When I freely publish my business name and address in the phonebook, is it really accurate to call it theft when someone breaks in to my store and steals my stuff?
Your analogy is almost right, but it should've read, "When I freely publish my business name and address in the phonebook, is it really accurate to call it identity theft when someone breaks in to my store and steals my stuff?". That is, the original claim was that using information you were given in order to steal money can be called "theft" but cannot be called "identity theft" since it is not the identity you are stealing.
If I give you a crowbar, and you use it to force open my front door and come into my house and steal my laptop and my iPod, we don't call that "crowbar theft". (We do call it "theft", of course.)
What I love about this is that it provides an obvious example of a law of physics in action. In high school, my physics teacher told me that gravity distorts space, and my reaction was, OK, sure you can probably come to that conclusion through a long series of complex (or at least clever and not immediately obvious) experiments and lots of math, but I'll have to take your word for it.
This, however, is a simple, simple thing that causes anyone who looks at the photo to want an explanation. That makes it so much more concrete. It's no longer just some abstract idea that makes the math work out; instead, the distortion of space by gravity now has a home within a really simple mental framework: it's the reason these rings show up in this photo.
If somebody says they won't believe that gravity distorts space until they see it with their own eyes, you can show them this photo and say, "Well, now you have." (Granted, seeing via the Hubble telescope isn't literally seeing with your own eyes, but most people have looked through a telescope, so they can relate to that and there isn't much difference.)
The naivety of the faithful is truly astounding. God cares about the outcome of YOUR football game. God cares if you get that promotion at work or if your business is a success. And God certainly wants you to get that new car.
In fairness to religious people, once you take it as a given that
God exists, all these ideas fall out quite naturally and it's
actually a fairly consistent.
God is by definition omnipotent.
Therefore, "the constant fear of scarcity / aggression as its
child" (to quote a Sting song) does not apply to God. God would,
logically, not ever be in short supply of any resource. God doesn't
have to worry about time management or make tough choices about
priorities. The very idea of God (at least with the typical
Western definition) necessarily implies that, yes, he really can take the
time to care about YOUR football game. It's the same concept as
the idea that a rich guy can buy you and everyone else in the
restaurant a slice of pie if he's feeling magnanimous, because he
really isn't going to feel it in the wallet. And he really isn't
doing it because you are so special that you deserve the slice of
pie. It might just be because he feels like being a nice guy.
Probably because the differentiation between "macro-evolution" ("speciation") and "micro-evolution" is an ID foil. *ALL* evolution is microevolution. There's nowhere in evolutionary theory that says a frog must give birth to a mouse for evolution to occur. Micro-evolutionary changes are sufficient to explain speciation over a long enough time frame.
While I'm sure that someone has claimed otherwise at some time,
the most useful understanding of "macro-evolution" is not a frog giving
birth to a mouse. Instead, "macro-evolution" would simply describe
that there must be an evolutionary path (with many steps) from frog
to mouse (or whatever species). That is, the term "macro-evolution" does
not have to explain large changes that happen instantaneously;
it can simply describe large changes that happen, period.
When we get back to that definition, we can consider the original
point, which is that (as far as I know), we have considerably less
evidence of "macro-evolution" than of "micro-evolution". That's
not to say that macro-evolution doesn't happen. It's just that
in order to accept larger changes over a longer term (a time
interval orders of magnitude longer than our lifetimes), we have
to rely more on indirect evidence.
IMHO, people who reject evolution often attack this point because
it actually is a weak point. I'm not saying it's a weak
enough point that evolution doesn't make sense. I'm just saying
it's a weak enough point that it makes a natural target for
rhetoric. Anyway, the point is that I think "micro-evolution" vs.
"macro-evolution" is a perfectly reasonable distinction to make.
Besides, if were all supposed to be companions to God after we're dead, why the hell would he want to surround himself with stupid people?
So in your story, the stupid people are the ones who figure out the
truth first, and the smart ones are the ones who get it last?:-)
I'm an atheist, but your scenario seems a little bit odd to me.
Incidentally, I agree that the people who figure it out first aren't
necessarily smart if they come to the right conclusion for the wrong
reason. But on the other hand, if something is true, there are often
many reflections of that. It's hard to keep the truth from "tainting"
the world in a way that makes it possible to discern. Basically
what I'm saying is that it might not even be possible for God, if he
existed, to completely hide his existence.
I tried to play the "infinity" card against an IDer recently, the "paradox of evil" as you put it (and they put it). For the uninitiated, the argument goes: God is infinite, which means by definition that he includes everything. Ergo, if evil exists then it too must be part of God. This requires one of three conclusions, (a) God is not all good, (b) God is not infinite, or (c) evil doesn't exist.
Congratulations: that type of discussion is one of the reasons that
some people still disbelieve evolution. Many religious people dig
in mentally and refuse to budge in their beliefs because they feel
they are under attack by atheists. You might call this a persecution
complex except for the fact that they're right. (Of course,
atheists are also under attack by religious people.)
Your argument was pretty poor from a philosophical and a mathematical
point of view. Why? The set of integers is infinite. The set of real
numbers is also infinite. Therefore, if your argument about infinite
things having to include everything were valid, the set of integers
would have to include real numbers. Therefore 3.14159 would be
an integer. Your argument is essentially that all infinite sets
are the universal set ("universal set" being the term in set theory
that describes the set that contains all elements under discussion).
The worst part of all this is, you think you won the argument! The truth
is, as you described it, both of you advanced arguments
that were pretty much invalid. I'd say you both got nowhere as far as
reaching any sort of valid conclusion, convincing the other of
anything, or even coming to a better understanding of the basis
of your own beliefs.
This'll be UK-only; probably licensed under the BBCPL, which is like the GPL, but only for people in England, Scotland, Wales, and N. Ireland.
Could be worse. Could be released under the TVL (TV Licence), where you'd
have to pay £135.50 per year to run the software. (Or £45.50
if your web site is in black and white instead of color.)
The good
news then would be that if you live in your parents' basement
and they have a TV Licence paid for, you can host the web site
under their licence as long as the server is located in your
parents' house.
I really don't see the application of this information. If you get a call with an ID that you don't recognize, do you really want to run to your computer first to decide whether or not to answer?
You let the call go to voicemail, then you run to the computer afterwards to possibly
gain some information about whether this is (a) that job interview you've been expecting
a call about or (b) some scam artist. Granted, most of the time people do bother to
leave a voicemail if they are calling about something important, but sometimes you have
to deal with people who don't.
In short, if you don't recognize the number and they don't leave a voicemail, you use
this as a piece of information in the decision on whether to call them back.
Also, sometimes these guys will call multiple times. If you know who they are, then
you can prepare yourself so that if they call again, you don't accidentally pick up.
Whoever designed the damn thing should get a "stupidest design on market" award though.
I've mentioned this piece of junk before, but
I think that award should go to the Samsung phone I used to have where
holding down "9" would dial 911, even when key lock was turned
on. Arrrrrrrggh.
Not surprisingly, this behavior made the 911 operators angry.
It made me even angrier since I started to fear I might eventually be
arrested if I kept carrying the phone. Of course I ditched the
phone.
Wow, mod parent up. The blue food angle is a huge factor here.
I think we, as humans, are used to seeing things with a lot of
food coloring in them, and we've learned to eat them, but
our natural instinct (and the monkey's) might just be to
steer clear of them.
I pretty much live in a continual jumble of thoughts, and then somehow fit them all together into a single picture, where both hold together.
If you don't already know about it, you may be pleased to know
that philosophers have described this exact process. The original
thought is called the Thesis, the thought that comes along and
contradicts it is called the Antithesis, and the new insight
gained from refusing to reject either out of hand but instead
working toward a new understanding that takes both into account,
that is called the Synthesis.
This idea is often attributed to
Hegel,
and in fact I previously knew it as the Hegelian Synthesis,
but according to Wikipedia, he didn't invent the idea and
merely referenced it once or twice. Nevertheless, and
regardless of who invented it, I think it's a great concept.
Obviously you can't always take this approach because
practical constraints often force a conclusion or a decision,
but it's nice to have the capacity to reason this way
and to know that you're skipping it intentionally when you
decide to just make a quick decision.
Where's the willingness to take one for the team? If you are so scared of being "arrested", I wonder what you'll do when they threaten to kill you?
Where's the benefit of getting arrested? The public already knows about
the case. A federal judge has already ruled against the government and
invalidated portions of the Patriot act. How much does it change if we
know John Doe's name?
So discuss away. Have sock puppets discuss away. Have your wife discuss away.
The stupid Patriot act makes it illegal for the person to tell their wife!
So, that's not really a work-around. It'd be better for them to just say
whatever they're going to say.
For what it's worth, I think the ISP owner has done the right thing. They've
done everything they can without getting arrested. They haven't said, "Ah,
it's too much trouble to fight this." Instead, they've called in the ACLU
and taken the government to court. The government, so far,
is losing. There's not much point in risking what the ISP owner would risk
by giving up their identity. The ACLU has already drawn a lot of attention
to it, and it doesn't seem like they'd get that much publicity by shedding
their anonymity.
By the way, if you appreciate the fact that the ACLU provided free lawyers
and made it way easier for the guy to fight the government
on this (thus decreasing the chances he'd blow it off), you might
consider donating a
little cash to help them provide more lawyers in future situations
like this.
What are the other carriers to do? The phone OS's functionality is basically specified by the carrier, who picks and chooses various features depending on the phone's price point, how the phone will fit into the carrier's current phone mix, and the competition (not necessarily in that order).
It's true that carriers have traditionally maintained a lot of control over the devices.
In fact, they're notorious for this. But there's another factor here: the iPhone has
been wildly successful, which to me means the time may be right for a shift in the
expectations for cell phones. In this view, the iPhone is the source of disruptive
change in the industry, and industry players (carriers) must respond in order to avoid
being left behind by Apple (and their carrier partner AT&T).
Or to put it another way, in developing a phone, Apple has created a vacuum. They
made a device that's wildly popular, but they made it available only through AT&T.
This leaves all other carriers with a sort of vacuum in the area of their devices
with nothing to fill it. The fact that people have been rogue-unlocking the iPhone
to use with other carriers attests to the existence of this vacuum, and I think we
can expect carriers are going to try to get something that competes with the iPhone.
So there's this big vacuum, and nothing obvious to fill it. Until today, when
Google announced Android. Google is the one company that has an image and a level
of popularity comparable to Apple, so if there really is a vacuum to be filled,
Google is a very good candidate to fill it.
Furthermore, if the vacuum is big enough, and if the carriers are desperate
enough, maybe the disruptive change caused by the iPhone will be enough to force
carriers to trade some openness for the opportunity to get on the Android bandwagon
and not be left behind.
unless BB undercuts the Netflix price scheme one way or the other, the only advantage they have is the physical store.
For comparable plans, Netflix and Blockbuster have the exact same prices.
Both have a 3-out-at-a-time plan for $16.99, a 2-out-at-a-time plan for $13.99, a 1-out-at-a-time plan for $9.99, and a 2-movies-per-month plan for $4.99.
Given that, it's down to the small ways that they find to differentiate
themselves. Netflix has streaming movies, although others have said
the selection there is not good. Blockbuster has the option
of renting in-store, and though their Netflix-comparable plans include
no free in-store rentals, they discount rentals to $1.99 when you return
a DVD with those plans. So they each have one perk which has marginal
usefulness for most people.
Basically, as far as I can tell, neither is obviously better than the other.
They are very closely matched.
The electronics come with a handful of preprogrammed popular alternate tunings as well as the traditional one. They can also be used to tune the guitar to another instrument, such as a piano, or to store a player's own invented tunings.
This is an outrage! They should do something about it!
If there were only someone with connections to the Hollywood
movie who
they could get in touch with and who could
help them out, help them go after those guys and get their
stuff back. Someone strong... like maybe a former
football player or something...
The electronics come with a handful of preprogrammed popular alternate tunings as well as the traditional one. They can also be used to tune the guitar to another instrument, such as a piano, or to store a player's own invented tunings.
That may be possible. From TFA:
The electronics come with a handful of preprogrammed popular alternate tunings as well as the traditional one. They can also be used to tune the guitar to another instrument, such as a piano, or to store a player's own invented tunings.
Just how much control you have over "invented tunings" is a good question. Can you set the exact frequencies of the strings, or can you just say "this one is an A" and stuff? Hopefully the former, because it would be nice to be able to play, say, halfway between A and A-flat if you wanted to. Or create custom (non-compromise) tunings for different keys.
If you can communicate with someone (even just to ask to be added to someone's "circle of trust") then you will receive spam over that channel.
Ah, that's a good insight. I suppose one way of dealing with this would
be to allow people to join the circle of trust only by being vouched for
by someone already in the circle of trust or by doing something out of
band (like printing out an invitation and physically handing it to the
person you want to invite). But although this would work, in practice
the reduced flexibility would make it so that people wouldn't do that.
IMHO, people would rather have a little bit of spam than have to lose
the convenience of being able to contact anyone at any time.
Speaking or random number generators - the Keno machines at the Montreal Casino were originally defective (bad clock batteries) so that every day, when they were started, they would generate the same sequence of numbers. At least one guy made out like a bandit over that "bug". The Quebec government sued to try to get "their" money back.
Sounds kinda like the story of Michael
Larson on the game
show Press
Your Luck. However, it appears that after they realized what
he had done, the TV network was decent enough to let him keep the
money since it was their fault for using "random" sequences that
were really not random at all.
(before someone rips into me, I am not expressing any opinion about Darfur, just pointing out that probably the people screaming the loudest for American action in Darfur are Americans. I know that here in Canada I have never heard anyone suggest it is an American problem; every person who brings it up wants the Canadian government to take action)
Here in the United States I've never heard the suggestion that it's an
American problem either. It's just that we tend to discuss whether
our government should get involved because our government is the one
we have some (small) chance of influencing, and it is our country whose
actions and choices we feel we should be responsible for.
I guess we could spend our time debating whether Greece or Korea or
Bolivia should get involved, but since we're not any of those countries,
we can't control what they do, so it would be mostly a waste of time.
It's even simpler than that. All you need is sufficient terrorists to ensure that the chance of getting one through security exceeds some limit. For example, if there is a 33% chance of getting caught, all you need is three or four terrorists to almost guarentee that one will get through the security checks.
Presumably you detect brute force attacks like that by shutting down
flights or reacting in some other fairly extreme way after several
terrorists get caught in a short span of time.
And of course you scrutinize the guys who do get caught and look for
links between them and other possible terrorists so that if they try
to do it over a longer time span, you have a decent shot at finding the
other terrorists before they do anything.
the paper is so badly written I can't be bothered identifying which.
Thanks. I'm glad to get confirmation it wasn't my reading comprehension
skills that caused me to give up after ever single word in the paper
caused the mental fog to get a little bit thicker until in the end
(actually somewhere in the middle), I had no earthly idea what the
damned thing was about.
Slashdot Mirror
What "news for nerds" means is subjective, but I would argue this:
Your analogy is almost right, but it should've read, "When I freely publish my business name and address in the phonebook, is it really accurate to call it identity theft when someone breaks in to my store and steals my stuff?". That is, the original claim was that using information you were given in order to steal money can be called "theft" but cannot be called "identity theft" since it is not the identity you are stealing.
If I give you a crowbar, and you use it to force open my front door and come into my house and steal my laptop and my iPod, we don't call that "crowbar theft". (We do call it "theft", of course.)
What I love about this is that it provides an obvious example of a law of physics in action. In high school, my physics teacher told me that gravity distorts space, and my reaction was, OK, sure you can probably come to that conclusion through a long series of complex (or at least clever and not immediately obvious) experiments and lots of math, but I'll have to take your word for it.
This, however, is a simple, simple thing that causes anyone who looks at the photo to want an explanation. That makes it so much more concrete. It's no longer just some abstract idea that makes the math work out; instead, the distortion of space by gravity now has a home within a really simple mental framework: it's the reason these rings show up in this photo.
If somebody says they won't believe that gravity distorts space until they see it with their own eyes, you can show them this photo and say, "Well, now you have." (Granted, seeing via the Hubble telescope isn't literally seeing with your own eyes, but most people have looked through a telescope, so they can relate to that and there isn't much difference.)
In fairness to religious people, once you take it as a given that God exists, all these ideas fall out quite naturally and it's actually a fairly consistent.
God is by definition omnipotent. Therefore, "the constant fear of scarcity / aggression as its child" (to quote a Sting song) does not apply to God. God would, logically, not ever be in short supply of any resource. God doesn't have to worry about time management or make tough choices about priorities. The very idea of God (at least with the typical Western definition) necessarily implies that, yes, he really can take the time to care about YOUR football game. It's the same concept as the idea that a rich guy can buy you and everyone else in the restaurant a slice of pie if he's feeling magnanimous, because he really isn't going to feel it in the wallet. And he really isn't doing it because you are so special that you deserve the slice of pie. It might just be because he feels like being a nice guy.
While I'm sure that someone has claimed otherwise at some time, the most useful understanding of "macro-evolution" is not a frog giving birth to a mouse. Instead, "macro-evolution" would simply describe that there must be an evolutionary path (with many steps) from frog to mouse (or whatever species). That is, the term "macro-evolution" does not have to explain large changes that happen instantaneously; it can simply describe large changes that happen, period.
When we get back to that definition, we can consider the original point, which is that (as far as I know), we have considerably less evidence of "macro-evolution" than of "micro-evolution". That's not to say that macro-evolution doesn't happen. It's just that in order to accept larger changes over a longer term (a time interval orders of magnitude longer than our lifetimes), we have to rely more on indirect evidence.
IMHO, people who reject evolution often attack this point because it actually is a weak point. I'm not saying it's a weak enough point that evolution doesn't make sense. I'm just saying it's a weak enough point that it makes a natural target for rhetoric. Anyway, the point is that I think "micro-evolution" vs. "macro-evolution" is a perfectly reasonable distinction to make.
So in your story, the stupid people are the ones who figure out the truth first, and the smart ones are the ones who get it last? :-)
I'm an atheist, but your scenario seems a little bit odd to me. Incidentally, I agree that the people who figure it out first aren't necessarily smart if they come to the right conclusion for the wrong reason. But on the other hand, if something is true, there are often many reflections of that. It's hard to keep the truth from "tainting" the world in a way that makes it possible to discern. Basically what I'm saying is that it might not even be possible for God, if he existed, to completely hide his existence.
Congratulations: that type of discussion is one of the reasons that some people still disbelieve evolution. Many religious people dig in mentally and refuse to budge in their beliefs because they feel they are under attack by atheists. You might call this a persecution complex except for the fact that they're right. (Of course, atheists are also under attack by religious people.)
Your argument was pretty poor from a philosophical and a mathematical point of view. Why? The set of integers is infinite. The set of real numbers is also infinite. Therefore, if your argument about infinite things having to include everything were valid, the set of integers would have to include real numbers. Therefore 3.14159 would be an integer. Your argument is essentially that all infinite sets are the universal set ("universal set" being the term in set theory that describes the set that contains all elements under discussion).
The worst part of all this is, you think you won the argument! The truth is, as you described it, both of you advanced arguments that were pretty much invalid. I'd say you both got nowhere as far as reaching any sort of valid conclusion, convincing the other of anything, or even coming to a better understanding of the basis of your own beliefs.
Could be worse. Could be released under the TVL (TV Licence), where you'd have to pay £135.50 per year to run the software. (Or £45.50 if your web site is in black and white instead of color.)
The good news then would be that if you live in your parents' basement and they have a TV Licence paid for, you can host the web site under their licence as long as the server is located in your parents' house.
You let the call go to voicemail, then you run to the computer afterwards to possibly gain some information about whether this is (a) that job interview you've been expecting a call about or (b) some scam artist. Granted, most of the time people do bother to leave a voicemail if they are calling about something important, but sometimes you have to deal with people who don't.
In short, if you don't recognize the number and they don't leave a voicemail, you use this as a piece of information in the decision on whether to call them back.
Also, sometimes these guys will call multiple times. If you know who they are, then you can prepare yourself so that if they call again, you don't accidentally pick up.
I've mentioned this piece of junk before, but I think that award should go to the Samsung phone I used to have where holding down "9" would dial 911, even when key lock was turned on. Arrrrrrrggh.
Not surprisingly, this behavior made the 911 operators angry. It made me even angrier since I started to fear I might eventually be arrested if I kept carrying the phone. Of course I ditched the phone.
Wow, mod parent up. The blue food angle is a huge factor here. I think we, as humans, are used to seeing things with a lot of food coloring in them, and we've learned to eat them, but our natural instinct (and the monkey's) might just be to steer clear of them.
As if that concept weren't enough, there's a web site devoted to color which specially mentions that blue M&M's are supposedly unappetizing!
If you don't already know about it, you may be pleased to know that philosophers have described this exact process. The original thought is called the Thesis, the thought that comes along and contradicts it is called the Antithesis, and the new insight gained from refusing to reject either out of hand but instead working toward a new understanding that takes both into account, that is called the Synthesis.
This idea is often attributed to Hegel, and in fact I previously knew it as the Hegelian Synthesis, but according to Wikipedia, he didn't invent the idea and merely referenced it once or twice. Nevertheless, and regardless of who invented it, I think it's a great concept. Obviously you can't always take this approach because practical constraints often force a conclusion or a decision, but it's nice to have the capacity to reason this way and to know that you're skipping it intentionally when you decide to just make a quick decision.
Where's the benefit of getting arrested? The public already knows about the case. A federal judge has already ruled against the government and invalidated portions of the Patriot act. How much does it change if we know John Doe's name?
The stupid Patriot act makes it illegal for the person to tell their wife! So, that's not really a work-around. It'd be better for them to just say whatever they're going to say.
For what it's worth, I think the ISP owner has done the right thing. They've done everything they can without getting arrested. They haven't said, "Ah, it's too much trouble to fight this." Instead, they've called in the ACLU and taken the government to court. The government, so far, is losing. There's not much point in risking what the ISP owner would risk by giving up their identity. The ACLU has already drawn a lot of attention to it, and it doesn't seem like they'd get that much publicity by shedding their anonymity.
By the way, if you appreciate the fact that the ACLU provided free lawyers and made it way easier for the guy to fight the government on this (thus decreasing the chances he'd blow it off), you might consider donating a little cash to help them provide more lawyers in future situations like this.
It's true that carriers have traditionally maintained a lot of control over the devices. In fact, they're notorious for this. But there's another factor here: the iPhone has been wildly successful, which to me means the time may be right for a shift in the expectations for cell phones. In this view, the iPhone is the source of disruptive change in the industry, and industry players (carriers) must respond in order to avoid being left behind by Apple (and their carrier partner AT&T).
Or to put it another way, in developing a phone, Apple has created a vacuum. They made a device that's wildly popular, but they made it available only through AT&T. This leaves all other carriers with a sort of vacuum in the area of their devices with nothing to fill it. The fact that people have been rogue-unlocking the iPhone to use with other carriers attests to the existence of this vacuum, and I think we can expect carriers are going to try to get something that competes with the iPhone.
So there's this big vacuum, and nothing obvious to fill it. Until today, when Google announced Android. Google is the one company that has an image and a level of popularity comparable to Apple, so if there really is a vacuum to be filled, Google is a very good candidate to fill it.
Furthermore, if the vacuum is big enough, and if the carriers are desperate enough, maybe the disruptive change caused by the iPhone will be enough to force carriers to trade some openness for the opportunity to get on the Android bandwagon and not be left behind.
For comparable plans, Netflix and Blockbuster have the exact same prices. Both have a 3-out-at-a-time plan for $16.99, a 2-out-at-a-time plan for $13.99, a 1-out-at-a-time plan for $9.99, and a 2-movies-per-month plan for $4.99.
Given that, it's down to the small ways that they find to differentiate themselves. Netflix has streaming movies, although others have said the selection there is not good. Blockbuster has the option of renting in-store, and though their Netflix-comparable plans include no free in-store rentals, they discount rentals to $1.99 when you return a DVD with those plans. So they each have one perk which has marginal usefulness for most people.
Basically, as far as I can tell, neither is obviously better than the other. They are very closely matched.
From TFA:
This is an outrage! They should do something about it! If there were only someone with connections to the Hollywood movie who they could get in touch with and who could help them out, help them go after those guys and get their stuff back. Someone strong... like maybe a former football player or something...
That may be possible. From TFA:
Just how much control you have over "invented tunings" is a good question. Can you set the exact frequencies of the strings, or can you just say "this one is an A" and stuff? Hopefully the former, because it would be nice to be able to play, say, halfway between A and A-flat if you wanted to. Or create custom (non-compromise) tunings for different keys.
If only TFA had said something about that specific subject...
Ah, that's a good insight. I suppose one way of dealing with this would be to allow people to join the circle of trust only by being vouched for by someone already in the circle of trust or by doing something out of band (like printing out an invitation and physically handing it to the person you want to invite). But although this would work, in practice the reduced flexibility would make it so that people wouldn't do that. IMHO, people would rather have a little bit of spam than have to lose the convenience of being able to contact anyone at any time.
Sounds kinda like the story of Michael Larson on the game show Press Your Luck. However, it appears that after they realized what he had done, the TV network was decent enough to let him keep the money since it was their fault for using "random" sequences that were really not random at all.
Here in the United States I've never heard the suggestion that it's an American problem either. It's just that we tend to discuss whether our government should get involved because our government is the one we have some (small) chance of influencing, and it is our country whose actions and choices we feel we should be responsible for.
I guess we could spend our time debating whether Greece or Korea or Bolivia should get involved, but since we're not any of those countries, we can't control what they do, so it would be mostly a waste of time.
Presumably you detect brute force attacks like that by shutting down flights or reacting in some other fairly extreme way after several terrorists get caught in a short span of time.
And of course you scrutinize the guys who do get caught and look for links between them and other possible terrorists so that if they try to do it over a longer time span, you have a decent shot at finding the other terrorists before they do anything.
Thanks. I'm glad to get confirmation it wasn't my reading comprehension skills that caused me to give up after ever single word in the paper caused the mental fog to get a little bit thicker until in the end (actually somewhere in the middle), I had no earthly idea what the damned thing was about.