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Comment Administration... (Score 3, Interesting) 89

Hopefully the treatment will be amenable to some sort of relatively 'hands off' dispersal method. Veterinary care as all well and good(and, certainly, if it doesn't work in that environment, it probably doesn't work, so it's an obvious place to do R&D); but cave conditions are difficult enough that you won't make a dent in mortality unless you can 'dust' a cave, or set up aerosol dispersal at a cave entrance, or some other wholesale distribution mechanism. Even something that you have to spray directly on affected animals would be pretty tricky in a lot of these roosting environments.

Comment The made-for-TV-movie... (Score 1) 56

While they are admittedly a staple of low-budget action shlock; it seems that the 'celebrities, politicians, and high level business executives'(none of those midlevel guys, do you know what a kidnapping costs, per kilogram of hostage?) would be the least relevant targets for this flavor of attack.

Fancy prominent people are valuable, strategically relevant, or have deranged and dangerous fans. Such people have merited considerable human effort on the part of assorted attackers more or less since the invention of enough society to be hierarchical.

A cheap, ubiquitous, trivial-to-implement; and quite possibly also legal (no reasonable expectation of privacy, yadda yadda) tracking mechanism doesn't change the game for them, it changes the game for every last Joe and Jane Nobody with some RF widget. As cellphones have demonstrated, enough bluetooth to track nearby bluetooth radios, and enough cellular hardware to report back to the mothership is smaller than a deck of cards, especially if installed somewhere with access to power. It's also cheap, potentially vanishingly so compared to things like billboard/signage space in well traveled areas, or other plausible deployment points.

"The CEO of SomethingDyne Corp has been kidnapped! Can you backtrace his bluetooth?" makes a better B movie; but this tracking technique is far more promising as a cheap, ubiquitous, mass observation mechanism(probably for some bullshit 'audience engagement metrics' thing, not even a proper authoritarian dystopia) than it is for picking off some dude in an armored limo with a couple of those ear-radio guys flanking him.

Comment Re:Blocking access (Score 2) 253

The trick is that you don't need to get perfect results:

It is definitely not the case that you can be perfect results(given that we don't even have an unambiguous definition of what we seek to block, of course it isn't going to work); but even quite primitive filters will hit some stuff. This allows you to tell the Daily Mail readers that Something Is Being Done, just as it ought to.

Next, the real fun begins: various smartass nerds and/or concerned parents will point out instances where your glorious purity filter has failed. What's to be done?

Sort into two categories:

1. Porn site/source has violated some aspect of your broadly worded law and has some operations, persons, or assets in the UK or cooperative jurisdictions. Solution? A nice, soothing, show trial, followed by satisfied preening.

2. For technical, legal, or jurisdictional reasons, no penalty can be applied. Decry the depravity of the situation, where the wicked jeer as the good stand helpless, and announce that New Powers Are Needed. Announce bill to expand powers, decry opponents as pedophiles and enemies of decency, families, and the children.

You just can't lose. Sure, you wont' actually stop all the porn; but who cares?

Comment Re:Truth be told... (Score 5, Insightful) 149

Anonymous coward( 'Bull Fucking Shit', below) is far too strident; but it is the case that there's a curious sort of 'bifurcation' in the 'terrorist' labor market(a confusion we probably contribute to by conflating the various local tribal militias, warlords, strongmen, etc. who cause us trouble during our ground campaigns with the 'terrorists' who are much more international in scope).

On the one hand, as you say, the terrorist grunt supply is heavily drawn from frustrated young men(inconveniently, lots of prime recruiting grounds have demographics that skew fairly young, so there are lots of them), with limited economic prospects, often compounded by a culture where you probably aren't getting laid unless you've achieved enough economic stability to get married. The miscellaneous 'insurgents' who raise hell when you attempt to occupy their home sand trap; but lack international ambitions and/or capabilities are mostly these guys. Some of the lower-skill terrorists proper are as well(particularly for the Israelis, since Gaza's festering-prison-slum atmosphere provides an endless supply of the angry and hopeless; and you don't even need to buy them plane tickets to have them go do a 'martyrdom operation'.

On the other hand, a lot of terrorist leadership, and high-skill recruits(if you want to blow stuff up, it sure helps to have some real engineers and chemists around), are not driven by economic desperation. Bin Laden himself was basically a trust-fund fundamentalist, and a lot of the more influential and logistically important figures are people with decent university degrees, often in marketable subjects, who are financially stable; but alienated by some aspect of the injustice of the world, or disaffected by secularism or the wrong sort of religious practice, exactly which one varying by person.

They come in both flavors.

Comment Re:business of mass-murdering innocent people (Score 5, Interesting) 149

If anything, Al-Qaeda isn't actually in the mass-murder business.

They are a nasty bunch, treat civilian casualties as a feature not a bug, etc.; but they don't have nearly the resources or the direct combat assets; much less specialized infrastructure that must either be carefully hidden or sited in an area where you are the de-facto government, to do 'mass murder'.

They do terrorism: that tends to include a good deal of violence; but calibrated with an eye to maximum psychological impact, attacks on culturally salient targets, that sort of thing. In terms of straight body count, they rank well below more-or-less-strictly-business drug cartels, and even a fair percentage of the 21st century bush wars in countries that aren't interesting enough to even attract a few foreign correspondents; much less the sort of stuff that made the 20th century so notorious.

The numbers get a bit fuzzy because of the various more-and-less-actually-connected 'franchise' operators, some of which were actually collaborators to some reasonably close degree, some of which were little more than unrelated thugs with a taste for trademark infringement; but Al-Qaeda's body count just isn't that big. It's well weighted for psychological punch, lots of Americans in important buildings, fewer peasant conscripts in ethniclashistan; but in absolute numbers? Chickenshit. ISIS and Boko Haram are almost certainly well ahead; and let's not even talk about how quickly the professionals working for established nation states can stack up bodies...

Comment Re:This isn't a question (Score 2) 623

That isn't something gay parents specifically do though. I am a gay man, I have a pretty masculine job (zookeeper) and when I go through the surrogacy process to have kids (hopefully soon) I hope they grow up to like toy guns, action figures, dirt bikes, etc (assuming I have boys)

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