I'm not sure I'm following your argument. Are you saying that since Padilla was indicted on charges not related to terrorism that he couldn't have been guilty of that as well? I don't think that is a reasonable assumption. More likely, the justice dept. thought that it would be easier to obtain a conviction on the charges they presented or that they did not want to expose intelligence gathering methods in a civilian court.
I think you have to look at a redefinition of battlefield when dealing with terrorism. The battlefield is where they choose, and they generally choose civilian targets. Much of our thinking is outmoded when it comes to fighting a threat like terrorism. There is no surrender of the enemy to mark the end of hostilities. Victory consists largely of being able to avoid or limit attacks.
Having been in the intelligence community (though not NSA), I think it is clear why people are confused on this issue. The administration is treating the "war on terror" as a literal war on terror. Under that definition, the President can intercept these communications to suspected Al Qaeda members as part of a military campaign. Many of the people who are up in arms about this are viewing the "war on terror" as an extended police operation. FISA clearly applies to criminal investigations. It is generally accepted that military actions in war time are held to a different standard.
I believe the courts will probably uphold the administration's version, since they are in many cases, choosing to engage those on the other end of the communication with military (deadly) force. I think if they were just trying to arrest people and prosecute them, the administration's case would be far weaker.
I don't know that it is as clear cut as those on either side say. We'll have to wait for the courts to decide.
A well set up Unix/Linux system has/home as a separate partition. I have upgraded many times, and even switched distibutions while my files in/home stayed the same.
That isn't to say I haven't had some issues. When I upgraded from gnome1 to gnome2 I wound up having to blow away the.gnome* directories to get things to work smoothly, but I didn't lose any of my data. Just some preferences that needed to be reset.
Saddam honestly thought he had those weapons. His own people were lying to him about what they were doing. The facts are that they didn't have any active programs, but they did have plenty of precursor programs. In fact, all the Republican Guard officers assumed that the other units had the chemical weapons. So, it wasn't just made up by Bush. The Iraqis thought they had them too.
There is solid evidence of links to Al Qaeda, but just because you don't believe it doesn't make them not real. I assume that you know about them but relegate them to the "low level" contacts, not policy makers.
You are right that it isn't our job to police the world. However, I have found that saying is often invoked by people who don't want to do something, say for instance, the Republicans when talking about the Balkins. Now it is the Democrats over Iraq. Most of them are just fine being the policemen over things they care about.
Most people are so one-sided on this that it isn't even funny. The fact is that Bush didn't lie. He was mistaken, as was everyone else (though most forget that rather conveniently now). Being mistaken and lying are two entirely different things, but Bush-haters can't (or more realistically - won't) tell the difference.
Frankly, I wasn't happy with the decision to go to war with Iraq, but once it started that became irrelevant. I believe we have to see the effort to rebuild the country through. We simply cannot afford to fail for either us or the Iraqis. Fortunately, I think both major parties in the US understand that even if they aren't totally sure how to finish.
How on earth is "almost all modern terrorism" due to US foreign policy? Are you nuts or a troll?
Chechens are driven by US foreign policy? Northern Ireland is driven by US foreign policy? Tamil separatists are driven by US foreign policy? Kashmir terrorists are driven by US foreign policy?
What the hell are you talking about and what morons think you're insightful?
Wrong. Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean it did not happen. There was this little thing called the World Trade Center bombings in 93. Maybe you remember now? There were deaths in that. A handful, true, but deaths. And, they were connected to the same groups that finished the job on 9/11.
Also, there were several plots broken up in the late 90s and 2000 that would have killed plenty. The people who are doing this don't give a crap about whether Bill Clinton or George Bush is president. They just want to kill Americans. That won't change if we elect Dean, or anyone else.
The enemy we face is intractible, driven by religious fanaticism, and must be destroyed at their roots. Education might have worked 20 or 30 years ago, but we have to solve the problem that exists now.
Please get your facts straight
on
KDE Gets The Hat
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I'm running null on my laptop right now and when you start a KDE app (I use the KCalc app rather than the Gnome calc, for example) you find the about section still lists the authors and the fact it comes from KDE.
As far as I can tell, none of the KDE apps have been removed. The only thing different is that they have picked what they consider best of breed apps and given them generic labels like mail, or browser.
You don't get all Gnome apps, you get a mix. The nice thing is that they look somewhat integrated and it works. I thought the idea was to give the end user a good experience. RedHat is trying to do that by picking the best of the apps out there for the defaults.
You know, I had more respect for the KDE guys before these ludicrous rants based on falsehoods. It is not even childish, it is just plain pathetic.
You are woefully misinformed. Micron doesn't want to sell below cost, they have to do that to maintain market share. Micron will definitely put smaller competitors (like Toshiba or TI) out of the business if they can, but they aren't as nefarious as you make them out to be.
The problem is there is too much capacity. Eliminating most of Toshiba's capacity will help, but not a great deal. There is simply no demand for new PCs (which is where most DRAM goes and you can check Gateway and Dell's performance if you doubt me) and without that driving the industry (as it did in 1999 & 2000) you're going to see over production. This results in higher inventory levels which represent tied up capital. So, either you sell the inventory at what the market is paying to free up operating cash or you lay off people and try to hope that your competitors will also slow down production and not steal your market share.
Since everyone at Micron making over $60K a year just took a 10% pay cut and the executives aren't getting paid, I'd say that they aren't doing this just because they weren't getting the profit margins they wanted.
The real problem with the DRAM market is that Hynix (who is also in negotiations with Micron) owes 7 Billion dollars on 2 Billion worth of assets refuses to go into bankruptcy. They continue to sell at even higher losses than Micron and Samsung racking more and more debt.
Uh, hate to point this out on such a fine rant, but we attacked a Sudanese aspirin factory, not a Somalian one. Same continent, different country.
Why do they hate us? Maybe because even when we do something stupid, most of the public (including those who were obviously upset by it) can't remember which one of those backwards, third world countries it was....
Your statement is ridiculous. The Taliban has declared itself by its actions to be an enemy of the United States by harboring a known terrorist who has had thousands of US citizens killed for nothing more than being US citizens.
You can take your moral equivalency bullshit and choke on it. This is real life dumbass, not some classroom debate. They were warned about what we were going to do if they didn't turn the terrorists over and they didn't do anything but threaten us and try to delay.
We didn't attack without warning, they did. Actions come with consequences and it is time that these people learned that.
I don't welcome the deaths of innocents, but I'm not going play the moral equivalance game. We're in the right, no question about it. This is a fight, and we have to win.
Global warming is not the most significant threat
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
That's got to be the most over used statement in the "green" movement. Used to be nuclear war. Gee, I don't remember anyone saying that we have figured out a way to eliminate nukes, but global warming is the fund raiser du jour.
What will happen if the Earth gets warmer? The oceans may rise some, but not all at once. People are mobile, they can move inland. A warmer Earth also means more precipitation which is a good thing (but I assume you knew that the increase in desert areas was directly related to the cooling of our planet over the past few centuries, right?).
The biggest threats humanity faces are the stupidity and gullibility of the population. Plenty of people would agree with that.
Since I think you're stupid, and therefore a contributor to what I consider the greatest threat facing all of us, do I have the right to burn your property and harass you until you agree with me?
China vs. US? Actually red vs. blue has been used forever by the US military. Blue forces are always "good guys" and red forces are always "bad guys". It could be China, it could be Russia, it could be anyone.
I think the Washington Post is reading WAY too much into this (but if it gets you to view their web site, I'm sure they don't care)....
The lawyers are in full attack mode and I don't see either side calling them off. People are making stupid arguments on both sides and losing sight of the fact they are going to have to live and work together after all this.
I think the best thing for everyone would be for Gore to concede, Bush to end his Supreme Court case and everyone to focus on what they can agree on. Gore would gain stature and stop looking more and more like a sore loser. He can take comfort in the fact that history shows that every President elected by an Electoral College majority and losing the popular vote has been a one termer.
At least my kids got a good lesson in civics from all of this.
I know one of the features we use extensively is the ability to schedule meetings in our timezone but our team members in Europe or Asia see the meeting time properly for their timezone.
I hate having to think about adding 14 hours here or subtracting three hours there to figure when the event is for someone else.
The simple answer is that DRAM is a commodity. People produce what there is demand for. Now, as far as fab capacity goes you have to remember that the DRAM industry has been in a major downturn where even the lowest cost producers were losing hundreds of millions a year.
Steppers and such are very expensive so, in general the DRAM industry is not as aggressive in moving to the new equipment since they are still recovering. In addition to using steppers capable of finer work, they haven't adopted 300mm wafer technology yet either (though there is an entirely different set of reasons there as well).
Anyway, DRAM prices always drop over time. Just wait 6 months to a year and the prices will generally be significantly lower. I think we are getting to a point where even the bloatware can't keep up with DRAM capacities. 128MB is a lot of memory, especially when coupled with an efficient virtual memory system.
Micron is the third largest DRAM manufacturing in the world behind Samsung and Hyundai. It is however the lowest cost manufacturer of DRAM in the industry. It is unlikely that anyone would be able to seriously threaten Micron's market share by trying to undercut them since they are also very aggressive (and successful) in protecting their position by using the product dumping laws against any DRAM manufacturer that sells lower than them.
Of course, knowing that Micron is the lowest cost producer and that they are raising their prices, makes it likely that the other producers are going to want to increase their prices as well since they aren't making the same margin on the product as Micron. Since the whole DRAM market has been in a severe downturn for the past couple of years, they are all looking to recoup some of those losses.
When I was a govt contractor, we were using the GNU tools and perl on several Department of Defense projects because the were the most portable around. Of course these were Unix based projects.
Is anyone out there actively lobbying the government to officially endorse OSS solutions rather than proprietary software? It seems to me as a taxpayer that I would like to see the vast number of government projects out there actively evaluate Linux as well as Solaris and NT as platforms.
Not only would they be getting a high quality, low cost platform, the code that the government contractors develop could be fed back into the community. The govt develops a considerable amount of software and while much of it is specific to its needs, there are other areas such as infrastructure where having an OSS solution makes sense.
If they used OSS software as the basis of building their systems, it would prevent a lot of the reinventing of the wheel and proprietary lock-in that occurs now.
There are a lot of people posting here that don't understand the spy game. First, most intelligence is gathered through plain old human interaction, e.g., getting someone to talk, stealing things, etc. Encryption isn't likely to slow these types of activities down, so stop thinking it is a magic amulet that protects you against bad guys.
Second, spying is an important aspect of international affairs. The more you know, the better decisions you make. Many of the people posting here would rather have less information on which to base decisions because spying is "bad." I prefer that we have the information available to us so that we have the opportunity to make good decisions (not that we always will).
Third, everyone really is doing it. The French, in particular, have been extremely aggressive with economic spying both against the US and their other allies. I doubt that US efforts are even close to their's or China's. If you think we don't have fairly complete intelligence files on the British or anyone else, you're not very bright. They definitely have them on us.
Fourth, we often spy on industrial targets to understand production rates, output, planned growth, etc. It helps us understand what the other countries long term strategies are. The information that is passed along would most likely be used to help our industries (that are considered critical to our economy) remain competitive.
So, while it isn't exactly glamorous and exciting, it is an important part of the overall intelligence picture that we need to have. And, while it may seem unfair, it is in fact the only way to level the playing field since most other nations' intelligence agencies consider us hopelessly naive because we don't normally concentrate on economic intelligence and they do.
I recommend anyone seriously interested read Sun Tzu's remarks on spying. He grokked it.
Re:How much did it really cost?
on
On to Mars
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· Score: 1
You're making a mountain out of a mole hill. Really, you just taking advantage of your computer is much more environmentally damaging than any number of these missions. Think about it, what are the costs of the fuel to create the electricity to power your PC, the toxins involved in creating the semiconductors in the chips, the refining of oil and other limited resources to make the case to contain it all? Spare us all the psuedo-environmentalism.
The point of space exploration is to go and learn new things. To see things that no one has seen before. To test ourselves against the unknown. Humanity has a need to grow and we do that by challenging nature.
I find that your 50% number is completely unbelievable. Where did it come from? As a guy married to a mathematician, I have learned to be extremely wary of unsubstantiated statistics (because every one that she sees she destroys with terribly efficient logic, even if she agrees with the point that it supposed to support)! Better to support your arguments with citations so they're more believable.
Re:What racial slurs?!?
on
GEEK Unions?
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· Score: 1
He makes it quite clear that he thinks that those programmers here on visas (read: Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, etc.) are going to be taking less money to keep their jobs in times of turmoil and that poor Americans programmers will be out of work because of that. Also, people here on work visas are not indentured servants. Why does he assume that they are not making as much as he is?
He hides his racism by not using the terms. But it is clear from his message what he thinks of these people. For his information, we pay equally for talent. We don't pay less to those from a foreign country. Nor should we.
Re:We don't need no stinking unions
on
GEEK Unions?
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· Score: 1
Let me spank your whiny butt.
You can be the boss, you just have to want to put in the time and energy necessary to get that job. They won't give it to you because you're smart.
As for implementing policy, start with small steps. Change what you have control over. Demonstrate your success and you will have greater influence over others. Don't whine when people don't latch on to your ideas, figure out why they didn't. Use your ability to learn from your experience.
I have knowledge of unionized programmer shops (yes they do exist). Quite frankly, these are the biggest overhead I/S organizations around. A DBA cannot write perl scripts to help manage the database servers because that is coding and is reserved for programmers not DBAs. If you get caught breaking the rules, well you'd better have seniority or you could be walking. Just for trying to be more efficient. Yeah, unions are just what we need.
I have worked my way up to where my opinion carries weight in my organization. It wasn't through threats, but by showing that my ideas help the company. I didn't wait for someone to notice them, I pointed them out. I looked for opportunities. And, it didn't take forever.
Most companies, when they get into trouble, layoff production/operations employees. This is because they are the easiest to replace. Unless your I/S department is a real loser, you probably won't get cut. You may not replace attrition, get tiny raises, etc., but it would be costly to have to replace you when times get better.
I won't even address your racial slurs (disguised as "realism") other than to say that I find them seriously offensive.
As for hiring older workers, our company gladly would but most of them don't have the skill set we are looking for (VB/C++/Java/SQL). We need people and to discriminate on the basis of age would be stupid. We are just looking for skills. This is capitalism, we pay for what we need. If you keep your skills up to date (sometimes you have to do it on your own) then you can find work. No one is going to look out for your career besides you.
NSA is responsible for COLLECTING intelligence. They are not counter espionage. The people who should have been looking for spies at the labs were 1) The FBI (they are counter espionage inside the US) and 2) The CIA (they are counter espionage outside the US).
Let's not try to blame everything on the NSA. Actually, they are the most harmless of the bunch. They don't have field operatives with guns and itchy trigger fingers.
I think way too many of you believe everything you see in the movies....
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I'm following your argument. Are you saying that since Padilla was indicted on charges not related to terrorism that he couldn't have been guilty of that as well? I don't think that is a reasonable assumption. More likely, the justice dept. thought that it would be easier to obtain a conviction on the charges they presented or that they did not want to expose intelligence gathering methods in a civilian court.
I think you have to look at a redefinition of battlefield when dealing with terrorism. The battlefield is where they choose, and they generally choose civilian targets. Much of our thinking is outmoded when it comes to fighting a threat like terrorism. There is no surrender of the enemy to mark the end of hostilities. Victory consists largely of being able to avoid or limit attacks.
Having been in the intelligence community (though not NSA), I think it is clear why people are confused on this issue. The administration is treating the "war on terror" as a literal war on terror. Under that definition, the President can intercept these communications to suspected Al Qaeda members as part of a military campaign. Many of the people who are up in arms about this are viewing the "war on terror" as an extended police operation. FISA clearly applies to criminal investigations. It is generally accepted that military actions in war time are held to a different standard.
I believe the courts will probably uphold the administration's version, since they are in many cases, choosing to engage those on the other end of the communication with military (deadly) force. I think if they were just trying to arrest people and prosecute them, the administration's case would be far weaker.
I don't know that it is as clear cut as those on either side say. We'll have to wait for the courts to decide.
A well set up Unix/Linux system has /home as a separate partition. I have upgraded many times, and even switched distibutions while my files in /home stayed the same.
.gnome* directories to get things to work smoothly, but I didn't lose any of my data. Just some preferences that needed to be reset.
That isn't to say I haven't had some issues. When I upgraded from gnome1 to gnome2 I wound up having to blow away the
Saddam honestly thought he had those weapons. His own people were lying to him about what they were doing. The facts are that they didn't have any active programs, but they did have plenty of precursor programs. In fact, all the Republican Guard officers assumed that the other units had the chemical weapons. So, it wasn't just made up by Bush. The Iraqis thought they had them too.
There is solid evidence of links to Al Qaeda, but just because you don't believe it doesn't make them not real. I assume that you know about them but relegate them to the "low level" contacts, not policy makers.
You are right that it isn't our job to police the world. However, I have found that saying is often invoked by people who don't want to do something, say for instance, the Republicans when talking about the Balkins. Now it is the Democrats over Iraq. Most of them are just fine being the policemen over things they care about.
Most people are so one-sided on this that it isn't even funny. The fact is that Bush didn't lie. He was mistaken, as was everyone else (though most forget that rather conveniently now). Being mistaken and lying are two entirely different things, but Bush-haters can't (or more realistically - won't) tell the difference.
Frankly, I wasn't happy with the decision to go to war with Iraq, but once it started that became irrelevant. I believe we have to see the effort to rebuild the country through. We simply cannot afford to fail for either us or the Iraqis. Fortunately, I think both major parties in the US understand that even if they aren't totally sure how to finish.
How on earth is "almost all modern terrorism" due to US foreign policy? Are you nuts or a troll?
Chechens are driven by US foreign policy? Northern Ireland is driven by US foreign policy? Tamil separatists are driven by US foreign policy? Kashmir terrorists are driven by US foreign policy?
What the hell are you talking about and what morons think you're insightful?
Wrong. Just because you don't remember it doesn't mean it did not happen. There was this little thing called the World Trade Center bombings in 93. Maybe you remember now? There were deaths in that. A handful, true, but deaths. And, they were connected to the same groups that finished the job on 9/11.
Also, there were several plots broken up in the late 90s and 2000 that would have killed plenty. The people who are doing this don't give a crap about whether Bill Clinton or George Bush is president. They just want to kill Americans. That won't change if we elect Dean, or anyone else.
The enemy we face is intractible, driven by religious fanaticism, and must be destroyed at their roots. Education might have worked 20 or 30 years ago, but we have to solve the problem that exists now.
We already knew your opinion Darl.
I'm running null on my laptop right now and when you start a KDE app (I use the KCalc app rather than the Gnome calc, for example) you find the about section still lists the authors and the fact it comes from KDE.
As far as I can tell, none of the KDE apps have been removed. The only thing different is that they have picked what they consider best of breed apps and given them generic labels like mail, or browser.
You don't get all Gnome apps, you get a mix. The nice thing is that they look somewhat integrated and it works. I thought the idea was to give the end user a good experience. RedHat is trying to do that by picking the best of the apps out there for the defaults.
You know, I had more respect for the KDE guys before these ludicrous rants based on falsehoods. It is not even childish, it is just plain pathetic.
You are woefully misinformed. Micron doesn't want to sell below cost, they have to do that to maintain market share. Micron will definitely put smaller competitors (like Toshiba or TI) out of the business if they can, but they aren't as nefarious as you make them out to be.
The problem is there is too much capacity. Eliminating most of Toshiba's capacity will help, but not a great deal. There is simply no demand for new PCs (which is where most DRAM goes and you can check Gateway and Dell's performance if you doubt me) and without that driving the industry (as it did in 1999 & 2000) you're going to see over production. This results in higher inventory levels which represent tied up capital. So, either you sell the inventory at what the market is paying to free up operating cash or you lay off people and try to hope that your competitors will also slow down production and not steal your market share.
Since everyone at Micron making over $60K a year just took a 10% pay cut and the executives aren't getting paid, I'd say that they aren't doing this just because they weren't getting the profit margins they wanted.
The real problem with the DRAM market is that Hynix (who is also in negotiations with Micron) owes 7 Billion dollars on 2 Billion worth of assets refuses to go into bankruptcy. They continue to sell at even higher losses than Micron and Samsung racking more and more debt.
I think what he probably meant is that one was for commercial gain (Dmitri) and the other was for research (Felton).
Uh, hate to point this out on such a fine rant, but we attacked a Sudanese aspirin factory, not a Somalian one. Same continent, different country.
Why do they hate us? Maybe because even when we do something stupid, most of the public (including those who were obviously upset by it) can't remember which one of those backwards, third world countries it was....
Just a thought.
Your statement is ridiculous. The Taliban has declared itself by its actions to be an enemy of the United States by harboring a known terrorist who has had thousands of US citizens killed for nothing more than being US citizens.
You can take your moral equivalency bullshit and choke on it. This is real life dumbass, not some classroom debate. They were warned about what we were going to do if they didn't turn the terrorists over and they didn't do anything but threaten us and try to delay.
We didn't attack without warning, they did. Actions come with consequences and it is time that these people learned that.
I don't welcome the deaths of innocents, but I'm not going play the moral equivalance game. We're in the right, no question about it. This is a fight, and we have to win.
That's got to be the most over used statement in the "green" movement. Used to be nuclear war. Gee, I don't remember anyone saying that we have figured out a way to eliminate nukes, but global warming is the fund raiser du jour.
What will happen if the Earth gets warmer? The oceans may rise some, but not all at once. People are mobile, they can move inland. A warmer Earth also means more precipitation which is a good thing (but I assume you knew that the increase in desert areas was directly related to the cooling of our planet over the past few centuries, right?).
The biggest threats humanity faces are the stupidity and gullibility of the population. Plenty of people would agree with that.
Since I think you're stupid, and therefore a contributor to what I consider the greatest threat facing all of us, do I have the right to burn your property and harass you until you agree with me?
China vs. US? Actually red vs. blue has been used forever by the US military. Blue forces are always "good guys" and red forces are always "bad guys". It could be China, it could be Russia, it could be anyone.
I think the Washington Post is reading WAY too much into this (but if it gets you to view their web site, I'm sure they don't care)....
The lawyers are in full attack mode and I don't see either side calling them off. People are making stupid arguments on both sides and losing sight of the fact they are going to have to live and work together after all this.
I think the best thing for everyone would be for Gore to concede, Bush to end his Supreme Court case and everyone to focus on what they can agree on. Gore would gain stature and stop looking more and more like a sore loser. He can take comfort in the fact that history shows that every President elected by an Electoral College majority and losing the popular vote has been a one termer.
At least my kids got a good lesson in civics from all of this.
I know one of the features we use extensively is the ability to schedule meetings in our timezone but our team members in Europe or Asia see the meeting time properly for their timezone.
I hate having to think about adding 14 hours here or subtracting three hours there to figure when the event is for someone else.
The simple answer is that DRAM is a commodity. People produce what there is demand for. Now, as far as fab capacity goes you have to remember that the DRAM industry has been in a major downturn where even the lowest cost producers were losing hundreds of millions a year.
Steppers and such are very expensive so, in general the DRAM industry is not as aggressive in moving to the new equipment since they are still recovering. In addition to using steppers capable of finer work, they haven't adopted 300mm wafer technology yet either (though there is an entirely different set of reasons there as well).
Anyway, DRAM prices always drop over time. Just wait 6 months to a year and the prices will generally be significantly lower. I think we are getting to a point where even the bloatware can't keep up with DRAM capacities. 128MB is a lot of memory, especially when coupled with an efficient virtual memory system.
Micron is the third largest DRAM manufacturing in the world behind Samsung and Hyundai. It is however the lowest cost manufacturer of DRAM in the industry. It is unlikely that anyone would be able to seriously threaten Micron's market share by trying to undercut them since they are also very aggressive (and successful) in protecting their position by using the product dumping laws against any DRAM manufacturer that sells lower than them.
Of course, knowing that Micron is the lowest cost producer and that they are raising their prices, makes it likely that the other producers are going to want to increase their prices as well since they aren't making the same margin on the product as Micron. Since the whole DRAM market has been in a severe downturn for the past couple of years, they are all looking to recoup some of those losses.
When I was a govt contractor, we were using the GNU tools and perl on several Department of Defense projects because the were the most portable around. Of course these were Unix based projects.
Is anyone out there actively lobbying the government to officially endorse OSS solutions rather than proprietary software? It seems to me as a taxpayer that I would like to see the vast number of government projects out there actively evaluate Linux as well as Solaris and NT as platforms.
Not only would they be getting a high quality, low cost platform, the code that the government contractors develop could be fed back into the community. The govt develops a considerable amount of software and while much of it is specific to its needs, there are other areas such as infrastructure where having an OSS solution makes sense.
If they used OSS software as the basis of building their systems, it would prevent a lot of the reinventing of the wheel and proprietary lock-in that occurs now.
There are a lot of people posting here that don't understand the spy game. First, most intelligence is gathered through plain old human interaction, e.g., getting someone to talk, stealing things, etc. Encryption isn't likely to slow these types of activities down, so stop thinking it is a magic amulet that protects you against bad guys.
Second, spying is an important aspect of international affairs. The more you know, the better decisions you make. Many of the people posting here would rather have less information on which to base decisions because spying is "bad." I prefer that we have the information available to us so that we have the opportunity to make good decisions (not that we always will).
Third, everyone really is doing it. The French, in particular, have been extremely aggressive with economic spying both against the US and their other allies. I doubt that US efforts are even close to their's or China's. If you think we don't have fairly complete intelligence files on the British or anyone else, you're not very bright. They definitely have them on us.
Fourth, we often spy on industrial targets to understand production rates, output, planned growth, etc. It helps us understand what the other countries long term strategies are. The information that is passed along would most likely be used to help our industries (that are considered critical to our economy) remain competitive.
So, while it isn't exactly glamorous and exciting, it is an important part of the overall intelligence picture that we need to have. And, while it may seem unfair, it is in fact the only way to level the playing field since most other nations' intelligence agencies consider us hopelessly naive because we don't normally concentrate on economic intelligence and they do.
I recommend anyone seriously interested read Sun Tzu's remarks on spying. He grokked it.
You're making a mountain out of a mole hill. Really, you just taking advantage of your computer is much more environmentally damaging than any number of these missions. Think about it, what are the costs of the fuel to create the electricity to power your PC, the toxins involved in creating the semiconductors in the chips, the refining of oil and other limited resources to make the case to contain it all? Spare us all the psuedo-environmentalism.
The point of space exploration is to go and learn new things. To see things that no one has seen before. To test ourselves against the unknown. Humanity has a need to grow and we do that by challenging nature.
I find that your 50% number is completely unbelievable. Where did it come from? As a guy married to a mathematician, I have learned to be extremely wary of unsubstantiated statistics (because every one that she sees she destroys with terribly efficient logic, even if she agrees with the point that it supposed to support)! Better to support your arguments with citations so they're more believable.
He makes it quite clear that he thinks that those programmers here on visas (read: Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, etc.) are going to be taking less money to keep their jobs in times of turmoil and that poor Americans programmers will be out of work because of that. Also, people here on work visas are not indentured servants. Why does he assume that they are not making as much as he is?
He hides his racism by not using the terms. But it is clear from his message what he thinks of these people. For his information, we pay equally for talent. We don't pay less to those from a foreign country. Nor should we.
Let me spank your whiny butt.
You can be the boss, you just have to want to put in the time and energy necessary to get that job. They won't give it to you because you're smart.
As for implementing policy, start with small steps. Change what you have control over. Demonstrate your success and you will have greater influence over others. Don't whine when people don't latch on to your ideas, figure out why they didn't. Use your ability to learn from your experience.
I have knowledge of unionized programmer shops (yes they do exist). Quite frankly, these are the biggest overhead I/S organizations around. A DBA cannot write perl scripts to help manage the database servers because that is coding and is reserved for programmers not DBAs. If you get caught breaking the rules, well you'd better have seniority or you could be walking. Just for trying to be more efficient. Yeah, unions are just what we need.
I have worked my way up to where my opinion carries weight in my organization. It wasn't through threats, but by showing that my ideas help the company. I didn't wait for someone to notice them, I pointed them out. I looked for opportunities. And, it didn't take forever.
Most companies, when they get into trouble, layoff production/operations employees. This is because they are the easiest to replace. Unless your I/S department is a real loser, you probably won't get cut. You may not replace attrition, get tiny raises, etc., but it would be costly to have to replace you when times get better.
I won't even address your racial slurs (disguised as "realism") other than to say that I find them seriously offensive.
As for hiring older workers, our company gladly would but most of them don't have the skill set we are looking for (VB/C++/Java/SQL). We need people and to discriminate on the basis of age would be stupid. We are just looking for skills. This is capitalism, we pay for what we need. If you keep your skills up to date (sometimes you have to do it on your own) then you can find work. No one is going to look out for your career besides you.
NSA is responsible for COLLECTING intelligence. They are not counter espionage. The people who should have been looking for spies at the labs were 1) The FBI (they are counter espionage inside the US) and 2) The CIA (they are counter espionage outside the US).
Let's not try to blame everything on the NSA. Actually, they are the most harmless of the bunch. They don't have field operatives with guns and itchy trigger fingers.
I think way too many of you believe everything you see in the movies....