Management failed to prevent "programmers" from having access to production systems. Developers will break things all the time in the course of development, which is why you don't have them working on your actual production system.

Unless they meant a system administrator or a data entry clerk with access to delete existing records was a "programmer", which is just as likely given the usual level of government understanding of IT.

Depends on the actual harm. I doubt your story of how you told the 7-11 to go fuck themselves once you got into C-M is going to get much sympathy in court. That just sounds like you burned bridges unnecessarily. Besides, there are tons of shit jobs out there, as long as you don't want to make a career out of them.

As the article said, however, if you were accepted elsewhere prestigious and declined their offer, and now you had no place to go in the fall, that's something that represents real harm. In that case, you have to accept either waiting a semester or a whole year to reapply to the other school, or you have to accept going to a less prestigious school, which would have longer term effects.

You could then additionally argue (without mentioning any burned bridges) that a year of waiting to try again (and possibly failing the second time around) would represent a hardship financially as well, but that is less persuasive because going to grad school costs money, it doesn't make you money. You could get TA jobs and grad living arrangements, of course, but it's not like being a grad student is actually more lucrative in the short term than being a pizza delivery person who lives with their parents for another year.

If you want to make 80K a year in CS or IT in general, you don't have to graduate from C-M to do it.

If you want to work at Google or someplace like that, it may be somewhat more helpful.

You forgot the r-word.

Radiation.

Perhaps once they got there, they could burrow underground... maybe... but on their year long trip there they will be bombarded with solar radiation of the type that you need a magnetic field and an ozone layer to deal with.

The level of shielding they would need to protect themselves from all that would be significant. And heavy.

Because Space Suicide Pact! It's News!

Seriously, I would like to go to Mars myself, but only as a tourist. I've seen pictures of the place and know what the environment is supposed to be like. Its like living in red Death Valley, only without the cheery warmth. With extra radiation.

Did I mention, it's red *every where*?

So, yeah, not where I want to strand myself for the remainder of my brief existence.

In the sense that a virtual reality that you can enter and exit any time you like is not going to be the same, I agree. Indeed, having to actually live with the experience, as opposed to temporarily subjecting yourself to it is the real issue.

That said, anything that allows non-schizophrenic people to experience the same sort of inputs will be useful towards understanding.

Gitmo isn't a secret prison. That's not where they send the people who they really want to keep hidden. The real point of Gitmo is storage of people who they don't want to give a civilian trial to, not secret incarceration.

Those secret prisoners that we have are likely located in places where the media and general population aren't talking about.

The usual problem with Security or Operations doing their job right... having no failures makes evaluating the effectiveness of the controls a much more complex concept.

AQ hasn't had a big attack inside the US in the last few years. Why?

Is it:

a) because they are internally disorganized aside from any external cause
b) the invasion of Afghanistan disordered them
c) easy sources of money dried up once banks and muslim charities started coming under hard scrutiny
d) more and/or better visa checks or no-fly lists prevented intrusions
e) the NSA and other intel is watching much more closely and using their powers to identify threats
f) something entirely different

Or some or all of the above?

I think it is safe to say that the US government has had at least a little something to do with avoiding another attack, but what data can we collect and what methodology do we use to assess that?

It comes down to risk assessment. What vectors for attack are most likely, what is their impact, and how can they be controlled?

On one hand, the risk to individuals is very small from terrorism. Assuming a population who internalizes just how unlikely a terrorist attack is, then you may be able to just simply go back to pre-2001 security levels with some minor modifications. Is a one in a million chance worth a real degradation of privacy? I'd say no.

The problem is that humans have poor risk assessment skills. We often focus on what is possible, rather than what is probable. That's why you'll have people scared shitless of being messily killed by a random bomb, while they drive into work everyday on crowded freeways where a fatal accident is much, much more likely than any attack. And they talk on their cellphone without a care, thus adding to their risk of death or dismemberment.

The media is also a problem, because they play on the novelty of terrorism to get eyes on their sites, and by providing insight into the effects of terrorism, without hammering home how unlikely it is to affect you, they actually make international terrorism effective. I'd argue that if you want to severely decrease the effectiveness of international terrorism, you just implement censorship on the media, preventing them from reporting on low probability events like terrorism (or school shootings for that matter). While I am not against a free press, we need to accept that it is a vector of attack which doesn't always help us.

Is the NSA overreaching, or are they the only reason that we're safe? I don't actually know, and I don't know that most people have any real way of knowing because there's no data and it is hard to interpret. So, instead, we whipsaw back and forth based on our emotions and the level of inconvenience that it exposes us to at any one time.

There is a potentially important difference. Although admittedly, it is mostly a matter of definitions between the two fictional concepts.

"Sufficiently advanced science" would work according to certain principles firmly rooted in natural laws and logic and would presumably be accessible to humans (and any other sentient based on those laws) at a sufficient technological level.

"Magic", such as that produced by deities presumed to be outside the Universe, may be empowered by forces that humans or other denizens of this universe, have no control over nor any access to.

If Asgardians are merely super-powered denizens of the normal Universe, but still fully subordinate to all its physical laws, then yes, their power might be copied eventually.

If they are the local projections of beings from outside the Universe or of beings who span multiple universes, then they may be able to affect the Universe in a way that cannot be duplicated by those of us who are completely of this universe. In that case, full control of the universe from the inside still doesn't necessarily grant the same powers as an Asgardian.

In that case, you could redefine "magic" as "power inaccessible to humanity", and suggest that there might be some way to incorporate that into human knowledge, but since there is no direct path for humans to "uplift" themselves to that level, "magic" would simply be power that is only accessible to humans via an intermediary who exists in a sufficient reality to do so. That sounds a lot like our normal concept of deities, miracles, and praying for intercession.

Western European law from medieval times all the way to the Napoleonic code has been based, in part, on Roman law concepts based on the Emperor Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis. Since Western Europe isn't exactly made up of third world countries, I'd take issue with your assertion.

Both Roman civil law and English common law have their strengths and weaknesses, but both are systems that have been used successfully for centuries which suggests that they are hardly a root cause of civilization decay.

Bitcoin is not really completely anonymous, but it is portable, and criminals need to move millions of dollars around. With bank regulators in the West being more on top of laundering, criminals want to send their money to countries that are still soft on laundering. To do that, cash is extremely inconvenient. Bitcoin, as long as it is a feasible store of wealth which can be exchanged for currency, is perfect for moving millions out of the US to somewhere where the criminals can cash in.

And so what if a trail has some drug deals on it? Every dollar bill in the US over a certain age has probably been passed in a drug deal at one point or another....

Exactly. Just like if you were to form your own personal army in the US and use it to invade Mexico, since you totally don't represent the US, you'd allowed to do that. Also, no one would ever think that the US government has any responsibility, nor any legal right to stop you from engaging in a private act of war.

Oh wait....

Invading the sovereign airspace of another country that clearly does not want you is in no way legal, and could be interpreted as an act of espionage at the very least. It doesn't matter if it is a private endeavor. Even if private enterprises like that were legal to execute, that doesn't prevent the North Koreans from interpreting it as a stunt that had the backing of the US government and presenting that as a cause for more misbehavior.

I entirely agree with you, especially if the US is going to do what it did before. Which is to say, we started a fight, but we ran when it took too long to finish and didn't finish the job. Or we didn't even really have a plan to finish the job to begin with and then just started exploring exit strategies.

Either way, enter ISIS.

Could we apply force to end ISIS and not make the job worse? It is probably possible to do, but I don't get the idea that we're being anything but reactive. If all we do is react to ISIS, then yes, they are pulling our strings.

I do think the US could have a military role to play, but we need a plan and we need the people at home to understand why this is important. Simply being outraged by some killings isn't going to sustain the sort of commitment we need to make this work.

Lasers have over the horizon issues as they can't use ballistic trajectories. You aren't going to take out another ship at 100 miles with a laser, even aside from the thermal blooming issues which would start sapping the energy of the beam at that range in atmosphere.

Lasers work better against ballistic missiles or airplanes because they are much farther above the horizon and can be targeted without worrying about the curvature of the Earth. Even then, they are still more of a defensive weapon under those conditions.

For long range naval gunfire, it's going to be something like a rail gun that would fire projectiles that can follow a curved ballistic path. That or we just use more advanced missiles.

That said, at ranges that you might get small attack craft, a laser might be useful for ship-to-ship, but so would a .50 cal. and it's probably a lot easier to mount a bunch of those than a directed energy weapon at today's tech level.

Let me settle this once and for all.

"The word gerrymander (originally written Gerry-mander) was used for the first time in the Boston Gazette on 26 March 1812. The word was created in reaction to a redrawing of Massachusetts state senate election districts under the then-governor Elbridge Gerry (pronounced /ri/; 1744–1814). In 1812, Governor Gerry signed a bill that redistricted Massachusetts to benefit his Democratic-Republican Party."

Democratic-Republican. While, yes, the party being spoken of is different than either of today's parties, I find the naming to be meaningful. It's not the Democrats or the Republicans or the Federalists or the Whigs who are responsible for it. It's all of them.

One party blaming situations on gerrymandering is like pissing into the wind. Yes, they can't win elections because the other party gerrymandered. Of course, they both have done it when they had the power to do it, and will do it themselves again when the power comes back to them.

Nevertheless, things do change in the US, just like everywhere else, but that only really happens when you actually give people a choice of what they can vote for, as opposed to two sides of the same coin, only with one or two hot-button items to make it seem like they are different.