No what I was saying is the "terrorists we are used to" are generally fools the FBI setup to make headlines to justify their overhyped jobs. My particular favorite is the dude they approached asking if he could get a shoulder fired missile.

Over the months they watched him, he stalled and bumbled and utterly failed to do anything of note, except be told by contacts he had from previous legal buisiness that he couldn't get one. The entire time the only thing he did on his own was download a sales brochure off the internet to show them. Seriously....

they handed him contacts, they handed him fake papers, they handed him the missile itself..

What are they protecting us from exactly when they have to create the terrorists before they can find them? Its a bullshit jobs program from the TSA to the FBI.

But wouldn't such a determination be based on the specific facts and timelines, which, the court should be quite capable of determining without the help of advantageous timing by prosecutors to avoid their pervue....I mean I would think....or do you think the courts incompetent to make such a determination, hence we need this sort of secrecy?

I always see that, sometimes even on systems I co-administer and its like....really? YOu don't even change the fucking alias so someone can't just go "gee I wonder if phpmyadmin is installed?" and go to the fucking default URL.

I know its convinent as fuck but this is bad practice in production even if you are not running a multimillion dollar black market operation. If you are dumb enough to expose that to the internet, at least expose it with a URL you chose ffs.

Not only are most "secret question" answers easily guessable for anyone you know well, it's also a security risk not unlike reusing the same password on multiple sites.

If I sign up at banks A and B and provide truthful answers to security questions, then any employee of bank A can authenticate /as me/ to bank B, and the reverse as well, on top of anyone that knows me well who could likely pull it off with both banks.

I store secret questions picked and that sites answers along with the rest in my password manager.

If I ever expect to possibly one day maybe need it for say phone verification, I'll put 3-5 seconds of thought into what in-context would be the most off-topic, shocking, and hilarious answers possible that can be spoken over the phone.
Otherwise nonsensical random words are used just like you did.

aka, when signing up for a bank loan, perhaps:
Q: What is the name of the first street you lived on?
A: The corner of blackjack rd and slot-machine ave, next to "i don't have a problem" park.

This is why there should be no deadline and no last appeal. There should always be room for new evidence, especially evidence of official misconduct.

Because they hadn't been grooming the suspects and didn't help them obtain driver's licenses; which means these people were at least competent enough to acquire a car and fuel on their own.... so its unlikely to be terrorism in the sense we have become accustomed to in the past decade or so.

No its pretty easy, they were in disguise trying to pass a bad guys checkpoint....

Exactly, we don't want to be associated with torture, that stuff has to be kept quiet. It is no longer socially acceptable to openly torture.

Then they should be issued to the public who can't seem to stop shitting themselves every time there is an incident. Frankly I think planes are victims of their own success, so safe that crashes are too unusual and people can't handle it makes them freak out more.

Fact is when this happens it is major international news. That right there tells you something. This is not even worth the time we have spent talking about it, never mind wasting time playing musical chairs every time someone has to take a piss.

Considering that nuclear power is the safest form of power the world has ever known, I'd say it's worthy of recognition for offsetting carbon more than anything else. To borrow a phrase, "It's the energy density, stupid."

There's a reason why China has 30 nuclear plants under construction, while the US just approved its first new plant in 30 years.

That isn't a rumor. I was there, and yes, people did burst into song. I've never worked for a more hated CEO. She sure as Hell isn't getting my vote for anything.

- Necron69

That's why I said "or a replacement". At the least, the ISS can serve as a construction shack while assembling that replacement, and as a source of parts and refined/processed raw materials to expand it's replacement. It's replacement may not even ever be truly separate, it may start as new modules attached to the ISS and once those new modules have enough space the original ISS modules would be disconnected and cannibalized.

And the ISS will help how, exactly? The entire ISS came from the Earth's surface. Unless you have a really fancy plan to do asteroid/lunar mining, that's where all future materials will ultimately come from too.

Yep, it did. And yep, we will need asteroid or lunar mining of some sort to get raw materials. Like I said, we can't sustain orbital manufacturing and construction while lifting the majority of the materials and supplies from the surface, which means we'd better stop dismissing lunar and asteroid mining and such as sci-fi dreams and start figuring out how to make them work. As far as the ISS, it helps because it's there. A city doesn't just appear full-blown, and neither does orbital infrastructure. The ISS is a structure already in orbit you can expand to house more people, so that your workforce for the next step can have a place to stay in orbit rather than commuting to and from the surface all the time. It may be in low orbit, but the biggest fuel cost and the biggest constraints on weight and size aren't in getting from low orbit to high orbit, they're in getting from the surface to low orbit. And ultimately it'll end up being recycled into raw materials or basic parts for something else once it's no longer needed (for instance if the solar panels are still in working order they can be disconnected and attached to something else that needs more power capacity).

No, it's not going to be easy or simple. Colonizing North America wasn't easy or simple either, but we did it. And as for Star Trek having ruined a generation's sanity, all it did was encourage them to set a goal and then figure out how to go about getting there. Though I'll admit that attitude does seem kind of insane to the couch potatoes. Not really my problem though, my entire career my motto's been "They don't pay me to not get the job done." and the older I get the less reason I see to change it.

If the US wants to go to Mars for more than a single short mission, it's going to need the ISS or a replacement. We'll need to be able to build ships in orbit so they aren't limited by the constraints of the first hundred or so miles of the trip (lifting the ship up from the surface to Earth orbit), that's the only way we'll be able to build them large enough for the crew, supplies and equipment needed for a mission of more than a week or two. And if we want this to be a sustained thing, sending more than a couple-three missions, we're going to need to be able to build ships without shipping the majority of their components up from surface.

We can already see the parallels from large historical construction projects in the US. For Hoover Dam they didn't ship the concrete in from the nearest cities and they didn't have the workers commuting between the dam site and those cities. They set up the cement plant on-site to make the concrete from local materials and a town sprang up at the site to house and supply the workforce. For resources (silver, gold, timber, cattle, oil, etc.) it's worked the same way, people moved to where they were needed and the facilities and infrastructure to house, support and feed those people grew with the population. Because frankly you just can't run an oil field in Texas with all your workers and suppliers back in New Orleans.

...but they get our shit to space.