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Not really. Like someone who's already replied to this post, China already has missile technology easily capable of hitting Taiwan. Taiwan and China are right next to each other. Back in the day, when they were still fighting each other with weapons, artillery fire was able to reach the smaller islands that are part of Taiwan from the coast of China. Yes, it's that close. Oh, and can the US really make it in time to save Taiwan? Maybe, maybe not. The article provides an interesting insight as to how China could quickly take over the island. Remember, it's not like the US Navy sits in the Taiwan strait all day. They actually have to deploy out from Japan/S. Korea/Guam/etc.

um... i think you have your cause and effect a little off there dude

The British at the onset of their Industrial Revolution had no consumers for the crap their power looms produced.

so why did they build power looms?

that's like saying microsoft had no consumers for the crap their software engineers produced

it was cheaper, and they made more of it, and the quality was good

yes, the quality was good: microsoft makes better software if you take gui into account, and the east india trading company made better fabric if you take reliability and consistency into account

artisan weavers making beautiful high quality fabrics in limited, undependable, and of shifting providence does not an industry make

you need to reread your 19th century history, as you seem to be drowning in revisionist malarky

i suppose if history were different, you'd be complaining about how the east india trading company forced millions of poor indians to weave for them when they had perfectly good power looms that could do the work of thousands, freeing the indians for other pursuits ;-P

why are sowing conflict and blame where none exists?

the east india did vile, evil things in india to indians, but by your reading, we would all better off without the power loom... ummm... no

you can hate microsoft, you can hate the east india trading company, you can hate any large corporation all you want

and i agree with you: microsoft, the east india company, they have all done evil things

but no corporation has ever existed, will ever exist, or is currently existing that didn't get to its behemoth size because it made something someone wanted somewhere

no one is pouring coke down your throat, no one is remotely turning your computer on at night and installing internet explorer, no one is forcing indonesian sweat shop nike sneakers on your feet, no one is forcing mexican or chinese t-shirts on your back

The iron ore produced in India gets shipped to Japan to come back as automobile engines

yes... and? are you saying that this is wrong somehow... somehow immoral (!?) that's a leap!

it's called global trade, and no one is stopping india from building automobile factories... malaysia tried it ambitiously (read: the pm's hubris), called the proton, to great failure

so are you supposing that indians won't fall into the fate of east germans and yugoslavians driving around trabants or yugos? of course, they may not, the indians may make the best cars the world has ever seen if they tried, what do i know? but that's up to the indians, and they don't want to make a car, so where are you coming from?

the japanese make damn good cars, people want japanese cars, so japan buys raw materials and makes cars, that's it!

nobody is stopping india from making cars, no one wants to, but india isn't making cars... why? because they're perfectly happy buying japanese cars!

but the way you phrase it, it's some sort of conspiracy against indians that japanese buy iron from them... and give them back cars?!

are you ok?

This story is not totally correct. Take a look at The CIA Factbook and you will see that Japan is indeed paying quite an amount (compared to "nothing"). Further, more than 80% of the cost of the US-military stationed in Japan is payed by the japanese government.

> China does not accept U.S. dollars for their goods. They may very well convert their dollars into Yuan and buy Chinese products. But as I covered elsewhere in this thread, at some point, those dollars are coming home, unless they're being used for decoration.

Chinese exporters convert their dollar profits into Yuan (to pay workers and suppliers). The dollars get deposited at the central bank.
Jul 15, 2003:
Japan's foreign reserves currently total $496 billion, followed by China at $310 billion and Taiwan at US$170 billion, according to figures compiled in April by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority. Hong Kong, with 7.5 million people, has reserves of $114 billion, nearly seven times the total money in circulation in the territory. Other Asian treasuries are similarly bulging with dollars.

there is no rational reason for such big foreign reserves. unless, of course, you do not care about the value of your accumulated paper reserves, but have other goals, like GDP growth on your mind (transfer of industrial infrastructure). undervalued currency means the population does not buy much of imported goods.

for comparison: The UK Government's net reserves rose by $621 million in December 2003, bringing the end-December total to $17,903 million

since July 2003 the value of the dollar dropped by ca. 10%. so china's central bank lost say, $30 bln. they do not buy anything material with those dollars. they just reinvest them into US-bonds (as good as cash, but gives interest over time).

japan's foreign reserves are even bigger, because they tried hard to keep their economy afloat trough out the nineties. they bet on exports to the US, so they had to have a cheaper currency.

According to this story : "Sony Corp announced on Monday that it plans to build new lines at Toshiba Corp and IBM Corp factories to produce advanced microprocessors for use in such products as digital appliances and game machines including Microsoft's Xbox gaming console and Sony's PlayStation 3."

So the scenario is that Sony invests in IBM chip production, and then Microsoft buys chips from IBM for the XBOX 2 that competes with Sony's Playstation 2 & 3. This might be a ploy by Sony to get a leg up on Microsoft. Or, more likely in my opinion, the console market is so important to both companies that going with the technology with the best price/performance has naturally led them to the same IBM chips.

If both Sony & MS rely on basically the same chips then the next round of the consol war will truly come down to who has the best games and best exclusive games.

This space for rent.

Mmhmm, so you really think there's a conspiracy at work here? That's a pretty unlikely theory, I'm afraid, especially considering we're talking about actually bringing troops home from Afghanistan.

I suggest providing actual sources and reasoning for your views, rather than just "could be's" and other conspiracy theory views. Technically, your assertion is unfalsifiable: that is, it is impossible to prove wrong and as such is unscientific and can't really be logically discussed (much like assertions regarding the existence of God, or conspiracy theories regarding all sorts of things). So yeah, I'd suggest shaping up on that. My initial response to you praised your logic, but it seems like I may have been mistaken.

Also, keep in mind that 60 degrees farenheit is pretty far from freezing and that the inside of your house is unlikely to reach the temperatures required to freeze the pipes *inside* your home.

For the record, the inside temperature (at the thermostat, at least) was about 65 degrees when the pipes were frozen. This had happened before to earlier tenants, so there was a small access opening cut into the wall space where the pipes ran. I had to cram a hairdryer in and run it intermittently over the course of about an hour before the water started flowing again. By the way, we're talking about the edges of Zones 5 & 6 here. Not exactly North Dakota.

After that, I reluctantly left the tap on with just the slightest drip, and that was enough. Moving water doesn't freeze as easily. That winter got even colder for a while, but the pipes never froze again. Needless to say, I didn't renew my lease. Ah, campus slumlords.

There was a study from some Think Tank, and then an article by Jim Lobe summarizing/commenting the result, which had some fame, with title "We report, you get it wrong". Search the title, you'd find it on several sites, some of which of some interest, the source is Tim Lobe via the Asia Times

Ah, a Fox News viewer.

Do you think Chinese involvement with the European GPS project Galileo a reason for this perceived threat?

If you can't connect the dots... China supports alternate to GPS. China blows up our GPS satellites. China retains GPS capability, while we go blind

Anyone who doesn't think this is any big deal doesn't realize just how much we rely on GPS in the military today. Take a look at UAVs, for example. How do they navigate? Chances are it is not dead reckoning...

Doctors can't easily be outsourced. Are you going to fly out a patient to India? Video conferencing probably won't cut it.

Not so fast! HMOs are beginning to realize that it's cheaper to fly you to India for surgery than it is for you to get surgery here!

Radiologists are already getting hosed. It used to be that going into radiology was a license to print money. Now they just send a TIFF of your guts to India and get diagnoses emailed back from ten different guys.

(Moderator posting anonymously)

Considering This and This, He may already be dead.

I find the entire thing suspect personally.

Bottom line: that stuff about the floating point error in the PAC-2 system looks neat on paper but it's not at all clear that the faulty calculation was responsible for the loss of life.

GMD

Nobody - starved - under communism ?

Nauru is not exactly club med. 8 sq. miles and 80% uninhabitable.
too strange to be fiction dept.
brief history in articles

Nauru Turns to Dust
bbc - Big tasks for a small island

true, there is no oil in Afghanistan to speak of (though there is some gas) - but oil and gas are a crucially important part of the current unpleasantness there.

why? simple. there are very large oil and gas reserves in Turkmenistan (and surrounding nations), directly to the north of Afghanistan, and for years American oil companies have been maneouvring to have a pipeline built from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan, south to Pakistan and thence to the giant markets in North America, Europe, etc.

by "very large", read oil deposits similar to those of Saudi Arabia, and the largest gas reserves in the world.

when the stakes are this high, a lot of the strange stuff going on in this region recently starts to make sense...

Pipeline Politics: Oil, gas and the US interest in Afghanistan

Oil and Gas International editorial

Control of Central Asia's oil is the real goal

The oil behind Bush and Son's campaigns

it would appear china has been in diplomatic negotiations with the taliban for awhile now

Yeah...um, why don't you go ahead and give me the oil export numbers for Afghanistan then. Just the simple stuff, you know, millions of barrels exported per year, etc.

Oh that's right, there are no oil exports from Afghanistan. Maybe there's some other dark government secret you can dig up for me.

Alright, you got it, ooo you got me. There are no oil exports from Afghanistan yet. But they have been planned for quite a long time.

And mostly plans have been made to move both natural gas and oil through the region from former Soviet republics. But since I am nothing but an idiot conspiracy theorist, you might not want to read the documents from the Department of Energy like I have said in other posts.

From the Department of Energy website:

In February 1998, the Taliban announced plans to revive the Afghan National Oil Company, which was abolished by the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Soviet estimates from the late 1970s placed Afghanistan's proven and probable oil and condensate reserves at 95 million barrels. Oil exploration and development work as well as plans to build a 10,000-bbl/d refinery were halted after the 1979 Soviet invasion.

The Soviets had estimated Afghanistan's proven and probable natural gas reserves at up to 5 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) in the 1970s. Afghan natural gas production reached 275 million cubic feet per day (Mmcf/d) in the mid-1970s.


In January 1998, the Taliban signed an agreement that would allow a proposed 890-mile, $2-billion, 1.9-billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project led by Unocal to proceed. The proposed pipeline would have transported natural gas from Turkmenistan's 45-Tcf Dauletabad natural gas field to Pakistan, and most likely would have run from Dauletabad south to the Afghan border and through Herat and Qandahar in Afghanistan, to Quetta, Pakistan


Besides the gas pipeline, Unocal also had considered building a 1,000-mile, 1-million barrel-per-day (bbl/d) capacity oil pipeline that would link Chardzou, Turkmenistan to Pakistan's Arabian Sea Coast via Afghanistan. Since the Chardzou refinery is already linked to Russia's Western Siberian oil fields, this line could provide a possible alternative export route for regional oil production from the Caspian Sea. The $2.5-billion pipeline is known as the Central Asian Oil Pipeline Project. For a variety of reasons, including high political risk and security concerns, however, financing for this project remains highly uncertain

Pumping Oil Out Of Central Asia

The Geopolitics of Oil In Central Asia

Caspian Sea Oil and Gas Production

The oil behind Bush and Son's campaigns

Consortium formed to build Central Asia gas pipeline

So why dont you go ahead and read those little ditties I dug up for you as you requested and remember: its easy to use a search engine, so why not try and use one before copping some sort of attitude about me being some wacko who is full of shit.

I quote you:

Maybe there's some other dark government secret you can dig up for me.

It aint dark, its right at your fingertips.

The article doesn't cite any sources. It seems there was a failure to communicate. This page is apparently based on the same sources, but has slightly different figures:

Alleged lost sales: 200 billion won ($152 M)
2000 sales: 410 billion won ($312 M)
1999 sales: 380 billion won ($289 M)

Presumably you can find this information on their official website, but it seems to be in Korean. In any case, it seems that in the article a decimal point has been slipped in by mistake, makeing a ridiculous claim into an apparently outrageous one.