It doesn't matter if you can't make your mortgage or car payments or credit cards by $1000 or $10000. If debts exceed means, then many will be forced to declare bankruptcy.
why the focus on drones? Why not focus on ALL targeted killing? They pick drones, because it's new and scary (They can rally support through sensationalism). Not because it's radically changed the way the military has operated (in terms of who to kill, not in strategy).
Drones radically change the way we can conduct intelligence operations. Being able to keep a week-long surveillance on targets (with shifts of operators) allows collection of much more detailed information than if we had humans on-site, and with nearly no risk. It also makes it easier to conduct said operations than if we have to deploy a sniper team or commando squad.
Because it's so much easier and safer to do, there's a risk that it could be done frivolously. When you have to risk men's lives to kill someone, one generally makes sure that it's worth the risk. When you're pressing a button on a joystick, and not even risking your airborne asset (or, not risking human assets), it gets potentially much more tempting to say "oops!" after the fact.
I'm not sure how using drones to do killing is much different from using some F-15s that fly over the target, though, aside from being less vulnerable to detection by ground forces. At this point, from what I've read, the drones are being used to provide mountains of intelligence and evidence (e.g., "We saw this guy plant a dozen IEDs in the road, and have had him on video and thermal observation ever since.") that can be used to justify operations (or make them happen more safely for us), which I heartily approve of.
I'm not against using drones for that. (Perhaps the ACLU is.) The complaint summary that I read, if I understand it correctly, was about making sure there was a legal basis for the killings, and any limits on who is targeted, as well as how they make sure they got the guy or how they ensure that it's Being Done Right.
Those are all, IMO, valid concerns. I'm just fine with the targets being people we can prove were shooting at us, with targets chosen based on X amount of analysis by Y teams of people of Z evidence, and where operators (as well as analysts) are overseen by group Q which ensures that they are properly following protocol and law when determining targets.
If there's no oversight, that's a problem. Similarly, if insufficient intel is gathered to ensure that it IS a valid enemy target (rather than his neighbor or his milkman), that's also a problem. I believe, based on the article I read in some magazine a few months ago about drone operations, that such intel IS being gathered, in exhaustive detail. I'm less certain (though hopeful and optimistic) that there is oversight over such killings.
The ACLU isn't trying to stop us from killing americans remotely, but rather to ensure that we're doing it Properly (and that mistakes are corrected/disciplined). (If they think we aren't doing it properly, then they would sue to stop the actions. This is all a fact finding mission, right now.
I'm not sure I understand why the ACLU is getting involved in this if it is not being done domestically against American citizens. What's done in war time on foreign soil against non-American citizens doesn't seem to fall within the domain of the American Civil Liberties Union.
If records are kept secret, can you be sure that this is not being planned against american citizens, on domestic soil? If the government says, "Sure we assassinate people, but it's only bad guys", do you believe them out of hand, or do you want some proof? Recall that Hoover and others very much targeted Americans in our nation.
This is not meant as some tinfoil-hat conspiracy of "omg they're killin' us!". Rather, it's meant to ensure that it's not being done. The complaint linked is because the government has specifically not done anything with the FOIA request. Normally, they must be processed (whether the request is denied or approved) within twenty days. Sixty had passed with no response when the ACLU made their complaint. This is (more immediately) about ensuring that the government is complying with the FOIA than it is about the drones themselves.
Yes, but even playing a relatively action-heavy game like Final Fantasy (any version, at least through 7) involves large amounts of reading. (Newer ones likely have more voiced parts -- I have not played them.) Just to understand what needs doing in FF7, or 6, 2, or even 1, involves reading lots of little boxes of text.
For what it's worth, the Nissan hybrid rental car that I drove was very nice. Aside from a keyless ignition, the controls felt very "normal".
Re:TrueCrypt file named DSC43423.jpg
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Hollow Spy Coins
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Better yet, use an existing image on there in such a way as to hide it with steganography -- that way it still looks like a photo. Otherwise, they might scroll through your pics and wonder why one is "broken".
Re:Sounds rather disappointing, really
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Hollow Spy Coins
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· Score: 1
I've found that I'm fairly absent-minded about which pocket I put my keys or pocketknife in. 95% of the time (or maybe 99%), they go in the Correct Pocket, but sometimes I find that I've swapped m car and house keys, or put both in the same pocket. I don't know why I do it. If I had a hollow coin, I'd mis-pocket it even more easily. A better solution, I think, would be to make sure it was a denomination you don't normally carry. A nickel, perhaps... or a Canadian nickel (which are uncommon but not unheard of to see even in the southwest US). Something that you will know not to make change with.
I've noticed that with the few power metal albums I have by Kamelot. I normally would listen to my mp3s on shuffle, but when I bought (and then ripped) these, I cannot. It just doesn't sound right at all.
A 256 bit key has 2^256 possibilities. That's 1.15x10^77 possibilities. If you can try 10 million keys in a second, then you "only" need 1.15x10^70th seconds. If you can multiply that speed by a factor of a thousand, then you "only" need 1.15x10^67th seconds. That's 3.67x10^59th years. The universe is only 1.3x10^10 years old.
Wrong. You only are likely to need that time. A random key in that keyspace, however, might be the fifth one you try, or the five millionth one, or might be the very last one you try. You won't know until you try them, but once you find a key that works, you don't need to test any further. That could occur in the first minute, the first month, the first year, or the first centurey of trying keys.
You're right, though, that the odds of the key being in the first-tried slice of the keyspace are slim, and the odds of them being in the first $TIME of key-testing decrease as your keyspace increases.
True. It does seem somewhat strangely aimed as a product.
Rich people who backpack might want it (I think I would!). Poor people in developing countries will poop in a latrine or a humanure contraption, and wonder why they need to pay extra for a bag.
It does, however, sound like an awesome bit of technology. Very Cool.
I agree on the merits of population control, but in a society where the primary thing is agriculture, rather than manufacturing or other industrialized stuff, one's family's productivity tends to scale with the number of hands one can produce capable of tending crops (or herds or what-have-you). Moreover, the presence of diseases, poor medical facilities, and other factors contribute heavily to child death rates, and thus being able to make more of them is a way to ensure the genetic line goes on.
Clearly, making so many that none can eat is a poor idea, but so is making too few and being unable to harvest enough food to feed the family. Simiarly, you'd feel pretty shitty if your only kid (and co-laborer) went and broke his leg, or blew it off in a land mine, or died of AIDS, or got bit by a snake, or killed by a neighboring group of people.
I'm pretty sure that the DMCA (and copyright in general) applies to more than things that can be sold. If I write poetry and put it on my blog, and someone yoinks it, or someone puts my home videos on youtube, I believe I can send a takedown request.
Yea, actually tried going through the HOA first. Talking to the guy directly was something we'd done before with no success on other issues. He was a real asshole to start with. Kinda felt good doing that.
Someone else being a jerk first does not make your actions less rude.
If some other people had done some planning, the nation might not have become war-torn or impoverished.... That may be true but it's in no way constructive. Not everyone has the option to escape such things; if my state were to get nuked, or the LA basin ate a dirty bomb (or new york or pick-your-scary-target), the people living there couldn't really have done much to avoid that ahead of time, and yet the local economy is completely screwed, everyone's effectively a refugee (or dead or worse).
I hope this isn't a spoiler, as all I've seen is the promotional videos.
It's not "mature" merely for being dark, but because it's about the nature of moral choices, as well as dealing with loss. I think it takes a fairly mature audience (perhaps even a parent to fully empathize with a father character whose son is killed in front of him. I am sure kids or teens or even single young adults will recognize that there's some loss there, but I'm not sure that they could fully understand the dark place that such a loss would send you. (Unless, perhaps, they'd already lost a very dear family member.) Sure, a person that isn't at that stage of their life can play through the game, but will they really empathize to the same degree? I don't think they will know until they are a parent, and think back to the game (or re-play it), or get a flash of the icy feeling of "oh god where is my son?".
I'm assuming that the rest of the game deals with the father character's OTHER son getting kidnapped, and his choices of how far he wants to go in his pursuit. I'm probably way off; the game is about a serial killer and is, apparently, told from the perspectives of several (unrelated?) main player characters.
They aren't fucking joking - How far ARE you willing to go to save someone you love?
I pray that I never have to find out. It's a frightening enough idea that I am not even sure I can handle thinking about it much. It's an emotional cthulhu.;)
I saw a promo video for Heavy Rain and it looks... awesome. Kindof makes me wish I had a PS3. And yet, it's SO disturbing that I don't know my wife would let me play it. Kudos to them for making a game that explores such themes though.
Part of this is, I think, that it takes some time to digest the lore nuggets that the games spew at us, especially when it's done from the firehose of an FMV or other cutscene. I like lore-heavy stories, or games with a plot, but it can sometimes be hard to geta good idea of "what the hell is going on" if you don't play something regularly.
I'm several hours (5? 4? 6?) into Twilight Princess. The story is great so far. However, I haven't played in a year because every time I think about it, I can't remember why I'm at this particular point, how I got there, or whatnot. The underlying fabric of the tapestry of lore is something I'd be familiar with if I were playing it regularly, but I've forgotten and now it's hard to jump in in the middle. So hard, in fact, that it's tempting to restart my game (but, I don't want to repeat the half dozen hours of gameplay if I don't have to).
Games I can "jump into", like COD or Borderlands or super monkey ball or even Wii Fit are more appealing to me right now, precisely because I am not going todevote the regular blocks of time to playing more complex games like dragon age or twilight princess.
It could be. The chiropractors I've known have had long practices, where their concern has been with helping their patients get better.
Sure, their methods may be quackery, but they believe they aren't. Fraud implies, at least to most people, that there was deliberate misleading happening. I don't think that most chiropractors believe that their techniques are bogus, yet still treat patients. I'm sure there are chiropractors who are frauds, but I wouldn't call it an inherently fraudulent profession. If it doesn't work, I'd call it a misinformed medical technique.
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Please tell us more about this no-name device, including its name and roughly what it costs. :D
It doesn't matter if you can't make your mortgage or car payments or credit cards by $1000 or $10000. If debts exceed means, then many will be forced to declare bankruptcy.
Drones radically change the way we can conduct intelligence operations. Being able to keep a week-long surveillance on targets (with shifts of operators) allows collection of much more detailed information than if we had humans on-site, and with nearly no risk. It also makes it easier to conduct said operations than if we have to deploy a sniper team or commando squad.
Because it's so much easier and safer to do, there's a risk that it could be done frivolously. When you have to risk men's lives to kill someone, one generally makes sure that it's worth the risk. When you're pressing a button on a joystick, and not even risking your airborne asset (or, not risking human assets), it gets potentially much more tempting to say "oops!" after the fact.
I'm not sure how using drones to do killing is much different from using some F-15s that fly over the target, though, aside from being less vulnerable to detection by ground forces. At this point, from what I've read, the drones are being used to provide mountains of intelligence and evidence (e.g., "We saw this guy plant a dozen IEDs in the road, and have had him on video and thermal observation ever since.") that can be used to justify operations (or make them happen more safely for us), which I heartily approve of.
I'm not against using drones for that. (Perhaps the ACLU is.) The complaint summary that I read, if I understand it correctly, was about making sure there was a legal basis for the killings, and any limits on who is targeted, as well as how they make sure they got the guy or how they ensure that it's Being Done Right.
Those are all, IMO, valid concerns. I'm just fine with the targets being people we can prove were shooting at us, with targets chosen based on X amount of analysis by Y teams of people of Z evidence, and where operators (as well as analysts) are overseen by group Q which ensures that they are properly following protocol and law when determining targets.
If there's no oversight, that's a problem. Similarly, if insufficient intel is gathered to ensure that it IS a valid enemy target (rather than his neighbor or his milkman), that's also a problem. I believe, based on the article I read in some magazine a few months ago about drone operations, that such intel IS being gathered, in exhaustive detail. I'm less certain (though hopeful and optimistic) that there is oversight over such killings.
The ACLU isn't trying to stop us from killing americans remotely, but rather to ensure that we're doing it Properly (and that mistakes are corrected/disciplined). (If they think we aren't doing it properly, then they would sue to stop the actions. This is all a fact finding mission, right now.
If records are kept secret, can you be sure that this is not being planned against american citizens, on domestic soil? If the government says, "Sure we assassinate people, but it's only bad guys", do you believe them out of hand, or do you want some proof? Recall that Hoover and others very much targeted Americans in our nation.
This is not meant as some tinfoil-hat conspiracy of "omg they're killin' us!". Rather, it's meant to ensure that it's not being done. The complaint linked is because the government has specifically not done anything with the FOIA request. Normally, they must be processed (whether the request is denied or approved) within twenty days. Sixty had passed with no response when the ACLU made their complaint. This is (more immediately) about ensuring that the government is complying with the FOIA than it is about the drones themselves.
Yes, but even playing a relatively action-heavy game like Final Fantasy (any version, at least through 7) involves large amounts of reading. (Newer ones likely have more voiced parts -- I have not played them.) Just to understand what needs doing in FF7, or 6, 2, or even 1, involves reading lots of little boxes of text.
If he could demonstrate mastery of the force, he'd be a million dollars richer thanks to James Randi.
For what it's worth, the Nissan hybrid rental car that I drove was very nice. Aside from a keyless ignition, the controls felt very "normal".
Better yet, use an existing image on there in such a way as to hide it with steganography -- that way it still looks like a photo. Otherwise, they might scroll through your pics and wonder why one is "broken".
I've found that I'm fairly absent-minded about which pocket I put my keys or pocketknife in. 95% of the time (or maybe 99%), they go in the Correct Pocket, but sometimes I find that I've swapped m car and house keys, or put both in the same pocket. I don't know why I do it. If I had a hollow coin, I'd mis-pocket it even more easily. A better solution, I think, would be to make sure it was a denomination you don't normally carry. A nickel, perhaps ... or a Canadian nickel (which are uncommon but not unheard of to see even in the southwest US). Something that you will know not to make change with.
I've noticed that with the few power metal albums I have by Kamelot. I normally would listen to my mp3s on shuffle, but when I bought (and then ripped) these, I cannot. It just doesn't sound right at all.
Wouldn't a more efficient way to do that be to just route ALL the traffic to a separate machine (or set of machines) to do the deep packet inspection?
Imagine how much traffic could be routed to collection clusters on behalf of your favourite three letter agency.
Wrong. You only are likely to need that time. A random key in that keyspace, however, might be the fifth one you try, or the five millionth one, or might be the very last one you try. You won't know until you try them, but once you find a key that works, you don't need to test any further. That could occur in the first minute, the first month, the first year, or the first centurey of trying keys.
You're right, though, that the odds of the key being in the first-tried slice of the keyspace are slim, and the odds of them being in the first $TIME of key-testing decrease as your keyspace increases.
True. It does seem somewhat strangely aimed as a product.
Rich people who backpack might want it (I think I would!).
Poor people in developing countries will poop in a latrine or a humanure contraption, and wonder why they need to pay extra for a bag.
It does, however, sound like an awesome bit of technology. Very Cool.
Perhaps she wants to use Compiz Fusion. (Is that the old name or the new one? I forget.)
I agree on the merits of population control, but in a society where the primary thing is agriculture, rather than manufacturing or other industrialized stuff, one's family's productivity tends to scale with the number of hands one can produce capable of tending crops (or herds or what-have-you). Moreover, the presence of diseases, poor medical facilities, and other factors contribute heavily to child death rates, and thus being able to make more of them is a way to ensure the genetic line goes on.
Clearly, making so many that none can eat is a poor idea, but so is making too few and being unable to harvest enough food to feed the family. Simiarly, you'd feel pretty shitty if your only kid (and co-laborer) went and broke his leg, or blew it off in a land mine, or died of AIDS, or got bit by a snake, or killed by a neighboring group of people.
I'm pretty sure that the DMCA (and copyright in general) applies to more than things that can be sold. If I write poetry and put it on my blog, and someone yoinks it, or someone puts my home videos on youtube, I believe I can send a takedown request.
Someone else being a jerk first does not make your actions less rude.
If some other people had done some planning, the nation might not have become war-torn or impoverished. ... That may be true but it's in no way constructive. Not everyone has the option to escape such things; if my state were to get nuked, or the LA basin ate a dirty bomb (or new york or pick-your-scary-target), the people living there couldn't really have done much to avoid that ahead of time, and yet the local economy is completely screwed, everyone's effectively a refugee (or dead or worse).
I hope this isn't a spoiler, as all I've seen is the promotional videos.
It's not "mature" merely for being dark, but because it's about the nature of moral choices, as well as dealing with loss. I think it takes a fairly mature audience (perhaps even a parent to fully empathize with a father character whose son is killed in front of him. I am sure kids or teens or even single young adults will recognize that there's some loss there, but I'm not sure that they could fully understand the dark place that such a loss would send you. (Unless, perhaps, they'd already lost a very dear family member.) Sure, a person that isn't at that stage of their life can play through the game, but will they really empathize to the same degree? I don't think they will know until they are a parent, and think back to the game (or re-play it), or get a flash of the icy feeling of "oh god where is my son?".
I'm assuming that the rest of the game deals with the father character's OTHER son getting kidnapped, and his choices of how far he wants to go in his pursuit. I'm probably way off; the game is about a serial killer and is, apparently, told from the perspectives of several (unrelated?) main player characters.
I pray that I never have to find out. It's a frightening enough idea that I am not even sure I can handle thinking about it much. It's an emotional cthulhu. ;)
I saw a promo video for Heavy Rain and it looks ... awesome. Kindof makes me wish I had a PS3. And yet, it's SO disturbing that I don't know my wife would let me play it. Kudos to them for making a game that explores such themes though.
Part of this is, I think, that it takes some time to digest the lore nuggets that the games spew at us, especially when it's done from the firehose of an FMV or other cutscene. I like lore-heavy stories, or games with a plot, but it can sometimes be hard to geta good idea of "what the hell is going on" if you don't play something regularly.
I'm several hours (5? 4? 6?) into Twilight Princess. The story is great so far. However, I haven't played in a year because every time I think about it, I can't remember why I'm at this particular point, how I got there, or whatnot. The underlying fabric of the tapestry of lore is something I'd be familiar with if I were playing it regularly, but I've forgotten and now it's hard to jump in in the middle. So hard, in fact, that it's tempting to restart my game (but, I don't want to repeat the half dozen hours of gameplay if I don't have to).
Games I can "jump into", like COD or Borderlands or super monkey ball or even Wii Fit are more appealing to me right now, precisely because I am not going todevote the regular blocks of time to playing more complex games like dragon age or twilight princess.
It could be. The chiropractors I've known have had long practices, where their concern has been with helping their patients get better.
Sure, their methods may be quackery, but they believe they aren't. Fraud implies, at least to most people, that there was deliberate misleading happening. I don't think that most chiropractors believe that their techniques are bogus, yet still treat patients. I'm sure there are chiropractors who are frauds, but I wouldn't call it an inherently fraudulent profession. If it doesn't work, I'd call it a misinformed medical technique.