> But the reason people take plea deals all the time is they are guilty
Ok fine, then they should be able to prove that at trial and there should be no need whatsoever in threatening them massive amounts of jail time in order to coerce them into waiving their right to a trial. seems if they really are guilty, then prosecutors should do their job and make a case before a jury.
Yah except, we banned lead in gasoline in the 70s and got the decrease in violence. Are you suggesting a delayed effect that that somehow resulted in a major increase in the murder rate during the 80s (when the crack fueled gang wars started)?
There is a fair amount of drug market (not drug induced) violence, and a lot of it goes unreported. I have been a white middle class pot smoker for almost 2 decades now, and, at times that has meant dealing with people who sell drugs, and even getting to know them. Most of them, are no different from me, except, they don't have a job that can pay for their habbit without bankrupting them - I easily could have been one of them if not for becoming a Unix admin.
In those years, I can't think of many other people I know who have had guns shoved in their faces and been robbed. Several of them have been; they never report it.
- One friend was invited over someones house, being told this guy wanted to try a sample before buying a quantity, while in there his car was broken into and his stash stolen, and when he found out, he was surrounded by 3 big guys suggesting he just leave. (they also took other property of his, including his pool cue) - Same guy, was robbed at knife point for some pot and money (different perp) - Another had a gun shoved in his face at his house, and was robbed. - Yet another just said he had been robbed, didn't give details - Someone I didn't know but was a friend of friends, was stabbed to death and had pot dumped all over his body (yes, you probably heard about that one in relation to the boston bombings)
So yes, actual violence, or at least the threat of it....and these are just the ones that have come to me within 1-2 degrees of relation, off the top of my head, and ignores a few older ones that I don't remember well enough to really recall.
Of course, not all of it involves violence, After that first incident where my friend was robbed and not so subtly threatened, he tried to restock and keep going, but his upstream dealer wasn't someone he knew well, and decided to rob him too. However, he just did it by saying he should meet a friend of his to make the exchange, and got handed a sealed cardboard shipping box full of marshmellows.
None of these people were even gang members. This is just what happens amongst the white kids. That said, gang violence is still the major type of gun violence in this country (unless you count suicides as gun violence, but I find that very disingenuine)
Yes, Lead is a problem, but, the idea that its still lead or still mostly lead.... I question that.
I hadn't actually thought of it that way, as terrible as the incident would still be, I would be quite amused by the gun debate after a headline "Would be mass shooter dies in hail of bullets; 1 victim; 3 dead from stray gunfire"... "I got him" "No I got him" "You are all under arrest"
Perhaps because for every dollar generated by the desire to have oxygen masks for firefighters, only a fraction of a penny goes towards the firefighters and equipment, whereas 20 cents goes to the military to buy equipment they don't need and prepare for wars they don't need to fight, and the rest gets split between poorly run social programs and interest on the debt that, no matter how much they get, keeps rising.
Overall, more lives, globally, would be saved by not funding their wars than by equiping the firemen. So maybe we need to take the hit and not be as protected, so others can actually live.
Funny thing is.... your gun death rates just are not that impressive compared to ours though. Oh yes, what is it 1/2 or 1/3rd? Somewhere around there? 2 in 100 000 to like 6 in 100 000? You do realize that.000002 vs.000006....doesn't seem so big anymore.
Gun violence here, and especially school shootings, is way overblown and sensationalized. Realize that we have 100,000 schools, and that children in school are, by my own back of the envelope calculation from the numbers I looked up, much safer in school in terms of gun deaths than the entire rest of the population.
But hey.... lets compare those directly and individually to smaller countries with working social welfare that don't have a massive gang problem caused by the combination of black markets, poverty, and selective enforcement that has decimated many lower income neighborhoods....total apples to apples.
I am with you man, really. However that isn't it either. Its been going down a lot longer than that. Really.... it was the end of the crack wars in the 90s and the slow diminishing of gang culture that has done it more than anything like that.
Guns, and assault weapons don't create crime. We know that, its pretty fucking obvious. The major source of violent crime for the past couple of generations has been bad drug policy. The policy that created the gangs and gave them valuable markets to fight over.
The drug war did nothing to the addiction rates (check it out, its basically fluctuates around a flat line) yet made addiction more damaging, and put all the money in the hands of the worst people out there.
Guns are a scapegoat issue that is little more than a way to deflect criticism away from policies which have created massive numbers of jobs for police departments and prisons....and driven the real violence problems.
> At least the latter were proven to be sex offenders in court
How is this insightful in a country where 90% of convicts never even get a trial? Most people are not proven anything in court, most people are threatened with so many charges and years in jail that they will plead guilty whether they are actually or not rather than take a chance of ending up behind bars for a significant portion of their life.
As part of gun safety, you are not supposed to ever point a gun, not even an unloaded one, at anyone who isn't a clear and present threat to your life or the lives of others.
When you invade someone elses country you are the threat, so that seems like a basic violation of gun safety right there.
> Unfortunately, it looks like American law started with rights for all and > is now working its way back up.
Rights for ALL* in America!
* Some restrictions apply, applies to US residents before the signing of the constitution or born here afterwards. Void in the case of membership in native tribes. Must own significant land to qualify. Men only.
Sure my gut tells me the same; but that doesn't mean I think much can be done about it in most situations. The simple fact is you need your employees to do their job, if your information is so valuable to your business, then its even more likely that impeding them getting it is impeding your business.
Security measures are best seen as insurance since they can never pay off in the positive, they can only cost, and hopefully, less than the alternative....and that cost isn't just the cost of doing them once, but the cost of keeping them up every single day and the entire effect of that.
I seriously think a person trying to solve this problem is, most likely, trying to solve the wrong problem, unless perhaps, he is a criminal, or actually has data that is worth more to a criminal than the HR database of names, SSN, addresses, salaries etc.... which is unlikely for anyone asking slashdot.
> Exactly, because all the most altruistically great companies had no data they would like to > keep from the public and their competitors.
Who said that? The point is that, as a technological problem there is no serious solution set. You can either deny access entirely, or put onorus productivity and morale killing restrictions on access. However, anything you can think up, likely can be somehow defeated.... unless you think you can get away with asking people to strip naked upon their arrival to work and work in the nude while you stand over their shoulder watching and video recording them.... but even then someone will, given enough time and with enough motivation, find a way to trick you.
However, not making your employees feel that they should do it goes a long way to making sure it doesn't happen. I have seen many disgruntled employees, but vanishingly few of them actually turn to releasing secrets or stealing lots of data. (of course, few companies really have much all that worth stealing, despite what they may think.... lots of people think their own pile of shit is solid gold.
Honestly, I think most companies get this right by not spending too much time or resource on it, and instead, focusing on getting the job done. If you really don't want it to happen, your absolute best bet is to cultivate happy employees who feel the company is good to them.
Then, just be sure if you do anything so illegal or so morally objectionable that even good, happy, otherwise loyal employees want to blow the whistle, you keep that really really quiet and away from their eyes.
And if you really have any secrets that are so valuable someone will seriously pay money to steal them, then maybe you want to think of some amount of access control, keeping things on machines off the network, that sort of.... you know...all the normal suggestions that everybody, very smartly, ignores 99.999% of the time.
> you may still end up with bad employees. The question of securing your data shouldn't be about > good or evil, or any particular moral judgment, but simply about how to make sure you're critical and > confidential data doesn't end up being ripped off.
Don't let your employees access any data that you don't want them to release. Period.
If you are really that worried, then you can't give them access. If someone has access to the data, and feels it should be released, they will release it, they will find a way, and nothing you do is going to be able to prevent it.
Any measure you take can be defeated, short of not allowing access at all. Store the data on systems that are connected to nothing and require physical access in a secure and monitored location. Make them work under the eye of cameras. Stand over their shoulder while they work.
Seriously, short of that, you are hosed. In the end, don't do things that people will want to release, and you solve the vast majority of the problem. The more controversial your secrets (that is, the more people who see you as evil) the more control you need to prevent it.
So.... don't deserve a Snowden and the chances that you will have one are seriously reduced.
I thought about that but, figured that using the $100 for windows as a yard stick was easier than looking up what the add-on software on top of that costs:)
Course, as someone who runs linux exclusively on his laptops, and only got a windows license to play steam games on his desktop..... I also reserve the right to store my head up my own ass on that issue:)
Nope, thats not what i meant at all. I was assuming that "you" (ie the rightful owner) would not be using unlicensed commercial software to "protect" your laptop. That extra $100 (plus other software) is in terms of cost to the owner of the laptop.
Of course the thief will have no qualms about downloading windows....but will a linux user buy a copy (assuming he doesn't already have it) just on the off chance that the other conditions for it to work are met?
My real point is that, in the real cost/benefit, I am not sure that adding even that $100 to the cost of a laptop is worth it. Remember, if the laptop is never stolen that $100 is wasted. If it is stolen, then it still needs to be used in such a way as to catch the thief or their customer.... the value purchased by that $100 is likely on the low side); and again, this is all before counting in the other software which requires it to work.
You are essentially buying a form of insurance, a very limited one. As such, the cost should be looked at accordingly.
ROTFL I have never heard that one but.... I used to live in a house (condo conversion) where 8 people in two apartments had 6 cars with 1 driveway (worst case, number of both cars and people changed over time). During most of that time, I had the only manual transmission (I find it amusing they are still called "standard" by many).
Generally speaking, nobody could move my car but me. Eventually someone moved in downstairs who could move it, but, for the most part, I had to do it, which meant I couldn't just leave without my car unless I made sure it was all the way in the back.
This is an interesting solution, and may even be the best one for a Linux laptop.
Simple, have windows and computrace on there...run linux. The software does nothing until someone steals it and tries to run or reinstall windows, at which point it activates and starts doing its thing. In the mean time, it doesn't really track you.
The only real problem comes if the thief decides to keep it running linux or some other non-windows flavor (encrypt the whole hard drive with LUKS and that should at least make it useless until they install something on it.... which decreases the likelyhood of them not loading win one way or another)
Of course, a Windows license is around $100, plus any other software costs. Figuring that cost vs the chance that your laptop will first be stolen, then have windows loaded on it by someone wbo doesn't know any better, then be used in such a way as to get back uselful information that can be used to recover it.... well, I don't even generally buy extended warrantees, not sure how this compares value wise, but, its unlikely to be worth it.
Macomber: That is illegal. Kissinger: Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, "The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer." [laughter] But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that.
Was this comment the only evidence that the past was anything but the story of the rule of law being strong and the government restrained in its activities, then I might brush it off, but I see little evidence that this has been anything but the standard MO throughout history.
Law is for the public, and things done in public. Law exists to be applied to the little people, as it is convinenet or profitable to do so.
What has changed is the little people, or at least the ones who care too, are able to see so much more than ever before. Over time, the ability of individuals to store and share information globally has reached a point that secrets are much much harder to keep, and so....when secrets get out we now get to view things that we never got to see before.
As we have seen with the legitimization of indefinite detention and dogged persual of whistle blowers is simply the result of a desire to not change but, to turn back time to a situation where the powerful could act with impunity and public opinion be damned and maliciously manipulated to the ends of those in power.
> if we're talking about a sci-fi movie with FTL-capable ships, a slower-than-light weapon would be > mostly useless
Would it? I think you make some assumptions about FTL drives to say that. Look at Star Trek, yes they had FTL via the warp drive, but, they couldn't do much other than communicate while at warp. In fact, I can think of only one time, off the top of my head, where warp was used during an engagement, in a manuever that involved firing, warping to a second location and then firing again: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Picard_Maneuver
Which tends to indicate that the weapons systems are only useful outside of the actual warp move.
The only people more suprized by the hubub are the mathematicians... who can't imagine why you would care to continue once you prove that a solution exists.
I don't believe statements of fact should be taken as statements of endorsement.
I was pretty pissed recently when my state (recently) ammended its constitution for the first time in several decades to remove voting rights from felons.
Afterall, the ISS can be assumed to be a frictionless point masss, as can any objects up there. The odds of two point masses colliding is so infinitesmially small as it must never happen, and if it was looking likely, you just model all the thrusters as a single force vector on the sphereical evenly distributed point mass.... simple.
Sheesh, engineers always make things so complicated.
1. the act or an instance of conjoining 2. occurrence together in time or space 3. b : a configuration in which two celestial bodies have their least apparent separation
So.... you could say that the paths of an object like the ISS and one of these fist sized bits of junk meeting is.... them occuring at together in time and space; which would make them have the "least apparent separation" (none at all)....and would likely at least partially "conjoin" them (especially if the debris punched through the wall)
Not in the least, in fact, with the way the UK doesn't recognize the right to free speech, and likes putting gobs and gobs of cameras everywhere, it isn't really a place I even want to visit.
Course, these days our government seems to be gaining some of those tendancies too. Hopefully our government wont last as long. It needs a refresh as it is, and its nowhere near as old and crusty as yours.
This is true, but, it wouldn't be illegal if they did it either, in fact, they could likely turn around and make a profit selling that data to the government.
In fact, the general wisdom of those in the know (a while back I had relations with some people who used to move a lot of grass, even used to ship it) is that USPS is actually the safest carrier to use because they are the government.
As such, they are the only package carrier that actually has restrictions on what they can do in terms of searching packages. USPS? FedEx? They are private, constitutional protections don't even apply to them.
The post office, on the other hand, needs a warrant. That said, they do have procedures for calling out suspicious packages, checking them out, calling in the dogs, etc. However, private carriers have no such restrictions (they also handle such a large volume that its more "needle in a haystack".
Of course, this all refers to what is in the package and assumes things like...there are no white powders coming out of the seams or they don't smell like pot or otherwise meet the suspicious package criteria. (hint: Don't put excess tape on the outside, that is exactly how one guy I know did end up getting caught...and its right on their list of things to look for too)
Hair splitting. So instead of sending them to their deaths, they get sent to their prison rapes. Sure they don't die per se, but they don't often get a trial either. May not be political dissidents, but most of them never actually hurt anyone either, they just happened to be brown people who chose to smoke a joint like the white kids do.
So yah, these distinctions are not really that important to me. I definitely put them in the same general category of evil.
Slashdot Mirror
> But the reason people take plea deals all the time is they are guilty
Ok fine, then they should be able to prove that at trial and there should be no need whatsoever in threatening them massive amounts of jail time in order to coerce them into waiving their right to a trial. seems if they really are guilty, then prosecutors should do their job and make a case before a jury.
Yah except, we banned lead in gasoline in the 70s and got the decrease in violence. Are you suggesting a delayed effect that that somehow resulted in a major increase in the murder rate during the 80s (when the crack fueled gang wars started)?
There is a fair amount of drug market (not drug induced) violence, and a lot of it goes unreported. I have been a white middle class pot smoker for almost 2 decades now, and, at times that has meant dealing with people who sell drugs, and even getting to know them. Most of them, are no different from me, except, they don't have a job that can pay for their habbit without bankrupting them - I easily could have been one of them if not for becoming a Unix admin.
In those years, I can't think of many other people I know who have had guns shoved in their faces and been robbed. Several of them have been; they never report it.
- One friend was invited over someones house, being told this guy wanted to try a sample before buying a quantity, while in there his car was broken into and his stash stolen, and when he found out, he was surrounded by 3 big guys suggesting he just leave. (they also took other property of his, including his pool cue)
- Same guy, was robbed at knife point for some pot and money (different perp)
- Another had a gun shoved in his face at his house, and was robbed.
- Yet another just said he had been robbed, didn't give details
- Someone I didn't know but was a friend of friends, was stabbed to death and had pot dumped all over his body (yes, you probably heard about that one in relation to the boston bombings)
So yes, actual violence, or at least the threat of it....and these are just the ones that have come to me within 1-2 degrees of relation, off the top of my head, and ignores a few older ones that I don't remember well enough to really recall.
Of course, not all of it involves violence, After that first incident where my friend was robbed and not so subtly threatened, he tried to restock and keep going, but his upstream dealer wasn't someone he knew well, and decided to rob him too. However, he just did it by saying he should meet a friend of his to make the exchange, and got handed a sealed cardboard shipping box full of marshmellows.
None of these people were even gang members. This is just what happens amongst the white kids. That said, gang violence is still the major type of gun violence in this country (unless you count suicides as gun violence, but I find that very disingenuine)
Yes, Lead is a problem, but, the idea that its still lead or still mostly lead.... I question that.
I hadn't actually thought of it that way, as terrible as the incident would still be, I would be quite amused by the gun debate after a headline "Would be mass shooter dies in hail of bullets; 1 victim; 3 dead from stray gunfire" ...
"I got him"
"No I got him"
"You are all under arrest"
Perhaps because for every dollar generated by the desire to have oxygen masks for firefighters, only a fraction of a penny goes towards the firefighters and equipment, whereas 20 cents goes to the military to buy equipment they don't need and prepare for wars they don't need to fight, and the rest gets split between poorly run social programs and interest on the debt that, no matter how much they get, keeps rising.
Overall, more lives, globally, would be saved by not funding their wars than by equiping the firemen.
So maybe we need to take the hit and not be as protected, so others can actually live.
Funny thing is.... your gun death rates just are not that impressive compared to ours though. Oh yes, what is it 1/2 or 1/3rd? Somewhere around there? 2 in 100 000 to like 6 in 100 000? You do realize that .000002 vs .000006....doesn't seem so big anymore.
Gun violence here, and especially school shootings, is way overblown and sensationalized. Realize that we have 100,000 schools, and that children in school are, by my own back of the envelope calculation from the numbers I looked up, much safer in school in terms of gun deaths than the entire rest of the population.
But hey.... lets compare those directly and individually to smaller countries with working social welfare that don't have a massive gang problem caused by the combination of black markets, poverty, and selective enforcement that has decimated many lower income neighborhoods....total apples to apples.
I am with you man, really. However that isn't it either. Its been going down a lot longer than that. Really.... it was the end of the crack wars in the 90s and the slow diminishing of gang culture that has done it more than anything like that.
Guns, and assault weapons don't create crime. We know that, its pretty fucking obvious. The major source of violent crime for the past couple of generations has been bad drug policy. The policy that created the gangs and gave them valuable markets to fight over.
The drug war did nothing to the addiction rates (check it out, its basically fluctuates around a flat line) yet made addiction more damaging, and put all the money in the hands of the worst people out there.
Guns are a scapegoat issue that is little more than a way to deflect criticism away from policies which have created massive numbers of jobs for police departments and prisons....and driven the real violence problems.
> At least the latter were proven to be sex offenders in court
How is this insightful in a country where 90% of convicts never even get a trial? Most people are not proven anything in court, most people are threatened with so many charges and years in jail that they will plead guilty whether they are actually or not rather than take a chance of ending up behind bars for a significant portion of their life.
As part of gun safety, you are not supposed to ever point a gun, not even an unloaded one, at anyone who isn't a clear and present threat to your life or the lives of others.
When you invade someone elses country you are the threat, so that seems like a basic violation of gun safety right there.
> Unfortunately, it looks like American law started with rights for all and
> is now working its way back up.
Rights for ALL* in America!
* Some restrictions apply, applies to US residents before the signing of the constitution or born here afterwards. Void in the case of membership in native tribes. Must own significant land to qualify. Men only.
Sure my gut tells me the same; but that doesn't mean I think much can be done about it in most situations. The simple fact is you need your employees to do their job, if your information is so valuable to your business, then its even more likely that impeding them getting it is impeding your business.
Security measures are best seen as insurance since they can never pay off in the positive, they can only cost, and hopefully, less than the alternative....and that cost isn't just the cost of doing them once, but the cost of keeping them up every single day and the entire effect of that.
I seriously think a person trying to solve this problem is, most likely, trying to solve the wrong problem, unless perhaps, he is a criminal, or actually has data that is worth more to a criminal than the HR database of names, SSN, addresses, salaries etc.... which is unlikely for anyone asking slashdot.
> Exactly, because all the most altruistically great companies had no data they would like to
> keep from the public and their competitors.
Who said that? The point is that, as a technological problem there is no serious solution set. You can either deny access entirely, or put onorus productivity and morale killing restrictions on access. However, anything you can think up, likely can be somehow defeated.... unless you think you can get away with asking people to strip naked upon their arrival to work and work in the nude while you stand over their shoulder watching and video recording them.... but even then someone will, given enough time and with enough motivation, find a way to trick you.
However, not making your employees feel that they should do it goes a long way to making sure it doesn't happen. I have seen many disgruntled employees, but vanishingly few of them actually turn to releasing secrets or stealing lots of data. (of course, few companies really have much all that worth stealing, despite what they may think.... lots of people think their own pile of shit is solid gold.
Honestly, I think most companies get this right by not spending too much time or resource on it, and instead, focusing on getting the job done. If you really don't want it to happen, your absolute best bet is to cultivate happy employees who feel the company is good to them.
Then, just be sure if you do anything so illegal or so morally objectionable that even good, happy, otherwise loyal employees want to blow the whistle, you keep that really really quiet and away from their eyes.
And if you really have any secrets that are so valuable someone will seriously pay money to steal them, then maybe you want to think of some amount of access control, keeping things on machines off the network, that sort of.... you know...all the normal suggestions that everybody, very smartly, ignores 99.999% of the time.
> you may still end up with bad employees. The question of securing your data shouldn't be about
> good or evil, or any particular moral judgment, but simply about how to make sure you're critical and
> confidential data doesn't end up being ripped off.
Don't let your employees access any data that you don't want them to release. Period.
If you are really that worried, then you can't give them access. If someone has access to the data, and feels it should be released, they will release it, they will find a way, and nothing you do is going to be able to prevent it.
Any measure you take can be defeated, short of not allowing access at all. Store the data on systems that are connected to nothing and require physical access in a secure and monitored location. Make them work under the eye of cameras. Stand over their shoulder while they work.
Seriously, short of that, you are hosed. In the end, don't do things that people will want to release, and you solve the vast majority of the problem. The more controversial your secrets (that is, the more people who see you as evil) the more control you need to prevent it.
So.... don't deserve a Snowden and the chances that you will have one are seriously reduced.
I thought about that but, figured that using the $100 for windows as a yard stick was easier than looking up what the add-on software on top of that costs :)
Course, as someone who runs linux exclusively on his laptops, and only got a windows license to play steam games on his desktop..... I also reserve the right to store my head up my own ass on that issue :)
Nope, thats not what i meant at all. I was assuming that "you" (ie the rightful owner) would not be using unlicensed commercial software to "protect" your laptop. That extra $100 (plus other software) is in terms of cost to the owner of the laptop.
Of course the thief will have no qualms about downloading windows....but will a linux user buy a copy (assuming he doesn't already have it) just on the off chance that the other conditions for it to work are met?
My real point is that, in the real cost/benefit, I am not sure that adding even that $100 to the cost of a laptop is worth it. Remember, if the laptop is never stolen that $100 is wasted. If it is stolen, then it still needs to be used in such a way as to catch the thief or their customer.... the value purchased by that $100 is likely on the low side); and again, this is all before counting in the other software which requires it to work.
You are essentially buying a form of insurance, a very limited one. As such, the cost should be looked at accordingly.
ROTFL I have never heard that one but.... I used to live in a house (condo conversion) where 8 people in two apartments had 6 cars with 1 driveway (worst case, number of both cars and people changed over time). During most of that time, I had the only manual transmission (I find it amusing they are still called "standard" by many).
Generally speaking, nobody could move my car but me. Eventually someone moved in downstairs who could move it, but, for the most part, I had to do it, which meant I couldn't just leave without my car unless I made sure it was all the way in the back.
This is an interesting solution, and may even be the best one for a Linux laptop.
Simple, have windows and computrace on there...run linux. The software does nothing until someone steals it and tries to run or reinstall windows, at which point it activates and starts doing its thing. In the mean time, it doesn't really track you.
The only real problem comes if the thief decides to keep it running linux or some other non-windows flavor (encrypt the whole hard drive with LUKS and that should at least make it useless until they install something on it.... which decreases the likelyhood of them not loading win one way or another)
Of course, a Windows license is around $100, plus any other software costs. Figuring that cost vs the chance that your laptop will first be stolen, then have windows loaded on it by someone wbo doesn't know any better, then be used in such a way as to get back uselful information that can be used to recover it.... well, I don't even generally buy extended warrantees, not sure how this compares value wise, but, its unlikely to be worth it.
"Breaking down" implies that they were, at some point int he past, stronger. This would tend to disagree with the recent leaked document detailing a comment by Henry Kissinger: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/08/wikileaks_dumps_1_7_million_kissinger_cables/
Was this comment the only evidence that the past was anything but the story of the rule of law being strong and the government restrained in its activities, then I might brush it off, but I see little evidence that this has been anything but the standard MO throughout history.
Law is for the public, and things done in public. Law exists to be applied to the little people, as it is convinenet or profitable to do so.
What has changed is the little people, or at least the ones who care too, are able to see so much more than ever before. Over time, the ability of individuals to store and share information globally has reached a point that secrets are much much harder to keep, and so....when secrets get out we now get to view things that we never got to see before.
As we have seen with the legitimization of indefinite detention and dogged persual of whistle blowers is simply the result of a desire to not change but, to turn back time to a situation where the powerful could act with impunity and public opinion be damned and maliciously manipulated to the ends of those in power.
> if we're talking about a sci-fi movie with FTL-capable ships, a slower-than-light weapon would be
> mostly useless
Would it? I think you make some assumptions about FTL drives to say that. Look at Star Trek, yes they had FTL via the warp drive, but, they couldn't do much other than communicate while at warp. In fact, I can think of only one time, off the top of my head, where warp was used during an engagement, in a manuever that involved firing, warping to a second location and then firing again: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Picard_Maneuver
Which tends to indicate that the weapons systems are only useful outside of the actual warp move.
The only people more suprized by the hubub are the mathematicians... who can't imagine why you would care to continue once you prove that a solution exists.
I don't believe statements of fact should be taken as statements of endorsement.
I was pretty pissed recently when my state (recently) ammended its constitution for the first time in several decades to remove voting rights from felons.
Afterall, the ISS can be assumed to be a frictionless point masss, as can any objects up there. The odds of two point masses colliding is so infinitesmially small as it must never happen, and if it was looking likely, you just model all the thrusters as a single force vector on the sphereical evenly distributed point mass.... simple.
Sheesh, engineers always make things so complicated.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conjunction
So.... you could say that the paths of an object like the ISS and one of these fist sized bits of junk meeting is.... them occuring at together in time and space; which would make them have the "least apparent separation" (none at all)....and would likely at least partially "conjoin" them (especially if the debris punched through the wall)
Not in the least, in fact, with the way the UK doesn't recognize the right to free speech, and likes putting gobs and gobs of cameras everywhere, it isn't really a place I even want to visit.
Course, these days our government seems to be gaining some of those tendancies too. Hopefully our government wont last as long. It needs a refresh as it is, and its nowhere near as old and crusty as yours.
This is true, but, it wouldn't be illegal if they did it either, in fact, they could likely turn around and make a profit selling that data to the government.
In fact, the general wisdom of those in the know (a while back I had relations with some people who used to move a lot of grass, even used to ship it) is that USPS is actually the safest carrier to use because they are the government.
As such, they are the only package carrier that actually has restrictions on what they can do in terms of searching packages. USPS? FedEx? They are private, constitutional protections don't even apply to them.
The post office, on the other hand, needs a warrant. That said, they do have procedures for calling out suspicious packages, checking them out, calling in the dogs, etc. However, private carriers have no such restrictions (they also handle such a large volume that its more "needle in a haystack".
Of course, this all refers to what is in the package and assumes things like...there are no white powders coming out of the seams or they don't smell like pot or otherwise meet the suspicious package criteria. (hint: Don't put excess tape on the outside, that is exactly how one guy I know did end up getting caught...and its right on their list of things to look for too)
Hair splitting. So instead of sending them to their deaths, they get sent to their prison rapes. Sure they don't die per se, but they don't often get a trial either. May not be political dissidents, but most of them never actually hurt anyone either, they just happened to be brown people who chose to smoke a joint like the white kids do.
So yah, these distinctions are not really that important to me. I definitely put them in the same general category of evil.