Murderers have rights. Pedophiles have rights. Rapists have rights.
That's right, they do. They have the same rights as the rest of us, including the right to a speedy, fair, trial by jury, and the right to remain silent. What they don't have is the right to murder, molest children, and to rape. I don't know how people don't get that.
I don't see anyone here suggesting otherwise.
You don't find it disturbing that a criminal is our greatest hero of the age, specifically because he's a criminal?
If you mean to say that he is a hero because he committed a criminal act then why don't we all go and worship our heros in prison? No, actually just you asking that question has clarified it in my mind. He is a hero because he sacrificed a comfortable life to reveal the crimes of the NSA and GCHQ.
You think that Ministry of Sound is part of the UK government?
Meybe the Ministry of Truth should spend some tax money on basic education.
Unfortunately the Ministry of Truth gave their education budget to the Ministry of Silly Walks. Can't have too many educated people walking around questioning things.
Sure, it sounds like they did
Not the way I read it, sounds to me like as soon as he had access to their user accounts he had access to all the files in plain text, no metion of breaking encryption anywhere.
And then that's going to be the failure point in your system -- all it takes is one guy who writes his password down, and the whole thing is screwed.
I'm not crypto expert, but let's do a thought experiment.
Let's say that I've got a bunch of people, and 3 levels of security.
So, if we want all of the people (all of whom have the lowest level of security for sake of argument) to have access, we get one of two scenarios. You have a single decryption key they all share, and the first person to accidentally leak it screws it up for everyone. Or, you have to build a crypto system which will allow the same information to be decrypted using multiple decryption keys -- and my first thought is the more different ways you can decrypt the more likely it is that someone can break into it by crafting a key which also works because it's no longer unique.
Same goes the other way
You could try to have a broker which authenticates you, and from there grabs the key it will need to decrypt and then use that
And, you'll probably have corner cases in which generally someone is only allowed the lowest level of access, but for specific things you can get 'read in' on stuff that needs you to escalate your access -- but *only* for that and nothing else. You could also have cases where you have a second group of documents in the "highest access possible" category not accessible to everyone at that level -- say, the OPR at the FBI where you might be investigating the top people and need to keep that secret from them.
I'm sure there's been literally volumes written on this, by people who have far more qualifications than I on the topic. But in general, I think the whole problem of guaranteeing only authorized users can ever access something at a given time is a hard problem. Because the more permutations on what you're trying to do, and the more people involved in it, the more places where there could be gaps.
Any security system will have holes but it would have been a whole lot harder for Snowden to get hold of the information he did if he had to loiter around peoples offices which he probably had no business being in( read plausible excuse) searching below desks for handy post-its, that or find an accomplice that had the correct encrytion codes. So I agree that no system is completely secure, but they certainly can be more secure.
but energy use drives progress and quality/length of life. we need a plan of producing increasing amounts of energy that is carbon neutral and with no lingering waste products (which advanced reactors can do).
All very good points, but wasted energy helps none of these things. Also sustainability is at least if not more important than carbon neutrality, I have a feeling that figures that are produced for carbon neutrality are so manipulated as to be useless IMO.
actually, by the site's own claims 22% of energy is used for lighting, and 8% of the 22% for outdoor lighting.....1.6% is not much to be worried about saving a portion of, sorry.
From a wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption article on energy usage
Energy consumption in the G20 increased by more than 5% in 2010 after a slight decline of 2009. In 2009, world energy consumption decreased for the first time in 30 years, by 1.1%—equivalent to 130 megatonnes (130,000,000 long tons; 140,000,000 short tons) of oil—as a result of the financial and economic crisis, which reduced world GDP by 0.6% in 2009.[11]
So 1.6% of that is 2080000 long tons of oil per year based on 2009 figures, it's almost certain that figure is higher now. Now work out how many power stations it would take to create the equivalent output. Not so insignificant?
Journalists knew the date of d-day. * Several journalists actually joined the troops as far as I know, however, how is these journalists revealing information about the landings comparable to Manning and Snowden? Firstly Manning and Snowden didn't endanger any lives but their own, let alone hundreds of thousands, secondly if the journalists did reveal the landing date in a public newspaper/s how do you think the Germans would have verified that information, given the the level of misinformation that was common in secret communiques at that time and more so in the public press. In short none of your argument makes any sense.
I don't think I am aware of anyone as committed to a secret surveillance state as you are, if you don't already work for the NSA you really should apply.
The problem is: How do you prove that it was an intentional event, as opposed to a malfunctioning of the controls?
Or what if one country hacks into another country's control system and uses one of their satellites as weapon? If the satellite happens to be on the other hemisphere (so there's no danger of accidentally hitting the own country), they don't even need to have control. Just DoS the other country's control, and have the out-of-control satellite burn populated areas at random.
Something like a system whereby the satellite will only transmit when it is within a fraction of a degree of its normal orientation, or a signal constantly transmitted by the base station when it is receiving, a combination of both. That's just off the top of my head while I'm at a party I'm sure the researchers involved have thought about this a lot.
It seems like the fear of weaponisation is whats kept this sort of thing from being explored more fully, up till now of course, but I think that there are logical arguments that prevent this from being an issue. For instance if country 1 put up enough of these things they would be able to supply a large proportion if not all of their countries energy needs creating a significant economic advantage for country 1. Said country then decides to point one elsewhere to burn down a city or military installation in country 2 therefore breaking the International space treaty and probably many others, and the international community forces country 1 to dissasemble their SPS-alpha capability, causing them severe economic dissadvatage.
TLDR using these as weapons makes no economic sense.
Money is the root of all evil, and man needs roots.
