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Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

Here is a bunch of links about Computer Ethics from when I was researching about it. The google video link (last one on this list) is particularly interesting. Computer ethics is actually a university research topic! http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/cei_hp.htm http://ethics.csc.ncsu.edu/ http://www.southernct.edu/organizations/rccs/resources/teaching/teaching_mono/moor/moor_definition.html http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-computer/ http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/ProfessionalEthics.html http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/hackers.html http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=4279094 http://cyberethics.cbi.msstate.edu/ http://www.oekonux.org/texts/copykillsmusic.html http://www.progilibre.com/Open-Source-Alternative-ou-fausse-route-_a350.html http://www.osalt.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License http://creativecommons.org/ http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html http://www.itc.virginia.edu/policy/ethics.html http://www.brook.edu/its/cei/overview/Ten_Commanments_of_Computer_Ethics.htm http://www.acm.org/serving/se/code.htm http://www.ieee.org/portal/site http://video.google.fr/videoplay?docid=-3088012854941915784&q=computer+ethics

People have increasingly been doing that since the mid-to-late 20th century. This has political consequences.

So that leaves us with four choices for their school nights. We can drug them into a stupor. We can have them sit quietly in a corner for the entire night. We can nuke them from orbit. Or we can STOP IT WITH THIS OVERPROTECTIVE BULLSHIT AND LET THEM BE KIDS, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!

-Eric

See, it's comments like that that let people know you're going by hearsay rather than actual evidence. The 155mm nuclear artillery shell weighed 855 pounds and was 4.5 feet long. If you have a guy that can carry a backpack with that in it, you don't NEED a nuke-- just send that big bastard in with a club to SMASH the base like Gojira!

Fiscal conservative is now democratic property- you know, the guys who balanced the budget in the 90s.

The push in the 1990s for the balanced budget was instigated by the Republicans in 1994 as part of their platform dubbed "Contract with America". Specifically, the Fiscal Responsibility Act was one of the first attempts to pass a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution which would effectively outlaw deficit spending. The House of Representatives passed the amendment under Newt Gingrich, but Democrats in the Senate defeated the amendment by one vote (65-35).

Since Budgets are always created by the House, the new 1994 Republicans who dominated the House of Representatives throughout the latter half of the decade were instrumental in cutting spending dramatically. You can read the Brookings Institution's analysis of the 104th Congress to get an idea of what their intentions were and who they were fighting against.

Clinton refused to sign the 1996 budget over objections to spending cuts. The resulting shutdown of the federal government was somehow blamed on Republicans, despite the fact that no other President in US history had ever vetoed the budget. Regardless, it was clear at that time that Clinton was much more interested in funding social projects than balancing a budget.

The other benefit that helped balance the budget in the 1990s was the Internet Boom, which drove tax revenues through the roof. The combination of record tax revenues and House Republican spending cuts reversed the horrible deficits which occurred under the split-party system of the 1980s (Tip O'Neill vs. Ronald Reagan).

While I agree that the current administration has no idea how to balance a budget, I completely reject your claim that the Democrats are any more fiscally responsible!

If only we had not built the first atom bomb, no other nation in the world would have tried to do so.

I think perhaps you meant to say:

If only we had not been the first to use an atom bomb against a civilian population, and then built a further seventy thousand warheads no other nation in the world would have tried to do build atom bombs.

I mean for God's sake - you've now got 250 times the number of deployed nukes that China does.

Don't you think the way for the US to really ensure its population's security would be to try to track down the arsenal of the former USSR?

Some people are saying "It's all economics, they're poor / unemployed so they are fighting against the Man the only way they can", while others are saying "It's all religion, they're all middle-eastern, its what they do".... but those are just the talking points of the far Left and far Right. The issue, as always, is more complicated.

What you have are immigrant population from French colonies in North Africa (who happen to be of middle-eastern and african descent) who have entered France through their weaker immigration laws. The French are traditionally very nationalistic (see their Language boards), and the immigrants were discriminated against and were not assimilated into mainstream cultures. Secondly, the middle-eastern culture itself is very prideful, mainly becase of their religious practices and family customs. The net result was that the immigrants self-segretated themselves into comminities of like-minded peoples.

So, the dominant european ethnics (through prejudice) resisted their assimilation, which had the net result of limiting the earning potential of the middle-eastern ethnics. The immigrants resist learning the French language and culture, and because of French law, are denied representation in their governments. When the government does try to "help" them with social programs, their culture see it as insulting / condescending. The net result of this is a hatred of a government that is constantly trying to patronize them and force them to give up their heritage.

So, these neighborhoods tend to have less governmental police prescence than other suburbs of Paris, which tends to lead to more criminal elements. It had gotten so bad, representatives of the federal government of France were claiming that they would "clean up the scum", which didn't go so well with the locals. In the latest chain of events, there were two youths who were fleeing police, hid in a utility station and accidentally electrocuted themselves. The immigrant cultures see this as police brutality & oppression, something denied by the authorities.

Finally, there are now criminal elemnts in the immigrant culture that are rising up and causing damage around the suburbs, fighting their "battle" against the government for making them the way they are... Yet, these people do not see that a share of that responsibility is theirs.

the manpower superiority of china is purely in the meatshield department. china only has enough guns for a fraction of thier military and since private gun ownership isn't permitted there is little oppurtunity for any sort of militia force to be useful.

There are two things preventing large scale war between USA and PRC, nuclear weapons and economic dependance.

Interesting Article from 1999 on China's military

Actually I had a glance at the Hague Convention Concerning the Rights and Duties of Neutral Powers in Naval War recently. I was tolerably familiar with the Arms Control treaties of the Sixties and Seventies.

One provision of those treaties stands out, considering neither the US nor the Soviet Union trusted each other, quoting from SALT I

Article V

1. For the purpose of providing assurance of compliance with the provisions of this Interim Agreement, each Party shall use national technical means of verification at its disposal in a manner consistent with generally recognized principles of international law.

2. Each Party undertakes not to interfere with the national technical means of verification of the other Party operating in accordance with paragraph 1 of this Article.

3. Each Party undertakes not to use deliberate concealment measures which impede verification by national technical means of compliance with the provisions of this Interim Agreement. This obligation shall not require changes in current construction, assembly, conversion, or overhaul practices.

verification by national technical means refers to satellites. Military satellites observing the enemy, verifying that they were in fact keeping their word.

It's also consistent with the Hague Convention referred to above, in practically all its articles, effectively neutralizing NEO. It treats NEO as if it were a Neutral Power

Art. 10.

The neutrality of a Power is not affected by the mere passage through its territorial waters of war-ships or prizes belonging to belligerents.

Art. 5.

Belligerents are forbidden to use neutral ports and waters as a base of naval operations against their adversaries, and in particular to erect wireless telegraphy stations or any apparatus for the purpose of communicating with the belligerent forces on land or sea.

'Nuff sed?

Heavy yes, but not as hard to make small as one might think. Certainly small enough to lug around in a car trunk.

Here's a link to the Davy Crockett recoilless rocket launched artillery, at 0.01 kilotons it's not a big nuke. But sure as hell would raise the hackles of the US Govt. and scare the crud out of whole states full of people (aside from the ones killed outright).

This was back in 1961. Since then, there is probably little point in making it much smaller, rather making it have a higher yield. I wouldn't be suprised if there were warheads this size with 10 times the yield of this one available now.

Science will never present us with a peer-reviewed study proving once and for all that you should be good to your fellow man

Interesting claim! I have two ideas that may spark some discussion.

Economics is a form of science, and one interesting branch of economic study is the study of cooperation. Some economists study this through statistics and computer modeling (http://www.brook.edu/es/dynamics/models/pd.htm). Some economists and psychologists study this through models of happiness (http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/050415-16.htm). Some study this through research into primate behavior (http://www.primates.com/monkeys/fairness.html). The general consensus is that, although a free economic system requires there to be some level of competition, cooperation and mutual assistance are innately bred into us by natural selection, since it helps us achieve things we could not achieve alone.

Philosophy, the study of thought that gave rise to modern scientific theory (http://www.constitution.org/bacon/nov_org.htm), has always been capable of tackling these moral issues. Some of the the best writing on the topic of justice includes John Rawls "Justice as Fairness" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/067 4005112/002-0144128-7693626?v=glance), in which he argues that the best possible society is one in which we are all treated fairly. He has a pretty clever way of defining fairness, too. If you dislike Rawls, there are tons of other philosophers to choose from who have created logical arguments for treating men justly - Socrates and Locke are two others you may wish to read, or Hospers if you're into the libertarian thing (although his vision of fairness can occasionally sound a little like the mindless pursuit of wealth).

Science is a process that we can use to evaluate ideas through objective criteria. It makes no difference whether those ideas are biological, astronomical, legal, or moral. As long as we have an objective, measurable goal, we can use the scientific method to try to better understand which ideas work and which ideas don't.

To respond to your rhetorical questions, yes, economics does show us that there is a lot to be gained by eliminating hunger. Philosophy and ethical theory does indeed show us that we can achieve more if we pursue our interests living within a just and fair social framework.

What does make me very sad is when people say that you cannot be a good, moral person if you don't believe in God. Neither one causes the other.

not much point in not using real dollars per capita IMO (see Over the same time period (1988-98), real higher education appropriations per capita declined from $185 to $175.

Even if you believe that everyone in 1988 had a chance to maximize their talents, we are in decline from that state now. If (as seems likely) only a fraction of the people in 1988 whom could have contributed more to society if they had advanced training were able to get it, then we are in more serious decline.

That goes to the point: we'll need to maximize the potential of every person to staty competitive, if real $ per capita declines, then there are people with talents who are not getting the chance to maximize those talents.

And do we even -have- any non-nuclear ICBMs?

Yes, we do. They can be launched from Subs, and through the use of cruise missiles. In short, the dilivery of atomic weapons is only limited by the imagination and technology that our military is capable of.

And for some real fun! Check out the Davy Crockett. If you were stong enough to cary 76lb on your shoulder, then you had a portible RPG Nuke that detonated with the force of 10 tons of TNT. It's a small nuke for sure, but for it's size it packs a nasty little punch.

http://www.brook.edu/FP/projects/nucwcost/davyc.ht m

Note: The fireworks stands should be selling these instead of those crappy M60s. They are sooo week! *sigh*

They point to a more persistent problem, the widespread usage of caller screening technologies that have been adopted to ward off telemarketers. "Recent compilations of response rates in telephone surveys by the Council for Marketing and Opinion Research suggest that studies with short field periods are now averaging about 10 percent, although most media polls have response rates in the 30-45 percent range"

It doesn't take much of a stretch to realize that it is the more affluent and educated that generally spend the time and money to avoid unwanted interruptions by the telephone. This seems to me to make a very slight (maybe a point or less in most polls) conservative bias in many polls.

The upshot for those who want to get their voice heard by a pollster - pick up the phone when the caller ID says "unknown caller". It might be someone asking your opinion about presidential candidates. Of course, it probably is someone asking you to buy storm windows or somesuch.

An American soldiers life is worth untold millions in defense spending.

Would that Americans thought so highly of Iraqi lives. Thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have died since 'Mission Accomplished' largely because we can't pacify the country, and nobody in the USA, certainly not the mainstream media, seems to give a d*mn.

The best thing a president can do to revitalize a sluggish economy is press for tax cuts, and President Bush did that, and it's working (for the moment).

>> Done.

Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to be arguing with someone who knows nothing and certainly doesn't know they're humiliating themselves with a startling amount of stupidity? This, perhaps, goes beyond your inability to comprehend the mass question regarding DU ordinance. Where in that link does Hans Blix say anything about Iraqis not experiencing freedoms and opportunities? Your link suggests the exact opposite! When Blix said, "It's positive that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone" what exactly do you think he was talking about? Presumably the fact that the Iraqi people now have access to freedoms they haven't experienced in decades.

Clearly you must be the brightest bulb in your family. There are two possibilities here. Perhaps you simply lacked the intellectual capacity to understand that the issue was whether or not you were a first class moron for saying that the Iraqi people are experiencing new freedoms and opportunities, not whether the war was the "right" or "good" thing to do. I explicitly stated that I wasn't addressing that question because it is too early to judge. What I challenged was your incalculably stupid suggestion that the Iraqis are not experiencing new freedoms and opportunities. You can't find a single person who agrees with you on that precisely because it is one of the dumbest things any human has ever said in the history of the world.


>> Oh?

Ok, I can see where that article might have misled someone as simple-minded as you are, but Senator Clinton didn't actually say that women were better off under Saddam. Look at the pdf file of the full transcript of that speech at the Brookings Institution. The portion in question is on page 19. Here is the relevant text:

"We also have to do more on women's rights and roles. And I have been deeply troubled by what I hear coming out of Iraq. When I was there and met with women members of the governing councils and local--of the national governing councils and local governing councils in Baghdad and Kirkuk, they were starting to express concerns about some of the pullbacks in the rights that they were given under Saddam Hussein. He was an equal opportunity oppressor, but on paper women had rights; they went to school; they participated in the professions; they participated in government; and business and, as long as they stayed out of his way, they had considerable freedom of movement.

Now, what we see happening in Iraq is the governing council attempting to shift large parts of civil law into religious jurisdiction. This would be a horrific mistake and especially for it to happen on our watch. And I have spoken to the White House about this on several occasions. I appreciated Ambassador Bremer speaking out about the need to involve women. But we must go much further. I would like to see a statement from the President. I would like to see a much greater emphasis that we will not have become the vehicle by which women's rights in Iraq are turned back."

Notice the following things if you have the mental capacity to understand them:

#1) She spoke with women on local and national governing councils, councils that didn't even exist under Saddam. Therefore those women obviously have not only gained access to freedoms and opportunities they didn't have before, they are exercising them.

#2) Senator Clinton is talking about Iraqi women's concern about what might happen in the future, based on worries about implementation of sharia in places like Afghanistan under the Taliban. That hasn't happened yet, and presumably won't. The very fact that women are on the governing councils strongly suggests that to be a flight of fancy given that any anti-female attitudes necessary for

Look for imstance at the W54 warhead, weighed 54 lbs, developed in 1961. Yield only 0.18 kilotons, though. A look at some stats on Russian ICBMS shows they could deliver 2500 kg, which could be a single 20 MT H Bomb, or maybe a dozen smaller ones. These could easily be put in a shipping container. Radiation can be shielded. Maybe not well enough to survive a close examination, but would get by in most ports I think. Or brought in on a yacht, anchor in the port, detonate before anyone gets close, take out a city. The only reason it hasn't happened yet is that box cutters and suicide bombers are cheap and effective.

I am somewhat bemused that despite sitting on something like 28% of the world's uranium, us Aussies don't have a reactor of our own (with the exception of the Lucas Heights HIFAR reactor opened in 1958). We even bitch about mining the stuff, the proceeds of which could be used to deal with real threats to the surrounding environment, like cane toads. We make over 10% of the world's supply of computer grade doped silicon, yet we bitch about upgrading the reactor facility too. Hopefully with some debate people will start pulling their heads out of their asses and making it happen before we end up with some serious problems on our hands. Before long chernobyl et al will end up being the most catastrophic events we've ever experienced - not because of the local effects but because of the resulting widespread misconception about nuclear power. Yes, where there are more plants nuclear fuel necessarily is more available so there is a greater need for security. However those linking the increased use of nuclear energy with foolish nuclear enabled governments and terrorists ought to spend more time worrying about who's got the weapons, why, who pays and what they are (or aren't) doing to protect them.

If those plants were very cheap, I'd guess they'd cost about 300-400 million, putting your figure of oil independance at 3-4 trillion $, just to build the plants

Which, if it is spent to end dependence on foreign oil (and reduce the environmental footprint of our economy as a side effect) would be cheap at the price. It's not an expense, it's an investment with potentially huge benefits economically, evironmentally, diplomatically, and militarily.

For comparison, the Manhattan Project cost $20 billion or thereabouts in 1945. In 2004 dollars, that's about $1.25 trillion. Add in the expense of our nuclear arsenal over the years, and it comes to about $6.4 trillion. (In 2004 dollars.) We're talking about a similarly large strategic and economic benefit. If this process really works as described, it's worth the investment.

Remember also, this process can be used to reform practically any organic waste, including plastics and even PCB's.

So here's a private business plan for you: Aquire the mineral rights to a huge old landfill. Build one of these plants nearby. Mine it to feed your waste-to-oil converter, seperating the metals and other inorganics as you go and selling what you can as raw materials.

Continue until the landfill site is empty, then keep digging and processing to clean the contaminated earth under it. Cover it with remediated or remanufactured soil, and open a park or a turkey ranch. Meanwhile, keep operating your plant with waste from the city that created the landfill in the first place.

Sure, you're left with a pile of nasty heavy metals and inorganics that no one wants, but now they're in some much more pure form and can be appropriately processed and sequestered.

If this technology is any good at all, it should be possible to turn at least a modest profit over the long haul.

The United States also designed, manufactured and deployed nuclear landmines during the Cold War. See here for some pictures.

The page also shows a SADM - the nuclear demolition charge intended for use by parachute dropped saboteurs. The SADM's W54 warhead was the smallest and lightest developed by the US and was also used in theDavey Crockett 'nuclear bazooka' and the AIM 26-A nuclear air-to-air missile.

The page also shows a SADM - the nuclear demolition charge intended for use by parachute dropped saboteurs. The SADM's W54 warhead was the smallest and lightest developed by the US and was also used in theDavey Crockett 'nuclear bazooka' and the AIM 26-A nuclear air-to-air missile.

Now we are told once more that the best cure against spam should be to reinvent something to replace the tried-and-true eMail system of decade-old reliability, just because some sociopaths apparently cannot learn to behave without getting a spanking (or jail time) and U.S. privacy laws are still too weak to stop the spam.

And after all the years that spam has plagued the networks, that's quite a poor achievement for a nation that managed to outlaw junk faxes, and had confirmation from the courts that regulating advertising does pass constitutional muster perfectly well:

"Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or to view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit... We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has the right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another... We repeat, the right of a mailer stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain."
Supreme Court
Rowan v. U.S. Post Office
397 U.S. 728

This is not about "lawmakers never knowing enough about the Internet to regulate any aspect of it in a meaningful way", it's about doing something to prevent imposing compulsory changes to technology that keep fighting the symptoms rather than the cause.
Congress should get over such shameful cowardice and make the simple law that's needed and proven to work.

There is no need to re-engineer the Internet.
There is no justification for widespread surveillance and data retention under the poor excuse of trying to track down spammers.
There is no risk of banning mailing lists or commercial eMail.
There is no doubt what the sociopathic behavior is.

All that is needed is mandatory opt-in for unsolicited bulk eMail (encompassing all kinds of electronic messaging).

And yet some self-proclaimed "experts on electronic advertising" (whose only merit probably is that they know how to spam because they've done it a trillion times at everyone else's expense) keep pretending that opt-in wasn't legal, or feasible, or desirable.

Opt-in works, and it does not hurt anyone but the spammers.

Europe has adopted it, Australia is adopting it (how far behind do you want the U.S. to be, are we to wait for China to outlaw spam before the U.S. will?!), but most importantly the USA have successfully adopted it themselves against junk faxes.

There's probably something wrong in Washington D.C., and the news media in general, when the most insightful newspaper article on the issue comes from USA Today.
Be sure to fax or eMail it to your congress(wo)man though.
Don't spam them, but do attach some selected masterpieces of spam if you think they need an idea of what ends up in the inbox of their constituents, and of their children, 9 billion times, every single day.

Even crazier on the site you reference is the nuclear land mine. I'd hate to be the poor guy who stepped on that one...

When the Soviets got the Bomb, of course, the Cold War started in earnest, and so plans had to be drawn up to fight the most colossal and devastating war in human history (hot on the heels of that previous most colossal and devastating war in human history where the Soviet happened to be our allies). It was of course feared that in this upcoming war, the Soviets would have a tremendous advantage in conventional forces, and waves of Soviet tanks would roll across Europe. Thus, our rapidly growing stockpile of atomic bombs would become an important asset. The major question was how these weapons would be delivered. The Air Force of course responded by building a fleet of long range strategic bombers, and the Navy a fleet of submarines that could launch nuclear missiles; these measures, however, took years to set up, leading to a variety of interesting stopgap measures. This includes the lovely "idiot loop" maneuver explained here of course, as well as the Army's approaches, which included a 280mm cannon that fired atomic artillery shells, and what is perhaps the most unbelievable weapon in military history (and that includes the insane ideas the Nazis had at the end of WWII like the Me-162), the Davy Crockett. Why yes, that is a nuclear warhead being fired out of a recoilless rifle barrel.

Like I said, these were stopgap measures, born out of desperation. Of course, this period pretty much entered its twilight with the development of the thermonuclear "Super" device, and was utterly swept away with the advent of the ICBM and SLBM to carry it. It became clear that there was no longer any place for tactics on a nuclear battlefield- with thousands of ballistic missiles on each side, most of civilization would be vapor before conventional troops got loaded into the transport plane. Also, the long term effects of radiation were becoming known- how does the traditional idea of territorial control work if in order to gain territory, you have to nuke it? Anyway, some of the ideas that came up in this short period were pretty crazy, but they're pretty much par for the course in military history- whenever a new technology hits the battlefield, strategists go nuts trying to either combat against it, or work it into their plans- compare this period in history, where a weapon of incredible power threatened to make conventional forces obsolete, to a period like the introduction of firearms to the medieval battlefield, or the introduction of the ironclad in naval battles- the old weapons and strategies quickly beome obsolete, and military planners become willing to try absolutely anything to gain the upper hand.

How do you know what the US needs to spend on defense? Do you work for the NSC or Pentagon? No? I thought not. Your ignorance is appalling and you best serve society by remaining quiet than by spouting your ill-informed rhetoric.

Not so ignorant. What freedoms are the military protecting right now if you believe everyone who has something negative to say should just be quiet? Some people just amaze me.

Huge militaries are relative to huge security needs. Norway, Canada and Belgium have relatively little threatening them and very little international interests. The US has huge interests and is the single most threatened nation in the world (in terms of power). Apples and Oranges.

My point wasn't to stop all military and defense actions. Just to budget it better. I hardly think the $396,100,000,000.00 spent on military (52% of the total budget) is really as nessesary as the government would like you to believe.

Nothing is ever perfect, but what you are proposing is just as short sighted as the parent post. I don't agree with everything the Bush administration is doing, but I at least realize they have access to all the information and I do not.

You have almost all of the information at your finger tips. And blindly following the administration because "they have access to all the information and I do not" is such a sad thing to hear in this day and age I don't really want to respond to it.

Think about this: for this war, Bush and Blair privately met with all the other leaders of major UN countries. They provided reasoning and proof for it, yet only Australia (whose Free-Trade agreement has since then been accelerated) decided to support the movement. Either the US actually doesn't have any proof whatsoever, or, ummm... well I guess that was actually it. Only after Bush declared war did some smaller countries hop aboard (all without actually dedicating troops or resources to the mission, hmmm...).

Myself, I'm not sure I'd take the word of a sportswriter.

The Davy Crockett

If you work out, you might be able to carry one on each shoulder!

Link1

Link2

Link3

The lightest portable identified in the Brookings survey and your link was the "Davy Crockett" (51 lbs.). It does seem they had a nuke for every occasion. Perhaps there is an undisclosed weapon even more portable.

I wanted to say that the idea of nuclear interceptors for ABM was long dead, but it's not at all true. In April 2002 the WP published this op-ed re the Pentagon's Defense Science Board studying the option. Congress overrode the Pentagon in October and forbade research into the topic. I read somewhere that the Board intends to complete its study nonetheless.

EMP and danger to U.S. satellites are mentioned as hazards, aside from political fallout. So I guess despite misgivings the nuclear interceptor concept is still live, at least in the minds of some planners.

Yeah, I was surprised at the low-yield nukes, too, used in nuclear artillery and, my favorite, the nuclear land mine (intended to destroy tunnels, not to be run over). The Brookings Institute did a recent study of the total cost of the nuclear weapons program from Manhattan to now (~$5+ trillion?) and details the number and types of weapons and tests at different times. Look for it on their site.

One reason for the baby nukes suggested was the Army's desire for a piece of the nuclear pie; the armed services can be very competitive. The Army can't use the big yields very well, so little weapons were developed less than one kiloton. I think they backed off a while ago. Ground nukes also offered a risk of escalation in the face of advancing troops, when a use-it-or-lose-it situation could appear. Similar criticisms were made of forward placement of the Pershing missile in Western Europe IIRC.

Are you kidding, or just ignorant? Russia has more nukes than us

US: 7,982 deployed nuclear weapons
Russia: About 6000.

the only biological and chemical weapons we have left are used for training and research only, not research into new weapons mind you, but how to defend against them.

Bullshit. "How to defend against them" is a euphemism for "how to unleash them with minimal losses on our part". And you don't really need new wepons, you already have good weapons...people won't get any more dead with new weapons than with what's already available.

Yes, we are still the only country to use nuclear weapons in war. However, it probably saved the lives of 5 million American and Japanese soldiers who would've died in an invasion, and it ended the war.

Against civillians, mind you, and the war was already won. Japan had been trying to negociate a surrender with the help of russian diplomats for about a year when the US decided to nuke 'em (twice!). The point was not to end the war, it was to get an unconditionnal surrender...kick 'em while they're down.
It also came in handy as a way to scare the rest of the world into submission to US foreign policy...the "we have the bomb" argument was a pretty good one for 10 or 15 years, until others could say the same.

Your utopia will never exist, and besides, I wouldn't want to live there.

How's your best friend Satan?

You also have a severe misunderstanding of the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists' mindset.

I don't know about him, but my understanding is like this: You hit them, they hit you back more, you ht THEM back more, they hit YOU back double more...

Round and round it goes...

So, yeah, keep on picking a fight with Irak, and when the extremists hit you back for them, you can say "see, they hit us, we were right to hit them first", again and agin and again.

A Brookings Institute study you and others might enjoy on the cost, policy, and conduct of the U.S. nuclear weapons program ($4 trillion). Interesting history reading. ... and I'm not sure I'm ready to sign on to a "single world power" just yet :) ...

-=Roxton

I'd have to say the most "expensive" bits of information had to be the notes that Klaus Fuchs passed from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. Estimates I've seen are that the material was no more than four dozen full pages, but that material was the key to allowing the Soviet Union to finish their Atomic bomb research years ahead of time (providing at least a 5-year jump). For an estimate of what the Manhattan Project cost, look here. For a conservative estimate, I'd say that those 50 pages (~2000 characters each = 100kB) saved some $10 Billion in research costs. And that's in 1945 dollars.

The German, Italian, and Japanese cypher codes were similarly valuable, though not quite as expensive to obtain.

Historically, I'd say that the $50 in trinkets that Dutch explorers paid to the Native Americans living on Manhattan Island for title to their island (ie, for the signature on the treaty giving the Dutch what became New York City) was the ultimate rip-off (or, great deal, depending on which way you look at it). Signature = ~25 bytes, with current value of the Manhattan Island real estate well north of $10 trillion.

As a side note, the US (and presumably the other nuclear powers) does NOT maintain the "Launch Codes" at the political level. These are AUTHORIZATION codes, which tell the military that a valid order to launch exists. The military maintains the actual launch codes (at different places for different weapon systems), so theoretically, it is possible to launch a nuclear weapon without permission. For obvious reasons, the military designs launch systems so this is as difficult as possible.

-Erik

I wanted to point out to /.s out there that there is quite a bit of software available to explore artificial societies on your own. I also wanted to say that I have had the rare privledge of working w/ these folks for many years and all of the positive comments (and none of the negative ones :-)) in this thread are right on. Anyway, Ascape, a software framework for agent-based modelling that I developed is available for download at the Brookings Website. Many other interesting models are also described there.. Its all in Java, and the source code for versions of many models is available. (For the person who was complaining that the results aren't reproducable, this will prove you completely wrong. In fact, Epstein and Axtell and others in the field have spent a lot of time thinking about how models can be independently understood and verified.) Someone has allready mentiond JASSS; there is an article in that journal on Ascape. The Ascape build on the Brookings website is now quite old. I joined the Bios Group some time ago and we've been improving and enhancing Ascape as part of our work in using complexity science in "real world" applications. So there should be a new public release RSN, but the version on the website now is relativly robust and has a lot of features. Note that the mailing list at the Brookings website appears to be down at the moment.

I wanted to point out to /.s out there that there is quite a bit of software available to explore artificial societies on your own. I also wanted to say that I have had the rare privledge of working w/ these folks for many years and all of the positive comments (and none of the negative ones :-)) in this thread are right on. Anyway, Ascape, a software framework for agent-based modelling that I developed is available for download at the Brookings Website. Many other interesting models are also described there.. Its all in Java, and the source code for versions of many models is available. (For the person who was complaining that the results aren't reproducable, this will prove you completely wrong. In fact, Epstein and Axtell and others in the field have spent a lot of time thinking about how models can be independently understood and verified.) Someone has allready mentiond JASSS; there is an article in that journal on Ascape. The Ascape build on the Brookings website is now quite old. I joined the Bios Group some time ago and we've been improving and enhancing Ascape as part of our work in using complexity science in "real world" applications. So there should be a new public release RSN, but the version on the website now is relativly robust and has a lot of features. Note that the mailing list at the Brookings website appears to be down at the moment.

The Soviet have 150-mm nuclear tactical warhead to be fired from a regular 150-mm artillery gun. These warheads are supposed to have a yield of less than a kiloton. The Soviet forces also have nuclear landmines, presumably to blow up large infrastructures.

The US have 155-mm nuclear artillery, such as the W-48 warhead, with a very low yield (less than 0.1 kiloton).

So I fail to see what's so new, exciting and dangerous about deployment of tactical, low yield nukes. Such dangerous gadget have been deployed since the fifties. Just because the poster did not know about it does not make it new.

To be exhaustive, NATO claims that all nuclear artillery shells and tactical surface warheads (anti-ship and anti-submarines) were eliminated between 1991 and 1993. So this article merely suggest that these weapons are returning to the Western arsenal.

-- SysKoll

They first hit the media when the US announced that Libya was constructing a chemical weapons production facility (which the US dubbed "Rabta II"), and the idea was floated to take it out with the aforementioned earth-penetrating nuclear weapon... anyway, you can read more about it here:

http://www.brook.edu/dybdocroot/FP/PROJECTS/NUCWCO ST/lasg.htm

You are possibly referring to Project Pluto (see small bit of info here. There was a similar project to create a nuclear airplane. While it was actually a benefit in a deterrent nuclear cruise missle to fly around an enemy territory spewing radiation from an unshielded reactor, it's unlikely that would be looked on favorably these days. Heck, even at the height of the cold war the USAF got cold feet over the idea. That link also refers to project rover, which was a nuclear powered rocket. Some bad ideas just never die.

Bzzzt, wrong! Thanks for playing!

You should have known that

the quote is what J. Robert Oppenheimer said, quoting from Bhagavad Gita, after the first successful test of the nuclear bomb. Look at you, you just made a fool of yourself.

Here's a great picture of a prototype. Note the concept plane at the bottom. The flight deck "could be detached in cases of emergency." What more safety could anyone ask for?

This debate has been around for a long time. In particular, things to note are:

• Britain has considered introducing a system whereby a key to decrypting the encrypted data has to be sent to the government. Here is more information from a dissenting group of privacy advocates in Britain.
• Microsoft has been accused of doing this (and I remember hearing about one time where they actually lost a server containing their only key.) There was a lot of debate over that; you can read some more abuot Microsoft's key structure here.
• Here is a long but rather interesting viewpoint of the debate about crypto.
• Don't forget (and please, tell your less technically-inclined friends) that crypto is NOT just used to send secret terrorist information. It is used by major retailers on the Internet to encrypt sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers.

A hypothetical example of my biggest personal fear regarding crypto follows:

An overzealous government tries to stomp out terrorism by requiring crypto backdoors. For the sake of argument, let's say it is the United States. Now, there are millions of hackers out there. A lot of them are smart enough to realize that if the government required keys to be kept in a central location, a hack of this location would be the biggest hack EVER. It would contain ALL keys to credit card numbers used by major Internet retailers. It would contain sensitive healthcare information. It would contain numerous trade secrets sent by company representatives.

Before we go any further, let's say that it was hacked. Now Joe Consumer knows his personal information was sent to Amazon.com. Amazon was required to give the key to decrypting it to the government. Now some terrorist has it. The government blames rogue hackers. "Well, whatever," Joe thinks to himself. "All I know is that they got my information from the Internet. I'm certainly not going to buy anything from there again."

You see, in this (albeit alarmist) scenario, the government has facilitated what could possibly be the biggest terrorist attack EVER, and ruined e-commerce in the process.

As an offhand note, do you think the government would use a system like Passport to do this? If so, we're in for a really tough ride. Just something to think about.

P.S. While I abhor the thought of keeping data in one place, I do support the idea of basic security regulations so that I know that when I purchase things online, my data IS actually being encrypted instead of being sent via plaintext email to the site owner.

According to articles here, here and here, it doesn't sound like the Chinese will be knocking on our door (with nuclear warheads or troops) any time soon. Given the current Chinese disputes with Russia, Japan, Malaysia and the Philippines (over islands) as well as mounting tensions with Taiwan, China is in no mood (or ability) to go to war. There will be plently of posturing, but this dispute is purely politics.

China has a lot to sort out internally before they are any sort of major military threat. That doesn't mean that there couldn't be regional conflicts that escalate (after all, that is how WW I got started), it only means that conflict between our two nations is unlikely. Do a little reading at Janes or other sites before rattling sabres. China has a long history of spying and tough talk (like the USSR, USA, et. al.), but they currently pose little threat.

If you want something to really worry about, start paying more attention to the escalation in the Middle East.

Actually, inner city schools tend to be well-funded. The terrible Washington, D.C. system has one of the highest per-student spending in the country. Throwing billions of dollars at the Kansas City schools didn't improve them at all.

In fact, extensive studies have shown that there's very little association between school funding and student performance.

See Does Money Matter or the work of Eric Hanushek

Individual and family factors are the dominant forces. Asian immigrants often attend poor schools yet manage to achieve. Conversely, there are many bad students in rich schools.

There's an abandoned ABM site near Nekoma, North Dakota. Place looks right out of the X-Files. I haven't driven by it in a looong time, but supposedly the lights are still on... I'd rather not poke around on what, at its time, was über classified stuff.

The closest I can come to, personally, is owning a closed Wells Fargo branch. Yup. Okay... it's the foundation of an old Wells Fargo stagecoach stop, but I did nearly fall in the well and kill myself.

Now a 747 cruising around blasting VW bugs would be cool...

Dude. Nuclear LAND MINE...