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Meet the Men Who Deploy Airstrikes
Lanxon writes "Wired followed US Army Staff Sergeant Kevin Rosner into Afghanistan to see first-hand the tools, tactics, and pressures involved in coordinating military airstrikes. This lengthy piece explores the people and technology involved in high-risk airborne warfare, from their perspective. From the article: 'Strapped to his chest, Rosner carries a handheld video player called a "Rover," built by L3 Communications, a New York-based defense contractor. The device, the size and shape of a PSP game console and costing tens of thousands of dollars, reads signals transmitted by the camera pods strapped to the underside of all NATO fighter aircraft. With his Rover, Rosner can see everything a pilot sees, from the pilot's perspective. On his back he carries a radio programmed with secure frequencies that tie him directly to the pilots overhead and to his unit's headquarters, several miles away. At the headquarters, another JTAC monitors a bigger, more sophisticated video terminal that displays the same video Rosner sees, plus other data.'"
In all honestly I'm not the most fully versed person on the Spanish Inquisition and the like; however, I've read a number of historical texts in regards to the Spanish Inquisition and the use of torture in general and it's not that uncommon to come across temperature letters that were written questioning the use. Also, it was usually well observed that there were those that did torture because they had to for any of a number of reasons and those that relished the thoughts of being able to torture someone. In some cases you find that the people attracted to certain roles would be the ones that where the most willing to preform torture.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with my comment, it surely is not a troll (it's also on topic). I do hope the mods who did that get punished in M2. Moderation is not supposed to be used to suppress comments one finds disagreeable.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
not done with drones - but how much easier it would be if you're even :-P
one more level detached from the reality?? when killing is like a videogame..
wiki-leaks video of airstrikes on reporters
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/05/wikileaks-video-of-u.html#more
+4 "insightful". What bullshit.
"insightful" and "underrated". Hard to say which one's worse.
A better rating would be +5 "tragic."
Actually Britain did repay its war/lend-lease debt to the USA. The final payment was made in 2006.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
If your argument is about merits of different societal structures, then why do you keep comparing the US and UK to Persia in terms of intellectual accomplishments? The Arab and Persian worlds were intellectually way advanced of the western world for a very long time. Much of that ingenuity you are so proud of in extracting oil from the ground rests on great advancements in math and science made in India, the Middle East and Persia. If your argument really is about societal structures, then that would be fine - but you keep dragging in what are innate human characteristics, which smacks of some kind of prejudiced tribalism.
The west, the US particularly, may have some dominance at this time, but history tells us that great societies wax to shine brightly, only eventually to wane and dim, often because of their own hubris. You may be committing the sin of sitting in judgement from your tiny little corner of time, failing to place it in its proper larger context (never mind unable to see what's ahead)...
I think you have an extremely narrow world-view. You should get out more. From my experience of such people and given you're reasonably mature, I doubt you have any intention of allowing your views to be swayed (e.g. you've completely ignored the points about contracts being made undemocratically, about the US defaulting on its contracts too, rule of law, and you ignore the decades of brutal Western sponsored repressed that unquestionably setback those nations generation or more thereafter). No doubt you're proud of that. So I'll leave this be.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
Ok, never mind. I've prejudged you and clearly failed to properly read your comment. Scratch that.
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.