>I am convinced that 99% of politicians are totally clueless... however the article is better than a lot of other ones I've seen. Clueless as to what? To many aspects of computers maybe, but I assume most of them are quite adept at politicking. That is generally why most are politicians rather then running Internet companies. Almost everyone is clueless about a huge amount of things that you and I consider vitally important, that doesn't make them any less knowledgeable, they just have a different focus. The Internet companies are just behaving as every other company that lives within the confines that our capitalistic democracy dictates; in order to gain more representation within the government they are "investing" in various officials and parties. Money always buys power, and the Internet is a newfound panache of wealth that has not yet grown into the power that it should command, what we are seeing now is just the natural filling of a vacuum.
Actually nukes are the only thing Russia is really trying to keep in working order. They pretty much figured out that they don't have the money to field a conventional force to defend a territory as large as theirs, so they've decided to put their money into nukes to prevent a large scale attack and are using special forces/paratroopers to keep order in smaller border wars. There were a few articles in various foreign policy journals about this, reporting that a much higher percent of Russias defence budget is going into the design and manufacture of new nukes as well as maintenance of its current stockpile.
>keep in mind, the anti-ballistic missile is being designed for one purpose, defense from an air threat. This is not a weapon of attack, and therefore should not be infringed upon by any treaty. In itself the ABM isn't an offensive weapon, but used in conjunction with our current nuclear force it can defiantly be one. If a country prevented from launching a retaliatory strike in order to detour a possible nuclear attack upon themselves, it essentially makes it a though the county has no nuclear arms at all. Remember in their current conception nuclear weapons are defensive, the only way anyone besides terrorists admits to plausible possible use scenarios is in a preemptive strike or as a defense against foreign powers that a conventional army would be destroyed by. This is one of the things that prevents the US from stomping all over Russia as we did with the serbs, nuclear weapons present the ultimate detourant to aggression by foreign powers upon ones homeland.
One small correction, it was Nato that the US went into to Kosovo with. This is one of the main problem many in the world community had with the intervention, the US completly ran over the process that suppossed to take place in the UN when a countries soveregnity is at stake. Of course the UN would never have approved of the violation of Yugo. integrety because Russia and china both saw the writing on the wall in appllication to themselves, ie. Chechnya and Tibet
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>I am convinced that 99% of politicians are totally clueless... however the article is better than a lot of other ones I've seen. Clueless as to what? To many aspects of computers maybe, but I assume most of them are quite adept at politicking. That is generally why most are politicians rather then running Internet companies. Almost everyone is clueless about a huge amount of things that you and I consider vitally important, that doesn't make them any less knowledgeable, they just have a different focus. The Internet companies are just behaving as every other company that lives within the confines that our capitalistic democracy dictates; in order to gain more representation within the government they are "investing" in various officials and parties. Money always buys power, and the Internet is a newfound panache of wealth that has not yet grown into the power that it should command, what we are seeing now is just the natural filling of a vacuum.
Actually nukes are the only thing Russia is really trying to keep in working order. They pretty much figured out that they don't have the money to field a conventional force to defend a territory as large as theirs, so they've decided to put their money into nukes to prevent a large scale attack and are using special forces/paratroopers to keep order in smaller border wars. There were a few articles in various foreign policy journals about this, reporting that a much higher percent of Russias defence budget is going into the design and manufacture of new nukes as well as maintenance of its current stockpile.
>keep in mind, the anti-ballistic missile is being designed for one purpose, defense from an air threat. This is not a weapon of attack, and therefore should not be infringed upon by any treaty. In itself the ABM isn't an offensive weapon, but used in conjunction with our current nuclear force it can defiantly be one. If a country prevented from launching a retaliatory strike in order to detour a possible nuclear attack upon themselves, it essentially makes it a though the county has no nuclear arms at all. Remember in their current conception nuclear weapons are defensive, the only way anyone besides terrorists admits to plausible possible use scenarios is in a preemptive strike or as a defense against foreign powers that a conventional army would be destroyed by. This is one of the things that prevents the US from stomping all over Russia as we did with the serbs, nuclear weapons present the ultimate detourant to aggression by foreign powers upon ones homeland.
One small correction, it was Nato that the US went into to Kosovo with. This is one of the main problem many in the world community had with the intervention, the US completly ran over the process that suppossed to take place in the UN when a countries soveregnity is at stake. Of course the UN would never have approved of the violation of Yugo. integrety because Russia and china both saw the writing on the wall in appllication to themselves, ie. Chechnya and Tibet