Forget 'parts', steal the damn gasoline. They should have at least thought of that, and then dismissed it because Doc already drained the gas from the mine-car. (You don't want gas to sit in a car for that long.)
Yeah, this is what always confused me about the clever 'Oh, you'll end up in empty space.' people.
Really? Why? If the earth isn't the frame of reference, what the hell is? How exactly does anyone think a point in space is the 'same spot' as earth was early? Because that requires a frame of reference too!
Logically, teleportation through time (Which is what we're talking about) requires some frame of reference, or there's no such thing as 'location' on the other end.
This applies even if the time machine can travel though space, too. It cannot start being 'somewhere' without an existing location to be offset from.
So everyone who 'cleverly' points out you'd end up in empty space is sorta dumb. No, you 'wouldn't really' end up in empty space, because to really 'arrive' somewhere, you must specify that location relative to something, so all time machines that work must have already solved that problem, or they wouldn't 'arrive' anywhere at all.
I've decided a long time ago, so that it's possible for time machines to reappear at all, they must simply stick a 'placeholder' when they leave that stays in roughly the same place gravitationally (Imagine it pinned to specific point on the the gravitational curve), and reappear at it. Like a 'scratch' on gravity. Which works as long as the object they're on roughly stays the same, which obviously the earth does. (Although with tidal effects, they could end up slightly above or below the ground.)
An ad hominem is when an argument is dismissed due to who's making it. (Incidentally, if people can't figure it out due the craptastic comment system, this AC is responding to my original post to clarkkent09.)
The only thing I said about the person making the argument was that he was 'an ass', and that he should direct his argument not to people that are finally shown the truth (and outraged), but to the system that hides what war looks like.
I made absolutely no claim that what he said should be dismissed because of who he is, or that anything about him dismisses his arguments.
In fact, strictly speaking, I didn't argue with him at all. He's entirely right about how other countries have behaved at war, and he's entirely right that the military was operating within correct procedure.
In fact, he wasn't arguing with fredmosby either. fredmosby, the person he responded to said, like most of the American population would say, that the US army appears to have rather low standards of proof in a war. Which is also correct, but clarkkent09 decided to act if he was wrong.
No one is fucking arguing with anyone about the actual facts. We have one set of posters who say what the actual facts are, and are horrified by them, and we have one set of posters who say what the actual facts are...and somehow are annoyed that the other set don't like innocent children being blown up. (And we have the general population, who refuses to believe the actual facts and use cognitive dissonance to believe it doesn't happen all the time, that this was a crazy mistake.)
The US government has a very low standard of killing because it's a war, period, full stop, and innocent people get shot in a war. It's not a 'low standard' compared to other countries at war, but it sure as hell is a low standard for 'killing people' in general. Some of us think it's good for the American people to know that, and it's good to show the American people what war actually looks like. (Because, you know, 'Democracy' and all that.)
Other people seem to think either it's morally wrong to show the American people the effect of their war, and/or the American already know the effect of war, and they shouldn't act shocked. (Sometimes they appear to be saying both those things at once, despite that making no sense.)
Both you and I and clarkkent09 are saying 'War is a horrible thing that if people knew what really happened, they'd be horrified, so the people talking about war gloss over the details.' We all appear to be in agreement on that..
However, I think that's a damn good reason to not invade other countries to 'liberate' them anymore, whereas you two seem to think that's an argument against telling showing people what actually happens because they won't like it, which is the most goddamn fascist bullshit I've ever heard my life.
No shit that people don't like war. No shit governments have always sanitized it so they can have their 'adventures' against 'the bad guy'.
We all know that. It's that some of us DON'T LIKE THAT, dumbass. Others, like you, seem to think the problem is actually admitting what really happens in a war, presumably because...you're pro-war in general?
I don't think the general public really do want to know the gory details of each and every atrocity.
'Beware of the man who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.'
And I love how you say that and then, two paragraphs later, imply they do already know the details, and I'm some sort of idiot for pointing out they do not and were horrified when shown them.
No, the general public did not know the US military would blow up vehicles that just happened to be driving near firefights. And probably would have been more upset if they understood that, instead of a couple of loose cannons who did something careless, the people who did it were entirely within correct behavior, and vans full of innocent children could hypothetically be blown up all the time.
Sadly, most of the general public appear to think it was some sort of one-time mistake instead of, strictly speaking, not a mistake at all. Hopefully the WikiLeaks release will help dissuade them of that.
In case you haven't noticed, India is exactly one country away from Iran. There's just Pakistan in between. It's less than 400 miles away. India is actually closer to Iran than Lebanon or Israel are!
I don't know what sort of 'Middle East' point you're trying to make, but I didn't say anything about the Middle East. Go ahead, search my post for 'Middle East'. There are not 'regions' where countries are located in and don't influence outside. Egypt doesn't say 'Oh, we're technically in Africa, we have nothing to do with the Middle East', and India doesn't say 'This is the Indian subcontinent, we have nothing to do with Pakistan, the country next door, or anything past that.'. The influence of a country doesn't magically stop at the where we've decided to divide geographical areas.
India is a rather strong county, and fairly close to Iran. That is the facts. Ergo, they are competing 'regional powers', even if you want to quibble about what to call that region, which I will mention again I didn't call anything.
And, despite what you said, I in no way implied that Turkey, India, and Saudi Arabia were all in the same region, whatever the fuck that means. They are, however, regional powers physically close to Iran. Sheesh.
Gold isn't a store of value either, unless you're operating some sort of microprocessor plant.
There are two schools of thought about 'value', either that it is inherent or it's subjective.
You are clearly operating under the inherent one, as, subjectively, money does have value. You're trying to make the claim that gold has some inherent value that cash does not.
Sadly, that doesn't work. Gold actually has almost no inherent value. If it did, almost all the gold in the world wouldn't be sitting in gold bars in a warehouse somewhere.
Gold has most of the time, about the same level of inherent value as glitter. Ooo, it's pretty to look at!
There are some circumstances where the actual metallic properties of gold are useful, but, frankly, an equal weight of aluminum is much more useful in general. Or a slab of beef.
You can either live in a world where things have the value that humanity ascribes to them, aka, how useful they are in trade, in which case gold and cash are both pretty valuable, or you can live in a world where the value is only some sort of measure of their usefulness in some objective sense, in which case cash is valueless and gold is almost valueless.
You need to review your statement. These are the same people building nuclear facilities.
No, they aren't. There's no evidence they've been building anything but nuclear power.
Which they're doing in secret, because other countries apparently think it's fucking acceptable to bomb them. (Which is, of course, trying to make war, which is a war crime.)
History says otherwise. Iraq/Iran have always been central themes/threats to stability in the region.
Really? Why don't you list the countries Iran's invaded, then?
Why, the last one appears to be India. In 1738. Which logically makes England a greater threat to stability in the region, considering that England conquered India after that.
Just saying 'central themes/threats' like that doesn't magically make them 'threats'. And neither does including Iraq in there, which has been a major source of instability in the region...ever since we stuck Saddam in charge and encouraged him to fucking invade anywhere he wanted.
Iran has always been an important country, it has always been a major player central to the region, and it continue to do so. It's just not a threat to anything but our control of the region.
The US is, by any objective measurement, a much stronger force for instability in the region. We overthrew Iran's government, we supported Iraq when it invaded Iran, we support the wildly insane government of Pakistan, we armed the Taliban, we encouraged Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, etc, etc.
Iran just sits there and tries to build influence in nearby countries. Granted, some of the groups it funds are not the nicest people, but just because the US tries to claim Hezbollah are terrorists doesn't actually make that true. (Hezbollah is a 'militia', if you're wondering.)
It doesn't matter what the fucking standard is, if it results in destroying innocent children in vans driving by, the AMERICAN PEOPLE THINK IT IS TOO LOW.
If you can't fight a war without following that standard, perhaps the American people should be apprised of this fact so they can, before the war, debate 'Hey, should we kill some innocent children or not?'. And if they aren't willing to accept that, perhaps they should, I dunno, decide against said war.
This democratic concept, that American people should decide if the horrors of war are 'worth it', only fucking works if the American people know what war looks like.
You don't get to whine and bitch that they were actually, finally, shown that and think it's outrageous. Please direct your whining and bitching to the media and government that sanitized the war for almost a decade.
You lost the logic flow by having the words 'murdering people' removed from the sentence before that.
There are plenty of places US troops are there with the invitation of the real, not-installed-by-the-US government...but it's places like England, where they presumably not killing anyone.
You're right that in essentially all places that the US is engaged in active combat operations right now, they're operating with the support of a local government essentially installed by the US.
Except Pakistan, where the government was only partially installed by the US, so they're only partially in favor of our military operations, which is a rather good exception that proves the rule.
Please stop falling for the neocon nonsense and actually do some research. Iran is not going to destroy itself, and the leader of Iran is no, in any way, shape, or form, crazy.
Iran wants to be a regional power. It wants to essentially control the Shia nations near it...Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. And to keep the US out of that area.
And weaken the existing regional powers...Saudi Arabia and Turkey and India.
That's basically it. That's all it wants. It doesn't even give a flying fuck about Palestine, which is Sunni and utterly worthless to them if they have Lebanon and coastal access there. All its talk about Israel is just a sort of 'Muslim bonding' they're trying to do, and, no, they don't make threats about Israel, and any talk you've heard about that is deliberate lies.
It might care about Sunni Afghanistan to the extent it's literally next door, but as long as the US isn't there, it probably doesn't. It doesn't care enough to even make a play for it.
The only people ascribing crazy motives to Iran are the people who want to invade it, and the people listening to them.
Iran does go around undermining democratic governments near to it, but I hardly think the US, of all people, get to complain about that.
There is a difference between 'believers' and 'zealots'.
The actual leaders of Iran do indeed believe everything they say...but you'll also note that they are the ones saying that nuclear weapons are against Islam.
That's not to mention that Iran is Shia, and would hardly be supporting the Sunni Palestinians. They support Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is attempting to run Lebanon and Syria, and would hardly nuke them.
Iran is the most absurdly overblown 'threat' to the middle east peace, ever. Iran doesn't give a damn about Israel, and is essentially mouthing whatever they think sounds good on that topic. Iran cares about Syria and Lebanon, and there's no way that nuking anyone could result in control of them.
It also cares about the US not invading it, as the US has been, rather illegally with no justification under international law, threatening to do. They've realized we apparently don't invade places with nukes.
If an extremism group get a nuke and blow up Israel, it will be from Pakistan, handed off to some crazy Palestinian group. (And I mean 'crazy'. You can't blow up Israel without blowing up Palestine.)
Heinlein's story was pre-Outer Space Treaty, which essentially removed ownership of the moon as possibility, ever, from the countries that signed it. 'Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means'.
Technically, you can't even have 'private property' on the moon. Same treaty: 'Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.'
Read that carefully, and realize that legally stops the US from building a shack with a locked door on it on the moon. No one can bar other nations from any area of 'celestial bodies', at all. You cannot say 'This area of the moon is the US's.'. Russians can wander in and hang out in your living room. (Nations can, however, bar people from space stations and areas on them.)
Of course, that wouldn't apply to a colony that claimed self-governance and, obviously, had signed no such treaty. OTOH, just 'claiming' to be a nation, and have no one recognize you, is pretty useless.
Since the ownership is "nobody", you can plop your mining company down wherever you feel like and start digging. Nobody has the right to stop you.
Legally, all space missions have to be 'flagged' under some nation, just like any ship in international water(1), and you are, indeed, under their jurisdiction. So says the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.
Other countries can only object to this (and any other space mission) if they feel it would cause 'potentially harmful interference with activities in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies'.
As there is a rather huge area on the moon available for exploration, it's hard to see how any mining operation would impact that. Arguably, it could (and should) be used to keep you away from any existing 'exploration or use', like the existing Apollo landing sites, but you'd probably be lynched if you screwed with them anyway.
1) And if you're not, you're a SPACE PIRATE! WHEEE!
Diamond may be the best heat conductor, but it's not a very useful heat conductor, seeing as it's impossible to actually shape it where it fully touches the thing you're trying to remove heat from. And the same problem if you're trying to make a heat-sink...good luck carving a diamond like that.
So, essentially, to use diamond, you have to put something between it and what you're trying to remove heat from, or put heat into, which means you might as well just have used that other thing for the whole thing.
No it wouldn't. Electromagnetism is clearly a natural phenomenon that is easy to demonstrate to others, and inherently no weirder than blowing on something and making it move.
The idea that everyone in history were superstitious idiots is an invention of fiction.
You go back in time and start demonstrated very advanced technology without explaining any basis for it, like a television, maybe you get in trouble. You go back in time and demonstrate how a moving magnet (And they know all about magnets) in one place can move the effect somewhere else over wire, and everyone would be 'Oh, okay.'
Yes, goods canned in the fall and sitting in city warehouses, which was my point. There might be giant rural farms, but they're shipping their produce to entirely city warehouses to pack and ship to mostly city stores, so unless the hypothetical collapse happens right at harvest time, all that harvested food isn't anywhere near the rural farm.
The idea that in a disaster that people would come pouring out of the cities is nonsense. If anything, the suburbs go pouring into the cities looking for food.
And if people think there's enough hunting around to support rural areas, ha. That's a silly theory.
I have at no point indicated people won't have an incentive to tamper with paper ballots.
I said I can watch paper ballots to make sure they don't.
And, unlike the 1920 tampering you appear to think still goes on, in actuality, you can walk down to your polling place and watch the empty ballot box get filled, by individual votes, and then dumped out and counted.
You cannot, under any circumstances, do that with software.
You don't seem to understand that the difference between paper ballots and electronic ballots is that you can theoretically secure paper ones, whereas you cannot theoretically secure electronic ones. You keep talking about 'open' like it's some magic wand, but there is no possible way to verify that the 'open' software you spent all that time and effort on is the only software actually running on the machine.
Of course, in our universe votes are tallied up every second, which supposedly makes them 'safe', but either they're going fast enough that no one knows whose vote is whose, in which case the machines can trivially lie and change votes as they go out, or people do know whose vote is whose.
But in this country we have a secret ballot, and, as I pointed out, historically, non-secret ballots result in a metric fuckload more vote tampering, including the exact corrupt elections you think are the fault of paper ballots, but were actually a problem with people pressuring voters. The Chicago Machine problem was vote pressuring with a few rare cases of actual tampering.
I don't understand why you don't grasp 'There is no way to verify what software is running on the machine'. I've said it in every goddamn post I've made to you. It doesn't matter what is supposed to be running on it, there is no way to see what is actually running on it.
If it were as easy to hack devices and systems as you suggest, then we would have no such thing as the internet because you wouldn't be able to trust anything - literally anything any computer told you unless you had assembled it from raw silicon, and even then, it's best not to take chances.
In fact, we would have programs running on computers that send out spam and steal credit card numbers, and lie to antivirus programs to stay hidden.
Oh, wait. WE HAVE THOSE THINGS.
I don't need to 'trust' my computer not to lie to me to visit slashdot. I don't need to 'trust' my computer not to lie to me to read my email. I'm not entirely sure what my computer would be lying about anyway.
I do need to trust it to not steal my credit card info when I use it, so I run some extra checks to make sure it isn't, an extra piece of software called 'antivirus', but I truly, honestly, have no actual way to verify it's not running software I don't want. Do you really not understand that?
Luckily, if it does steal my credit card info, and someone uses that, I will detect it, and my bank will reverse the charge, and it's just some minor trouble. Again, spyware hijacking computers happens every day in this country. I am flabbergasted you don't appear to know this.
If a computer changes my vote, I would not detect it.
Oh, and I'll point out: All that spyware I was talking about? It's usually unwanted by the system administrator. Which isn't really situation for any vote-tampering software, which would be deliberately installed by someone.
If elections can have magically undetectable counting errors, why would you ever trust your bank to not also have undetectable counting errors?
Because I can add up my bank statement myself, you git. If they made a math mistake I can easily find it. If they put in transactions I didn't make I can easily find them.
The process is, to use a word you think you know the meaning of but don't, 'transparent'. They have transparently added and removed money from my account, and I can view them having done this.
Which I rather obviously cannot do with votes.
After all they're undetectable, and apparently, no computer system can be designed where tampering is evident, or detectable
Not when the people who build it have an incentive to tamper with it, no, it is impossible to build a tamper-proof system.
when they are building an open electronic voting system which can be inspected, audited, and verified by anybody who wishes to do so.
Really? How the fuck do you propose I walk up to a machine and inspect the software on it? Electron scanning microscope? Magic?
You can't see software, you asshat. All you can see is the result of software. Even when you 'look at' the software to 'audit' and 'verify' it, you're using software to do that, and that software could be lying to you.
Which isn't some amazing new software I just invented...software that hides itself by having the system lie to people who try to look at it is all over the place, it's called a 'rootkit'. It gets into memory and then keeps all software that looks at the disk or memory from seeing it by intercepting those attempts and lying.
Granted, I could disassemble the voting computer and stick the hard drive in a machine I brought and scan it from a clean machine, which is how you get rid of rootkits in real life, but, um, that seems to allow me to tamper with the vote and/or the software, so doesn't seem like a good solution.
You could even run a closed email system that is essentially an electronic version of the post office, where people could send mail from an address, to another address, and pay a small amount to do so. (With it getting forwarded if people want.) And if they don't have email, it gets printed out and delivered by the mail people.
There's all sorts of interesting things that could happen there, there's all sorts of interesting things you can do when you take existing namespaces and put them in DNS.
For example, businesses are licensed in many ways, and have federal, state, and local license numbers. Wouldn't it be helpful to be able to take the license number and pull up that business's website, and you'd know it was the right place, because only that business could have that domain registered? And the website could have/licenses.xml which lists all those domains, and you can actually verify that they have those domains.
Or with radio stations, what if/stream.xml was a standard location for a document telling people where to get any streams for that station? And/schedule.xml was a place to get the schedule?
Then someone just has to punch in the radio call letters to have their computer look up the website and find out stuff automatically.
But, instead of that, the entire concept of 'namespace' in DNS appears to be 'Let's invent a new one every year so that all businesses leap in and buy all their trademarks in that one also'.
And we've decided to outsource all the verification stuff to damn idiotic SSL providers, despite that rendering us unable to find anyway, all that can tell us if we did find the right people (sometimes), not where they are to start with. And the fact that they're in competition to sell for the cheapest and have no incentive to actually verify anything.
You can talk about gardens all you want, I'm talking about Stonehenge.
The idea that a garden, which has to be constantly replanted, is a 'heritage' site, is somewhat stupid.
You're talking about a park, which is all well and good to have, but is hardly some great cultural blow if it isn't maintained for a few years, and two decades from now the government has to step back in and fix it up. You need even less protection for a park, people aren't going to vandalize trees. (Some of them have some historic buildings, which do need guards.)
Unlike Stonehenge, which people actually will damage.
But as for "cannot trust a computer", as I've noted elsewhere: if the ballots are both machineable and human-readable simultaneously (IE: no barcodes or anything; just make the computer read the text, which is pretty frickin easy these days), then everyone who's interested can bring their own counting machine along, and count each batch of ballots.
Heh, that's exactly what I think we should use.
We've got plenty of OCR-able fonts, we can easily make ballots that print 'Senator: John Johnson (D)' on them that a computer and a human can read. No one will every argue over a 'light mark' or a 'chad', and no computer will ever tell us that 2000 people voted for someone when only 200 people voted. It's very damn clear, their full name and office.
And forget tiny cramped ballots. Print everyone an entire 8x11 piece of paper, with nice big text on it. (Obviously, watermarked paper or something. Then do the ballot counting with a blacklight turned on so everyone can see the watermarks.)
And we can make the machines do any sort of assistance required. (With blind people having their ballot checked by a sighted help, but that has to happen anyway.)
And, while we're at it, we can randomize the order displayed to each person, so there's no order bias.
I've very careful to call this 'paper voting', though, because otherwise the media will represent it and electronic voting as the same thing.
It's damn amazing and absurd how many people here seem to want to build a 'security voting system', and have no concept of how difficult actual 'secure' computers are, or the fact it's impossible to make computers that are 'secure' from the damn people who built them, and yet won't sit down and think 'Hey, we can use computers to make remove every single problem with paper ballots, and yet leave all the security of them.'.
It wouldn't be that hard to build a decoder for uncompressed digital signals with basic relays and a quartz clock. Sadly, all of them are compressed and encoded weird, so you can't just read eight bits and turn it into voltage from 0 to 255 and that into sound.
Granted, it's pretty damn hard handmaking an FM radio also.
Of course, this hypothetical really makes no sense anyway. People attempting to communicate with stone-age tech-level, but knowledgeable, people would surely be using AM signaling, so that the people can build a crystal radio. Worrying about decoding digital really only makes sense if somehow part of civilization collapses and other parts don't know that, which is just silly. (Although we have our suspicions about Alabama.)
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Forget 'parts', steal the damn gasoline. They should have at least thought of that, and then dismissed it because Doc already drained the gas from the mine-car. (You don't want gas to sit in a car for that long.)
Yeah, this is what always confused me about the clever 'Oh, you'll end up in empty space.' people.
Really? Why? If the earth isn't the frame of reference, what the hell is? How exactly does anyone think a point in space is the 'same spot' as earth was early? Because that requires a frame of reference too!
Logically, teleportation through time (Which is what we're talking about) requires some frame of reference, or there's no such thing as 'location' on the other end.
This applies even if the time machine can travel though space, too. It cannot start being 'somewhere' without an existing location to be offset from.
So everyone who 'cleverly' points out you'd end up in empty space is sorta dumb. No, you 'wouldn't really' end up in empty space, because to really 'arrive' somewhere, you must specify that location relative to something, so all time machines that work must have already solved that problem, or they wouldn't 'arrive' anywhere at all.
I've decided a long time ago, so that it's possible for time machines to reappear at all, they must simply stick a 'placeholder' when they leave that stays in roughly the same place gravitationally (Imagine it pinned to specific point on the the gravitational curve), and reappear at it. Like a 'scratch' on gravity. Which works as long as the object they're on roughly stays the same, which obviously the earth does. (Although with tidal effects, they could end up slightly above or below the ground.)
An ad hominem is when an argument is dismissed due to who's making it. (Incidentally, if people can't figure it out due the craptastic comment system, this AC is responding to my original post to clarkkent09.)
The only thing I said about the person making the argument was that he was 'an ass', and that he should direct his argument not to people that are finally shown the truth (and outraged), but to the system that hides what war looks like.
I made absolutely no claim that what he said should be dismissed because of who he is, or that anything about him dismisses his arguments.
In fact, strictly speaking, I didn't argue with him at all. He's entirely right about how other countries have behaved at war, and he's entirely right that the military was operating within correct procedure.
In fact, he wasn't arguing with fredmosby either. fredmosby, the person he responded to said, like most of the American population would say, that the US army appears to have rather low standards of proof in a war. Which is also correct, but clarkkent09 decided to act if he was wrong.
No one is fucking arguing with anyone about the actual facts. We have one set of posters who say what the actual facts are, and are horrified by them, and we have one set of posters who say what the actual facts are...and somehow are annoyed that the other set don't like innocent children being blown up. (And we have the general population, who refuses to believe the actual facts and use cognitive dissonance to believe it doesn't happen all the time, that this was a crazy mistake.)
The US government has a very low standard of killing because it's a war, period, full stop, and innocent people get shot in a war. It's not a 'low standard' compared to other countries at war, but it sure as hell is a low standard for 'killing people' in general. Some of us think it's good for the American people to know that, and it's good to show the American people what war actually looks like. (Because, you know, 'Democracy' and all that.)
Other people seem to think either it's morally wrong to show the American people the effect of their war, and/or the American already know the effect of war, and they shouldn't act shocked. (Sometimes they appear to be saying both those things at once, despite that making no sense.)
Jesus Christ.
Both you and I and clarkkent09 are saying 'War is a horrible thing that if people knew what really happened, they'd be horrified, so the people talking about war gloss over the details.' We all appear to be in agreement on that..
However, I think that's a damn good reason to not invade other countries to 'liberate' them anymore, whereas you two seem to think that's an argument against telling showing people what actually happens because they won't like it, which is the most goddamn fascist bullshit I've ever heard my life.
No shit that people don't like war. No shit governments have always sanitized it so they can have their 'adventures' against 'the bad guy'.
We all know that. It's that some of us DON'T LIKE THAT, dumbass. Others, like you, seem to think the problem is actually admitting what really happens in a war, presumably because...you're pro-war in general?
I don't think the general public really do want to know the gory details of each and every atrocity.
'Beware of the man who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.'
And I love how you say that and then, two paragraphs later, imply they do already know the details, and I'm some sort of idiot for pointing out they do not and were horrified when shown them.
No, the general public did not know the US military would blow up vehicles that just happened to be driving near firefights. And probably would have been more upset if they understood that, instead of a couple of loose cannons who did something careless, the people who did it were entirely within correct behavior, and vans full of innocent children could hypothetically be blown up all the time.
Sadly, most of the general public appear to think it was some sort of one-time mistake instead of, strictly speaking, not a mistake at all. Hopefully the WikiLeaks release will help dissuade them of that.
Huh?
In case you haven't noticed, India is exactly one country away from Iran. There's just Pakistan in between. It's less than 400 miles away. India is actually closer to Iran than Lebanon or Israel are!
I don't know what sort of 'Middle East' point you're trying to make, but I didn't say anything about the Middle East. Go ahead, search my post for 'Middle East'. There are not 'regions' where countries are located in and don't influence outside. Egypt doesn't say 'Oh, we're technically in Africa, we have nothing to do with the Middle East', and India doesn't say 'This is the Indian subcontinent, we have nothing to do with Pakistan, the country next door, or anything past that.'. The influence of a country doesn't magically stop at the where we've decided to divide geographical areas.
India is a rather strong county, and fairly close to Iran. That is the facts. Ergo, they are competing 'regional powers', even if you want to quibble about what to call that region, which I will mention again I didn't call anything.
And, despite what you said, I in no way implied that Turkey, India, and Saudi Arabia were all in the same region, whatever the fuck that means. They are, however, regional powers physically close to Iran. Sheesh.
Gold isn't a store of value either, unless you're operating some sort of microprocessor plant.
There are two schools of thought about 'value', either that it is inherent or it's subjective.
You are clearly operating under the inherent one, as, subjectively, money does have value. You're trying to make the claim that gold has some inherent value that cash does not.
Sadly, that doesn't work. Gold actually has almost no inherent value. If it did, almost all the gold in the world wouldn't be sitting in gold bars in a warehouse somewhere.
Gold has most of the time, about the same level of inherent value as glitter. Ooo, it's pretty to look at!
There are some circumstances where the actual metallic properties of gold are useful, but, frankly, an equal weight of aluminum is much more useful in general. Or a slab of beef.
You can either live in a world where things have the value that humanity ascribes to them, aka, how useful they are in trade, in which case gold and cash are both pretty valuable, or you can live in a world where the value is only some sort of measure of their usefulness in some objective sense, in which case cash is valueless and gold is almost valueless.
You need to review your statement. These are the same people building nuclear facilities.
No, they aren't. There's no evidence they've been building anything but nuclear power.
Which they're doing in secret, because other countries apparently think it's fucking acceptable to bomb them. (Which is, of course, trying to make war, which is a war crime.)
History says otherwise. Iraq/Iran have always been central themes/threats to stability in the region.
Really? Why don't you list the countries Iran's invaded, then?
Why, the last one appears to be India. In 1738. Which logically makes England a greater threat to stability in the region, considering that England conquered India after that.
Just saying 'central themes/threats' like that doesn't magically make them 'threats'. And neither does including Iraq in there, which has been a major source of instability in the region...ever since we stuck Saddam in charge and encouraged him to fucking invade anywhere he wanted.
Iran has always been an important country, it has always been a major player central to the region, and it continue to do so. It's just not a threat to anything but our control of the region.
The US is, by any objective measurement, a much stronger force for instability in the region. We overthrew Iran's government, we supported Iraq when it invaded Iran, we support the wildly insane government of Pakistan, we armed the Taliban, we encouraged Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, etc, etc.
Iran just sits there and tries to build influence in nearby countries. Granted, some of the groups it funds are not the nicest people, but just because the US tries to claim Hezbollah are terrorists doesn't actually make that true. (Hezbollah is a 'militia', if you're wondering.)
You know, you're an ass.
It doesn't matter what the fucking standard is, if it results in destroying innocent children in vans driving by, the AMERICAN PEOPLE THINK IT IS TOO LOW.
If you can't fight a war without following that standard, perhaps the American people should be apprised of this fact so they can, before the war, debate 'Hey, should we kill some innocent children or not?'. And if they aren't willing to accept that, perhaps they should, I dunno, decide against said war.
This democratic concept, that American people should decide if the horrors of war are 'worth it', only fucking works if the American people know what war looks like.
You don't get to whine and bitch that they were actually, finally, shown that and think it's outrageous. Please direct your whining and bitching to the media and government that sanitized the war for almost a decade.
You lost the logic flow by having the words 'murdering people' removed from the sentence before that.
There are plenty of places US troops are there with the invitation of the real, not-installed-by-the-US government...but it's places like England, where they presumably not killing anyone.
You're right that in essentially all places that the US is engaged in active combat operations right now, they're operating with the support of a local government essentially installed by the US.
Except Pakistan, where the government was only partially installed by the US, so they're only partially in favor of our military operations, which is a rather good exception that proves the rule.
Please stop falling for the neocon nonsense and actually do some research. Iran is not going to destroy itself, and the leader of Iran is no, in any way, shape, or form, crazy.
Iran wants to be a regional power. It wants to essentially control the Shia nations near it...Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. And to keep the US out of that area.
And weaken the existing regional powers...Saudi Arabia and Turkey and India.
That's basically it. That's all it wants. It doesn't even give a flying fuck about Palestine, which is Sunni and utterly worthless to them if they have Lebanon and coastal access there. All its talk about Israel is just a sort of 'Muslim bonding' they're trying to do, and, no, they don't make threats about Israel, and any talk you've heard about that is deliberate lies.
It might care about Sunni Afghanistan to the extent it's literally next door, but as long as the US isn't there, it probably doesn't. It doesn't care enough to even make a play for it.
The only people ascribing crazy motives to Iran are the people who want to invade it, and the people listening to them.
Iran does go around undermining democratic governments near to it, but I hardly think the US, of all people, get to complain about that.
There is a difference between 'believers' and 'zealots'.
The actual leaders of Iran do indeed believe everything they say...but you'll also note that they are the ones saying that nuclear weapons are against Islam.
That's not to mention that Iran is Shia, and would hardly be supporting the Sunni Palestinians. They support Hezbollah, but Hezbollah is attempting to run Lebanon and Syria, and would hardly nuke them.
Iran is the most absurdly overblown 'threat' to the middle east peace, ever. Iran doesn't give a damn about Israel, and is essentially mouthing whatever they think sounds good on that topic. Iran cares about Syria and Lebanon, and there's no way that nuking anyone could result in control of them.
It also cares about the US not invading it, as the US has been, rather illegally with no justification under international law, threatening to do. They've realized we apparently don't invade places with nukes.
If an extremism group get a nuke and blow up Israel, it will be from Pakistan, handed off to some crazy Palestinian group. (And I mean 'crazy'. You can't blow up Israel without blowing up Palestine.)
Heinlein's story was pre-Outer Space Treaty, which essentially removed ownership of the moon as possibility, ever, from the countries that signed it. 'Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means'.
Technically, you can't even have 'private property' on the moon. Same treaty: 'Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies.'
Read that carefully, and realize that legally stops the US from building a shack with a locked door on it on the moon. No one can bar other nations from any area of 'celestial bodies', at all. You cannot say 'This area of the moon is the US's.'. Russians can wander in and hang out in your living room. (Nations can, however, bar people from space stations and areas on them.)
Of course, that wouldn't apply to a colony that claimed self-governance and, obviously, had signed no such treaty. OTOH, just 'claiming' to be a nation, and have no one recognize you, is pretty useless.
Since the ownership is "nobody", you can plop your mining company down wherever you feel like and start digging. Nobody has the right to stop you.
Legally, all space missions have to be 'flagged' under some nation, just like any ship in international water(1), and you are, indeed, under their jurisdiction. So says the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies.
Other countries can only object to this (and any other space mission) if they feel it would cause 'potentially harmful interference with activities in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies'.
As there is a rather huge area on the moon available for exploration, it's hard to see how any mining operation would impact that. Arguably, it could (and should) be used to keep you away from any existing 'exploration or use', like the existing Apollo landing sites, but you'd probably be lynched if you screwed with them anyway.
1) And if you're not, you're a SPACE PIRATE! WHEEE!
The dollar isn't a 'store of value'. It's a medium of exchange.
Diamond may be the best heat conductor, but it's not a very useful heat conductor, seeing as it's impossible to actually shape it where it fully touches the thing you're trying to remove heat from. And the same problem if you're trying to make a heat-sink...good luck carving a diamond like that.
So, essentially, to use diamond, you have to put something between it and what you're trying to remove heat from, or put heat into, which means you might as well just have used that other thing for the whole thing.
No it wouldn't. Electromagnetism is clearly a natural phenomenon that is easy to demonstrate to others, and inherently no weirder than blowing on something and making it move.
The idea that everyone in history were superstitious idiots is an invention of fiction.
You go back in time and start demonstrated very advanced technology without explaining any basis for it, like a television, maybe you get in trouble. You go back in time and demonstrate how a moving magnet (And they know all about magnets) in one place can move the effect somewhere else over wire, and everyone would be 'Oh, okay.'
Yes, goods canned in the fall and sitting in city warehouses, which was my point. There might be giant rural farms, but they're shipping their produce to entirely city warehouses to pack and ship to mostly city stores, so unless the hypothetical collapse happens right at harvest time, all that harvested food isn't anywhere near the rural farm.
The idea that in a disaster that people would come pouring out of the cities is nonsense. If anything, the suburbs go pouring into the cities looking for food.
And if people think there's enough hunting around to support rural areas, ha. That's a silly theory.
s/in our universe votes are tallied up every second/in your universe votes are tallied up every second/
I have at no point indicated people won't have an incentive to tamper with paper ballots.
I said I can watch paper ballots to make sure they don't.
And, unlike the 1920 tampering you appear to think still goes on, in actuality, you can walk down to your polling place and watch the empty ballot box get filled, by individual votes, and then dumped out and counted.
You cannot, under any circumstances, do that with software.
You don't seem to understand that the difference between paper ballots and electronic ballots is that you can theoretically secure paper ones, whereas you cannot theoretically secure electronic ones. You keep talking about 'open' like it's some magic wand, but there is no possible way to verify that the 'open' software you spent all that time and effort on is the only software actually running on the machine.
Of course, in our universe votes are tallied up every second, which supposedly makes them 'safe', but either they're going fast enough that no one knows whose vote is whose, in which case the machines can trivially lie and change votes as they go out, or people do know whose vote is whose.
But in this country we have a secret ballot, and, as I pointed out, historically, non-secret ballots result in a metric fuckload more vote tampering, including the exact corrupt elections you think are the fault of paper ballots, but were actually a problem with people pressuring voters. The Chicago Machine problem was vote pressuring with a few rare cases of actual tampering.
I don't understand why you don't grasp 'There is no way to verify what software is running on the machine'. I've said it in every goddamn post I've made to you. It doesn't matter what is supposed to be running on it, there is no way to see what is actually running on it.
If it were as easy to hack devices and systems as you suggest, then we would have no such thing as the internet because you wouldn't be able to trust anything - literally anything any computer told you unless you had assembled it from raw silicon, and even then, it's best not to take chances.
In fact, we would have programs running on computers that send out spam and steal credit card numbers, and lie to antivirus programs to stay hidden.
Oh, wait. WE HAVE THOSE THINGS.
I don't need to 'trust' my computer not to lie to me to visit slashdot. I don't need to 'trust' my computer not to lie to me to read my email. I'm not entirely sure what my computer would be lying about anyway.
I do need to trust it to not steal my credit card info when I use it, so I run some extra checks to make sure it isn't, an extra piece of software called 'antivirus', but I truly, honestly, have no actual way to verify it's not running software I don't want. Do you really not understand that?
Luckily, if it does steal my credit card info, and someone uses that, I will detect it, and my bank will reverse the charge, and it's just some minor trouble. Again, spyware hijacking computers happens every day in this country. I am flabbergasted you don't appear to know this.
If a computer changes my vote, I would not detect it.
Oh, and I'll point out: All that spyware I was talking about? It's usually unwanted by the system administrator. Which isn't really situation for any vote-tampering software, which would be deliberately installed by someone.
If elections can have magically undetectable counting errors, why would you ever trust your bank to not also have undetectable counting errors?
Because I can add up my bank statement myself, you git. If they made a math mistake I can easily find it. If they put in transactions I didn't make I can easily find them.
The process is, to use a word you think you know the meaning of but don't, 'transparent'. They have transparently added and removed money from my account, and I can view them having done this.
Which I rather obviously cannot do with votes.
After all they're undetectable, and apparently, no computer system can be designed where tampering is evident, or detectable
Not when the people who build it have an incentive to tamper with it, no, it is impossible to build a tamper-proof system.
when they are building an open electronic voting system which can be inspected, audited, and verified by anybody who wishes to do so.
Really? How the fuck do you propose I walk up to a machine and inspect the software on it? Electron scanning microscope? Magic?
You can't see software, you asshat. All you can see is the result of software. Even when you 'look at' the software to 'audit' and 'verify' it, you're using software to do that, and that software could be lying to you.
Which isn't some amazing new software I just invented...software that hides itself by having the system lie to people who try to look at it is all over the place, it's called a 'rootkit'. It gets into memory and then keeps all software that looks at the disk or memory from seeing it by intercepting those attempts and lying.
Granted, I could disassemble the voting computer and stick the hard drive in a machine I brought and scan it from a clean machine, which is how you get rid of rootkits in real life, but, um, that seems to allow me to tamper with the vote and/or the software, so doesn't seem like a good solution.
That's just total nonsense. It doesn't even bear a response, it's so idiotic.
Yeah, that would be the logical thing to do.
You could even run a closed email system that is essentially an electronic version of the post office, where people could send mail from an address, to another address, and pay a small amount to do so. (With it getting forwarded if people want.) And if they don't have email, it gets printed out and delivered by the mail people.
There's all sorts of interesting things that could happen there, there's all sorts of interesting things you can do when you take existing namespaces and put them in DNS.
For example, businesses are licensed in many ways, and have federal, state, and local license numbers. Wouldn't it be helpful to be able to take the license number and pull up that business's website, and you'd know it was the right place, because only that business could have that domain registered? And the website could have /licenses.xml which lists all those domains, and you can actually verify that they have those domains.
Or with radio stations, what if /stream.xml was a standard location for a document telling people where to get any streams for that station? And /schedule.xml was a place to get the schedule?
Then someone just has to punch in the radio call letters to have their computer look up the website and find out stuff automatically.
But, instead of that, the entire concept of 'namespace' in DNS appears to be 'Let's invent a new one every year so that all businesses leap in and buy all their trademarks in that one also'.
And we've decided to outsource all the verification stuff to damn idiotic SSL providers, despite that rendering us unable to find anyway, all that can tell us if we did find the right people (sometimes), not where they are to start with. And the fact that they're in competition to sell for the cheapest and have no incentive to actually verify anything.
You can talk about gardens all you want, I'm talking about Stonehenge.
The idea that a garden, which has to be constantly replanted, is a 'heritage' site, is somewhat stupid.
You're talking about a park, which is all well and good to have, but is hardly some great cultural blow if it isn't maintained for a few years, and two decades from now the government has to step back in and fix it up. You need even less protection for a park, people aren't going to vandalize trees. (Some of them have some historic buildings, which do need guards.)
Unlike Stonehenge, which people actually will damage.
But as for "cannot trust a computer", as I've noted elsewhere: if the ballots are both machineable and human-readable simultaneously (IE: no barcodes or anything; just make the computer read the text, which is pretty frickin easy these days), then everyone who's interested can bring their own counting machine along, and count each batch of ballots.
Heh, that's exactly what I think we should use.
We've got plenty of OCR-able fonts, we can easily make ballots that print 'Senator: John Johnson (D)' on them that a computer and a human can read. No one will every argue over a 'light mark' or a 'chad', and no computer will ever tell us that 2000 people voted for someone when only 200 people voted. It's very damn clear, their full name and office.
And forget tiny cramped ballots. Print everyone an entire 8x11 piece of paper, with nice big text on it. (Obviously, watermarked paper or something. Then do the ballot counting with a blacklight turned on so everyone can see the watermarks.)
And we can make the machines do any sort of assistance required. (With blind people having their ballot checked by a sighted help, but that has to happen anyway.)
And, while we're at it, we can randomize the order displayed to each person, so there's no order bias.
I've very careful to call this 'paper voting', though, because otherwise the media will represent it and electronic voting as the same thing.
It's damn amazing and absurd how many people here seem to want to build a 'security voting system', and have no concept of how difficult actual 'secure' computers are, or the fact it's impossible to make computers that are 'secure' from the damn people who built them, and yet won't sit down and think 'Hey, we can use computers to make remove every single problem with paper ballots, and yet leave all the security of them.'.
It wouldn't be that hard to build a decoder for uncompressed digital signals with basic relays and a quartz clock. Sadly, all of them are compressed and encoded weird, so you can't just read eight bits and turn it into voltage from 0 to 255 and that into sound.
Granted, it's pretty damn hard handmaking an FM radio also.
Of course, this hypothetical really makes no sense anyway. People attempting to communicate with stone-age tech-level, but knowledgeable, people would surely be using AM signaling, so that the people can build a crystal radio. Worrying about decoding digital really only makes sense if somehow part of civilization collapses and other parts don't know that, which is just silly. (Although we have our suspicions about Alabama.)