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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:Ducted fans? (Score 1) 81

You don't need "antigravity" (which in all likelihood is impossible). Diamagnetic hoverboards would be possible... if we could make ridiculously powerful, compact halbach arrays in the board. Also you'd need a clever mechanism to detect and deal with flying over ferromagnetic material, or otherwise it's going to smack into your board really hard.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Why libressl is stupid 2

I really want to like libressl. But it pretends to be openssl badly. They refused a patch that would have mitigated this whole RAND_egd problem by simply returning that it doesn't work when someone tries to use it, which means that you commonly need a patch to use it at all. If it's not going to work like openssl, then it shouldn't occupy the same space in the filesystem.

Comment Power to the blamers! (Score 1, Insightful) 295

Power to the blamers! There is far too much power to be garnered from inflaming (occasionally real, but often wholly manufactured) biases.
But things like the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax, global warming, GamerGate, &c have blown the lid off what a bunch of cheap hucksters the Grievance Industrial Complex are.
Go back to hell and stay there, creeps.

Comment Re:32MB? (Score 1) 227

these days, the IoT term has been hijacked to mean 'we mine your personal info along with smart sensors we convince you to buy and install inside your private LAN.'

that's really a bad idea, of course. I'm very into IoT things right now, myself, but NOT cloud-based shit! not for me! MY iot stuff is about device to device and device to small server, ALL staying local and nothing going across to a WAN. nrf24l01, xbee, even esp8266 - all neat wireless protocols. but all meant to stay local, too.

if your iot solution leaks info, you picked some cloud-based thing. DONT DO THAT!

iot != cloud

Comment Re:32MB? (Score 1) 227

likely its the magic 32k number, which happens to be the size of the atmega 328 (arduino classic) chip!

still, 32k is too large for many sensors. attiny chips are now in the 8k range and even that is asking a lot. 4k used to be more typical.

android? HAHAHAHAH! google, you are teh funny. the security nightmare and complexity of android for IoT sensors? wow, I needed a good laugh today.

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