I assume that you are a knowledgeable computer user with the ability to administer multiple devices without any problems caused by rogue software, malware and such.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the average user of a PC today needs one of two things: either a completely locked-down environment that cannot be broken into to install rogue software, malware and such or a system where someone else is administering it (and cleaning it peridocally). There is no other way - the third way, left up to the user, results in millions of computers being used for nefarious purposes by people other than their owner.
People simply aren't going to put up with this long term. Today they can go out and buy an iPad instead of a PC and get that experience. And guess what? Tablet sales are showing they are doing just that. Android, being less locked-down and more open to malware is having somewhat less of an enthusiastic response but it is still selling because it isn't a PC and for the most part is immune to malware.
No, it isn't going to be more open and more subject to malware in the future. Not at all.
Security is important to just about every business. The idea that if the handset falls into inappropriate hands that all the email, all the contacts and all the notes are wide open and available.
The iPhone has some security but mostly it relies on two things: a very limited amount of email on the device itself and being able to remote wipe the device from the Exchange server. Which means the user has to (a) recognize the device is missing and (b) call IT real quick to get it wiped.
Blackberry has the edge on this with whole-device encryption which I do not believe exists on either iPhone or Android. This difference all by itself could have been used to RIM's advantage but they apparently missed this being significant.
One huge failing that I see is the handling of HTML email on the device. Blackberry chose - intentionally - to strip HTML email down and send it to the device to display in text-only form. For the purposes of storing hundreds, if not thousands of company emails on the device in 8GB (or less) it works. For the purposes of dealing with internal company email that some secretary has jazzed up with fancy stationary it works by throwing all that garbage away. Unfortunately, it doesn't work if the HTML in the email really has a purpose. Unfortunately, the answer to this is to go the iPhone/Android way and holding almost nothing on the device - which nobody ever explained to the business users.
Today, we have Angry Birds instead of security and everything that entails. Sure, the screen is bigger and in some cases more functional. But is this what business customers need? It is clearly what they want.
One of the basic problems today is when you buy as PC it doesn't come with an administration service. You, the purchasor are expected to "figure it out". Well, most people do not and that clearly should not be news to anyone. The result is that there are a lot of computers that are causing trouble for everyone on the Internet.
Who should be responsible? Clearly not the computer owner unless we start enforcing some education requirements and have real penalties for allowing your computer to be used for criminal purposes.
The other alternative is we get most of the computer users off of general-purposes computers that can be subverted all too easily and on to appliances which are resistant to subversion. This means that they are not suitable for installing random software on that nobody is inspecting and that the computer needs zero administration. Not a "zero administration" installation of Windows but something real. An iPad comes very close to this function. Android tablets are pretty close as well. But today's tablets are quite resistant enough and the software review process isn't bulletproof. If we want to move the 98% of computer users that need nothing else onto this kind of platform is has to be really bulletproof. Which means there is no way a misbehaving tablet cannot be locked out from the Internet until the offending software is removed or it is wiped.
We are perhaps a year or two away from having an event like 10% of the customers of a bank having all of their money stolen because of a lack of administration of general-purposes computers in uneducated user hands. Easily we could see something like this bring down a large bank - or even a smaller government. We could certainly see a government lose a huge amount of money because of poorly administered computers in user hands. Are we really going to wait for that to happen?
I would say, yes, we are going to wait for that to happen and the results will be interesting to say the least.
So far my understanding of the sequence of events is:
Find an IP address that is associated with uploading materials that are not public domain. Log this as an "event" with the date and time.
File a lawsuit and use discovery for the lawsuit to get the owner of the IP address to disclose the account holder using the IP address at that date and time.
Again using a discovery motion, have the account holder's computer(s) examined for pirated materials.
If such pirated materials are found, lawsuit moves forward - if nothing is found on the computer(s) then maybe it was something else...
The problem is that in a predominance of cases so far upon reaching item 3 the defendant is screaming about their rights and begging for a cheap way out. The lawsuit never moves forward. In the few cases where settlement hasn't been reached - and it has been a very,very small number - it turns out that it is obvious to everyone that looks at the computer(s) in question that uploading of pirated materials was clearly going on to an unknown extent.
Sure, it could be that it is someone else and if all that was required was "we found your IP address, pay up!" it would be clearly unfair. But there is a lot more behind what is going on than that in spite of what some people would like to believe. So far there have been some mistakes but it is unclear how those mistakes were made. Carelessness on the part of the monitoring/capture of IP addresses, such as just writing down the wrong address? I don't know and I don't think the specific problems have ever been described. I do know that the people that have tried to use the "open WiFi" defense have been found with pirated materials on their computer and other supporting evidence that it had been being uploaded.
The fundamental issue we have to come to terms with is either this is going to be a non-crime and copyright is meaningless or not. If we choose to go the route of copyright being meaningless and unlimited redistribution is allowed then there has to be some pretty significant realignment in how things work in most of the Western world. I, for one, would be out of a job and my employees would be on the street. So would a lot of other people. And while we would have ego-driven productions (think Yentel and such) where the people doing it want to and don't care if it ever makes any money the idea of investor-supported media would be out the window.
The thing that most people don't understand today is just how much of the economy is related to promotion of coopyright-protected works. Lose the monopoly edge that is copyright and you lose the promotion. What is Amazon at its core? A vehicle for promoting the sale of copyrighted works in different media forms. Think about that for a while and consider what happens if we lose all promotion of such works. We are probably talking about something that would affect 30% of the workforce in US and EU. No, not all of them are involved in copyright works production but they are affected by the promotion industry, which is huge.
How did "everyone" know that Bush stole the election from Gore? Because in 2000 CBS News announced Gore as the winner around midnight Central time and people went to bed. When they woke up the next morning Gore had retracted his declaration of victory and the Bush was the winner. Clearly something had happened between the time these people went to bed and when they got up in the morning and the only logical conclusion was that Bush stole the election. After all, Gore had been declared the winner.
My guess is that if the TV News people ever do that again there will be riots in the streets and a lot of properly (meaninglessly) burned up.
Signature? The last time I voted in Arizona (by mail) if you signed the outside of the envelope the ballot was trashed because this violated the ballot secrecy requirements. Signing the big book at the polling place is fine, but what exactly do they compare it to? They do not have any "original signatures" at the polling place (at least not in Arizona or Illinois) and the signatures can only be compared if individual votes are contested. Which isn't really going to happen.
I suppose if you find someone voted for you already that you could contest that - but there is no getting rid of the ballot that was voted.
The rarity of evidence in cases of voter fraud is mostly because nobody wants to know about it. Nobody at all, except maybe the person that "lost their vote" because someone voted in their name already. Which I will agree is so rare as to be unheard of. What we all know is that blocks of people vote without ever going near a polling place in cities like Chicago. The "cemetary vote" is legendary there and has been for probably a hundred years. But where is the proof and the convictions? Did I say nobody wants to know about it? Everyone living in Chicago knows about it but no offical action has ever been taken and none will ever be taken. Cook County was known to have been swung for JFK in 1960 and there was some pretty convincing evidence of it happening - but nothing official was ever done.
You aren't going to convince anyone that ever lived in Chicago that voter fraud doesn't happen.
First problem is blind people. Second problem is what language the ballot is printed in - there is no official language for the US so every language has to be given equal weight. The language problem has already been decided in courts to the extent that if you ask for a ballot in Swahili the polling place workers are required to have one on hand and to give it to you. If they do not have such a ballot they have to make one up immediately so you can vote. Failure to do so is a violation of the Voting Rights Act and the county may be subject to a huge fine.
Fun thing to do is ask in California (where I believe this requirement exists) for a ballot in Klingon. Might just be San Francisco County or something like that but I do recall this being decided a while back. This is one of the central requirements of the Help America Vote Act.
Voting on paper isn't handicapped-friendly and it isn't language-friendly, so it is gone. Pretty much a done deal for most of the US now.
Sure you could have a computer system print out a ballot for an auditable and recountable piece of paper. But the first requirement there is to get "auditable" and "recountable" into the list of requirements in the Help America Vote Act. Until that happens these concepts will go nowhere because both handicapped access and language-friendly did make it onto the list of requirements.
There are two very conflicting requirements for US voting - handicapped access and secret ballots. What they have tried to do with the current "electronic voting" machines is balance these two things and pretty much not considered anything else. I believe this is intentional and not because of a desired insecurity but because those two items are on the list from federal and state requirements - and nowhere do things like auditability or security appear on the list of requirements.
Why can't the US just use paper ballots? Because they aren't handicapped-friendly. The US also has an issue with language - in many counties they have to print ballots in multiple languages as there is no such thing as an official language or languages for anywhere in the US today. After a bunch of lawsuits it pretty much means that you can go into a polling place and request a ballot in Klingon and they have to give you one or pay a huge fine. You can bet these counties want to have screens and not paper for ballots.
Another problem is all voting in the US is handled at the county level. Some decisions are made at the state level, but not very many. This means that you can have the newest electronic machine in one county whereas the county 20 miles east is using a ScanTron system from the 1980s. I believe it was the Help America Vote Act which tried to push enough money into counties to get everyone using some kind of post-1980s technology but I do not know how well that worked.
So, could auditability be handled with maintaining secret ballots? Maybe. Could auditability be put on the list of requirements for an "approved" voting machine at the federal level and force all states (and counties) to adopt such requirements? Probably. But the secret ballot requirement makes things tougher. You can pretty much forget any paper-based system for the US - it would not meet with requirements for handicapped access and there would be huge expenses in some counties for multiple languages. Not, Going. To. Happen.
Can there be a "secure" electronic system that meets the current secrecy and handicapped access requirements? I'm sure it is possible, but it isn't any of the current systems and we aren't going to see it for a while.
Oh, I think someone would find some damages. And the lawyers would flock to it.
It is true that if there was no money in it the case would go nowhere. But, I suspect it isn't that difficult to find a lawsuit that was decided in favor of the plantiff where a company did something like this - blatent and obvious with the idea that they would be immune to being sued. My guess is that if you suggested such a scheme to a lawyer they would be able to find the case in 30 minutes or know it from law school.
People that don't understand that about 30% of civil tort law is based on common sense and "technicalities" simply don't exist shouldn't step outside without talking to a real lawyer. Sadly, case law books are filled with examples of people that think they can get away with something without penalties by trying to skate around what they understand the law to be.
Something to think about is the idea of the old, obsolete open sourced version being updated and turning into a stronger competitor for newer stuff coming out.
I have seen this happen in a strange way and under circumstances that are better left long dead but the nightmare that everyone in the software business can relate to is something old sneaking out the back door and being recognized as being really interesting - and stealing sales from newer and possibly lamer stuff coming out. It is very difficult to compete with free on these terms, so if free stuff is at all interesting it will displace newer pay-for items.
This is something that anyone in a real software business - you know, employees, insurance, rent, payroll, all of those things - is going to be aware of. If you can pitch an open-source deal in a way that eliminates this threat, great. Otherwise? Otherwise it is going to take some real courage on the part of the original developer to release the source to something that could turn and bite new business.
Obviously, if the original development company was one guy who is now retired and has no new business this isn't a factor.
But what do you think would happen if a old version of Quicken got released as open source? I'll bet it is something some guys at Intuit worry at least a little bit about.
The problem here is that Google probably has the legal muscle to enforce what it believes is its copyright. As the guy behind youtube-mp3 points out, practically they cannot stop such software, although they can make it harder to find.
Now, one thing that clearly is something that is going to interest a lot of people is the idea that a streaming service can be defeated by software to provide the recipient of the stream with a whole copy of the work. This would have an immediate and very, very negative result on Netflix and a bunch of other such streaming services. It doesn't even matter that someone has a service or program to do this with Netflix - just that Google loses out on this. What that would do is clearly put things in the perspective of viewers having the ability - and maybe the right - to retain copies of anything streamed to them.
The result would be that Netflix would have to at least renegotiate every deal they have and probably a lot of them would just disappear. Most other streaming services would just pull the plug as well. It is not the intent of the content owners to provide permanent copies of their media to viewers via a streaming service.
Sure, it is possible. It may even be in some cases convenient and simple to do. But if it is done you will see streaming ended as we have come to know it.
Today generation, distribution and consumers are three different companies in the US. And it has been complicated so much by the overall lack of capacity that the distribution company cannot simply buy electricity from a single supplier anymore. They are forced to gather as much power as they can by dealing with multiple providers.
I don't think there is much profit in generation today and the difficulties are such that it is impossible to build a new generating plant. Nobody has built a large plant (over 1000MW) in the US in decades. Today the focus would seem to be in building the plants in Mexico and Canada and shipping the electricity into the US.
Government subsidy of solar power for homeowners has just about ended. You used to be able to get about half the system paid for but today it is more like 25% and much of that is spread out over many years of tax credits. So in order to put even a small 6-8KW PV system on your roof is going to cost you $30,000 and you can expect only $10,000 from various government and industry sources to cover this. This means you are going to have to put up $30,000 and get $10,000 back the next year. Maybe. You begin to see why the solar leasing folks are having a good time these days where you do not buy the system but only lease it - it significantly reduces the upfront cost.
By the way, net metering doesn't really make your wattmeter run backwards. There are two meters and there are different rates already, at least for most of the utilities that are doing this. Naw, if you really want to smack the utilities around you need to go to a battery system where you are charging the batteries during the day and not pulling from a grid ever. Sure, a cloudy day might mean the refrigerator shuts off at 9PM until the sun comes out the next day, but that is what it means to be free of the utility monopoly.
The US has a capacity problem - we haven't built a major generating plant in decades and have been living off the overcapacity that was built in the 1960s and 1970s. Well, we have used that up and have been building what "peaker" plants that could be built to try to fill in the gaps. There is a serious capacity problem today.
See all the generating plants being built to solve this problem? It takes about five years to build a large coal-fired plant and more like ten years to build a nuclear plant. We probably should not be building new coal plants today but there is little choice. There is one nuclear plant on the drawing board and the government is probably going to be financing it because private financing isn't very supportive of it. Not only that, but the chances are still pretty good that the NIMBY folks will prevent the plant from being built at all.
Will conservation fix this problem? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that we are still seeing growth in consumption in the US based on immigrant population moving in and businesses using more and more power for lighting and computers. The big factories that have all gone to China aren't there anymore but they were rather small concentrations that sometimes generated their own electricity. But every time someone opens a real estate office there are a bunch of lights and computers that are going to be running at least eight hours a day. And when a few guys from Mexico come to the US it is another apartment with TVs and microwaves being used during the critical peak consumption times. No, there is no way that conservation is going to make a sigificant dent in this.
One possible solution, if you want to call it that, is where your smart meter simply turns off the power to homes during the day. You aren't home and if nobody opens the refrigerator the food will be fine. The problem is that this works in a lot of areas with mixed use between homes and offices but it doesn't really help if you have a big suburb with little or no commercial use. But it is likely to be implemented anyway making what was once a hallmark of American society - ubiquitous and reliable electric power - something of a relic.
An important subsection of radiophobes are those that are afraid of EMF radiated from transmission lines. These folks have successfully tied in knots the idea of running transmission lines anywhere near residential areas. They are able to be successful in blocking such construction because they pretty much sit and argue in a reasonable-sounding manner until the utility gives up. High voltage transmission lines have been accused of being responsible for cancer, impotence, warts, and just about every other thing that affects humans, except for government deficit spending.
Anyone that believes the US will be rewired with a new grid system hasn't run into these people. New transmission lines will not be coming to an area near you. Existing transmission lines will be taken down should any sort of permit be required to update them.
Last I heard about this was a utility in New York was desperate enough to consider running a new transmission line through a lake so that nobody would see it and it wasn't near anyone's house.
Robert Heinlein seems to have been in favor of this. Ignoring the movie, check out the book Starship Troopers where he describes a system where by you get the right to vote by performing some kind of public service - either in the military where you literally put your life on the line for the good of "the people" or engage in some other type of community service. So, for example, you could be a pro-bono attorney and get the right to vote. Or maybe a trash collector. The point is, you are doing something for "the people" and not getting rich while doing it.
Of course, you could elect to be an MBA-type and make lots of money... but not have the right to vote. Because you didn't put "the people" ahead of your own interests at least for a while.
Seems like an interesting concept in that it would get people sorted out pretty quick in terms of what really made sense to vote for and it utterly eliminates glory-hound trailer trash like John Kerry from the political system. No, you don't get to pretend to serve in the military, collect three Purple Hearts in a few months and get shipped home. It would have also eliminated just about everyone else that you can think of who is currently in politics - except John McCain. Probably a few others that I do not know of offhand. Not saying that John McCain is ideal as a politican. George H. W. Bush would have qualifed, as would JFK and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not Truman, not FDR. Not Nixon, or Ford or Carter. Interesting when you think about it.
Of course, the idea today is to grab all you can for yourself while "serving the people" and we aren't going to be getting away from that anytime soon.
People pretty much have discovered the nasty truth about democracy: that they can vote for people that promise them whatever it takes to get elected. "Campaign promises" have been a joke for at least a century, but of late people seem to be taking them seriously. Probably from a lack of historical context. To most young people anything that happened before they were born is somehow irrelevant to their lives.
The end result is we will certainly have an endless series of politicians that figure out they can promise the world to voters and get elected. Of course their ability to fulfill such promises may conflict with reality, but I am sure this series will result in the US Treasury being used to fund a lot. We will certainly have government-paid healthcare within the next 10 years or so, but it will be funded like Medicare and Medicaid which means there will be huge shortages of providers. But nobody will stop to ask how this could possibly work - they just want the goodies.
We are going to have to have Federal Permanent Unemployment. Face it, we just don't need as many employees as there are workers available. There will always be 20-30% of the population that isn't working and we are going to have to take care of them. Certainly if we are throwing open the doors and not even pretending to not be the world's caretaker we are going to have to support more and more people directly.
And what will all of this mean? It means "democracy" can't die as long as there are people that know they can vote themselves onto the gravy train. Sure, it will be an even smaller minority of people voting than it is today, but these people will know deep in their hearts that all they have to do is vote for the "right" people and they will get manna raining down on them.
The credit card issuer (bank?) doesn't take a loss - they charge it back to the merchant. The card holder doesn't take a loss - the fraudulent charges are removed from the bill. The merchant doesn't take a loss - they have insurance for this.
So nobody loses at all. So why make it secure? It is like having a combination lock on the bathroom door so nobody else can pee in your toilet.
This is clearly not really the case, although you might think it is.
One obvious fallacy is if I (from the US) come in with my PIN-less credit card and want to make a purchase. No PIN exists, so what are they going to do? Telling me to go away is not a winning strategy. So someone comes in with a re-striped card without a PIN and they are going to be able to pay just like I can.
I suspect the store isn't sending the code but the card issuer. Great for validation but it sucks for the folks trying to use stolen credit card information.
You see, in the US the card holder, the card issuer and the card organization (VISA or MasterCard) don't care about fraud. For everyone but the merchant it is meaningless and the merchant just has insurance to cover their losses due to fraud. So it is important for things to be as easy as possible for people getting stuff with stolen credit card information. Well, I guess you would need to call it "borrowed" because they really haven't stolen anything - just made a copy.
And nobody is ever prosecuted for this sort of stuff, unless you do something wild and crazy with a million credit card numbers.
I do not see this situation changing, ever. Why would it? It doesn't really affect anyone except the cardholder who has to get a new card with a different number. Yes, some people get away with buying stuff that nobody ever pays for, but the merchant is covered by insurance so they lose nothing. Certainly the insurance companies don't want it to change because then nobody would buy the insurance.
In the US credit card fraud is essentially not prosecuted. Which means you can be in line next to a uniformed police officer and hand the clerk a card that the clerk is told (phone, terminal, cash register system, whatever) to confiscate the card. Nothing happens.
I suppose you could hand the clerk an obviously hand-forged credit card and again, nothing would happen. Video surveilance is meaningless for this because it is a non-prosecuted crime. Which is why there is so much of it.
But the important aspect of this is that it is pretty much a victimless crime today in the US. OK, so I drop my card on the street and some enterprising youth picks it up and decides to renew his five different World of Warcraft accounts. My credit card company sees this and flags it as fraud. Sorry, no renewals. Oh, Blizzard gets dinged for a chargeback but they have insurance for this or they just write it off. Same thing happens if the card gets used in a store and the person walks out with $1000 flat screen TV. The fraud might not get caught immediately, but it probably does. Even if it doesn't I can dispute the charge and it comes off immediately and is charged back. The merchant is out the TV (probably cost them $500) and the chargeback but again, they certainly have insurance for this or they have no business operating a retail store. The same insurance covers them when someone fakes a slip-and-fall and wants to sue for millions of dollars.
As far as I know, no card holder has ever had to pay for fraudulent use of a credit card or credit card number. Also, as far as I know nobody ever in the US has been charged with any crime using a credit card or credit card number in a fraudulent manner. Heck, I had a card stolen from a relative's house and the police refused to pursue it even when we knew who had the card and they were trying to buy stuff with it.
Couple this with the fact that you can sell credit card info for about $0.50 each today and you can see where this goes. I am not sure if the situation is the same in other countries - clearly with debit cards it is not - but the situation in the US is very much like the justification for bank robbery - you aren't stealing anything except some insurance money. And if insurance companies didn't have to pay out once in a while nobody would buy the insurance. So it is a win-win for everyone.
Yes, the US was able to build a nuclear weapon in less than four years from scratch. But we did not have any restrictions on mining uranium and we could dedicate any percentage of the federal budget to the project we wanted to. It was fairly cheap to do, considering labor costs in those days, but still it was a huge endevor at the time.
Iran doesn't have minable uranium resources within their borders, so anything they obtained had to be from outside. They have been saddled with building huge underground bunkers for the operation from the beginning because doing anything in the open simply invited destruction from opposing powers. I would say they have had a much harder time than the US did during WW II to build anything.
Twenty years? OK, they have not had a nuclear weapons program for twenty years although they might have had aspirations for that long. It is only in the last four or five years that it has become blindingly obvious to everyone that they are going ahead with enrichment on a scale that it far beyond what is needed for electrical generation or research reactors.
For the US it could be considered to be immaterial if Iran has nuclear weapons. They have limited delivery systems and what they do have we can pretty easily take out. Unfortunately, they have two big opponents in the Middle East that would be extremely uncomfortable with Iran having nuclear weapons - Saudia Arabia and Israel. While they are unlikely (ha ha ha) to cooperate on dismantling Iran's bomb program, both are capable of inflicting significant damage well in advance of Iran having the capability of a nuclear strike on their countries. The real question is when might such an attack take place?
My guess is we have given Iran a new objective - retaliation at all costs. The only thing that is more powerful than their desire to rid the planet of Jews is their inability to appear weak in the face of other Islamic countries. We have made them look weak with (now) a rather public slap in the face. I don't think they can afford to wait much longer before doing something, anything they possibly can, to inflict billions of dollars in damage to the US.
The problem is, Iran doesn't have the time or expertise to retaliate with anything except bullets and bombs.
You do understand they have to retaliate now, right? We got them where it hurts and cost them a lot of money and time. All of their Islamic buddies are now sitting around talking about how the Great Satan pulled a good one on ole Iran. The disclosure turned a painful incident into a public slap in the face. So now they can either be considered inferior by their Islamic buddies or they can slap back any way they can.
I do not believe for a second it will be a corresponding cyber attack.
While the wisdom of pursuing the attack can be debated, a larger question of disclosing it publicly needs to be addressed. Let's just say that doing it was of questionable benefit and it probably should not have been done.
However, once it was done I would say that as a major component of any covert military operation there was an extreme need to keep it secret. Forever. Disclosing this has more or less committed Iran to a course of action to retaliate. There is no escaping that fact - they have to retaliate, probably on a larger scale. We cost them millions of dollars so they have to cost us billions. Failure to retailate will make them appear to other Islamic powers that they have faced the Great Satan and blinked, which is not a posture they can afford.
You can argue that it was theorized already that the US might be responsible. The difference is that before disclosure it was just a theory and it is difficult to justify retaliation based on a theory. Unfortunately, what disclosure has done is made it impossible to ignore any longer. It is the difference between thinking your wife might be being unfaithful and coming home to find her in bed with someone else. It is no longer possible to ignore the situation and it demands action.
Disclosure of this sort of military secret - and it cannot be termed anything but that - is clearly treasonous. I would put it on the same level as telling Germany at the height of the U-Boat campaign that we had cracked their code and knew where the subs were being sent. The result would have been a change in strategy and tactics as well as a tremendous loss of life. This disclosure will certainly lead to a significant loss of life as well.
So because some people blabbed about this we are now going to face an attack, probably within the continental US and probably pretty soon. I believe the timing will correspond to the Iranian position on the US Presidential election. Attacking before November pretty much puts Obama out of office, so if they believe Romney would be a weaker opponent the attack will be before the election. Personally, I would suspect Obama to be the weaker opponent for Iran and therefore the attack will be sometime in early 2013.
In order to cause the required amount of damage to the US, it is going to have to be a nuclear detonation. While Iran has a shortage of bomb-grade materials, other powers do not and will almost certainly share for an enterprise of this nature. A air or missle attack would be hopeless for Iran and there are too many potential avenues of discovery for a smuggled weapon. So the likey route for the attack will be by cargo ship in a encircling harbor. The Chesapeak Bay might be a great place for this with the opportunity to shower Washington DC with radioactive water and debris.
In short, if you live in a harbor area on the East coast you might want to take a trip until, say April of 2013.
Those who refuse to learn from history are condemmed to repeat it.
Just because people in your age group feel that events 200 years ago have no meaning to them does not mean other cultures feel the same way. In part, Jews have a worldwide problem because many Christian people hold a grudge against something 2000 years ago. Conflicts today in many cases rooted in conflicts many years ago. Irish and Scottish independence is rooted in events more than 600 years ago and the brutality that was inflicted upon them by England. We may have seen the end (for now?) of Irish violence, but there is still resentment.
The formation of Israel may have been a mistake, but it was a mistake that was designed in the aftermath of WW I. There are two choices today in reality, either the continued support of a Jewish state or the destruction of it. There is no real "third solution" which would involve Israel becoming an Arab state or some type of temporary co-existance on the same land. Israel will be a battleground until their neighbors accept it and live with this acceptance for a couple of generations. There can be no co-existance when Palestinian TV shows children's programming glorifying martyrs and promoting the destruction of Israel. They are taking historical events from hundreds of years ago and reframing them for the children today.
Today the US is still concerned with conflicts in our streets resulting from many African Americans feeling that they are continued to be oppressed as slaves. There have been no real slaves for over 140 years but as long as people on both sides cling to a slave culture and a cutlure of oppressing slaves there will be conflict. A lot of Mexico's problems come from a clear separation between those of Indian origin and those of Spanish origin, with the Spanish heritage folks owning most of the property and wealth with the Indian heritage people existing in poverty and subsistance farming. All of Central America has had these problems for the last 500 years or so and the current "solution" is to export the underclass to the US.
So as much as you might like to ignore history and say that it has no bearing on your life, it does. And it will continue to do so. If you do not educate yourself as to how history impacts you in your daily life you are going to be simply reliving the same conflicts and the results of these conflicts without solving anything.
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I assume that you are a knowledgeable computer user with the ability to administer multiple devices without any problems caused by rogue software, malware and such.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the average user of a PC today needs one of two things: either a completely locked-down environment that cannot be broken into to install rogue software, malware and such or a system where someone else is administering it (and cleaning it peridocally). There is no other way - the third way, left up to the user, results in millions of computers being used for nefarious purposes by people other than their owner.
People simply aren't going to put up with this long term. Today they can go out and buy an iPad instead of a PC and get that experience. And guess what? Tablet sales are showing they are doing just that. Android, being less locked-down and more open to malware is having somewhat less of an enthusiastic response but it is still selling because it isn't a PC and for the most part is immune to malware.
No, it isn't going to be more open and more subject to malware in the future. Not at all.
Security is important to just about every business. The idea that if the handset falls into inappropriate hands that all the email, all the contacts and all the notes are wide open and available.
The iPhone has some security but mostly it relies on two things: a very limited amount of email on the device itself and being able to remote wipe the device from the Exchange server. Which means the user has to (a) recognize the device is missing and (b) call IT real quick to get it wiped.
Blackberry has the edge on this with whole-device encryption which I do not believe exists on either iPhone or Android. This difference all by itself could have been used to RIM's advantage but they apparently missed this being significant.
One huge failing that I see is the handling of HTML email on the device. Blackberry chose - intentionally - to strip HTML email down and send it to the device to display in text-only form. For the purposes of storing hundreds, if not thousands of company emails on the device in 8GB (or less) it works. For the purposes of dealing with internal company email that some secretary has jazzed up with fancy stationary it works by throwing all that garbage away. Unfortunately, it doesn't work if the HTML in the email really has a purpose. Unfortunately, the answer to this is to go the iPhone/Android way and holding almost nothing on the device - which nobody ever explained to the business users.
Today, we have Angry Birds instead of security and everything that entails. Sure, the screen is bigger and in some cases more functional. But is this what business customers need? It is clearly what they want.
One of the basic problems today is when you buy as PC it doesn't come with an administration service. You, the purchasor are expected to "figure it out". Well, most people do not and that clearly should not be news to anyone. The result is that there are a lot of computers that are causing trouble for everyone on the Internet.
Who should be responsible? Clearly not the computer owner unless we start enforcing some education requirements and have real penalties for allowing your computer to be used for criminal purposes.
The other alternative is we get most of the computer users off of general-purposes computers that can be subverted all too easily and on to appliances which are resistant to subversion. This means that they are not suitable for installing random software on that nobody is inspecting and that the computer needs zero administration. Not a "zero administration" installation of Windows but something real. An iPad comes very close to this function. Android tablets are pretty close as well. But today's tablets are quite resistant enough and the software review process isn't bulletproof. If we want to move the 98% of computer users that need nothing else onto this kind of platform is has to be really bulletproof. Which means there is no way a misbehaving tablet cannot be locked out from the Internet until the offending software is removed or it is wiped.
We are perhaps a year or two away from having an event like 10% of the customers of a bank having all of their money stolen because of a lack of administration of general-purposes computers in uneducated user hands. Easily we could see something like this bring down a large bank - or even a smaller government. We could certainly see a government lose a huge amount of money because of poorly administered computers in user hands. Are we really going to wait for that to happen?
I would say, yes, we are going to wait for that to happen and the results will be interesting to say the least.
So far my understanding of the sequence of events is:
The problem is that in a predominance of cases so far upon reaching item 3 the defendant is screaming about their rights and begging for a cheap way out. The lawsuit never moves forward. In the few cases where settlement hasn't been reached - and it has been a very,very small number - it turns out that it is obvious to everyone that looks at the computer(s) in question that uploading of pirated materials was clearly going on to an unknown extent.
Sure, it could be that it is someone else and if all that was required was "we found your IP address, pay up!" it would be clearly unfair. But there is a lot more behind what is going on than that in spite of what some people would like to believe. So far there have been some mistakes but it is unclear how those mistakes were made. Carelessness on the part of the monitoring/capture of IP addresses, such as just writing down the wrong address? I don't know and I don't think the specific problems have ever been described. I do know that the people that have tried to use the "open WiFi" defense have been found with pirated materials on their computer and other supporting evidence that it had been being uploaded.
The fundamental issue we have to come to terms with is either this is going to be a non-crime and copyright is meaningless or not. If we choose to go the route of copyright being meaningless and unlimited redistribution is allowed then there has to be some pretty significant realignment in how things work in most of the Western world. I, for one, would be out of a job and my employees would be on the street. So would a lot of other people. And while we would have ego-driven productions (think Yentel and such) where the people doing it want to and don't care if it ever makes any money the idea of investor-supported media would be out the window.
The thing that most people don't understand today is just how much of the economy is related to promotion of coopyright-protected works. Lose the monopoly edge that is copyright and you lose the promotion. What is Amazon at its core? A vehicle for promoting the sale of copyrighted works in different media forms. Think about that for a while and consider what happens if we lose all promotion of such works. We are probably talking about something that would affect 30% of the workforce in US and EU. No, not all of them are involved in copyright works production but they are affected by the promotion industry, which is huge.
How did "everyone" know that Bush stole the election from Gore? Because in 2000 CBS News announced Gore as the winner around midnight Central time and people went to bed. When they woke up the next morning Gore had retracted his declaration of victory and the Bush was the winner. Clearly something had happened between the time these people went to bed and when they got up in the morning and the only logical conclusion was that Bush stole the election. After all, Gore had been declared the winner.
My guess is that if the TV News people ever do that again there will be riots in the streets and a lot of properly (meaninglessly) burned up.
Signature? The last time I voted in Arizona (by mail) if you signed the outside of the envelope the ballot was trashed because this violated the ballot secrecy requirements. Signing the big book at the polling place is fine, but what exactly do they compare it to? They do not have any "original signatures" at the polling place (at least not in Arizona or Illinois) and the signatures can only be compared if individual votes are contested. Which isn't really going to happen.
I suppose if you find someone voted for you already that you could contest that - but there is no getting rid of the ballot that was voted.
The rarity of evidence in cases of voter fraud is mostly because nobody wants to know about it. Nobody at all, except maybe the person that "lost their vote" because someone voted in their name already. Which I will agree is so rare as to be unheard of. What we all know is that blocks of people vote without ever going near a polling place in cities like Chicago. The "cemetary vote" is legendary there and has been for probably a hundred years. But where is the proof and the convictions? Did I say nobody wants to know about it? Everyone living in Chicago knows about it but no offical action has ever been taken and none will ever be taken. Cook County was known to have been swung for JFK in 1960 and there was some pretty convincing evidence of it happening - but nothing official was ever done.
You aren't going to convince anyone that ever lived in Chicago that voter fraud doesn't happen.
First problem is blind people. Second problem is what language the ballot is printed in - there is no official language for the US so every language has to be given equal weight. The language problem has already been decided in courts to the extent that if you ask for a ballot in Swahili the polling place workers are required to have one on hand and to give it to you. If they do not have such a ballot they have to make one up immediately so you can vote. Failure to do so is a violation of the Voting Rights Act and the county may be subject to a huge fine.
Fun thing to do is ask in California (where I believe this requirement exists) for a ballot in Klingon. Might just be San Francisco County or something like that but I do recall this being decided a while back. This is one of the central requirements of the Help America Vote Act.
Voting on paper isn't handicapped-friendly and it isn't language-friendly, so it is gone. Pretty much a done deal for most of the US now.
Sure you could have a computer system print out a ballot for an auditable and recountable piece of paper. But the first requirement there is to get "auditable" and "recountable" into the list of requirements in the Help America Vote Act. Until that happens these concepts will go nowhere because both handicapped access and language-friendly did make it onto the list of requirements.
There are two very conflicting requirements for US voting - handicapped access and secret ballots. What they have tried to do with the current "electronic voting" machines is balance these two things and pretty much not considered anything else. I believe this is intentional and not because of a desired insecurity but because those two items are on the list from federal and state requirements - and nowhere do things like auditability or security appear on the list of requirements.
Why can't the US just use paper ballots? Because they aren't handicapped-friendly. The US also has an issue with language - in many counties they have to print ballots in multiple languages as there is no such thing as an official language or languages for anywhere in the US today. After a bunch of lawsuits it pretty much means that you can go into a polling place and request a ballot in Klingon and they have to give you one or pay a huge fine. You can bet these counties want to have screens and not paper for ballots.
Another problem is all voting in the US is handled at the county level. Some decisions are made at the state level, but not very many. This means that you can have the newest electronic machine in one county whereas the county 20 miles east is using a ScanTron system from the 1980s. I believe it was the Help America Vote Act which tried to push enough money into counties to get everyone using some kind of post-1980s technology but I do not know how well that worked.
So, could auditability be handled with maintaining secret ballots? Maybe. Could auditability be put on the list of requirements for an "approved" voting machine at the federal level and force all states (and counties) to adopt such requirements? Probably. But the secret ballot requirement makes things tougher. You can pretty much forget any paper-based system for the US - it would not meet with requirements for handicapped access and there would be huge expenses in some counties for multiple languages. Not, Going. To. Happen.
Can there be a "secure" electronic system that meets the current secrecy and handicapped access requirements? I'm sure it is possible, but it isn't any of the current systems and we aren't going to see it for a while.
Oh, I think someone would find some damages. And the lawyers would flock to it.
It is true that if there was no money in it the case would go nowhere. But, I suspect it isn't that difficult to find a lawsuit that was decided in favor of the plantiff where a company did something like this - blatent and obvious with the idea that they would be immune to being sued. My guess is that if you suggested such a scheme to a lawyer they would be able to find the case in 30 minutes or know it from law school.
People that don't understand that about 30% of civil tort law is based on common sense and "technicalities" simply don't exist shouldn't step outside without talking to a real lawyer. Sadly, case law books are filled with examples of people that think they can get away with something without penalties by trying to skate around what they understand the law to be.
Something to think about is the idea of the old, obsolete open sourced version being updated and turning into a stronger competitor for newer stuff coming out.
I have seen this happen in a strange way and under circumstances that are better left long dead but the nightmare that everyone in the software business can relate to is something old sneaking out the back door and being recognized as being really interesting - and stealing sales from newer and possibly lamer stuff coming out. It is very difficult to compete with free on these terms, so if free stuff is at all interesting it will displace newer pay-for items.
This is something that anyone in a real software business - you know, employees, insurance, rent, payroll, all of those things - is going to be aware of. If you can pitch an open-source deal in a way that eliminates this threat, great. Otherwise? Otherwise it is going to take some real courage on the part of the original developer to release the source to something that could turn and bite new business.
Obviously, if the original development company was one guy who is now retired and has no new business this isn't a factor.
But what do you think would happen if a old version of Quicken got released as open source? I'll bet it is something some guys at Intuit worry at least a little bit about.
The problem here is that Google probably has the legal muscle to enforce what it believes is its copyright. As the guy behind youtube-mp3 points out, practically they cannot stop such software, although they can make it harder to find.
Now, one thing that clearly is something that is going to interest a lot of people is the idea that a streaming service can be defeated by software to provide the recipient of the stream with a whole copy of the work. This would have an immediate and very, very negative result on Netflix and a bunch of other such streaming services. It doesn't even matter that someone has a service or program to do this with Netflix - just that Google loses out on this. What that would do is clearly put things in the perspective of viewers having the ability - and maybe the right - to retain copies of anything streamed to them.
The result would be that Netflix would have to at least renegotiate every deal they have and probably a lot of them would just disappear. Most other streaming services would just pull the plug as well. It is not the intent of the content owners to provide permanent copies of their media to viewers via a streaming service.
Sure, it is possible. It may even be in some cases convenient and simple to do. But if it is done you will see streaming ended as we have come to know it.
Today generation, distribution and consumers are three different companies in the US. And it has been complicated so much by the overall lack of capacity that the distribution company cannot simply buy electricity from a single supplier anymore. They are forced to gather as much power as they can by dealing with multiple providers.
I don't think there is much profit in generation today and the difficulties are such that it is impossible to build a new generating plant. Nobody has built a large plant (over 1000MW) in the US in decades. Today the focus would seem to be in building the plants in Mexico and Canada and shipping the electricity into the US.
Government subsidy of solar power for homeowners has just about ended. You used to be able to get about half the system paid for but today it is more like 25% and much of that is spread out over many years of tax credits. So in order to put even a small 6-8KW PV system on your roof is going to cost you $30,000 and you can expect only $10,000 from various government and industry sources to cover this. This means you are going to have to put up $30,000 and get $10,000 back the next year. Maybe. You begin to see why the solar leasing folks are having a good time these days where you do not buy the system but only lease it - it significantly reduces the upfront cost.
By the way, net metering doesn't really make your wattmeter run backwards. There are two meters and there are different rates already, at least for most of the utilities that are doing this. Naw, if you really want to smack the utilities around you need to go to a battery system where you are charging the batteries during the day and not pulling from a grid ever. Sure, a cloudy day might mean the refrigerator shuts off at 9PM until the sun comes out the next day, but that is what it means to be free of the utility monopoly.
My father used to have a Hamm's obsession, but then he got to liking Schlitz better.
The US has a capacity problem - we haven't built a major generating plant in decades and have been living off the overcapacity that was built in the 1960s and 1970s. Well, we have used that up and have been building what "peaker" plants that could be built to try to fill in the gaps. There is a serious capacity problem today.
See all the generating plants being built to solve this problem? It takes about five years to build a large coal-fired plant and more like ten years to build a nuclear plant. We probably should not be building new coal plants today but there is little choice. There is one nuclear plant on the drawing board and the government is probably going to be financing it because private financing isn't very supportive of it. Not only that, but the chances are still pretty good that the NIMBY folks will prevent the plant from being built at all.
Will conservation fix this problem? The short answer is no. The longer answer is that we are still seeing growth in consumption in the US based on immigrant population moving in and businesses using more and more power for lighting and computers. The big factories that have all gone to China aren't there anymore but they were rather small concentrations that sometimes generated their own electricity. But every time someone opens a real estate office there are a bunch of lights and computers that are going to be running at least eight hours a day. And when a few guys from Mexico come to the US it is another apartment with TVs and microwaves being used during the critical peak consumption times. No, there is no way that conservation is going to make a sigificant dent in this.
One possible solution, if you want to call it that, is where your smart meter simply turns off the power to homes during the day. You aren't home and if nobody opens the refrigerator the food will be fine. The problem is that this works in a lot of areas with mixed use between homes and offices but it doesn't really help if you have a big suburb with little or no commercial use. But it is likely to be implemented anyway making what was once a hallmark of American society - ubiquitous and reliable electric power - something of a relic.
An important subsection of radiophobes are those that are afraid of EMF radiated from transmission lines. These folks have successfully tied in knots the idea of running transmission lines anywhere near residential areas. They are able to be successful in blocking such construction because they pretty much sit and argue in a reasonable-sounding manner until the utility gives up. High voltage transmission lines have been accused of being responsible for cancer, impotence, warts, and just about every other thing that affects humans, except for government deficit spending.
Anyone that believes the US will be rewired with a new grid system hasn't run into these people. New transmission lines will not be coming to an area near you. Existing transmission lines will be taken down should any sort of permit be required to update them.
Last I heard about this was a utility in New York was desperate enough to consider running a new transmission line through a lake so that nobody would see it and it wasn't near anyone's house.
Robert Heinlein seems to have been in favor of this. Ignoring the movie, check out the book Starship Troopers where he describes a system where by you get the right to vote by performing some kind of public service - either in the military where you literally put your life on the line for the good of "the people" or engage in some other type of community service. So, for example, you could be a pro-bono attorney and get the right to vote. Or maybe a trash collector. The point is, you are doing something for "the people" and not getting rich while doing it.
Of course, you could elect to be an MBA-type and make lots of money... but not have the right to vote. Because you didn't put "the people" ahead of your own interests at least for a while.
Seems like an interesting concept in that it would get people sorted out pretty quick in terms of what really made sense to vote for and it utterly eliminates glory-hound trailer trash like John Kerry from the political system. No, you don't get to pretend to serve in the military, collect three Purple Hearts in a few months and get shipped home. It would have also eliminated just about everyone else that you can think of who is currently in politics - except John McCain. Probably a few others that I do not know of offhand. Not saying that John McCain is ideal as a politican. George H. W. Bush would have qualifed, as would JFK and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Not Truman, not FDR. Not Nixon, or Ford or Carter. Interesting when you think about it.
Of course, the idea today is to grab all you can for yourself while "serving the people" and we aren't going to be getting away from that anytime soon.
People pretty much have discovered the nasty truth about democracy: that they can vote for people that promise them whatever it takes to get elected. "Campaign promises" have been a joke for at least a century, but of late people seem to be taking them seriously. Probably from a lack of historical context. To most young people anything that happened before they were born is somehow irrelevant to their lives.
The end result is we will certainly have an endless series of politicians that figure out they can promise the world to voters and get elected. Of course their ability to fulfill such promises may conflict with reality, but I am sure this series will result in the US Treasury being used to fund a lot. We will certainly have government-paid healthcare within the next 10 years or so, but it will be funded like Medicare and Medicaid which means there will be huge shortages of providers. But nobody will stop to ask how this could possibly work - they just want the goodies.
We are going to have to have Federal Permanent Unemployment. Face it, we just don't need as many employees as there are workers available. There will always be 20-30% of the population that isn't working and we are going to have to take care of them. Certainly if we are throwing open the doors and not even pretending to not be the world's caretaker we are going to have to support more and more people directly.
And what will all of this mean? It means "democracy" can't die as long as there are people that know they can vote themselves onto the gravy train. Sure, it will be an even smaller minority of people voting than it is today, but these people will know deep in their hearts that all they have to do is vote for the "right" people and they will get manna raining down on them.
Sort of like a cargo cult, you see.
The credit card issuer (bank?) doesn't take a loss - they charge it back to the merchant. The card holder doesn't take a loss - the fraudulent charges are removed from the bill. The merchant doesn't take a loss - they have insurance for this.
So nobody loses at all. So why make it secure? It is like having a combination lock on the bathroom door so nobody else can pee in your toilet.
This is clearly not really the case, although you might think it is.
One obvious fallacy is if I (from the US) come in with my PIN-less credit card and want to make a purchase. No PIN exists, so what are they going to do? Telling me to go away is not a winning strategy. So someone comes in with a re-striped card without a PIN and they are going to be able to pay just like I can.
I suspect the store isn't sending the code but the card issuer. Great for validation but it sucks for the folks trying to use stolen credit card information.
You see, in the US the card holder, the card issuer and the card organization (VISA or MasterCard) don't care about fraud. For everyone but the merchant it is meaningless and the merchant just has insurance to cover their losses due to fraud. So it is important for things to be as easy as possible for people getting stuff with stolen credit card information. Well, I guess you would need to call it "borrowed" because they really haven't stolen anything - just made a copy.
And nobody is ever prosecuted for this sort of stuff, unless you do something wild and crazy with a million credit card numbers.
I do not see this situation changing, ever. Why would it? It doesn't really affect anyone except the cardholder who has to get a new card with a different number. Yes, some people get away with buying stuff that nobody ever pays for, but the merchant is covered by insurance so they lose nothing. Certainly the insurance companies don't want it to change because then nobody would buy the insurance.
In the US credit card fraud is essentially not prosecuted. Which means you can be in line next to a uniformed police officer and hand the clerk a card that the clerk is told (phone, terminal, cash register system, whatever) to confiscate the card. Nothing happens.
I suppose you could hand the clerk an obviously hand-forged credit card and again, nothing would happen. Video surveilance is meaningless for this because it is a non-prosecuted crime. Which is why there is so much of it.
But the important aspect of this is that it is pretty much a victimless crime today in the US. OK, so I drop my card on the street and some enterprising youth picks it up and decides to renew his five different World of Warcraft accounts. My credit card company sees this and flags it as fraud. Sorry, no renewals. Oh, Blizzard gets dinged for a chargeback but they have insurance for this or they just write it off. Same thing happens if the card gets used in a store and the person walks out with $1000 flat screen TV. The fraud might not get caught immediately, but it probably does. Even if it doesn't I can dispute the charge and it comes off immediately and is charged back. The merchant is out the TV (probably cost them $500) and the chargeback but again, they certainly have insurance for this or they have no business operating a retail store. The same insurance covers them when someone fakes a slip-and-fall and wants to sue for millions of dollars.
As far as I know, no card holder has ever had to pay for fraudulent use of a credit card or credit card number. Also, as far as I know nobody ever in the US has been charged with any crime using a credit card or credit card number in a fraudulent manner. Heck, I had a card stolen from a relative's house and the police refused to pursue it even when we knew who had the card and they were trying to buy stuff with it.
Couple this with the fact that you can sell credit card info for about $0.50 each today and you can see where this goes. I am not sure if the situation is the same in other countries - clearly with debit cards it is not - but the situation in the US is very much like the justification for bank robbery - you aren't stealing anything except some insurance money. And if insurance companies didn't have to pay out once in a while nobody would buy the insurance. So it is a win-win for everyone.
It isn't required but you get dinged for a higher discount rate if you do not have it. So there is an incentive to process cards with this number.
Required? Heck no.
Yes, the US was able to build a nuclear weapon in less than four years from scratch. But we did not have any restrictions on mining uranium and we could dedicate any percentage of the federal budget to the project we wanted to. It was fairly cheap to do, considering labor costs in those days, but still it was a huge endevor at the time.
Iran doesn't have minable uranium resources within their borders, so anything they obtained had to be from outside. They have been saddled with building huge underground bunkers for the operation from the beginning because doing anything in the open simply invited destruction from opposing powers. I would say they have had a much harder time than the US did during WW II to build anything.
Twenty years? OK, they have not had a nuclear weapons program for twenty years although they might have had aspirations for that long. It is only in the last four or five years that it has become blindingly obvious to everyone that they are going ahead with enrichment on a scale that it far beyond what is needed for electrical generation or research reactors.
For the US it could be considered to be immaterial if Iran has nuclear weapons. They have limited delivery systems and what they do have we can pretty easily take out. Unfortunately, they have two big opponents in the Middle East that would be extremely uncomfortable with Iran having nuclear weapons - Saudia Arabia and Israel. While they are unlikely (ha ha ha) to cooperate on dismantling Iran's bomb program, both are capable of inflicting significant damage well in advance of Iran having the capability of a nuclear strike on their countries. The real question is when might such an attack take place?
My guess is we have given Iran a new objective - retaliation at all costs. The only thing that is more powerful than their desire to rid the planet of Jews is their inability to appear weak in the face of other Islamic countries. We have made them look weak with (now) a rather public slap in the face. I don't think they can afford to wait much longer before doing something, anything they possibly can, to inflict billions of dollars in damage to the US.
The problem is, Iran doesn't have the time or expertise to retaliate with anything except bullets and bombs.
You do understand they have to retaliate now, right? We got them where it hurts and cost them a lot of money and time. All of their Islamic buddies are now sitting around talking about how the Great Satan pulled a good one on ole Iran. The disclosure turned a painful incident into a public slap in the face. So now they can either be considered inferior by their Islamic buddies or they can slap back any way they can.
I do not believe for a second it will be a corresponding cyber attack.
While the wisdom of pursuing the attack can be debated, a larger question of disclosing it publicly needs to be addressed. Let's just say that doing it was of questionable benefit and it probably should not have been done.
However, once it was done I would say that as a major component of any covert military operation there was an extreme need to keep it secret. Forever. Disclosing this has more or less committed Iran to a course of action to retaliate. There is no escaping that fact - they have to retaliate, probably on a larger scale. We cost them millions of dollars so they have to cost us billions. Failure to retailate will make them appear to other Islamic powers that they have faced the Great Satan and blinked, which is not a posture they can afford.
You can argue that it was theorized already that the US might be responsible. The difference is that before disclosure it was just a theory and it is difficult to justify retaliation based on a theory. Unfortunately, what disclosure has done is made it impossible to ignore any longer. It is the difference between thinking your wife might be being unfaithful and coming home to find her in bed with someone else. It is no longer possible to ignore the situation and it demands action.
Disclosure of this sort of military secret - and it cannot be termed anything but that - is clearly treasonous. I would put it on the same level as telling Germany at the height of the U-Boat campaign that we had cracked their code and knew where the subs were being sent. The result would have been a change in strategy and tactics as well as a tremendous loss of life. This disclosure will certainly lead to a significant loss of life as well.
So because some people blabbed about this we are now going to face an attack, probably within the continental US and probably pretty soon. I believe the timing will correspond to the Iranian position on the US Presidential election. Attacking before November pretty much puts Obama out of office, so if they believe Romney would be a weaker opponent the attack will be before the election. Personally, I would suspect Obama to be the weaker opponent for Iran and therefore the attack will be sometime in early 2013.
In order to cause the required amount of damage to the US, it is going to have to be a nuclear detonation. While Iran has a shortage of bomb-grade materials, other powers do not and will almost certainly share for an enterprise of this nature. A air or missle attack would be hopeless for Iran and there are too many potential avenues of discovery for a smuggled weapon. So the likey route for the attack will be by cargo ship in a encircling harbor. The Chesapeak Bay might be a great place for this with the opportunity to shower Washington DC with radioactive water and debris.
In short, if you live in a harbor area on the East coast you might want to take a trip until, say April of 2013.
Those who refuse to learn from history are condemmed to repeat it.
Just because people in your age group feel that events 200 years ago have no meaning to them does not mean other cultures feel the same way. In part, Jews have a worldwide problem because many Christian people hold a grudge against something 2000 years ago. Conflicts today in many cases rooted in conflicts many years ago. Irish and Scottish independence is rooted in events more than 600 years ago and the brutality that was inflicted upon them by England. We may have seen the end (for now?) of Irish violence, but there is still resentment.
The formation of Israel may have been a mistake, but it was a mistake that was designed in the aftermath of WW I. There are two choices today in reality, either the continued support of a Jewish state or the destruction of it. There is no real "third solution" which would involve Israel becoming an Arab state or some type of temporary co-existance on the same land. Israel will be a battleground until their neighbors accept it and live with this acceptance for a couple of generations. There can be no co-existance when Palestinian TV shows children's programming glorifying martyrs and promoting the destruction of Israel. They are taking historical events from hundreds of years ago and reframing them for the children today.
Today the US is still concerned with conflicts in our streets resulting from many African Americans feeling that they are continued to be oppressed as slaves. There have been no real slaves for over 140 years but as long as people on both sides cling to a slave culture and a cutlure of oppressing slaves there will be conflict. A lot of Mexico's problems come from a clear separation between those of Indian origin and those of Spanish origin, with the Spanish heritage folks owning most of the property and wealth with the Indian heritage people existing in poverty and subsistance farming. All of Central America has had these problems for the last 500 years or so and the current "solution" is to export the underclass to the US.
So as much as you might like to ignore history and say that it has no bearing on your life, it does. And it will continue to do so. If you do not educate yourself as to how history impacts you in your daily life you are going to be simply reliving the same conflicts and the results of these conflicts without solving anything.