I've always thought it would be great if there were a Federation Civil War.
But because of Roddenberry's guiding principles, that'll probably never happen. "Enlightened people of the future will never fight each other."
Andromeda was originally intended to be a 'Star Trek: Fall of the Federation' series. Wasn't a bad series, until Kevin Sorbo turned it into Hercules In Space, firing that writer from DS9.
But an actual series dealing with the fall, rather than the results, would be good. Easy enough to do, too; two member factions get in a fight, the Federation Council tries to intervene, doesn't work, Starfleet is sent in to 'keep the peace,' there's an incident, the Vulcans walk in protest, people draw up sides, and the Federation turns, over the space of a few years, into, say, about six to ten separate groups.
The Federation: Earth, Andoria, and a few other 'core' members, they attempt to cling to the original tenents.
Vulcan, and others; view the Federation as a good idea ruined by bad species; they revert back to isolationism; not all Vulcans agree, though.
Antagonist A and Antagonist B, and assorted hangers-on; obviously, they're at war. One side invites in the Klingons to help out, the other side invites in the Romulans, and it all goes to pot.
Several other 'balkanized' areas which revert to sectoral or species lines, rejecting the Federation as being ultimately ineffective. Think League of Nations at this point. Others reject the Federation for trying at all to intercede, or blame the 'incident' on official Policy, rather than Shit Happens.
The next thing you know, some of these groups are attacking the core worlds, because they want Starfleet technology and knowledge that was withdrawn when they broke away from the Federation, there are old grudges flaring up, the Klingons and Romulans are nibbling at the edges, gleefully taking advantage of the Chaos, Starfleet are trying to maintain their principles and dignity while their ideals are collapsing around them, and so on.
But at what rate? Mars has an atmosphere now; it's obviously not being stripped away all that quickly. As long as you can replenish faster than it gets blown away, what's the hey hey?
Yes, it may very well be a one way trip. But, the idea is that the colonists will be much happier and more productive, as they're not beholden to external machines to simply survive.
Even being able to survive, say, five minutes of exposure means that you don't panic when you tear a hole in your suit; this would have, in theory, an incredible positive psychological effect.
Besides, the sort of people you want for colonization wouldn't want to come back anyway.
Of course, you're just setting yourself up for a declaration of independance, a schism between pure strain humans and the gennies, and an eventual war, but hey, what can you do?
Think of DNA as a huge mass of undocumented COBOL spaghetti code, on punchcards. Unlabelled punch cards. Oh, and some of the punchcards are from old programs, different programs, or just happen to be in the pile.
Sure, you can rename some variables, maybe jump to some new subroutines that you mix in from your old programs, but you're still in the 'I wonder what happens if I do *this*' mode of doing it.
Maybe this was on Tuesday or Wedensday of last week, when there was akamai and hotmail issues? "Oh, he's not getting my email, so Hotmail must be blocking Gmail."
I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think you see my point.
What I'm trying to say is that geographical territory is no longer a factor in determining combatants in war. You can't point to a map and say 'this is the enemy.' Regardless of the tactics, Al-Queda, say, as an identifiable group, can wage war upon the US, using, in this case, terrorist tactics. The fact that they don't have a coloured section on a map shouldn't really matter.
One day, several years ago, I was bitching during a game of StarCraft about how little the gov't was paying me. One of the guys, an acquaintance, said 'well, what do you do for a living?'
I rattled off my skills, and he said 'shit, we need you. Fax me a resume, tomorrow. Here's the number....'
Turns out the guy was head of the tech support department for a Texas tech company. Within a few weeks, having then flown from Ontario to Texas for an interview, I had an offer in hand for literally twice the money.
It's all about the right place at the right time, and the right timing with the right people.
See, this is the problem. 'War' is no longer a concept of nation-state vs nation-state. Just because your opponent is an ideological faction, not a chunk on a map, doesn't make them any less dangerous. If anything, it makes them more dangerous.
Military analysts had been predicting this for years. Go google for 'low intensity conflict.'
Seconded; anybody grounded in reality will tell you it's not what you know, it's who you know. Friend of a friend, back door, what is euphamistically called the 'hidden job market' by trainers in such things.
Want a job? Pop onto your favourite mailing list for your profession and let it be known that you're hiring. Tell your friends who work for companies, in ANY capacity, what you're looking for; all it takes is one dropped comment by the water cooler, and you get that magic call.
You know, I've never seen an Xbox game that looks like crap. I've seen Xbox games that obviously weren't taking advantage of the hardware, like Dead to Rights, Buffy, and so on, but none of them looked like *crap.*
Then, I finally got around to getting a Playstation 2, for the.hack series, the Final Fantasy X series, and so on. And I loaded FF X in, and HOLY SHIT.
The opening animation alone gave me a terrible headache. Hell, the damn models were swimming, like the vertexes were getting rounded to one value this frame, and a different value another frame. Horrible examples of polygons not meshing properly. Argh.
And my personal greatest pet peeve of the moment; clothes as textures. Maybe I've been spoiled by the Dead Or Alive series. But you know what? If somebody's wearing a necklace, model the damn necklace.
And, aye, the DC is still head and shoulders above the PS2.
I'm sure that if they had targetted Wall Street, you'd be complaining that it was only a symbolic strike. I should remind you that many foreign corporations - including French ones- lost their entire presense on US soil. People did not hang out at the WTC for fun- they worked there. It had a strategic importance in the day-to-day business of the US economy, and IIRC, some intel operations. Therefore it could have given a military advantage.
It is true that the WTC attack did have some 'infrastructure destruction' to it, but there were better places to hit. They meant it as an attack against a famous landmark, nothing more.
It's not all about you, either. Targetting the WTC meant they could boost the morale of their combattants. That could make it militarily justified... though not morally so.
And here we get to the meat of the matter; as I said, bearding the lion. This sort of gesture, however, is somewhat meaningless; it needed to be followed up upon. "I fear we have awakened the sleeping giant" and all that.
your country is so filled with people that are so damned self-righteous, that have no clue what the enemy wants (it isn't all that irrational), and are shockingly ignorant as to your vulnerability
Actually, Canada is quite clueful in this regard; but then, that's probably why most of the world doesn't hate us. I assume, though, you're referring to America, and you're right; people hate the fact that America doesn't even know why they're so hated.
your distinctions between legit war and terrorism are like theological discussions of how many angels you can fit on a pin-head
I make no distinction, really; war is when you do it, terrorism is when they do it. However, some actions are more easily defined, from an objective viewpoint, as one or the other; Germany rolling tanks into Poland in '39 was an act of war; the camps, however, were acts of terrorism.
9/11 I was surprised by the audacity and brilliance of the execution. I wasn't surprised like many of your country-folk that terrorists attacked, nor did I hold any absurd belief that it was because you're free and prosperous that people somehow hate you. I'll be surprised by the means, but not that they carried out another attack. Trans-Alaska pipeline? SPR? Dirty bomb? Those aren't even the most nightmarish!
Again, I don't think Canada was particularly surprised. Hell, I was disappointed with the uselessness of 9/11; it's something you get to do once, and they could have done so much more, really.
But then again, anybody who's read Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor knows that.
Don't confuse bombing City X to destroy the railyards, or the industrial factories, or the dam, or whatever, and bombing City X to kill civilians in an attempt to weaken their will to oppose you.
Unfortunately, to the victims, it's all the same.
So, Al-Queda crashing a plane into the Pentagon would be one thing. Hell, crashing a plane into Wall Street would be an interesting move. But bringing down the WTC didn't actually accomplish anything; it was a symbolic strike. It was bearding the lion, so to speak. Well, all that usually gets you is a lion which is beardless, perhaps, but very, very pissed. And cold.
If you think the people are not ultimatly responsible for the governments actions, ask yourself if we would be fighting in Iraq if Gore had won the election.
If the people were responsible, America would not be in Iraq regardless of who is President.
That having been said, the worst way to run a group is by pure democracy; 'the will of the masses' is far too fleeting and uninformed a thing by which to run a country.
Besides, that's a bad choice, because as far as I'm concerned, Bush didn't win the presidency, and there was outright treasonous fraud going on in Florida. But that's another conversation, for another time.:-)
Fucking submit button. Sorry, this is a follow on to the above post.
When Japan surrendered after WW2, it wasn't because they were terrified, or terrorized, or didn't want to die. They were quite happy to die.
Japan went into WW2 because they'd decided that they were inherently superior to everybody else, and really should have an empire to prove it. America proved that Japan wasn't top dog, so Japan backed off and tried a different approach.
Politics is simply the externalization of internal desires. You want an ice cream, but mommy won't let you have one? Politics. You want the oil in that country over there, but they won't give it to you? Politics.
That's a very subjective viewpoint.
All viewpoints are; I don't believe in the concept of 'objective truth.' There is no such thing as an absolute value. Absolutely.:-)
Through diplomatic back-channels, it was communicated that Japan was ready to capitulate.
As I said in a different comment, who exactly was ready to surrender? The Emperor? The heads of the military? The civilians throwing themselves off of cliffs to avoid the shame of being captured?
Shock and Awe is another way to say terrorism. How many civilians?
Actually, it's an element of basic animal combat response. See, every social animal other than Man has some pretty well ingrained blocks against killing their own species; if at all possible, there will be dominance/submission displays, 'ritual' combat and the like. The wolf who exposes his belly and throat is left alive, knows his place, and keeps it.
Studies show that humans are much the same; in combat (until recently, as in WW2 onwards recently) humans were more interested in posturing and intimidating than in actually killing. Read Grossman's 'On Killing' for some fascinating arguments and facts here. I don't agree with his conclusion that playing Doom turns you into a murdering psychopath, but most of the book seems solid enough.
POINT BEING that given Japan's culture at the time, you know, samurai, bushido, and so on, and given all the other factors, for Japan as a nation to surrender, it can be argued that a display of force that powerful was required.
How much infrastructure was bombarded? Was not the objective to paralyze them through fear, aka terror?
Lots of infrastructure, but removing infrastructure is valid military strategy. Besides, it was shown both in the blitzes against Britan, and the firebombing of Dresden that, curiously enough, that sort of terror attack on civilian populaces simply doesn't really work.
It was a valid strike, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't 'military' in any sense of the word.
They understand what most americans rambling on and on about attacks against the "innocent" don't. In all contries with a representative democracy (By The People..) the populus is no more "innocent" than the government, or the military, as the governement and the military are just extensions of the peoples will and power. The only people who are truely "innocent" in the USA are those who are too young to vote. If you are of voting age and an american, all of the blood spilt at the hands of our government and military is on your hands.
That would be true if America was a democracy, which it isn't. America is a representational republic specifically designed to remove decision-making power from the masses.
Who wanted to surrender, exactly? The soldiers who were charging American lines armed only with bayonets? The kamikaze pilots driving their planes into ships? The civilians throwing themselves off of cliffs to avoid capture?
There is a theory that the Emperor and higher levels of gov't wanted to surrender, but if they'ed tried, then in all likely hood, they'd have been deposed, and the hardline military would have continued the war.
The war also had to be decisively ended to keep Stalin from either taking or splitting Japan, and to demonstrate the nuke to the world.
Basically, if you're doing it, it's war; if they're doing it, it's terrorism.
But for a more objective viewpoint, if it has an 'immediate' and 'direct' valid military value, it's war; if it doesn't, it's terrorism. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki had direct military value; 'shock and awe,' which is a trite phrase, but valid strategy, demonstration of weapon capability and political will to use it, demonstration of ability to strike at territory with impunity, and so on.
September 11 didn't, however, have military value. It was just intended to kill random people, and make people sad. If, however, there had been a war on, it probably could have been considered a valid attack against economic infrastructure.
What they're saying here, is, if you've got a flat square area, made out of 100 triangles, you can do it with two.
If you've got an *almost* flat, square area, made out of several hundred triangles, well, flatten that bugger out, use two triangles, and the human watching probably won't notice.
Slashdot Mirror
Andromeda was originally intended to be a 'Star Trek: Fall of the Federation' series. Wasn't a bad series, until Kevin Sorbo turned it into Hercules In Space, firing that writer from DS9.
But an actual series dealing with the fall, rather than the results, would be good. Easy enough to do, too; two member factions get in a fight, the Federation Council tries to intervene, doesn't work, Starfleet is sent in to 'keep the peace,' there's an incident, the Vulcans walk in protest, people draw up sides, and the Federation turns, over the space of a few years, into, say, about six to ten separate groups.
The Federation: Earth, Andoria, and a few other 'core' members, they attempt to cling to the original tenents.
Vulcan, and others; view the Federation as a good idea ruined by bad species; they revert back to isolationism; not all Vulcans agree, though.
Antagonist A and Antagonist B, and assorted hangers-on; obviously, they're at war. One side invites in the Klingons to help out, the other side invites in the Romulans, and it all goes to pot.
Several other 'balkanized' areas which revert to sectoral or species lines, rejecting the Federation as being ultimately ineffective. Think League of Nations at this point. Others reject the Federation for trying at all to intercede, or blame the 'incident' on official Policy, rather than Shit Happens.
The next thing you know, some of these groups are attacking the core worlds, because they want Starfleet technology and knowledge that was withdrawn when they broke away from the Federation, there are old grudges flaring up, the Klingons and Romulans are nibbling at the edges, gleefully taking advantage of the Chaos, Starfleet are trying to maintain their principles and dignity while their ideals are collapsing around them, and so on.
Possible, aye, but harder to do, and easier to detect, than just tapping an ethernet cable.
Of course, if it matters that much to you, your cable should be run in a sealed conduit filled with pressurized gas.
But at what rate? Mars has an atmosphere now; it's obviously not being stripped away all that quickly. As long as you can replenish faster than it gets blown away, what's the hey hey?
The concept is 'pantropy,' or 'grow anywhere.'
Yes, it may very well be a one way trip. But, the idea is that the colonists will be much happier and more productive, as they're not beholden to external machines to simply survive.
Even being able to survive, say, five minutes of exposure means that you don't panic when you tear a hole in your suit; this would have, in theory, an incredible positive psychological effect.
Besides, the sort of people you want for colonization wouldn't want to come back anyway.
Of course, you're just setting yourself up for a declaration of independance, a schism between pure strain humans and the gennies, and an eventual war, but hey, what can you do?
Think of DNA as a huge mass of undocumented COBOL spaghetti code, on punchcards. Unlabelled punch cards. Oh, and some of the punchcards are from old programs, different programs, or just happen to be in the pile.
Sure, you can rename some variables, maybe jump to some new subroutines that you mix in from your old programs, but you're still in the 'I wonder what happens if I do *this*' mode of doing it.
Maybe this was on Tuesday or Wedensday of last week, when there was akamai and hotmail issues? "Oh, he's not getting my email, so Hotmail must be blocking Gmail."
I agree with what you're saying, but I don't think you see my point.
What I'm trying to say is that geographical territory is no longer a factor in determining combatants in war. You can't point to a map and say 'this is the enemy.' Regardless of the tactics, Al-Queda, say, as an identifiable group, can wage war upon the US, using, in this case, terrorist tactics. The fact that they don't have a coloured section on a map shouldn't really matter.
Exactly!
One day, several years ago, I was bitching during a game of StarCraft about how little the gov't was paying me. One of the guys, an acquaintance, said 'well, what do you do for a living?'
I rattled off my skills, and he said 'shit, we need you. Fax me a resume, tomorrow. Here's the number....'
Turns out the guy was head of the tech support department for a Texas tech company. Within a few weeks, having then flown from Ontario to Texas for an interview, I had an offer in hand for literally twice the money.
It's all about the right place at the right time, and the right timing with the right people.
See, this is the problem. 'War' is no longer a concept of nation-state vs nation-state. Just because your opponent is an ideological faction, not a chunk on a map, doesn't make them any less dangerous. If anything, it makes them more dangerous.
Military analysts had been predicting this for years. Go google for 'low intensity conflict.'
Seconded; anybody grounded in reality will tell you it's not what you know, it's who you know. Friend of a friend, back door, what is euphamistically called the 'hidden job market' by trainers in such things.
Want a job? Pop onto your favourite mailing list for your profession and let it be known that you're hiring. Tell your friends who work for companies, in ANY capacity, what you're looking for; all it takes is one dropped comment by the water cooler, and you get that magic call.
You know, I've never seen an Xbox game that looks like crap. I've seen Xbox games that obviously weren't taking advantage of the hardware, like Dead to Rights, Buffy, and so on, but none of them looked like *crap.*
Then, I finally got around to getting a Playstation 2, for the .hack series, the Final Fantasy X series, and so on. And I loaded FF X in, and HOLY SHIT.
The opening animation alone gave me a terrible headache. Hell, the damn models were swimming, like the vertexes were getting rounded to one value this frame, and a different value another frame. Horrible examples of polygons not meshing properly. Argh.
And my personal greatest pet peeve of the moment; clothes as textures. Maybe I've been spoiled by the Dead Or Alive series. But you know what? If somebody's wearing a necklace, model the damn necklace.
And, aye, the DC is still head and shoulders above the PS2.
Or the fact that you just need to copy it within 8 hours.
It is true that the WTC attack did have some 'infrastructure destruction' to it, but there were better places to hit. They meant it as an attack against a famous landmark, nothing more.
And here we get to the meat of the matter; as I said, bearding the lion. This sort of gesture, however, is somewhat meaningless; it needed to be followed up upon. "I fear we have awakened the sleeping giant" and all that.
Actually, Canada is quite clueful in this regard; but then, that's probably why most of the world doesn't hate us. I assume, though, you're referring to America, and you're right; people hate the fact that America doesn't even know why they're so hated.
I make no distinction, really; war is when you do it, terrorism is when they do it. However, some actions are more easily defined, from an objective viewpoint, as one or the other; Germany rolling tanks into Poland in '39 was an act of war; the camps, however, were acts of terrorism.
Again, I don't think Canada was particularly surprised. Hell, I was disappointed with the uselessness of 9/11; it's something you get to do once, and they could have done so much more, really.
But then again, anybody who's read Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor knows that.
Don't confuse bombing City X to destroy the railyards, or the industrial factories, or the dam, or whatever, and bombing City X to kill civilians in an attempt to weaken their will to oppose you.
Unfortunately, to the victims, it's all the same.
So, Al-Queda crashing a plane into the Pentagon would be one thing. Hell, crashing a plane into Wall Street would be an interesting move. But bringing down the WTC didn't actually accomplish anything; it was a symbolic strike. It was bearding the lion, so to speak. Well, all that usually gets you is a lion which is beardless, perhaps, but very, very pissed. And cold.
If the people were responsible, America would not be in Iraq regardless of who is President.
That having been said, the worst way to run a group is by pure democracy; 'the will of the masses' is far too fleeting and uninformed a thing by which to run a country.
Besides, that's a bad choice, because as far as I'm concerned, Bush didn't win the presidency, and there was outright treasonous fraud going on in Florida. But that's another conversation, for another time. :-)
Fucking submit button. Sorry, this is a follow on to the above post.
When Japan surrendered after WW2, it wasn't because they were terrified, or terrorized, or didn't want to die. They were quite happy to die.
Japan went into WW2 because they'd decided that they were inherently superior to everybody else, and really should have an empire to prove it. America proved that Japan wasn't top dog, so Japan backed off and tried a different approach.
Politics is simply the externalization of internal desires. You want an ice cream, but mommy won't let you have one? Politics. You want the oil in that country over there, but they won't give it to you? Politics.
All viewpoints are; I don't believe in the concept of 'objective truth.' There is no such thing as an absolute value. Absolutely. :-)
As I said in a different comment, who exactly was ready to surrender? The Emperor? The heads of the military? The civilians throwing themselves off of cliffs to avoid the shame of being captured?
Actually, it's an element of basic animal combat response. See, every social animal other than Man has some pretty well ingrained blocks against killing their own species; if at all possible, there will be dominance/submission displays, 'ritual' combat and the like. The wolf who exposes his belly and throat is left alive, knows his place, and keeps it.
Studies show that humans are much the same; in combat (until recently, as in WW2 onwards recently) humans were more interested in posturing and intimidating than in actually killing. Read Grossman's 'On Killing' for some fascinating arguments and facts here. I don't agree with his conclusion that playing Doom turns you into a murdering psychopath, but most of the book seems solid enough.
POINT BEING that given Japan's culture at the time, you know, samurai, bushido, and so on, and given all the other factors, for Japan as a nation to surrender, it can be argued that a display of force that powerful was required.
Lots of infrastructure, but removing infrastructure is valid military strategy. Besides, it was shown both in the blitzes against Britan, and the firebombing of Dresden that, curiously enough, that sort of terror attack on civilian populaces simply doesn't really work.
It was a valid strike, don't get me wrong, but it wasn't 'military' in any sense of the word.
That would be true if America was a democracy, which it isn't. America is a representational republic specifically designed to remove decision-making power from the masses.
Yup, and it's extra funny, as genetically speaking, the 'Japanese' (as opposed to the native Ainu people) are, well, Korean.
Who wanted to surrender, exactly? The soldiers who were charging American lines armed only with bayonets? The kamikaze pilots driving their planes into ships? The civilians throwing themselves off of cliffs to avoid capture?
There is a theory that the Emperor and higher levels of gov't wanted to surrender, but if they'ed tried, then in all likely hood, they'd have been deposed, and the hardline military would have continued the war.
The war also had to be decisively ended to keep Stalin from either taking or splitting Japan, and to demonstrate the nuke to the world.
Basically, if you're doing it, it's war; if they're doing it, it's terrorism.
But for a more objective viewpoint, if it has an 'immediate' and 'direct' valid military value, it's war; if it doesn't, it's terrorism. Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki had direct military value; 'shock and awe,' which is a trite phrase, but valid strategy, demonstration of weapon capability and political will to use it, demonstration of ability to strike at territory with impunity, and so on.
September 11 didn't, however, have military value. It was just intended to kill random people, and make people sad. If, however, there had been a war on, it probably could have been considered a valid attack against economic infrastructure.
This is /., so I'll trot out the trite quotes.
How do you know he's not using a text-to-speech engine to listen to /.?
What they're saying here, is, if you've got a flat square area, made out of 100 triangles, you can do it with two.
If you've got an *almost* flat, square area, made out of several hundred triangles, well, flatten that bugger out, use two triangles, and the human watching probably won't notice.
The market voted with their dollars, and their feet, and Aureal was shown the door.
Me, I still use my A3D 2 card. Only now that I've upgraded to XP, where the drivers are crap, am I considering changing.