lightknight

We seem to have created many of the problems that we now need the Defense industry to bail us out of.

How does owning a gun provide protection against meteors? It doesn't; the question itself is invalid.

If you think the US military will deploy against even one million Americans on American ground, for the sake of shredding the US Constitution, well...you may as well believe orange is violet.

The US military has already said, as have the multitudes of its members under its control, that it will not be marching on the US civilian population. They would throw down their arms and join the other side, that of their friends and families, long before they'd betray everything they'd sworn an oath to.

Now, you might find one or two people, with a handful of soldiers who, for the thirty seconds it would take before they'd be executed (not even court martial-ed) with such an intent. And they'd be buried in a common grave, stripped of name and rank, for their actions.

Maybe you would, maybe you wouldn't.

See, that's part of the problem in terms of economic calculation when dealing with a surveillance society -> since it's largely impossible to quantify the amount of lost business due to various surveillance / justice actions, as the methods and individual events in which such actions took place may never see the light of day, a society could be going bankrupt due to an overly large security division, and never know it.

Let's consider a real-life plausible scenario: a DEA agent gets a tip from a questionable source about a large shipment of Molly coming in tonight on the docks (cliche, but let's roll with it). The information isn't good enough to get a warrant, but the DEA hasn't had a bust in a while, and the agents are being pressured to find something to justify their jobs. This DEA agent figures that it wouldn't hurt to have a look around (nothing illegal there, right?), and spotting nothing immediately out on the docks, begins to think that it's a bust. The agent notices that an upper window is open on one of the warehouses, and that there are voices being heard within; it would take a little effort, shimmying up the side, but the agent could peak through the window (questionable)...and maybe even climb inside if the agent sees something. The agent climbs up, and hears rising voices from within. Not seeing anyone, the agent climbs in.

The agent, walking on top of some crates, sees the owners of the voices, and after listening for several moments, realizes that it's just a typical worker's spat. The agent goes to leave, not seeing anything of interest...but as the agent moves, one of the crates topples, pushing the one in front of it, and so on in a domino fashion. The agent manages to leave undiscovered, but not before $30 million in Lowe's Italian Chandeliers are dropped three stories onto a hard concrete floor.

The workers will be blamed for not stacking the crates correctly, and the owner of the warehouse cited. The insurance company will, of course, cover the costs of the damaged merchandise. However, the cost to society, for this overstep, was more than a minor civil rights violation...it was more than those workers make in a decade, possibly their lives.

And that's kind of at the heart of these infringements...when the intelligence agencies screw up, when the police screw up, it's not like they're shouldered with that debt; it's charged to society as the cost of doing business...no different from what the bankers did recently when they 'privatized the gains, and socialized the losses.'

The fundamental problem with that saying is that it for it to be formed, for it to even exist, as a thought, the reality in which you are currently cohabiting must be terribly skewed off the truth axis. Black must be white, up must be down, and good must be evil.

I mean, look at our society...just look at it. So much of its energy is devoted to ruling people. Judges, courts, bailiffs, clerks, kings, police, lawyers, etc. It's madness. Most people can't even imagine any other way of living...when they write about alien societies, the aliens have laws as well, and clerks as well, and laws as well.

Good. If they're not going to play by the rules, then I shall feel no regret by in abiding by their lead.

So...on the off-chance that the default SDKs for Java / .Net do not implement this natively, anyone have a link to some (preferably free) libraries that do make use of this implementation?

If I ever find a rootkit on my system, that OS gets binned permanently, no questions asked. I have a zero tolerance policy for who's system my computer is: it's mine. Not the US's, not Law Enforcement's, not the MPAA's, not MS's. If it achieves sentience, fine, it can be it's own; until then, any OS which fails to understand this arrangement (that a secure OS means that only I and system services (Windows Update, various package managers and their delegates) install software...third parties are not allowed), will be binned. If I can't trust my machine to have my singular best interests at heart, I cannot work with it; multiple tethers, trojan rootkits, superseding accounts with permissions higher than my own...these run contrary to my designs, and make it difficult, in the very least, to know when a problem is being caused by them, or by me. Plus I despise being spied on; if I'm going to put on a show, I'm going to get paid for it (no freebies).

I am more and more disturbed with the way OSs are going in general. They are...slowly removing usefulness from themselves, making it hard for admins to work with them, and adding on crap, like Windows Store...which is not needed. It's starting to feel like the computers I work with are...owned by someone else...which means I will start caring for them a lot less. The least of things which currently bothers me are the cross-threading errors which seem to appear in Windows 7...why have these not been fixed?

Hey, look, it's time for me to try linux again...

So...launch some floating cities, send them to Venus, send the astronauts later on. There's more than enough energy in the atmosphere to run machinery, and unless there are some truly violent lightning storms, the cities should stay afloat. As tech advances, a cable can be dropped to the surface (or several of them), and colonization take place.

Pity the atmosphere is so inhospitable, the surface so bland, and the utter lack of lifeforms. But a little work, and it will probably resemble Earth.

As for Mars, Mercury, and the Moon...Mercury is a surprising read. Mars would need nuclear reactors, I agree, or some other process for creating energy (anything in the soil that could react chemically with something else?). And the Moon...hmm. There's just a lack of data here, for all of them.

Hmm. The problem is that self-replicating machinery, like all robots, would get a little squirrely when exposed to that much ionizing radiation. You'd basically need several humans, hiding out in a radiation-hardened shelter, to run out every 15 minutes, to reflash the machine's OS, because the radiation is going to start randomly flipping bits, and soon, the robots that were supposed to build a reactor will start building a sand castle instead. Only there's no sand.

Look how much trouble we've had with the Mars rovers: we can't even get the instructions right half the time. And it takes several hours to see if we can recover from some really stupid mistakes. And the funny part is this: I'm saying this, and I wouldn't want to be caught dead outside during a ionizing radiation spike; you'd think I'd be all for the robots handling it all.

So I think that's the first problem we need to address: we need much better radiation shielding, and faster engines (either that or status chambers, immortality, etc.).

Depends entirely on what you're doing. If you're just saving large sets of data to the disk, and doing nothing else with them, then yeah, don't use a DB. If you're running lots of random queries on piece-mail parts of several dozen sets of those files, then use a DB.

There's a reason it's called SQL: Structured Query Language. If you're interrogating the data, you want SQL (or something like it). If you're just loading stuff / saving stuff to disk, like a Word file, and not performing any sort of random search or query on it, then yeah, using a DB doesn't make sense.

Bah, PC makers have done this to themselves. Look at their starting lineup...compare it to your average tablet. The tablet is, surprisingly, a better experience. Why? Because it has a solid state drive.

It's kind of like what would happen to Porsche / BMW / Mercedes-Benz if a car maker came along that offered an electric sports car for $20K that performed like their $70K offerings. No one wants to buy a $50K BMW that performs worse than a $20K electric car...that's easy to understand. Unfortunately, these PC makers haven't grasped this concept...which says a lot about them; they are too intent on preserving their price structure (that overpriced upgrade to a SSD) to realize that they need to spec them in standard, or they will collapse (their company will shed stock). The nature of the game has changed, but they're still worshiping Jobs and picking over his final words for any hidden meanings to guide them to profitability. Yesh.

I mean seriously, Ultrabooks? "Oh yeah, we'll just copy the MacBook Air, and BAM! Profit!" Because that's what consumers want...a more expensive, less useful version of a laptop. Only now that the Jobs reality distortion field is fading are we seeing people wake up, and wonder whether they really want an iPhone 6.