That's not necessarily the case. You're assuming that with more people, everyone has to get a smaller slice of the pie. But the size of the pie isn't fixed. People willing to uproot themselves and their families to go halfway around the world tend to be motivated and they tend to be risk-takers. That means they start businesses at a much higher rate than native-born Americans. A recent study found that immigrants are 13% of the population, but 18% of the small business owners. They employed $4.7 million people in 2007. Some of the companies founded by immigrants become big companies as well... Sergei Brin, who was born in the USSR, founded this thing called Google you may have heard of. Immigrants are innovators as well- think of Tesla, Einstein, von Braun. So when you recruit the best and brightest the world has to offer, the technologies and companies these people found will make the economy stronger, and that will increase the number and quality of jobs.

Perhaps. But before people go blaming Congress for all the problems with government, consider that congressmen, for the most part, are just doing whatever it takes to get re-elected. The Tea Partiers, for example, were elected on the promise that they wouldn't compromise, wouldn't work with the other side, and wouldn't let the Democrats and Obama ever accomplish anything. And they've lived up to those promises.

The American people are as much to blame as anyone. We constantly demonize the other side and our politics are increasingly polarized, we have special TV programs and web sites that reflect our own biased worldview back at us, and we elect people based on this worldview. Then we act surprised and disappointed when the people we elect can't ever get any legislation passed.

Wonderful. Thank you, Slashdot, for posting an article glorifying this human piece of garbage. I suppose this is supposed to make us forget that Putin has jailed his critics, restricted the press, and rigged the electoral system to guarantee his victory? The man is nothing more than a bully, and these antics just show what a small, pathetic person he really is. The outlandish antics- tiger hunting, shooting whales, bare-chested horseback riding... he's doing it for the same reason as the guy who buys the really expensive, shiny, loud red pickup. He's compensating for deep insecurities. In his heart, he's nothing but a coward. If he weren't, he wouldn't have to spend all his time desperately trying to prove that he's such a badass. A real leader wouldn't spend all his time glorifying himself. And a real man wouldn't be so terrified by a bunch of girls in a punk band that he'd have to send them to prison for standing up to him.

There's a reason why the same people who deny science also buy into the particular right-wing brand of free-market economics promoted by the Republican Party and libertarians, and the reason is that it's just another form of pseudoscience. It's part of a pattern of thinking (or lack of thinking, to be more accurate) that we see on the right, where people refuse to acknowledge basic realities that don't fit their worldview.

Republicans argue that they can somehow manage to balance the budget. Yet they advocate more tax cuts for the rich, they've signed a pledge that they won't raise taxes, and they won't identify the spending cuts they'll make to bring it all in line. To top it all off, they want to increase military spending. At the end of the day, it somehow has to all add up, and it doesn't. They're denying the basic principles of arithmetic.

Meanwhile the libertarians argue that they can somehow create an economic utopia by unleashing a sociopathic social order in which corporations are free to do whatever they want without oversight by the government. But we've seen what happens without a strong government, and the result is Somalia. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. A strong economy and thriving corporations require a government to provide infrastructure, security, and the rule of law. And we've seen what happens when corporations are allowed to do whatever they want; the result is disasters like the 2008 financial meltdown perpetrated by Wall Street speculators. Their entire premise is that we can just ignore political and economic realities and build a better world by following ideas from a series of poorly written economic fantasy novels.

Healthy political discourse requires disagreement and different views. But one end of the political spectrum just seems to have taken a break from reason. It's not just that they're rejecting science, they have an increasingly shaky hold on reality.

There's no "likely" about it. We know exactly where the C02 increase is coming from. Every year humans pull millions of barrels of oil out of the ground, billions of tons of coal, and trillions of cubic meters of natural gas. Then we burn them, and that releases carbon dioxide. Using the word "likely" implies that there's actually some uncertainty here or reasonable doubt. There are legitimate areas of debate (exactly how much it warm? how fast? what are the costs and benefits of various policies?) but when you question high-school chemistry and mathematics, you're engaging in precisely the kind of pseudoscience that the article is talking about. Implying that it's "likely" that human have added C02 suggests that it's likely humans haven't added C02. Which is an exercise in irrational, paranoid, conspiracy-theory type thinking. It's like saying that it's "likely" that NASA did put a man on the moon instead of staging the Apollo landings, or "likely" that the earth is round, or likely the North Pole is in the North and the South Pole is in the South, or "likely" that the government isn't secretly run by a cabal of powerful warlocks.

We should demand that the U.S. behave in an ethical fashion, but I'm not sure what is supposed to be unethical about Stuxnet or Flame. The Iranians have secretly launched a program that will allow them to enrich uranium to weapons grade. Since Iran is swimming in oil and natural gas, this is a pretty clear signal that the regime wants to build a nuclear bomb, or at the very least, they want that option on the table. Rather than bomb the facility, and putting American pilots and Iranian civilians at risk, the U.S. and the Israelis blew up their centrifuges with a virus. That's a hell of a lot more humane than dropping bunker-busters from a B-2. As for Flame, it spies on people... and yeah, espionage is sort of a dirty business, but it's always been that way, long before the internet. I don't see how spying digitally makes it any more unethical than planting a bug in their office. There are weapons that are by their nature unethical- nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, which are indiscriminant and cause a lot of suffering. But cyberwarfare isn't like that, it's capable of being extremely targeted and can neutralize a target without any loss of life or suffering.

Richard Clarke writes about this in his book Cyber War, and it's actually a pretty insightful take on the situation. His argument is that there's no point in some kind of blanket treaty against cyberwarfare. But, he argues, it makes sense to have policy and treaties that prohibit certain kinds of cyberwarfare. He argued that the banking system should be off limits. Civilian targets should be off limits. Attacking power grids and other infrastructure should be off limits, unless you'd already entered into a shooting war. So far, the U.S. appears to have restrained from these sort of attacks. You can't really say the same thing about certain other countries. North Korea has been involved in attacks against banks; Russia has attacked civilian sites, and China has supposedly spent years planting logic bombs that would allow them to turn off the lights in the U.S.

I think this view makes a lot of sense. Talking about banning cyberwarfare is sort of like looking at the Wright Brother's plane and saying that we should ban the use in aircraft in war because civilians might be targeted. First off, it's a legitimate tool of war. Second of all, it's gives you a tremendous military advantage, so it's going to happen, the only question is how. As a good rule of thumb, I think you could argue that if you'd be justified in dropping a bomb on a target, you're certainly justified in taking it out with a piece of code. Likewise, if it's not okay to bomb it, it's not okay to take it out with a logic bomb.

That's not even remotely close to being true- countries have been launching cyberattacks a long time before Stuxnet was discovered. Russia launched cyberattacks against Estonia in 2007 and then against Georgia in 2008 during the war over South Ossetia. North Korea allegedly launched a massive attack on U.S. government sites in 2009. In 2007, the Israelis used a cyberattack to disable Syria's air defenses so they could bomb the Syrian nuclear program. And China's supposedly been planting logic bombs and backdoors that would, in the event of a war, allow them to take down U.S. infrastructure. Cyberwarfare was happening long before Stuxnet became known in 2010.

Most of the stuff Manning revealed didn't provide any evidence of wrongdoing, so he's not protected as a whistleblower. The "collateral murder" video, for instance. A reporter was wandering through an active war zone in the company of insurgents armed with RPGs and AK-47s, and Apache gunship pilots mistook him for an insurgent when he aimed his telephoto lens at them. So they opened fire. It's a horrific tragedy, and a reminder of the costs of war, but it's not criminal. The Apache pilots followed the rules of engagement. Similarly, revealing private, non-criminal communications by diplomats is not protected by whistleblowing laws.

So the fact that there's not a shred of evidence to support any the stuff you're saying proves that there is a huge conspiracy. Because otherwise, there's no way to explain why there isn't anything on the internet to back up what you're saying.

In other words, you're just pulling this stuff out of your ass.

Thank you, Anonymous Coward, for managing to Godwin the entire discussion. But perhaps we can all agree that whether or not Barack Obama is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, the United States does some pretty bad stuff, and needs to be held accountable. The question is, do we need Wikileaks, or something like it?

Let's take a moment and consider abuses concealed by the U.S. government by the past ten years. I would nominate Abu Ghraib, the CIA black prisons, and the domestic eavesdropping program as the three worst scandals, in the sense of concealed abuses (as opposed to, say, the Iraq War, which was an abuse of power conducted in full view of everyone). In each case, the scandals were broken by traditional news media. Abu Ghraib, for instance, was broken by Seymour Hersh writing in the New Yorker. Old media seems to be doing pretty well in exposing the government. To the point, I would argue, that if you're a regular reader of the New York Times, you have a pretty good idea of what your government is up to. The diplomatic cables only confirmed this, I'd argue. When the lid was taken off the whole thing, it worked pretty much the way it we thought it did.

Traditional media establishments do a decent job of keeping us informed about our government's failures, if we care to be informed about them (many people don't but that's another issue). This seems to be true of western democracies as a whole. Democracies already have mechanisms for collecting leaks (reporters) and distributing the information (newspapers, TV news, websites). Where Wikileaks- or an organization like Wikileaks- could really do a lot of good is in areas where traditional media aren't able to operate freely. That would include places like China, Russia, parts of Africa and much of the Middle East. Whether WikiLeaks is the best way to do this is arguable. Assange and his notoriety are both the organization's biggest asset, and it's biggest liability.

My impression is that it doesn't have good stability. Stability refers to the tendency of an aircraft to correct deviations in its flight path. An aircraft has inherent stability in three axes- pitch, yaw, and roll. Pitch refers to the nose pitching up and down, yaw refers to the nose yawing left and right, and roll is rolling about the long axis. So if a gust of wind rolls one wing up, the plane will automatically compensate and level out-without any action on the part of the pilot. This machine seems to perhaps have decent pitch and yaw stability, but roll stability seems to be pretty minimal. You can watch the machine slowly rolling in the movie; it's presumably the result of having a high center of gravity, like a man standing in a canoe.

As far as I can tell, the machine isn't actually stable, instead the pilot continually makes small adjustments to keep the machine flying level. According to the article, "Aerofex's new proof-of-concept craft keeps itself stable by responding to a human rider's natural sense of balance" and "The company has apparently rectified the issue with the addition of knee-level "control bars" on either side of the vehicle that make the vehicle more responsive to the pilot's movements." So from the video and the article it would seem that they haven't made the machine stable, they've made it controllable, and given the pilot the ability to continually make small adjustments to keep it level. If he gets distracted, of course...

It's important science, but even if the telescope works without a hitch and everything goes according to plan, the Webb Space Telescope represents a real failure on the part of NASA administration. According to Wikipedia, the telescope was originally supposed to launch in 2007 for a cost of $500 million; then 2007-2008 for a cost of $1 billion, then 2009 for $1.8 billion, now it's 2018 and 8.7 billion. The Curiosity rover has also had major problems, being two years behind schedule and $1.5 billion over budget.

I support the work NASA does, and I think that we should support projects like the Webb telescope and Curiosity. But it's pretty clear that the current management at NASA is incompetent when we have this situation of projects continually coming in late and massively over budget. The guys in the blue shirts we saw working mission control are doing a great job, but their leadership is failing them. It seems to me that if we could figure out how to reform NASA, reward success and have accountability for failures, we might be able to save money and get more science done at the same time- although I'm not terribly optimistic about that.

Sounds like all the Thinkpads and most of the Apple lappies I've had over the years. The stickers are a bit different...mostly either political, Anime/Manga or F/OSS related. But yeah, not a business look, more "geek in the house" look. My new Lenovo Ideapad is still virgin...for now. But it will look like "Ms. Geek's current lappie" soon enough. X60T was a really nice machine.

Nobody's going to dispute that the military has produced some major technological breakthroughs. A lot of the early efforts in computing were military cryptographic efforts, the military played a critical role in developing navigational technologies like radar and later GPS, and of course, DARPA brought us the internet.

But there are a couple of things to keep in mind here. First, I'd argue it's pretty hard *not* to have one or two major technological breakthroughs when you're spending $700 billion per year. The question isn't whether the military produces major technological advances, the question is whether it would be more cost-effective to fund pure research, rather than hope that pissing away trillions in Iraq and Afghanistan somehow nets us an innovative technology. If your goal is research ,distributing $700 billion to civilians to do blue-sky research and R&D would probably create a lot more of that.

Second, while the military may have driven civilian technology in the past, that seems to be less true today. These days, we see the military increasingly using civilian technology- hooking together PlayStation processors to create a supercomputer, using Xbox controllers to pilot predator drones, using iPods as ballistics computers for sniper rifles... that kind of thing. More and more, we see that the military is leapfrogging on civilian technology, not the other way around. So even if funding the military may have produced innovation in the past, that seems less true today.

That all depends on his role. Stealing the cables is illegal, but publishing them isn't. That, in short, is why Bradley Manning is in jail, and the editor of the New York Times is not. The question is, which role did Assange play?

If Bradley Manning planned the theft of the cables himself and then handed it off to Wikileaks, Assange is in the clear, just like the New York Times. But if Assange and Manning had a dialogue, and Assange guided or helped Manning in any way, Assange is guilty of espionage.

I think that if the U.S. had a strong case, Assange wouldn't be hanging out in the Ecuadorian embassy, instead the British would have rounded him up and sent him off the the U.S. for trial a long time ago. But Assange isn't stupid or complacent, he's smart and paranoid. So he did one of two things. Either (a) he helped Manning, but he did so in a way that was completely untraceable, or (b) he was smart about it, and said "whoa, hey dude, happy to help distribute this stuff but I'm not going to be involved in stealing anything."

I'd bet that Assange kept his hands clean. He's expecting the U.S. to come after him, and so if someone approaches him about the possibility of stealing American intelligence, he'll suspect a trap. Even once he's satisfied that it's not a trap, he'd see the risks posed by direct involvement. Another thing to keep in mind is that the U.S. has been leaning on Manning for a long time. You can bet the interrogators and prosecutors have told him that if he implicates Assange, they can get him a better deal. So Manning has told them Assange isn't involved- and either he's steel-willed and won't break, or he's being honest. Either way, the U.S. is screwed.