I agree, while the book tends to draw out the time periods, the movie compresses it greatly. This I think does not make it better, just different. It probably is better for the 'medium' the story is conveyed in, it definately lends itself to faster action, more sense of impending doom etc.
As to Tom:S, If i saw some guy prancing through the streets singing and all dressed in yellow on the street, I'd prolly run him down with the Dodge;-). Can't say I weep to see him removed from the movie.
Dear anonymous coward, nice to see you dont have the guts to attach your name to this loose collection of misguided(probably misquoted too) opinions that mean nothing to anyone except religious fanatics who pop them out to prove a point.
As is the case ive found with fanatics(like yourself), they find it easy to point to someone elses opinion as justified fact of their point of view. An opinion, no matter the source, does not equal instant fact. Do me a favour, dont think for yourself, dont attempt to deviate from the course set by your betters, and keep washing my car.
And if you dont like my sig, you sir, can kiss my halfling.
Amazing. In once sentence, you question their science, and then follow it up with some of your own brand of mythology.
"No alien-Jesus, no aliens."
Now seeing you are not an alien, I doubt you can testify to the fact that no "alien-Jesus" exists or ever existed. Alien-Jesus never visited you, or got some drunken buddies to write a book about him that you have read. So by you own occams razor, alien-jesus doesnt exist, and thus, aliens dont exist.... well done Cleetus, you have solved the worlds greatest question, back to the mountains with you.
I've never seen your brain, and you have never seemed to have used it, so by your own version of occams razor, you don't have one.
Which should include various anti personnel and area denial weapons that are deployed by air, such as cluster munitions(such as those the US prefers to use for anti runway missions), and also some of the various mine systems that were deployed by helicopter in Vietnam.
In this case the tool is partly to blame, because its indescriminate, and effective many years after deployment.
And the US does definately deploy its fair share of area denial weapons systems, from anti tank mines, to anti personnel mines deployed by hand or aerial dispersal methods(ie cluster munitions) such as those used in almost every US air war waged to date to take out runways and to deny heavy traffic routes to the enemy.
more likely it would just have pride and satisfaction from planting the flag of our computer overlords.......... I've been told I have said too much...... logging off now....
well put. I've never seen newtons law of universal morals, so I can hardly testify to absolute goods and evils. The universe in which we live is governed by many laws, but morals are not among them, nor can they be, because they are a side effect of the human virus on this planet, the planet didnt come with a morals owners manual.
They are a creation, made by the society or civilization of the week, just like god, the telly tubbies and chocolate ice cream.
The Roman civilization imposed its concept of morals and religion(which is just as valid a belief system today as christianity), and so has every other civilization since and before them.
Things are neither bad nor good, they just are, or were or "may be". We humans apply our own personal experience, morals and upbringings to an event, and attribute a label.
The US is dealing with a group of people, who are not going to obey the laws, are not going to play by our rules, who are not going to present themselves as targets in the traditional manner.
Thus there are some alternatives to how you can deal with them, attempt to stop them in a traditional method, which will fail. Or, change the rules of the game so you can have more room to maneuver.
You can morally joust all day long, it wont change some simple facts. The enemy will not fight in a conventional manner, thus the US has to fight using unconventional tactics. If changing laws and curtailing liberties is what is required, then that is what will be done to win.
Shrub said the war will be costly, if we thought money, we would be right, if we thought lives, we are right again, if we didnt think the price may include some liberties & freedoms, we are very wrong.
Liberties are as open to abuse just as curtailing liberties can be abused. We must find the balance that allows the US the most room to deal with these terrorist networks, while at the same time making sure, unnecessary steps are not being taken by the government to lock down the populace.
So far I havent read too much on what liberties might be targeted, it is up to us to determine and fight for what is neccessary and prevent what isnt. Government can write policies, that is what they are there for, we are here to make our thoughts and feelings known about those policies, before and during implementation.
make no mistake, things will change, how much depends on us. If the US wins against terrorism domestically, is up to us the people as to how much we will allow the rules to change, to allow it to happen.
The Pros, The Cons, The bombs, Oh my
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 1
I think the US is faced with a unique dilema. To strike an enemy, hiding in a populace, without adding to the enemies cause through collateral damage and politcal fallout.
So what do we have? We have an enemy, woh has a distributed structure in many countries, some are cooperative and are actively hunting terrorists in their own countries, which is good, others are obviously unwillling to check their domestic terrorists that pose international threat.
These countries then show a willingness to harbour terorrism. And can be dealt with as extensions of the terrorist network themselves. To this end, one might apply total warfare
The Point of this of course is to cause such disruption and destruction, that your enemy will capitulate readily. In the case of Afghanistan though, you have a country that is already devesated by war with the Soviets, and civil war for a decade. They already live with destruction, and chaos is no stranger. A total war would be only be breaking large rubble into smaller rubble. We also face the real possibility of increasing the strength of the Bin Laden Network through having the local populace rushing to join his cause, as well as other fundamentalist islamic citizens flocking to his banner due to sympathy of his plight(And its likely this is already happening anyway as I type.)
Now I hear many of your right now screaming, so the hell what! We can take em all on, no matter how many people or other countries flock to the bin laden cause. And the truth is, maybe we could, but only in the end with the use of non-conventional weapons, which any administration would be rather careful about the authorization of. Alternatively we are talking about a massive coalition force consisting the rest of the world against the middle east. Sounds good to many people too! But after the anger fades, and resources such as oil start to become a problem for your massive mechanized force and you find the local populace of every village and town is just one more 3 month conflict, it quickly loses velocity as a viable option, as it would be a 100 year war. While these are rare in history though, they do happen.
So a campaign of total warfare would only further his cause(if we werent lucky and dropped a GBU on his head in the first day of air strikes) and might lead us to letting slip the dogs of nuclear / biological warfare or prolonged conflict over generations. And I might mention that many people I know, advocate non conventionals, letting anthrax, ebola, and god knows what else is lying in our biological weapons stock piles, do the work for the US Armed Forces.
Many do not want to open that box though, so what are we left with?
An Low Intensity, paramilitary intelligence war. Which I believe would be long, arduous, but more successful then just letting the missles fly. It does have benefits over brute force, in that we can determine if Bin Laden has nuclear weapons, we can determine information on other terrorist networks he may be associated with. We can determine and thwart future attacks, and of course. Its cheaper in resources and cost compared to total war, which means it can be waged for a longer period. It also enables us to insert psychological warfare(propaganda and such) into the fray in easily digestable chunks, rather then blowing everyone away, and leaving a pamphlet saying it was ok to kill them on each body.
We can get close to the great bearded psychopath himself, and either put a 9mm low velocity round into his melon, or strap his ass to a Saturn V for a one way trip to the sun.
Now this kind of war takes years, but we have an edge, the current turmoil will cause great amounts of followers to his side, in which might be, five or twenty gentlemen of talent in the field of information gathering, and disposal of human walking waste. We currently though, are unlikely to have these people on payroll currently, which leaves us in further dilema. Rather a shame.
So where might we get these people from? The Mossad and Israeli Army Intelligence, may have people of this calibre, may even be already on the way, who knows. But options are few, and time is short.
SO whats my point? This, no war is perfect in conception, in planning, in execution or results. We will get a war, be sure, but what kind will be up to which angry guy is loudest in the conference room in the national security council.
I personally dont know which I want, my heart wants fast decisive action against everyone who has even seen the guy, and their pets. My head says that is polically dangerous and expensive in human lives, its not polically correct.
I think it won't be long before the US Federal Trade Commission has a nice long talk with Sony management
Assuming that is that the sony management arent also fictional
what about if we instead bundle all the hungry and cancer patients into one giant scotch taped lump, fire them into space, and use them to alter the earths orbit.
I agree with you, but a proper airship would have to be run like a cruise liner, as sitting in those cramped little seats for hours, while the air ship moved at 50mph, basically u would have lethal a blood clot about 1/3 the way into your trip.
I believe though there could be a market in airship cruise liners, for the same reason people take cruises on the water. The food, the sex and the view. And maybe the mariachi band.
And as to the hindenburg exploding(in the article), I saw a documentary a few months back explaining that the skin of the hindenburg was made up of various chemical components that approximate the substance hydrazine. Often used in solid rocket boosters. This was unknown at the time of course. The theory is though, that a static shock caused the hydrazine to start to burn, which in turn ignited the hydrogen seconds later. Kablooey.
Here here, I couldn't agree more sir
I think most humans tend to catagorize life quickly and easily as "something like us" or "something chemically/geneticall/biologically" like us" in terms of needs/structure.
Extraterrestrial life may well defy definition for a long time, simply because either we havent experienced it yet, or we have and didnt recognize it for what it is.
To truely quantify something like life in such broad terms, and compare it to a universe, is as hard a task as has ever been set, because the only baseline we have of life, that we can compare to what we may find, is what we already have on this small rock. Compared to a galaxy, we have a rather small control group.
Proof and likelihood are two different animals. Evidence doesnt not always point to probability.
And even if evidence did exist on earth, we may not even recognize it for what it is, or alternatively assume humans hands were those that created it.
Alien life may choose not visit us apes, may decide the majority of us are far too superstious to accept an alien life form into our cultures. They may not even wish to colonize in the very human traits of greed, expansionism and imperialism, may not even need to due to their biology, society, or culture.
Life is far too diverse to catagorize it so simply, and under our own definitions of what we "think" life may be, and in what forms it will take, how it will act, react, feel and think.
Besides, and heres the good part, if this life does exist, and i most certainly believe it does, how do you know they believe in life outside their planet? They may think you a mythical being, they may think that I am a statistical anomoly because I should not exist. And even if they do know we are here, what makes us so important to visit. Frankly, id just drive on by.
Historically, we are a dangerous race for first contact even in our own terrestrial matters.
I agree with you, the study is a sham. It lacks the language and knowledge to define social interactivity for us. Mainly because, this is our society, and we define the culture for it. It cannot be dictated to us by those outside of it.
I also met my wife online, i moved to Canada from Australia to marry her, now we live back in Austrlia again, married three years with a two year old daughter. This hardly seems the result of me becomming socially inept, withdrawn and isolated. If it was the case, when i met my wife f2f for the first time, I would have drawn myself up into a ball, and had a convulsion on the ground until everyone stopped looking.
Communication is Communication, regardless of its medium, and whosoever lets their thoughts and feelings be known by communicating, have added to that society.
I feel however that this study will no doubt be taken and run with by the usual suspects in the media, who will tout it about as undeniable proof that the internet is unhealthy, and the usual suspects in the public, those who require the media to tell them how to think, will be urging those around them to not spend so much time online, cause it's unhealthy. Verification, and cofirmation, means little to some areas of the media, and less to those who listen to them in turn.
It wasnt that long ago current medical thinking advised against taking baths as it was considered unhealthy. If you did take a bath, medical experts would advise you to take a few days in bed to recover, lest disease get into your body via pores in your skin, opened by the heat of the bath.
Maybe the next study will tell us the internet causes blindness, hair on the palms and a distinct limp in the Autumn.
Slashdot Mirror
Roger milli vanilli chilli willi!
I agree, while the book tends to draw out the time periods, the movie compresses it greatly. This I think does not make it better, just different. It probably is better for the 'medium' the story is conveyed in, it definately lends itself to faster action, more sense of impending doom etc. As to Tom :S, If i saw some guy prancing through the streets singing and all dressed in yellow on the street, I'd prolly run him down with the Dodge;-). Can't say I weep to see him removed from the movie.
Radio Shack Hobbit Detectors?;-)
Dear anonymous coward, nice to see you dont have the guts to attach your name to this loose collection of misguided(probably misquoted too) opinions that mean nothing to anyone except religious fanatics who pop them out to prove a point.
As is the case ive found with fanatics(like yourself), they find it easy to point to someone elses opinion as justified fact of their point of view. An opinion, no matter the source, does not equal instant fact. Do me a favour, dont think for yourself, dont attempt to deviate from the course set by your betters, and keep washing my car.
And if you dont like my sig, you sir, can kiss my halfling.
Amazing. In once sentence, you question their science, and then follow it up with some of your own brand of mythology.
"No alien-Jesus, no aliens."
Now seeing you are not an alien, I doubt you can testify to the fact that no "alien-Jesus" exists or ever existed. Alien-Jesus never visited you, or got some drunken buddies to write a book about him that you have read. So by you own occams razor, alien-jesus doesnt exist, and thus, aliens dont exist.... well done Cleetus, you have solved the worlds greatest question, back to the mountains with you.
I've never seen your brain, and you have never seemed to have used it, so by your own version of occams razor, you don't have one.
Ok then. You are wrong. Hope this helps;-)
depends on your classification of landmines.
Which should include various anti personnel and area denial weapons that are deployed by air, such as cluster munitions(such as those the US prefers to use for anti runway missions), and also some of the various mine systems that were deployed by helicopter in Vietnam.
In this case the tool is partly to blame, because its indescriminate, and effective many years after deployment. And the US does definately deploy its fair share of area denial weapons systems, from anti tank mines, to anti personnel mines deployed by hand or aerial dispersal methods(ie cluster munitions) such as those used in almost every US air war waged to date to take out runways and to deny heavy traffic routes to the enemy.
You must have an Ex Wife too....
more likely it would just have pride and satisfaction from planting the flag of our computer overlords.......... I've been told I have said too much...... logging off now....
well put. I've never seen newtons law of universal morals, so I can hardly testify to absolute goods and evils. The universe in which we live is governed by many laws, but morals are not among them, nor can they be, because they are a side effect of the human virus on this planet, the planet didnt come with a morals owners manual.
They are a creation, made by the society or civilization of the week, just like god, the telly tubbies and chocolate ice cream.
The Roman civilization imposed its concept of morals and religion(which is just as valid a belief system today as christianity), and so has every other civilization since and before them.
Things are neither bad nor good, they just are, or were or "may be". We humans apply our own personal experience, morals and upbringings to an event, and attribute a label.
The US is dealing with a group of people, who are not going to obey the laws, are not going to play by our rules, who are not going to present themselves as targets in the traditional manner.
Thus there are some alternatives to how you can deal with them, attempt to stop them in a traditional method, which will fail. Or, change the rules of the game so you can have more room to maneuver.
You can morally joust all day long, it wont change some simple facts. The enemy will not fight in a conventional manner, thus the US has to fight using unconventional tactics. If changing laws and curtailing liberties is what is required, then that is what will be done to win.
Shrub said the war will be costly, if we thought money, we would be right, if we thought lives, we are right again, if we didnt think the price may include some liberties & freedoms, we are very wrong.
Liberties are as open to abuse just as curtailing liberties can be abused. We must find the balance that allows the US the most room to deal with these terrorist networks, while at the same time making sure, unnecessary steps are not being taken by the government to lock down the populace.
So far I havent read too much on what liberties might be targeted, it is up to us to determine and fight for what is neccessary and prevent what isnt. Government can write policies, that is what they are there for, we are here to make our thoughts and feelings known about those policies, before and during implementation.
make no mistake, things will change, how much depends on us. If the US wins against terrorism domestically, is up to us the people as to how much we will allow the rules to change, to allow it to happen.
I think the US is faced with a unique dilema. To strike an enemy, hiding in a populace, without adding to the enemies cause through collateral damage and politcal fallout.
So what do we have? We have an enemy, woh has a distributed structure in many countries, some are cooperative and are actively hunting terrorists in their own countries, which is good, others are obviously unwillling to check their domestic terrorists that pose international threat.
These countries then show a willingness to harbour terorrism. And can be dealt with as extensions of the terrorist network themselves. To this end, one might apply total warfare
The Point of this of course is to cause such disruption and destruction, that your enemy will capitulate readily. In the case of Afghanistan though, you have a country that is already devesated by war with the Soviets, and civil war for a decade. They already live with destruction, and chaos is no stranger. A total war would be only be breaking large rubble into smaller rubble. We also face the real possibility of increasing the strength of the Bin Laden Network through having the local populace rushing to join his cause, as well as other fundamentalist islamic citizens flocking to his banner due to sympathy of his plight(And its likely this is already happening anyway as I type.)
Now I hear many of your right now screaming, so the hell what! We can take em all on, no matter how many people or other countries flock to the bin laden cause. And the truth is, maybe we could, but only in the end with the use of non-conventional weapons, which any administration would be rather careful about the authorization of. Alternatively we are talking about a massive coalition force consisting the rest of the world against the middle east. Sounds good to many people too! But after the anger fades, and resources such as oil start to become a problem for your massive mechanized force and you find the local populace of every village and town is just one more 3 month conflict, it quickly loses velocity as a viable option, as it would be a 100 year war. While these are rare in history though, they do happen.
So a campaign of total warfare would only further his cause(if we werent lucky and dropped a GBU on his head in the first day of air strikes) and might lead us to letting slip the dogs of nuclear / biological warfare or prolonged conflict over generations. And I might mention that many people I know, advocate non conventionals, letting anthrax, ebola, and god knows what else is lying in our biological weapons stock piles, do the work for the US Armed Forces.
Many do not want to open that box though, so what are we left with?
An Low Intensity, paramilitary intelligence war. Which I believe would be long, arduous, but more successful then just letting the missles fly. It does have benefits over brute force, in that we can determine if Bin Laden has nuclear weapons, we can determine information on other terrorist networks he may be associated with. We can determine and thwart future attacks, and of course. Its cheaper in resources and cost compared to total war, which means it can be waged for a longer period. It also enables us to insert psychological warfare(propaganda and such) into the fray in easily digestable chunks, rather then blowing everyone away, and leaving a pamphlet saying it was ok to kill them on each body. We can get close to the great bearded psychopath himself, and either put a 9mm low velocity round into his melon, or strap his ass to a Saturn V for a one way trip to the sun.
Now this kind of war takes years, but we have an edge, the current turmoil will cause great amounts of followers to his side, in which might be, five or twenty gentlemen of talent in the field of information gathering, and disposal of human walking waste. We currently though, are unlikely to have these people on payroll currently, which leaves us in further dilema. Rather a shame.
So where might we get these people from? The Mossad and Israeli Army Intelligence, may have people of this calibre, may even be already on the way, who knows. But options are few, and time is short.
SO whats my point? This, no war is perfect in conception, in planning, in execution or results. We will get a war, be sure, but what kind will be up to which angry guy is loudest in the conference room in the national security council.
I personally dont know which I want, my heart wants fast decisive action against everyone who has even seen the guy, and their pets. My head says that is polically dangerous and expensive in human lives, its not polically correct.
Then my heart says, so what?
really? i prefer "evil bastard god of IT"...
damn right
id pay some real money to watch his capsule either
a: burn up in the atmosphere or
b: see it break apart at 300 feet
if killing astronauts for public entertainment is good enough for nasa, its good enough for me.
I think it won't be long before the US Federal Trade Commission has a nice long talk with Sony management Assuming that is that the sony management arent also fictional
bletchley park, kidna like mcarthur park? I never forgave richard harris for that one either...:-)
what about if we instead bundle all the hungry and cancer patients into one giant scotch taped lump, fire them into space, and use them to alter the earths orbit.
then everyone will be happy.
the herculoids... i forget my network logons, but i never forget good tv, or in this case, bad
I agree with you, but a proper airship would have to be run like a cruise liner, as sitting in those cramped little seats for hours, while the air ship moved at 50mph, basically u would have lethal a blood clot about 1/3 the way into your trip.
I believe though there could be a market in airship cruise liners, for the same reason people take cruises on the water. The food, the sex and the view. And maybe the mariachi band.
And as to the hindenburg exploding(in the article), I saw a documentary a few months back explaining that the skin of the hindenburg was made up of various chemical components that approximate the substance hydrazine. Often used in solid rocket boosters. This was unknown at the time of course. The theory is though, that a static shock caused the hydrazine to start to burn, which in turn ignited the hydrogen seconds later. Kablooey.
...is this guy a christmas cracker?
nothing like a festive crime to get you in the spirit to knock over some dot coms...
Here here, I couldn't agree more sir
I think most humans tend to catagorize life quickly and easily as "something like us" or "something chemically/geneticall/biologically" like us" in terms of needs/structure.
Extraterrestrial life may well defy definition for a long time, simply because either we havent experienced it yet, or we have and didnt recognize it for what it is.
To truely quantify something like life in such broad terms, and compare it to a universe, is as hard a task as has ever been set, because the only baseline we have of life, that we can compare to what we may find, is what we already have on this small rock. Compared to a galaxy, we have a rather small control group.
Proof and likelihood are two different animals. Evidence doesnt not always point to probability.
And even if evidence did exist on earth, we may not even recognize it for what it is, or alternatively assume humans hands were those that created it.
Alien life may choose not visit us apes, may decide the majority of us are far too superstious to accept an alien life form into our cultures. They may not even wish to colonize in the very human traits of greed, expansionism and imperialism, may not even need to due to their biology, society, or culture.
Life is far too diverse to catagorize it so simply, and under our own definitions of what we "think" life may be, and in what forms it will take, how it will act, react, feel and think.
Besides, and heres the good part, if this life does exist, and i most certainly believe it does, how do you know they believe in life outside their planet? They may think you a mythical being, they may think that I am a statistical anomoly because I should not exist. And even if they do know we are here, what makes us so important to visit. Frankly, id just drive on by.
Historically, we are a dangerous race for first contact even in our own terrestrial matters.
I'll need a water proof laptop before i hit the water slides.
I agree with you, the study is a sham. It lacks the language and knowledge to define social interactivity for us. Mainly because, this is our society, and we define the culture for it. It cannot be dictated to us by those outside of it.
I also met my wife online, i moved to Canada from Australia to marry her, now we live back in Austrlia again, married three years with a two year old daughter. This hardly seems the result of me becomming socially inept, withdrawn and isolated. If it was the case, when i met my wife f2f for the first time, I would have drawn myself up into a ball, and had a convulsion on the ground until everyone stopped looking.
Communication is Communication, regardless of its medium, and whosoever lets their thoughts and feelings be known by communicating, have added to that society.
I feel however that this study will no doubt be taken and run with by the usual suspects in the media, who will tout it about as undeniable proof that the internet is unhealthy, and the usual suspects in the public, those who require the media to tell them how to think, will be urging those around them to not spend so much time online, cause it's unhealthy. Verification, and cofirmation, means little to some areas of the media, and less to those who listen to them in turn.
It wasnt that long ago current medical thinking advised against taking baths as it was considered unhealthy. If you did take a bath, medical experts would advise you to take a few days in bed to recover, lest disease get into your body via pores in your skin, opened by the heat of the bath.
Maybe the next study will tell us the internet causes blindness, hair on the palms and a distinct limp in the Autumn.