Obama was rightly 100% anti-Iraq war when it mattered, before we got there, before we dug into old military bases, before a whole bunch of equipment was unloaded and set up on foreign soil. His practicality was just fine. He's never had to deal with the logistics of military deployment or recall, so it makes sense that after Petraeus gave him an update of what it would take given current deployments, it's no wonder he had to back off the impossible - it can't happen over night, and the Iraqis should have been doing this switch-over a long time ago. Petraeus did a good job of turning the strategy around so that this timeline was possible. Instead of insisting on a timeline from a disorganized government with no teeth, because distrust was so rife in the populace, was ludicrous. The US bungled the entry, deployment, and handling of the war up until Petraeus took over. What's happening now is a good transition point. Even our own country is not 100% violence free, and two of the reasons bombs are not as common as they are in Iraq for carrying attacks out is 1) infrastructure limits access to materials and knowledge and 2) civility and tolerance are much higher frequency in our populace, forcing those contemplating bombs of any sort to operate in secret from a vast majority of the rest of us. Over there, there's some sort of organization distributing knowledge and materials, and their attacks have more meaning than gangs in the slums here against each other. Slowing that to a point where the populace is intolerant makes it a police rather than military issue. That's what's coming up in Iraq. Hopefully the switch over sees a successful recruitment campaign for Iraqi forces, such that the US military can be drawn down and out of Iraq - providing that this BS unilateral status of forces agreement Bush is trying to erect in his last days doesn't provide some sort of contractual obligation that the next president can't negotiate out of.
Afghanistan? Has the potential to be blundered, just like Iraq in the beginning, but it seems Petraeus' rocketing promotion spree will help outline a more useful strategy for the region. However, that's still a lot of money and troop familiarity and community trust that must be used and built on top of whatever Bush gets passed in the SoF with Iraq. Petraeus' hands may be tied with insufficient resources for his strategy to work again in Afghanistan. If that's the case, anyone towing the line of "until we win" will be hard-pressed for credibility when numbers start coming through the media on death tolls in Afghanistan. Can it be done? Maybe. The infiltration of antagonist ideology is deeper in Afghanistan thanks to the difference in troop levels and strategies. Getting the government propped up against that will be more difficult than Iraq was. Expect another huge daily expense on the line for this one.
Iran, with nuclear weapons technology? Not nearly as much a threat as trigger-happy North Korea, or did we forget about their missile test sent sailing towards Japan? I would be more worried about them getting stable enough to develop nuclear weapons technology. ICBMs are more useful with a nuclear warhead, and it seems they have the ICBM part getting closer to a realized dream. Conventional warheads on ICBMs aren't cost- or space-effective. They will pursue the mutually assured destruction route just as other countries before them. Iran will too, but their neighbors, and the US presence in the region, will make their leadership think twice before pulling a blatant provocation like North Korea did.
Russia? They've always been at odds with the west. What's new here? Sure, Soviet infrastructure collapsed, but I bet you the people who enabled it are still around. If they had to, I'm sure Russia could flex some considerable muscle, but just like Iran, they're unlikely to be trigger-happy and advertise exactly what they're doing. They, like Canada and the US, are well-insulated from being invaded and shut down by conventional means, and no one in their right mind wants to
"Fair share" is everyone paying the same flat rate (the poor and middle class would still pay less, but the same proportion). But when the bottom 50% of wage earners only pay 3.6% of the taxes [taxfoundation.org], there is something very unfair about that. At some point, people in the bottom third not only pay no taxes, but get net checks from the government. Is this still fair by your world view? At what point does it get unfair?
You're playing the same game we've seen a million times from pro-corporate people of all stripes: "The percentages aren't even!" It's a mathematician's trick that partly enables corporations to pay the majority of their workers incomes below poverty level, and come out with egregious profits for their share holders.
The truth of the matter is that the barriers to entry into higher tax brackets for families that have historically paid no taxes or have been on the bottom bracket for more than one generation are ONLY mitigated by spreading the wealth downward. Federal grants have income caps, and are used for education, which in turn will increase the tax bracket of the recipient. (Presuming he's not an IT engineer working nights at Circle-K because of competition and/or knowing too much to be in other positions) The end result, and what people like those in the lowest bracket and below get heated over is not the percentages, but the amounts resulting from the applied percentages. Not everyone will understand that 1.1 billion in revenue might be offset by 1.0 billion in costs, but when the word profit is used to describe such numbers, people know what that means. A large corporation may have to pay 35% tax or its equivalent in donations to approved parties, but billions in profits is post-tax, where dividends are decided and the rest goes to profit sharers, and those involved still reap many more dollars than the minimum-wage workers who enabled their profits. That's where the little guy gets pissed at big business, but that just sets the stage for my point here.
So what happens if the percentages are even? Tax revenues would go down, those federal grants may be in jeopardy, and many social programs that benefit corporate enablers (those minimum-wagers that corps love to treat like dirt) would also fail from lack of funding. Eventually the company itself may run into a labor shortage for anyone with a clue because you're having to fight over all those candidates who didn't need grants with other companies who weren't paying higher taxes either. Then a situation similar to the Boomer retirement wave comes, and the company could really be in trouble.
Long story short, higher taxes on increasing incomes helps enable those incomes indirectly. You can spout off all of your individual responsibility BS all you want, but the fact of the matter is that today's environment is different than the days when most business tycoons of today were growing up. Opportunity to do what they did is limited much more by IP threats. You can't start from nothing because someone else probably thought of it first. Education about what came first is the key to those opportunities, and for the lower-class, your taxes are one of the few ways they can have a chance. Those tax dollars will also help the future survival of the company as generations march on.
The reality is that businesses are flocking to Ireland, which has a corporate tax rate one half that as the US. Now that's a careless tax policy.
And finally, that's an incomplete view. The most you could relocate to Ireland over the US is headquarters. Manufacturing, services, and retail will likely remain established where they are, and have their own tax responsibility and impacts. And that loophole of funneling all income out of country to avoid taxes on the corporate level may not remain for long now that it's in the commoner's spotlight.
I happen to know that a similar program aimed specifically tracking missiles from space has been underway for at least two years with a seperate favorite defense contractor in the desert. The working project title sent chills down my spine, but it's only an orbital tracker that relays to ground missiles. (supposedly) Project "Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle" or commonly referred to by its acronym.
So what your claiming is that all slaves were tribal criminals of one sort or another, and that their descendants could never amount to anything better? What ever happened to that continent called Autralia, I wonder?
Oh right, no one would help the "criminals'" descendants so they made their own society. Get off your "high horse" arguing that they have enough with their current standard of living and give real education where it can make a difference and you will change the world for the better.
Or, y'know, keep being ignorant of plight and keep putting up those walls and see what happens. Oh right, there was a civil war over that, wasn't there?
I'll start by saying I am not a developer, but I have been watching some open-source projects.
When you're looking at open-sourcing sourcing a title, there are going to be many things that you should consider. First and foremost, it makes the game and its functions available to be modded, much like Diablo 2 saw many fan mods that changed things up for the classes, only on a wider, deeper scale. It also means that communities will form around the game for trading of ideas and content or code for the old game. It means releasing the old corporate idea of control from the game, but opens up other possibilities.
This may present unprecedented insight into trends among consumers. The open-source community may be a small demographic (people who understand at least some of the code), but focus-groups have been used for years by corporations to get consumer feedback. Worry over competition from open-sourcing old projects is unwarranted. For example, Blizzard knows very well how much it takes to go from concept art to a new outdoor landscape in WoW, for someone to take the source of Starcraft, let's say, and make it 3D rendered instead of sprite-based would take years of focused development, while also making the potential for script issues and glitches to arise. In that time, the community, from what I've seen, understands that it would not be attributing these changes to the classic to Blizzard, but rather to the volunteers and their own contributions. As long as that wish was passed along in the source, Blizzard is unlikely to hear anything about it. The company already issues EULAs with an AS-IS disclaimer, the only difference would be that open-source communities constantly change the AS-IS state to new versions on the source tracker. Also, the disclaimer likely wouldn't be included in the source - legalese in comments is in bad taste, but pointing to a legal document on the web seems perfectly fine.
While I find it terribly unlikely that something as recent as Warcraft 2 or Starcraft will be open-sourced any time soon, but those scenarios could lead to new insights about the flexibility the games already have. Alterations to the event engine in Starcraft could expand the diversity of options, and bring new fans to current releases.
Should Blizzard be concerned about divulging inner workings of battle.net and it's handling of any present or previous games, it may be an option to remove specific battle.net code before open-souring the title, but take care not to disable all forms of network or internet play, as they were often a driving reason those supported games were such a huge success.
Bullshit confirmed. Also, there ARE several white-out spots on the Niagara river that are visible structures from both river-tracing roads.
However, world diversity necessitates certain omissions. As much as any country would like to think itself superior, deriving site function with a little background knowledge and a few satellite images is relatively easy. So any geopolitical protection agency worth its weight in salt recognizes the potential to form strategies against critical establishments should detailed global information truly be global. Current enmity from abroad towards the US aside, what could have happened if unedited satellite data were available to everyone in either of the world wars? Or in current conflicts? Knowing how to subjugate people you don't like by taking out key points of their national works is something all national interests are trying to guard against. I'd insert something like wishing for world peace and trust here, but I'm not that naive.
Space is a pretty high barrier to entry for this kind of data. Even so, that barrier has been getting lower and lower since Sputnik. Though the first private space launch succeeded today, you can bet that there are legal and political strings behind that company's success that dictated some sort of anti-publishing of orbital photos before going through a review board because the nationalists won't let their protections be for naught because the people they are protecting can launch into space themselves. This view may become increasingly outdated or tested as some point in the future when we enter a privateer era of inter-planetary travel, but we may or may not live to see that era.
Have you ever believed an opinion? Have you taken that belief to a debate including the opposite of that opinion? Were you more inclined to disagree with the debater or to take his points into account? Most people, sadly, do belong to the former group. What's worse is that trait is being exploited by other leaders.
Case in point, people being told how to vote on some bills, or for or against some candidates, because they feel it right to advise on 'moral' bills and those who are for or against them. It takes advantage of an already mostly-aligned belief to create a position on controversy. My wife got one such call just this month. fortunately she's free-thinker enough from her religion that the call didn't carry much weight. This from a religion that up until recently was of the opinion that it doesn't do this to its followers. Thankfully it's not my headache.
The others have answered well to this question, but I would add that the protection is not written in. Dubbing clauses unconscionable was used in the last AT&T case I recall (linked above), but that did not mean that the clause itself was illegal. And, unfortunately, the rest of the business world in the US takes that fact and writes all their contracts with it. I haven't seen an agreement that doesn't defer to arbitration as the sole option in at least 5 years. They basically write in that there is no higher authority than our chosen arbiter. Also, contracts that were fought in court were sometimes dismissed in American courts because the arbitration clause was not specifically targeted, and was ruled, therefore, that the signing parties were obligated to pursue that avenue first.
I don't know the statistics, but I'd be curious to see if any of the groups you mentioned (cop-haters, anti-war-activists) would be statistically significant, income-wise, to cause collapse in the respective system. Locally? maybe. But if we're talking technology-enabled tax allocation election (and we are, it would be impossible otherwise), then we could simply take all the money up to a pool, aggregate the % elections, then trickle down to the departments accordingly.
This, however, will never happen in the United States. We are very technically capable of designing and implementing a system such as this. The current political body is not willing to change anything in fields they now have power in. As benevolent as many of them are, telling a large chunk of them that they will not need to make decisions on X anymore because it's going to the people, even if security of the system is air-tight, will bring up many cries relating to history and education being the deciding factors for these things. This is why the electoral college was founded, but that was done in an age before public information availability. They'll argue that their way is still necessary, we'll argue otherwise, and in the end the proposal won't see a vote.
If you want an example, let's point to the Diebold fiasco, where salespeople and contracts were put ahead of independent criticism and gave us a patchy (at best) and easily-hackable first generation eVoting, where other smaller countries (mainly in Europe) have been doing it smoothly for years. This was an example of disjointed politics attempting to make technical decisions. The end result was a media with big distrust in eVoting, a couple of choice flaws brought up by technology groups that can be quoted out of context and slapped on any eVoting system (mostly with impunity because the public already has a negative view thanks to the media), and several counties that have moved back to paper because of it all.
Right, so Asus, Chaintech, and all those other manfacturers lost out by not following IBM's philosophy in proprietary design and instead agreed that motherboard mounts and expansion slot positioning should be an open standard, huh?
Why should it follow that an open design leads to no profit? Generations before us made millions by opening and standardizing physical form factors. When was the last time your standard PC tech at best buy had to deal with an expansion bus card that held expansion cards parallel to the motherboard?
There's been sucessful and unsucessful attempts at open standards, but the concept can not be dismissed automatically as unsucessful.
I'm sure there's techniques out there to run envelopes through a bright scanner and reconstruct contents by dividing relative optacity into different layers and OCR'ing it. Besides that, do you really think it would be beyond the CIA or FBI to order reading of outgoing mail to X recipient? And as for your other two suggestions, those are just wiretaps like the government has been doing all this time anyways. Even this, you think this content didn't go through an NSA computer? the edges are closing in with this EFF alert, and soon the only 'secret' will be how much social engineering happens based on what goes through all your smart devices.
Yet...No one will ever do actually anything about it. Even those that continually break the rules are just pointed to and accused, but slip away anyways. Any history buff on here care to mention what happens when that's observed over long periods?
Well, although it's partly an aeronautics problem to construct aerial vehicles suitable for Titan's atmosphere (vastly more pressure in a gradient steeper than Earth's), but also potentially a larger physics problem. Current aeronautic propulsion technology produces a lot of heat as a by-product, which, given the chemicals in the "air" on Titan, will produce greater forces as the gases contacting hot engines expands at a greater rate than our own air. Talk about afterburners is for another time entirely. And introduction of all this heat will invariably change the weather patterns. Locally at first, but colonizing Titan would do even more.
Leeroy's hardly a creative take on gaming, but has anyone in these suits thought of the fact that specific sequences of play are the sole execution of the player?
Seriously. Just once I'd love to see someone contrast the many ways to play X while recording with Y, with the many ways to code W and Z. (for example) There's bad ways to play a game that get you stomped, just like there's bad ways to code that get you fired. There's good too, of course, but my point is it would be counter-productive for the owners of compiler software to suddenly litigate against coders who use their compiler to include built code from other compilers or vice versa. Likewise these companies should be grateful for the free advertising they get when someone plays their game (output to screen) and uses another software package to share that unique experience on YouTube.
Seriously...The Feds squashed Texas for trying to do the same damn thing. This, whether you believe or not, is the real reason it should not be taught in public schools. There's a chain of schools called "Catholic" for a reason - You want your kids to have a decreased affinity for seeking out why the universe works because they simply believe that it does? There's the school chain for you. The general public (and more importantly, the state) is barred from permitting this kind of non-sense.
Now leave the rest of us who have more important work to do alone.
Continental drift opens volcanic wounds. This has gone on for eons. The fact that we have instruments in the last 2 decades that are capable of returning this meaningful data in high-pressure, 4 degree Celsius, salt-water environments speaks to the real meaning of these studies: Now we can watch them. It is nothing new in the planet's history - massive spots don't form overnight. Only our ability to see them is new.
You know, rocket scientists have to account for the rate of change in an object's relative speed to launch satellites. This is something the world has gotten very good at.
You would think geophysicists would catch the drift and start isolating acceleration as a variable to better estimate when the polar bears will have to raid Eskimo villages to survive.
Unlike our first commentor, this is a more serious approach to the problem.
Depending on the model of machine you're using, there's really no way to spot it as it's happening given your restriction set. Your problem is not with "box" stuffer vulnerability, but record vulnerability - Slashdot's collective outcry has been because there was no security or checks and balances put into Diebold's (and their later off-shoots) machines, causing potential for huge abuse at any point before voting, and any point after voting until announcements are made. We think contracts were pushed to facilitate this weakness in the system, but are powerless to change it individually.
As a disclaimer, the following measures, even if followed to the letter, will not guarantee vote security if using machines with the above mentioned vulnerabilities, and will not permit any politician to pretend otherwise.
That said, here are problems on the systems themselves that should not be allowed by default to address your time of interest (voting); open ports - of the system has a floppy drive, a cd rom drive, or any sort of pluggable port besides the power cord, that is accessable with moderate difficulty, that's a breach waiting to happen. Ask your technitions this specific question - "are there any IR or radio devices in these terminals?" A program built to listen for wireless devices is just as serious as a USB port being open. Ask them about the system inputs. If there are keyboards, "have you disabled all possible shortcut key combinations to prevent system access?" There is more that could possibly go wrong, but I'm sure Slashdot will have plenty to say.
P.S. Hope you weren't expecting an overall warm welcome - your party's reputation here was shredded and torched over the past 8 years.
Let's not forget about one of the fundamentals of population and bell curves: proportional growth. When Gen X begot Gen Y, the problem of the Boomer-era population growth got worse. So we have a populace, X percentage of which has problems with math or logic or something that causes issues. When operational cash is granted from the public based on performance, and X being unevenly distributed through the system, the motivation is to induce success by inching the bars lower in those schools that got stuck with a greater percent of X.
Now throw in national correlation for education 'standards' and the bars all over start moving. The net effect seems to be lowered expectations, and thus lower student motivation to push their own envelope. I've heard entirely too many new parents talk about brush off low (70 and lower) math grades in a conversation about art, plays, music, or sports. Or worse still, altered grades based on performance in those areas. A prime example of this is a fellow student of mine in the electrical engineering program who slipped through the cracks, was told to sit in a corner and do something else while the others where testing, and has left this one to this day with 5th grade language skill, and intellectually lazy to the point of not caring if they understands the concepts when guessing answers on (multiple choice math) tests.
By the way, that's another problem with education: multiple choice only encourages this sort of behavior. Problems have been more frequently reverse-worked from the answer list than actually solved among my classmates. It encourages leaning on the mental cruch of the easier operations rather than learn new ones.
So here you are, motivated to just move the kids through meaningless grades on salaries built for college students and you're wondering why the net education level has disintegrated? Maybe you're not wondering, in which case you should be part of a grassroots crusade to expect more out of rising generations, and get them to think.
Good point, if this technology is tuned to listen to those control centers, any applicable use for extra limbs would have to be trained into those centers and mimic the formating for movement of existing limbs, something that may be difficult even for introspectives.
But, here's a thought for you; exo-suits. Why try to take over the world with a clumsy set of limbs you've only had 2 years practice with when you could gain current your dexterity inside an alloyed plated exo-suit and basically gain the servo and dermal strength with little to no loss? The drawback, of course, is now we need a 3 inch arc reactor.
That's the arguement the pro-monitor group will use, then it will go into effect against all protest from the privacy advocates and things will go quiet...
Now here's the kicker. Groups or social undesirables could then be criminalized, even to a trvial level that the congress may not balk at. No one would be safe from the consequences that follow.
If, for instance anti-abortion zeal goes too far and gets in at the federal level, even mentioning to a friend online that you're considering it, thinking of leaving the country to get one done suddenly makes you a target.
Of more concern to slashdotters may be (among a lot of other things) the dangerous dance some rederick painting an engineer's thought patterns as simiar to terrorists against the state.
I've posted links to senators feedback site and so forth before, this must stop.
This would be the greatest breach of constitutional protection from search by the government... Made public anyways. Don't stay quiet and let this pass, raise the storm.
There are magnetized wires out there with analog sound recordings on them from the days before vinyl. This is nothing new, and without a better control and recall system, is highly inefficient. Now, if the patent deals with the control system, kudos to IBM. If it deals with just the idea of selectively magnetizing a wire set, this has already been done. Google wire recording if you want more info.
Replace every instance of fiber in your comment with paved roads, then tell me the market will make it work. I don't buy it. Lines are lines, put them up every where, establish routing structure, put channels out to the private sector. The current model only promotes monopolies by way of "we already have that..." Or "we have contractual obligations preventing us from discussing it, let alone accepting it." Market will not solve this.
This could range from malicious intent down to incompetent workers to deficient policies. Policies which may not have been written to encompass the need for retrieval, or had them written out upon Bush's inauguration. This whole mess is ridiculous though, why didn't this statement come out earlier? It seems to me that hard drive destruction was recent. The court should demand procedures and/or vendor receipts and start chasing this down. It's ludicrous to think that the motions would have gone on this long only to NOW say that the physical media was destroyed. Chase the rabbit down the hole, maybe we'll finally catch something out of this whole mess.
I understand you can't answer specific questions on your budget expenditures. However, I am curious about your departments' general strategy for acquisition in agents and equipment. Given that your branch is both new and will be charged with handling challenges that could include: mitigating massive Denial of Service attacks from computer nets across the world; specifically targeted viruses against pentagon and other systems; and digital interference against foreign hacker teams, will your team be expected to have a high machine:cyber-agent ratio or rely more on effective individual actions using fewer machines?
Slashdot Mirror
Obama was rightly 100% anti-Iraq war when it mattered, before we got there, before we dug into old military bases, before a whole bunch of equipment was unloaded and set up on foreign soil. His practicality was just fine. He's never had to deal with the logistics of military deployment or recall, so it makes sense that after Petraeus gave him an update of what it would take given current deployments, it's no wonder he had to back off the impossible - it can't happen over night, and the Iraqis should have been doing this switch-over a long time ago. Petraeus did a good job of turning the strategy around so that this timeline was possible. Instead of insisting on a timeline from a disorganized government with no teeth, because distrust was so rife in the populace, was ludicrous. The US bungled the entry, deployment, and handling of the war up until Petraeus took over. What's happening now is a good transition point. Even our own country is not 100% violence free, and two of the reasons bombs are not as common as they are in Iraq for carrying attacks out is 1) infrastructure limits access to materials and knowledge and 2) civility and tolerance are much higher frequency in our populace, forcing those contemplating bombs of any sort to operate in secret from a vast majority of the rest of us. Over there, there's some sort of organization distributing knowledge and materials, and their attacks have more meaning than gangs in the slums here against each other. Slowing that to a point where the populace is intolerant makes it a police rather than military issue. That's what's coming up in Iraq. Hopefully the switch over sees a successful recruitment campaign for Iraqi forces, such that the US military can be drawn down and out of Iraq - providing that this BS unilateral status of forces agreement Bush is trying to erect in his last days doesn't provide some sort of contractual obligation that the next president can't negotiate out of.
Afghanistan? Has the potential to be blundered, just like Iraq in the beginning, but it seems Petraeus' rocketing promotion spree will help outline a more useful strategy for the region. However, that's still a lot of money and troop familiarity and community trust that must be used and built on top of whatever Bush gets passed in the SoF with Iraq. Petraeus' hands may be tied with insufficient resources for his strategy to work again in Afghanistan. If that's the case, anyone towing the line of "until we win" will be hard-pressed for credibility when numbers start coming through the media on death tolls in Afghanistan. Can it be done? Maybe. The infiltration of antagonist ideology is deeper in Afghanistan thanks to the difference in troop levels and strategies. Getting the government propped up against that will be more difficult than Iraq was. Expect another huge daily expense on the line for this one.
Iran, with nuclear weapons technology? Not nearly as much a threat as trigger-happy North Korea, or did we forget about their missile test sent sailing towards Japan? I would be more worried about them getting stable enough to develop nuclear weapons technology. ICBMs are more useful with a nuclear warhead, and it seems they have the ICBM part getting closer to a realized dream. Conventional warheads on ICBMs aren't cost- or space-effective. They will pursue the mutually assured destruction route just as other countries before them. Iran will too, but their neighbors, and the US presence in the region, will make their leadership think twice before pulling a blatant provocation like North Korea did.
Russia? They've always been at odds with the west. What's new here? Sure, Soviet infrastructure collapsed, but I bet you the people who enabled it are still around. If they had to, I'm sure Russia could flex some considerable muscle, but just like Iran, they're unlikely to be trigger-happy and advertise exactly what they're doing. They, like Canada and the US, are well-insulated from being invaded and shut down by conventional means, and no one in their right mind wants to
"Fair share" is everyone paying the same flat rate (the poor and middle class would still pay less, but the same proportion). But when the bottom 50% of wage earners only pay 3.6% of the taxes [taxfoundation.org], there is something very unfair about that. At some point, people in the bottom third not only pay no taxes, but get net checks from the government. Is this still fair by your world view? At what point does it get unfair?
You're playing the same game we've seen a million times from pro-corporate people of all stripes: "The percentages aren't even!" It's a mathematician's trick that partly enables corporations to pay the majority of their workers incomes below poverty level, and come out with egregious profits for their share holders.
The truth of the matter is that the barriers to entry into higher tax brackets for families that have historically paid no taxes or have been on the bottom bracket for more than one generation are ONLY mitigated by spreading the wealth downward. Federal grants have income caps, and are used for education, which in turn will increase the tax bracket of the recipient. (Presuming he's not an IT engineer working nights at Circle-K because of competition and/or knowing too much to be in other positions) The end result, and what people like those in the lowest bracket and below get heated over is not the percentages, but the amounts resulting from the applied percentages. Not everyone will understand that 1.1 billion in revenue might be offset by 1.0 billion in costs, but when the word profit is used to describe such numbers, people know what that means. A large corporation may have to pay 35% tax or its equivalent in donations to approved parties, but billions in profits is post-tax, where dividends are decided and the rest goes to profit sharers, and those involved still reap many more dollars than the minimum-wage workers who enabled their profits. That's where the little guy gets pissed at big business, but that just sets the stage for my point here.
So what happens if the percentages are even? Tax revenues would go down, those federal grants may be in jeopardy, and many social programs that benefit corporate enablers (those minimum-wagers that corps love to treat like dirt) would also fail from lack of funding. Eventually the company itself may run into a labor shortage for anyone with a clue because you're having to fight over all those candidates who didn't need grants with other companies who weren't paying higher taxes either. Then a situation similar to the Boomer retirement wave comes, and the company could really be in trouble.
Long story short, higher taxes on increasing incomes helps enable those incomes indirectly. You can spout off all of your individual responsibility BS all you want, but the fact of the matter is that today's environment is different than the days when most business tycoons of today were growing up. Opportunity to do what they did is limited much more by IP threats. You can't start from nothing because someone else probably thought of it first. Education about what came first is the key to those opportunities, and for the lower-class, your taxes are one of the few ways they can have a chance. Those tax dollars will also help the future survival of the company as generations march on.
The reality is that businesses are flocking to Ireland, which has a corporate tax rate one half that as the US. Now that's a careless tax policy.
And finally, that's an incomplete view. The most you could relocate to Ireland over the US is headquarters. Manufacturing, services, and retail will likely remain established where they are, and have their own tax responsibility and impacts. And that loophole of funneling all income out of country to avoid taxes on the corporate level may not remain for long now that it's in the commoner's spotlight.
Public desensitization training.
I happen to know that a similar program aimed specifically tracking missiles from space has been underway for at least two years with a seperate favorite defense contractor in the desert. The working project title sent chills down my spine, but it's only an orbital tracker that relays to ground missiles. (supposedly) Project "Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle" or commonly referred to by its acronym.
So what your claiming is that all slaves were tribal criminals of one sort or another, and that their descendants could never amount to anything better? What ever happened to that continent called Autralia, I wonder?
Oh right, no one would help the "criminals'" descendants so they made their own society. Get off your "high horse" arguing that they have enough with their current standard of living and give real education where it can make a difference and you will change the world for the better.
Or, y'know, keep being ignorant of plight and keep putting up those walls and see what happens. Oh right, there was a civil war over that, wasn't there?
I'll start by saying I am not a developer, but I have been watching some open-source projects.
When you're looking at open-sourcing sourcing a title, there are going to be many things that you should consider. First and foremost, it makes the game and its functions available to be modded, much like Diablo 2 saw many fan mods that changed things up for the classes, only on a wider, deeper scale. It also means that communities will form around the game for trading of ideas and content or code for the old game. It means releasing the old corporate idea of control from the game, but opens up other possibilities.
This may present unprecedented insight into trends among consumers. The open-source community may be a small demographic (people who understand at least some of the code), but focus-groups have been used for years by corporations to get consumer feedback. Worry over competition from open-sourcing old projects is unwarranted. For example, Blizzard knows very well how much it takes to go from concept art to a new outdoor landscape in WoW, for someone to take the source of Starcraft, let's say, and make it 3D rendered instead of sprite-based would take years of focused development, while also making the potential for script issues and glitches to arise. In that time, the community, from what I've seen, understands that it would not be attributing these changes to the classic to Blizzard, but rather to the volunteers and their own contributions. As long as that wish was passed along in the source, Blizzard is unlikely to hear anything about it. The company already issues EULAs with an AS-IS disclaimer, the only difference would be that open-source communities constantly change the AS-IS state to new versions on the source tracker. Also, the disclaimer likely wouldn't be included in the source - legalese in comments is in bad taste, but pointing to a legal document on the web seems perfectly fine.
While I find it terribly unlikely that something as recent as Warcraft 2 or Starcraft will be open-sourced any time soon, but those scenarios could lead to new insights about the flexibility the games already have. Alterations to the event engine in Starcraft could expand the diversity of options, and bring new fans to current releases.
Should Blizzard be concerned about divulging inner workings of battle.net and it's handling of any present or previous games, it may be an option to remove specific battle.net code before open-souring the title, but take care not to disable all forms of network or internet play, as they were often a driving reason those supported games were such a huge success.
Bullshit confirmed. Also, there ARE several white-out spots on the Niagara river that are visible structures from both river-tracing roads.
However, world diversity necessitates certain omissions. As much as any country would like to think itself superior, deriving site function with a little background knowledge and a few satellite images is relatively easy. So any geopolitical protection agency worth its weight in salt recognizes the potential to form strategies against critical establishments should detailed global information truly be global. Current enmity from abroad towards the US aside, what could have happened if unedited satellite data were available to everyone in either of the world wars? Or in current conflicts? Knowing how to subjugate people you don't like by taking out key points of their national works is something all national interests are trying to guard against. I'd insert something like wishing for world peace and trust here, but I'm not that naive.
Space is a pretty high barrier to entry for this kind of data. Even so, that barrier has been getting lower and lower since Sputnik. Though the first private space launch succeeded today, you can bet that there are legal and political strings behind that company's success that dictated some sort of anti-publishing of orbital photos before going through a review board because the nationalists won't let their protections be for naught because the people they are protecting can launch into space themselves. This view may become increasingly outdated or tested as some point in the future when we enter a privateer era of inter-planetary travel, but we may or may not live to see that era.
Have you ever believed an opinion? Have you taken that belief to a debate including the opposite of that opinion? Were you more inclined to disagree with the debater or to take his points into account? Most people, sadly, do belong to the former group. What's worse is that trait is being exploited by other leaders.
Case in point, people being told how to vote on some bills, or for or against some candidates, because they feel it right to advise on 'moral' bills and those who are for or against them. It takes advantage of an already mostly-aligned belief to create a position on controversy. My wife got one such call just this month. fortunately she's free-thinker enough from her religion that the call didn't carry much weight. This from a religion that up until recently was of the opinion that it doesn't do this to its followers. Thankfully it's not my headache.
The others have answered well to this question, but I would add that the protection is not written in. Dubbing clauses unconscionable was used in the last AT&T case I recall (linked above), but that did not mean that the clause itself was illegal. And, unfortunately, the rest of the business world in the US takes that fact and writes all their contracts with it. I haven't seen an agreement that doesn't defer to arbitration as the sole option in at least 5 years. They basically write in that there is no higher authority than our chosen arbiter. Also, contracts that were fought in court were sometimes dismissed in American courts because the arbitration clause was not specifically targeted, and was ruled, therefore, that the signing parties were obligated to pursue that avenue first.
I don't know the statistics, but I'd be curious to see if any of the groups you mentioned (cop-haters, anti-war-activists) would be statistically significant, income-wise, to cause collapse in the respective system. Locally? maybe. But if we're talking technology-enabled tax allocation election (and we are, it would be impossible otherwise), then we could simply take all the money up to a pool, aggregate the % elections, then trickle down to the departments accordingly.
This, however, will never happen in the United States. We are very technically capable of designing and implementing a system such as this. The current political body is not willing to change anything in fields they now have power in. As benevolent as many of them are, telling a large chunk of them that they will not need to make decisions on X anymore because it's going to the people, even if security of the system is air-tight, will bring up many cries relating to history and education being the deciding factors for these things. This is why the electoral college was founded, but that was done in an age before public information availability. They'll argue that their way is still necessary, we'll argue otherwise, and in the end the proposal won't see a vote.
If you want an example, let's point to the Diebold fiasco, where salespeople and contracts were put ahead of independent criticism and gave us a patchy (at best) and easily-hackable first generation eVoting, where other smaller countries (mainly in Europe) have been doing it smoothly for years. This was an example of disjointed politics attempting to make technical decisions. The end result was a media with big distrust in eVoting, a couple of choice flaws brought up by technology groups that can be quoted out of context and slapped on any eVoting system (mostly with impunity because the public already has a negative view thanks to the media), and several counties that have moved back to paper because of it all.
Right, so Asus, Chaintech, and all those other manfacturers lost out by not following IBM's philosophy in proprietary design and instead agreed that motherboard mounts and expansion slot positioning should be an open standard, huh?
Why should it follow that an open design leads to no profit? Generations before us made millions by opening and standardizing physical form factors. When was the last time your standard PC tech at best buy had to deal with an expansion bus card that held expansion cards parallel to the motherboard?
There's been sucessful and unsucessful attempts at open standards, but the concept can not be dismissed automatically as unsucessful.
I'm sure there's techniques out there to run envelopes through a bright scanner and reconstruct contents by dividing relative optacity into different layers and OCR'ing it. Besides that, do you really think it would be beyond the CIA or FBI to order reading of outgoing mail to X recipient? And as for your other two suggestions, those are just wiretaps like the government has been doing all this time anyways. Even this, you think this content didn't go through an NSA computer? the edges are closing in with this EFF alert, and soon the only 'secret' will be how much social engineering happens based on what goes through all your smart devices.
Yet...No one will ever do actually anything about it. Even those that continually break the rules are just pointed to and accused, but slip away anyways. Any history buff on here care to mention what happens when that's observed over long periods?
Well, although it's partly an aeronautics problem to construct aerial vehicles suitable for Titan's atmosphere (vastly more pressure in a gradient steeper than Earth's), but also potentially a larger physics problem. Current aeronautic propulsion technology produces a lot of heat as a by-product, which, given the chemicals in the "air" on Titan, will produce greater forces as the gases contacting hot engines expands at a greater rate than our own air. Talk about afterburners is for another time entirely. And introduction of all this heat will invariably change the weather patterns. Locally at first, but colonizing Titan would do even more.
Leeroy's hardly a creative take on gaming, but has anyone in these suits thought of the fact that specific sequences of play are the sole execution of the player?
Seriously. Just once I'd love to see someone contrast the many ways to play X while recording with Y, with the many ways to code W and Z. (for example) There's bad ways to play a game that get you stomped, just like there's bad ways to code that get you fired. There's good too, of course, but my point is it would be counter-productive for the owners of compiler software to suddenly litigate against coders who use their compiler to include built code from other compilers or vice versa. Likewise these companies should be grateful for the free advertising they get when someone plays their game (output to screen) and uses another software package to share that unique experience on YouTube.
Seriously...The Feds squashed Texas for trying to do the same damn thing. This, whether you believe or not, is the real reason it should not be taught in public schools. There's a chain of schools called "Catholic" for a reason - You want your kids to have a decreased affinity for seeking out why the universe works because they simply believe that it does? There's the school chain for you. The general public (and more importantly, the state) is barred from permitting this kind of non-sense.
Now leave the rest of us who have more important work to do alone.
Continental drift opens volcanic wounds. This has gone on for eons. The fact that we have instruments in the last 2 decades that are capable of returning this meaningful data in high-pressure, 4 degree Celsius, salt-water environments speaks to the real meaning of these studies: Now we can watch them. It is nothing new in the planet's history - massive spots don't form overnight. Only our ability to see them is new.
You know, rocket scientists have to account for the rate of change in an object's relative speed to launch satellites. This is something the world has gotten very good at.
You would think geophysicists would catch the drift and start isolating acceleration as a variable to better estimate when the polar bears will have to raid Eskimo villages to survive.
Poor bears.
Unlike our first commentor, this is a more serious approach to the problem. Depending on the model of machine you're using, there's really no way to spot it as it's happening given your restriction set. Your problem is not with "box" stuffer vulnerability, but record vulnerability - Slashdot's collective outcry has been because there was no security or checks and balances put into Diebold's (and their later off-shoots) machines, causing potential for huge abuse at any point before voting, and any point after voting until announcements are made. We think contracts were pushed to facilitate this weakness in the system, but are powerless to change it individually. As a disclaimer, the following measures, even if followed to the letter, will not guarantee vote security if using machines with the above mentioned vulnerabilities, and will not permit any politician to pretend otherwise. That said, here are problems on the systems themselves that should not be allowed by default to address your time of interest (voting); open ports - of the system has a floppy drive, a cd rom drive, or any sort of pluggable port besides the power cord, that is accessable with moderate difficulty, that's a breach waiting to happen. Ask your technitions this specific question - "are there any IR or radio devices in these terminals?" A program built to listen for wireless devices is just as serious as a USB port being open. Ask them about the system inputs. If there are keyboards, "have you disabled all possible shortcut key combinations to prevent system access?" There is more that could possibly go wrong, but I'm sure Slashdot will have plenty to say. P.S. Hope you weren't expecting an overall warm welcome - your party's reputation here was shredded and torched over the past 8 years.
Let's not forget about one of the fundamentals of population and bell curves: proportional growth. When Gen X begot Gen Y, the problem of the Boomer-era population growth got worse. So we have a populace, X percentage of which has problems with math or logic or something that causes issues. When operational cash is granted from the public based on performance, and X being unevenly distributed through the system, the motivation is to induce success by inching the bars lower in those schools that got stuck with a greater percent of X. Now throw in national correlation for education 'standards' and the bars all over start moving. The net effect seems to be lowered expectations, and thus lower student motivation to push their own envelope. I've heard entirely too many new parents talk about brush off low (70 and lower) math grades in a conversation about art, plays, music, or sports. Or worse still, altered grades based on performance in those areas. A prime example of this is a fellow student of mine in the electrical engineering program who slipped through the cracks, was told to sit in a corner and do something else while the others where testing, and has left this one to this day with 5th grade language skill, and intellectually lazy to the point of not caring if they understands the concepts when guessing answers on (multiple choice math) tests. By the way, that's another problem with education: multiple choice only encourages this sort of behavior. Problems have been more frequently reverse-worked from the answer list than actually solved among my classmates. It encourages leaning on the mental cruch of the easier operations rather than learn new ones. So here you are, motivated to just move the kids through meaningless grades on salaries built for college students and you're wondering why the net education level has disintegrated? Maybe you're not wondering, in which case you should be part of a grassroots crusade to expect more out of rising generations, and get them to think.
Good point, if this technology is tuned to listen to those control centers, any applicable use for extra limbs would have to be trained into those centers and mimic the formating for movement of existing limbs, something that may be difficult even for introspectives.
But, here's a thought for you; exo-suits. Why try to take over the world with a clumsy set of limbs you've only had 2 years practice with when you could gain current your dexterity inside an alloyed plated exo-suit and basically gain the servo and dermal strength with little to no loss? The drawback, of course, is now we need a 3 inch arc reactor.
That's the arguement the pro-monitor group will use, then it will go into effect against all protest from the privacy advocates and things will go quiet...
Now here's the kicker. Groups or social undesirables could then be criminalized, even to a trvial level that the congress may not balk at. No one would be safe from the consequences that follow.
If, for instance anti-abortion zeal goes too far and gets in at the federal level, even mentioning to a friend online that you're considering it, thinking of leaving the country to get one done suddenly makes you a target.
Of more concern to slashdotters may be (among a lot of other things) the dangerous dance some rederick painting an engineer's thought patterns as simiar to terrorists against the state.
I've posted links to senators feedback site and so forth before, this must stop.
This would be the greatest breach of constitutional protection from search by the government... Made public anyways. Don't stay quiet and let this pass, raise the storm.
There are magnetized wires out there with analog sound recordings on them from the days before vinyl. This is nothing new, and without a better control and recall system, is highly inefficient. Now, if the patent deals with the control system, kudos to IBM. If it deals with just the idea of selectively magnetizing a wire set, this has already been done. Google wire recording if you want more info.
Replace every instance of fiber in your comment with paved roads, then tell me the market will make it work. I don't buy it. Lines are lines, put them up every where, establish routing structure, put channels out to the private sector. The current model only promotes monopolies by way of "we already have that..." Or "we have contractual obligations preventing us from discussing it, let alone accepting it." Market will not solve this.
This could range from malicious intent down to incompetent workers to deficient policies. Policies which may not have been written to encompass the need for retrieval, or had them written out upon Bush's inauguration. This whole mess is ridiculous though, why didn't this statement come out earlier? It seems to me that hard drive destruction was recent. The court should demand procedures and/or vendor receipts and start chasing this down. It's ludicrous to think that the motions would have gone on this long only to NOW say that the physical media was destroyed. Chase the rabbit down the hole, maybe we'll finally catch something out of this whole mess.
I understand you can't answer specific questions on your budget expenditures. However, I am curious about your departments' general strategy for acquisition in agents and equipment. Given that your branch is both new and will be charged with handling challenges that could include: mitigating massive Denial of Service attacks from computer nets across the world; specifically targeted viruses against pentagon and other systems; and digital interference against foreign hacker teams, will your team be expected to have a high machine:cyber-agent ratio or rely more on effective individual actions using fewer machines?