Do you post the same comment in every politics.slashdot.org article? You didn't actually make any comment at all - you added about as much as the ACs who feel compelled to say 'obligatory - in soviet russia...'
If you want the moral high ground, why don't you read the full text of the new space policy (go here).
You do realize that Bush (walking through a door left open by Clinton) is declaring that the US will do whatever it feels is necessary to defend its interests in space - including developing and deploying space weapons.
A direct quote from the policy paper reads:
"The United States will preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests," (quoted in the BBC article)
I'm all for frickin' laser beams and photon torpedos on Star Trek, but in real life this sort of behavior is stupid. Space travel is difficult enough as it is; there is no need to complicate things by introducing the added costs and dangers of space missiles, anti-missile missiles, etc.
I was at Siggraph in 1997, and saw an SGI monitor that was amazing - I had to do a double-take, it looked so real. I don't know if it was an early HD monitor or what, but damn, I wish I had one!
You see, the internet is like a stream in the woods.
Water in the Amazon river and a stream may travel at the same speed, but the Amazon moves a heck of a lot more water in a given period of time than the stream. This difference is analogous to bandwidth. Electrical signals and light signals both travel at essentially the same speed (though I believe there is actually a small difference in the real world), but fiber can carry a lot more data than copper.
Fast inet to the home is great and all, but it won't mean anything if ISPs don't budget for their customers actually using the connections. As things stand now, people running bittorrent are supposedly being greedy for simply using a good portion of their bandwidth all the time. 100Mbps or whatever is useless if you're only supposed to use it for downloading the odd PDF or big JPEG.
Did you want to invade North Korea? You do realize that the USA tried to take over North Korea in the 1950s, at a time when its military, technological and economic power was at its height, and at a time when it held a monopoly on the atomic bomb, and still failed?
The only thing that has happened to day is that it has now been confirmed that an enourmous amount of money, resources, effort, and time has been wasted on the creation of a device whose sole purpose is to satisfy the ego of a shut-in dictator. They will, of course, never actually use the bomb; if they do, their armies and, perhaps, cities, will be replaced with thin films of glass very quickly. And they know this.
Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them. If North Korea nukes the South, the Americans will nuke North Korea; if the Americans nuke North Korea, the North Koreans will nuke the South. So both sides have to rely on their conventional armies, just like before.
Not only that, the North Koreans have claimed to have nukes for ages now. This sort of publically-announced test is just an extremely expensive and technologically advanced version of chest-beating.
HOWEVER, assuming you are American, if you (and a significant majority of your countrymen) allow this to scare you and both 1) reelect jingoist pro-war politicians, and 2) support launching a 'pre-emptive' war against North Korea, things will become very dreadful indeed for the Korean peninsula.
As a wise man once said, 'the only thing to fear is fear itself'.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want the moral high ground, why don't you read the full text of the new space policy (go here).
You do realize that Bush (walking through a door left open by Clinton) is declaring that the US will do whatever it feels is necessary to defend its interests in space - including developing and deploying space weapons.
A direct quote from the policy paper reads:
"The United States will preserve its rights, capabilities, and freedom of action in space... and deny, if necessary, adversaries the use of space capabilities hostile to US national interests," (quoted in the BBC article)
I'm all for frickin' laser beams and photon torpedos on Star Trek, but in real life this sort of behavior is stupid. Space travel is difficult enough as it is; there is no need to complicate things by introducing the added costs and dangers of space missiles, anti-missile missiles, etc.
I was at Siggraph in 1997, and saw an SGI monitor that was amazing - I had to do a double-take, it looked so real. I don't know if it was an early HD monitor or what, but damn, I wish I had one!
You see, the internet is like a stream in the woods.
Water in the Amazon river and a stream may travel at the same speed, but the Amazon moves a heck of a lot more water in a given period of time than the stream. This difference is analogous to bandwidth. Electrical signals and light signals both travel at essentially the same speed (though I believe there is actually a small difference in the real world), but fiber can carry a lot more data than copper.
Fast inet to the home is great and all, but it won't mean anything if ISPs don't budget for their customers actually using the connections. As things stand now, people running bittorrent are supposedly being greedy for simply using a good portion of their bandwidth all the time. 100Mbps or whatever is useless if you're only supposed to use it for downloading the odd PDF or big JPEG.
Did you want to invade North Korea? You do realize that the USA tried to take over North Korea in the 1950s, at a time when its military, technological and economic power was at its height, and at a time when it held a monopoly on the atomic bomb, and still failed?
The only thing that has happened to day is that it has now been confirmed that an enourmous amount of money, resources, effort, and time has been wasted on the creation of a device whose sole purpose is to satisfy the ego of a shut-in dictator. They will, of course, never actually use the bomb; if they do, their armies and, perhaps, cities, will be replaced with thin films of glass very quickly. And they know this.
Nukes are the most useless weapon any country can have, simply because you can't use them. If North Korea nukes the South, the Americans will nuke North Korea; if the Americans nuke North Korea, the North Koreans will nuke the South. So both sides have to rely on their conventional armies, just like before.
Not only that, the North Koreans have claimed to have nukes for ages now. This sort of publically-announced test is just an extremely expensive and technologically advanced version of chest-beating.
HOWEVER, assuming you are American, if you (and a significant majority of your countrymen) allow this to scare you and both 1) reelect jingoist pro-war politicians, and 2) support launching a 'pre-emptive' war against North Korea, things will become very dreadful indeed for the Korean peninsula.
As a wise man once said, 'the only thing to fear is fear itself'.