A definition of IranyFollow

Varus,



So you'r saying that the west should have just ignored the fact that millions of people were suffering because the existing government was friendly towards us? Sounds terrible to me. Also, to call the people currently running Egypt "radical muslims" is a bit of a stretch.




That's capitalism. Want to sell something? Got a buyer? Sell to the buyer. Capitalism.



Again, liberal is an inaccurate label. Nothing in international politics and econimics is just conicidence, and if I had more time, I'd lay out for you the history of the last 31 years regarding Iran, The Middle East, American foreign policy, and the religion of Islam, but I'm a college student, I have more pressing and important things to do with my time.



I don't think you do either.



In the case of Iran's government, I think, "orthodox muslims" is a lot closer to the truth than "radical muslims". Also, it wasn't given, no western government would do so in the current political climate, even if you want to believe it really badly. I am however, getting the feeling that you're one of those people who thinks you should be able to fly into any country's airspace regardless of international law, treaties, etc. just because you're American.



Where does it say, anywhere, that the president is pretending it didn't happen?

Yeah, you'd think the Republicans would be in favor of this kind of free-market economy.

And I'm still puzzled by the claims that liberals hate the military. I don't hate the military; hell I have friends and family that are on active duty. I just don't like seeing them put at risk for silly nation-building wars overseas. Especially when people ***** that we assisted in popular revolts like Egypt and Libya, yet have nothing but praise for the prolonged occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Republicans must be the ones who hate the military and keep sending them into unwinnable situations.

Russia's got it's own problems at the moment.

I'm going to be sorely disappointed if Putin goes down for election fraud. He deserves something worthy of a Bond villain. Not that I think Putin is evil, mind you, but if he was evil he'd somehow be even cooler.



Edited, Dec 7th 2011 11:40pm by Omegavegeta

China can't afford to go to war with us. They'd like it if their bonds were actually worth something.

Yeah, this actually is the blessing in disguise of interconnected global economics. These days anyone who's big enough to pose a real threat has too much invested to engage in hostilities.

You do realize that that idiot actually will try harder now, don't you?

I'll buy the "Obama just gave it to them" story a lot sooner than the "We hacked it" story.

I am thinking more along the lines of Israel attacking Iran. I'm not convinced that Israel could be used as our "pitbull" in the Middle East..
Then again; I doubt anything of the sort will happen while Obama is still in office.

Run Raolan! Varus has a Man-Boy crush on you! If he asks you to join nambla with his don't do it. <insert General Akbar>

Yeah I was thinking about that in terms of nuclear war... if anything like that got serious the social disorder, panic and chaos on both sides of the war would be pretty hard to manage. I mean, a billion people freaking out that they might be torched with an atom bomb would be tough for even the most authoritarian regime to deal with.

I was going to reference the same event but got busy. No, intercepting video feeds isn't the same as controlling the drone but it does show that stuff gets left with security holes. How many reports have we seen about gaping holes in our own infrastructure systems that can be exploited by hackers as we laugh at Iran for falling prey to the Stuxnet virus (which was handcrafted to exploit their system).

Stuxnet was the precision tactical nuke of viruses. It took advantage of multiple ZDEs and was written to target a very specific system with specific control signatures. Stuxnet is in no way an indication of how strong or weak a network is.

As far as the cyber aspect of the US military, it's a joke. Cyber control wasn't established until either '08 or '09 and was bounced back and fourth between the NSA and USAF for the past few years. They just completed one of their first (if not their first) large scale cyber war game within the past week or two.

The video feed thing is relatively minor since the video feed and control feeds are likely operating on two different connections. However, a few months ago the control center at Nellis discovered malware in the drone control systems. Depending on who you listened to, it was either a keylogger, monitoring software, or random internet garbage.

Also, it was recently discovered that China has been in our government and defense systems for years without us knowing it. Who knows how much info they managed to pull from us. RSA was recently breached with attacks on both Lockheed and Northrop using those breached RSA tokens, and who knows how many other defense contractors that didn't publicly report the attack.

The US recently redefined cyber attacks as an act of war due to how badly we've been being raped on the cyber front. If Iran had any chance of downing this thing, I would say electronically was the only plausible option they had.