One of them is my DM. He runs a tight ship, and yes, he's insane.:)
This is finally some good use of taxpayer money. Science and technology like this is rarely applied directly as intended, but the spinoffs are what give us MRIs, integrated circuits, etc. </preach target="choir">
The Blame America school of foreign policy isn't terribly accurate. More importantly, from an American policy-maker's point of view, who cares? If everything that goes wrong is our fault anyway, then we might as well pursue our national interest like everyone else.
Blame America is based on a unique variant of American exceptionalism: that we're uniquely evil-- that China, or the USSR, or Syria have no control over their own destinies becasue it's all Our Fault. History was pretty bleak before we came along; I like to think we've had a good impact overall, but we're not omnipotent.
The civil war in Sudan had nothing to do with us, or the violence in Rwanda, or the Kurd separatism in Turkey. Where we have been involved (Afghanistan, the Korean Penninsula, Taiwan, Eastern Europe) there is a good defense to be mounted.
Either way, the idea that the military creates global chaos so that it can justify its own funding is ill-conceived claptrap. Why not prop up the Soviet Union to keep the Cold War going?
War and chaos and death is a reality of the human condition. Even if all weapons were somehow destroyed, people would get boards with nails in them and start the whole thing over. The US military is trying to think of clever, weird ways to approach conflict to make it more decisive and with fewer dead innocents. Three cheers for that.
Mainly, people have this impression because they aren't given a good grounding in history. On many important metrics, the environment is far better off than it was a century ago-- but increased scrutiny means we are only in the last couple decades paying attention to the problem at all. Similarly, conflicts that we never would have heard about (in Rwanda, for example) are now front-page material, with pictures.
In previous centuries, we just didn't track all this violence as carefully or with the same outrage. A hundred years ago, war in Africa, Asia or South America was ignored. To this day, history books kind of gloss over it.
Most of the ethnic conflicts of the latter half of the 20th century are longstanding affairs dating back hundreds and thousands of years-- eg the Balkans, central Asia, the expansion of Islam, Rwanda. Is any of this new?
As bad as war is, the second half of this century has seen less of it than most of the rest of history. The first half saw unprecedented conflict in both scope and severity, so you are right for the century as a whole.
Re:Why today...
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It sucks.
I've been trying to buy three more CPU licenses for Linux, and now I can't use those machines until SCO's online store comes back up.
I agreee. I think the counter-culture has been trying to adopt Linux as Member of the Movement. It's a little embarrassing.
I have a friend who claims to be a geek. He can italicize and link in his livejournal. That's it. He put LimeWire proficiency on his resume to bulk out the "software" section. Yeah, yeah, I know in these enlightened times you can be a film geek, a music geek, a political geek, a goth club geek, or a football geek. In fact, virtually everyone has some kind of interest, so the word apparantly has no meaning anymore. Oh, and it used to be about the music.:)
Bitter? Hell, yeah.
Actually, political geeks are called policy wonks, and I'm one, and so I guess that puts me with the other hangers-on. But I'll brave that risk and say that any meaningful comparison of Linus to Che Guevara requires that Linus torture at least a dozen people to death.
Failing that, Open Source is an economic, social and technological exercise. Political revolution is not on the menu, except maybe as a side project of some of our luminaries. Whose politics? (ESR? RMS? IBM?) Virtually any, apparantly.
So I'd thank the drug-addled, media-obsessed non-programmers to stop trying to co-opt Linux into something that it isn't. I mean, seriously, go write a mission statement.
It will be very difficult to capture a pigeon without killing it.
Special equipment could pull it off, but we'll have to build / buy that, get it to the right people, and even then we still won't know where to use it. Finally, how do you identify pigeons? Only way I know is visually. Soldiers would have to be trained to identify a pigeon themselves (or relay pictures to trained experts, in which case they'd get a response only after a long delay).
You laugh, but check this out. Drug cartels in Pakistan are using carrier pigeons to route messages. The logic is obvious: any landline medium is expensive and can be traced. And any RF technology can be intercepted by American spy satellites.
If a signal (ie pigeon) is caught, the signal isn't received by the intended receipient. You can also send signals without the sender knowing the physical location of the other party-- useful for security.
Actually, now what I think of it, that is the area that bin Laden is believed to be hiding out in. If I were him, I'd be using carrier pigeons and dead-drops to communicate with my followers. I'm not sure if we're even looking for them, but even if we were, finding a species of bird in those mountains? Separating it from the non-pigeon birds? Catching the RIGHT pidgeon (if too many pidgeons disappear from being intercepted, you stop talking for a while)?
Navajo was devastatingly effective in WWII. There was a plan to drop bats equipped with timed incendiaries-- a town was devastated in a test using this weapon. Don't underestimate steam-punk methods.
Decent gravity solves a bunch of problems, but creates many, too... for example, the problem that you have to spend fuel entering and leaving the gravity well. Atmospheres help reduce the arrival cost, but indicates an expensive gravity well.
I'd argue that anything that requires >.2G or an atmosphere to make would be best made on Earth, where we have the most industry. The moon is very local and has no atmosphere (making launches easier) so I might make an exception there. Otherwise, using an asteroid or micromoon as a "yolk" is the key to bootstrapping space development.
Terraforming is out of the question. By the time we have the technology, infrastructure and spare time to do it, the question of a kick-off location will have long been solved. Ditto for anything requiring large numbers (more than two dozen) of people.
So it's a question. You're right: you get more easily available resources from Mars, but pay for it in requiring much more infrastructure to get those resources off planet-- infrastructure a starting colony doesn't have. I think the real question is this: is the purpose of the colony a lifesystem? Or is the lifesystem a requirement to accomplish some other objective. I would argue the latter.
A base on deimos or phobos makes far more sense-- or simply a large asteroid in earth orbit. I don't hold with gravity wells-- simply too expensive. In earth's case, you make an exception since we have so much infrastructure down here. But otherwise, why bother with Mars, other than as a flag-planting exercise.
The moon is the best balance of resource availability and gravity penalty for the medium term. For the short term, of course, Earth is the only answer. But in the long run, there are effectively infinite resources in the asteroid belt, and micromoons like Mars's.
As for the legal arguments, I find that hilarious. Might makes right in the international community. If someone were in a position to claim portions of the moon, Mars system or asteroids, a hastily negotiated Cold War-era piece of paper would hardly stop them. Sure, there would be some legal pretext attached, because your diplomats have to say something. History has encountered this situation many times before. And short of some apocalyptic showdown, there are enough resources for every spacegoing nation for a hundred years not to bump into one another. No treaty will change any of that.
As always, a nation will own whatever it can take, hold and keep.
Hundred dollar hooker everyday for a year, and a big orgy at Christmas time with the $3495.00 left over.
No, but you seem in touch with the spirit of Space Ghost himself. If Moltar didn't co-sign all the purchases, SG would have gone with the hookers.
BTW, for 40,000, I'd rather they let me pick my LCD monitor for the folding panel. Anybody who pays for a space ghost desk is going to have a 22 inch display.
You know, I've voted using virtually every mechanism available (including punch-cards, scantron paper ballots, a touchscreen last night, and more).
My all time favorite are the mechanical voting machines (which IIRC were invented by Thomas Edison). They were still used in my home state as of about 8 years ago.
Basically, you hit the little lever next to the name you want. Write ins have their own lever and a little pulltab that you can write on. You can only vote for the exact number of allowed candidates (usually one), otherwise the lever just won't pull. The whole time, you're hidden behind a curtain. To open the curtain, you pull a big friendly lever, and all your votes are recorded.
Tampering is easy to detect as mechanical wear and modifications.
I'm as into computers as anyone, but these proved to be the easiest to use, most reliable and most tamper-proof. Why not switch back to them? If "retro" technology is better, why not use it??
However: In the end result to a combat soldier, it is roughly similar in interface to a FPS map. And (eventually) they want it to be even closer, with better battery life and integration into the helmet display. So I stand by the comparison: it really is the closest thing to how BFT works.
HOW the signal is propagated (and how accurate it is, and how many system failures there are) wasn't the point. That's subject to improvement. The project goal is what's important.
PS By "system failure" I mean ways in which the system fails to optimally achieve its goals. So allies or forces without BFT is a diplomatic or budgetary failure. LOS and signal issues, not to mention power and EW concerns, are technical failures. To the guy on the ground, they're all various ways in which the system has failed to achieve its goal. Like I said, those are being addressed.
It was shorthand. I'm a Dirtside man myself now, and play White Wolf and D&D for my RPG fix.
Battletech straddles the line of miniatures / RPG gaming. If you read Field Manual: Warden Clans, for example, its got the BattleTech product number, and a couple BattleTech systems at the end (with some Mechwarrior stuff thrown in), but is nearly all fluff. Many people I know who played alot of battletech had careful rosters filled out with designs, battle histories, insignias. Players would battle 'in character' (especially with clan rules of honor).
So perhaps I might have said, "excuse the miniatures gaming reference" or "excuse the RPG reference, but BattleTech (often played as an adjunct to MechWarrior) blah blah". My philosophy was: if you've played Battletech, you get the idea, and if you haven't, I'm not going to educate you now.
But I'm not terribly detailed in my Army Transformation plan summary, either. The goal is for people who've never heard of it to get up to speed with the basic issues. By all means, research more: you'll see all kinds of details that I summarized, omitted or telescoped for brevity's sake. Frankly, I think if/. people had heard about it two years ago, they'd have freaked, because it is very cool, very forward looking, and very unconventional.
The army's been very good about its transformation plan. In case some/. readers haven't heard it in its full glory, here it is:
OK, pre-9/11, the Army embarked on a very controversial plan. Basically, they looked at all the wars that we have any realistic chance of being in. Then they looked at what we have to fight them.
The problem was this: we have oodles of heavy tanks, which pretty much kick all kinds of ass. But they can only win where they can be brought to bear. They're so heavy that they require massive transportation time and cost (not to mention a friendly port to set up in). Another problem is that while tracked vehicles can be heavier and go places that wheeled vehicles can't, they are very maintenance intensive. They need lots of fuel and spare parts, which requires still more ships or a massive airlift.
Bottom line: unless we're fighting on the Korean penninsula or in Europe, where were pre-positioned, it would take six months to fight a war anywhere, and that's assuming we had a friendly neighbor to give us a place to set up in.
The result was the Army transformation plan. The idea is that they would get phase out most of their heavy tank divisions, and replace them with smaller, modular formations called Brigade Combat Teams. The BCT's job would be this: assuming the Air Force can clear a drop zone, we ought to be able to put a brigade anywhere in the world, opposed or not, within 96 hours of the President saying so. Four brigades within 14 days, and more (I don't remember how many) within 90 days. That's even if we drop in the middle of a shooting enemy.
One way we could do this was to get a vehicle that could be a little less armed and armored, and could be a little less mobile, but MUST be air-transportable. That's the Stryker. Think of it (excuse the roleplaying reference) as an Omnimech: a vehicle that is designed to be reconfigurable to do lots of different missions. So there's a communications loadout, and a tank-killer loadout and an infantry-carrier loadout, and lots more.
Post 9/11 lessons have been mixed. On one hand, invincible tanks in Germany did us absolutely no good when we suddenly found ourselves at war in Afghanistan. On the other, when we had a year to move them to Iraq, our tanks did extremely well-- and as DefenseTech points out, absorbs fire that would have destroyed Strykers. The gripping hand is that long occupations like Iraq are better suited to Strykers, LAV's or armored Hummers than to heavy tanks and APC's.
So, like most things, one tech isn't necessarily better or worse than another. You use whatever best fits the situation you're in. On that basis, I like the Stryker. An all-Stryker Army? No. But it is a very valuable program.
Most American war plans in the 90's were built around the idea of a set-piece conflict with an adversary (like China, Iraq or North Korea) that while not exactly equal in technology was at least comparable. 9/11 proved that asymmetrical conflicts would also happen: conflicts where the enemy's main goal is to demoralize our political leadership because they can't defeat us militarily.
And in those cases, we can't count on someone granting us entry, we may need to move very fast, and it might be in some remote corner of the world, far from our forces.
Related to that is improved command and control. Many of our casualties in the Gulf War were friendly-fire, so the Army worked on reducing that, too. Vehicles can now see on a map where others in their unit are (just like in a first-person shooter like BF1942). The problem is that the equipment is still too heavy and battery-draining to be useful for infantry. Hopefully, a vehicle-run 'subnet' can help alleviate this. And running it w/ Linux will hopefully improve efficiency and reliability.
Overall, I think the Army's on the right track with this. I'd hate to lose our heavy tank divisions-- those come in mighty handy. But a less powerful force that can actually get to the battle is better than an invincible juggernaut that is stranded somewhere else.
Those are pretty minor contributions so far. Look, let's be realistic about the way it works. If you have some agenda to make a politician look like a crook, sure you'll say he's been bought. But that isn't true, and let's be fair (it will help your cause more, too).
If a tech-friendly candidate (say, Sonny Perdue of Georgia, who just withdrew GA DMV records from MATRIX) was running for office, and you contributed to him, have you 'bought' him? No, you've donated to help a candidate win who you know will help you. The same way that your donation to EFF will help defend fair use exemptions in copyright law. You're not buying their opinion, you're helping them because you two are trying to accomplish the same thing.
This has a practical implication, too. If we pretend to ourselves that MPAA friendly leaders like Sen Feinstein and Rep Tauzin are only 'doing it for the money', it might make us feel better, but won't be helpful. There are genuine principles being held by the IP holders.
Unless we can understand and address their concerns, and show how other principles override, we're in a shouting match. One we won't win. The people who vote based on this issue, for the most part, are people whose jobs are at stake. There are far more IP consumers than producers, but for consumers, it's not a compelling, overriding issue the way national security or the economy is.
I used to be an EE major in school. I learned very quickly that electric gives you magic acceleration. A hard-core performance electric (rather than those dinky solar or euro-trash bimbo boxes) is what the industry needs to get people thinking in the right direction. Granted, IMHO, batteries still aren't quite there yet, but we're not so far off now.
Sorry, channelling serious testosterone right now. This is totally what they need to be making right now. Have they considered a Dymaxian configuration (two front drive wheels, one rear steering wheel)? You'd save plenty of weight, still seat two, be a little more aerodynamic, and look like a vicious predator.
Also note the Chechnyan conflict in Russia. Or the violence in Indonesia. For that matter, in Europe, there was a wave of terrorist attacks (actually in the 80's more against western europe than America). Or the violence in North and East Africa against non-muslims. China, in fact, is the only exception-- its muslim community remains peaceful, despite atrocious repression from China.
What's particularly worrisome is that much of it is non-national. In other words, you can't track down some general somewhere who's giving orders. Instead, you have this wave of grass-roots violence.
Islam has been completely hijacked by their radical wing, and frankly, it's muslims who should be most alarmed.
Yes. I know what they want. I know what motivates them. Envy of economic status that transforms to hatred. As for Ashcroft, he attacks us on a level far more dangerous than a hijacked planes. A plane can remove your life. Ashcroft tried to remove the meaning of your life.
This would be easier to answer if it were written a little bit more clearly, but in short, Ashcroft is not a patriot. He is a fascist who hides behind a tainted flag. No more, no less.
This doesn't seem terribly well thought out to me.
First, you don't apparantly know what motivates them (there are several excellent books on this; try Alan Dershowitz's book Why Terrorism Works, for example, as your tone indicates you are fairly left-of-center, as is Dershowitz). What you're talking about (hatred between nations of differing states of economic development) is what international relations theorists call World System Theory.
Don't impose your cultural biases on the situation. The terrorists are, as another poster pointed out, from wealthy backgrounds. Their nation is a major economic power. Instead, we have a cultural / religious conflict. A history of european imperialism, the recent collapse of the Ottoman empire, and a history of hatemongering by the totalitarian regimes there have created the terrorism problem.
Certainly, US policies play a part in this. But do you suggest abandoning our key ally (Israel, the only democracy in the region)? That's a major irritant to the Arab world. So is western culture. That's frankly an even bigger provokation. The only way to stop that would be major cultural changes in the US. Removing the rights of women, for example. Or executing gays and lesbians. Any takers? Not me. A third source of the conflict is religion. Saudi Arabia and other countries have espoused fundamentalist strains of their religion. So instead of the history of tolerance we saw at the Islamic world's height, we see massive intolerance, and violence against every country on the Muslim world's borders.
Virtually none of this is our (America's) fault. Not every evil that happens in the world is our fault. So while I'm sure that the blame-America contingent feels sophisticated and cosmopolitan, they're frankly in the wrong here. If that's not you, then good for you (there are plenty of people who believe this, so my point isn't wasted). Your 'tainted flag' reference lead me to believe you are.
OK, so now Ashcroft. I'm not sure what you mean by "removing the meaning of your life". (Though banning Monty Python would be tragic.) Apart from highly partisan smearing, I've yet to hear a real criticism against him. He's hard working, organized and smart. The objections against him typically boil down to "he's evil because he's evil" (a tauntology), "he's destroying america / secretly a nazi / wants to remove our rights / etc" (hyperbole, again unsupported), and the PATRIOT Act.
If you're a moderate who's only just tuned in, only that last argument against Ashcroft has any factual basis. So then, all we have to do is decide if the PATRIOT Act is good or bad.
Bottom line (my opinion): there are some excellent provisions to it, and some very bad provisions. Nearly all of the new powers it gives to law enforcement actually require a warrant from a judge. Much simply establishes a procedure for already legally acceptable investigation avenues.
However, there are several provisions that are very worrisome. For one thing, some special powers delegated to anti-terrorism activities are being stretched by the DoJ to include non-terrorism activities, like drug enforcement. Gag orders on groups subpoened for membership records would be another. A final one would be 'trolling' type provisions that allow law enforcement to broadly grep for information without a particular investigation in mind.
So there's much to be fixed. Does this really make the A
Agreed! Social expectations are conquering the things that, to my mind, are really important. Why spend $10,000 - $20,000 on a ceremony? It seems silly and frivolous.
That's how I want to do it... though of course the lady-friend will be making most of the decisions in that regard. I want to be married, but the pomp and circumstance doesn't appeal to me.
Seriously. I just had dinner with a friend who won't marry her boyfriend because she doesn't want to spend so much on a ring, but won't go through it without it. So, instead she's looking into 'domestic partnerships' that will be lifetime committments without a wedding.
When I told her that I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, she agreed, but couldn't help it.
Absolutely amazing. To be honest, I'd rather give a sapphire or ruby if I could get away with it. I think they're much prettier. And since gems often form the basis for international drug smuggling, terrorism funding and money laundering, all the more reason to commoditize them. They're rocks, for crying out loud. If they're pretty, why not mass-produce them?
We clearly see some lines of code in the first Terminator. As my Computers for Business high school teacher pointed out, the Terminator was written in COBOL.
Niven did compile his laws on his web site (link not handy, sorry).
I'm planning on saving the URL for my post for the next time the Bush campaign does something silly. This really does happen all the time to both sides.
Slashdot Mirror
One of them is my DM. He runs a tight ship, and yes, he's insane. :)
This is finally some good use of taxpayer money. Science and technology like this is rarely applied directly as intended, but the spinoffs are what give us MRIs, integrated circuits, etc. </preach target="choir">
The Blame America school of foreign policy isn't terribly accurate. More importantly, from an American policy-maker's point of view, who cares? If everything that goes wrong is our fault anyway, then we might as well pursue our national interest like everyone else.
Blame America is based on a unique variant of American exceptionalism: that we're uniquely evil-- that China, or the USSR, or Syria have no control over their own destinies becasue it's all Our Fault. History was pretty bleak before we came along; I like to think we've had a good impact overall, but we're not omnipotent.
The civil war in Sudan had nothing to do with us, or the violence in Rwanda, or the Kurd separatism in Turkey. Where we have been involved (Afghanistan, the Korean Penninsula, Taiwan, Eastern Europe) there is a good defense to be mounted.
Either way, the idea that the military creates global chaos so that it can justify its own funding is ill-conceived claptrap. Why not prop up the Soviet Union to keep the Cold War going?
War and chaos and death is a reality of the human condition. Even if all weapons were somehow destroyed, people would get boards with nails in them and start the whole thing over. The US military is trying to think of clever, weird ways to approach conflict to make it more decisive and with fewer dead innocents. Three cheers for that.
I disagree.
Mainly, people have this impression because they aren't given a good grounding in history. On many important metrics, the environment is far better off than it was a century ago-- but increased scrutiny means we are only in the last couple decades paying attention to the problem at all. Similarly, conflicts that we never would have heard about (in Rwanda, for example) are now front-page material, with pictures.
In previous centuries, we just didn't track all this violence as carefully or with the same outrage. A hundred years ago, war in Africa, Asia or South America was ignored. To this day, history books kind of gloss over it.
Most of the ethnic conflicts of the latter half of the 20th century are longstanding affairs dating back hundreds and thousands of years-- eg the Balkans, central Asia, the expansion of Islam, Rwanda. Is any of this new?
As bad as war is, the second half of this century has seen less of it than most of the rest of history. The first half saw unprecedented conflict in both scope and severity, so you are right for the century as a whole.
It sucks.
I've been trying to buy three more CPU licenses for Linux, and now I can't use those machines until SCO's online store comes back up.
I agreee. I think the counter-culture has been trying to adopt Linux as Member of the Movement. It's a little embarrassing.
:)
I have a friend who claims to be a geek. He can italicize and link in his livejournal. That's it. He put LimeWire proficiency on his resume to bulk out the "software" section. Yeah, yeah, I know in these enlightened times you can be a film geek, a music geek, a political geek, a goth club geek, or a football geek. In fact, virtually everyone has some kind of interest, so the word apparantly has no meaning anymore. Oh, and it used to be about the music.
Bitter? Hell, yeah.
Actually, political geeks are called policy wonks, and I'm one, and so I guess that puts me with the other hangers-on. But I'll brave that risk and say that any meaningful comparison of Linus to Che Guevara requires that Linus torture at least a dozen people to death.
Failing that, Open Source is an economic, social and technological exercise. Political revolution is not on the menu, except maybe as a side project of some of our luminaries. Whose politics? (ESR? RMS? IBM?) Virtually any, apparantly.
So I'd thank the drug-addled, media-obsessed non-programmers to stop trying to co-opt Linux into something that it isn't. I mean, seriously, go write a mission statement.
It will be very difficult to capture a pigeon without killing it.
Special equipment could pull it off, but we'll have to build / buy that, get it to the right people, and even then we still won't know where to use it. Finally, how do you identify pigeons? Only way I know is visually. Soldiers would have to be trained to identify a pigeon themselves (or relay pictures to trained experts, in which case they'd get a response only after a long delay).
Bottom line: very tough problem to solve.
You laugh, but check this out. Drug cartels in Pakistan are using carrier pigeons to route messages. The logic is obvious: any landline medium is expensive and can be traced. And any RF technology can be intercepted by American spy satellites.
If a signal (ie pigeon) is caught, the signal isn't received by the intended receipient. You can also send signals without the sender knowing the physical location of the other party-- useful for security.
Actually, now what I think of it, that is the area that bin Laden is believed to be hiding out in. If I were him, I'd be using carrier pigeons and dead-drops to communicate with my followers. I'm not sure if we're even looking for them, but even if we were, finding a species of bird in those mountains? Separating it from the non-pigeon birds? Catching the RIGHT pidgeon (if too many pidgeons disappear from being intercepted, you stop talking for a while)?
Navajo was devastatingly effective in WWII. There was a plan to drop bats equipped with timed incendiaries-- a town was devastated in a test using this weapon. Don't underestimate steam-punk methods.
Well, since we're clearly doomed, I for one welcome our new SCO overlords.
I'm wearing my shirt now (link via Groklaw).
When SCO wins, you'll all be my servants!! Bwah ha ha!
(As Groklaw points out, SCO is clearly playing for time now. I'm not even sure if they believe they can win.)
Very good points.
Decent gravity solves a bunch of problems, but creates many, too... for example, the problem that you have to spend fuel entering and leaving the gravity well. Atmospheres help reduce the arrival cost, but indicates an expensive gravity well.
I'd argue that anything that requires >.2G or an atmosphere to make would be best made on Earth, where we have the most industry. The moon is very local and has no atmosphere (making launches easier) so I might make an exception there. Otherwise, using an asteroid or micromoon as a "yolk" is the key to bootstrapping space development.
Terraforming is out of the question. By the time we have the technology, infrastructure and spare time to do it, the question of a kick-off location will have long been solved. Ditto for anything requiring large numbers (more than two dozen) of people.
So it's a question. You're right: you get more easily available resources from Mars, but pay for it in requiring much more infrastructure to get those resources off planet-- infrastructure a starting colony doesn't have. I think the real question is this: is the purpose of the colony a lifesystem? Or is the lifesystem a requirement to accomplish some other objective. I would argue the latter.
A base on deimos or phobos makes far more sense-- or simply a large asteroid in earth orbit. I don't hold with gravity wells-- simply too expensive. In earth's case, you make an exception since we have so much infrastructure down here. But otherwise, why bother with Mars, other than as a flag-planting exercise.
The moon is the best balance of resource availability and gravity penalty for the medium term. For the short term, of course, Earth is the only answer. But in the long run, there are effectively infinite resources in the asteroid belt, and micromoons like Mars's.
As for the legal arguments, I find that hilarious. Might makes right in the international community. If someone were in a position to claim portions of the moon, Mars system or asteroids, a hastily negotiated Cold War-era piece of paper would hardly stop them. Sure, there would be some legal pretext attached, because your diplomats have to say something. History has encountered this situation many times before. And short of some apocalyptic showdown, there are enough resources for every spacegoing nation for a hundred years not to bump into one another. No treaty will change any of that.
As always, a nation will own whatever it can take, hold and keep.
Hundred dollar hooker everyday for a year, and a big orgy at Christmas time with the $3495.00 left over.
No, but you seem in touch with the spirit of Space Ghost himself. If Moltar didn't co-sign all the purchases, SG would have gone with the hookers.
BTW, for 40,000, I'd rather they let me pick my LCD monitor for the folding panel. Anybody who pays for a space ghost desk is going to have a 22 inch display.
Ouch!
All my illusions are ruined.
You know, I've voted using virtually every mechanism available (including punch-cards, scantron paper ballots, a touchscreen last night, and more).
My all time favorite are the mechanical voting machines (which IIRC were invented by Thomas Edison). They were still used in my home state as of about 8 years ago.
Basically, you hit the little lever next to the name you want. Write ins have their own lever and a little pulltab that you can write on. You can only vote for the exact number of allowed candidates (usually one), otherwise the lever just won't pull. The whole time, you're hidden behind a curtain. To open the curtain, you pull a big friendly lever, and all your votes are recorded.
Tampering is easy to detect as mechanical wear and modifications.
I'm as into computers as anyone, but these proved to be the easiest to use, most reliable and most tamper-proof. Why not switch back to them? If "retro" technology is better, why not use it??
True that!
However: In the end result to a combat soldier, it is roughly similar in interface to a FPS map. And (eventually) they want it to be even closer, with better battery life and integration into the helmet display. So I stand by the comparison: it really is the closest thing to how BFT works.
HOW the signal is propagated (and how accurate it is, and how many system failures there are) wasn't the point. That's subject to improvement. The project goal is what's important.
PS By "system failure" I mean ways in which the system fails to optimally achieve its goals. So allies or forces without BFT is a diplomatic or budgetary failure. LOS and signal issues, not to mention power and EW concerns, are technical failures. To the guy on the ground, they're all various ways in which the system has failed to achieve its goal. Like I said, those are being addressed.
It was shorthand. I'm a Dirtside man myself now, and play White Wolf and D&D for my RPG fix.
/. people had heard about it two years ago, they'd have freaked, because it is very cool, very forward looking, and very unconventional.
Battletech straddles the line of miniatures / RPG gaming. If you read Field Manual: Warden Clans, for example, its got the BattleTech product number, and a couple BattleTech systems at the end (with some Mechwarrior stuff thrown in), but is nearly all fluff. Many people I know who played alot of battletech had careful rosters filled out with designs, battle histories, insignias. Players would battle 'in character' (especially with clan rules of honor).
So perhaps I might have said, "excuse the miniatures gaming reference" or "excuse the RPG reference, but BattleTech (often played as an adjunct to MechWarrior) blah blah". My philosophy was: if you've played Battletech, you get the idea, and if you haven't, I'm not going to educate you now.
But I'm not terribly detailed in my Army Transformation plan summary, either. The goal is for people who've never heard of it to get up to speed with the basic issues. By all means, research more: you'll see all kinds of details that I summarized, omitted or telescoped for brevity's sake. Frankly, I think if
The army's been very good about its transformation plan. In case some /. readers haven't heard it in its full glory, here it is:
OK, pre-9/11, the Army embarked on a very controversial plan. Basically, they looked at all the wars that we have any realistic chance of being in. Then they looked at what we have to fight them.
The problem was this: we have oodles of heavy tanks, which pretty much kick all kinds of ass. But they can only win where they can be brought to bear. They're so heavy that they require massive transportation time and cost (not to mention a friendly port to set up in). Another problem is that while tracked vehicles can be heavier and go places that wheeled vehicles can't, they are very maintenance intensive. They need lots of fuel and spare parts, which requires still more ships or a massive airlift.
Bottom line: unless we're fighting on the Korean penninsula or in Europe, where were pre-positioned, it would take six months to fight a war anywhere, and that's assuming we had a friendly neighbor to give us a place to set up in.
The result was the Army transformation plan. The idea is that they would get phase out most of their heavy tank divisions, and replace them with smaller, modular formations called Brigade Combat Teams. The BCT's job would be this: assuming the Air Force can clear a drop zone, we ought to be able to put a brigade anywhere in the world, opposed or not, within 96 hours of the President saying so. Four brigades within 14 days, and more (I don't remember how many) within 90 days. That's even if we drop in the middle of a shooting enemy.
One way we could do this was to get a vehicle that could be a little less armed and armored, and could be a little less mobile, but MUST be air-transportable. That's the Stryker. Think of it (excuse the roleplaying reference) as an Omnimech: a vehicle that is designed to be reconfigurable to do lots of different missions. So there's a communications loadout, and a tank-killer loadout and an infantry-carrier loadout, and lots more.
Post 9/11 lessons have been mixed. On one hand, invincible tanks in Germany did us absolutely no good when we suddenly found ourselves at war in Afghanistan. On the other, when we had a year to move them to Iraq, our tanks did extremely well-- and as DefenseTech points out, absorbs fire that would have destroyed Strykers. The gripping hand is that long occupations like Iraq are better suited to Strykers, LAV's or armored Hummers than to heavy tanks and APC's.
So, like most things, one tech isn't necessarily better or worse than another. You use whatever best fits the situation you're in. On that basis, I like the Stryker. An all-Stryker Army? No. But it is a very valuable program.
Most American war plans in the 90's were built around the idea of a set-piece conflict with an adversary (like China, Iraq or North Korea) that while not exactly equal in technology was at least comparable. 9/11 proved that asymmetrical conflicts would also happen: conflicts where the enemy's main goal is to demoralize our political leadership because they can't defeat us militarily.
And in those cases, we can't count on someone granting us entry, we may need to move very fast, and it might be in some remote corner of the world, far from our forces.
Related to that is improved command and control. Many of our casualties in the Gulf War were friendly-fire, so the Army worked on reducing that, too. Vehicles can now see on a map where others in their unit are (just like in a first-person shooter like BF1942). The problem is that the equipment is still too heavy and battery-draining to be useful for infantry. Hopefully, a vehicle-run 'subnet' can help alleviate this. And running it w/ Linux will hopefully improve efficiency and reliability.
Overall, I think the Army's on the right track with this. I'd hate to lose our heavy tank divisions-- those come in mighty handy. But a less powerful force that can actually get to the battle is better than an invincible juggernaut that is stranded somewhere else.
Those are pretty minor contributions so far. Look, let's be realistic about the way it works. If you have some agenda to make a politician look like a crook, sure you'll say he's been bought. But that isn't true, and let's be fair (it will help your cause more, too).
If a tech-friendly candidate (say, Sonny Perdue of Georgia, who just withdrew GA DMV records from MATRIX) was running for office, and you contributed to him, have you 'bought' him? No, you've donated to help a candidate win who you know will help you. The same way that your donation to EFF will help defend fair use exemptions in copyright law. You're not buying their opinion, you're helping them because you two are trying to accomplish the same thing.
This has a practical implication, too. If we pretend to ourselves that MPAA friendly leaders like Sen Feinstein and Rep Tauzin are only 'doing it for the money', it might make us feel better, but won't be helpful. There are genuine principles being held by the IP holders.
Unless we can understand and address their concerns, and show how other principles override, we're in a shouting match. One we won't win. The people who vote based on this issue, for the most part, are people whose jobs are at stake. There are far more IP consumers than producers, but for consumers, it's not a compelling, overriding issue the way national security or the economy is.
Hell yeah.
I used to be an EE major in school. I learned very quickly that electric gives you magic acceleration. A hard-core performance electric (rather than those dinky solar or euro-trash bimbo boxes) is what the industry needs to get people thinking in the right direction. Granted, IMHO, batteries still aren't quite there yet, but we're not so far off now.
Sorry, channelling serious testosterone right now. This is totally what they need to be making right now. Have they considered a Dymaxian configuration (two front drive wheels, one rear steering wheel)? You'd save plenty of weight, still seat two, be a little more aerodynamic, and look like a vicious predator.
Either way, excellent car!
Good point.
Also note the Chechnyan conflict in Russia. Or the violence in Indonesia. For that matter, in Europe, there was a wave of terrorist attacks (actually in the 80's more against western europe than America). Or the violence in North and East Africa against non-muslims. China, in fact, is the only exception-- its muslim community remains peaceful, despite atrocious repression from China.
What's particularly worrisome is that much of it is non-national. In other words, you can't track down some general somewhere who's giving orders. Instead, you have this wave of grass-roots violence.
Islam has been completely hijacked by their radical wing, and frankly, it's muslims who should be most alarmed.
This doesn't seem terribly well thought out to me.
First, you don't apparantly know what motivates them (there are several excellent books on this; try Alan Dershowitz's book Why Terrorism Works, for example, as your tone indicates you are fairly left-of-center, as is Dershowitz). What you're talking about (hatred between nations of differing states of economic development) is what international relations theorists call World System Theory.
Don't impose your cultural biases on the situation. The terrorists are, as another poster pointed out, from wealthy backgrounds. Their nation is a major economic power. Instead, we have a cultural / religious conflict. A history of european imperialism, the recent collapse of the Ottoman empire, and a history of hatemongering by the totalitarian regimes there have created the terrorism problem.
Certainly, US policies play a part in this. But do you suggest abandoning our key ally (Israel, the only democracy in the region)? That's a major irritant to the Arab world. So is western culture. That's frankly an even bigger provokation. The only way to stop that would be major cultural changes in the US. Removing the rights of women, for example. Or executing gays and lesbians. Any takers? Not me. A third source of the conflict is religion. Saudi Arabia and other countries have espoused fundamentalist strains of their religion. So instead of the history of tolerance we saw at the Islamic world's height, we see massive intolerance, and violence against every country on the Muslim world's borders.
Virtually none of this is our (America's) fault. Not every evil that happens in the world is our fault. So while I'm sure that the blame-America contingent feels sophisticated and cosmopolitan, they're frankly in the wrong here. If that's not you, then good for you (there are plenty of people who believe this, so my point isn't wasted). Your 'tainted flag' reference lead me to believe you are.
OK, so now Ashcroft. I'm not sure what you mean by "removing the meaning of your life". (Though banning Monty Python would be tragic.) Apart from highly partisan smearing, I've yet to hear a real criticism against him. He's hard working, organized and smart. The objections against him typically boil down to "he's evil because he's evil" (a tauntology), "he's destroying america / secretly a nazi / wants to remove our rights / etc" (hyperbole, again unsupported), and the PATRIOT Act.
If you're a moderate who's only just tuned in, only that last argument against Ashcroft has any factual basis. So then, all we have to do is decide if the PATRIOT Act is good or bad.
Bottom line (my opinion): there are some excellent provisions to it, and some very bad provisions. Nearly all of the new powers it gives to law enforcement actually require a warrant from a judge. Much simply establishes a procedure for already legally acceptable investigation avenues.
However, there are several provisions that are very worrisome. For one thing, some special powers delegated to anti-terrorism activities are being stretched by the DoJ to include non-terrorism activities, like drug enforcement. Gag orders on groups subpoened for membership records would be another. A final one would be 'trolling' type provisions that allow law enforcement to broadly grep for information without a particular investigation in mind.
So there's much to be fixed. Does this really make the A
Agreed! Social expectations are conquering the things that, to my mind, are really important. Why spend $10,000 - $20,000 on a ceremony? It seems silly and frivolous.
Good for you!
That's how I want to do it... though of course the lady-friend will be making most of the decisions in that regard. I want to be married, but the pomp and circumstance doesn't appeal to me.
Seriously. I just had dinner with a friend who won't marry her boyfriend because she doesn't want to spend so much on a ring, but won't go through it without it. So, instead she's looking into 'domestic partnerships' that will be lifetime committments without a wedding.
When I told her that I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, she agreed, but couldn't help it.
Absolutely amazing. To be honest, I'd rather give a sapphire or ruby if I could get away with it. I think they're much prettier. And since gems often form the basis for international drug smuggling, terrorism funding and money laundering, all the more reason to commoditize them. They're rocks, for crying out loud. If they're pretty, why not mass-produce them?
We clearly see some lines of code in the first Terminator. As my Computers for Business high school teacher pointed out, the Terminator was written in COBOL.
Skynet is evil.
Well said!
Niven did compile his laws on his web site (link not handy, sorry).
I'm planning on saving the URL for my post for the next time the Bush campaign does something silly. This really does happen all the time to both sides.