One of the problems with Slashdot is that there isn't much time to think things through. In this case, I'm reacting to the fact that the banks almost surely do not have a clue how to do anything reasonable if they are given access to user machines. Odds are that they will either not do anything (best case) or (more likely probably) will do something stupid.
If they actually had a technology in mind (what could it possibly be?) that required access to client machines in order to secure connections, that'd be different... probably.
***If you use that logic...all car accidents are the fault of the state...they provide the roads so they should make sure your car is safe!?***
Actually, that'd be correct only if I blamed the telcos, ISPs and/or HTTP/SHTTP protocols for all security problems. The logic equivalent is that car accidents are the fault of the automobile manufacturer -- which is actually (and properly) the case for many classes of accidents where the vehicle is determined to be unsafe by design. That's what recalls are all about..
Take 'em at their word. They don't want to sell you an XP license. So, do what someone who needs an OS for a 486DX100 with 16MB of RAM does. Either switch to an old version of an Open Source PC Unix of some sort or just pirate the appropriate MS OS and get on with life.
There comes a point where trying to accomodate stupid becomes more of a burden than reasonable people ought to put up with.
***Why on earth should a bank take a loss when it was your fault?***
I dunno. Maybe because they are the ones offering the damn service. If they can't provide it in a secure manner, why is that my problem? Now if I begged them to please offer the service...
In any case, prudent users probably will not use these services. You don't have to be Nostradomus to project that even if the banks gain access to the user PCs,.they are unlikely to be able to act intelligently on what they find there. You also don't have to be much of a fortune teller to project that the banks are unlikely to admit that this scheme isn't working even if it does not. On top of that, it is likely only a matter of time until somebody finds a way to hijack the bank's gateway into user PCs
***A slower but non-radioactive approach was to place kilotons of debris into ~ equatorial orbit.***
That'll work of course. But won't it also take out your own surviellance satellites? And, of course if anyone knows you plan to do that, there will be a new generation of surviellance satellites in elliptical orbits that cross the equator at relatively high altitudes. No more sun-sychronous orbits of course, but I'm sure the spooks can work around that.
***Couldn't you use explosives to fragment the missile though?***
Maybe. You'd have to preignite the explosive charge. Explosions operate on millisecond time scales, and the objects are moving at 25 feet per millisecond. You'd also have to be careful about the thrust vector from the explosion. Don't want to cause the interceptor to miss by pushing it off somewhere.
***but what happens if the satellites start to maneuver to avoid anti satellite missiles? ***
As a practical matter, a satellite probably can't carry much reaction mass for maneuvering. A missile designed entirely to do damage probably can carry a lot more fuel for maneuvering. The difference between a 747 and a heat seeking missile... sort of.
***I think the threat from a debris only weapon (small tungsten carbide balls/cubes?) is something a rogue nation can do cheaply.. no need to develop sophisticated technology other than being able to get up into space.***
At 25000 fps closing velocity, the material won't matter much. Dust bunnies, chicken feathers, or Twinkie fragments would all be about as devastating as tungsten carbide.
***I'm sure someone said that about Sea Warfare once, and it was true until Aegis anti-missile and torpedo decoys were developed. Every battlefield has it's differences and there are many for which defending is difficult without technology. The only real area where you can hide behind things is land battles, and I don't think anyone would suggest that Sea and Air warfare 'Involve almost no defensive options' as there are possible options, they're just not natural to the terrain.***
Someone did say that. Rear Admiral Hyman G Rickover. He told the Senate armed services committee in the 1970s that the carriers would last about two days in an all out war with the Soviet Union.
You have a lot more faith in the Navy's defensive capabilities than many of us do. One notes that on the rare occasions since World War II where someone has taken serious umbrage at the presence of a naval vessel, the vessels often have not fared well. e.g General Belgrano sunk by a torpedo during the Falklands war and the HMS Sheffield sunk two days later by an Exocet missile. As recently as last Summer Hezbolah guerillas in Lebanon used some sort of antiship missile to severely damage the INS Hanit.
As for Aegis -- best known for shooting down Iran Air flight 655 flying at constant altitude in a well defined commercial corrider -- under the misapprehension that it was firing at an fighter aircraft on an attack run -- I'm inclined to go with Rickover. Mean lifetime of about two days if someone really wants an Aegis equipped vessel gone.
***Nope. The reason why missiles have explosives on them is because a direct hit is very difficult to achieve.***
It's only difficult if you don't know exactly where your target will be at any given time. Satellite positions are highly predictable, and maneuver options are somewhere between slim and none. Hitting a satellite in orbit is rocket science, but it's not difficult rocket science.
With the velocity differences that will be present in collisions between a satellite and a satellite killer object, explosives would be unecessary. Kinetic energy will do the job without further assistance. We're talking closing velocities of 25000 or even 50000 fps here. And -- guess what -- it's possible to design anti-saellite weapons such that if you some how miss the first time, you get a second chance with the same 'warhead' on the next revolution of the satellite, and the third....
***Of course, it helped that the enemy that we faced was morally bankrupt and couldn't have possibly won the cold war.
It frightens me that people actually associate "morally bankrupt" with "couldn't have possibly won." The two don't necessarily go together***
To which one might add, that if moral bankrupcy will inevitably destroy a political system, the United States itself may be in considerable trouble. It's not like the Bush administration has turned out to be a shining beacon of good behavior
I used to sysadmin in an elementary school. We had over 100 PCs -- Maybe 40 different hardware configurations. Windows 95, windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98SE (We also had one XP machine -- no more than that because Windows Multiuser support works differently in NT than in Windows 9 -- and nowhere near as well). So what would happen if I set out to install some high class piece of Windows software in 100 machines?
Typically, it would install fine on about 91 machines. Six would fail for some reason -- typically a missing DLL or a recently installed DLL that only was present on machines that had some specific software package installed. Two of the remaining machines would have unique problems -- often not shared by conceptually identical PCs elsewhere in the building. And one machine would melt down completely. So, I have half a day of installation, three half day debugging jobs and another few hours of work to get the destroyed machine back on line.
It took a few years, but by the time I was through, I was no longer a Windows fan
The Spanish have a word for this sort of thing -- "Atascadero". It means about what it sounds like it means. Perhaps Microsoft should adopt it for their next OS.
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Is Linux better? For servers, yes. For desktops, No. But it's not much worse, and it -- unlike Windows -- seems still to be improving. In the long run if people can have aggravation for free or pay handsomely for aggravation, I imagine that most of them will opt for free aggravation.
***In the email instance, anyone can at any time send classified information over an unclassified network. It is up to the user to not do this. Granted, there are various technical and other procedures that can help prevent this, but it can never be completely avoided.***
Excuse me. Back when I was doing gubmint (DOD) work, connecting a machine with classified data stored on it to an unclassified network with unmonitored connections to the outside world would have gotten you ten years and/or $10000. Apparently the policy has changed.
And, BTW, the requirements for monitoring a pipeline to an unclassified destination were so onerous that it was hardly ever done.
There may have been good reasons for the change if there has indeed been one. But it most certainly IS possible to preclude users from inadvertantly sending classified data electronically to an unclassified network, and that used to be the norm.
Hard for me to get worked up over this. IMO, most classified data I've seen (and I've seen lots of it) shouldn't be classified. And the remainder needs better protection than it typically gets.
Probably not out of proportion. The military has separate secure communications, but civil society doesn't. And many of our key networks aren't exactly robust. We've had incidents in the past of phone networks going down because of bad software upgrades to switches. And of power distribution networks going down for no very good reason and taking many hours to get back up. And satellites going out.
So what happens when a technically savvy bunch of folks with a point to make starts off by hijacking Microsoft Update to zombiate millions of PCs, uses other update services to brick all sorts of devices, then simultaneously goes after the DNS servers; North American power grid controls; and every satellite link they have previously found a vulnerability in? What if they can take down major parts of the cell phone network? Probably they can DOS the financial service network providers if they can't hack into them -- No functioning ATMs and likely no functioning banks and likely few functioning stores of any kind. And they reprogram a lot of the nation's traffic signals to turn all lights green permanently. They do the same for the railroads. And they turn off the natural gas distribution system -- in January. And they shut down the aquaduct pumping stations feeding Southern California.... etc, etc, etc. And finally, they shut down as much of the phone system as they can get to.
A serious attack by a technically savvy attacker with significant resources and a good plan can very likely do most of those things and a great many more.
If an attacker can do even a quarter of that, it'd take any industrial country a week to get back up after a fashion, and months to really get things back under control. So, no, it's probably not blown out of proportion.
***I mean who the FUCK would be stupid enough to have the controls for a Dam connected to the internet?***
What is the cheapest and most cost effective way to control a remote power facility? And who says cyber attacks are limited to the Internet? If your dam is 300 miles away, you're going to need remote access -- at least for monitoring and quite likely for command and control. Seems to me like most, maybe all, of the technologies to do that -- internet, phone network, satellite, radio links, etc--are open to interception and attack. Even if you can't break into the control link, you likely can deny service in one way or another.
The CIA et al (There are about two dozen intelligence agencies) really are involved in two quite different jobs. The jobs overlap, but they are different.
The first job is to try to determine what is going on in foreign countries. Where is Osama bin Laden? (Who the hell knows) Is Iran trying to build a nuclear bomb? (probably) How many ICBMs does China have (not a lot), etc. This is where most of the money goes because it involves a lot of expensive technology.-- satellite photos, communications intercepts, etc. It's hard to object to this except for the issue of at what point the sum cost of getting data exceeds the value of the data. And keep in mind that the value of the data includes the costs of acting on bad data or data that should probably have been available -- about $400 billion so far for the Iraq fiasco alone.
There is also a covert action component -- the James Bond stuff. This seems to be overwhelmingly attractive to certain overgrown adolescents. The problem is that covert action frequently misfires. On good days, the misfire is harmless. Castro doen't smoke the booby trapped cigar. Sometimes it comes back to haunt us. We overthrow a democratic government in Iran in the 1950s and -- suprise -- our chosen stooge, the Shaw gets pitched out in the 1970s and we find ourselves faced with a theocracy that doesn't much like us.
These papers seem to deal with the covert stuff and to chronicle what went wrong and (I assume) what went right as well.
***Injecting Javascript into a web page creates an unauthorized derivative work.***
So does injecting HTML. Fair use allows some exceptions. For example, if the ISP needed to tinker with your headers or page to get around problems with upstream routers, that might be OK.
I'm not (thank God) an IP lawyer but intuitively, it doesn't seem that pasting advertising into someone else's creative work without permission would be fair use.
***Aren't all analog transmissions going to end in a couple years?***
That's TV, and it probably won't happen on schedule (in about 20 months)
Given the bandwidth requirements of digital sound and the fact that FM can deliver pretty decent audio in its primary service area, it's not easy to see why -- other than marketing -- one would want to replace it with a digital service. There are some experiments in progress with sending digital subchannels on subcarriers of FM stations, but I'm not sure that makes engineering sense.. Anyone have a reference to an engineering (rather than marketing) justification for that.
***With other more cost-effective media like the internet, why would non-profits CARE about radio?***
A few reasons:
Some of us still hope against hope that drivers are not browsing the Internet in their cars... at least not while driving.
You must have a lot better wireless access than some of us do. Indeed, here in Vermont you're damn lucky to get reliable cellphone service if you are more than a 20 minute walk from the corner of Church and Main in Burlington. Wireless is much worse of course.
If you have an ISP like Verison, it's no great problem to hook up to an internet radio stream. But you'll be damn lucky to hold that connection for more than 60-90 minutes.
Not everyone can afford even the modest cost of an always on Internet connection. And that assumes that one is available -- which is not the case in an embarassing percentage of rural America -- the FCC's bad bookkeeping notwithstanding.
Not everyone has a computer. In fact, a significant portion of the population not only doesn't HAVE one, they don't WANT one.
Not everyone would agree with you that the Internet is more effective than radio. At least not at everything.
Setting up and maintaining a Low Power radio transmitter is probably substantially CHEAPER than setting up and maintaining a decent web site with equivalent coverage. Non-profits are, for the most part, impoverished.
Programming of a radio station can be done by relatively low skilled volunteers with usable results. Care to try that with a web site?
***Overall, Biofuels are a mistake. About the only place that I see them of use is in the algae's ability to accumulate a LOT of CO2.***
Maybe not that bad. I can see a possibility that some amount of biofuel can be created from something -- not corn or soy -- grown on land that is too marginal climate-wise to farm for food. And there is a lot of that sort of land in the world. But I can't see a world economy based on biofuels.
***But if you're going to move the automobile infrastructure to electricity and away from petroleum, you're going to have to build more nuclear power plants.***
Of course we're going to have to build more nuclear power plants. Anyone who spends as much as a few hours looking at numbers and modeling scenarios (i.e. virtually no one) knows that. Even if you assume that Americans and Canadians can cut per capita energy usage in half (to the level of France or Japan), more nukes looks like part of the equation if you throw in independence from non-North American petroleum as a goal.
It's clear that the debate over energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions, etc is going to be conducted in the usual way -- by fools, liars, special interests, and total whack jobs, and is going to be based mostly on emotion, not reality. Like the totally bungled "War on Terror", it doesn't have to be that way. But it appears that folks really LIKE the pain they are inflicting on themselvs by making decisions based on wishful thinking, gut feel, and emotions rather than facts and logic..
We're going to have to make big time upgrades the power grid also.
***140K emails? Even over six years, that's over 20k messages per year, or about 400/week. Say 80 emails/day. Assuming a 16 hour work day, that's 5 emails/hour, every hour, forever. Basically an email every 12 minutes. I don't see where Mr Rove has any time to do anything other than receive and answer emails.***
Math looks right. I imagine that they are quoting a number that their IT folks gave them. Likely copies of the same message to different recipients are counted separately or something like that. Or maybe the Republican IT folks were hired from the same College Republican people pool that screwed up so wonderously in Iraq. Doesn't matter if you can do the job if your heart is pure.
***Flagrant violations of the presidential records act aside, given this administration's cavalier attitude about the handling of classified information, I have to wonder if some of these messages contained any. And if they did, I have a hard time believing a facility operated by the RNC complied with the many rules and regulations for keeping classified information safe. ***
There are real, serious, rules about handling classified data. They are explained to people when they receive clearances. The gummint actually does THAT pretty well. The rules most certainly do NOT include transmitting classified data via any sort of public electronic or physical mail (except Registered snail mail which is always under positive control). For the most part, this stuff is assigned control numbers and ownership/location is tracked.
Of course the defining trait of the Bush administration is that these buffoons are totally incompetent. So there probably is a small amount of classified information in their eMails.
But I wouldn't get too worked up about that. IMO, Most information that is classified shouldn't be. And the subset that is properly classified often is a secret only to the American people. Find a copy of "The Pentagon Papers" and you'll see what I mean.
***This is why when I see one of those stupid magnetic ribbons proclaiming that "freedom isn't free" on a gas-guzzling SUV, and I can't tell if the owner is connected with the military in any way (serving, veteran, family member in the service, etc.).. I steal it. Fuck 'em, they didn't pay a thing.***
THEM pay? No, No, you misunderstand. They are free. You pay.
***transatlantic voyages were impossible 1000 years ago.***
They were possible. They probably weren't being made routinely. Iceland -- the half way point more or less -- was colonized by the Norse in the 9th Century. Greenland was colonized from Iceland in the 10th century. The Norse tried to set up a settlement in Labrador at Lanse aux Meadows in 1007.
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I sort of agree that we don't know what future technologies will offer. So I don't think the analysis of colonizing the solar system is worth much other than to emphasize the near impossibility of doing so with today's technology.
But, it does look like you don't mess with a few basic laws of nature -- the speed of light and conservation of energy in particular. If that's true, then his analysis of the problems of colonizing the galaxy may have some validity.
***To say that we haven't made huge strides in the past 100 years is ridiculous. 100 years ago, a trip from New York to Japan would take months and be considerd a culmination of a life's work.***
We HAVE made enormous strides, but not that enormous. in 1907 New York to Japan would have taken 3-4 weeks. Four or five days to the West Coast by train and the rest by steamship.
"Around the World in Eighty Days" was published in 1873 and a lot of progress in transportation was made in the 34 years between 1873 and 1907. With good luck one could have made it from San Francisco to London in 1907 in about 10-11 days -- train from San Francisco to New York, then steamship. In 1905, the Pennsylvania RR could get you from Chicago to New York in 18 hours. Faster than you can legally drive that diistance today. The Lusitania crossed the Atlantic in 5 days on its maiden run in 1907.
Who knows. if airline travel continues to deteriorate and costs of liquid hydrocarbons continue to increase, we may well be back to trains and steamships by 2107.
Slashdot Mirror
If they actually had a technology in mind (what could it possibly be?) that required access to client machines in order to secure connections, that'd be different ... probably.
***If you use that logic...all car accidents are the fault of the state...they provide the roads so they should make sure your car is safe!?***
Actually, that'd be correct only if I blamed the telcos, ISPs and/or HTTP/SHTTP protocols for all security problems. The logic equivalent is that car accidents are the fault of the automobile manufacturer -- which is actually (and properly) the case for many classes of accidents where the vehicle is determined to be unsafe by design. That's what recalls are all about..
Take 'em at their word. They don't want to sell you an XP license. So, do what someone who needs an OS for a 486DX100 with 16MB of RAM does. Either switch to an old version of an Open Source PC Unix of some sort or just pirate the appropriate MS OS and get on with life.
There comes a point where trying to accomodate stupid becomes more of a burden than reasonable people ought to put up with.
I dunno. Maybe because they are the ones offering the damn service. If they can't provide it in a secure manner, why is that my problem? Now if I begged them to please offer the service ...
In any case, prudent users probably will not use these services. You don't have to be Nostradomus to project that even if the banks gain access to the user PCs,.they are unlikely to be able to act intelligently on what they find there. You also don't have to be much of a fortune teller to project that the banks are unlikely to admit that this scheme isn't working even if it does not. On top of that, it is likely only a matter of time until somebody finds a way to hijack the bank's gateway into user PCs
That'll work of course. But won't it also take out your own surviellance satellites? And, of course if anyone knows you plan to do that, there will be a new generation of surviellance satellites in elliptical orbits that cross the equator at relatively high altitudes. No more sun-sychronous orbits of course, but I'm sure the spooks can work around that.
Maybe. You'd have to preignite the explosive charge. Explosions operate on millisecond time scales, and the objects are moving at 25 feet per millisecond. You'd also have to be careful about the thrust vector from the explosion. Don't want to cause the interceptor to miss by pushing it off somewhere.
***but what happens if the satellites start to maneuver to avoid anti satellite missiles? ***
As a practical matter, a satellite probably can't carry much reaction mass for maneuvering. A missile designed entirely to do damage probably can carry a lot more fuel for maneuvering. The difference between a 747 and a heat seeking missile ... sort of.
At 25000 fps closing velocity, the material won't matter much. Dust bunnies, chicken feathers, or Twinkie fragments would all be about as devastating as tungsten carbide.
Someone did say that. Rear Admiral Hyman G Rickover. He told the Senate armed services committee in the 1970s that the carriers would last about two days in an all out war with the Soviet Union.
You have a lot more faith in the Navy's defensive capabilities than many of us do. One notes that on the rare occasions since World War II where someone has taken serious umbrage at the presence of a naval vessel, the vessels often have not fared well. e.g General Belgrano sunk by a torpedo during the Falklands war and the HMS Sheffield sunk two days later by an Exocet missile. As recently as last Summer Hezbolah guerillas in Lebanon used some sort of antiship missile to severely damage the INS Hanit.
As for Aegis -- best known for shooting down Iran Air flight 655 flying at constant altitude in a well defined commercial corrider -- under the misapprehension that it was firing at an fighter aircraft on an attack run -- I'm inclined to go with Rickover. Mean lifetime of about two days if someone really wants an Aegis equipped vessel gone.
It's only difficult if you don't know exactly where your target will be at any given time. Satellite positions are highly predictable, and maneuver options are somewhere between slim and none. Hitting a satellite in orbit is rocket science, but it's not difficult rocket science.
With the velocity differences that will be present in collisions between a satellite and a satellite killer object, explosives would be unecessary. Kinetic energy will do the job without further assistance. We're talking closing velocities of 25000 or even 50000 fps here. And -- guess what -- it's possible to design anti-saellite weapons such that if you some how miss the first time, you get a second chance with the same 'warhead' on the next revolution of the satellite, and the third ....
To which one might add, that if moral bankrupcy will inevitably destroy a political system, the United States itself may be in considerable trouble. It's not like the Bush administration has turned out to be a shining beacon of good behavior
I used to sysadmin in an elementary school. We had over 100 PCs -- Maybe 40 different hardware configurations. Windows 95, windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 98SE (We also had one XP machine -- no more than that because Windows Multiuser support works differently in NT than in Windows 9 -- and nowhere near as well). So what would happen if I set out to install some high class piece of Windows software in 100 machines?
Typically, it would install fine on about 91 machines. Six would fail for some reason -- typically a missing DLL or a recently installed DLL that only was present on machines that had some specific software package installed. Two of the remaining machines would have unique problems -- often not shared by conceptually identical PCs elsewhere in the building. And one machine would melt down completely. So, I have half a day of installation, three half day debugging jobs and another few hours of work to get the destroyed machine back on line.
It took a few years, but by the time I was through, I was no longer a Windows fan
The Spanish have a word for this sort of thing -- "Atascadero". It means about what it sounds like it means. Perhaps Microsoft should adopt it for their next OS.
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Is Linux better? For servers, yes. For desktops, No. But it's not much worse, and it -- unlike Windows -- seems still to be improving. In the long run if people can have aggravation for free or pay handsomely for aggravation, I imagine that most of them will opt for free aggravation.
Excuse me. Back when I was doing gubmint (DOD) work, connecting a machine with classified data stored on it to an unclassified network with unmonitored connections to the outside world would have gotten you ten years and/or $10000. Apparently the policy has changed.
And, BTW, the requirements for monitoring a pipeline to an unclassified destination were so onerous that it was hardly ever done.
There may have been good reasons for the change if there has indeed been one. But it most certainly IS possible to preclude users from inadvertantly sending classified data electronically to an unclassified network, and that used to be the norm.
Hard for me to get worked up over this. IMO, most classified data I've seen (and I've seen lots of it) shouldn't be classified. And the remainder needs better protection than it typically gets.
Tain't entirely true. Ask the Poles.
Nonethelss, it'd be a very good start. Especially for people who have proved, on the whole, to be rather inept at meddling.
***Isn't this blown out of proportion, again?***
Probably not out of proportion. The military has separate secure communications, but civil society doesn't. And many of our key networks aren't exactly robust. We've had incidents in the past of phone networks going down because of bad software upgrades to switches. And of power distribution networks going down for no very good reason and taking many hours to get back up. And satellites going out.
So what happens when a technically savvy bunch of folks with a point to make starts off by hijacking Microsoft Update to zombiate millions of PCs, uses other update services to brick all sorts of devices, then simultaneously goes after the DNS servers; North American power grid controls; and every satellite link they have previously found a vulnerability in? What if they can take down major parts of the cell phone network? Probably they can DOS the financial service network providers if they can't hack into them -- No functioning ATMs and likely no functioning banks and likely few functioning stores of any kind. And they reprogram a lot of the nation's traffic signals to turn all lights green permanently. They do the same for the railroads. And they turn off the natural gas distribution system -- in January. And they shut down the aquaduct pumping stations feeding Southern California. ... etc, etc, etc. And finally, they shut down as much of the phone system as they can get to.
A serious attack by a technically savvy attacker with significant resources and a good plan can very likely do most of those things and a great many more.
If an attacker can do even a quarter of that, it'd take any industrial country a week to get back up after a fashion, and months to really get things back under control. So, no, it's probably not blown out of proportion.
***I mean who the FUCK would be stupid enough to have the controls for a Dam connected to the internet?***
What is the cheapest and most cost effective way to control a remote power facility? And who says cyber attacks are limited to the Internet? If your dam is 300 miles away, you're going to need remote access -- at least for monitoring and quite likely for command and control. Seems to me like most, maybe all, of the technologies to do that -- internet, phone network, satellite, radio links, etc--are open to interception and attack. Even if you can't break into the control link, you likely can deny service in one way or another.
The first job is to try to determine what is going on in foreign countries. Where is Osama bin Laden? (Who the hell knows) Is Iran trying to build a nuclear bomb? (probably) How many ICBMs does China have (not a lot), etc. This is where most of the money goes because it involves a lot of expensive technology.-- satellite photos, communications intercepts, etc. It's hard to object to this except for the issue of at what point the sum cost of getting data exceeds the value of the data. And keep in mind that the value of the data includes the costs of acting on bad data or data that should probably have been available -- about $400 billion so far for the Iraq fiasco alone.
There is also a covert action component -- the James Bond stuff. This seems to be overwhelmingly attractive to certain overgrown adolescents. The problem is that covert action frequently misfires. On good days, the misfire is harmless. Castro doen't smoke the booby trapped cigar. Sometimes it comes back to haunt us. We overthrow a democratic government in Iran in the 1950s and -- suprise -- our chosen stooge, the Shaw gets pitched out in the 1970s and we find ourselves faced with a theocracy that doesn't much like us.
These papers seem to deal with the covert stuff and to chronicle what went wrong and (I assume) what went right as well.
So does injecting HTML. Fair use allows some exceptions. For example, if the ISP needed to tinker with your headers or page to get around problems with upstream routers, that might be OK.
I'm not (thank God) an IP lawyer but intuitively, it doesn't seem that pasting advertising into someone else's creative work without permission would be fair use.
That's TV, and it probably won't happen on schedule (in about 20 months)
Given the bandwidth requirements of digital sound and the fact that FM can deliver pretty decent audio in its primary service area, it's not easy to see why -- other than marketing -- one would want to replace it with a digital service. There are some experiments in progress with sending digital subchannels on subcarriers of FM stations, but I'm not sure that makes engineering sense.. Anyone have a reference to an engineering (rather than marketing) justification for that.
If they were licensed, they probably would not be on your local NPR station's frequency. That's the rationale for licensing.
A few reasons:
Maybe not that bad. I can see a possibility that some amount of biofuel can be created from something -- not corn or soy -- grown on land that is too marginal climate-wise to farm for food. And there is a lot of that sort of land in the world. But I can't see a world economy based on biofuels.
Of course we're going to have to build more nuclear power plants. Anyone who spends as much as a few hours looking at numbers and modeling scenarios (i.e. virtually no one) knows that. Even if you assume that Americans and Canadians can cut per capita energy usage in half (to the level of France or Japan), more nukes looks like part of the equation if you throw in independence from non-North American petroleum as a goal.
It's clear that the debate over energy usage, greenhouse gas emissions, etc is going to be conducted in the usual way -- by fools, liars, special interests, and total whack jobs, and is going to be based mostly on emotion, not reality. Like the totally bungled "War on Terror", it doesn't have to be that way. But it appears that folks really LIKE the pain they are inflicting on themselvs by making decisions based on wishful thinking, gut feel, and emotions rather than facts and logic..
We're going to have to make big time upgrades the power grid also.
Math looks right. I imagine that they are quoting a number that their IT folks gave them. Likely copies of the same message to different recipients are counted separately or something like that. Or maybe the Republican IT folks were hired from the same College Republican people pool that screwed up so wonderously in Iraq. Doesn't matter if you can do the job if your heart is pure.
There are real, serious, rules about handling classified data. They are explained to people when they receive clearances. The gummint actually does THAT pretty well. The rules most certainly do NOT include transmitting classified data via any sort of public electronic or physical mail (except Registered snail mail which is always under positive control). For the most part, this stuff is assigned control numbers and ownership/location is tracked.
Of course the defining trait of the Bush administration is that these buffoons are totally incompetent. So there probably is a small amount of classified information in their eMails.
But I wouldn't get too worked up about that. IMO, Most information that is classified shouldn't be. And the subset that is properly classified often is a secret only to the American people. Find a copy of "The Pentagon Papers" and you'll see what I mean.
THEM pay? No, No, you misunderstand. They are free. You pay.
They were possible. They probably weren't being made routinely. Iceland -- the half way point more or less -- was colonized by the Norse in the 9th Century. Greenland was colonized from Iceland in the 10th century. The Norse tried to set up a settlement in Labrador at Lanse aux Meadows in 1007.
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I sort of agree that we don't know what future technologies will offer. So I don't think the analysis of colonizing the solar system is worth much other than to emphasize the near impossibility of doing so with today's technology.
But, it does look like you don't mess with a few basic laws of nature -- the speed of light and conservation of energy in particular. If that's true, then his analysis of the problems of colonizing the galaxy may have some validity.
We HAVE made enormous strides, but not that enormous. in 1907 New York to Japan would have taken 3-4 weeks. Four or five days to the West Coast by train and the rest by steamship.
"Around the World in Eighty Days" was published in 1873 and a lot of progress in transportation was made in the 34 years between 1873 and 1907. With good luck one could have made it from San Francisco to London in 1907 in about 10-11 days -- train from San Francisco to New York, then steamship. In 1905, the Pennsylvania RR could get you from Chicago to New York in 18 hours. Faster than you can legally drive that diistance today. The Lusitania crossed the Atlantic in 5 days on its maiden run in 1907.
Who knows. if airline travel continues to deteriorate and costs of liquid hydrocarbons continue to increase, we may well be back to trains and steamships by 2107.