Not necessarily. Following 9/11, the U.S. began two major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the Bush administration. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. has withdrawn from Iraq, wound down operations in Afghanistan, and begun to reduce the size of the army. As a result there is going to be a lot of equipment that simply isn't needed anymore; if we're not longer engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq for example, we don't need all those MRAP vehicles anymore. So what do you do with all this crap? One solution is to give it to the local police, but as we seen if you arm them with the tools of an occupying military force, they start acting like one. Another would be to give it to the Iraqis and Afghans or whatever regime we're trying to prop up this week... but as we've seen in Iraq, these weapons have a way of changing hands and now we've got ISIS militants armed with M-16s and driving humvees.

It seems logical to try to find a use for all this material but arguably giving people weaponry tends to fuel conflict. We saw something similar happen after the end of the Cold War. The USSR and Warsaw Pact countries produced millions of AK-47s with the idea that they could hand them out to peasants in case they ever got in a fight with NATO. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, you had all these extra guns nobody needed. Enterprising people figured you could make a lot of money flying them into conflict zones in places like Africa, fueling civil wars and militias.

Eisenhower said that war was humanity hanging on a cross of iron- that "every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." But its worse than that- those billions of dollars spent after 9/11 in the name of defending our freedoms are not just stolen from the American people, but are now being used to oppress them and spy on them.

I find it absolutely hilarious the way everyone disparages Chinese manufacturing while 95% of all electronics, clothing, and gadgetry is made in China or other asian countries.

Scariest of all are the ill-informed masses who think that IBM, HP, Dell, etc. actually make any of their own parts any more. They're US companies in name only.

Wake up. Globalization has already happened.

I have one word for you: Godzilla.

Of course. Perfectly simple. Perfectly simple to secure a 10,000 gallon tank of diesel oil in the face of a 20 foot high cascade of water and debris capable of knocking entire buildings off their foundations. And that after a magnitude 9 earthquake. Totally simple.

Surprised I am to find that wee bits of assorted chemicals were dumped into the environment after the disaster. Most surprised.

No brainer, indeed.

He thinks Slashdot uses BBcode.

Chip and PIN cards don't work at most U.S. retailers today, but as of October 2015 the Payment Card Industry has scheduled a change to the contracts to in what is being called the "liability shift". It means that whoever has the least security in the payment chain will be held liable for non-payment or fraud for the charges incurred. So if Home Depot doesn't accept a chip card, and your bank's card has a chip on it, then Home Depot will be liable because their system is the least secure. Or if Home Depot's systems are able to accept the chip cards, but your bank's card doesn't have a chip, then your bank will be liable. This penalty is a huge financial incentive for both retailers and banks to upgrade the security of their systems to fully support Chip and PIN by that date so they don't get left holding the bag.

Once Chip and PIN systems are deployed to most places, they will begin requiring the removal of mag stripes. That's when the final pieces of security will kick in, and account number theft will be essentially eliminated.

It's Obama's fault.

I think: "File Not Found".

Bad linky...

They don't have to block SSL, they just have to MITM the connection if they need to analyse or log the traffic. IPS and DLP devices that can do this for all the major protocols have been available to professional sysadmins for some time. If you access the Internet from a company device at an organisation that is either very large or working in a particularly sensitive field, there is a good chance your traffic is already being processed in this way.

If you want some communications to be private from your employer, use your own device, not a company-administered one. It's really as simple as that these days.

And this is what's wrong with our countries today. People all over the world fight and die for the right to hear and see news other than the officially approved ones, but we can't be assed to spend 10 minutes of our time to actually execute that right.

Maybe we'll only start to miss it once it's gone.

What chemicals spilled, other than all the radioactive water?

And since when have people not been interested in the effects of chemical spills, genetic or otherwise?

That works for my university. It's different when you're dependent on the students 'cause they're essentially your customers, not your pupils...

Bah, you're making the radical assumption that scientists have a clue about the things they study.

True. For businesses, you have to turn to IBM and Lotus Notes to get your walled garden.

They did. They failed not because they were gated and walled, but because they didn't offer what people wanted.