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Boeing Joins In Anti-Gravity Search
SimcoFrappe writes: "BBC News reports that Boeing is trying to extend the research of Russian scientist Dr. Yevgeny Podkletnov to develop a device to shield against gravity. The military branch of the British BAe Systems announced a similar program in 2000. One step closer to cheap space travel or just more sci-fi jive?"
is quite a weighty problem.
I was promised flying cars.
A variant on this story comes up every year or so, but there is never any evidence substantiating Dr. Podkletnov's claims...
First NASA, now Boeing. Rubbish, I'm inclined to believe.
:wq
It's a conspiracy against "overweight" people. If we're shielded from gravity, we'll all simply be known as fat.
How the hell does one do that? From what I understand you can't block gravity like you can block the wind, you need to actively repel against gravity.
Silly silly silly...
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
So Boeing spends a few million, finds the guys research is bunk and discards the project? No problem, they're a multi-billion dollar company.
But... if on the off chance that it really works and could be used in commercial projects and could bring billions (trillions?) in sales and licensing royalties...
Seems like a worthwhile risk to me.
for example, it could be used to make high-rise buildings higher and larger than ever before. And build shielding a la Star Trek.
Imagine the value of a patent on this.
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
The amount of "antigravity" in this research is never more than would be accounted for by miscalibration of instruments.
It's a little out of date, but do read Martin Gardner's "Fads and Fallacies" for a marvelous chapter on antigravity silliness.
Please keep this number in mind. This is not a guy that tries to make SF happen. Zero-G would have a huge impact on the future of humanity.
Does -2% G too?
Johan.
No... since "weight" has to do with the force of gravity, instead of being "heavy" you will simply be "massive".
But I must be off now. I've got a YBa_2Cu_3O_{7-x} widget factory to get off the ground. :B
I'm sure alot of you will first respond by saying thats impossible. But you're wrong. There are no laws of physics that say its is impossible to block gravity. At this point we no so litle about gravity that it is difficult to make any conclusions about it.
Some elementary electromagnetism courses will teach you about faraday cages, which block electromagnetic radiation. Pretty much everyone has experienced this. Ever walk into a concrete building and lose cell phone reception? This is because the concrete is reinforced with steel bars which form a kind of metalic cage around you, this is a faraday cage.
Now like electromagnetism, gravity is one of the four fundamental forces. If we can create a shield to block one of them why not block gravity?
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
You're not fat, you're big boned.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
The real problem with "research" like this is that it brings out the very worst in the peer review system which usually serves scientists so well. As soon as a journal dares to publish something so dubious, there is a huge backlash by the establishment, to the extent that real, innovative research can be stifled.
The best-known example of this phenomenon was the cold-fusion debacle of the late '80s. A group of researchers claimed (essentially) to have initiated nuclear fusion in a beaker using heavy water and palladium electrodes. No-one else was able to reproduce the experimental results. The result, however, was not just to discredit the report's authors, but to cause a scepticism so immense that no electro-chemist could publish a paper which mentioned a similar experiment. I can see the same happening to unsuspecting scientists working on superconductors now.
I would link to an interesting editorial in this month's NewScientist, which describes the phenomenon in considerable detail, but it would appear that they only put it in the print version. Shame, that.
These sigs are more interesting tha
It is not quite clear to me why that would happen, perhaps someone with more insight into elementry physics could (try to) explain this?
The Podkletnov Effect
Search engine Google relates this guy to the alternative science section...
It does make sense for them to spend a few millions just to make sure that the experiment does not work, just in case the experiment actually worked and somebody was covering up.
.. substantial divident.
After all, coming up with an application of this research first would yield a rather
- Michel
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
What about artificial (sp?) gravity? Anti Gravity is usefull to get stuff into orbit and to help disabled people not to mention commercial use in general.
But what about artificial gravity? Once we get into space zero-gravity is a problem. Do you just rotate it to the left instead of right or vice-versa?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
... I suppose you can always fake it.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
My alma mater has a monument to this forthcoming breakthrough, placed by Roger W Babson (of Babson College). It's called the Gravity Stone and it's "to remind students of the blessings forthcoming when a semi-insulator is discovered in order to harness gravity as a free power and reduce airplane accidents" Kinda kooky stuff, check the link.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
There is also this Slashdot story.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
erconductors today are like electricity was in the 1800s. Back then, we understood little about how magnatism and electricity worked. It had a mystique about it that led to gypsies and sayonces (sp?) trying to contact the dead. Commonly, they used this new 'electricity' to contact lost relatives, loved onces, ect. Of course, they were debunked.
Superconductivity is today's mystery phenomenon. We see things float in air, we see electricity move sans resistance, and other principal physics phenomena simply discarded. It's something new, and not as well known. With this mystique, people can claim to have done wonderous things, and have at least a portion of the general population go along with it. Or invest in it.
Also, have you seen the Russian economy? How the brilliant scientists are treated? There's no money for them, they live in near poverty. I don't blame a Russian scientist if he tries to make money this way, legitimate or not. Personally, i find it much preferrable than him selling old USSR equipment (uranium, nukes, hot material, ect) to the highest bidder, in order to feed his family. If you don't think so, that's your problem.
I've got a Craftsman Rotary PowerSander strapped to my ass and I'm floating above my personal magnet collection!
Woohoo!
Who wants my frequent flyer miles?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Will finally be developed by some horny scientist that will try to lift up skirts of women as they walk by...
till he realizes the women are lifted up as well
He pointed to the fact that an Irish university (sorry - don't remember which) had spent quite some time reproducing the experiment, and that this re-running of the experiment had failed to verify a single claim.
I'd love this to be true. Sadly however, at this moment I'd have to put myself in the non-believer camp.
Cheers,
Ian
It's often said that IBM poured money into Josephson's work even though they didn't have any expectation of it succeeding because it would force their competitors to spend money on it - which they couldn't afford as well as IBM. Maybe Boeing are trying the same thing.
Or maybe BAe are trying it, and have succeeded with Boeing...
I wouldn't be surprised if the block-and-tackle industry buys the patents and kills the technology.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I am no physicist, but is creating an upward force to lift objects (which I suppose is what they are trying to accomplish) really anti-gravity?
Wouldn't an object within a true field (or what you would call it) of lessened gravity be less attracted to the Earth (and the Sun, etc..) to a much larger extent than would be controllable / desirable?
I think of Asimov's story "The Billiard Ball", where a scientist uses a billiard ball shot through a field of "anti-gravity" as a murder weapon. Since the Earth, and the Solar System itself keeps on moving at their usual speed when the ball enters the field (and stops being affected by gravity - whatever that means) the result is that the ball moves relative to the surface of the Earth at an enormous speed.
... High tension electricity.. Hasnt this been done and there are videos on the internet showing this. They had models wired up to a transformer that fed a high tension feed to the model and it was levitating.
Anybody got the URL for those vids?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
I like when large companies intervene on our behalf. A friend of mine and me have been trying to defy gravity for a long time using a combination of strong marihuana and yoga.
We could just reverse the polarity on the deflector sheild, and then modify a photon torpedy to emit a burst of t-phase radiation! That should do it!
Wouldn't an easier way to get a 2% reduction in weight be to remove it from the passengers. Set a weight limit for plane passengers and weight everyone at check-in. Anyone over the limit gets immediate liposuction.
Never have to sit next to a fat person on a plane again.
HH
--
They call it "Pascal's Gamble" in one of the articles. It is a breakthrough technology; revolutionary. Revolutions require faith and gambles.
Phantom - A unseen spirit
Work - Doing stuf
/. and that nr.2 is true. /. readers (no this isn't an oxymoron) realise the truth that 2 is true! ;)
So what conclusions can we make with this info?
(1)
Phantoms are mostly only annoying and some people think that is what they are here for (eg. their work)
So then Phantom Works is for those anoying projects that some bigshot manager at Boeing came up with this *dumb* project....
OR
(2)
Boeing might just be a pawn in an intelligence agency (think MIIIB here) who naturally have been tracking this project for a long time and realise it's potencial!
And because they don't want to let other agencies in on this, they search for a way too invest money into it and what better than a aeroplane maker?
PS.
(Of course if this get's modded down this means that the intelligence agency is watching
But if it get's modded up it's because the intelligent
Moderation: +4. Modded 70% Funny and 30% Overrated. 100% Saturated.
Any research conducted in order to obtain a better understanding of gravity is a good thing IMO. This is an extremely large company with plenty of essets. If this project fails, it's nothing much off their backs. They may not find anything that gives them 0G, but some important discoveries may be made in the process.
- A real programmer uses $ cat > a.out
This is pretty sweet because that means there is an electrical way to modulate mass. So you set up a wheel--on one side there's no EM field and so the magnets on the wheel have low mass. On the other side is a strong EM field so the magnets have high mass. The forces on the opposite sides of the wheel are out of balance, so it turns. Ta-da, high-efficiency power generation with practically no cost!
Since we all know that
1. Cats always land on their feet, and
2. A buttered slice of bread will undoubtedly land on the carpet butter side down,
we could strap said buttered slice of bread onto the cats back, then drop the whole thing to the floor.
Will work for bandwidth
I have no expectations that a means of blocking gravity have [or will] be found. But, if it should come to pass, I have only one question:
(For the humor-impaired, that was supposed to be a joke.)"Hey, waddaya know? I am big boned!" Undead pirate from The Curse of Monkey Island.
I always thought that two objects with mass always have gravitational attraction. I also thought that two objects can never get far enough appart to have their gravatational attraction go to zero.
F = G * m1 * m2 / d^2
This equation shows that the gravitational attraction can never go to zero.
That said, does anyone have any idea how this guy got two objects with mass to not have any gravitational attraction? It seems impossible.
-ted
Anyhow, I bet heaps of fa^H^Hoverweight people would love to be shielded from gravity...
It's just going to be a problem for everyone else with 200 pound balls of flesh floating around..
Sorry that wasn't PC, I'll make a skinny person joke sometime soon to even up my (real) karma...
More on this story here
How often do you hear of something being made top secret when its a failure?
Also because its top secret, dont expect to be able to be able to use this for a good 20 years or more, while the military creates aircrafts.
Actually, anti gravity has already been found by a few diffrent guys, and its been proven in a lab, the problem is, its very difficult to control, it works in the lab but making it work on an actual aircraft is a totally diffrent story.
Boeing is investing in this technology because it worked in a lab, Im sure they have other anti gravity technology, and prototypes, but its kinda strange for them to announce what they are doing, usually for top secret skunkworks or phantomworks projects, they arent allowed to even tell you what it is.
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Hmm, although I agree it's difficult to say that shielding against gravity is impossible, the above is not exactly sound logic. You need to look at the origin of the forces in question to see why.
The general relativistic model of gravity as the effect of warped spacetime would seem to indicate that blocking gravity could be a fundamentally different problem than blocking electromagnetic radiation.
Electromagnetic radiation travels through spacetime, i.e. it follows the curvature of spacetime. Blocking it is simply a matter of constructing the right kind of interfering device, such as a faraday cage, to prevent electromagnetic photons/wave packets from penetrating.
OTOH, according to GR, gravity as we perceive it is essentially a secondary effect due to the curvature of spacetime. To "block" it, you would have to be able to uncurve spacetime in the vicinity you wish to block. This is a little different from blocking photons. The only thing we've ever discovered that's capable of warping spacetime is "mass". So sure, we can counter the effects of gravity, there's no mystery about it: simply use a mass as large as the mass of the object whose gravitational effects you want to counter.
Unfortunately, in the case of gravity, this doesn't really work the way we want. Let's say I create a black hole with a similar mass to that of the Earth (I have a fairly well-equipped basement). In the vicinity of the black hole, I would feel a force towards the hole (please no goatse jokes) of approximately 1G (adjust masses to achieve appropriate effect outside the Schwarzchild radius, etc.) So if I hang the black hole from my ceiling, I could create a micro-gravity environment in my basement, with the force upward cancelling the force downward.
Astute readers have by now noticed a slight problem with this scenario. Despite my well-equipped basement, I don't happen to possess a means for suspending an Earth-mass object a few feet above another Earth-mass object (i.e. the Earth itself). There's not going to be a heck of a lot I can do about the fact that my black hole is going to shoot down towards the earth under a combined force of 2G and a momentum that would require numbers with "E" in them to describe. (I had better not be standing beneath it, if I want to avoid rather nasty tidal effects as the black hole travels through my body - that killed a guy on Mars once.)
Because of the nature of gravity, "shielding" against its effects may not even be meaningful. Even if it is possible, it's highly doubtful that we will stumble across the solution by random experimentation with e.g. spinning disks. Spinning disks might confuse researchers, but they don't confuse the universe.
It's simple. You take a cat, and a slice of bread with butter, and strap it on the cat's back. Then drop it.
Cat's always fall on their feet.
According to Murphy, the bread always falls on the buttered side. Since this object will be able to do neither, it simply won't fall (as falling would break at least one universal law).
I find a good bottle of tequila makes me lighter...
You need a good sized toilet though so that the law of conservation of mass stays valid.
I went to the Farnborough airshow at the weekend and there were some serious hardware which appeared to defeat gravity.
With the aid of a few thousand pounds of thrust, yes.
And you never know what sorts of things you might discover even in failure to achieve the original goal.
It's called serendipity.
Must not be top-secret is the head of the department is talking to the interviewer about it. I would also like to see your proof of a true anti-gravity machine.
I learned this in quake:
Step 1: Lower gravity to 0
Step 2: Wait for enemies to accelerate upwards.
Step 3: Increase gravity to 255, watch enemies splatter all over the ground.
This would be the advanced ward that a Tremere can cast upon any weapon providing lethal damage to anything affected by gravity. This differs from ward vs kindred in that instead of use of blood the caster spends 45 minutes rubbing magnets all over the weapon.
Why not simply butter the bread on both sides? Or is this physically impossible.
Of course, you could also alter cats to have no feet.
Prof. Bullfinch had This years ago. Read all about it in _Danny Dunn and the Anti-Gravity Paint_.
(Although now I think about it, he must've cribbed it from Cavor. (_First Men in the Moon_))
Antigravity and remote viewing is the stuff of Art Bell. This should be +2Funny at least. Lousy /. story, whatsamattaU, can't take some sarcasm?
Come on, people. This guy is making extra-ordinary claims and has no proof -- nor confirmation -- to back it up with.
His experiment was simple, yet his results are not reproducible. A sure sign that he's a bullshitter. What amazes me is that Boeing actually takes this crap seriously -- sort of like how the FBI turns to "psychics" to solve crimes. Idiots.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. This guy has none.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Doesn't it suck when beaucrats make these big research decisions, wasting millions in research dollars? If resonable scientists had been involved in the decicion-making process they wouldn't come within a football field of this project. Frankly, I'd rather they spend the money on in-flight 3D games for the passengers...
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
Announce that you're spending $million$ researching some dubious, far-out idea that (if REALLY long odds went your way) could be awesomely profitable.
Set up a big secret lab, post guards, etc. Assign a bunch of researchers (especially poor security risks) to seems-real research on the cover story. Insure a regular trickle of leaks about false leads, barely-measurable & irreproducable effects, discovered sources of error, etc.
Meanwhile, have a bunch more (tight-lipped) researchers in the back room doing the real research on the REAL secret project.
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Sesh, is Boeing behind the curve or what! Everybody knows that the military already has anti-gravity technology taken from alien spacecraft. Just ask Bob Lazar!
Surely you would have to pump energy in at some stage adding more weight (ok that weight would need less gravity) Anti gravity laptops with endless batery life ?
We have observed items defying gravity on a macro and micro scale. High energy particles, exemplified by , have been observed to easily negate some of the gravity effects their mass would mathmatically tell us they should be affected by. On a large scale, radiation in the form of light particles escape from black holes energetically even through mathmatically predicted gravity fields that should retain and stop them.
Everything I have read says that gravity is not a particle, but more like a very weak nuclear force that can act at long distances. I doubt you can contain that force, nor generate it with current power sources we have today, but you might be able to deflect or negate it's attractive force.
If it is a particle, it would bet my kiddney that someday soon we will not only be able to generate it in a lab, but be able to harness and control it. I think one of the most interesting things I have seen as of late link GP multistate particle that exists in multiple dimensions, hence it's lack of observed existence (yet).
The WHO is trying to extend the research of Chinese scientist Dr. Alex Chiu to develop a device to make its owner never perish. The Ch*r*h of **ientology announced a similar program in 2000. One step closer to human immortality or just more sci-fi jive?
if i had the proof id be killed the prototypes are top secret
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
....Boeing is throwing their money away. Unlike the other three forces (weak and strong nuclear, and electromagnetic) Gravity doesn't have a particle. It has no physical or electrical particle that applies a force. So negating gravity isn't possible. All matter exerts gravity as matter of fact. It really is a condition of being matter, hence nothing with matter is immune to gravity. Spend the money on a space elevator or new launch devices!
.
Ignored Since 1973
Let's stop trying to do the impossible and spend the money on more credible science... like cold fusion in a bottle.
Seriously, if someone could get it to work, the impact would be beyond belief.
One thing that makes me very suspicious of this is the necessity for something to be spinning very, very fast. As anybody who has played with gyroscopes knows, spinning objects behave in very counter-intuitive ways.
Thirty years ago, Professor Eric Laithwaite, quoted as the inventor of the linear motor, claimed that an assembly of gyroscopes could produce anti-gravity. He was scorned at the time, and his career was wrecked. As I undertand it, after much follow-on research, he admitted that he hadn't got anti-gravity or a reactionless drive, but an interesting side effect of the complex behaviour of spinning gyroscopes.
I would bet heavily that this is another occurrence of the same. Some novel (or perhaps not novel, but forgotten) effect is producing a force on the object being weighed - e.g. second or third order effects from the currents in the rotating disk - a bit like the Hall Effect.
This does not mean that it is foolish of Boeing to follow up the claims with a bit of their "blue sky" research budget. The strange effect may have useful consequences elsewhere in research - it is worth looking. Remember that the transistor came about from investigating an unexpected effect when a wire just touched a lump of silicon instead of being properly fixed to it - and look where that got us.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
One step closer to cheap space travel or just more sci-fi jive?"
Both this suggestion and a lot of comments fail to take into account one thing.
Although some device might shield against gravity, the shield itself will be affacted by gravity. So, even if there is zero gravity inside some sphere, the sphere itself vill rest firmly on earth.
Thus, no cheap space travel, but a lot of uses, none the less..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
If the effects of gravity are shielded, how about the inertial mass of the object? If local spacetime is "decurved", would this allow the object to accelerate past the speed of light, or at least decrease the dilation effect?
I can't see how you could do one without the other...while anti-gravity seems really cool, if there's an effect on inertia, this is potentially far greater, IMHO.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
This is all great and everything but if we're going to be spending time and money chasing a very likely pipe dream I would much rather they get cracking on those personal teleporters.
I have a fantasy where I leave for work at 8:00AM and get to work right on time at exactly 8:00AM. That would be the ticket. Gimmie something that will enable me to sleep in later in the morning and get to work without sitting in traffic and tossing a bunch of pollution in the air.
Imagine the changes something like that would bring to the world. Hell even if they never got to a point where you could teleport living things but only inanimate objects that would be something. Zero transportation costs would do an number on both prices and pollution.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
lol, I was just thinking of him when I read the preceeding comment, I really should play those games again...
dave
The wonder bra!
Think about it...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It was on a set of scales, and when he turned it on, it weighed less! Last I heard (several years ago) he wandered off to Australia where he had some promise of funding (UK Gov didn't think it'd be very useful or something - bless them!).
It apparently had an arrangement of Gyroscopes inside, and we all know about the 90 degree thang with gyros don't we - spin one and try to make it turn, and it will move at 90 degrees to the applied force - or something. So - setup a bunch of 'em in a case ... yada yada yada ...
Anyone else remember this ... and 'where is he now'?
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
Why do you think they are asking Slashdot users for ideas?
There is always coral castle.......
When there are scientists that are claiming more interesting results with strong (although possibly flawed) mathematical/quantum models to back them?
One of these guys has even got funding from NASA.
Electrogravity
"I have been around the world and found that only stupid people are breeding" -- Harvey Danger
Coral Castle
I came acrosss this semmingly more respected anti grav device within a few link clicks of the article. Though IANAP.
Eat at Joe's.
Let's say you set up some anti gravity, and float up into the air. Then you turn it off and you'll fall down. Now, let's set up anti gravity and use it to lift a 500 pound weight up a rail. Turn it off, and allow the weight to do some work on the way down.
This violates the law of conservation of energy. Yes, perhaps you have to put the energy in to lift the object off the ground, but then technically you'd be pushing against the ground, not shielding yourself from gravity.
So we have GMm/r^2 = GHm/s^2. The G and m cancel out, leaving M/r^2 = H/s^2. Using an Earth mass of 5.9736 x 10^24 kg, and a radius of 6370000m, and assuming s=1m, my calculations show that the black hole would need a mass of 1.472 x 10^11 kg (147 billion kilograms) to create a micro-gravity environment in my basement - however localized, and however briefly. That's hundredths of trillionths of the mass of the Earth - quite a lot lighter, as Rhombus guessed.
Yes, there exists politics in science. It is necessary when everyone is being fed from the same slop-bucket. The cold fusion debacle wasn't really an example of this. (Your point is valid, but you picked a poor example.)
My research advisor, Rich Petrasso, was one of the scienctists who proved Fleischmann and Pons wrong. If you had actually studied the case, you would have known that:
a) F+P had a tremendous amount of internal pressure to publish. They had to rush the results or risked getting scooped.
b) They were electrochemists doing nuclear spectroscopy, using a device that they were unfamilar with. The "fusion" peak that they saw was an artifact from a previous test. An experianced scientist would have caught it.
c) Where did they make their announcement? Science? Nature? JoAPS? No, they made it on CNN. Only AFTER the circus came, did they bother to publish an article in Science. How much time/money was wasted trying to prove these clowns wrong?
The lesson learned from the cold fusion debate was that "extraordinary claim require extraordinary proof." The science community has a system for error checking in place. When someone delibrately skirts this they are not engaging their peers.
Check out the other side of the story at http://www.infinite-energy.com
Cartman: 'I'm not fat, dammit, I'm just a little big boned' :)
Obelix: 'I'm not fat, I'm just a little chubby'
Michel, who's desperately trying to gain weight
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
For those who are interested, Pascal's Wager actually involves something far more significant.
Got Wisdom?
Of course, being as how Boeing's stock price is lower than the execs would like it to be (nobody wants the damn planes anymore, doh!), this could just be an experiment to see if anti-gravity stories can levitate stock prices to a level where options can be exercised at a profit - or am I just a twisted old cynic?
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
butter both sides of the bread instead of dumb cats
It appears that this Russian scientist has bec ame quite reclusive after he released his research. It is possible that he found that his theory is incorrect, or maybe he never really existed and this is a hoax. So far as I can see , this has only been disproved rather than proved. Why is there so much hype?
Does this mean that I could just think up the most useful technological anyone could possibly imagine and a big corporation could fund it?
IIRC, Pascal's Wager was first used as an argument for the existence of God. A pretty screwy argument considering that if I can think up a supernatural being who will punish you worse than that of any other religion for disobeying it and reward you the best for obedience, then you automatically must believe it exists.
Happy people make bad consumers.
Oh, come on. We all noticed this one, right? UFO With Fighter Escort Over DC! ...News at Eleven. On a side note, of course Boing and NASA are sinking money into this; Just like several well known companies sank money into the Internet via Powerlines scam. If it pans out, your looking at a real society changing event, not some auto-balacing scooter hype. If not, they'll try to sue the guy's butt, legs and arms off and walk away with their tail between their legs. Life goes on. Further, you won't see this in civilian applications anytime soon if it is the real anti-gravity McCoy. Ever see Evangelion? Notice how they were always (until the later eps) attatched to a giant extention cord? I suspect your power-hungery anti-gravity unit is either going to be teathered to one of these or have it's own mini S2 nuclear plant. At least until we develop Mr. Fission, that is.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Nick Cook used to be an editor for Janes - so is a credible source for this sort of stuff.
More details on the book - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0767906276/ ref%3Dbr%5Fb%5Fnr%5F5/103-1437011-7987841
Evil ZEN Scientist
Any philosophy which mentions the word `God` as part of its `proof` is probably not worth reading. I mean, why would you?
After the initial press conference, there quickly came a lot of early confirmations from various respected laboratories. There were also a large number of "early drafts" of papers from teoreticians for teories that should explain the finding.
However, as far as I knew none of it made it through the review process. I guess most of it was withdrawn as more well-planed experiments failed to reproduce the results.
I suspect the real lesson is not the peer-reviewed system itself, but the problems that come when you go around it by publishing through the press, instead of waiting for the system.
Though you might not realize it from watching Star Trek, science isn't about rewriting the principles of physics just in time to save everyone from the Life-Force-Sucking Energy Creatures. Sciences is about coming up with ideas (yes, crazy ideas are ok) and testing them. Carefully. Looking for any possible flaw in your hypothesis, and honestly trying to dubunk it.
It's hard. When you've spent months or years working on something, you grow to care about it and believe in it. There's a huge temptation to see only the results that confirm what you believe. It's very easy to pretend, even to yourself, that your ideas are more important than the method, that the results show generally the right thing anyway, that the contradicting data isn't relevent.
It's also wrong. "Too much zeal", in this case, is likely dishonesty. Someone who simply comes up with cute ideas and tries to find supporting data isn't a scientist. For every Cold Fusion debacle, there are hundreds of cases of fudged results by researches with "too much zeal", every one of which muddies the waters of understanding and wastes taxpayer and corporation money.
Your so-called "zeal" does nothing to advance sciences. If the ideas are correct, careful testing will support them, and openly publishing results will allow others to reproduce them. If they can't survive, then no amount of effort will make them fly.
Reading a lot of the posts people have made here so far is quite disheartening. Has everybody become so cynical that they reject any slightly outlandish claim without critical thought simply because 'everybody knows anti-gravity is impossible'. Right, everybody knew flying was impossible. Everybody knew going to the moon is impossible. We shouldn't just immediately dismiss the possibility - even if it is a one in a million chance, the potential pay off makes it worth while.
That being said, there are several reasons why I'm willing to consider the possibility that Dr. Podkletnov was onto something.
So I've got a few reasons to watch this research with interest and frankly hope. I won't be planning on owning a flying car a few years down the road. Healthy skepticism is a good thing, and extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, but if you immediately dismiss an idea as outlandish and never give it a chance, you'll never get your extraordinary proof no matter how solid an idea it was in the first place.
It's sad in a way ... modern physics may become a victim of its own success. For hundreds of years our understanding of science was furthered by people doing stuff, noticing something strange and trying to figure out why it happened. Of course, now we've got quantum mechanics which is just so goddamned good at what it does (i.e., modeling the subatomic universe) that anything which comes along and isn't explainable under the current theory is immediately dismissed after a half-assed attempt at reproducing. This isn't the way science is supposed to work! This is particularly sad since we already know that quantum mechanics is incomplete.
Come on people! Where's your sense of wonder? This is potentially the greatest scientific discovery in seventy years! But if it's never given a chance to prove itself, it'll become the greatest scientific non-discovery.
didn't boeing also buy into that AMAZING new kind of cooling technology, it was slashdotted a while ago. here
i think that boeing just tends to jump on unsound technology. i wonder if they own any bitboys oi! stock?
A Graviton is a spinning cylinder, not a spinning disk. When you get inside, it starts to spin, and you slide across the floor and stick to the inside wall of the cylinder. Then they drop the floor and friction holds you to the wall. But it gets boring pretty quickly.
I once snuck a tennis ball inside and tried to throw it to my buddy on the far side of the cylinder, but it didn't travel in a straight line. Spooky.
Except that the wager is flawed. It's impossible to determine any course of action from the wager.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Washington 50 years ago
"In the absence of hard information, the Washington Daily News printed a roundup of rumors. The "most persistent rumor" was that the saucers were American aircraft secretly produced by Boeing "at some remote site." An "absolutely weird" rumor was that the saucers were alien aircraft that had crashed and then been repaired and flown by the Air Force."
Sipping G&T in the pyjama farm with all the others?
How often do you hear of something being made top secret when its a failure?
Well I can give you one good example. Missile defense.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
or simply strap a buttered toast (buttered side up) to the back of a cat to achieve a similar effect...
An anti-gravity technology patent has already been filed by Microsoft for creating cool WindowsXP advertisements.
Along with the EULA now XP comes with a private pilot license and ELT equipped stress ball.
delete free(system.gc);
'cause it assumes only one choice - the Catholic God or no God. When you throw in all the other religions, your chance of picking the "right" one falls off to about 0.
"You want the truth you can't handle the truth, but here is a link anyways."
The Anonymous, not-for-Karma, God has SPOKEN!
Actually, it wasnt a failure, it worked in a few tests, however its useless in real wars where there will be hundreds of dummy bombs launched with the real bomb
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
It might be more practical for airlines to charge by the pound.
"Funny thing is that no lessons have really been learned from the wholesale debunking and smear campaign that took place against Pons and Fleichsmann, but it has thrown up some small oddities like Muon Catalysed Fusion"
Check your facts. Muon-catalyzed fusion was researched long before the cold-fusion debacle (prior to Pons and Fleichsmann, it was called "cold fusion"). They deserve no credit for it. And it's not an "oddity"; it's easy to understand (from quantum mechanics) how muons could catalyze fusion.
And another point, people keep saying that no engines will be required. OK, we get lift, but we still need forward propulsion!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Just what we need. Fat, evil dictators floating around in their antigrav suits.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
What we like is wave. Mmmmh. Waves packet too. Duality onde-corpuscule (if you ahve a particule then you may associate it with an onde of wavelength "de Broglie" lambda=something/m). And so forth. Such physic is far in the apst for me but you see where I am pointed at : Quantum physic is more onde+corpouscule. Classical physic is more "corpuscule" only.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Dr. Podkletnov and his associate G. modanese used to maintain a website at Gravity.org. That website has since disappeared, for several months now. Folks, I know these claims seem outrageous but there is an interesting point here. IF there is grand unified Theory that means there will be a relationship between GRavity and Electromagnetism. AND there s a loophole in electromagnetism provided by the zero resistance of a superconductor. V=I*R (ohms law) Well...Voltage in a superconductor goes to zero, because resistance is at zero? So I can ramp up power to an infinite degree? And the Meissner effect (the anti magnetism around the superconductor) already demonstrates peculiar properties. Look folks, we need this examined carefully and repeatedly until we understand it. This may be one of the experimental proofs of a GUT that we have been looking for. It may point us to an electro-magnetic-gravity theory. Wish that website were still up...
Since it is much easier to observe something once it has been captured, I see no problem with trying to capture it before observing it.
Yes. It is the logical equivalent of the "?" step that ends with "3: Profit!"
Mass change of 2% aren't that hard to measure. You can measure even mass change of 0.1% (see the experience we are discussing tehre !).
Furthermore it wasn't *one* university which tried to reproduce , but many team over the world. All making errors ? And even in that improbable case, why is the Russsian professor *NOT WANTING* to help them correct their error ?
The biggest problem here, isn't the extraodinary claim, but the fact that the russian professor do not support fully its claim with independant reproducibility.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
It is a well known empirical result that water doesn't block fish.
If the bread is on the cat's back, it will still avoid the carpet if the cat lands on its feet. Surely you need to strap the bread to the cat's feet, with the butter side down.
Wasn't the default gravity setting 800? :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
That Quake 1 had a hidden level called Ziggurat, which had 'moon gravity' ie, very low gravity. :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
They can likely shuffle their numbers around using this as a legitimate tax writeoff somewhere so that they can increase their profit.
"It's not pluses and minuses. It's pluses and pluses - if you play your minuses correctly" - Mrs Carlson. WKRP in Cincinatti.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
It doesn't take a rocket scientist, or a prophet, to realize that if there's an all-powerful being that created the world and wants to be worshiped, there's only *one* of them.
The question of "is there a God" is a different one than "What's God like?" AFAIK, he's a bloodthirsty indian elder-spirit, who for some reason wants Christians to worship as a nice guy who hung on a cross.
Not the Catholic God - the Catholics believe all sorts of non-Christian things (like Jesus is crucified every time their priests invoke a wafer).
So, yes, missile defense DOES make sense even if it can only zap an incoming attack of two or three missiles. That's the most probable nuclear threat that the U.S. faces.
...inside his hollowed-out volcano, high in the Peruvian Andes.
Actually, I was thinking that the wager is incomplete. The possibilities of action are only believe or don't believe, which is imcomplete.
Belief cannot be automatically assumed. Someone who tries hard to believe might actually fail to believe. And someone who tries hard not to believe might fail in that, and wind up believing anyway.
So accounting for that, we wind up with:
believe infinite gain
believe and fail infinite loss
not believe infinite loss
not believe and fail infinite gain
For either course that I could pick, the possible outcomes are either infinite gain or infinite loss. That's what I mean when I say that Pascal's wager does not offer any help in deciding the proper course to take.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
His latest paper came out last August - no more spinning superconductors, now he's playing with huge voltages on a fixed superconductor. It sounds interesting; I can't tell you if it's real or not, but maybe Boeing can figure something out. Here's a link to the more recent paper:
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0108005
I have 2 grams of Upsydaisyum acquired from a former Soviet source I won't mention, let's just call him "Boris" and leave it at that. ;-P ( One hundred beeel-yon dollars )
If NASA wants it I'll sell it for $100 Billion dollars
PS Dr. Evil call me later, our tee off time has changed, let me know when you're free.
My excuse? It's morning.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
... isn't gravity a security device? ... trying to circumvent it is probably a violation of the DMCA ... better watch out ... God could sue ...
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
That was the movie. Which totally misunderstood the book. What can you say in favor of a movie that ends "And then the little girl fell out of bed and woke up."? I can't say anything favorable.
Movies may be more popular, but frequently their interpretation of what is important about a book is governed by production requirements. And this often causes them to get everything quite wrong.
To me, the Wizard of OZ was the most blatant example, but then it's bothered me ever since I was four. Another atrocious example was Dune, a magnificint book, and a movie that was so different it was a different story counterfeiting a semblance. And not very good.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Fall, and just miss the ground.
The best application of a faraday cadge for
gavity would not be an airplane. The plane
would have to cary the cadge around it and
therefore could never get off the ground.
A better use would be for various industrial,
processes on earth that would otherwise need to
be flown in space. The cadge would provide cheap
access to micro gravity. OK if you want to
fly this thing use it to shield a gyroscope
or an accelomemeter so that you can make
realy good inertial nav instruments.
I can think of al kinds of way a chemist could
put this thing to use. Suspensions that don't settle out and so forth..
but "gravitationally challenged"
This is obviously a cover up for when the government does release anti-gravity technology several years from now. Boeing has agreed to this story so the truth about alien derived ant-gravity technology will be kept hidden. The general consensus among scientist is that Dr. Yevgeny Podkletnov is a quack and Boeing would never pursue something like that.
Excuse me, but when was the last time either of those nations attacked the US? Are they ever likely to, unless provoked? And would it be by a missile? Or do people in Congress have "friends/family" and "election fund contributors" in the defence industry, backing this worthless system? You decide. Save billions on anti-missile systems by not annoying/invading/subverting other countries. It works surprisingly well. Believe me, these people don't dislike the US because they hate "freedom and democracy" or the dominant religion, despite what your rulers & media want you to believe. They just don't like governments that lie, cheat, steal & deal with other corrupt governments to get more oil for the wealth of the ruling classes, at the expense of the people on both sides of the equation. (Sorry, don't mean to turn this into a political debate, or to cause offence. This illogical kind of thinking annoys me however.)
An anti-gravity device which leaves the mass intact but shields gravitational effects can also be used as an inertial dampner, essentially a mass reducer if object in question can be surrounded by it. Either that or Mach's principle is incorrect (which may as well be.)
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
The Phantom Works owes it's name to Boeing/McDonnel Douglas's most successful and revolutionary F-4 Phantom II from 1956, which stayed in production through 1979 at least, with thousands produced. It was the first 'real' multi-role combat aircraft, thanks to it's powerful J-79 engines that were able to push a wing that was big enough to actually lift something more than a box of matches for the length of a baseball pitch.
Before Douglas Aircraft and McDonnel Aircraft merged, McDonnel had a tradition of naming it's designs after supernatural entities, giving us the: Phantom1, the F3H Demon, the Banshee, FJ Fury, and probably one or two more that I've forgotten. Very early Carrier-based Jet aircraft which had service lives of less than a decade, as aircraft technology was progressing so quickly at the time.
I suspect some PLOT from the Russian FSB which is apparently churning out half-baked, highly convoluted theories on cutting-edge subjects to keep western brains occupied.
This is already way OT, but hey...
:)
From my quick reading of the link to Pascal's gambit above, I would conclude that the 'many Gods' objection is actually more substantial than your meaning of incompleteness.
That webpage (near the end) and Pascal in his original writing both address your second choice: "believe and fail". You assume that the consequence of that is infinite loss. However, you can't actually make yourself believe. You can only cultivate belief by acting as if you believe. If by doing that, you actually end up believing, that's outcome #1. If you attempt to believe and fail, it is possible that a diety could recognize that as all you were capable of doing, and the outcome might still be infinite gain.
Under that alternate assumption, the gambit actually more strongly favors belief. At worst it essentially reduces to the original form, I think. Of course, you know what they say about the word ass-u-me.
However, I can see we're getting into Occam's Razor territory, so I'll drop it...
Christopher
Mozilla
It is to be hoped that some great science will be spun out of this (probably doomed) effort for anti-gravity.
And don't forget the Mad Scientist's Motto: It
I believe in God out of faith and conviction. But even so it is amusing to see people disregard the possibility of God and then offer no "proven" alternative and offer only theories that, lacking proof, are no more likely to be true than the existince of God.
Tell me again why I should believe them instead of God? Or better yet, tell me again why I need to believe them at the EXCLUSION of God?
Next you'll see "Wear this vibrating belt, and see your weight go down 2% immediately!!" on your favorite infomercial channel:)
Little did buyers know that the vibrating was a superconducting ceramic disk rotating over powerful electromagnetics within the belt's buckle, causing the belt wearer to lose weight almost immediately.
Companies are free from litigation, because technically weight is "force of gravity" and not *mass*...so the belt works 'as advertised' and no one can sue them!
But it might eat a lot of batteries...
So you advocate a pre-Pearl Harbor/pre-9/11 approach where we should do absolutely nothing to protect ourselves until thousands of our citizens are killed? Would it not be better to have a defense system in place that would make it clear that a missile attack on the U.S. would be futile, so why even consider it? It will save lives on both sides--U.S. lives from the missile attack and lives on the other side from the inevitable counter-strike.
Are they ever likely to, unless provoked?
I don't know, do you presume to? How many millions of lives are you willing to stake on your belief?
And would it be by a missile?
It's certainly possible, especially given North Korea's recent interest in ballistic missile tests. Iraq also showed their fondness for missiles when they lobbed a few into Israel during the Gulf War.
Or do people in Congress have "friends/family" and "election fund contributors" in the defence industry, backing this worthless system?
That's certainly possible, too, but it does not eliminate the potential real usefulness of the system.
You decide.
Thanks, I'll take the missile defense system.
Save billions on anti-missile systems by not annoying/invading/subverting other countries. It works surprisingly well.
Yeah, ask Western Europe how well it worked with Germany. Ask Kuwait how well it worked with Iraq. Remember how well it worked with Japan (remembering that we only denied them oil because they wanted to take over SE Asia/Pacific).
Sorry, not annoying, invading, or suberting other countries is no guarantee against an attack. History shows that conclusively.
Believe me, these people don't dislike the US because they hate "freedom and democracy" or the dominant religion, despite what your rulers & media want you to believe.
I really don't care why they like or dislike us. I might not like the Taliban or Afghanistan, but I didn't favor invading them until 9/11. They don't want us to annoy them? They shouldn't annoy us. It works both ways.
This illogical kind of thinking annoys me however.
Illogical thinking? Illogical to strive to develop a missle defense system that would protect our country from small missile strikes which are quite probably the most probable type of missile attack?
Is it more illogical to protect ourselves with a missle defense that does no-one damage and protects us? Or should we invade every potential country that may be attempting to create ballistic missiles just to be sure? I'd prefer the missile defense system.
"I lost 30 kilos on the new Podkletnov WEIGHT (not mass) loss program"
Under that alternate assumption, the gambit actually more strongly favors belief. At worst it essentially reduces to the original form, I think. Of course, you know what they say about the word ass-u-me.
I once worked with a person who was formerly a Catholic monk. He knew that I didn't believe, and we had many discussions about many things including religion. His viewpoint startled me, to be honest. He said flat out that atheism didn't preculde entry to heaven, according to his understanding. My "quest for truth" as he put it would surely count for *something* in the eyes of the Catholic god.
But anyway, the way to read these things is not to add up the numbers of possibilities one each side. In other words, it's not correct to say "there's three scenarios that lead to gain, but one that lead to loss, so pick one of the scenarios that lead to gain".
The way to use this thing is to pick the path that leads to maximum gain. In all cases, a possible outcome is equal: infinite gain.
I assume you're familiar with the standard "prisoneer's dilemma". In that scenario, the outcomes all have different values - 10 years vs. 5 years vs. 3 years, and so on.
Imagine that the dilemma was posed with the outcomes all having equal values - we couldn't choose what to do.
Example:
If nobody talks, 0 years for both.
If one person talks, 0 years for the talker, 10 for the one who didn't.
If both people talk, 10 years for both.
So, we've got the following possibilities:
I don't talk: 0 years, or 10 years.
I do talk: 0 years, or 10 years.
See? That's exactly how Pascal's wager is flawed. When all courses can lead to exactly the same gain, it cannot logically be used to make a decision.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
That's just what we need. Instead of turning commercial jumbo jets into flying explosives, now a terrorist might just decide to use a jet to catapult skyscrapers into space.
The poster talked about proofs that include God as part of the proof. For you to turn that into "disregarding the possibility" is disingenuous. There is an ocean of difference between disregarding a possibility and not seeing sufficient evidence to persuade.
If no one offers you a "proven" alternative then feel free to not believe them. But for you to offer that as evidence for a God is illogical. You're probably a very logical person in everyday issues. You also, for whatever reason, want to believe in God. That desire clouds your ability to approach it logically (this is not unique to you or this issue - it happens to everybody).
I happen to be, for whatever reason, predisposed to not expecting a God at the end of the tunnel. However, don't get me wrong, I'm pulling for you! I of course hope you're right. I just don't think you are.
Out of (quite a lot) of Catholics I know, none of them believe that.
Hasn't anyone watched "Event Horizon"?
Intense supercooled magnetic fields can cause artificial black holes, and rifts in space-time.
Shit like this can cause dimensional doorways to occur.
This stuff, like human cloning, should be against international law.
or I'll be disappointed.
before you plonk a few million bucks into something, you should be better prepared to defend it in front of your peers. A few thousand heads is ALWAYS better than one. (Don't give me those Einstein=genius crap : several including Hilbert were close to what he was going after, and he did not do it in seclusion).
Of course, Our eminent Russian Scientist refuse to devulge his "secrets", which by the way, if true will win a few nobel prizes. not to mention violate a few fundamental physical principles.
But, this is just nuts. Give science a really bad name.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Have shown about a 2% reduction in mass, not too shabby, but as has already been pointed out that's not much help either. But keep this in mind: the tests used ceramic discs that were, what, maybe an inch (or 2.54 cm for those metric types) across? Ok, cool. What happens if we make this with a disc, say, 24 meters (or metres) across? Who knows? Damn thing might fly. Point is, nobody has tried this at scales of that size. So this costs the various companies a couple of million (maybe a billion) to research. If it fails, it's a valid R&D expenditure and therefore a Capital Gains loss (tax break); but if it works... the flow of cash will make Gates look poor. I want to see this researched more, especially at really large scales.
Why don't we build on the work from
Townsend Brown. 2% weight reduction.. big deal!
Mod this as funny you cretins!
Some of the jokes would have been at least half-way funny if they didn't stop the movie to explain the hell out of them.
4. Dr Podkletnov claims weight can be reduced by 2% (1kg=980g)
I hope that the 1kg=980g was the reporters interpretation and wasn't Dr Podkletnov's doing since that isn't a change in weight, it's a change in mass. A change in weight would be 981 N = 784.8 N.
I stole this Sig
... which can be found here:
;-)
http://www.gravity-society.org/
I was loosely following this news since 1992 when it first broke. While I remain sceptical, this is nevertheless Anti-G research that looks like real science (for instance Giovanni Modanese who offers a theoretical explanation for the presumed effect was a fellow of the very renowned German Max Planck institutes).
I hold a Masters in Physics and looking at his papers I can at least testify that they are not easy to dismiss (quite to the contrary to all the other Anti-G nonsense that's floating around on the web). It is also interesting to note that a Chinese theoretical physicist at the UofA predicted a gravitational effect of spinning superconducting disks prior to the (presumed) 1992 findings (unfortunately I've forgotten her name). She tried to reproduce the effect, but since I've never seen it mentioned again I assume she failed.
Anyway, I won't believe it until I've seen or preferably measured it myself
It may not be such a big deal if it only reduces by 2%. Is the effect cumulative? The device is a disk, after all. If it's solid, then build the disk above a disk. 98% of 98% is 96.04% If you build a big stack of these 34 high you should be able to reduce the weight to about 50%. (.98 ^ 35 ~= .5) If it's hollow, then build 35 concentric rings, like the rings of a tree.
Of course, if it doesn't work that way, I'd love to hear why.
-Wyck
Get a life, please. Nobody should rant this long over a sig/movie.
You'd think they'd have enough to do working on the so-called A380-killer the lapdogs in the aerospace and mainstream press fawned over last year.
Though the archaic and burdensome notion of "gravity" is still religiously adhered to in third world nations and some especially backward regions of Canada, know that the more progressive states are already on their way to outlawing this ridiculous concept. This particular reader is of the opinion that it's about time that, similar to "evolution," we rejected the myth of "gravity" for the bunk that it is.
Renowned historians at prominent Texan community colleges agree that gravity was invented by the Assyrians as a way to ensure cohesion of their empire and frighten their subjects from escaping into space to establish free colonies there. At the beginning of the 20th century, the fabrication of gravity was adopted by top Liberals and stockpiled for later use.
When in the 1950's, decent G-d fearing Americans began looking to spread the blessing of democracy to other regions, such as Canada and the Moon, the selfsame Liberals brought gravity back from hiatus and used the lie to subdue the population (eventually wrestling it under Jimmy Carter's control).
Fortunately, the information revolution has brough about an enlightenment about this outdated establishment. Soon, it will follow the way of smallpox, opening the skies for America once and for all.
Wake me up when they can teleport me, so that I don't have to go on those planes in the first place!
Ok. So, this is rather exciting, if it turns out to be true. It would implicate that energy is what really warps time-space, and that the high energy of mass has hidden that from us, wouldn't it? E=MC^2 could hide that it really is E that warps timespace.
On another note, the lazy among us could make sex less physically challenging, by reducing the gravity field. This could also enable new, exciting positions, although I'm a bit too gravity-bound to figure out which..
Stop the brainwash
I wonder if 2% of us have been with a women...? (I have so there's my vote..)
So you advocate a pre-Pearl Harbor/pre-9/11 approach where we should do absolutely nothing to protect ourselves until thousands of our citizens are killed?
Let's get one thing straight first, both of these attacks were not unprovoked. I'm not saying either was justified, but the popular media views on both events are severely distorted. In both cases, an attack was expected. On 9/11, the form of attack was not fully known, and who could have known anything as horrible as that could happen. The attack was generated from hatred arising from dubious policies on the procurement of oil. And the war in Afghanistan has only led to more of this; do you think the Rangers are there to protect the people or the pipeline? Where do you think this will lead? More terrorists, more death. Would a missile shield have helped anyway?
In Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were not "denied oil" as you said, an embargo stopped most shipping trade. They are an island nation, in case you didn't notice. They depend on it. It's kind of like strangling a person and complaining when they hit you back. It's rumoured that Eisenhower provoked them intentionally to start the war, which was against US public option at the time. That's the stuff of conspiracy theories, but scaringly the same parallels are being made to Bush's foreknowledge of 9/11. I really hope these things are stuff of the paranoid, but these days it's hard to tell. Especially in someone as untrustworthy as Bush & pals, who have a long dark history together. He is a proven liar, yet no one cares? Why is that?
Yeah, ask Western Europe how well it worked with Germany. Ask Kuwait how well it worked with Iraq. Remember how well it worked with Japan (remembering that we only denied them oil because they wanted to take over SE Asia/Pacific).
I fail to see the relevance of this. Defending yourself is one thing, but to advocate a practically useless defence shield citing the fact there have been wars in the past as justification is not valid. Moreover, when has a missile ever been launched from a rouge state on another in a form that would be stopped by a missile shield?
Sorry, not annoying, invading, or subverting other countries is no guarantee against an attack. History shows that conclusively.
Who is going to attack the US? Who would be so stupid? No nation state for sure. If Saddam or anyone else was going to launch a attack on the US, they would know that they stood no chance. There will be no more Vietnams, wars aren't fought that way anymore. The US will simply bomb the hell out of them. And rightly so.
So that leaves only terrorists harbouring hatred as a motivation, rather than the traditional greed that starts all wars. That hatred is generated by the above behaviour. Anyway, terrorists don't have ballistic missile systems.
I really don't care why they like or dislike us. I might not like the Taliban or Afghanistan, but I didn't favor invading them until 9/11. They don't want us to annoy them? They shouldn't annoy us. It works both ways.
That's were most Americans fail on the understanding on the recent terrorism. The US annoyed them first, but your media won't tell you that, they prefer the "attacking freedom and democracy" story. By supporting corrupt governments, especially in the Middle East, an enormous amount of hatred as built up. Look at it from the civilian's point of view, where the terrorists get their money and recruits. The US comes into a country and strikes a deal for oil from the (corrupt) government. By all rights, the country (one nation under whatever god) owns that oil, yet only a handful of people will ever see it, most of them unaccountable to the public. Some of these counties are extremely poor, and how do you think they react to seeing US troops about, guarding their national property from them while they live in poverty? It's the presence of these troops in Saudi that drives Bin Laden. They want to control their own resources; they want freedom and democracy. Not tyranny. Their methods are abhorrent, but you can't fail to see their reasoning.
Illogical thinking? Illogical to strive to develop a missle defense system that would protect our country from small missile strikes which are quite probably the most probable type of missile attack?
"The most probable type of missile attack" maybe. But look at how likely is that event going to happen. Basically, it's not. The missile defence shield is a "jobs for the boys" program. The American people should be outraged and demanding answers. But instead you get propaganda saying why it's necessary. The Nazis used similar methods to persuade people that persecuting someone based of race/religion/sexuality is good. It worked for the German people, what makes you immune?
Is it more illogical to protect ourselves with a missle defense that does no-one damage and protects us?
No. You are starting another pointless arms race. By having a missile shield, that makes a pre-emptive strike possible for the US to start and win a nuclear war. I know, that probably won't happen. But neither will the strikes you speak of, and you see them as valid justification for building a shield. Other countries will see this shield and will also desire similar systems to protect themselves. That's how an arms race works. So billions and billions of dollars are redirected from the public purse in to the coffers of the arms industry. Bush & Buddies are happy, the people lose services and pay more taxes.
Or should we invade every potential country that may be attempting to create ballistic missiles just to be sure? I'd prefer the missile defense system.
Woah!!! You just don't get it, do you? It's that attitude that leads to these problems! There is talk of invading Iraq because they have "weapons of mass destruction". So do you. They have chemical/biological weapons? So do you, in fact, you developed most of them. They have ballistic missiles? Well, the US/Soviet space race developed that technology (for that purpose partially). They have nukes? Who invented them? Who is the only country to drop one in anger? (Ironically, if that hadn't happened and the world hadn't seen the horrors one nuke could cause, there would have probably been a nuclear war by now)
What makes you holier than thou? Admittedly, Saddam is not a nice fellow, but you have no right to invade a country just because they have the capability to attack you. I'm amazed at the level of provocation against Saddam, there are UK/US strikes every other week, but it's not newsworthy, so therefore it isn't happening. Why didn't you do that to the Commies? Oh, they could fight back. Let's pick on Iraq then, they can't fight back. Oh, they have lot's of oil too? That's a coincidence...I wonder if we could topple the Saddam regime and install a US-friendly goverment. Sound familiar?
Listen, I'm not anti-US. If I come off sounding that way, I apologise. I hate it when corrupt governments abuse their power, and mislead the public into backing them. Like the "war" in Afganistan, which was being planned prior to 9/11. Any time I hear someone talking that way, I feel compelled to state my opinion. Hopefully I've made a few people think about the other side of the story. Peace can only follow understanding. Not a missile shield.
I wonder if this could help not just my car, but my Karma fly...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Err, no. Pascal's Wager is not an arguement for the existence of God. It's an argument for what it is most profitable to believe. It's a pragmatic argument, not a metaphysical one...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
To paraphrase Q, it's not that hard, just change the gravitational constant of the universe.
Geez.
When did I ever say Catholics believe Pascal's Wager? I've got plenty of Catholic friends too who can also see the logical error in the wager.
Lower your threshold and read the AC post he was actually replying too...
Ah, my apologies then :)
-- SIGFPE
As soon as the words 'anti gravity' is uttered, its automatically assumed its crakpot science...
Once apon a time so was electricity..
True the hoaxes are there, but lets not just assume its garbage..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Podkletnov worked in Finland, not in Russia
After all, it doesn't reverse or completely negate gravity per se, and there is no evidence that it negates gravity other than that within immediate influence of the superconductors involved... Shouldn't the term be "gravity dampening" instead?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
In Brian Greene's book "The Elegant Universe" he states that, I'm paraphrasing here, Magnetism is (approx) a hundred million million billion times stronger than gravity. So you'd think it would be easy to make an anti-grav device hunh? Afterall we have MagLev trains! ;-P ...or a fig newton.
I guess the fact that we don't know what gravity is or isn't or how it is made is why we can't do it. We all think we know what it is but obviously we don't.
I think I'll go have an apple
The true question is, how many missiles+dummies can the attacker afford, vs. how much anti-missile defense can the other side afford.
Today, the same thing occurs between general relativity and quantum physics. A search for "bell inequality" in google returns more than 10 pages. Bell's inequality is a simple proof that general relativity and quantum physics can't both be right, and quantum physics is "less wrong" than GR, that is, a closer approximation to reality.
3Dfx is not somthing to joke about...
3D: the human brain computes in 3d, but the respective soul occupying a human brain is not able to conciously make decisions on 3d data without intensive education.
fx: shourthand for "effects", signifying the occurence, issue, or action caused by stimuli.
At the beginning of 3Dfx Inc, they released the 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics. It was a revolutionary 3D-only graphics adaptor and much of the industry's work has been influenced by it. The Voodoo Graphics was such a good peice of hardware that any computer with a CPU the size of a matchbox and a powercord the length of a pitched baseball could use it. Later, 3Dfx release the Voodoo Rush which finally included a VGA controller as well as 3D graphics hardware. The first well-balanced graphics adaptor from 3Dfx was the Banshee and although the consumer was not quite enthused with the banshee, many waited and purchased 3Dfx's latest acheivment; the Voodoo2. The Voodoo2 was a continuum of th Voodoo Graphics, but boasted CPU-dependant operation and hardware Fullscreen Anti-Aliasing, but most programs were not aware of the Voodoo2's anti-aliasing support; and further, most consumer computers at the time were Intel-compatibles, meaning performance was terrible if you weren't using an Alpha, Sparc, or PA-RISC platform. 3Dfx's next crownless joy was the Voodoo3 and it was a disappointment overall, by not being performance-scalable on the latest CPU's. Two Voodoo2 adaptors in "SLI mode" could outperform a Voodoo3 and later was determined that a Voodoo2 in "SLI mode" was 10% slower than 3Dfx's greater Voodoo4. At last, 3Dfx released a crown product they dubbed the Voodoo5, but were unable to reach their funding goals and the expectations of consumers despite the Voodoo4 flopping and the Voodoo5 being a quite well-balanced peice of hardware for computers. 3Dfx sold its assets to nVidia and slowly closed its sales and its doors 7 months later. It's line of products could be purchased on eBay for a fraction of the rerail cost and it is supported perfectly on the Linux and freeBSD platforms due to the great longevity of the products and the kindness of 3Dfx to release all technical details and supporting software in opensource form to developers and end-users.
(anonymous coward, that i'm responding to, sucks my ass cheeks)
But, the important point is that a lot of scientists all over the world did check those cold-fusion claims, and demonstrated them wrong. Many experiments were performed, in many different places, using different methods, and all of them failed to produce cold fusion. Today, if you want to publish something in that area, you must present some very plausible evidence showing why is it that your experiment alone is right, and all those others are wrong.
The timing of this report is curious, as it comes about a month after this year's Joint Propulsion conference, where I gave a presentation on the paper "Evaluation of an Impulse Gravity Generator Based Beamed Propulsion Concept" (AIAA Paper 2002-4095) discussing aerospace propulsion applications of Dr. Podkletnov's latest work. Now Boeing leaks to Janes that they have a Gravity Research for Advanced Space Propulsion project to investigate aerospace propulsion applications of Dr. Podkletnov's latest work (see http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,31500-120604 72,00.html ). Either they are rushing to get on the bandwagon, or they have some guys at Phantom Works who are p!$$ed off that they weren't permitted to publish their ideas first.
I like Mach's principle better. The math even works out. If you consider all mass in the universe pulling against an object with gravity, the equations reduce down to F=MA.
Not if the other religions believe in "many paths". Then you're still better off believing in God.
If this pans out, I can imagine there would be a significant change in the strucure of aircraft. I'm no aeronautical engineer, but some of you probably are. Hypothetically, what could we expect to change in the design of an aircraft that was significantly relieved of the restriction of having to provide large amounts of lift, in addition to thrust?
Wise enough to win the world, fool enough to lose it
Let's get one thing straight first, both of these attacks were not unprovoked. I'm not saying either was justified, but the popular media views on both events are severely distorted. In both cases, an attack was expected. On 9/11, the form of attack was not fully known, and who could have known anything as horrible as that could happen. The attack was generated from hatred arising from dubious policies on the procurement of oil. And the war in Afghanistan has only led to more of this; do you think the Rangers are there to protect the people or the pipeline? Where do you think this will lead? More terrorists, more death. Would a missile shield have helped anyway?
:)
By that definition, that argument itself could be contrued as provocative. In HINDSIGHT (and in both cases), an attack could have been SAID to have been exptected. Armchair quarterbacking is always easier after the fact. I don't agree with the OIL policy, but OPEC is just as much a guilty party in this as anyone. Also, the education system (or lack of) in most of the middle east where religious fanatacism IS the educational system, would give a better reason of whats going on. They don't hate us because of the OIL. They hate us for religous reasons. Everything else is just icing on the cake as far as they are concerned. We are talking about a conflict that has been going on since the time of Abraham.
In Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were not "denied oil" as you said, an embargo stopped most shipping trade. They are an island nation, in case you didn't notice. They depend on it. It's kind of like strangling a person and complaining when they hit you back. It's rumoured that Eisenhower provoked them intentionally to start the war, which was against US public option at the time. That's the stuff of conspiracy theories, but scaringly the same parallels are being made to Bush's foreknowledge of 9/11. I really hope these things are stuff of the paranoid, but these days it's hard to tell. Especially in someone as untrustworthy as Bush & pals, who have a long dark history together. He is a proven liar, yet no one cares? Why is that?
This isn't even the same thing here. They attacked us for our morality (or lack of in their opinion). Also the issue of foreknowledge of the untrustworthy "Bush and pals"? You shouldn't try to take things that are more stereotypes then apply intellectual arguments to them. It doesn't work here.
I fail to see the relevance of this. Defending yourself is one thing, but to advocate a practically useless defence shield citing the fact there have been wars in the past as justification is not valid. Moreover, when has a missile ever been launched from a rouge state on another in a form that would be stopped by a missile shield?
By that comment, then why do we have a military at all? Justification (or lack of) can not be determined by whether or not it has already happened. Justification is determined by "threat" and a nation's ability and WILL to follow through with it. Both of THOSE are subjective and debatable, but the argument that just because it hasn't happened therefore we should defend against it, I think is short-sighted.
Who is going to attack the US? Who would be so stupid? No nation state for sure. If Saddam or anyone else was going to launch a attack on the US, they would know that they stood no chance. There will be no more Vietnams, wars aren't fought that way anymore. The US will simply bomb the hell out of them. And rightly so.
Believe me, there are a lot of stupid people in this world.
So that leaves only terrorists harbouring hatred as a motivation, rather than the traditional greed that starts all wars. That hatred is generated by the above behaviour. Anyway, terrorists don't have ballistic missile systems.
This war was not started because of greed. It was started in spite of it. It also "started" the day Isreal declared it's Independence.
That's were most Americans fail on the understanding on the recent terrorism. The US annoyed them first, but your media won't tell you that, they prefer the "attacking freedom and democracy" story. By supporting corrupt governments, especially in the Middle East, an enormous amount of hatred as built up. Look at it from the civilian's point of view, where the terrorists get their money and recruits. The US comes into a country and strikes a deal for oil from the (corrupt) government. By all rights, the country (one nation under whatever god) owns that oil, yet only a handful of people will ever see it, most of them unaccountable to the public. Some of these counties are extremely poor, and how do you think they react to seeing US troops about, guarding their national property from them while they live in poverty? It's the presence of these troops in Saudi that drives Bin Laden. They want to control their own resources; they want freedom and democracy. Not tyranny. Their methods are abhorrent, but you can't fail to see their reasoning.
What country has ever liked the United States? We have all of the people that the world didn't want for whatever reason, either religious, cultural, (yes criminal), you name it. But we deal with it better than any other country has, could, or even would. The problem with the oil isn't the "corrupt" US government. I will just say it. Saudia Arabia. They are the heart of this beast. They are the heart of the problem. They are the corrupt government (Although I will grant you that there is an old axiom "you are who you associate with"). The only thing that WE in the United States can do is to hope that the energy policy becomes one of energy Independence, instead of energy convenience.
"The most probable type of missile attack" maybe. But look at how likely is that event going to happen. Basically, it's not. The missile defence shield is a "jobs for the boys" program. The American people should be outraged and demanding answers. But instead you get propaganda saying why it's necessary. The Nazis used similar methods to persuade people that persecuting someone based of race/religion/sexuality is good. It worked for the German people, what makes you immune?
It may be propoganda, (all solicitation for public funds have to include some sort of "FUD"), but that particular analogy is stupid. Make another one that we can agree with.
No. You are starting another pointless arms race. By having a missile shield, that makes a pre-emptive strike possible for the US to start and win a nuclear war. I know, that probably won't happen. But neither will the strikes you speak of, and you see them as valid justification for building a shield. Other countries will see this shield and will also desire similar systems to protect themselves. That's how an arms race works. So billions and billions of dollars are redirected from the public purse in to the coffers of the arms industry. Bush & Buddies are happy, the people lose services and pay more taxes.
No, you assume we are. This isn't EVEN a real missle defense program that the U.S is developing. It hasn't been advertised that way, and hasn't been advertised to give the U.S. first strike capabilities. If you look at how the U.S. works is the first "version" is really nothing more than a research project for the real deal. And this is the research project to give the U.S. the ability to actually develop a REAL missle defense shield. Anyone who looks at the whole concept of "needle killing needles" is going to see that it is silly. This is merely a stop-gap for the more (MUCH MORE) advanced stuff coming down the pipe. And it won't be lasers mounted with 747s (another cutsie, but again incremental but closer approach to what they are really researching).
Woah!!! You just don't get it, do you? It's that attitude that leads to these problems! There is talk of invading Iraq because they have "weapons of mass destruction". So do you. They have chemical/biological weapons? So do you, in fact, you developed most of them. They have ballistic missiles? Well, the US/Soviet space race developed that technology (for that purpose partially). They have nukes? Who invented them? Who is the only country to drop one in anger? (Ironically, if that hadn't happened and the world hadn't seen the horrors one nuke could cause, there would have probably been a nuclear war by now)
I actually agree with you here I think, but not for the same reasons. No matter how hard you think the other guy will punch, it is not good form to attack first. If the U.S. really wants to invade Iraq, there will be some "crisis" pop up (like something linking Iraq to a terrorist attack, Isreali/Palelistinian issue, etc). Also, blaming the "innovator" for the worlds problems is a CLASSIC fallacy of composition. You can't say that because we invented it, we are also responsible for all of the child probabilities that occur because of it.
What makes you holier than thou? Admittedly, Saddam is not a nice fellow, but you have no right to invade a country just because they have the capability to attack you. I'm amazed at the level of provocation against Saddam, there are UK/US strikes every other week, but it's not newsworthy, so therefore it isn't happening. Why didn't you do that to the Commies? Oh, they could fight back. Let's pick on Iraq then, they can't fight back. Oh, they have lot's of oil too? That's a coincidence...I wonder if we could topple the Saddam regime and install a US-friendly goverment. Sound familiar?
Proof? You can't keep "suggesting" this garbage without sounding someone closed-minded biased with a disposition toward a certain policty affinity that prides itself on being open minded.
Listen, I'm not anti-US. If I come off sounding that way, I apologise. I hate it when corrupt governments abuse their power, and mislead the public into backing them. Like the "war" in Afganistan, which was being planned prior to 9/11. Any time I hear someone talking that way, I feel compelled to state my opinion. Hopefully I've made a few people think about the other side of the story. Peace can only follow understanding. Not a missile shield.
Ok. You were fairly logical and well-thought out until that nonsense spewed out. Name one fact that actually proves we were planning to attack Afghanistan prior to 9/11? As for the other side of the story, I think you miss the whole point. You try to reduce every conflict to greed/corruption/power. At first it sounds logical, until you factor in religion, then all logic goes out the window. And that is where (IMHO) we are at now. This is not a war about OIL, or conspiracies, or CONTROL. On the surface, it may from time to time this way, but over the next decade or so as this thing plays out (yes, I think it will take that long), we will see who rears his ugly head, what his motivations are, and the conflict will be more head-on, rather than this beating around the bush stuff that has been going on.
-Mikestro
R U a troll? Seriously... you must be.
Plug 'em into a dumb-ass, 'documentary', give them government approved 'science' text books during their tender formative years, let 'em watch Star Trek, let 'em believe they are coming to these conclusions on their own, (like the average, "No really! I chose this life without any influence from my church group," born again Christian), and that their fucking CD player and cell phone are proof positive that 'science' is honest and up front. . , Do these things, and they'll be your unthinking Yes-men forever and anon, ready to spit and fume like robot dogs in defense of whatever bullshit 'truth' the Wealthy Few want installed today.
The most bent part is that the ones they support laugh at them from behind their backs. "I wonder what the unwashed brainwashed are doing today. . ."
Best P.R. you can buy. . .
-Fantastic Lad
The original parent wrote: "Pascal's Wager was first used as an argument for the existence of God.
There was then a reply that read: "Any philosophy which mentions the word `God` as part of its `proof` is probably not worth reading. I mean, why would you?"
Given the context of the original post (Pascal's Wager being an argument for the existence of God), the reply would suggest that Pascal's Wager is not worth reading because it mentions God. Granted, Pascal's Wager isn't a philosophy but the fact that that msg was in reply to the parent implies that the reply was rejecting Pascal's Wager because it included "God" in the "proof."
Actually, Pascal didn't even seem to say that God definitely exists. He just calculated that a rational person playing the odds would be better off believing in God.
But for you to offer that as evidence for a God is illogical.
Actually I don't believe that the failure of science in a given area is proof of God. But the more we learn the more we realize we have left to understand. Either we'll someday understand everything or the current trend will continue whereby knowing more just raises more questions about what we already know, sometimes throwing into doubt that which was already "certain" or proven.
You're probably a very logical person in everyday issues. You also, for whatever reason, want to believe in God. That desire clouds your ability to approach it logically.
I do believe in God, not because I WANT to but because I do. At the same time, I'm not a die-hard evangalist that believes everyone who believes differently than I do will burn in flames.
I admit a bias going into my conclusion (reached years ago) that God does exist, but I do believe I made a rational decision. If my conclusion had left any doubts in my mind, I would be able to confess that I had doubts. But I don't.
I happen to be, for whatever reason, predisposed to not expecting a God at the end of the tunnel. However, don't get me wrong, I'm pulling for you! I of course hope you're right. I just don't think you are.
I understand. I was (and am) predisposed to expect God at the end of the tunnel. I kept that predisposition in mind when I spent time reviewing whether my faith was blind or reasonable.
I think that the more science learns, the more it will seem quite improbable that it all happened by pure chance. Sure, we could be that one in nearly infinity chance, it could be the laws of physics have to work the way they do because there is no other way. But, personally, I think the more we discover about the world, galaxy, and universe around us the more it becomes quite improbable that it "just happened."
I know that most astronauts return with increased faith, or FIND faith. I've heard that that is often the case of many scientists, too--presumably as they discover how it all works they come to the conclusion that it was made by "someone," just as someone rebuilding a car engine can gain appreciation of those that designed it and quickly discards the possibility the engine just happened to come together by itself.
Er, no.
The original experiment has been duplicated, but the results claimed by the original investigator have never been seen since and said original investigator apparently refuses to tell the other experimenters what it is they're doing wrong.
More to the point, relativity says that gravity is not a force, but curvature of spacetime. It checks out to as many decimal places as can be measured. On the other hand, there's no theory that even hints at the gravity defying (i.e. spacetime warping) powers of spinning superconductors.
Occasionally discoveries happen by accident, but the vast, vast, vast majority of progress is made by conducting experiments indicated by theory (to do otherwise is to waste one's time hoping to get lucky.)
I'm reminded of the story about a man found spooning yoghurt into a lake. The onlookers ask him what he's up to and he tells them that this is how he's going to make an entire lake of yoghurt. They tell him that this isn't how yoghurt is made and he replies, "Well, yes, but what if it worked?!"
Boeing was one of the developers of the terrestrial field propulsion discs back-engineered from captured and donated extraterrestrial craft, therefore this is merely another step in the de-classification of technology already in use.
All Rights Reserve Without Prejudice, Angela Kahealani. All information + transactions nonnegotiable + private.
If I jump in the air I experience zero gravity for like a microsecond or somethin...
You believe it's more probable that an American President intentionally provoked an enemy and let them attack and destroy much of the Pacific Fleet to allow him to get into a war that the U.S. was then unprepared to enter due to that attack? Or could it be that the reason we "provoked" them was because we could not morally agree with their expansionist plans that would come at the cost of independent nations throughout Southeast Asia?
He is a proven liar, yet no one cares? Why is that?
Hmmm, perhaps because Clinton set the precedent? :)
Defending yourself is one thing, but to advocate a practically useless defence shield
If it's useless, why would it cause an arms race or give us first-strike capability?
Moreover, when has a missile ever been launched from a rouge state on another in a form that would be stopped by a missile shield?
Hasn't happened yet, thank God. I'd rather "think outside the box" and anticipate what might happen in the future. Right now only a small number of countries have ballistic missile capabilities but the technology is only about 50 years ago. Who do you think will have the technology in 50 years? It's not really all that complicated, the rest of the world just needs time. Without trying to resort to cliches, remember the line from "The Sum of All Fears": "I'm not afraid of the guy with a thousand nuclear warheads, I'm afraid of the guy with one."
Who is going to attack the US? Who would be so stupid?
Consult the history books, please.
No nation state for sure.
Complacency has always gotten us into trouble. We were complacent at the beginning of WWI. We cleaned up there. We were complacent in WWII until we got bombed at Pearl Harbor. If the American public really thought we were going to be threatened do you think they would have withheld their support to enter the war? Many people (including you) may not see any risk and think building missile defense is silly--just like many people thought WWII was "Europe's War" and thought it useless to get into it.
It's easy to be compacent. Even moreso when we're talking about the most powerful country on earth. But that also makes us the biggest target and history has shown that complacency is a fatal error.
If Saddam or anyone else was going to launch a attack on the US, they would know that they stood no chance.
WE know that. It's less certain whether or not Saddam knows that. He should have known that in 1992 when a half million allies were arrayed on his border waiting to anhilate his military in a question of days and use the southern portion of the country as a "field test" of new and wonderful weapons? Whether he did it out of pride or did it in belief of being able to win is irrelevant--the fact is there always will be SOMEONE crazy and stubborn enough to look logic in the face and try to ignore it.
Anyway, terrorists don't have ballistic missile systems.
No, not yet. As far as we know. :) Hopefully we'll have a missile defense before Bin Laden is able to build, buy, or steal even an obsolete missile--perhaps from the former Soviet Union.
The US annoyed them first, but your media won't tell you that, they prefer the "attacking freedom and democracy" story.
We annoyed them first? Perhaps our annoyance (stationing troops in the region) was provoked by THEIR annoyance of not being able to exist without threatening Israel and each other, thereby threatening a regional conflict that would easily expand.
It's easy to blame everything on the U.S. But you can't ignore that the U.S. has reasons for what it does--and it's NOT just for our oil supply. You have to look at the history a little deeper.
By supporting corrupt governments, especially in the Middle East, an enormous amount of hatred as built up.
The governments are going to be corrupt whether we support them or not. There is no inherent reason to believe that if we stopped supporting certain governments and they were toppled "by the people" they would be any more honest.
We support many questionable governments in the region because, regardless of how questionable they may be, they are actually less likely to attack Israel than the alternative.
If the public in many of those Middle Eastern countries were to show they were RESPONSIBLE and not trigger-happy ready to start a regional (and thereafter world) war in regards to Israel, perhaps the U.S. would be more apt to let democracy run its course. Democracy requires responsibility and, as bad as it sounds, the populations of many of those Middle Eastern countries have not shown they are ready to accept that responsibility.
By all rights, the country (one nation under whatever god) owns that oil, yet only a handful of people will ever see it, most of them unaccountable to the public.
How is that different than in the United States?
Some of these counties are extremely poor, and how do you think they react to seeing US troops about, guarding their national property from them while they live in poverty?
As has been said, we import only about 8% of our oil from Saudia Arabia. We could get by without it, especially if we turned on Alaska and reactivated Texas.
We're not defending the oil FROM the populations of the host countries. We're defending the (corrupt?) government from their population that, were they to topple the government, would most likely make attacking Israel one of their first moves. And then we have to defend Israel.
History (WWI, WWII) has shown us that it is cheaper in the long run to stick our nose in internal affairs of other countries to avoid having to clean up a big mess later. Tough luck.
It's the presence of these troops in Saudi that drives Bin Laden
No it's not. It's the existance of Israel. If we leave the Middle East all that will happen is that all their efforts will be freed up to topple Israel. They just realized they can't topple Israel as long as the U.S. supports it. Leaving Saudia Arabia would not placate Bin Laden one bit.
They want to control their own resources; they want freedom and democracy. Not tyranny.
That may be on their list. But first and foremost they want to destroy Israel. And that's why we don't leave.
"The most probable type of missile attack" maybe. But look at how likely is that event going to happen. Basically, it's not.
If there is a 1 in 100 chance that someone is going to nuke a city and it just so happens that I have a 2 trillion dollar budget available, I might not be considered crazy investing a few ten billion dollars to reduce that risk to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10,000.
Basically, we have the money. If we can reduce the risk of nuclear missile attack from 1 in 100 to 1 in 1000, I think that's better use of 60 billion dollars than most of the other things the government would spend 60 billion on.
No. You are starting another pointless arms race.
You already said it won't work, so why would it create a new arms race? Either you think it will work (in which case we should definitely build it!) and are afraid of an arms race, or you think it won't work and therefore shouldn't now be citing the risk of an arms race as a reason not to research it.
By having a missile shield, that makes a pre-emptive strike possible for the US to start and win a nuclear war.
We already have a pre-emptive strike capability against absolutely the whole world except Russia. And we might actually have that capability against Russia.
But a missile defense will only defend us from small attacks. In those cases, we definitely already have a first-strike capability so the missile defense doesn't give us anything other than a defense.
Other countries will see this shield and will also desire similar systems to protect themselves.
And I hope they do. If these are DEFENSIVE systems designed to defend against the risk of a nuclear attack, I think that's great. I hope India and Pakistan both deploy it so they can both eventually get rid of their now-obsolete nukes. Hopefully the same applies to everyone else, too. If such a system sufficiently evolved, even the U.S. would have no need for a huge arsenal of ICBMs.
So billions and billions of dollars are redirected from the public purse in to the coffers of the arms industry.
Which creates other technology at the same time which is consumed by the public. Meanwhile, the "arms industry" buys from the public as do their employees.
Don't worry, it isn't a black hole where all the money goes into the pockets of fat cats never to be seen again.
Bush & Buddies are happy, the people lose services and pay more taxes.
Actually, Bush reduced the taxes that had been previously raised by Clinton. Your argument doesn't make any sense.
You just don't get it, do you? It's that attitude that leads to these problems!
And our attitude is justified based on history. If we don't "police the world" then WWI and WWII has shown us that countries will attack each other, regional war will break out, and we eventually have to step in and fix it--at great cost to our own people.
You want the U.S. out of everyone's business? Then every country ought to show that they can act mature without the U.S. providing worldwide stability.
There is talk of invading Iraq because they have "weapons of mass destruction". So do you. They have chemical/biological weapons? So do you, in fact, you developed most of them.
We have them as a deterrent and have shown restraint and responsibility in using them. Saddam doesn't have as much as we do, but what did he do? He lobbed them over at Israel which had nothing to do with the Gulf War with the only hope of provoking a response and creating an Arab vs. Israel conflict.
If you can't see the inherent difference in risk between certain countries possessing these weapons and others possessing them, I'm sorry. That probably goes a long way in explaining your point of view.
Who is the only country to drop one in anger?
In anger? Anger would have been to launch a few at Afghanistan a day or two after 9/11. The attack on Japan was a calculated strategic decision that most likely saved the lives of millions of Americans AND Japanese.
Ironically, if that hadn't happened and the world hadn't seen the horrors one nuke could cause, there would have probably been a nuclear war by now
There ya go. Not only did we probably save millions of lives in WWII by using nukes, we may have saved hundreds of millions in subsequent nuclear wars that were avoided. Considering we did it "out of anger" it looks like it worked out pretty damn well, didn't it?
What makes you holier than thou?
Holier? Not at all. But more responsible. Face it, after WWII we could have dominated the world. Now that the USSR has fallen, we could do it now. We don't. How many powers in history when given the option of total conquest did not take it? The U.S. has shown itself to be the most restrained superpower in the history of the world.
but you have no right to invade a country just because they have the capability to attack you.
Because they have the capability? No. But if we have reasonable justification to believe that that such an attack is imminent then we are certainly justified in taking preemptive action.
I don't have any problem with France, England, the former Soviet Union, Mexico, Canada, India, South Africa, etc. having the CAPABILITY to attack us because we have no reason to believe an attack will be forthcoming. But like the Japanese taught us at Pearl Harbor and as Bin Laden taught us on 9/11, if we believe an attack is imminent then damn right we ought to strike preemptively.
Like the "war" in Afganistan, which was being planned prior to 9/11.
I've read about that. Mostly in left-leaning liberal publications. Not much in the way of evidence for a "WAR" in Afghanistan. At best we would've looked the other way... Then again, Afghanistan was only recognized by three countries in the world. The Taliban was, in fact, the result of toppling the previous government. They were holding Westerners (not just Americans) on bogus charges and terrorizing their own people. Heck, even if 9/11 hadn't happened there was as much a case for a humanitarian "war" there as there has been in other "humanitarian" conflicts.
Hopefully I've made a few people think about the other side of the story.
I really doubt you have. You are full of opinions, granted, but don't offer much in terms of facts to back-up what is mostly liberal conspiracy theory.
Peace can only follow understanding.
You mean if we understand Bin Laden he won't attack us? If they understand us they won't be offended that we have troops in their countries? That if the Arabs understand Israel that they will let it exist? Nice academic/utopian world you are talking about.
In the real world, the world has been most stable in the last 50 years. That stability was created by the balance of POWER between the U.S. and the USSR. Now it is created by the POWER of the U.S.
I'm all for understanding and getting along whenever possible. But there will always be someone who wants power or wants their way the "old fashioned" way. You are mistaken if you believe that countries in the 21st century are inherently more averse to war than in the past. The reason you feel that way is because of your experience in the last 50 years--but again, that general stability has been brought by the threat of FORCE, not due to any enlightened understanding in recent years.
Signifigant differences exist between gravity and centrifugal force. "Gravity" will lessen of course as one gets closer to the hub of rotation, and dropped objects will be harder than usual to catch :-) And drop the large object, more fun to spin in carnival rides.
You're not fat, you're gravitationally challenged.
Make it idiot-proof, and someone will build a better idiot.
Interesting points from all. I'll try and keep this short...it's getting a little bloated!
They don't hate us because of the OIL. They hate us for religous reasons.
They attacked us for our morality (or lack of in their opinion).
Yes and no. The "religious fanatic" idea against the USA is very much overplayed. A lot of hatred comes from the whole Israel affair as well as the oil issues. Many believe Israel should not exist as a state; they are the fanatics. What clouds the issue is Israel's continued expansion into the West Bank, despite the international community (except the US) telling them not to. They now occupy 40% of the land. They have tanks and soldiers guarding the sealed settlements. The Israeli government is actively encouraging people to move there. The Palestinians have no freedom of movement in their own home, the military patrols don't allow it. How would you feel if you wanted to visit Washington, but the Canadians wouldn't let you? These actions give people a valid reason to be annoyed, and drum up huge amounts of support for these terror campaigns.
America only became a target to these particular groups via its continued and blind support of Israel. Consider this analogy: Any parent would support their child, but if that child went around bullying others, it's the parent's responsibility to stop that. America should tell Israel to behave itself, or stop being supported.
To claim that 9/11 happened because they thought you were immoral is just plain wrong. There are many countries far more immoral than the US! Why hasn't Holland been attacked? They allow many things that you don't, which could be considered far more immoral to the fanatics. Oil & Israel are far higher up the list than morality. The different morality is only one of many methods they use to get public support for their actions amongst their own people.
Re: usefulness of shield: By that comment, then why do we have a military at all?
A standard military does act as a deterrent and is a valid thing to have. My point is that a missile shield does nothing to further defence in any real way. Admitidy, is has some effect on defence capabilities, but the money could be far better spent on other things.
What country has ever liked the United States?
Most of us do actually. Even during the cold war, the USSR respected the US, there was simply a lack of trust. This recent "it's us against them" attitude doesn't help things however. See this article for a report on how things are getting worse, believe me Bush is not helping things. Prior to 9/11 world opinion of him was extremely low. In many ways. 9/11 saved his presidency. He cheated in the election! It was decided by a court decision in a state where his brother was the governor. I can't stand that sort of thing.
Re: comparing shield propagandas to the Nazi's It may be propoganda .... but that particular analogy is stupid
My point was that if an entire nation can be convinced that the Nazi's are justified, then how hard is it to convince you that you need this shield? None of us are immune to propaganda, each of us forms opinions based on the info we have. If that info is slanted (which politicians & the media have been doing for a very long time), then any decisions are also slanted.
Also, blaming the "innovator" for the worlds problems is a CLASSIC fallacy of composition.
I agree, but often people forget some of these basic facts. If you invent and possess a technology, you can't really complain too loudly if someone you don't like gets their hands on it. If the US was squeaky clean and didn't possess some of these technologies, then you are perfectly valid in not wanting other nations to have it. Otherwise, it's pots & black kettles.
Name one fact that actually proves we were planning to attack Afghanistan prior to 9/11?
BBC News Article, posted just one week after the attacks. There is lot's more info out there if you go looking. Again, popular media has ignored these facts.
At first it sounds logical, until you factor in religion, then all logic goes out the window.
Very well said. You can't expect people that believe there will be virgins waiting for them in the afterlife (if they die for the cause) to consider logic as important.
This is not a war about OIL, or conspiracies, or CONTROL.
Please see this article. The failing of this deal is what turned the US against the Taliban originally. Prior to that, it was the US that made them.
over the next decade or so as this thing plays out (yes, I think it will take that long)
Personally, I think unless a universally recognised messiah appears, or religion is proven false, this will never end. There will always be hatred if people are grown up to hate each other. Look at Northern Ireland, the people there are the same race, in the same villages, yet their hatred results in separate schools and streets!! Yes, there are many places where entire streets are of one religion, and walls have literally been built between them.
You believe it's more probable that an American President intentionally provoked an enemy and let them attack and destroy much of the Pacific Fleet to allow him to get into a war that the U.S. was then unprepared to enter due to that attack?
I'm basically not decided on this one, never have been. It's possible he didn't consider the damage that would be caused; he's a politician not a military expert. On the other hand, if his advisors who should have know the potential for damage didn't tell him, then it's their fault. They must have considered that they might be attacked; a large portion of the world was at war by then. We'll never know. You quote Tom Clancy, didn't you detect a constant theme in his books that the public never knows the whole truth? His books are largely the source of my mistrust; somehow I don't think the GWB has the integrity of Jack Ryan.
If it's useless, why would it cause an arms race or give us first-strike capability?
I didn't say it was technically useless, just that it has no real use. The physics behind it is complex, but there is no reason why it wouldn't work.
Who do you think will have the technology in 50 years?
Good point, something I've not considered. Hopefully the causes of terrorism will be long gone by then. But you may have to concede that you cannot wrap yourself up in cotton wool all the time. The world can be a dangerous place, throwing money at it will not change much.
remember the line from "The Sum of All Fears". "I'm not afraid of the guy with a thousand nuclear warheads, I'm afraid of the guy with one."
And they "proved" (in a literary sense) that this would not require a ballistic missile. So, you get your missile shield, are you going to build a huge wall around the country and make sure nukes (etc) don't get in that way? What about a ballistic missile launched from within the US? Will the system be able to handle that, or will it be limited to incoming missiles over the coastal areas. Again, I fail to see the worth of this system.
I'm sure terrorists read Clancy, it's a damn good insight into many aspects of the US for them no doubt. Who didn't think about the end of Debt of Honour re. 9/11. Scared the shit out of me, considering some of the other books.
Re: Who is going to attack the US? Consult the history books, please. Outside of Pearl Harbour (which wasn't even a state and has many other factors involved, like global madness), this hasn't happened. Terrorists don't count; every country has had problems with them at some point.
just like many people thought WWII was "Europe's War" and thought it useless to get into it.
The US didn't really get involved until most of Europe was under Nazi control. They would have had to deal with the Nazi's as a superpower. Remember, Japan attacked America, not Germany. The drive to enter the Euro war was mostly to get rid of the Nazi's. Either that, or learn to live with them. Besides, your use of the word "useless" implies a comparison to my statement of the missile shield being useless. Compare like with like please! WWII had a clear, obtainable goal.
But that also makes us the biggest target and history has shown that complacency is a fatal error.
Not building the shield could not be described as "complacence". There are other and better ways to defend yourself from real threats, not made-up-threats.
Saddam knows that. He should have known that in 1992 when a half million allies were arrayed on his border
He probably thought we were bluffing. Prior to the Gulf war, nothing like that had happened, nations do not usually get involved in other peoples wars. But, it gave Bill Hicks lot's of good material, so that'll cool. ;-) "Bring up G8. What's that do? Cool!".
However, he did not attack the US. No way could he have expected the response. In fact, the response really doesn't make a lot of sense, given the other stuff we haven't reacted to over the years. That's why he did it, he wasn't even thinking about what the US might do.
was provoked by THEIR annoyance of not being able to exist without threatening Israel and each other
If it wasn't for the oil, I think we would leave them to it. If they want to kill each other, let them. There are plenty of other problems in the world that need sorting. Anyway, what makes the Israelis so deserving of protection? Guilt over their unfortunate history? I don't know how your media has been covering things, but over the past few decades, they've probably killed far more Palestinians and committed far more atrocities than the Palatines. Here's a satiric piece on the figures. It sums up the emotional detachment we have gained from so much horror over the years. Neither side is "right", so why back either?
There is no inherent reason to believe that if we stopped supporting certain governments and they were toppled "by the people" they would be any more honest.
So the troops and US made weapons, planes, landmines are only there for show? It's too late now, with the weapons we sold them, they can defend themselves. Back in time however...hate runs deep and bridges the generations gaps. Most of these folk probably could not explain why they hate each other anyway. The only explanation is "Because we always have"
they are actually less likely to attack Israel than the alternative.
Why should that be a factor? You're willing to screw over an entire nation worth of mostly innocent people to help another nation? Any time someone criticises Israel, they get accused of being a Nazi...hang on a minute, so that gives Israel the right to do what they want, with the west's support? No wonder some folk hate us over it. But Israels are white, the others are black, so that makes it easy for us.
If the public in many of those Middle Eastern countries were to show they were RESPONSIBLE and not trigger-happy ready to start a regional (and thereafter world) war in regards to Israel
Again, what makes Israel immune to this logic? They are provoking other nations as I type this. They've started their own wars. Maybe if they also were responsible and not trigger-happy, we wouldn't be in this mess.
Both sides are equally as bad as the other. "He started it!" is a childish way of avoiding responsibility. Who started it is not the point. Who ended it, on the other hand...
Re: a few owning all the wealthHow is that different than in the United States?
That's true. There is a lot of poverty in the US and some folk with more money than they'll ever need. An unfortunate side effect of capitalism, but a deadly sin that has been around for a long time. But, at least the poor can afford TV and alcohol, so they'll be alright. As long as they don't get into the gated communities! ;-)
However, if you can get a college education, you can go far. The US is not unique in this, but the option is not open to a large amount of the world's people. What if the money for the shield was put to giving every US child a college education? Wow, think of that! In some other countries, learning to read can be difficult target.
It's the presence of these troops in Saudi that drives Bin Laden No it's not. It's the existance of Israel.
He has publicly said the Saudi issue is his primary beef with the Americans. When you hate someone on one front, it's easy to pick faults and start to hate other things. Ever heard women talk about each other? ;-)
Basically, we have the money.
No you don't. The stock markets have crashed.The airline industry has lost out big time. 8 million of your people live in poverty. I can think of better ways to spend the money.
You already said it won't work, so why would it create a new arms race?
I mentioned this earlier, it will work technically, it's just aimed at a nonexistent threat. I've got this magical rock that protects me from Polar bears. There aren't any Polar bears where I live, but it makes me feel safer somehow.
If these are DEFENSIVE systems designed to defend against the risk of a nuclear attack
Nuclear weapons have always been sold as a "deterrent" in the west. So we now have a deterrent for the deterrent. What's next, an arms race on technology to defeat/fake out missile shields? Then another to defeat that threat? Reminds me of an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, where they get bigger and bigger weapons...
get rid of their now-obsolete nukes
Note that this only means that they are made unfireable. Not that it means they cannot be reassembled, but the word "decommissioned" gives the public a nice fussy feeling though.
If we don't "police the world" then WWI and WWII has shown us that countries will attack each other, regional war will break out, and we eventually have to step in and fix it--at great cost to our own people.
Excuse me, I think you'll find the Russians did a large part of that, at an even larger cost to their people. Your history books and Hollywood propaganda removed all references to this during the commie witchhunt. They couldn't be seen to doing good for the world could they? WWII was a joint effort for all involved. While we respect and appreciate the help the US provided, don't think for one minute it was like Saving Private Ryan. There were other nations involved. If either Russia or the US didn't get involved, I'd be speaking German. No one could have done it alone. Fighting the war on two fronts broke Germanys back. And it was the Russians that got to Berlin first.
War has changed now. Only a few backwards nations still believe that it's necessary to capture land. Modern war is economic now. Why invade a country to get their resources when you can simply have companies do it for you. They still make a cut on what you take, but it's cheaper than the cost of a war, so in the end it's more profitable. And no one gets killed.
Then every country ought to show that they can act mature without the U.S. providing worldwide stability.
While the US is very admirable, it's not the bastion of standards every American thinks it is. Your county has done some heinous things. You have brought down governments, assassinated many people, tried to kill the Chinese leader several times (are you mad?). Take the spyplane in China issue. How would you feel if the Chinese were flying spyplaces 24/7 of the coast of Florida? I could go on and on about things the CIA have done in the "war against communism", which has blighted many countries and led to the creation of the Taliban and the complete destruction of Afghanistan. Twice now. Many many dodgy things have been done, and I don't have the time to sit here and catalogue them. Only a handful have made it to the publics attention. Are you so naïve to believe that everyone in control of your country is honest?
In anger? Anger would have been to launch a few at Afghanistan a day or two after 9/11.
Oops, you must have picked me up wrong. Many countries have tested nukes, but the US was the first (and last thankfully) to ever use one during an armed conflict. I didn't mean anything in the "in anger" part, just a figure of speech.
The attack on Japan was a calculated strategic decision that most likely saved the lives of millions of Americans AND Japanese.
Again, many say that it was completely unessessary and the war was already over. The Russians were due to enter the war the same week and if they had, post-war Japans spoils would have to been shared. There would be a Tokyo wall, just like in Berlin. I'm not saying that that's what I believe, but it's a popular theory.
Remember, politicians lie nowadays. That's nothing new. What makes you think we know the whole truth of any of these events? You are basing your knowledge on what you know. Consider this; you may not know the whole story. I certainly don't, but I'm not willing to believe anything I'm told without some analysis of my own.
Face it, after WWII we could have dominated the world.
You did. ;-) See my earlier remark on how wars are fought nowadays.
Anyways, I can see you are very patriotic, so I may be touching a nerve putting the US down. I apologise again for this, but you should be wary of being so patriotic that you cannot acknowledge the bad bits. Your leaders are just like me. Opinionated assholes that often defy logic!! ;-)
the /. summary blatantly says Russian. i suppose that's just his home country then. well, maybe he just has that russian attitude then, of get what you can, however you can. they had to think that way under commy gov't, just to survive...
It's possible he didn't consider the damage that would be caused; he's a politician not a military expert. On the other hand, if his advisors who should have know the potential for damage didn't tell him, then it's their fault.
I think it's far more likely from an objective review of the facts and based on logic that they were simply surprised at Pearl Harbor. We thought we were negotiating a peace. Any conspiracy theory related to Pearl Harbor, as is the case with 9/11, seems to require us to believe that people that grew up patriotic Americans somehow stop caring about their fellow Americans and their country when they obtain power in their country, allowing it to be attacked and fellow citizens killed. While it's fun for conspiracy theories, I don't think it's very probable.
didn't you detect a constant theme in his books that the public never knows the whole truth? His books are largely the source of my mistrust
Of course we don't know everything. But one thing is to not know everything and quite another to suggest that any American president had prior knowledge of an attack and did nothing, or actually wanted it to happen.
Also, keep in mind that Tom Clancy is fiction. Sure, it's fun stuff and I love his work and the movies (with Harrison Ford) are great. But remember to keep fact and fiction separate, regardless of how believable the fiction may seem.
Hopefully the causes of terrorism will be long gone by then.
They won't be. There will always be someone somewhere that isn't happy with something. The "reasons" may change, but don't expect the world to be a peaceful utopia in 50 years with everyone just getting along.
But you may have to concede that you cannot wrap yourself up in cotton wool all the time. The world can be a dangerous place, throwing money at it will not change much.
I agree that no-one can ever be completely safe. But I disagree that "throwing money" at a problem can't reduce the risks. Money won't make us safer, but the technology that money can buy CAN make it safer. Not 100% safe and it won't defend against every attack, but at least it provides one less way to attack us. I'm in favor of that.
So, you get your missile shield, are you going to build a huge wall around the country and make sure nukes (etc) don't get in that way?
Yes. Well, not literally. But I *AM* in favor of implementing technology so that every container on every ship and truck that enter the country pass through some kind of device that would detect nuclear material. I believe that could be accomplished with technology and focusing U.S. Customs solely on the purpose of detecting unwanted goods coming in rather than looking for goods to tax. I.e., Customs should be a PROTECTION agency to keep out unwanted goods--it should not be a fiscal agency with aims of collecting import tarrifs.
Again, I fail to see the worth of this system.
It's value is in that it eliminates one more way to attack the United States. No-one is going to launch a direct military assault on the continental U.S. If we have a missile defense, that method of attack goes away. If Customs passes all incoming goods through some kind of raditiation detection equipment then that route is closed off.
No, we can't be 100% safe. But we can take steps to significantly reduce the possibility of attacks.
Terrorists don't count; every country has had problems with them at some point.
Terrorists do count as long as there are countries supporting them or looking the other way. In fact, in a world where the U.S. is so strong it is not far-fetched to believe that countries will actually "deploy" terrorists to do through terror what they could never do with a direct military attack.
There are other and better ways to defend yourself from real threats, not made-up-threats.
Again, refer to my comment (which you agreed to) regarding who might have missiles in 50 years? All threats are real. If we can think of them, so can someone else. If we have no defense against a threat, that's the best threat to exploit.
Re: Saddam knows that. He should have known that in 1992 when a half million allies were arrayed on his border
You: He probably thought we were bluffing.Prior to the Gulf war, nothing like that had happened, nations do not usually get involved in other peoples wars.
What? Thought we were bluffing? Nations don't usually get involved in other peoples' wars? How about France helping the U.S. against England? How about U.S. helping various European countries in WWI and WWII? What about the U.S. in Korea and Vietnam?
And with 500,000 troops you really think he thought we were bluffing? I don't think so. He was either too stubborn/proud to retreat or actually was stupid enough to think he could win. Either way is dangerous and so is playing military "chicken" or "poker" because you think the other side is bluffing...
Re: Israel/Arabs
If it wasn't for the oil, I think we would leave them to it. If they want to kill each other, let them.
No, because history has shown that when we let other countries do that we eventually are the ones that have to come in and finish it. There was no oil in Europe that warranted our carrying whether the Nazis took over Europe and/or killed everyone.
what makes the Israelis so deserving of protection? Guilt over their unfortunate history?
What makes South Korea deserving of protection? What made Europe deserving of protection during the cold war? What makes Japan worthy of protection after they were our enemies?
For better or for worse, Israel was created by the United Nations over 50 years ago. The world agrees they have a right to exist. The United States defends that right. It is valid to ask "why" we are allies with Israel, but it's no more absurd than asking why we are allies with anyone else.
Plus if we just leave Israel to fend for itself there WILL be a bloodbath in the Middle East and it WILL grow to a regional conflict and then to a world war. Believe me, I'd rather support Israel than let the region spiral into war.
Neither side is "right", so why back either?
See above.
Me: There is no inherent reason to believe that if we stopped supporting certain governments and they were toppled "by the people" they would be any more honest.
You: So the troops and US made weapons, planes, landmines are only there for show?
No, they are there to defend the governments from being toppled by a radical population that would most likely attack Israel and plunge the region and world into war.
It has NOTHING to do from keeping riches from the masses. It has everything to do with keeping an irresponsible and radical mass of people from taking the reigns of government and starting a regional/world war.
Why should that be a factor? You're willing to screw over an entire nation worth of mostly innocent people to help another nation?
I'm willing to restrain (not screw over) a nation to keep it from attacking a neighbor--especially when the result of such an attack would almost certainly be a world war.
But Israels are white, the others are black, so that makes it easy for us.
The Arabs I've seen are no more "black" than your average Israeli or American.
Again, what makes Israel immune to this logic? They are provoking other nations as I type this.
Who are they provoking? Have they lobbed warheads into Baghdad because they were in a conflict with Syria? Have they launched terrorists to blow themselves up in the middle of Egypt?
They've started their own wars. Maybe if they also were responsible and not trigger-happy, we wouldn't be in this mess.
They've only started a war in, what, 1967 or so? And that was to take the "high lands" because their neighbors kept lobbing bombs at them from above.
But, at least the poor can afford TV and alcohol, so they'll be alright.
Yeah... in the Arab countries we're talking about that might not have enough money for either, but it doesn't matter since neither are permitted.
He has publicly said the Saudi issue is his primary beef with the Americans.
Feel free to believe him if you want. If our troops were there in preparation to assist them in attacking Israel I'm sure he wouldn't mind. Our presence there is not the problem. Our support of Israel is.
Me: Basically, we have the money.
You: No you don't. The stock markets have crashed.The airline industry has lost out big time. 8 million of your people live in poverty. I can think of better ways to spend the money.
Guess what? Our stock markets have "crashed", our airline industry is hurting, we have 8 million (3%??) of our population in poverty... and we STILL have money. We go through tough times like anyone, but that doesn't mean we're now a poor nation incapable of spending money on its defense.
Me: f we don't "police the world" then WWI and WWII has shown us that countries will attack each other, regional war will break out, and we eventually have to step in and fix it--at great cost to our own people.
You: Excuse me, I think you'll find the Russians did a large part of that, at an even larger cost to their people.
The RUSSIANS were DEFENDING THEMSELVES. They were being attacked by the Nazis. We went in to clean things up even though we weren't under direct attack by the Nazis.
I'm not belitting the Russian effort, but it's completely understandable. They were being attacked, they defended themselves. But for the U.S. to be at peace with everyone but Japan and open a second front in Europe and storm the beach at Normandy (my grandfather was there!) to liberate someone elses country? That's a different story.
While we respect and appreciate the help the US provided, don't think for one minute it was like Saving Private Ryan.
My grandfather was in the first wave on Omaha Beach. Virtually all of his fellow soldiers were killed that day. I don't know what part of "Saving Private Ryan" you are criticizing, but the sacrifice made by the landing troops on Omaha Beach is quite accurate, from what I've been told. We actually have a German Luger (sp?) that my grandpa picked up that day...
Take the spyplane in China issue. How would you feel if the Chinese were flying spyplaces 24/7 of the coast of Florida?
I wouldn't like it, but if they were outside our territorial limits I would recognize their right to do it.
Are you so naïve to believe that everyone in control of your country is honest?
No. But you have taken the inherent belief in their dishonesty to levels only justified if you buy into unproven conspiracy theories that somehow must believe that as soon as a normal patriotic American gets into positions of power he immediately forgets himself, his beliefes, and becomes a lying, blood-thirsty, warmongering dictator.
I believe that that point of view is just as silly as believing everyone that leads the U.S. is completely honest.
Re: Nukes in Japan in WWII
Again, many say that it was completely unessessary and the war was already over.
Many say that, many say it would have cost millions of lives. Take your pick.
The Russians were due to enter the war the same week and if they had, post-war Japans spoils would have to been shared.
I believe we had been waiting for the Russians to enter for some time. We dropped the bomb, the Russians figured the war was over, and I believe that's when they declared war on Japan. Perhaps we dropped the bomb so as not to share with Russia, or perhaps the Russians declared war because they figured the U.S. had already won and they (Russia) had nothing to lose.
There would be a Tokyo wall, just like in Berlin. I'm not saying that that's what I believe, but it's a popular theory.
The Russians did nothing to help us with the Japan front throughout the entire war. I believe they lost 20 million people in WWII? I find it far more believable that they were not in a position to help us and, even if they had, we were on our own in the Pacific for 4 years. Their help would have been too little too late.
What makes you think we know the whole truth of any of these events? You are basing your knowledge on what you know. Consider this; you may not know the whole story. I certainly don't, but I'm not willing to believe anything I'm told without some analysis of my own.
I know I don't know everything. And I went through a phase where I believed in conspiracy theories. You usually grow out of it by about 25 or 30 years old, though.
If you read international news on a daily basis, everything that happens is quite predictable based on public knowledge. If I see a terrorist attack against Israel, I can predict Israel will strike back within a day or two. Now you can suggest that they are evil and are decimating the Palestinians because they are evil and that the U.S. wants to kill off the Palestinians so we can get their oil, and that's why we support Israel. Perhaps you are even right. But everything is easily predictable by just reading the news.
I guess what I'm saying is that if everything is understandable based on the what's happening in the world, there's little reason to believe that conspiracy theories are necessary to explain what can be completely explained by day-to-day politics.
Anyways, I can see you are very patriotic, so I may be touching a nerve putting the US down.
Yes, I am patriotic but I love these kinds of debates. I am 100% American but have lived in Mexico for the last 6+ years, so I do have some experience "outside the box."
I apologise again for this, but you should be wary of being so patriotic that you cannot acknowledge the bad bits.
Believe me, my patriotism doesn't cause me to not acknowledge the bad bits. We've done bad things, mostly via the CIA. But while we and our leaders aren't saints, I cannot accept that virtually every action the U.S. engages in is driven by some dark, evil secret due to some conflict of interest of someone high-up in government. I just don't buy that.
Your leaders are just like me. Opinionated assholes that often defy logic!! ;-)
I'll agree they can be opinionated assholes, but I truly do NOT believe they defy logic. As I said, I can see the logic of EVERYONE involved (not just the U.S.) just by reading the news.
We are sometimes quick to judge without all the facts. This is something which will have to be nurtured to get the participation we seek. Even if this fails, the amount of knowledge we walk away with will be staggering. Man is always on the evolutionary climb, for you "NAY SAYERS" remember to clean the poop in your own backyards before complaining about the neighbors.
He's referring to the usage of the argument, not the definition of the argument.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
It is no wonder that the greater scientific community thinks that warp drive is nothing more than hype. There is very little out of box thinking taking place. Most people are socialized to believe that certain types of science are nothing more than sci-fi. This is a mistake. Do you think that Einstein or Maxwell would have made their contributions if they would have listened to the "experts". While you are digesting that, let us talk briefly about why warp drive doesn't fit into our equations. The frame work doesn't exist to allow for such propulsion. One, what is know about gravity is not complete. Two, the four fundamental forces have not been united (GUFT). And last, the ability to tap into zero-point energy has not been engineered. Once these three queries have been satisfied then and only then will we have an understanding of physics to allow for the construction and implementation of warp drive.
Podkletnov is too hard to pronounce - physical effects and forces always have easy-to-pronounce names. :O)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/