Having a "moderately less capable" military means we get our asses kicked moderately more proportionately. It may be my perception, but it sounds like you haven't done your time in the service.
Funding a standing military is the single most expensive venture any nation or entity can accomplish. This is because you have to feed, clothe, house, arm, and equip those soldiers/sailors/airmen/marines effectively. Oh yeah, and you have to pay them -- though their pay is generally well below what your average worker makes. Even with crappy paychecks, soldiers are EXPENSIVE. To top it all off, there are security clearances and compartmentalization for counter-espionage purposes, which adds to the necessary funding.
Want to know what is even more expensive than keeping a soldier trained up?...having one die on you. Take ALL of those costs of clearances, training, food, equipment, arms, housing and toss them down the drain. Now you've got to retrain another to do his job, incurring every expense you laid out for the fallen guy. And now you've got to pay out his Soldier's Group Life Insurance policy to his beneficiaries ($400k pre-taxes).
I'm not saying that the Department of Defense couldn't make cuts here and there; many areas of the DOD have been over the years, even if others have gotten proportionally more funding. But to short change the fighting men and women is both foolhardy and expensive in money and lives.
And some people with 5-digit incomes have 6+ digit net worth. Fiscal responsibility and preparation for the future is a huge part of it.
I think most people are just too used to having their $200/mo DirecTV with a bajillion channels, internet speeds which most will never even dream of maxing out once (other than techy types, who is really going to utilize 20+ Mb/s, ever?) two late-model car notes, a too-large home which they can't really afford, and oodles of plastic credit which slowly tightens the noose over the years. Increased "quality of life" does not necessarily mean we need a whole lot of unnecessary shit in our homes -- why the hell would ANYONE need half a dozen iPods for their individual (non-business) use?
Before I turned 25 I had saved over a year's worth of my 5-year salary. I don't foresee the $300k/year range any time soon (interest nonwithstanding) but I sure don't plan on not having money on which to fall back if I need it. Besides, even if I got "rich" by demonlapin's definition, I think I'd go stir-crazy and find some job to do anyway.
"Hard work and innovation" can be applied anywhere. We could argue that said American starting a small-but-growing uprising against Somali warlords, eventually shifting the whole economical and political arena of that area.
Our system can allow the small guy to succeed where he may not have a hell of a chance otherwise - his worst case scenario is bankruptcy, which can be overcome (look at Donald Trump, for example - he's been bankrupt numerous times over the years). The risk in Somalia or comparable third-world shitholes is that you'll be dragged into the street, beaten to near-death and then burned inside a stack of old tires.
While Mirror's Edge was a fun game to play, I felt it lacked the substance that many games have. The storyline was short and hardly captivating, and the levels were too few to consider it for purchase and replay. This is where Gamefly and friends with games are great! However, I certainly enjoyed the Parkour style of movement, the combination of fist fights and disarming/shooting enemies with their own firearm, and the speed challenges after playing through the story mode.
It wasn't ever meant to be a blockbuster which changed the way people think about shooters and gaming in general, but it does have its own little niche in my VG memory. Many shooters have an extremely linear path which you're obligated to take in order to progress the storyline -- Mirror's Edge helped delineate that path, created a mode where the player could sometimes think outside conventional methods of completing a task. Jump over the pipe, slide under it, go around it? Avoid the guard, beat him up, or shoot him from a distance?
It wasn't a total revelation, but more than once I've wished I could do some of the things you did as Faith (the protagonist, for those of you who didn't play Mirror's Edge) while playing different games. Nothing wrong with shooting everything dead and letting God sort them out, but it's nice to have options. This game made me think about those options...even if I still choose the trigger:D
How many legally purchased firearms are used in violent crimes? Most American gun owners are law-abiding citizens who own them for various reasons; hunting, sport shooting, self-defense, nostalgia, law enforcement (backup / off-duty guns), etc.
The fact remains that most firearm-related violent crime is committed with stolen or black-market hardware. Even the shootings at Virginia Tech back in 2007 were committed with illegally purchased handguns, as the shooter had been adjudicated to mental health care (http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html).
A nail gun, circular saw, or a hammer can be just as deadly as a gun, but we don't see regulation of their sales, do we? What about cars? A driver on a crowded highway or in a city with lots of pedestrian traffic can do immensely greater damage than a single shooter. What if it were a bus driver who went crazy and drove his passengers off a bridge, into a river or lake?
You ought to get that CNN gun control crap out of your head and check the real facts. Don't blame the tool, blame the person wielding it.
That's a valid point. Even the most virtuoso players will not get more than a prize here and there, and some slaps on the back.
Not that it's truly "making money" but I won enough local weekly tournaments to pay for my bar tab on Friday nights. $25 cash while drinking beer and winning, or pay nothing extra to do the same thing on Xbox Live?
One potential snag in their line (see what I did there?) could be the fact that some of these objects are moving in different or opposing directions. A single BB at 20000 km/h can burn through a solar panel array, what's to stop it from passing through a fine net? It'll still clean up lots of junk even with a greater-than-anticipated amount of holes, but there will certainly be discrepancies between projected results and actual.
That makes more sense. I appreciate the clarification. I work more on the transmission / RF side of communications, with only minor dabbling in system administration; that article had a lot of jargon that I'm not familiar with. Sometimes you've just gotta dumb it down for us telecomm guys:P
Depending on the type of bandwidth and modulation within those specific carriers (specifically at or very near 1559 MHz), they could be interfering with each other.
Using a more highly-compressed modulation type (ie qpsk or 8psk vs. bpsk) with viable harmonic filtering should eliminate any "side lobes" and therefore interference at low power levels. Filtering at the satellite and/or cell tower side should also be present, further eliminating possible treading across bands.
This sounds like a problem between frequency management, poor choices of modulation, excessively wide bandwidth on carriers, and simple bandpass-style filtering. Certainly not difficult to overcome, but one of these technologies is going to have to budge in the correct direction, and I doubt GPS will be the one to do so.
[semi-off-topic?]
Once someone is in your system with root/admin accesses, you're already hosed.
Most users will create the least-secure password which still meets the restrictions you've set upon them - whether that's 8-10 chars with 2 upper/lowercase, 2 digits, and 2 specials or a 16/32/64 digit extravaganza.
My philosophy is to make a very secure password and then keep it written and on my person until I completely memorize it. It doesn't have to make sense, it sure as hell won't be my anniversary or birthday. You've got a much less likely chance of kicking my ass and taking that piece of paper, compared to setting up a script to crack it.
To this day, the most secure form of sending a message is still a live messenger - codes can be cracked and transmissions can be intercepted. People are harder to break.
What you want to use is something that will not be trivial to brute force. Instead of doing 2300 million attempts per second, you want something that limits an attacker to 10,000 or 100,000 attempts per second.
Not being a security guru, why would you even give someone 10k or 100k attempts/second? I'd want to keep that number as low as feasibly possible, per account.
Great points, cronius. I can completely understand where you're coming from there. When I was in the military and very sick once, they kept me in the hospital until I was both healthy enough to take care of myself and no longer contagious, so there wouldn't be a spread of infection and/or pneumonia. I ended up going AWOL from the hospital and violated doctor's (Officer's) orders, but I that's another story:P The point being they took care of us, they all got paid the same (within their respective ranks) and they did their jobs to the best of their ability in the interest of keeping people healthy and ready for combat. The difference here is that medical care was a direct benefit of being active duty military, not a free government program.
A large part of the problem with the US health care system is litigation and malpractice insurance. Doctors in America can make several hundred thousand dollars or more if they're specialized and expert. Even at that, a very large part of their wages go to paying malpractice insurance, so that if someone brings them to court they can be covered for the likely-millions for which they're being sued.
We need to first fix our court and insurance systems, because without these two functioning properly we can not receive adequate health care without medical professionals worrying about huge repercussions.
I still wholeheartedly believe in the capitalist system being the most feasible. While many cry "unfair" at a system in which some people can afford care and others cannot, it is actually the most fair system possible. No one pays for something they haven't directly earned by doing their job -- you truly can't be more fair than that. There will always be NFP organizations willing to provide care to those who cannot afford it, just like there already are.
The "Obamacare" bill is a problem on multiple levels.
A.) It is unconstitutional in that it forces citizens to pay for a service which they may or may not choose to seek on their own.
B.) It is an extremely costly maneuver during a time when the government is absolutely fiscally BROKE. There is simply no money available for dropping billions of dollars on revamping the health care system. The fourth consecutive Continuing Resolution is underway until at least March, so until we can figure out what our budgets are in the first place, we have no place spending money we do not possess. In order to stabilize the economy, we need to cut a whole lot of spending, and that means cutting out the health care bill for starters.
C.) Health care is a private sector. The government needs to keep their nose out of it, unless there is some atrocious spike in deaths from malpractice or some other exceptional situation.
I'm not dead set on right- or left-leaning policies, nor do I support elephants or asses. I just want our Congressional and local representatives to get their heads out of their collective asses and fix what is clearly a problem. You don't make your dollar increasingly valuable by printing billions more.
I'd rather receive no healthcare than pay (via taxes or otherwise) for diluted, long-waiting-lines, we-don't-care-about-your-health care. At least I'd be getting my money's worth.
I can see this type of technology being used in a very pro-American area in which access has been eliminated or severely limited. Take Kurdistan, for example (an area in Northern Iraq); they can be extremely pro-Western and have even adopted some of our clothing and technology. I'm not sure about now, but a few years ago they were fairing much better than the rest of Iraq due to their more flexible nature and mentality.
One thing you'll find with the military infrastructure is that there won't be underpaid IT workers lackadaisically "getting around to it" when outages or problems arise. These guys are professionals with a mission to accomplish - downtime is extremely limited, even if the data rates and latency aren't the greatest. It's better to take slightly longer to get a complete, message than it is to get an incorrect or partial message through.
Of course, none of our technology would be used in a situation that didn't eventually benefit us as a nation. We might go too far in aiding others at times, but we're not complete idiots. Quid pro quo.
Your skill in using the word "Snark" has increased.
preventing the people from coordinating and rising up against their oppressors
The lack of internet didn't stop the American Revolution, and it wouldn't hinder anyone much if something were to happen in the future. People who feel the absolute need to make change will find a way to do so.
Did you notice the tan flight suits those Airmen are wearing? That's because they're deployed, most likely to the Middle East somewhere.
Most areas there still use the old "pull off tab" style of cans. Coke, Pepsi, Fanta, or otherwise. Not like the "wide mouth cans" we've seen in the US for years.
BTW - the Strawberry Fanta over there is amazing...
fiber is costly to deploy so doesn't have significant penetration
Fiber Optics are already everywhere. Practically all major telecommunications lines run over FO at one point or another. The key ingredient at this point in time is the hardware to support the FO cabling; FO is cheaper than Copper cable in itself, but legacy hardware is cheaper than FO transceivers.
Services like FiOS take a good step toward bridging the gap and making fiber more easily available to consumers, but they're still only Fiber-to-Curb or Fiber-to-Doorstep. Once there is opportunity for reasonably priced intra-home Fiber networks to proliferate, we may see a huge difference in how bandwidth is handled. 5 or 10 Mb/sec or MB/sec is laughable via single-mode Fiber Optics, and a LAN can be easily run with multi-mode, provided the transceivers are equipped.
Should all this happen, bandwidth could increase dramatically and latency may reduce proportionally (network topology limiting, of course).
A select few of us tend to sharpen ours. Having been several meters away from exploding ordnance, I can appreciate the comedy of life itself. When a gust of wind is all that separates you from potential death, little shit like people throwing rocks at each other is absolutely hilarious.
Exactly. Wait til this has been in the news more than a couple of weeks, and everyone from Jon Stewart to Conan O'Brien will have it in their comedy routine, if they don't already!
I think there should be a default level of "silence" depending on the programs to be installed. Make it optional to have everything, nothing, or specific programs bring up a prompt based on user preference. It sounds like a fairly easy solution, really.
While I'm running a recent version of the Blackberry software, I've got Google Sync allowed to do some things with everything else requiring my assent. Android designers should have taken a cue from an extremely successful portion of wireless market.
Slashdot Mirror
Having a "moderately less capable" military means we get our asses kicked moderately more proportionately. It may be my perception, but it sounds like you haven't done your time in the service.
...having one die on you. Take ALL of those costs of clearances, training, food, equipment, arms, housing and toss them down the drain. Now you've got to retrain another to do his job, incurring every expense you laid out for the fallen guy. And now you've got to pay out his Soldier's Group Life Insurance policy to his beneficiaries ($400k pre-taxes).
Funding a standing military is the single most expensive venture any nation or entity can accomplish. This is because you have to feed, clothe, house, arm, and equip those soldiers/sailors/airmen/marines effectively. Oh yeah, and you have to pay them -- though their pay is generally well below what your average worker makes. Even with crappy paychecks, soldiers are EXPENSIVE. To top it all off, there are security clearances and compartmentalization for counter-espionage purposes, which adds to the necessary funding.
Want to know what is even more expensive than keeping a soldier trained up?
I'm not saying that the Department of Defense couldn't make cuts here and there; many areas of the DOD have been over the years, even if others have gotten proportionally more funding. But to short change the fighting men and women is both foolhardy and expensive in money and lives.
And some people with 5-digit incomes have 6+ digit net worth. Fiscal responsibility and preparation for the future is a huge part of it.
I think most people are just too used to having their $200/mo DirecTV with a bajillion channels, internet speeds which most will never even dream of maxing out once (other than techy types, who is really going to utilize 20+ Mb/s, ever?) two late-model car notes, a too-large home which they can't really afford, and oodles of plastic credit which slowly tightens the noose over the years. Increased "quality of life" does not necessarily mean we need a whole lot of unnecessary shit in our homes -- why the hell would ANYONE need half a dozen iPods for their individual (non-business) use?
Before I turned 25 I had saved over a year's worth of my 5-year salary. I don't foresee the $300k/year range any time soon (interest nonwithstanding) but I sure don't plan on not having money on which to fall back if I need it. Besides, even if I got "rich" by demonlapin's definition, I think I'd go stir-crazy and find some job to do anyway.
"Hard work and innovation" can be applied anywhere. We could argue that said American starting a small-but-growing uprising against Somali warlords, eventually shifting the whole economical and political arena of that area.
Our system can allow the small guy to succeed where he may not have a hell of a chance otherwise - his worst case scenario is bankruptcy, which can be overcome (look at Donald Trump, for example - he's been bankrupt numerous times over the years). The risk in Somalia or comparable third-world shitholes is that you'll be dragged into the street, beaten to near-death and then burned inside a stack of old tires.
While Mirror's Edge was a fun game to play, I felt it lacked the substance that many games have. The storyline was short and hardly captivating, and the levels were too few to consider it for purchase and replay. This is where Gamefly and friends with games are great! However, I certainly enjoyed the Parkour style of movement, the combination of fist fights and disarming/shooting enemies with their own firearm, and the speed challenges after playing through the story mode.
:D
It wasn't ever meant to be a blockbuster which changed the way people think about shooters and gaming in general, but it does have its own little niche in my VG memory. Many shooters have an extremely linear path which you're obligated to take in order to progress the storyline -- Mirror's Edge helped delineate that path, created a mode where the player could sometimes think outside conventional methods of completing a task. Jump over the pipe, slide under it, go around it? Avoid the guard, beat him up, or shoot him from a distance?
It wasn't a total revelation, but more than once I've wished I could do some of the things you did as Faith (the protagonist, for those of you who didn't play Mirror's Edge) while playing different games. Nothing wrong with shooting everything dead and letting God sort them out, but it's nice to have options. This game made me think about those options...even if I still choose the trigger
How many legally purchased firearms are used in violent crimes? Most American gun owners are law-abiding citizens who own them for various reasons; hunting, sport shooting, self-defense, nostalgia, law enforcement (backup / off-duty guns), etc.
The fact remains that most firearm-related violent crime is committed with stolen or black-market hardware. Even the shootings at Virginia Tech back in 2007 were committed with illegally purchased handguns, as the shooter had been adjudicated to mental health care (http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vtech.shooting/index.html).
A nail gun, circular saw, or a hammer can be just as deadly as a gun, but we don't see regulation of their sales, do we? What about cars? A driver on a crowded highway or in a city with lots of pedestrian traffic can do immensely greater damage than a single shooter. What if it were a bus driver who went crazy and drove his passengers off a bridge, into a river or lake?
You ought to get that CNN gun control crap out of your head and check the real facts. Don't blame the tool, blame the person wielding it.
Screw light guns. I'm all about light BIKES!
http://armagetronad.net/
That's a valid point. Even the most virtuoso players will not get more than a prize here and there, and some slaps on the back.
Not that it's truly "making money" but I won enough local weekly tournaments to pay for my bar tab on Friday nights. $25 cash while drinking beer and winning, or pay nothing extra to do the same thing on Xbox Live?
I'll take the beer, sir.
You'd have to be a rocket scientist to design that...
One potential snag in their line (see what I did there?) could be the fact that some of these objects are moving in different or opposing directions. A single BB at 20000 km/h can burn through a solar panel array, what's to stop it from passing through a fine net? It'll still clean up lots of junk even with a greater-than-anticipated amount of holes, but there will certainly be discrepancies between projected results and actual.
I tend to think of it as a legislative version of Jack Bauer.
That makes more sense. I appreciate the clarification. I work more on the transmission / RF side of communications, with only minor dabbling in system administration; that article had a lot of jargon that I'm not familiar with. Sometimes you've just gotta dumb it down for us telecomm guys :P
Depending on the type of bandwidth and modulation within those specific carriers (specifically at or very near 1559 MHz), they could be interfering with each other.
Using a more highly-compressed modulation type (ie qpsk or 8psk vs. bpsk) with viable harmonic filtering should eliminate any "side lobes" and therefore interference at low power levels. Filtering at the satellite and/or cell tower side should also be present, further eliminating possible treading across bands.
This sounds like a problem between frequency management, poor choices of modulation, excessively wide bandwidth on carriers, and simple bandpass-style filtering. Certainly not difficult to overcome, but one of these technologies is going to have to budge in the correct direction, and I doubt GPS will be the one to do so.
Once someone is in your system with root/admin accesses, you're already hosed.
Most users will create the least-secure password which still meets the restrictions you've set upon them - whether that's 8-10 chars with 2 upper/lowercase, 2 digits, and 2 specials or a 16/32/64 digit extravaganza.
My philosophy is to make a very secure password and then keep it written and on my person until I completely memorize it. It doesn't have to make sense, it sure as hell won't be my anniversary or birthday. You've got a much less likely chance of kicking my ass and taking that piece of paper, compared to setting up a script to crack it.
To this day, the most secure form of sending a message is still a live messenger - codes can be cracked and transmissions can be intercepted. People are harder to break.
What you want to use is something that will not be trivial to brute force. Instead of doing 2300 million attempts per second, you want something that limits an attacker to 10,000 or 100,000 attempts per second.
Not being a security guru, why would you even give someone 10k or 100k attempts/second? I'd want to keep that number as low as feasibly possible, per account.
Great points, cronius. I can completely understand where you're coming from there. When I was in the military and very sick once, they kept me in the hospital until I was both healthy enough to take care of myself and no longer contagious, so there wouldn't be a spread of infection and/or pneumonia. I ended up going AWOL from the hospital and violated doctor's (Officer's) orders, but I that's another story :P The point being they took care of us, they all got paid the same (within their respective ranks) and they did their jobs to the best of their ability in the interest of keeping people healthy and ready for combat. The difference here is that medical care was a direct benefit of being active duty military, not a free government program.
A large part of the problem with the US health care system is litigation and malpractice insurance. Doctors in America can make several hundred thousand dollars or more if they're specialized and expert. Even at that, a very large part of their wages go to paying malpractice insurance, so that if someone brings them to court they can be covered for the likely-millions for which they're being sued.
We need to first fix our court and insurance systems, because without these two functioning properly we can not receive adequate health care without medical professionals worrying about huge repercussions.
I still wholeheartedly believe in the capitalist system being the most feasible. While many cry "unfair" at a system in which some people can afford care and others cannot, it is actually the most fair system possible. No one pays for something they haven't directly earned by doing their job -- you truly can't be more fair than that. There will always be NFP organizations willing to provide care to those who cannot afford it, just like there already are.
The "Obamacare" bill is a problem on multiple levels.
A.) It is unconstitutional in that it forces citizens to pay for a service which they may or may not choose to seek on their own.
B.) It is an extremely costly maneuver during a time when the government is absolutely fiscally BROKE. There is simply no money available for dropping billions of dollars on revamping the health care system. The fourth consecutive Continuing Resolution is underway until at least March, so until we can figure out what our budgets are in the first place, we have no place spending money we do not possess. In order to stabilize the economy, we need to cut a whole lot of spending, and that means cutting out the health care bill for starters.
C.) Health care is a private sector. The government needs to keep their nose out of it, unless there is some atrocious spike in deaths from malpractice or some other exceptional situation.
I'm not dead set on right- or left-leaning policies, nor do I support elephants or asses. I just want our Congressional and local representatives to get their heads out of their collective asses and fix what is clearly a problem. You don't make your dollar increasingly valuable by printing billions more.
You get what you pay for.
I'd rather receive no healthcare than pay (via taxes or otherwise) for diluted, long-waiting-lines, we-don't-care-about-your-health care. At least I'd be getting my money's worth.
What are the Swedes doing that requires so much emergency care?!
Remember, kids, cut AWAY from yourself!
I can see this type of technology being used in a very pro-American area in which access has been eliminated or severely limited. Take Kurdistan, for example (an area in Northern Iraq); they can be extremely pro-Western and have even adopted some of our clothing and technology. I'm not sure about now, but a few years ago they were fairing much better than the rest of Iraq due to their more flexible nature and mentality.
One thing you'll find with the military infrastructure is that there won't be underpaid IT workers lackadaisically "getting around to it" when outages or problems arise. These guys are professionals with a mission to accomplish - downtime is extremely limited, even if the data rates and latency aren't the greatest. It's better to take slightly longer to get a complete, message than it is to get an incorrect or partial message through.
Of course, none of our technology would be used in a situation that didn't eventually benefit us as a nation. We might go too far in aiding others at times, but we're not complete idiots. Quid pro quo.
preventing the people from coordinating and rising up against their oppressors
The lack of internet didn't stop the American Revolution, and it wouldn't hinder anyone much if something were to happen in the future. People who feel the absolute need to make change will find a way to do so.
Did you notice the tan flight suits those Airmen are wearing? That's because they're deployed, most likely to the Middle East somewhere.
Most areas there still use the old "pull off tab" style of cans. Coke, Pepsi, Fanta, or otherwise. Not like the "wide mouth cans" we've seen in the US for years.
BTW - the Strawberry Fanta over there is amazing...
fiber is costly to deploy so doesn't have significant penetration
Fiber Optics are already everywhere. Practically all major telecommunications lines run over FO at one point or another. The key ingredient at this point in time is the hardware to support the FO cabling; FO is cheaper than Copper cable in itself, but legacy hardware is cheaper than FO transceivers.
Services like FiOS take a good step toward bridging the gap and making fiber more easily available to consumers, but they're still only Fiber-to-Curb or Fiber-to-Doorstep. Once there is opportunity for reasonably priced intra-home Fiber networks to proliferate, we may see a huge difference in how bandwidth is handled. 5 or 10 Mb/sec or MB/sec is laughable via single-mode Fiber Optics, and a LAN can be easily run with multi-mode, provided the transceivers are equipped.
Should all this happen, bandwidth could increase dramatically and latency may reduce proportionally (network topology limiting, of course).
TLDR: Fiber good. Need more.
That's what I heard during my morning commute - and they tossed in the figure "7 of the last 9 correctly predicted games".
Maybe the NFL players are learning from Madden?
A select few of us tend to sharpen ours. Having been several meters away from exploding ordnance, I can appreciate the comedy of life itself. When a gust of wind is all that separates you from potential death, little shit like people throwing rocks at each other is absolutely hilarious.
Exactly. Wait til this has been in the news more than a couple of weeks, and everyone from Jon Stewart to Conan O'Brien will have it in their comedy routine, if they don't already!
Agreed.
I think there should be a default level of "silence" depending on the programs to be installed. Make it optional to have everything, nothing, or specific programs bring up a prompt based on user preference. It sounds like a fairly easy solution, really.
While I'm running a recent version of the Blackberry software, I've got Google Sync allowed to do some things with everything else requiring my assent. Android designers should have taken a cue from an extremely successful portion of wireless market.