. it's about the will of the people to fight.... But the will of the soldiers must be there
As I just said - there's large numbers of people, in Syria today, who want to fight both Daesh and Assad. By now, almost all veterans. So again, I'll repeat: If you want a military solution, why don't you start with actually arming them properly rather than involuntarily drafting refugees?
People who complain about people from other countries having cell phones and stuff like that have a strange concept of what life is like in poorer countries, As if everyone either lives like they do in America, or they're a mud farmer who sleeps in the dirt every night.
Travel to a poorer country some time and see how people live. You still find things like smartphones, TVs, washing machines, etc. They're generally lower quality or older, but most definitely present. You find a lower average number of "modern conveniences" per household, but that number is certainly not "zero". Buildings aren't built to as high of standards, but they're still fine for getting a night's sleep. People still have cars, even if the number per capita is lower and they average older/cheaper models. People in countries with ~$5k/yr per-capita GDP are not mud farmers. And that's exactly what Syria's per-capita income was before the civil war.
Different refugees have had different levels of luck. Some have lost everything they had, such as shells hitting their house. Others are simply in areas about to be overrun, but still have their possessions. When a person flees, they sell everything they can't take with them, and take with whatever they can. In a country where so much has been destroyed, there's always a market for replacement possessions - as well as a market for opportunistic groups to get goods for cheap. The money from selling whatever they couldn't take with becomes their funds for their trip. Small, important things like phones are one of the least likely things a person would sell. The biggest worry of a fleeing family is of becoming separated. The ability to get information is also critical. We live in a modern era.
The normal price for traffickers is several dozen to a several hundred euros, depending on the situation. Syria's pre-war GDP was about 4000 Euros per-capita. People leaving sell any assets that they have left (home if it's still standing, car if it's not bombed out, appliances, etc) to pay for their journey.
They're well fed and clean shaven because of the pro-refugee European volunteer groups who've been assisting them. And they most definitely have not been allowed to just go wherever, hence the train incident. They've since been allowed to move on to their destination, but it wasn't that way before.
Hungary is not allowing them to settle there, they rounded them up off of the train and moved them to a holding area, which would have resulted either in their deportation or a long-term stay in a refugee camp.
Turkey doesn't give them a chance to do that. It keeps them behind barbed wire in tents exposed to the weather, with their daily activities being to queue for a ration of rice and bread.
Daesh and al-Nusra were tiny entities until the Syrian civil war - it's the Syria chaos that allowed them to flourish, and eventually conquer chunks of Iraq with forces armed and trained in Syria. And part of the reason that they flourished in Syria was because they were far better armed than their secular competition.
That said, the Maliki government too most definitely contributed to helping Daesh gain membership, he did a bang-up job of alienating Iraq's Sunni population. And Maliki would never have been elected had Saddam not been overthrown. But you know that once you start playing this game of stepping back through history you can blame almost anything on almost anything else, it becomes Degrees of Kevin Bacon-ish. It should also be mentioned that Maliki was elected. It should furthermore be mentioned that Maliki and the US weren't exactly friends.
I say this as someone who was very much opposed to the Iraq invasion... as a general rule, I oppose taking peace and turning it into chaos. But I sometimes support taking chaos and giving it at least a chance to turn into peace.
So your plan is to send 200,000 people unarmed against Assad's tanks and air force? Do you also plan to send in several dozen bulldozers to dig the mass grave for them?
And really, the concept that sometimes weapons get taken by groups they're not intended for, and therefore, the world is always better if no weapons are used in any concept... please. Should nobody have armed Nazi resistance groups because the Nazis might perchance get ahold of the weapons? Does the fact that a student don't always get 100% perfect marks on tests in school mean that they failed out? Demanding perfection as a condition for doing anything is an absurdity. Yes, one needs to take into account a full risk-benefit analysis for every decision, and one of the "risks" is the odds of weapons capture or misuse - it's most definitely a real risk. But you want to simply write off the whole benefit side because that value is nonzero. Which is an absurdity, given that the reason for giving the weapons would be to destroy the power of two groups to wage war, one of said groups who's dropping chemical and barrel bombs on cities, and the other who's a sex-slaving antiquities-destroying terrorist group.
And we, outside the black hole, will "see" everything that the person inside the black hole sees as the black hole evaporates - albeit in a form mangled beyond recognition by the extreme forces at play.
They fall in, and in their reference frame, they're chasing an event horizon (the apparent horizon) that always recedes away from them and which they never hit, until they're torn apart. We see them approach, see their time slow down, get dimmer and dimmer and more and more distorted, but never really "get there" - and as the black hole evaporates, the spot where we could theoretically still see their image stretched out around the event horizon moves inwards and inwards as it does. It's the same causal series of events, just in the former case perceived as happening quickly, while in the latter case happening over trillions of trillions of years, and far too distorted and dim to make literal observations practical.
Black holes no longer seem that exotic when you just think of them as areas where (from an outside perspective) time has just slowed down to a near halt during the collapse of a massive star, and slowly leaks back out.
They're being given a lot of support by local pro-refugee groups, I know at least that much. There's even a caravan today of volunteers offering to drive refugees to their destinations so they don't have to walk.
A lot of pro-refugee people are driven to be even more accommodating in order to counter what they see as the attacks from the anti-refugee side. The anti-refugee side makes them feel unwelcome, so they want to do more than they otherwise would to make them feel welcome.
There's already lots of people in Syria who want to fight both Daesh and Assad, but are poorly armed. If you want a military solution, why don't you start with actually arming them properly rather than involuntarily drafting refugees?
I know it's common to blame the US for everything - and I'm generally no big fan myself. But the US just hasn't been a big player in this thing up until recently. And their local "dog in the game", the FSA, hasn't exactly had the largesse showered down on them. Here's a rough timeline:
March 2011: Protests start July 2011: FSA forms October 2011: Turkey lets the FSA operate a command headquarters on its side of the border. April 2012: Reporters covering describe the FSA as flush with well trained soldiers, but with little intel or weapons available to them. A ship containing small arms believed to be destined for the FSA was intercepted. November 2012: After infighting, the FSA joins as part of the Syrian National Coalition. December 2012: Saudi Arabia begins arming the FSA with weapons shipped from Croatia. March 2013: Due to a lack of weaponry, many fighters start deserting the FSA to the much better armed Al-Nusra Front. Al-Nusra (and increasingly with time, Daesh) begin coming into conflict with FSA over territory, and invariably winning as they do. April 2013: US begins shipping nonlethal aid to the FSA Late 2013: Reports of the first light arms shipments from the US to the FSA. February 2014: FSA replaces its chief of staff due to "paralysis within the military command". The "Southern Front" of the FSA forms April 2014: Small numbers of US anti-tank weapons systems start showing up in Syria. Southern Front of the FSA starts a string of successes against government forces. August 2014: Unconfirmed reports of a nonagression pact between the FSA and Daesh to focus on Assad Sep 2014: US begins bombing Daesh, increases light arms transfer to FSA. No approval given for transfer of antiaircraft systems, however.
ISIS and al-Nusra wouldn't be anywhere near as powerful as they are today had the US helped arm the FSA properly and early. But the US has been trying to avoid getting its hands dirty until the very last minute (for example, the Yazidi slaughter), and so these things happen.
The vast majority of the deaths in this conflict, according to international monitors, come from Assad, who's been using chemical weapons, barrel bombs on towns, long-range surface to surface missiles against cities, etc, as well as running a vast network of intelligence centers believed to have killed tens of thousands of prisoners. He has the air superiority and he's been using it. He also gets around one ship per week loaded with heavy arms from Russia and Iran - the former which has recently been reported to have significantly upped their local presence, building a base to handle over a thousand Russian soldiers. While Russia is reportedly planning to focus on Daesh, not the FSA, and the US isn't officially focusing on Assad, there's some serious potential for the two sides to butt up against each other, particularly as Daesh weakens.
Daesh, while gaining great notoriety for its efforts to publicize its brutal means of execution, its destruction of antiquities, its reestablishment of slavery (particularly sex slavery), and many other factors, nonetheless ranks a far second in the number of casualties caused. That said, it's obvious why the main international focus has been on them and the threat they present rather than on Assad.
What's the solution? Damned if I know. Way too many people have a dog in this game now. Russia thinks Assad is geopolitically too important to let go. Huge numbers of Syrians would rather die fighting than live under him - whether serving in secular or Islamist militias to try to bring him down. Daesh is the most powerful and wealthy of the militias, and this acts as a draw - not just locally, but for international fighters as well, even for those who don't give a rat's arse about Assad and just want to see a caliphate resurrected. The US, for obvious reasons, will never accept a super-well-funded and armed terrorist state establishing itself, and large numbers of people in the west aren't too keen on the c
Perhaps if they had gotten out one of those Macbooks and used it, they could have watched cops episodes online, read about phone tracking, learned about the details of how police conduct investigations, and found advice on how not to be an awful liar.
"In other news, a truck full of 3d printers was stolen just outside of Salem, MA last night. Driver Anton Saljanin III reported that he had been hired to drive 1,195 Makerbot XPs, valued at over $1 million, from a vendor in Massachusetts to a pair of high schools in New Jersey. The day after picking them up, according to his report, the truck disappeared overnight while he slept. The truck was spotted again the subsequent day, abandoned in a parking lot, but its cargo was no longer present."
"Also on Police Beat today: a large shipment full of polyamide filament, copper pellets, capacitors, resistors, silicon wafers, lithography photoresist, and 530 other raw materials was reported stolen just outside of Boston this morning. Driver Gjon Saljanin III described to the police how he had been hired to drive the supplies to a pair of New Jersey high schools from their warehouse in Massachusetts..."
V = Velocity Delta = Change Delta-V = Change in Velocity
Aka, from velocity X to velocity Y, the delta-V would be Y - X Obviously the units of "Y - X" are going to be the same as the units for Y and X. Thus delta-V has the same units as velocity. Aka km/s or similar.
I can't even begin to imagine how one is going to have a hypervelocity anchor attach to a comet rather than just blowing it up, and how any anchor attached to a comet would withstand 5 Gs. Comets aren't exactly the most structurally sound of objects...
They're talking about the theoretical strength of SWNTs, which is upwards of 120GPa. But the highest ever measured SWNT strength, last I read, was around 60Ga - and that's the properties of individual tubes (ropes don't even approach it).
Whenever you're reading something and it mentions needing a "carbon nanotube tether", toss whatever you're reading in the "sci-fi" category. Not even the hard sci-fi category. And all for what - a ~6 year Pluto transit time? Lame.
Don't they have anything better to research?
Heck, even I can think of a more plausible approach than that - one that doesn't require unobtanium at least. Forget the "diamond anchor", land a microsat on it (approaching comet, not a retreating one). Yeah, that takes a lot of delta-V, but if it's just a microsatellite, then that's not a lot of mass. Then, forget about the "carbon nanotube tether"; use a space fountain between the large craft and the lander. Space fountains (such as paired coilguns, for example) are plausible with today's technology, requiring no unobtainium.
But the whole concept of delta-V from a comet is just not a worthwhile avenue to pursue either way. Way too much difficulty and mechanisms for failure for way too little reward.
20/20 vision is defined by the ability to resolve 1 arc minute. For example, the "E" on an eye doctor's chart on the 20/20 vision line is 5 arc minutes tall, as reading it takes the ability to break it down into five vertical glyphs and distingish between them. That page is based on the premise of a person being able to resolve 0,3 arc minutes.
Problem.
Also, see above. The human eye has a lot more limitations than just a simple single angular resolution figure can express. I even forgot to list one: time. Not only does motion greatly limit one's resolution ability, but even on a stationary image, the person has to be able to focus and take time in order to get even "normal" levels of visual acuity.
The maximum physically possible resolution for the human eye to see is 2190 dpi. But that's not an average eye, but rather a flawless eye limited only by the size of the pupil; and viewed from as close as an adult can focus, 4 inches.
If we downgrade from a perfect eye to an average eye, the resolution drops down to 876 dpi... but still at 4 inches.
At a more practical 12 inches, this drops to around 300 dpi. Which is why magazines are printed at 300 dpi - it's good enough for most practical circumstances.
Also note some additional limitations:
* These sort of resolution figures are based on the ability to distingish bright white lines from bright black lines without them blurring together into gray. The smaller the contrast and the dimmer the light, the less the eye can resolve.
* The human eye also loses a great deal of ability to make out resolution when objects are moving.
* Obviously the further away one is from the center of the field of view, the lower the resolution - with a rather fast dropoff.
Yes, 808 dpi is complete and total overkill, unless you've got superb eyes and are in the habit of holding your phone as close to them as you can focus while looking at high contrast stationary images.
Slashdot Mirror
As I just said - there's large numbers of people, in Syria today, who want to fight both Daesh and Assad. By now, almost all veterans. So again, I'll repeat: If you want a military solution, why don't you start with actually arming them properly rather than involuntarily drafting refugees?
People who complain about people from other countries having cell phones and stuff like that have a strange concept of what life is like in poorer countries, As if everyone either lives like they do in America, or they're a mud farmer who sleeps in the dirt every night.
Travel to a poorer country some time and see how people live. You still find things like smartphones, TVs, washing machines, etc. They're generally lower quality or older, but most definitely present. You find a lower average number of "modern conveniences" per household, but that number is certainly not "zero". Buildings aren't built to as high of standards, but they're still fine for getting a night's sleep. People still have cars, even if the number per capita is lower and they average older/cheaper models. People in countries with ~$5k/yr per-capita GDP are not mud farmers. And that's exactly what Syria's per-capita income was before the civil war.
Different refugees have had different levels of luck. Some have lost everything they had, such as shells hitting their house. Others are simply in areas about to be overrun, but still have their possessions. When a person flees, they sell everything they can't take with them, and take with whatever they can. In a country where so much has been destroyed, there's always a market for replacement possessions - as well as a market for opportunistic groups to get goods for cheap. The money from selling whatever they couldn't take with becomes their funds for their trip. Small, important things like phones are one of the least likely things a person would sell. The biggest worry of a fleeing family is of becoming separated. The ability to get information is also critical. We live in a modern era.
The normal price for traffickers is several dozen to a several hundred euros, depending on the situation. Syria's pre-war GDP was about 4000 Euros per-capita. People leaving sell any assets that they have left (home if it's still standing, car if it's not bombed out, appliances, etc) to pay for their journey.
They're well fed and clean shaven because of the pro-refugee European volunteer groups who've been assisting them. And they most definitely have not been allowed to just go wherever, hence the train incident. They've since been allowed to move on to their destination, but it wasn't that way before.
Hungary is not allowing them to settle there, they rounded them up off of the train and moved them to a holding area, which would have resulted either in their deportation or a long-term stay in a refugee camp.
Versus, you know, how normal Turks live
Turkey doesn't give them a chance to do that. It keeps them behind barbed wire in tents exposed to the weather, with their daily activities being to queue for a ration of rice and bread.
You act as if they were allowed to live in Turkey as regular Turks do. Which is, of course, not the case. This is how Turkey makes them live.
Daesh and al-Nusra were tiny entities until the Syrian civil war - it's the Syria chaos that allowed them to flourish, and eventually conquer chunks of Iraq with forces armed and trained in Syria. And part of the reason that they flourished in Syria was because they were far better armed than their secular competition.
That said, the Maliki government too most definitely contributed to helping Daesh gain membership, he did a bang-up job of alienating Iraq's Sunni population. And Maliki would never have been elected had Saddam not been overthrown. But you know that once you start playing this game of stepping back through history you can blame almost anything on almost anything else, it becomes Degrees of Kevin Bacon-ish. It should also be mentioned that Maliki was elected. It should furthermore be mentioned that Maliki and the US weren't exactly friends.
I say this as someone who was very much opposed to the Iraq invasion... as a general rule, I oppose taking peace and turning it into chaos. But I sometimes support taking chaos and giving it at least a chance to turn into peace.
So your plan is to send 200,000 people unarmed against Assad's tanks and air force? Do you also plan to send in several dozen bulldozers to dig the mass grave for them?
And really, the concept that sometimes weapons get taken by groups they're not intended for, and therefore, the world is always better if no weapons are used in any concept... please. Should nobody have armed Nazi resistance groups because the Nazis might perchance get ahold of the weapons? Does the fact that a student don't always get 100% perfect marks on tests in school mean that they failed out? Demanding perfection as a condition for doing anything is an absurdity. Yes, one needs to take into account a full risk-benefit analysis for every decision, and one of the "risks" is the odds of weapons capture or misuse - it's most definitely a real risk. But you want to simply write off the whole benefit side because that value is nonzero. Which is an absurdity, given that the reason for giving the weapons would be to destroy the power of two groups to wage war, one of said groups who's dropping chemical and barrel bombs on cities, and the other who's a sex-slaving antiquities-destroying terrorist group.
And we, outside the black hole, will "see" everything that the person inside the black hole sees as the black hole evaporates - albeit in a form mangled beyond recognition by the extreme forces at play.
They fall in, and in their reference frame, they're chasing an event horizon (the apparent horizon) that always recedes away from them and which they never hit, until they're torn apart. We see them approach, see their time slow down, get dimmer and dimmer and more and more distorted, but never really "get there" - and as the black hole evaporates, the spot where we could theoretically still see their image stretched out around the event horizon moves inwards and inwards as it does. It's the same causal series of events, just in the former case perceived as happening quickly, while in the latter case happening over trillions of trillions of years, and far too distorted and dim to make literal observations practical.
Black holes no longer seem that exotic when you just think of them as areas where (from an outside perspective) time has just slowed down to a near halt during the collapse of a massive star, and slowly leaks back out.
You forgot to add, "Ther takin' er jerbss!!!"
They're being given a lot of support by local pro-refugee groups, I know at least that much. There's even a caravan today of volunteers offering to drive refugees to their destinations so they don't have to walk.
A lot of pro-refugee people are driven to be even more accommodating in order to counter what they see as the attacks from the anti-refugee side. The anti-refugee side makes them feel unwelcome, so they want to do more than they otherwise would to make them feel welcome.
Have you seen how Turkey treats them? Has Hungary exactly rolled out the red carpet? It should be obvious why they move on.
Europe needs a common policy to spread the load around on this issue. Heck, it needs such policies on a lot of issues.
There's already lots of people in Syria who want to fight both Daesh and Assad, but are poorly armed. If you want a military solution, why don't you start with actually arming them properly rather than involuntarily drafting refugees?
Absent, clearly.
Now are you saying that the west should strive to be moral equals of middle eastern despots?
I know it's common to blame the US for everything - and I'm generally no big fan myself. But the US just hasn't been a big player in this thing up until recently. And their local "dog in the game", the FSA, hasn't exactly had the largesse showered down on them. Here's a rough timeline:
ISIS and al-Nusra wouldn't be anywhere near as powerful as they are today had the US helped arm the FSA properly and early. But the US has been trying to avoid getting its hands dirty until the very last minute (for example, the Yazidi slaughter), and so these things happen.
The vast majority of the deaths in this conflict, according to international monitors, come from Assad, who's been using chemical weapons, barrel bombs on towns, long-range surface to surface missiles against cities, etc, as well as running a vast network of intelligence centers believed to have killed tens of thousands of prisoners. He has the air superiority and he's been using it. He also gets around one ship per week loaded with heavy arms from Russia and Iran - the former which has recently been reported to have significantly upped their local presence, building a base to handle over a thousand Russian soldiers. While Russia is reportedly planning to focus on Daesh, not the FSA, and the US isn't officially focusing on Assad, there's some serious potential for the two sides to butt up against each other, particularly as Daesh weakens.
Daesh, while gaining great notoriety for its efforts to publicize its brutal means of execution, its destruction of antiquities, its reestablishment of slavery (particularly sex slavery), and many other factors, nonetheless ranks a far second in the number of casualties caused. That said, it's obvious why the main international focus has been on them and the threat they present rather than on Assad.
What's the solution? Damned if I know. Way too many people have a dog in this game now. Russia thinks Assad is geopolitically too important to let go. Huge numbers of Syrians would rather die fighting than live under him - whether serving in secular or Islamist militias to try to bring him down. Daesh is the most powerful and wealthy of the militias, and this acts as a draw - not just locally, but for international fighters as well, even for those who don't give a rat's arse about Assad and just want to see a caliphate resurrected. The US, for obvious reasons, will never accept a super-well-funded and armed terrorist state establishing itself, and large numbers of people in the west aren't too keen on the c
Anagram for "Anal Ninja Snot"
Anagram for "A Ninja Logs NJ"
The ironically anagramed "Car case closes"
Perhaps if they had gotten out one of those Macbooks and used it, they could have watched cops episodes online, read about phone tracking, learned about the details of how police conduct investigations, and found advice on how not to be an awful liar.
Answer key:
1) No.
2) No.
3) No.
4) No.
"In other news, a truck full of 3d printers was stolen just outside of Salem, MA last night. Driver Anton Saljanin III reported that he had been hired to drive 1,195 Makerbot XPs, valued at over $1 million, from a vendor in Massachusetts to a pair of high schools in New Jersey. The day after picking them up, according to his report, the truck disappeared overnight while he slept. The truck was spotted again the subsequent day, abandoned in a parking lot, but its cargo was no longer present."
"Also on Police Beat today: a large shipment full of polyamide filament, copper pellets, capacitors, resistors, silicon wafers, lithography photoresist, and 530 other raw materials was reported stolen just outside of Boston this morning. Driver Gjon Saljanin III described to the police how he had been hired to drive the supplies to a pair of New Jersey high schools from their warehouse in Massachusetts..."
Almost all known asteroids and comets are vastly bigger than what you are envisioning. For example, here's the comet Rosetta is exploring.
V = Velocity
Delta = Change
Delta-V = Change in Velocity
Aka, from velocity X to velocity Y, the delta-V would be Y - X
Obviously the units of "Y - X" are going to be the same as the units for Y and X.
Thus delta-V has the same units as velocity.
Aka km/s or similar.
I can't even begin to imagine how one is going to have a hypervelocity anchor attach to a comet rather than just blowing it up, and how any anchor attached to a comet would withstand 5 Gs. Comets aren't exactly the most structurally sound of objects...
They're talking about the theoretical strength of SWNTs, which is upwards of 120GPa. But the highest ever measured SWNT strength, last I read, was around 60Ga - and that's the properties of individual tubes (ropes don't even approach it).
Whenever you're reading something and it mentions needing a "carbon nanotube tether", toss whatever you're reading in the "sci-fi" category. Not even the hard sci-fi category. And all for what - a ~6 year Pluto transit time? Lame.
Don't they have anything better to research?
Heck, even I can think of a more plausible approach than that - one that doesn't require unobtanium at least. Forget the "diamond anchor", land a microsat on it (approaching comet, not a retreating one). Yeah, that takes a lot of delta-V, but if it's just a microsatellite, then that's not a lot of mass. Then, forget about the "carbon nanotube tether"; use a space fountain between the large craft and the lander. Space fountains (such as paired coilguns, for example) are plausible with today's technology, requiring no unobtainium.
But the whole concept of delta-V from a comet is just not a worthwhile avenue to pursue either way. Way too much difficulty and mechanisms for failure for way too little reward.
Yes, there is. Even a flawless human eye couldn't resolve better than about 0,4 arcminutes.
20/20 vision is defined by the ability to resolve 1 arc minute. For example, the "E" on an eye doctor's chart on the 20/20 vision line is 5 arc minutes tall, as reading it takes the ability to break it down into five vertical glyphs and distingish between them. That page is based on the premise of a person being able to resolve 0,3 arc minutes.
Problem.
Also, see above. The human eye has a lot more limitations than just a simple single angular resolution figure can express. I even forgot to list one: time. Not only does motion greatly limit one's resolution ability, but even on a stationary image, the person has to be able to focus and take time in order to get even "normal" levels of visual acuity.
The maximum physically possible resolution for the human eye to see is 2190 dpi. But that's not an average eye, but rather a flawless eye limited only by the size of the pupil; and viewed from as close as an adult can focus, 4 inches.
If we downgrade from a perfect eye to an average eye, the resolution drops down to 876 dpi... but still at 4 inches.
At a more practical 12 inches, this drops to around 300 dpi. Which is why magazines are printed at 300 dpi - it's good enough for most practical circumstances.
Also note some additional limitations:
* These sort of resolution figures are based on the ability to distingish bright white lines from bright black lines without them blurring together into gray. The smaller the contrast and the dimmer the light, the less the eye can resolve.
* The human eye also loses a great deal of ability to make out resolution when objects are moving.
* Obviously the further away one is from the center of the field of view, the lower the resolution - with a rather fast dropoff.
Yes, 808 dpi is complete and total overkill, unless you've got superb eyes and are in the habit of holding your phone as close to them as you can focus while looking at high contrast stationary images.