. For diseases, the long term profit is usually in the form of selling the drugs that are developed. The cynic in me thinks that corporations would prefer developing maintenance type drugs instead of curative drugs (eg why cure aids when you can sell a drug to kept in check). The realist in me says that the scientists doing the research would rather develop a full cure, but often the short term goal of managing the disease is easier to achieve.
Web browsers have evolved into operating systems unto themselves
Really? I am unaware of a (common) browser that is able to do much more than work with data...
Let's try to leave the the analogies used to educated luddites out of summaries intended for people that *KNOW* the difference between an OS and an application.
There are certainly many companies out there that want your OS to be nothing more than a web browser. That way they can sell software as a service. For things like Google Gmail, Google Calendar , Google Docs, etc. Microsoft is slowly moving in that direction as well. Its much more profitable to sell based on usage or per month, rather than selling you a perpetual license. Many businesses are moving towards the desktop being little more than a terminal with the applications actually running on a centrally manager Terminal/Application/Web server.
The thing is, you can't reliably use a contest as a substitute for hiring people.
True, but these contests are a great way to solicit new ideas and approaches that you might not have thought of in-house. What really happens is the ideas and code garnered from these 'contests' are brought in-house and properly fleshed out and tested by your in-house folks. You also get a great opportunity to hire on someone who turns out to be really good.
Somehow I don't think that Toshiba is quite so stupid as to build what TFA describes: a laptop drive that wipes itself after the power is turned off.
My bet is on the usual baked-in drive encryption, very badly described.
Exactly. They're just saying that the encryption key is not kept in the drive when it powers down, and the key must be re-supplied at power up by the user to regain access. This was the flaw with the early 'lockable' drives in that the password could be retrieved from the drive, and that the data was not encrypted on the platters.
I recall a story about so-called AES encrypted thumb drives. While the hardware symmetric key was encrypted with AES, the actual 'encryption' of the data stored in the memory itself was nothing more the XORing the data with the secret key. Not terribly secure. Is this Toshiba drive actually doing any sort of decent encryption that losing the key is significant?
What makes this any more secure than Bitlocker or other similar whole drive/partition encryption with a passphrase?
Yes. Silent updates suck. Well at least, for people that want to control their own computer, it does.
Fortunately, you (or someone or collection of persons you trust) have the source, can build it, use it, and redistribute it. Thus, you don't *have* to use the software with silent update functionality, even if you keep using the browser itself. (though you'll lose the branding; call it "iceweasel" perhaps;)
And what percentage of Windows boxes even have a compiler installed, much less a user who know how to use it? Are you really going recompile by hand everytime you get an update? Yeah, I thought so.
If the material is currently classified, wouldn't it be against the UCMJ or other military policies to view such material?
Yes it is still classified material. Viewing or downloading it on an unclassified computer is therefore a security violation. It makes no difference that the material has effectively become common knowledge. The interesting part is that it's technically still a security violation to do so on your own personal computers.
Usually in the case of major spills like this, the govt ends up declassifying those particular documents just to get rid of the issue. I suspect they have not simply because it would be an admission that the documents really were not all that sensitive. To pursue a charge of treason or go after wikileaks they have to maintain the position that the release of the documents presented a serious threat to national security (the definition of the SECRET classification)
The Navy networks have since black listed wikileaks, so you can't get there anyway.
As Mr. Taubes says in the book, it's not all about the calories though. A huge part of the problem these days is the massive consumption of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates raise blood sugar, which raises insulin levels, which promotes fat storage, inhibits release of energy from fat tissue and promotes inflammation, associated with next to all our "western diseases" like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, fibromyalgia and so on
Eating lots of cheap, quickly absorbed carbs in the absence of exercise can indeed be a contributor to all those problems. I'd same the lack of exercise and overall weight are just as responsible for heart disease. It's interesting to note some studies which show that artificial sweeteners and some food additives such as msg also induce the glycemic response of raised insulin levels. In fact some studies show the act of swishing with a sugar solution and not even swallowing induces a response.
During exercise, its normal to see higher insulin levels as insulin is also responsible for prompting the muscles to uptake the sugars for burning and/or storage. The higher levels post-exercise are what drop the blood sugar levels and make you hungry.
Congratulations on the weight loss. You're another example of why one plan doesn't fit everyone. I'd say I'm another. I eat okay quality food, avoiding most of the junkier stuff loaded with msg & salts and other ingredients that actually increase hunger. I still drink regular sodas and eat fast food on occasion. I run about 40 miles a week and bike about 100 miles.
I'm atypical as I have the opposite issue of most in that I need to pay attention to calorie intake so I don't lose weight or have low blood sugar problems. I'm also blessed in that exercise typically decreases my hunger. Based on my BMR(about 2100) plus running a very hilly 25k race this morning, I need to eat about 4500 calories today. There are days when I've needed 7000 calories, which is hard to get without resorting to high calorie foods.
"Diets" don't work. In particular crash diets that just send your body into starvation/storage mode leaving with zero energy. Increase the quality of your food (no pre-prepared food and stop eating out) and pay attention to the calorie totals. Eating less more often and earlier in the day helps too. The magic ingredient is to start getting some exercise to increase your metabolism and burn more calories. If you're well over 200lbs, you can burn up to 200 calories fast walking a mile. Don't expect huge changes in weight. A slow steady and _lasting_ improvement takes time.
Yes, it can be as simple as weigh change = calories in - calories burned. The complications are that the type of foods and eating habits make a difference and that cutting back on calories alone can't affect significant weight loss. A starvation diet going below 1200 calories a day with zero exercise (which usually backfire, btw) can only drop 1 lb of weigh a week. The best best is diet improvment and getting mild to moderate exercise.
Besides, there is more to health than simply weigh. Percent fat and cardio health are just as important. Dieting your way to a skinny body doesn't imply that you have either. You might just be an out of shape, weak hearted thin person. That 200-lb guy that runs ironman will probably outlive you.
I agree on the commercialization of weight loss. Too many diet products on the shelves when the answer is get off the f-ing couch, do a bit of exercise, and stop buying crap food that puts on lbs like Doritos, Taco Bell, McDonalds.
It is essentially Server 2003. Driver support for it royally sucks, particularly for printers and video cards. It also has some odd issues if you're trying to run it on something with lots of CPU cores. I found remote connections to it start hanging as it has a stupidly low limit on worker processes.
If you want a stable and solid 64-bit OS, go with Windows7 64-bit. It might have a bigger footprint, but its better supported and faster the XP64-bit (based on my experience with CAD software).
Vista was and still is crap. My evidence? 10% of the computers I support have Vista, yet they account for %50 of the strange problems. Crap such as refusing to install patches from WSUS, spontaneously requiring to be activated via the phone, the DVD drive that suddenly refused to see the cdfs filesystem, UAC breaking GPOs and logon scripts. The XP boxes are all pretty solid and I've yet to have any real problems with the Win7 boxes.
Email yourself something enticing, like that you won something from the local radio station and let them know they need to come claim it in person at a specific time. Something tempting like an ipod. Then you wait their with your sledgehammer (the law or perhaps a real sledgehammer). It works all the time for the law and really dumb criminals who skipped on their bail.
Personally, I'd bet the current owner bought it off eBay or at the local pawn shop. Have you checked eBay for similar listings? Opening your email 4 times is probably just the person poking around the computer trying to figure out why they can't run internet explorer.
The guy at Mozilla that invented the extension framework needs to be given a company car and a big fat raise, because they couldn't have asked for a better lockin!
True the notion of extensions wasn't new, but it was the saving grace for Firefox. Now they just need to go back and implement it correctly, so that extensions can't hang the whole browser.
This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?
Exactly. I suspect there are far more phones in those areas than expensive optician sets. Despite the lack of cell coverage. Besides, it doesn't have to be a smartphone. This idea and application can be integrated into a lot of other equipment, such as the inexpensive laptops being deployed to the local schools or local clinics.
I also see a marketing opportunity here. Sell the viewfinder for $10 online and then have a website with the application (possible with a subscription fee).
If waterboarding is not torture, then you are willing, I presume, to undergo it for two or three days? If not, fuck you.
It has no lasting physical damage. And we already do waterboard our own military personnel to instruct them on what they might face if they were captured. Also the people that use it as a technique are required to also have it done to themselves in order to understand the physical and psychological effects is has.
So yeah, I'd be willing to be waterboarded. And like all techniques meant to momentarily weaken your resolve rather than actually hurt you, no I don't consider it torture.
Physical torture no, but it does qualify as psychological torture with potentially long lasting effects. Just check the citations in the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding. As such, it's a violation of the Geneva Convention (which the US govt claimed didn't apply). Go get a video of you being waterboarded and we might take you seriously.
Brazil, proofs produced by illegal means cannot be used
Same in America, and usually, that is how it works.
For a couple hundred pages of citations to the contrary, please read Constitutional Chaos. A bunch of under $10 used copies there, it's a very well-done book that every US citizen should understand before hitting the voting booth.
They wanted more info on the potential espionage. They didn't necessarily want it to use in a court of law.
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This seems to be just bad luck. You likely had cards from a bad batch.)
I dunno if its a bad batch, but since BFG overclocked the chips and ran them outside of the spec its conceivable that caused a higher than normal failure rate. The majority of failures I see are failed fans. Very rarely do I see what looks like failed memory without evidence of overheating such as a stuck fan.
Yes, some customers are getting "up to" the advertised speed. Since all the advertising says "up to" this isn't lying. Where's the story in this?
I just thought they were yuppies?
It seems like the only people only motorcycles nowadays are fat, bald, have a hair-dyed goatee, and ride while wearing shorts and fucking sandals!
Those guys are a different type of menace. They're the ones with the mid-life crisis who go out and buy a bike that's way to big for a beginner. It's kinda like going out and trying to drive a semi when you haven't mastered the toyota yet.
I see guys on crotch-rockets take incredibly insane risks at 100+ mph weaving in and out of traffic or sliding up and down on/off ramps or wheeling through the breakdown lanes all the fucking time.
Fortunately those jack-off are not the majority of the motorcyclist on the road. Unfortunately they perpetuate the stereotype of motorcyclists as either suicidal or Harley dirt bags.
is one thing that bothers me. $70-125 to install and another $70-110 per month isn't cheap, especially on top of the major bump in car insurance that they already ate. Given that drunk driving convictions skew to lower income, this has real potential to put even first-time offenders into bankruptcy.
The fact that it triggers on as little as 1/3 of the legal limit is also troubling. Maybe they should trigger at slightly below the legal limit, but 1/3? They couldn't get convicted of a DWI at that number, and yet you're going to shut off their car?
I'm just waiting for the day when the "reenact prohibition" assholes get enough power to try to make these things mandatory in all cars. After all, if it "saves lives", why not make everyone blow into the damn box to start the car, and at random times?
Insert obligatory "won't someone think of the children" bullcrap here too.
That's $70-$125 a month to rent the device, plus $100 to install, plus $100 to remove. That's highway robbery. I guess the company that makes these things has a good lobbyist. We'll ignore the fact that this has been a dismal FAILURE in New Mexico as less than half of the people that would normally be required to have one, avoided it by simply telling the judge they don't drive or don't own a car.
I'd much rather focus on the idiots driving with the cell phones glued to their ear. Statistics show they cause far more accidents. Some moron next to me at the lite yesterday was yaking away on the phone. When the lane next to him started up, he hit the gas and pulled out into the intersection. Only problem is that it was the turn lane that started and he still had a red light. Even after nearly getting creamed, he still didn't put the phone down. He just gave that little ooopsie-my-bad wave. To bad Darwin was asleep that day or we could have cleaned the gene pool a bit.
That the machine does randomly prompt for a retest to me is a safety hazard all by itself.
I've seen a network brought down when a student (or employee) plugged their toy windows 2000 server into the campus network. Said "server" was configured as a domain controller (or whatever they called it before active directory, it's been a while). Toss in DHCP and their box got DOS'd as the entire campus tried using them for authentication.
Good times. Can you even do that kind of thing these days?
Sure you can still do that today. All it takes is a poorly setup network and clueless sysadmin, just as it did back then.
The damage of a rogue DHCP server isn't an instantaneous problem everyone describes it, as clients normally go try to go back to the previous DHCP server to renew their lease. Many OSs (though not all) will remember that server through a reboot, but most devices don't and they will disappear as they get rebooted.
Cisco switches have a wonderful feature called dhcp snooping.
Not supported on many of the lower end Cisco edge switches. It believe it also interferes with DHCP relaying.
Another great tool is "ip verify source vlan dhcp-snooping
" which can be used to block traffic from IPs/macs that did not obtain their IP from the DHCP server. This nicely prevents users from statically assigning addresses and/or spoofing their mac address.
If you RTFA, there' no mention of Windows. The Car just wouldn't start. They disconnected the battery, and reconnected it.
True. In fact there is mention of Linux under the hood, so it would be more like a kernel panic.
The mess we have where potentially-useful information is kept secret and proprietary, in the name of profit or even just potential profit.
The problem is that research only gets corporately funded if the corporation believes it can make a long term profit from the research. For diseases, the long term profit is usually in the form of selling the drugs that are developed. The cynic in me thinks that corporations would prefer developing maintenance type drugs instead of curative drugs (eg why cure aids when you can sell a drug to kept in check). The realist in me says that the scientists doing the research would rather develop a full cure, but often the short term goal of managing the disease is easier to achieve.
Web browsers have evolved into operating systems unto themselves
Really? I am unaware of a (common) browser that is able to do much more than work with data...
Let's try to leave the the analogies used to educated luddites out of summaries intended for people that *KNOW* the difference between an OS and an application.
There are certainly many companies out there that want your OS to be nothing more than a web browser. That way they can sell software as a service. For things like Google Gmail, Google Calendar , Google Docs, etc. Microsoft is slowly moving in that direction as well. Its much more profitable to sell based on usage or per month, rather than selling you a perpetual license. Many businesses are moving towards the desktop being little more than a terminal with the applications actually running on a centrally manager Terminal/Application/Web server.
The thing is, you can't reliably use a contest as a substitute for hiring people.
True, but these contests are a great way to solicit new ideas and approaches that you might not have thought of in-house. What really happens is the ideas and code garnered from these 'contests' are brought in-house and properly fleshed out and tested by your in-house folks. You also get a great opportunity to hire on someone who turns out to be really good.
Somehow I don't think that Toshiba is quite so stupid as to build what TFA describes: a laptop drive that wipes itself after the power is turned off.
My bet is on the usual baked-in drive encryption, very badly described.
Exactly. They're just saying that the encryption key is not kept in the drive when it powers down, and the key must be re-supplied at power up by the user to regain access. This was the flaw with the early 'lockable' drives in that the password could be retrieved from the drive, and that the data was not encrypted on the platters.
I recall a story about so-called AES encrypted thumb drives. While the hardware symmetric key was encrypted with AES, the actual 'encryption' of the data stored in the memory itself was nothing more the XORing the data with the secret key. Not terribly secure. Is this Toshiba drive actually doing any sort of decent encryption that losing the key is significant?
What makes this any more secure than Bitlocker or other similar whole drive/partition encryption with a passphrase?
Fortunately, you (or someone or collection of persons you trust) have the source, can build it, use it, and redistribute it. Thus, you don't *have* to use the software with silent update functionality, even if you keep using the browser itself. (though you'll lose the branding; call it "iceweasel" perhaps ;)
And what percentage of Windows boxes even have a compiler installed, much less a user who know how to use it? Are you really going recompile by hand everytime you get an update? Yeah, I thought so.
If the material is currently classified, wouldn't it be against the UCMJ or other military policies to view such material?
Yes it is still classified material. Viewing or downloading it on an unclassified computer is therefore a security violation. It makes no difference that the material has effectively become common knowledge. The interesting part is that it's technically still a security violation to do so on your own personal computers.
Usually in the case of major spills like this, the govt ends up declassifying those particular documents just to get rid of the issue. I suspect they have not simply because it would be an admission that the documents really were not all that sensitive. To pursue a charge of treason or go after wikileaks they have to maintain the position that the release of the documents presented a serious threat to national security (the definition of the SECRET classification)
The Navy networks have since black listed wikileaks, so you can't get there anyway.
As Mr. Taubes says in the book, it's not all about the calories though. A huge part of the problem these days is the massive consumption of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates raise blood sugar, which raises insulin levels, which promotes fat storage, inhibits release of energy from fat tissue and promotes inflammation, associated with next to all our "western diseases" like heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer's, fibromyalgia and so on
Eating lots of cheap, quickly absorbed carbs in the absence of exercise can indeed be a contributor to all those problems. I'd same the lack of exercise and overall weight are just as responsible for heart disease. It's interesting to note some studies which show that artificial sweeteners and some food additives such as msg also induce the glycemic response of raised insulin levels. In fact some studies show the act of swishing with a sugar solution and not even swallowing induces a response.
During exercise, its normal to see higher insulin levels as insulin is also responsible for prompting the muscles to uptake the sugars for burning and/or storage. The higher levels post-exercise are what drop the blood sugar levels and make you hungry.
Congratulations on the weight loss. You're another example of why one plan doesn't fit everyone. I'd say I'm another. I eat okay quality food, avoiding most of the junkier stuff loaded with msg & salts and other ingredients that actually increase hunger. I still drink regular sodas and eat fast food on occasion. I run about 40 miles a week and bike about 100 miles.
I'm atypical as I have the opposite issue of most in that I need to pay attention to calorie intake so I don't lose weight or have low blood sugar problems. I'm also blessed in that exercise typically decreases my hunger. Based on my BMR(about 2100) plus running a very hilly 25k race this morning, I need to eat about 4500 calories today. There are days when I've needed 7000 calories, which is hard to get without resorting to high calorie foods.
"Diets" don't work. In particular crash diets that just send your body into starvation/storage mode leaving with zero energy. Increase the quality of your food (no pre-prepared food and stop eating out) and pay attention to the calorie totals. Eating less more often and earlier in the day helps too. The magic ingredient is to start getting some exercise to increase your metabolism and burn more calories. If you're well over 200lbs, you can burn up to 200 calories fast walking a mile. Don't expect huge changes in weight. A slow steady and _lasting_ improvement takes time.
Yes, it can be as simple as weigh change = calories in - calories burned. The complications are that the type of foods and eating habits make a difference and that cutting back on calories alone can't affect significant weight loss. A starvation diet going below 1200 calories a day with zero exercise (which usually backfire, btw) can only drop 1 lb of weigh a week. The best best is diet improvment and getting mild to moderate exercise.
Besides, there is more to health than simply weigh. Percent fat and cardio health are just as important. Dieting your way to a skinny body doesn't imply that you have either. You might just be an out of shape, weak hearted thin person. That 200-lb guy that runs ironman will probably outlive you.
I agree on the commercialization of weight loss. Too many diet products on the shelves when the answer is get off the f-ing couch, do a bit of exercise, and stop buying crap food that puts on lbs like Doritos, Taco Bell, McDonalds.
It is essentially Server 2003. Driver support for it royally sucks, particularly for printers and video cards. It also has some odd issues if you're trying to run it on something with lots of CPU cores. I found remote connections to it start hanging as it has a stupidly low limit on worker processes.
If you want a stable and solid 64-bit OS, go with Windows7 64-bit. It might have a bigger footprint, but its better supported and faster the XP64-bit (based on my experience with CAD software).
Vista was and still is crap. My evidence? 10% of the computers I support have Vista, yet they account for %50 of the strange problems. Crap such as refusing to install patches from WSUS, spontaneously requiring to be activated via the phone, the DVD drive that suddenly refused to see the cdfs filesystem, UAC breaking GPOs and logon scripts. The XP boxes are all pretty solid and I've yet to have any real problems with the Win7 boxes.
Email yourself something enticing, like that you won something from the local radio station and let them know they need to come claim it in person at a specific time. Something tempting like an ipod. Then you wait their with your sledgehammer (the law or perhaps a real sledgehammer). It works all the time for the law and really dumb criminals who skipped on their bail.
Personally, I'd bet the current owner bought it off eBay or at the local pawn shop. Have you checked eBay for similar listings? Opening your email 4 times is probably just the person poking around the computer trying to figure out why they can't run internet explorer.
The guy at Mozilla that invented the extension framework needs to be given a company car and a big fat raise, because they couldn't have asked for a better lockin!
True the notion of extensions wasn't new, but it was the saving grace for Firefox. Now they just need to go back and implement it correctly, so that extensions can't hang the whole browser.
This is great for countries that lack opticians with basic equiptment yet somehow have lots of people with large screened smartphones?
Exactly. I suspect there are far more phones in those areas than expensive optician sets. Despite the lack of cell coverage. Besides, it doesn't have to be a smartphone. This idea and application can be integrated into a lot of other equipment, such as the inexpensive laptops being deployed to the local schools or local clinics.
I also see a marketing opportunity here. Sell the viewfinder for $10 online and then have a website with the application (possible with a subscription fee).
If waterboarding is not torture, then you are willing, I presume, to undergo it for two or three days? If not, fuck you.
It has no lasting physical damage. And we already do waterboard our own military personnel to instruct them on what they might face if they were captured. Also the people that use it as a technique are required to also have it done to themselves in order to understand the physical and psychological effects is has.
So yeah, I'd be willing to be waterboarded. And like all techniques meant to momentarily weaken your resolve rather than actually hurt you, no I don't consider it torture.
Physical torture no, but it does qualify as psychological torture with potentially long lasting effects. Just check the citations in the wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding. As such, it's a violation of the Geneva Convention (which the US govt claimed didn't apply). Go get a video of you being waterboarded and we might take you seriously.
Same in America, and usually, that is how it works.
For a couple hundred pages of citations to the contrary, please read Constitutional Chaos. A bunch of under $10 used copies there, it's a very well-done book that every US citizen should understand before hitting the voting booth.
They wanted more info on the potential espionage. They didn't necessarily want it to use in a court of law.