Comment Re:Old tech is good tech (Score 1) 120
Surely the trailing wire back to the exchange was a bigger problem?
Rgds
Damon
Surely the trailing wire back to the exchange was a bigger problem?
Rgds
Damon
So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.
What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?
The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.
From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.
But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.
These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.
If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.
In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.
I used to run a SPARC box with 4MB (yes, mega) as my gateway/firewall machine when I was one of the few ISPs in the UK with (a) a live 'Internet' connection and (b) any sort of firewall.
I called the machine 'lemon' (http://www.exnet.com/NTP/ARC/ARC.html lemon.exnet.com) because it was (as a safety measure) pretty much incapable of running a compiler in that space, but it ran a mail proxy and firewall (http://www.exnet.com/ExFilter/V1.1.3-manual.html which I wrote to make sure I understoof what was going on) just fine.
Rgds
Damon
Like the summary says, nuclear weapons require expensive and hard to obtain raw materials and a significant amount of technology not common in the civilian space. This is the only reason, IMHO, that nuclear proliferation treaties work as well as they do.
On the other hand a single nuke is very powerful and easy to conceal, which is why nuclear proliferation treaties are very tough to enforce.
But no one really cares if you have a dozen autonomous weaponized drones, that's not going to give you a decisive military edge and any more than that you won't be able to conceal.
How does this group expect governments to keep a lid on military tech that relies on ubiquitous technology found throughout the civilian economy?
Make it against international law, people will occasionally violate the law but they'll be only small instances. The real cause for concern is a large scale deployment and arms race which a law can stop.
I'm guessing the vast majority of ad benefits come from impressions rather than clicks.
I don't think I've ever clicked on a movie ad, but I'm sure a lot of my movie choices come from movie ads.
Same thing for other products, the ads annoy you, but when you go to buy something the one you've seen the ad for suddenly looks a whole lot more credible and familiar.
I think the biggest problem is that a two party system completely dumbs down the whole process of government and removes nuance. If you're pro-gun, you pretty much have to be a Republican and if you're pro-gay, you pretty much have to be a Democrat.
Remove the winner-take-all election contents and rather divide districts such that they elect several representatives from each district. This eventually leads to choices that don't exist along party lines and you can find a candidate that more closely represents your views (e.g., pro-gun, pro-gay, anti-abortion, pro-immigration, etc.) that has a reasonable chance at election.
Any changes that make it more difficult for political parties to operate would go a long way towards improving the country. Politicians would have to start voting their own mind, or better yet talking with their electorate, rather than simply falling into line with the party, and there would be less pandering to small, vocal parties that serve as important parts of the political parties' bases.
I think you've got it backwards.
In Canada the parties are far stronger than they are in the US and the individual MPs are almost irrelevant as they're simply expected to vote with their party, yet we seem to have a lot less of this kind of corruption and I don't think it's a coincidence.
Look at the emails, the guy was so compliant partly because he was relying on the MPAA for fund-raising, he's a state level politician dealing with the representative of the US media industry, of course he was playing ball. Just like if he was some individual legislator with a big group threatening to flood his district with money for his opponent, it's really easy for powerful interests to manipulate the government by picking off individual legislators.
If you make the parties stronger then the interests have to deal with the party instead of the legislator, and the parties are strong enough (and often incentivized) to tell the powerful interests to screw off.
... maybe he'd suggest politicians be subject to greater financial transparency, and maybe be banned for a certain time from taking jobs in certain industries whose legislation they worked on as a politician.
This is how it's meant to work in the UK, but the body responsible for vetting jobs once leaving office seems never to say "no", and that's according to at least Private Eye and some private conversations!
Rgds
Damon
With your bare hands?!?
