When I was in US, I was very puzzled at the lack of empathy in public discourse towards prison rape. This was especially surprising since US leads the world in incarceration rate (3.5 times the supposedly âoeevery thing is a crimeâ Singapore) - so it is not even as if prison is reserved for the worst of the worst, with non-violent offenders frequently jailed, let alone the argument of punishing as sentenced and nothing more.
However, I don't understand your chain of reasoning. You argued that there is significant amount of rape when prisons are taken in account and then go on to say...
> Rape has the lowest occurrence rate in the US of any violent crimeâ. > Men are several times more likely to be KILLED.
Clearly not, even with just using numbers you list.
âoe4.5 percent of the state and federal prisoners surveyed reported sexual victimization in the past 12 months. Given a national prison population of 1,570,861, the BJS findings suggest that in one year alone more than 70,000 prisoners were sexually abused.â
Rape is far, far more common compared to homicide, anywhere in the world.
> You can either listen to the gender issues folks, who make it sound like violence against women is a HUGE CRISIS, or you can read the BJS statistics. Women have been, and continue to be, a protected class in the US.
Yes, it has declined according to BJS. But the starting numbers are so high, that it is still considered a large problem.
> How about letting people choose what methods of healing they want to use?
What is at issue is not about preventing people from using whatever snake oil floats their boat. It is about whether countries with socialized medicine should pay for said snake oils... and this report recommends that they don't.
Eh? That's exactly *my* argument. If one is an American and cannot see what is wrong with this mass surveillance of foreign citizens, I suggested that one replace US with China in the narrative. Then it would become clear to anyone with a parochial mindset. *I* am pointing to moral relativism of NSA defenders who argue: it is wrong when China does it, but should be regarded as normal if US does it.
> America is wrong to try to seek advantage for itself by denying others. Moral relativism at its finest.
Your argument seems to be: China does it (mass surveillance of *entire populations* - that's not proven yet with regards to China... or any other country for that matter). So why shouldn't we be able to do it?
Mass surveillance is commie behavior. You define yourselves by NOT doing that. Its not like: They got missiles, we will get more. This is like: Russia yanked Crimea off Ukraine. Why should we deny ourselves off yanking something off Canada?
> Just curious - if they are way off ethically and morally, why would you take that same approach?
Three words: Stanford Prison Experiment.
People, all of us, you and I included, suck at morality, when not given critical feedback from time to time. When tossed into a bubble of stress, where critical peer review is absent, we all try to be efficient towards perceived goals, while losing our moral compasses as peripheral concerns. There is a reason we have Institutional Review Boards for research. Well-meaning intelligent people can lose sight of the big picture of morals, ethics and humanity.
I have wondered myself whether I would act any differently from Gen. Alexander, if I was in his shoes (also, searching where there is light, rather than searching where I should - human intel is hard, but he knows how to do data intel), even though I completely disagree with his solution to the problem.
Spy agencies, secret police etc have always had this problem. They always have had lousy oversight, given the nature of their work. And they always cross the line.... just a matter of when and by how much. The political oversight failed to keep the NSA in order, by being content to be their cheer leaders. This is hardly a problem unique to US. This won't be the last time.
You can assume whatever you want. But there is no evidence that any other country has Skynet-grade data centers for mass surveillance. I understand that this may simply be a question on who has the ability to do it... for now, rather than a question of self-imposed ethics.
But now that the question has entered public consciousness, what we need is a charter on what is acceptable and what isn't, just like what we have with war. No country may shoot POWs today and not expect an international backlash. What we need is a Geneva convention of sorts to tackle the question of mass surveillance. Like with the question of how we conduct war, the question of privacy defines the very essence of our humanity. Anything goes is unacceptable – not for trade, not for war and certainly not for Orwellian intrusions.
> It's an intelligence agency, it spies on people. The only thing to discuss is whether it is allowed to spy on American citizens. Everyone else is fair game AFAIC
OK. Apply that logic to China spying on US govt, corporations, citizens and the rest of the world as well. No need for POTUS to raise issue at all on unsophisticated Chinese attempts at US. Right? Just a spy agency doing its thing... what its' paid to do and all that. Huawei can be banned in US, and Cisco, MS and the rest of the silicon valley can be banned in the rest of the world. Right? And with attitude such as yours, who would trust their data within US juristriction? And if NSA can tap lines, out of US, without consent of foreign governments, can Chinese intel agencies do it to you too? and you would not protest at all for your rights? Its an intelligence agency, after all.
AFAIK, NSA is quite unique in spying on wholesale foreign populations - all comms, all of the time, just in case - nothing "fair game" about it. Screw other countries, as long as I get my rights - is colonial era thought... quite indefensible in current international discourse.
All fine options - whether they are compile-time or runtime-time safety checks. The basic principle is - don't rely on humans not to make mistakes, especially as system complexity increases. They will eventually. That's just being human.
Functional programming languages make code less error prone. Certain unmanaged frameworks... VCL/LCL (Delphi/Lazarus), Qt etc. make memory leaks less easy to make, static analyzers warn of common lapses... anything to make code more safe is fine. The whole point of a good programming language/tool is about making the language fit the programmer mind, not the CPU. Its the compiler's headache to make optimized instructions from it.
Calling people stupid, as the GP did, because they occasionally make mistakes (especially when the system adds additional cognitive burdens), whether they are programmers or lay users, is just being naive. It is the duty of system designers to anticipate mistakes and elegantly encapsulate complexity; rather than blaming users for misusing their unintuitive designs.
> Anticipating the "but... but... it doesn't have garbage collection" - correct; it's not for brain dead idiots who can't program with proper technique and have to have something "managing" their code.
C++11 is an improvement. But wanting a GC has nothing to do with "brain dead idiots". It has been established decades ago that manual memory management is simply prone to errors, as program size increases. That includes expert programmers. This is a settled empirical question. If the overhead is acceptable, there is little reason to not want a GC.
But hey, if you want to feel smart, just because you use an unmanaged programming language and be condescending to the rest, I won't stop you.
> You should pretend your work will be so popular if you want it to be so popular.
No you should not. This is amateur/hobbyist talk. When you have a billion customers, you will have plenty of money to optimize... or by then, you will be able to afford to keep plenty of "terabytes" online. Writing apps for billions of users when all you are likely to have is a few hundred/thousand users... is plain delusional and is inviting trouble.
Highly optimized, hyper-scalable code does not come for free. You will simply go bankrupt before you even get the users to stress your app, if you keep wasting your limited resources (and they are always limited) on imaginary requirements. Keep the architecture clean and follow the wisdom of established design principles. Later optimization will be relatively easy, *if* that need ever arises.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth.
He just told you. It is a "*substantially* lower-level than C#".
There is a reason why people use C to write nearly every other language: To bring the programming language semantics closer to the semantics of the solution space. This is programming languages 101 and is covered in any intro to programming languages course.
C is easy to learn (not much to learn), but is tiedious (low-level) and unsafe (unmanaged) to work with because it has fewer abstractions and memory needs to be programmer managed (programmer costs are premium in most projects, not silicon costs). Its a great language when control over memory matters (a minority of projects or sub-projects). Its not a productive language for anything else. Ideally, one writes most of the code in an appropriate high-level programming language, profiles and identifies bottle necks and considers whether tuning them in the more tiedious and unsafe C code is worth while. Nearly all programming languages provide an FFI of some sort for this.
> has vast amounts of libraries to use.
Most of those libraries also tend to be low-level.
There is nothing Maoist about Democrats. In fact, no mainstream party in an industrial or post-industrial state can be considered Maoist. The term only refers to peasant socialism/communism in pre-industrial societies. Although there is some socialism for "peasants" (if you can call them that) in US (Agro subsidies), the farmer populations seem to consider themselves anti-socialistic and vote Republican. No?
I am not sure if the dichotomy between socialism and capitalism is that relevant any more, other than provide a decision framework for voters. All states now employ them together, in different configurations, rather than strictly choose between them.
> Other nations can distrust anything they wish, but they have not other useful alternatives than to deal with us, they are our bitches.
That is true in case of some technologies like chips which are expensive to independently develop for less rich/advanced nations. But a good deal of software stuff is quite replaceable, with minimal pain. There are open source solutions or foreign services that are only slightly behind proprietary or US hosted solutions/services. The current surveillance situation simply incentivizes the alternatives and bridges that gap.
Peru did an open source requirement for government work some time ago and other governments were looking at similar stuff. Microsoft wrote that famous letter, 12 years ago, defending proprietary companies; something which is quite indefensible now.
They simply did not have enough incentives until now. This isn't rocket science; its mainly a policy decision. China is developing its own Linux-based OS and has already replaced western social media services and search engine with its own etc. etc.
There is already that project that this will cost us $180 Billion in the near future. http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/... Let's see if it will bear out.
From NYT: "But the plans went further: to exploit Huawei’s technology so that when the company sold equipment to other countries — including both allies and nations that avoid buying American products — the N.S.A. could roam through their computer and telephone networks to conduct surveillance and, if ordered by the president, offensive cyberoperations."
Read all that. We all know our Chomsky. I know how to pick my media, thank you. The CIA adventurism was supposed to have been largely reined in by the congress in the 70s. The Internet stuff is new. Again, where do you think the new outrage is coming from. The world knows the history of US spy agencies.
> I'm not sure who you've been listening to but if you think the US pretends not to spy you really are unaware of the world around you.
Are you dense? Where do you think the outrage in the world is coming from if this was all understood as typical espionage activity.
Let me answer that for you. This isn't simple foreign spying. No one expected NSA to be spying on entire populations of the world. There is no spy agency in the world that does that. It is legitimate to do targeted espionage. Every country does that. This is not about nabbing a foreign terrorist or spying on diplomats.
People simply expected US to do a better job at targeted espionage than anyone else. No one also expected NSA to be engaged in character assassinations of conspiracy theorists and social manipulations of hactivists. US always promoted the rhetoric that these things as abhorrent and incompatible with its values and for the rest of the world.
And don't answer with an attitude that US can do what it wants and that it is up to foreign governments to protect their civilians either. US purports itself to be the leader of the free world and these actions are incompatible with that role. If it wants to simply be an imperial power - fine. Unless US addresses these issues, the world will reconfigure itself to such an implicit declaration in time.
> As to being an "NSA asshole," I truly hope that you someday break the conditioning of your Soviet youth to realize that not everyone thinks alike in the West. Some of us are actually right even if we are not a member of "the party," an apparatchik, or a member of the "dark forces."
For someone who is neither from a communist country nor was a subject of cold war era, anti-communist conditioning in the West, I must say that after JTRIG revelations, it is getting kinda hard to distinguish NSA ethos from communist ethos.
- Pentagon officials are US officials. - I did not say that an act of war isn't subject to interpretation, although I fail to see how you reached that conclusion, given your prior propositions. - Nor does it make sense for cold fjord to insinuate that I implied that all hacking falls under acts of war. He was making a strawman argument.
But I am asking what is it that was an "act of war" about Chinese hacking of US that wasn't the same about US hacking of Chinese. That it was that China did it, vs. US did it? Is that what you are referring to as "subject to interpretation".
This is the most BS I have seen in this article. I almost want to think you get paid for this.
> In this case to the benefit of China.
The point of the article is not whether it benefits China. The point is that US has been accusing other countries of doing things that it itself does many times over... things that it implied that it would find so abhorrent that it would never consider doing. This news would have been a lot less depressing if it was found that China broke into Cisco... because China does not lecture the world on digital principles.
As a non-american, I actually want US to be the bearer of high values in cyber space so that we have someone to point to and say - that is how things are supposed to be done. It has been incredibly disappointing to follow these revelations. Fortunately, the US tech community still holds high values, even if the corporates clearly don't.
The case of Huawei isn't just about China. It's products are used the world over. Attacking them is an attack on the communications of the world in general, not an attack on someone you can conveniently label as a communist enemy. There is no cold war here.
> Snowden claimed to be an expert about China and espionage. When do you think we'll see some information about that?
Snowden is a counter-intel guy on China. He does not have policy documents on China. Why is this even hard for you to grasp? What you are demanding is like China asking when Ai Weiwei and Chen Guangcheng will criticize US, rather than just China. That's not their responsibility.
> Or will the trend of only releasing information the compromises intelligence methods and activities of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and their allies continue?
First, he can only disclose what he had direct access to. If you want China docs, get a Chinese whistleblower.
Second, none of the disclosures are considered “methods”. The journalists have been cautious to not disclose them.
> He is indeed the rarest of "patriots," exposing only the intelligence plans of his own country and its allies, and not those of its adversaries.
Please provide a list of these non-rare patriots that expose intelligence plans on both sides.
Why don't you go ahead and define what is and what isn't an "act of war", exclusively using statements by US officials on this matter, rather than your personal opinions that suit your worldview.
According to US government, hacking communication infrastructure of a country by another government is an "act of war", not regular espionage. They said this very loudly just before Snowden revelations began. So NO. They are not supposed to be doing that.
> If I had a dollar for every professor whom I have met who shows up on campus at 9 a.m., teaches one lecture, takes an hour for lunch and leaves campus at 3 p.m. thinking that he has put in a full day of work and who actually believes that the smartest and most capable people work at universities,...
I have a STEM PhD. I do not know a *single* professor who did that. All of them worked longer than 9 - 5. I have not even heard of a faculty member who puts in less than 40 hrs per week, not the tenured ones and certainly not the ones on the tenure track.
I agree. I have the same DRM concerns. If I can't get DRM free sales, I at least want DRM at install time only, without any mandatory account creation/association - which Steam does not offer. The only place I have tolerated Steam so far is for a few charity sales.
I have. Between Amazon, Gamersgate and Steam... I did not find anybody to specially distinguish themselves on price. Sure, Steam may have a sale when others don't and vice versa. But the base prices of digital downloads seem to often (with a few exceptions, understandably) be standard across all vendors. Until someone does a proper statistical analysis and shows otherwise, I will remain unconvinced at this argument.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in US, I was very puzzled at the lack of empathy in public discourse towards prison rape. This was especially surprising since US leads the world in incarceration rate (3.5 times the supposedly âoeevery thing is a crimeâ Singapore) - so it is not even as if prison is reserved for the worst of the worst, with non-violent offenders frequently jailed, let alone the argument of punishing as sentenced and nothing more.
However, I don't understand your chain of reasoning. You argued that there is significant amount of rape when prisons are taken in account and then go on to say...
> Rape has the lowest occurrence rate in the US of any violent crimeâ.
> Men are several times more likely to be KILLED.
Clearly not, even with just using numbers you list.
According to Human Rights Watch though
http://www.hrw.org/en/news/200...
âoe4.5 percent of the state and federal prisoners surveyed reported sexual victimization in the past 12 months. Given a national prison population of 1,570,861, the BJS findings suggest that in one year alone more than 70,000 prisoners were sexually abused.â
According to this somewhat dated stats...
http://www.oneinfourusa.org/st...
Rape is far, far more common compared to homicide, anywhere in the world.
> You can either listen to the gender issues folks, who make it sound like violence against women is a HUGE CRISIS, or you can read the BJS statistics. Women have been, and continue to be, a protected class in the US.
Yes, it has declined according to BJS. But the starting numbers are so high, that it is still considered a large problem.
> How about letting people choose what methods of healing they want to use?
What is at issue is not about preventing people from using whatever snake oil floats their boat. It is about whether countries with socialized medicine should pay for said snake oils... and this report recommends that they don't.
> Moral relativism at its finest.
Eh? That's exactly *my* argument. If one is an American and cannot see what is wrong with this mass surveillance of foreign citizens, I suggested that one replace US with China in the narrative. Then it would become clear to anyone with a parochial mindset. *I* am pointing to moral relativism of NSA defenders who argue: it is wrong when China does it, but should be regarded as normal if US does it.
> America is wrong to try to seek advantage for itself by denying others. Moral relativism at its finest.
Your argument seems to be: China does it (mass surveillance of *entire populations* - that's not proven yet with regards to China... or any other country for that matter). So why shouldn't we be able to do it?
Mass surveillance is commie behavior. You define yourselves by NOT doing that. Its not like: They got missiles, we will get more. This is like: Russia yanked Crimea off Ukraine. Why should we deny ourselves off yanking something off Canada?
> Just curious - if they are way off ethically and morally, why would you take that same approach?
Three words: Stanford Prison Experiment.
People, all of us, you and I included, suck at morality, when not given critical feedback from time to time. When tossed into a bubble of stress, where critical peer review is absent, we all try to be efficient towards perceived goals, while losing our moral compasses as peripheral concerns. There is a reason we have Institutional Review Boards for research. Well-meaning intelligent people can lose sight of the big picture of morals, ethics and humanity.
I have wondered myself whether I would act any differently from Gen. Alexander, if I was in his shoes (also, searching where there is light, rather than searching where I should - human intel is hard, but he knows how to do data intel), even though I completely disagree with his solution to the problem.
Spy agencies, secret police etc have always had this problem. They always have had lousy oversight, given the nature of their work. And they always cross the line.... just a matter of when and by how much. The political oversight failed to keep the NSA in order, by being content to be their cheer leaders. This is hardly a problem unique to US. This won't be the last time.
You can assume whatever you want. But there is no evidence that any other country has Skynet-grade data centers for mass surveillance. I understand that this may simply be a question on who has the ability to do it... for now, rather than a question of self-imposed ethics.
But now that the question has entered public consciousness, what we need is a charter on what is acceptable and what isn't, just like what we have with war. No country may shoot POWs today and not expect an international backlash. What we need is a Geneva convention of sorts to tackle the question of mass surveillance. Like with the question of how we conduct war, the question of privacy defines the very essence of our humanity. Anything goes is unacceptable – not for trade, not for war and certainly not for Orwellian intrusions.
> It's an intelligence agency, it spies on people. The only thing to discuss is whether it is allowed to spy on American citizens. Everyone else is fair game AFAIC
OK. Apply that logic to China spying on US govt, corporations, citizens and the rest of the world as well. No need for POTUS to raise issue at all on unsophisticated Chinese attempts at US. Right? Just a spy agency doing its thing... what its' paid to do and all that. Huawei can be banned in US, and Cisco, MS and the rest of the silicon valley can be banned in the rest of the world. Right? And with attitude such as yours, who would trust their data within US juristriction? And if NSA can tap lines, out of US, without consent of foreign governments, can Chinese intel agencies do it to you too? and you would not protest at all for your rights? Its an intelligence agency, after all.
AFAIK, NSA is quite unique in spying on wholesale foreign populations - all comms, all of the time, just in case - nothing "fair game" about it. Screw other countries, as long as I get my rights - is colonial era thought... quite indefensible in current international discourse.
All fine options - whether they are compile-time or runtime-time safety checks. The basic principle is - don't rely on humans not to make mistakes, especially as system complexity increases. They will eventually. That's just being human.
Functional programming languages make code less error prone. Certain unmanaged frameworks... VCL/LCL (Delphi/Lazarus), Qt etc. make memory leaks less easy to make, static analyzers warn of common lapses... anything to make code more safe is fine. The whole point of a good programming language/tool is about making the language fit the programmer mind, not the CPU. Its the compiler's headache to make optimized instructions from it.
Calling people stupid, as the GP did, because they occasionally make mistakes (especially when the system adds additional cognitive burdens), whether they are programmers or lay users, is just being naive. It is the duty of system designers to anticipate mistakes and elegantly encapsulate complexity; rather than blaming users for misusing their unintuitive designs.
> Anticipating the "but ... but ... it doesn't have garbage collection" - correct; it's not for brain dead idiots who can't program with proper technique and have to have something "managing" their code.
C++11 is an improvement. But wanting a GC has nothing to do with "brain dead idiots". It has been established decades ago that manual memory management is simply prone to errors, as program size increases. That includes expert programmers. This is a settled empirical question. If the overhead is acceptable, there is little reason to not want a GC.
But hey, if you want to feel smart, just because you use an unmanaged programming language and be condescending to the rest, I won't stop you.
> You should pretend your work will be so popular if you want it to be so popular.
No you should not. This is amateur/hobbyist talk. When you have a billion customers, you will have plenty of money to optimize... or by then, you will be able to afford to keep plenty of "terabytes" online. Writing apps for billions of users when all you are likely to have is a few hundred/thousand users... is plain delusional and is inviting trouble.
Highly optimized, hyper-scalable code does not come for free. You will simply go bankrupt before you even get the users to stress your app, if you keep wasting your limited resources (and they are always limited) on imaginary requirements. Keep the architecture clean and follow the wisdom of established design principles. Later optimization will be relatively easy, *if* that need ever arises.
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth.
> Why?
He just told you. It is a "*substantially* lower-level than C#".
There is a reason why people use C to write nearly every other language: To bring the programming language semantics closer to the semantics of the solution space. This is programming languages 101 and is covered in any intro to programming languages course.
C is easy to learn (not much to learn), but is tiedious (low-level) and unsafe (unmanaged) to work with because it has fewer abstractions and memory needs to be programmer managed (programmer costs are premium in most projects, not silicon costs). Its a great language when control over memory matters (a minority of projects or sub-projects). Its not a productive language for anything else. Ideally, one writes most of the code in an appropriate high-level programming language, profiles and identifies bottle necks and considers whether tuning them in the more tiedious and unsafe C code is worth while. Nearly all programming languages provide an FFI of some sort for this.
> has vast amounts of libraries to use.
Most of those libraries also tend to be low-level.
> from reactionary Maoist [democrat]
There is nothing Maoist about Democrats. In fact, no mainstream party in an industrial or post-industrial state can be considered Maoist. The term only refers to peasant socialism/communism in pre-industrial societies. Although there is some socialism for "peasants" (if you can call them that) in US (Agro subsidies), the farmer populations seem to consider themselves anti-socialistic and vote Republican. No?
I am not sure if the dichotomy between socialism and capitalism is that relevant any more, other than provide a decision framework for voters. All states now employ them together, in different configurations, rather than strictly choose between them.
> Other nations can distrust anything they wish, but they have not other useful alternatives than to deal with us, they are our bitches.
That is true in case of some technologies like chips which are expensive to independently develop for less rich/advanced nations. But a good deal of software stuff is quite replaceable, with minimal pain. There are open source solutions or foreign services that are only slightly behind proprietary or US hosted solutions/services. The current surveillance situation simply incentivizes the alternatives and bridges that gap.
Peru did an open source requirement for government work some time ago and other governments were looking at similar stuff. Microsoft wrote that famous letter, 12 years ago, defending proprietary companies; something which is quite indefensible now.
http://opensource.org/docs/msF...
They simply did not have enough incentives until now. This isn't rocket science; its mainly a policy decision. China is developing its own Linux-based OS and has already replaced western social media services and search engine with its own etc. etc.
There is already that project that this will cost us $180 Billion in the near future.
http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2013/...
Let's see if it will bear out.
> Did we even read the article
From NYT:
"But the plans went further: to exploit Huawei’s technology so that when the company sold equipment to other countries — including both allies and nations that avoid buying American products — the N.S.A. could roam through their computer and telephone networks to conduct surveillance and, if ordered by the president, offensive cyberoperations."
I should say 80s.
Read all that. We all know our Chomsky. I know how to pick my media, thank you.
The CIA adventurism was supposed to have been largely reined in by the congress in the 70s. The Internet stuff is new. Again, where do you think the new outrage is coming from. The world knows the history of US spy agencies.
> I'm not sure who you've been listening to but if you think the US pretends not to spy you really are unaware of the world around you.
Are you dense? Where do you think the outrage in the world is coming from if this was all understood as typical espionage activity.
Let me answer that for you. This isn't simple foreign spying. No one expected NSA to be spying on entire populations of the world. There is no spy agency in the world that does that. It is legitimate to do targeted espionage. Every country does that. This is not about nabbing a foreign terrorist or spying on diplomats.
People simply expected US to do a better job at targeted espionage than anyone else. No one also expected NSA to be engaged in character assassinations of conspiracy theorists and social manipulations of hactivists. US always promoted the rhetoric that these things as abhorrent and incompatible with its values and for the rest of the world.
And don't answer with an attitude that US can do what it wants and that it is up to foreign governments to protect their civilians either. US purports itself to be the leader of the free world and these actions are incompatible with that role. If it wants to simply be an imperial power - fine. Unless US addresses these issues, the world will reconfigure itself to such an implicit declaration in time.
> As to being an "NSA asshole," I truly hope that you someday break the conditioning of your Soviet youth to realize that not everyone thinks alike in the West. Some of us are actually right even if we are not a member of "the party," an apparatchik, or a member of the "dark forces."
For someone who is neither from a communist country nor was a subject of cold war era, anti-communist conditioning in the West, I must say that after JTRIG revelations, it is getting kinda hard to distinguish NSA ethos from communist ethos.
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
It always makes one wonder what NSA calls its clearly more sophisticated equivalent of the 50 cent army... no doubt much better paid.
I think you argued for your position quite well here. It just did not connect in the earlier post since I cannot read your mind.
I am not sure what you are disagreeing with.
- Pentagon officials are US officials.
- I did not say that an act of war isn't subject to interpretation, although I fail to see how you reached that conclusion, given your prior propositions.
- Nor does it make sense for cold fjord to insinuate that I implied that all hacking falls under acts of war. He was making a strawman argument.
But I am asking what is it that was an "act of war" about Chinese hacking of US that wasn't the same about US hacking of Chinese. That it was that China did it, vs. US did it? Is that what you are referring to as "subject to interpretation".
This is the most BS I have seen in this article. I almost want to think you get paid for this.
> In this case to the benefit of China.
The point of the article is not whether it benefits China. The point is that US has been accusing other countries of doing things that it itself does many times over... things that it implied that it would find so abhorrent that it would never consider doing. This news would have been a lot less depressing if it was found that China broke into Cisco... because China does not lecture the world on digital principles.
As a non-american, I actually want US to be the bearer of high values in cyber space so that we have someone to point to and say - that is how things are supposed to be done. It has been incredibly disappointing to follow these revelations. Fortunately, the US tech community still holds high values, even if the corporates clearly don't.
The case of Huawei isn't just about China. It's products are used the world over. Attacking them is an attack on the communications of the world in general, not an attack on someone you can conveniently label as a communist enemy. There is no cold war here.
> Snowden claimed to be an expert about China and espionage. When do you think we'll see some information about that?
Snowden is a counter-intel guy on China. He does not have policy documents on China. Why is this even hard for you to grasp?
What you are demanding is like China asking when Ai Weiwei and Chen Guangcheng will criticize US, rather than just China. That's not their responsibility.
> Or will the trend of only releasing information the compromises intelligence methods and activities of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and their allies continue?
First, he can only disclose what he had direct access to. If you want China docs, get a Chinese whistleblower.
Second, none of the disclosures are considered “methods”. The journalists have been cautious to not disclose them.
> He is indeed the rarest of "patriots," exposing only the intelligence plans of his own country and its allies, and not those of its adversaries.
Please provide a list of these non-rare patriots that expose intelligence plans on both sides.
Why don't you go ahead and define what is and what isn't an "act of war", exclusively using statements by US officials on this matter, rather than your personal opinions that suit your worldview.
> Wait,... isn't this the purpose of the NSA?
According to US government, hacking communication infrastructure of a country by another government is an "act of war", not regular espionage. They said this very loudly just before Snowden revelations began. So NO. They are not supposed to be doing that.
> If I had a dollar for every professor whom I have met who shows up on campus at 9 a.m., teaches one lecture, takes an hour for lunch and leaves campus at 3 p.m. thinking that he has put in a full day of work and who actually believes that the smartest and most capable people work at universities, ...
I have a STEM PhD. I do not know a *single* professor who did that. All of them worked longer than 9 - 5. I have not even heard of a faculty member who puts in less than 40 hrs per week, not the tenured ones and certainly not the ones on the tenure track.
I agree. I have the same DRM concerns. If I can't get DRM free sales, I at least want DRM at install time only, without any mandatory account creation/association - which Steam does not offer. The only place I have tolerated Steam so far is for a few charity sales.
I have. Between Amazon, Gamersgate and Steam... I did not find anybody to specially distinguish themselves on price. Sure, Steam may have a sale when others don't and vice versa. But the base prices of digital downloads seem to often (with a few exceptions, understandably) be standard across all vendors. Until someone does a proper statistical analysis and shows otherwise, I will remain unconvinced at this argument.