I feel like I remember seeing a steampunk variant of this idea in some animation/comic (maybe in the Flight series or Bolt City?)
Scene: ten miles over a major metropolitan city, an ICBM is racing in. Seconds later the nose cone is jettisoned and a cluster of small cones begin pouring out. Little grid fins pop out and they scatter out like dandylion seeds to the wind. Zooming on one, we watch it hurtle towards an enormous skyscraper. The cone's nose begins blinking from green to red, blinking faster as it approaches its target. Screaming closer and closer, we see the tower suddenly open a panel showing a large tank and the cone slams into it with an enormous splash. As it settles a platform gently captures it and raises it up to a crew of people with mail carts ready to distribute the packages.
Exiles who left the country. If you were to speak to elderly Cubans who fled they would tell you about how they all had their possessions taken from them.
Any reason to expect they have a stronger or more likely to succeed claim than, say, the Japanese-American families whose possessions were taken from them in WW2?
I guess this will partly depend on the sentiment of the public. If you look at retributions for damage in World War Two, one sees that even cases where people _sold_ items to German citizens (possibly under duress, but after decades, and with many archives destroyed in the war, that is hard to prove in some cases) that were settled in the fifties or sixties got reopened decades later.
The first thing this article reminded me of was ghost in the shell season 2. In the show the Intelligence Agency of the government used this sort of info manipulation to increase animosity towards refugees to the point where the public was in support of basically slaughtering them.
In the show this agency also analyzed public opinion using info obtained from discussion forums to gauge the public's acceptance of government policy and they would use the information manipulation with sock puppets to change public opinion in their favor.
Yes and no[0]. For reference, the definition of a Stand Alone Complex from wikipedia [1]:
Stand Alone Complex (スタンド・アローン・コンプレックス Sutando Arōn Konpurekkusu) eventually came to represent a phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals create a seemingly concerted effort.
The ideology of radical Islam from the viewpoint of neoconservatives in the USA in the 00 decade was of "shadowy underground terrorist cells all linked together and we should all be afraid of it", when in reality it was much more akin to the Stand Alone Complex: disparate radical groups all over the world used a common idea to act on their own but without communicating to one another. When viewed by the intelligence community, of course they weren't independent isolated events influenced by the same root idea; they were a centralized enemy. They projected thwir own centralized nature to the fragmented radical Islamic movement of the early 00's. Eventually, that radical Islamic movement grew into the identity provided them by the intelligence community as a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.
[0]So yes in name, no in practice if you buy into the viewpoint above.
Ah ok maybe I overcomplicated the concept in my head. I had assumed the SaC to describes something more tech related, e.g.:
"Stand Alone Complex (スタンド・アローン・コンプレックス Sutando Arōn Konpurekkusu) eventually came to represent a phenomenon where unrelated, yet very similar actions of individuals and/or software bugs, plus other coincidental events create a seemingly concerted effort and/or seem to mimic or behave like an intelligent actor."
E.g. as a software guy I imagined bugs so interdependent and complex that accidentally implement an AI. Yep i'm a programmer alright. ;)
To take this a bit further, as far as I know, the question of what constitutes a mind is still an open question. Ie: where does the "mind" live in us? Is emergent minds, like that displayed by a ant colony, really a mind, in the same sense that we have minds?
One of the hard things about [ed: (military)] intelligence, [gathering] is that it is very hard to ask the right questions. You can sometimes find the "right" answers to the "wrong" questions -- and convince yourself you know what's going on -- while in reality you're interacting with a shadow-reality of partially your own creation.
For example: oppress and invade, deploy divide and conquer tactics across unconnected populations that share some cultural values -- and you'd probably be able to create a stand a alone complex in the form of the resistance that forms. Then that might latter merge into a true complex, as the various independent parts realize that they have a somewhat common agenda... Maybe we'll see the new Star Wars films inadvertently expand on this theme, judging by how they're setting up the story with then animated "Star Wars: Rebels" series? :-)
This applies just as aptly to peoples perception of government or corporate behavior as it does to anything else. IMO the ability to rationally analyze or predict outcomes basically goes away once people forget that the fundamental unit of cognition and influence on this planet is and remains the human mind, not the corporation, agency or government - things which are emergent phenomenons of many individuals interacting.
I.e. it is a mistake to think that 'intelligence agencies' could not make this same analysis if you can.
hn is without a doubt a target for these kinds of people. I'm honestly surprised that this thread hasn't been flag killed considering how it shows how blatantly idf are gaming this system.
edit: nothing against Israel and Jews in general, just that there was some pretty clear evidence specific to the IDF in the article
You see, I barely need to "understand" Java to use it and get decent and performant code but I need to be a javascript expert to be able to do anything not horrible.
Please stop trying to act like the state of web and javascript is good because it's shit. Web development is basically a bunch of people suffering from stockholm syndrome.
Really? I feel js gives way more freedom and is much more forgiving to writing in your own particular style. I've had the exact opposite experience with Java.
I write JavaScript all the time for work and hobby and it's always rewarding.
Also, I'm in college for computer science and the school will only teach Java courses. It's dreadful and maddening. Classical inheritance is complete shit. Compiler error messages suck. The language itself is just too bloated for me to want use. Whatever I can write in Java I can do in a fraction of the time with js with much more modular and maintainable code.
I think java interfaces are a clear sign of stockholm syndrome, as every time I asked the professor why they are necessary I never got an answer other than "to hide part of your code from the outside world", "to use as a blueprint for your classes", or my personal favorite "Because in Java you write interfaces." I tried shifting my question to "Why don't I have to write an interface in js?" That one never got answered. Maybe someone here who is crafty with Java could explain and justify for me the reason for writing what feels like more code for no obvious benefit.
Also, sorry if Java is your thing and I sound like I'm bashing it. It's just been really frustrating for me compared to literally every other language I've used, especially since my degree depends solely on the language.
java interfaces are one of the main reasons people like java (and as other people have said, it's reimplementation in other more modern languages shows how popular and useful they are). They promote code reuse and allow protected variation. Your professors bad explanations aren't a reason to dislike interfaces.
Also how have you not, in a java class, written code that uses polymorphism? That would be the easiest way to understand how useful interfaces are.
But I reuse code all the time with js, following DOT and DRY principles, just fine without an interface. Especially with tools like browserify, where I can basically manage my code as partials independent from each other. Also, I have had to write java code that uses polymorphism. I still find polymorphism easier in javascript. That being said, I think classes and polymorphism is kinda of all just nonsense.
My preferred method of "inheritance" really is just extending an object. Which js is great at. And there's multiple ways to do this, with multiple kinds of prototypes. For something quick an easy I can make a prototype and just pass that through object.create() and now I have a new object that has all the properties of what I would loosely consider to be a "parent". It's more cloning than it is inheritance, and I can completely override properties however I want, while the original properties stay unchanged.
IMO polymorphism and interfaces in Java seem more like hurdles and added complexity compared to object extension and cloning in JavaScript. _.extend paired with browserify also makes for extremely modular code that I haven't seen any Java code compare too.
I think that a lot of "classical" programmers simply don't understand how important modules are to JS development.
This is why you get these posts about "how can you manage 1,000,000 LOC in JS!!?", when they don't understand that you never have 1,000,000 in JS, you have a bunch of small, unit tested modules.
> Also, I'm in college for computer science and the school will only teach Java courses. It's dreadful and maddening. Classical inheritance is complete shit. Compiler error messages suck. The language itself is just too bloated for me to want use. Whatever I can write in Java I can do in a fraction of the time with js with much more modular and maintainable code.
Whoever likes writing Java in CS courses?
> I think java interfaces are a clear sign of stockholm syndrome, as every time I asked the professor why they are necessary I never got an answer other than "to hide part of your code from the outside world", "to use as a blueprint for your classes", or my personal favorite "Because in Java you write interfaces." I tried shifting my question to "Why don't I have to write an interface in js?" That one never got answered. Maybe someone here who is crafty with Java could explain and justify for me the reason for writing what feels like more code for no obvious benefit.
Almost all modern, statically typed languages have some equivalent of Java interfaces. Inheritance a la Java is controversial, but the concept of interfaces/signatures/typeclasses/traits is a very accepted language feature[1]. Maybe the benefit of it will become apparent to you once you have to write a project with more than 7 Java classes - or when you don't have to answer to lecturers that profess that you have to make all your throwaway course work super modular and generic.
My argument was that the idea of having to work on a javascript project with >10,000 lines of code makes me want to vomit while the idea of working on a java project with >1,000,000 lines of code doesn't make me feel anything special.
People that complain about verbosity really don't have their priorities in line
I don't get what you mean by your comment. CS:GO is the best thing to happen to counter strike and the game and the players are doing better than ever.
