I was wrong. Sorry, I spend more time at Janes than I do Yahoo Finance. However...
Looking at Unocal's website will turn up
"Unocal reiterates position on withdrawal from trans-Afghanistan pipeline project 2/16/99 "
http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/99news/021699.htm
"Unocal statement on withdrawal from the proposed Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline project 12/10/98"
http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/centgas.htm
It's a vaporware of a pipeline...and it's not that prime of a location
There are no pipelines being built across Afganistan. Afganistan is a landlocked nation between Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
There are no pipelines being laid there because there is no point in putting pipelines across nations that do not have oil importing neighbors. It is however the world's largest illicit opium producer, and a huge producer of hash.
The questionable regions of the world with pipeline projects in the...pipeline...are Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the rest of the whole southern CIS problem.
Here is the pipeline deal. There is a vast amount of oil in the Caspian Sea and Black Sea regions. The oil companies need to get that out to the West. Not in the middle of Asia. So the pipeline projects are from the Black Sea and Caspian to the west and to blue water ports for Supertankers. Afganistan is East. Not west. Afganistan has nothing to do with the enhanced oil export of the CIS.
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 4, Funny
What do you expect? That after three mass murdering sucide bombings the FBI wouldn't use these things?
I bet the FBI will suprise people and remove the boxes after they find/don't find what they are looking for.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 2
I think Mossad did a really good job dealing with those surviving Nazis that were involved with the Holocaust and also did a good job dealing with the Terrorists from the '72 Olympics.
I do not agree that if you try and kill them all more will spawn. The United States dealt harshly with the Barbary Coast Pirates in the early 1800s and we didn't have problems there again until the 1970s-80s.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Your average terrorist that is willing to smash jetliners into buildings with 25,000 people in them, doesn't give a flying fart about corporate greed and globalization.
Those are just buzz words for dissatisfied Western youths whom don't know what evils lurk out there in the world.
What will prevent terrorism? Through out history, the only way to prevent terror is to cleanly and violently defend your interests and remove the heads and bases of the threat.
I cite the Barbary Coast 1797-1806 and the German Spy threat in the United States and UK from 1939-1945 as examples of this working.
The Mossad has also had some good experiances with this working as well.
The French experiance in Spain during the Neopelonic Wars and the German experiance on the Russian Front and Balkins during World War Two as tacticts that do not work.
Americans gave the Afgani groups money, training, and weapons.
Americans were on the ground in Afganistan and Pakistan to give assistance and training. Much like the Soviets did for the Vietnamese and the Cubans did in Central America.
Stinger missiles, Redeyes, British Blowpipes, vehicles, small arms, medical equipment and hard cash were all turned over.
Yep we go intel back from them, but alot of the equipment in use there in Afganistan had already been captured by Israel in '67 and '73 as well as taken from Syria in '82.
The United States and Britan and to a lesser extent NATO are the reason that the Soviets were driven from Afganistan. And I will say again, that the Taliban forgets whome helped pull thier fat out of the Soviet fire.
After the First World War the US, pulled back into it's shell and let France and the UK pummel a devistated Germany with reperations that lead to the Second World War, and during the Second World War we gave Free France, the UK, Soviets all the tools they needed to fight and survive. Like the 13.5 million pairs of boots the Soviets used to march into Germany on.
And after the war we rebuilt Europe and Asia. We gave money, training and arms to Afganistan so they could beat off the Soviets.
Instead of letting Europe fall into a hole of it's own making in 1945 the United States made it so they could rebuild...and what do we get in return? Insults and utter disrespect for our system of Government and the punishments that the American people wish to hand out to killers. While Germans, French and British killed millions of people in two World Wars, it's the Americans whom are barbarians for still executing murders. It's Americans that are called on to pull Europe out of the messes it makes (Bosnia, Kosovo). And for alot of people, when the United States rains fire or Special Forces troopers on the monsters that attacked America on 9/11/01...WE will be the bad guys again.
My Grandfather's Generation helped free Europe and Europe doesn't seem to care that America threw billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of men into freeing Europe. And now the Taliban forgets whom helped pull thier fat out of the Soviet fire.
Many in the UK remeber and stand by the US, as do many Israelis, Koreans and even the Vietnamese and Japanese respect America. But for some reason many, many other people's have either forgotten what American did for them...or are too prideful to admit it.
People that don't understand why America becomes isolationist...look at how you act after we save you. It's your fault that Americans would rather leave you alone than help you, because for the most part you'd bite the hand that helps you.
Reading the novel of 2001 it said that Discovery had 2 or 3 spare parts for every piece on the ship.
With a replicator/printer like this you can estimate how many of which parts might fail, send up X amount of polycarbonate/Aluminum/Steel and a 3D "Printer" along with spares for other things that can't be replicated, thus saving alot of space that might otherwise be taken up by spare "replicatable" parts.
I can see this also being of great benefit to the Navy and Air Force for replicating complex CAD designed airframe parts instead of waiting for a replacement to be flown in by COD or Airlift. The USAF Europe had a fleet of little cargo aircraft just for flying parts around Europe.
Why ship a LHA or LST to Korea with bins full of nuts, bolts, screws that might not be used and will just sit there and get lost or rust when you can ship 3D printers and bulk materials and fabricate them on the fly?
The Pershing 2 also carried ER warheads for the total 9 months all 108 of them were fully operational till the CFE treaty took them out, fella in the Office today was a Pershing 2 tech and he called it the "missile that brought down the Berling Wall".
The British force in Northern Germany wasn't the Expeditionary Force (EF) it was the BR, British Army of the Rhine I think.
And the reason the Lance's got the old Long Tom warheads was because the US agreed to a fixed number of warheads. All the artillery piece ER weapons were stockpiled in the US and Johnson Atoll and would have been flown to Europe or Korea in event of hostilites.
From the comment at the top, it's obvious that Hemos doesn't understand what the Neutron bomb was designed for.
The common misunderstanding is that it was developed to leave industry alone so we could wage an atomic war and then move right in. That's simply not true.
The Neutron bomb, or Enhanced Radiation bomb (ER), was designed with Soviet Armor in mind. During the above ground weapons testing in Nevada, it became clear that a standard nuclear device wasn't effective at knocking out armor. Kind of like how cockroaches, turtles and armadillos survive nukes.
Since the Soviets had 6-1 armor strength in the 60s and 3-1 in the late 70s and early 80s, something else had to be developed. That was the ER nuclear device. Most ER warheads were developed for the 203, 175 and 155mm artillery pieces, the 175 'Long Tom' was retired so that left the 203 and 155, then the Lance tactical missile was fitted with the 175's warheads and the Pershing 1 was also given the ability to fire an ER weapon.
The Neutron bomb penetrated armor and killed the crew much more effectivly than a much larger conventional atomic device.
All the ER weapons were in the 10-15 KT range, not a city buster or stratigic weapon by any stretch, but a tactical weapon that would have been deployed in bottle-necks like the Fulda Gap or against Soviet Armor on the Northern German plains were the Soviet out tanked the British EF by 6-1 or 10-1 depending on the Soviet's deployment.
The whole Neutron bomb for nuking cities or industry and leaving it in-tact was propganda from the Soviet funded anti-nuclear activists. See the Mitrokhin Archives for info on that.
1. Satellite is in orbit and will have to be tasked, which wastes fuel and even then it's 90 minutes or more between pass.
2. Because a good satillite - Like a KH series is over a billion dollars, and a lower quality one like a SPOT or the Russian commercial grade sats are at least a 100 million.
3. Because a satellite will run out of fuel and be replaced every 3-5 years, even a 100 million is a hell of a lot for NASA or the Forest Service to shell every couple years.
4. UAVs are easier to move around than something in orbit, cheaper to lose and easier to build and upgrade when a next generation sensor comes out.
Way back when I was in High School and the Cold War ended, there were articles in Aviation Leak...err...Week and Popular Mechanics about how the NeXT Big thing was going to be corporate jets that were transonic.
Rumor at the time was that Boeing and Sukhoi were working with Lear on a supersonic 40 seat corporate jet, and they had 50 confirmed orders.
So this kind of thing is kind of old news.
I'd expect Boeing to ship the Sonic-Crusier cheaper and more flexable than any other corporate type jet, even thought the article mentions Boeing. I'd see the Sonic-Cruiser being the replacement for the 737 and 727 in these circles.
Seems that they are looking at these critters for extraction of Radioactive material in water for nuclear cleanups at Hanford and Rocky Flats. I recall they can pretty much work with any metal, and they think that these guys are the reason there were/are gold/silver flakes in river and stream beds.
If I rember it right, and since I can't get on the link...thats all I have...you get these things going in a pond with radioactive sediments after a while they'll accumulate big enough flakes that you can strain it out.
There is talk about using them on the piles (cubic miles) of debris from gold and silver mines like Homestake and the mines in Colorado and California, as well as cleaning up copper mines in Montana, Wyoming and Utah.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010827/en/tele vi sion-replay_1.html
"ReplayTV is planning a post-Labor Day introduction of a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs. It may also allow users to copy photo files from a PC to the DVR."
"Survey describes in detail the new product and asks respondents how much they would be willing to pay for it. Pricing proposals in the survey range from a model with 40 hours of storage capacity that could retail for $699 to a 320-hour model that might sell for $1,999."
"According to the email survey, the product could work with a standard dial-up phone modem for a monthly fee of $4.95 or a broadband Internet connection using an Ethernet home network at no monthly charge. The broadband connection is required for sending TV programs by email."
I love my ReplayTV 3030. I might have to get a second one...assuming my job stays there when these have been out a while.
Well, the term "war criminal" is getting thrown around pretty lightly these days.
But if other "war criminals" get tossed in, sure lets throw some Americans in the can.
Do I think Hitler was a War Criminal? Yep I sure do. What about "Bomber" Harris? That's a gray area, but yea. LeMay wasn't nor the boys that dropped the big ones on Japan. Was Tojo and the fellas that ordered the Nanking slaughter? Yes. Yamamoto, Dornitz, Rommel, the commanders of the German invasion of Russia wern't criminals. And the list goes on.
People have forgotten that wars are governed by rules, if you violate those rules you are a war criminal. Kissinger didn't violate the rules of war, nor did Slobodan or even Saddam (until the invasion of Kuwait). The Serbs and Iraqi's dealt with internal matters, not international ones. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, then it became a war and was dealt with as such.
War is a nasty thing to have happen, but it goes by it's own rules, as it has for thousands of years, and I don't think that the criminization of it by an outside body does any good.
The United Kingdom has had it's share of "war criminals" by the new definition, so if you are going to cast stones at the United States, you should remeber that.
I'm serious, reading some of the things that the UN intends to do with the world scare me.
A year ago I thought the UN was a good thing, but it's really starting to push the limits of it's charter. An organization started to defeat Nazism and Japanese Expansionism is starting to become a oppresive system it's self.
I don't want to start a flame war, or US vs. The World, but the UN is getting out of hand.
1. Expansion of the World Court's power.
2. Limiting access to firearms
3. Focusing the Anti-Racism Conference to an Anti-US, Anti-Israel Racism Conference.
4. Refusing to take action in Rwanda, yet "king-making" in Somolia.
My cousins and I used to do this, only when my aunt was not in the house, she'd get pissed if we did the smash tests. We'd have 5 minutes to rebuild before the next stage.
Fun times. We ran them at eachother atop my Uncles bar in his basement.
It's a failing support system that at the current rate of funding and payouts...will never be seen by anyone under the age of 30.
I will never see a dime of it, nor will anyone born since the Vietnam War ended.
I don't buy the "it makes more jobs open so the young can have work", because 16 million new jobs have been created in the US since 1991, and the majority of positions vacated by a retiring person isn't filled by a young high school or college graduate.
And...at the time of creation in the US, the median life expectancy was 65.5...and the Social Security age was set at 65, it was not and retirement or poverty assistance tool.
To sum up so I sort of kinda stay on topic.
Smart Card that track spending and income - Bad.
Social Security - Worthless for Me
Actually -
"This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"
Yes it does have a unique number, but it's not nearly as traceable as a credit card or smart card. If I use a dollar to buy beer, CD-Rs or cocaine, there's no record that John Doe used 100 dollar bill X12345678Z at 10:12:14 on Jan 1, 2002 at Bob's House of Crank, Beer and Blank CDs.
If I use a smart card or some other "cashless" solution...it's all tracked.
I dislike having my shopping habits tracked, and when it comes time to do work on the side, it's nice to be paid in cash and not have to worry about Federal or State Income Tax on said wages.
In a cashless society, everything is going to be tracked, and I do not like that.
Let's say for the desktop in an business, administration or education setting, there is no reason to ever have more than say...500 MHz.
Simply because Word,StarOffice,WordPerfect, IE,Nutscrape,Outlook,Excel or Palm Desktop do not need more than 500 MHz, heck...you'd be fine with 266 and enough RAM.
If I go from a 266 MHz to a 1.4 GHz...the only difference is going to be a little bit quicker opening time for the application, and if the application and OS are done right...you only do that once or twice a day.
For other...more specialized applications like graphics or database admin or development, a faster CPU is needed. But for the vast majority of desktops...a faster CPU doesn't give you that much more for the money.
Intel and AMD should have focused on cooler CPUs in the 400-700 MHz range that draw less power so better enclosures for limited space settings could have been developed. You know, little boxes like Apple's Cube or the iMac, but with Intel or AMD cpus for education and business.
Slashdot Mirror
I was wrong. Sorry, I spend more time at Janes than I do Yahoo Finance. However...
m
Looking at Unocal's website will turn up
"Unocal reiterates position on withdrawal from trans-Afghanistan pipeline project 2/16/99 "
http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/99news/021699.htm
"Unocal statement on withdrawal from the proposed Central Asia Gas (CentGas) pipeline project 12/10/98"
http://www.unocal.com/uclnews/98news/centgas.ht
It's a vaporware of a pipeline...and it's not that prime of a location
There are no pipelines being built across Afganistan. Afganistan is a landlocked nation between Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan.
There are no pipelines being laid there because there is no point in putting pipelines across nations that do not have oil importing neighbors. It is however the world's largest illicit opium producer, and a huge producer of hash.
The questionable regions of the world with pipeline projects in the...pipeline...are Iran, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the rest of the whole southern CIS problem.
Here is the pipeline deal. There is a vast amount of oil in the Caspian Sea and Black Sea regions. The oil companies need to get that out to the West. Not in the middle of Asia. So the pipeline projects are from the Black Sea and Caspian to the west and to blue water ports for Supertankers. Afganistan is East. Not west. Afganistan has nothing to do with the enhanced oil export of the CIS.
What do you expect? That after three mass murdering sucide bombings the FBI wouldn't use these things?
I bet the FBI will suprise people and remove the boxes after they find/don't find what they are looking for.
I think Mossad did a really good job dealing with those surviving Nazis that were involved with the Holocaust and also did a good job dealing with the Terrorists from the '72 Olympics.
I do not agree that if you try and kill them all more will spawn. The United States dealt harshly with the Barbary Coast Pirates in the early 1800s and we didn't have problems there again until the 1970s-80s.
Your average terrorist that is willing to smash jetliners into buildings with 25,000 people in them, doesn't give a flying fart about corporate greed and globalization.
Those are just buzz words for dissatisfied Western youths whom don't know what evils lurk out there in the world.
What will prevent terrorism? Through out history, the only way to prevent terror is to cleanly and violently defend your interests and remove the heads and bases of the threat.
I cite the Barbary Coast 1797-1806 and the German Spy threat in the United States and UK from 1939-1945 as examples of this working.
The Mossad has also had some good experiances with this working as well.
The French experiance in Spain during the Neopelonic Wars and the German experiance on the Russian Front and Balkins during World War Two as tacticts that do not work.
Americans gave the Afgani groups money, training, and weapons.
Americans were on the ground in Afganistan and Pakistan to give assistance and training. Much like the Soviets did for the Vietnamese and the Cubans did in Central America.
Stinger missiles, Redeyes, British Blowpipes, vehicles, small arms, medical equipment and hard cash were all turned over.
Yep we go intel back from them, but alot of the equipment in use there in Afganistan had already been captured by Israel in '67 and '73 as well as taken from Syria in '82.
The United States and Britan and to a lesser extent NATO are the reason that the Soviets were driven from Afganistan. And I will say again, that the Taliban forgets whome helped pull thier fat out of the Soviet fire.
I agree.
After the First World War the US, pulled back into it's shell and let France and the UK pummel a devistated Germany with reperations that lead to the Second World War, and during the Second World War we gave Free France, the UK, Soviets all the tools they needed to fight and survive. Like the 13.5 million pairs of boots the Soviets used to march into Germany on.
And after the war we rebuilt Europe and Asia. We gave money, training and arms to Afganistan so they could beat off the Soviets.
Instead of letting Europe fall into a hole of it's own making in 1945 the United States made it so they could rebuild...and what do we get in return? Insults and utter disrespect for our system of Government and the punishments that the American people wish to hand out to killers. While Germans, French and British killed millions of people in two World Wars, it's the Americans whom are barbarians for still executing murders. It's Americans that are called on to pull Europe out of the messes it makes (Bosnia, Kosovo). And for alot of people, when the United States rains fire or Special Forces troopers on the monsters that attacked America on 9/11/01...WE will be the bad guys again.
My Grandfather's Generation helped free Europe and Europe doesn't seem to care that America threw billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of men into freeing Europe. And now the Taliban forgets whom helped pull thier fat out of the Soviet fire.
Many in the UK remeber and stand by the US, as do many Israelis, Koreans and even the Vietnamese and Japanese respect America. But for some reason many, many other people's have either forgotten what American did for them...or are too prideful to admit it.
People that don't understand why America becomes isolationist...look at how you act after we save you. It's your fault that Americans would rather leave you alone than help you, because for the most part you'd bite the hand that helps you.
This is cool.
Reading the novel of 2001 it said that Discovery had 2 or 3 spare parts for every piece on the ship.
With a replicator/printer like this you can estimate how many of which parts might fail, send up X amount of polycarbonate/Aluminum/Steel and a 3D "Printer" along with spares for other things that can't be replicated, thus saving alot of space that might otherwise be taken up by spare "replicatable" parts.
I can see this also being of great benefit to the Navy and Air Force for replicating complex CAD designed airframe parts instead of waiting for a replacement to be flown in by COD or Airlift. The USAF Europe had a fleet of little cargo aircraft just for flying parts around Europe.
Why ship a LHA or LST to Korea with bins full of nuts, bolts, screws that might not be used and will just sit there and get lost or rust when you can ship 3D printers and bulk materials and fabricate them on the fly?
Wow, I was really off.
The Pershing 2 also carried ER warheads for the total 9 months all 108 of them were fully operational till the CFE treaty took them out, fella in the Office today was a Pershing 2 tech and he called it the "missile that brought down the Berling Wall".
The British force in Northern Germany wasn't the Expeditionary Force (EF) it was the BR, British Army of the Rhine I think.
And the reason the Lance's got the old Long Tom warheads was because the US agreed to a fixed number of warheads. All the artillery piece ER weapons were stockpiled in the US and Johnson Atoll and would have been flown to Europe or Korea in event of hostilites.
OK. I'll bite.
Aircraft
Ro/Ro Cargo ships
Computers
Internet
Automobiles
6 and 8 cylinder engines
Radial aircraft engines
Tires
Reusable space vehicles
Medical Imaging
Chemotherapy
There are a few things the US has been a fore-runner of that didn't involve killing people somewhere else.
Wow, I misspelled and mis -'ed this thing to hell. Sorry, am at work and dodging the boss as I /.
From the comment at the top, it's obvious that Hemos doesn't understand what the Neutron bomb was designed for.
The common misunderstanding is that it was developed to leave industry alone so we could wage an atomic war and then move right in. That's simply not true.
The Neutron bomb, or Enhanced Radiation bomb (ER), was designed with Soviet Armor in mind. During the above ground weapons testing in Nevada, it became clear that a standard nuclear device wasn't effective at knocking out armor. Kind of like how cockroaches, turtles and armadillos survive nukes.
Since the Soviets had 6-1 armor strength in the 60s and 3-1 in the late 70s and early 80s, something else had to be developed. That was the ER nuclear device. Most ER warheads were developed for the 203, 175 and 155mm artillery pieces, the 175 'Long Tom' was retired so that left the 203 and 155, then the Lance tactical missile was fitted with the 175's warheads and the Pershing 1 was also given the ability to fire an ER weapon.
The Neutron bomb penetrated armor and killed the crew much more effectivly than a much larger conventional atomic device.
All the ER weapons were in the 10-15 KT range, not a city buster or stratigic weapon by any stretch, but a tactical weapon that would have been deployed in bottle-necks like the Fulda Gap or against Soviet Armor on the Northern German plains were the Soviet out tanked the British EF by 6-1 or 10-1 depending on the Soviet's deployment.
The whole Neutron bomb for nuking cities or industry and leaving it in-tact was propganda from the Soviet funded anti-nuclear activists. See the Mitrokhin Archives for info on that.
Because of a number of reasons.
1. Satellite is in orbit and will have to be tasked, which wastes fuel and even then it's 90 minutes or more between pass.
2. Because a good satillite - Like a KH series is over a billion dollars, and a lower quality one like a SPOT or the Russian commercial grade sats are at least a 100 million.
3. Because a satellite will run out of fuel and be replaced every 3-5 years, even a 100 million is a hell of a lot for NASA or the Forest Service to shell every couple years.
4. UAVs are easier to move around than something in orbit, cheaper to lose and easier to build and upgrade when a next generation sensor comes out.
Way back when I was in High School and the Cold War ended, there were articles in Aviation Leak...err...Week and Popular Mechanics about how the NeXT Big thing was going to be corporate jets that were transonic.
Rumor at the time was that Boeing and Sukhoi were working with Lear on a supersonic 40 seat corporate jet, and they had 50 confirmed orders.
So this kind of thing is kind of old news.
I'd expect Boeing to ship the Sonic-Crusier cheaper and more flexable than any other corporate type jet, even thought the article mentions Boeing. I'd see the Sonic-Cruiser being the replacement for the 737 and 727 in these circles.
Heard about this on the way to work.
Seems that they are looking at these critters for extraction of Radioactive material in water for nuclear cleanups at Hanford and Rocky Flats. I recall they can pretty much work with any metal, and they think that these guys are the reason there were/are gold/silver flakes in river and stream beds.
If I rember it right, and since I can't get on the link...thats all I have...you get these things going in a pond with radioactive sediments after a while they'll accumulate big enough flakes that you can strain it out.
There is talk about using them on the piles (cubic miles) of debris from gold and silver mines like Homestake and the mines in Colorado and California, as well as cleaning up copper mines in Montana, Wyoming and Utah.
Replay today announced somethings too.
e vi sion-replay_1.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010827/en/tel
"ReplayTV is planning a post-Labor Day introduction of a souped-up DVR that could store as much as 320 hours of TV programming and send programs by email to other DVRs. It may also allow users to copy photo files from a PC to the DVR."
"Survey describes in detail the new product and asks respondents how much they would be willing to pay for it. Pricing proposals in the survey range from a model with 40 hours of storage capacity that could retail for $699 to a 320-hour model that might sell for $1,999."
"According to the email survey, the product could work with a standard dial-up phone modem for a monthly fee of $4.95 or a broadband Internet connection using an Ethernet home network at no monthly charge. The broadband connection is required for sending TV programs by email."
I love my ReplayTV 3030. I might have to get a second one...assuming my job stays there when these have been out a while.
Well, the term "war criminal" is getting thrown around pretty lightly these days.
But if other "war criminals" get tossed in, sure lets throw some Americans in the can.
Do I think Hitler was a War Criminal? Yep I sure do. What about "Bomber" Harris? That's a gray area, but yea. LeMay wasn't nor the boys that dropped the big ones on Japan. Was Tojo and the fellas that ordered the Nanking slaughter? Yes. Yamamoto, Dornitz, Rommel, the commanders of the German invasion of Russia wern't criminals. And the list goes on.
People have forgotten that wars are governed by rules, if you violate those rules you are a war criminal. Kissinger didn't violate the rules of war, nor did Slobodan or even Saddam (until the invasion of Kuwait). The Serbs and Iraqi's dealt with internal matters, not international ones. When Iraq invaded Kuwait, then it became a war and was dealt with as such.
War is a nasty thing to have happen, but it goes by it's own rules, as it has for thousands of years, and I don't think that the criminization of it by an outside body does any good.
The United Kingdom has had it's share of "war criminals" by the new definition, so if you are going to cast stones at the United States, you should remeber that.
I'm serious, reading some of the things that the UN intends to do with the world scare me.
A year ago I thought the UN was a good thing, but it's really starting to push the limits of it's charter. An organization started to defeat Nazism and Japanese Expansionism is starting to become a oppresive system it's self.
I don't want to start a flame war, or US vs. The World, but the UN is getting out of hand.
1. Expansion of the World Court's power.
2. Limiting access to firearms
3. Focusing the Anti-Racism Conference to an Anti-US, Anti-Israel Racism Conference.
4. Refusing to take action in Rwanda, yet "king-making" in Somolia.
Those are my big four right now about the UN.
My cousins and I used to do this, only when my aunt was not in the house, she'd get pissed if we did the smash tests. We'd have 5 minutes to rebuild before the next stage.
Fun times. We ran them at eachother atop my Uncles bar in his basement.
Yes. I am overlooking the word "social".
It's a failing support system that at the current rate of funding and payouts...will never be seen by anyone under the age of 30.
I will never see a dime of it, nor will anyone born since the Vietnam War ended.
I don't buy the "it makes more jobs open so the young can have work", because 16 million new jobs have been created in the US since 1991, and the majority of positions vacated by a retiring person isn't filled by a young high school or college graduate.
And...at the time of creation in the US, the median life expectancy was 65.5...and the Social Security age was set at 65, it was not and retirement or poverty assistance tool.
To sum up so I sort of kinda stay on topic.
Smart Card that track spending and income - Bad.
Social Security - Worthless for Me
I didn't touch games because I was talking about the vast majority of computer purchases.
IMHO - 90 percent of computers purchased today have no need to be over 500 MHz.
Actually -
"This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private"
Yes it does have a unique number, but it's not nearly as traceable as a credit card or smart card. If I use a dollar to buy beer, CD-Rs or cocaine, there's no record that John Doe used 100 dollar bill X12345678Z at 10:12:14 on Jan 1, 2002 at Bob's House of Crank, Beer and Blank CDs.
If I use a smart card or some other "cashless" solution...it's all tracked.
Cheating taxes....
Sorry, I think that the entire Income Tax system in the United States is horribly wrong and biased against lower income brackets.
Why should I have social security taken from work I do on the side when I will never see a dime from social security...
Why would we not want cash?
I like cash and I dislike cards.
I dislike having my shopping habits tracked, and when it comes time to do work on the side, it's nice to be paid in cash and not have to worry about Federal or State Income Tax on said wages.
In a cashless society, everything is going to be tracked, and I do not like that.
I'm touching power.
Let's say for the desktop in an business, administration or education setting, there is no reason to ever have more than say...500 MHz.
Simply because Word,StarOffice,WordPerfect, IE,Nutscrape,Outlook,Excel or Palm Desktop do not need more than 500 MHz, heck...you'd be fine with 266 and enough RAM.
If I go from a 266 MHz to a 1.4 GHz...the only difference is going to be a little bit quicker opening time for the application, and if the application and OS are done right...you only do that once or twice a day.
For other...more specialized applications like graphics or database admin or development, a faster CPU is needed. But for the vast majority of desktops...a faster CPU doesn't give you that much more for the money.
Intel and AMD should have focused on cooler CPUs in the 400-700 MHz range that draw less power so better enclosures for limited space settings could have been developed. You know, little boxes like Apple's Cube or the iMac, but with Intel or AMD cpus for education and business.