RAID-1, you mean; RAID-0 is striping (hence 0 redundancy). And yes, anything even vaguely important should be on a RAID array in addition to backups. RAID doesn't help much when your controller freaks out or you hit a fs or user error.
Anybody who doubts this is not being sufficiently paranoid. Not only does RAID not help if your controller goes wonky or you accidentally 'rm -rf/some/directory/', but it also won't help a bit if an employee goes postal and blows up your server with dynamite, or if your building gets hit by a meteor.
I seem to recall similar statements coming down from On High during the Myth 2 development process, but in the end, Myth 2 sucked and didn't hold a candle to the original. Let's hope Halo 2 doesn't follow the same fate.
That's an excellent point. I'd like to add that, while we laugh at crazy gunpowder-and-wing schemes to go to the moon, we don't laugh at the true high technology of the time. Things like sailing ships and buildings from that time period still get healthy respect from people now.
"OS X makes things so much easier than PCs, see example X."
"X is just as easy on PCs as on Macs, as long as you know which program to use, buy and install said program, and know how to use it."
The whole point is that the Mac Just Works. Stick a CDR in the drive, drag your files over, burn the CD, and you're done. Coming up with a "simple" nine-step process that does the same thing as the two-step process on the Mac is actually proving the Mac-head's point.
Right, but you see, in the USA, you only need papers if you're going to travel by airline, train, or car. There are still many legitimate means of travel that do not require papers, including the all-American Greyhound bus, bicycles, and hitchhiking. So, of course, we are not like Soviet Russia at all.
In either case, primates aren't discovered every day
I discover primates every day! Why, just today, I discovered a bus full of them. They made incessant noises and smelled funny, but they were indisputably primates. However, when I tried to mimic one of their mating rituals, I was physically assaulted, a very disappointing turn of events for science.
Where did you go in China? I've had pretty much the same experience as you during my visits in Beijing, but it appears that China's filtering policies differ depending on which parts of the country you're in. Also, the filtering isn't as extensive as the more paranoid would suggest; they won't filter things like CNN, but they will filter things which are specifically targeted at China, like sites advocating better human rights there, etc., which people like you and I are probably not very likely to try while we're there.
The Wikipedia article is interesting, and has links to further information.
It is slightly risky, though, since if they catch the person who actually made the site then they will put him in prison for the rest of his life. It doesn't really seem worth it.
Forcing porn to go underground (anybody who thinks that outlawing it is going to stop it needs to be less naive) will certainly improve conditions for porn industry workers, in much the same way that forbidding drugs and prostitution has made life so much better for junkies and whores. Making it so a porn actress can't go to the police when something happens will certainly make her life so much better.
You're a little too confident in our government's abilities, I think.
I may be wrong about this, but as far as I know, the first time anybody in power realized these men were dangerous is when they started going through passenger lists and security camera footage in the hours and days after the WTC towers had become one big smoking hole in the ground. Checking them against a watch list which didn't contain their names wouldn't have really helped.
I'm genuinely curious. I don't believe for a million years that the Kerry crowd is going to tighten up borders or anything substantive like that after they revoke Patriot Act stuff, so what exactly do they intend to do?
Hopefully they won't do anything.
I'm 100% serious. Nothing that has been done since the fall of 2001 has done anything to make me even vaguely safer, and my life is now a lot more inconvenient. Thanks to people with attitudes like yours, I now get patted down for not taking off my shoes in an airport, I have to get there at least two hours ahead of time to be sure of making it through all of the useless security checks on time, and my fiancee gets fingerprinted as though she were being arrested for a crime every time she comes into the US.
Tell me, why should we do anything? In particular, why should we do stupid things just because we can't think of anything smart?
Oh, and by the way, don't think for a moment that the "Kerry crowd" will do away with the Patriot Act or do anything else to undo the mistakes of the last four years. People like me are voting for him because he's the lesser of two evils, not because he'll actually do anything that might be a good idea.
Because, of course, it would be impossible to take the techniques that people are using to sniff people's address books over Bluetooth from two miles away and create an RFID reader that works from a couple of hundred feet down the highway.
Faraday cages have to be grounded to keep signals that are inside from getting out. They don't have to be grounded to keep signals that are outside from getting in.
Find an industry that has no industry-specific government regulation. Start selling a product that is manifestly unsafe. It kills 90% of the people who don't follow your manual to the letter, something like that. Then, when the police knock on your door to haul your ass off to jail, tell them "You have no cause to arrest me, this industry isn't regulated!" Time how long they laugh using a stopwatch, and report back.
Aside from the safety concerns above the craft, there are also major concerns for those around a launch site and for the enviorment in general. Rocket fuel is really nasty stuff.
Most rocket fuel is not. Space shuttles use what is basically a giant sparkler for the boosters, and boring liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the main engines. Not very nasty at all. SpaceShipOne uses tire rubber and laughing gas.
I remember the warnings after Columbia went bang sent out to people informing them that getting near peices of the reckage could be very hazerdous for their health.
You are not nearly cynical enough. 99% of the reasong those warnings were made was to keep people from walking off with evidence by injecting them with fear.
The remaining 1% is probably due to the nasty hypergolic fuels used for reaction thrusters and the like. This is not a huge concern, because the quantities are small, but it does exist.
What happens when one of the crafts goes bang over some city or populated area?
Same as what happens when an airliner crashes and burns over a populated area; horrible publicity, gigantic lawsuits, huge reparations. (Have you noticed that having a giant bureaucracy in place doesn't prevent the occasional airliner from crashing into a city?)
And what is to stop them from taking off on the outskirts of populated areas to begin with?
The fact that launch sites are already heavily regulated? The fact that anything that gets to space will go through FAA-controlled airspace first, and so allows the FAA to keep people from doing stupid things like launching big rockets from city parks? The fact that people would sue them into oblivion for even announcing plans?
Sure they arn't now, but no regulations exist on the books to ensure that they don't.
I really, really, really doubt that. The various licences that Scaled Composites obtained made headlines almost as large as their flights did. I doubt it would have been such a big deal if those licenses weren't necessary.
All this will do is make it so that you will have to go through the mountains of paperwork needed for FAA clearance and another mountain of paperwork needed for clearance from this other regulatory body. And instead of a bloated, unfriendly government agency being able to veto your flight, you will have two bloated, unfriendly agencies and a "no" from either one will sink your venture.
Incredibly insightful posts. Thanks for the history and geopolitics lesson.
Thanks for the compliment. I don't know how much I deserve it, as I'm basically just going by memory with a little help from the World Factbook. In case anybody isn't already, take everything I'm saying wiht a grain of salt.
Some questions and some thoughts.
Questions: Is Beijing in range of North Korea's missiles?
Beijing is a couple of hours by airliner to the west of North Korea. Although the missiles probably aren't aimed in that direction, if we're beginning to talk of a credible threat to parts of the continental US, then all of China would be within range.
How effective would bombing southern missile emplacements be? A missile attack on Seoul really only becomes mass death if: a) there are a lot of them and/or b) their combined effect is great (i.e. firebombing, etc.)
The threat against Seoul isn't missiles, it's artillery. Seoul is very close to the DMZ, and it's within range of thousands of North Korean artillery emplacements. I've seen estimates that the North could put 100,000 shells an hour into Seoul during the opening hours or days of a war. Taking them out preemptively isn't really workable, because artillery is numerous, small, and hard to destroy.
I thought I read something about a North Korea-Pakistan link. Have you heard anything about this?
I believe there has been some exchange going on involving nuclear weapons systems. Possibly North Korean missile technology in exchange for Pakistani warhead knowhow.
Thoughts: This seems to be yet another example of a two-bit dictatorship that came as a result of rapid disengagement by the world's superpowers (USSR/Russia, USA, China). It's amazing how well running a country as a military outpost and then leaving abruptly works to foment hatred and dangerous regimes.
I think this happens because they were always dangerous, but formerly under control. Now there is no control. (This goes for North Korea, Iraq, bin Laden, you name it.)
To my armchair international negotiator's brain it seems that the only road is to help create a legitimate political alternative to Kim Jong Il. N. Korea/S. Korea is like Isreal/Palestine to me in that there is really only one endgame, and that's a single state. Fortunately, the S. Koreans are apparently all for this (not so sure it'll pan out like they hope when millions of starving, illiterate, brainwashed peasants coming storming down looking for jobs in Samsung's HDTV plants).
You're probably right. I can't think of another country that was forcibly divided by outsiders and then stayed separated for so long. I'm sure somebody will remind me of some.
[snip] Yes, the approach is long and fraught with difficulty, but it can actually work. Countries like Poland, Mexico, India have all worked their way back from dictaorships to more or less functioning democracies. Given how paranoid Kim Jong Il is, and the current disarray of the US diplomacy, not to mention HUMINT, this is a decade-long project (which, as you note, makes it very hard for any one politician to own it). It is also one where the likelihood of being hornswaggled by an Ahmed Chalabi-type character is just as high as in Iraq and the stakes are 100 times as high. But it does have potential to bring real stability.
The problem is that there is no incentive for the leadership to change, and as far as I know, no organized political opposition to the leadership. North Korea is, from what we hear, as close to a one-party state without opposition as has ever existed. (The reality may be different, as there is little information flow in or out that isn't controlled by their government.) One day the people may well rise up and take back control of their destinies, but it won't be soon. A decade seems highly optimistic; half a century might be workable.
Again, I don't mean to put the suggestion down. It's a lovely idea, and I'd love for it to work.
Thank you for such a greast write up - it puts it into perspective. It is obvious what caused the political emnity between N&S, and following this, the populace see the N/S divide continuously.
This still doesn't say what the North wants...
To rule the south? to stop people looking at it like it is a crazy homicidal country?
They are fearful (my $20 says rightfully so) that world politics is scheming to take it down. This breeds more fear and war rhetoric, which breeds more scheming.
I think you have it pretty much right. What they want, at least in the near term, is to survive. They believe their survival is threatened. It may be so. Which one happened first is irrelevant at this stage; the situation is unstable and can't go back to how it was by just having one side back down. When you believe that your enemy will do anything to beat you, you will not believe the evidence when your enemy backs down.
I think the North and South need to become one. How to happen?
Consider the pain that Germany went through during reunification. The difference in the economies of the two sides made things very difficult, and East Germany was one of the most advanced economies on the Eastern side of things. East Germany was incredibly rich compared to North Korea.
One of the North's biggest international supporters, in terms of money and whatnot, is actually South Korea. They support the North because they fear collapse or reunification even more than the existence of their crazy neighbor.
First, if you tell the north this, they will let off all thier nukes thinking you are poised to crush them all out of history.
They are cornered really.
I agree 100%.
We need, as a global community, to voice support for north korea in all actions that are peace related.
I think this happens already, it's just that they do so little. When they apologized for kidnapping various Japanese people last year, everybody gave them a big pat on the back. Then they ruined it by announcing that they had, in fact, not followed the terms of the 1994 agreement and had an active nuclear weapons program.
Then we can remove barriers.
Political... we need to get thier political government to realise that they cannot be at war, but to give them a 4 year governance of the north 'district' or new korea.
When they realise this position removes all need for them to worry about food, education and jobs in north korea, and they get a nice car and house, they will comply.
Then they get phased out by elected officials - politics can do in 10 minutes what it would take 6 months of bloody combat to do.
or undo.
This sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Power is not acquired because of the creature comforts that come with it. People don't want to rule a country because the job comes with a nice house and it guarantees that their kids have enough food. Power is not a means to an end, it is an end in and of itself. Somebody who has risen to the top of a Stalinist totalitarian system will not give up that position willingly, no matter what happens.
These people will go down figting if they go down at all. Given the alternative between being being found in a hole in the ground by US soldiers after being overrun, and being set up with a nice house and a luxury car in the countryside, many people will legitimately choose the former. But even rational people will eventually come to the same decision. In order to protect your position from outside invasion, you must threaten a long and bloody resistance. Your threat has to be credible, meaning that you're pretty much forced to carry it out if it ever comes to that.
The same thing goes for people who keep pointing out that using nuclear weapons would be suicidal. That's true, but it doesn't preclude their use. The use for the weapons is as a threat, but in order for the threat to work, it has to be a credible threat.
That's entirely legitimate. Motive, means, and opportunity.
Means I already discussed.
Opportunity is there every day. It's just one order to send their army rushing across the DMZ into South Korea, start producing nukes, or launch those nukes at the US.
That brings us to motive. As you recognize, that's the most complicated piece of the whole thing. I don't entirely understand this part, but I'll do my best.
Korea's history in the 20th century isn't very happy. It spent most of the first half of the century under Japanese occupation. The Japanese were not known as particularly friendly occupiers (this is putting it much nicer than it should be). As the Second World War came to a close, Korea got liberated from two directions at once, with the US coming in from the south, and the USSR coming in from the north. Just as in Germany, the two sides immediately set up governments that were loyal to them. Of course, the US claimed that South Korea was an independent ally, and North Korea was a puppet to the Russians. The USSR claimed the opposite. Presumably the truth was in between.
Anyway, to cut the story short, war happened, with each side getting lots of assistance (and presumably more than a few orders) from their superpower allies. Each side saw the other side's system as fundamentally evil, and something that had to be stopped, but pragmatically there was nothing more to do. Like in Germany, the two sides were forced to deal with each other. Unlike Germany, the two sides had spent years fighting each other in war, and relations were much colder. The two Germanies kept reasonably close all through the Cold War, but the two Koreas were (and still are) separated by the most heavily fortified border on the planet, just waiting for somebody to twitch and start another war.
Fast forward a few decades, to the 90s. Communism collapses or transforms worldwide. By 1992, the remaining countries that are still actually Communist (and not just calling themselves that) have dwindled to, basically, Cuba and North Korea. North Korea's two big traditional allies, Russia and China, have basically converted to the other side and are busily making friends with the West. China is still Communist in name, and still making friendly gestures to North Korea, but nothing significant.
Motive for the leaders depends on whether you think they are idealistic or pragmatic. If they're idealistic, then North Korea is pretty much the last bastion in the world for Communism. The Imperialist Capitalists have conquered pretty much the rest of the planet. If they're pragmatic, it's almost the same, just with a cynical touch; the entire power structure depends on the rigid Communist system. They fear, rightly or not, that reforms will destroy their government.
Motive for the people is simpler, since they hear what their government wants them to hear. The fact that the US has had troops in South Korea for over fifty years doesn't help. Never mind that it's not an occupying force; government propaganda excels at twisting the truth in subtle ways.
The three disaster scenarios are collapse, conventional attack, and nuclear attack. Collapse doesn't need a motive, of course, since it wouldn't be intentional. Both attack scenarios share a motive; they provide hostages to secure the country's safety (the inhabitants of Seoul for the conventional attack, the inhabitants of Seattle or San Francisco for the nuclear option). Conventional attack has another potential motive, which is conquering/liberating the South. Take the fact that diplomatic communications with North Korea are almost nil, combine it with the fact that the North's leaders are incredibly paranoid, and you have a situation which is ripe for misunderstandings. MAD only works well when both sides are rational and communicating with each other. It is entirely conceivable that a move which we think is non-threatening could be interpreted as something which needs a response.
Actually, joking aside, the US is more interested in bombing the shit out of North Korea than making any gestures of help for these people.
Do you have any suggestions? The international community would be very happy to hear it if you actually came up with something workable.
The problem is that North Korea is both dangerous and oppressive on a scale that makes Iraq look like Luxembourg by comparison. While Iraq's people were somewhat poor and rather oppressed, North Korea is systematically crushing, murdering, and starving its people. It is more or less the crushing poverty and famine you would think typical of Ethopia with a government so tyrannical and powerful that it would make Stalin proud. The whole thing is run by nutjobs who are so into the cult of personality that the current President has been dead for over ten years and they still can't stand to remove him from the office.
Despite having an economy that is smaller than a medium-sized American city, and being full of starving people, this country has one of the largest and most powerful armies in the world. This is accomplished by spending almost one quarter of their entire GDP (note: not budget, but GDP) on the military. By contrast, the US spends about 3.3% of its GDP on its military.
North Korea is many things Iraq was not. It is genuinely, horribly oppressive. (Iraq's regime was evil, but not any more evil than dozens of other countries.) It has an actual, credible military threat to our allies in the region. (Seoul would be more or less flat within hours of the beginning of a war.) It has a great possibility of making life very difficult for any invaders, because of its gigantic army, the fact that the terrain is incredibly mountainous, and its people have been trained from birth to believe that their government is all that stands between them and a world bent on turning them into slaves. North Korea is also a pariah in the international community in a way that Iraq never was. The only country that even pretends to be friendly with them is China, and they only do it because it's a bad idea to piss off an army of a million fanatics sitting on your doorstep.
Oh, did I mention that this delightful place either has nuclear weapons or could produce them within a year if they so chose? Did I also mention that they have ballistic missiles with enough range to hit some targets on the west coast of the US? Another thing that's different from Iraq; they actually have WMD, and their leader is probably crazy enough to consider using them even if it meant the certain death of himself and 99% of his people.
Sending food, money, or anything else will not help these people. The North Koreans are suffering not because of abject poverty or famine, but because their government is totally insane. The poverty and famine is just a side effect.
The current plan seems to boil down to saying "nice doggy" and hoping that something changes. Leaving things as they are is not really acceptable, given that they will only increase their capacity to do murder and mayhem in the world at large. Invasion is pretty much out of the question, given the difficulty of protecting our allies in the region and the difficulty of actually winning. Engineering a collapse is out of the question for similar reasons; the only thing worse than having a million-man army lead by total wackos on your doorstep is having a the remnants of a million-man fanatical army suddenly stripped of its leadership and left to fend for itself, not to mention the nuclear weapons factor.
If you can come up with some kind of plan to help out, that would be great. The current worldwide consensus seems to be "pretend that there really isn't a problem, and hope that I'm out of office by the time it reaches the crisis point."
And despite a few tragic "early terminated" missions, its safety record is extremely high, especially compared to its competition.
Can you provide the figures you're using? I recall that NASA is averaging around a 1% fatality rate right now. The only competition with any record, the Russian program, is also at around 1%. The Chinese haven't done enough to count yet. Assuming I'm not totally off base, how does a 1% fatality rate, the same as the Russians', qualify as "extremely high, especially compared to its competition"?
His point was that all those guys are on the level of the guy in the balloon chair, not that they didn't exist. Only Scaled Composites was a serious contender.
I can't tell if you actually believe that or if you're just trying to show what he believes. Just in case it's the former; at the very least, the Da Vinci team is very close to making a serious attempt. They were going to launch this week, but were forced to delay. They may yet make a flight that would qualify for the X-Prize, if it hadn't been won first, by the end of the year.
Armadillo was also theoretically capable of putting something up by year's end (IIRC Carmack spoke of making a hurried attempt at it if Rutan's project crashed and burned), although that seems to be getting less realistic by the minute.
I'm sure that some of the others on that list were at least halfway serious as well.
Think harder. Today's launch was SpaceShipOne's third. Its first flight was in June, and there was more than three months of time during which somebody else could have had a launch.
Slashdot Mirror
Over thirty comments in and I'm downloading at almost 40k/sec (my connection tops out at 60). I'd say they can probably handle it.
RAID-1, you mean; RAID-0 is striping (hence 0 redundancy). And yes, anything even vaguely important should be on a RAID array in addition to backups. RAID doesn't help much when your controller freaks out or you hit a fs or user error.
/some/directory /', but it also won't help a bit if an employee goes postal and blows up your server with dynamite, or if your building gets hit by a meteor.
Anybody who doubts this is not being sufficiently paranoid. Not only does RAID not help if your controller goes wonky or you accidentally 'rm -rf
I seem to recall similar statements coming down from On High during the Myth 2 development process, but in the end, Myth 2 sucked and didn't hold a candle to the original. Let's hope Halo 2 doesn't follow the same fate.
That's an excellent point. I'd like to add that, while we laugh at crazy gunpowder-and-wing schemes to go to the moon, we don't laugh at the true high technology of the time. Things like sailing ships and buildings from that time period still get healthy respect from people now.
This is classic PC user blindness.
"OS X makes things so much easier than PCs, see example X."
"X is just as easy on PCs as on Macs, as long as you know which program to use, buy and install said program, and know how to use it."
The whole point is that the Mac Just Works. Stick a CDR in the drive, drag your files over, burn the CD, and you're done. Coming up with a "simple" nine-step process that does the same thing as the two-step process on the Mac is actually proving the Mac-head's point.
Right, but you see, in the USA, you only need papers if you're going to travel by airline, train, or car. There are still many legitimate means of travel that do not require papers, including the all-American Greyhound bus, bicycles, and hitchhiking. So, of course, we are not like Soviet Russia at all.
In either case, primates aren't discovered every day
I discover primates every day! Why, just today, I discovered a bus full of them. They made incessant noises and smelled funny, but they were indisputably primates. However, when I tried to mimic one of their mating rituals, I was physically assaulted, a very disappointing turn of events for science.
Where did you go in China? I've had pretty much the same experience as you during my visits in Beijing, but it appears that China's filtering policies differ depending on which parts of the country you're in. Also, the filtering isn't as extensive as the more paranoid would suggest; they won't filter things like CNN, but they will filter things which are specifically targeted at China, like sites advocating better human rights there, etc., which people like you and I are probably not very likely to try while we're there.
The Wikipedia article is interesting, and has links to further information.
It is slightly risky, though, since if they catch the person who actually made the site then they will put him in prison for the rest of his life. It doesn't really seem worth it.
Forcing porn to go underground (anybody who thinks that outlawing it is going to stop it needs to be less naive) will certainly improve conditions for porn industry workers, in much the same way that forbidding drugs and prostitution has made life so much better for junkies and whores. Making it so a porn actress can't go to the police when something happens will certainly make her life so much better.
You're a little too confident in our government's abilities, I think.
I may be wrong about this, but as far as I know, the first time anybody in power realized these men were dangerous is when they started going through passenger lists and security camera footage in the hours and days after the WTC towers had become one big smoking hole in the ground. Checking them against a watch list which didn't contain their names wouldn't have really helped.
I'm genuinely curious. I don't believe for a million years that the Kerry crowd is going to tighten up borders or anything substantive like that after they revoke Patriot Act stuff, so what exactly do they intend to do?
Hopefully they won't do anything.
I'm 100% serious. Nothing that has been done since the fall of 2001 has done anything to make me even vaguely safer, and my life is now a lot more inconvenient. Thanks to people with attitudes like yours, I now get patted down for not taking off my shoes in an airport, I have to get there at least two hours ahead of time to be sure of making it through all of the useless security checks on time, and my fiancee gets fingerprinted as though she were being arrested for a crime every time she comes into the US.
Tell me, why should we do anything? In particular, why should we do stupid things just because we can't think of anything smart?
Oh, and by the way, don't think for a moment that the "Kerry crowd" will do away with the Patriot Act or do anything else to undo the mistakes of the last four years. People like me are voting for him because he's the lesser of two evils, not because he'll actually do anything that might be a good idea.
Because, of course, it would be impossible to take the techniques that people are using to sniff people's address books over Bluetooth from two miles away and create an RFID reader that works from a couple of hundred feet down the highway.
Faraday cages have to be grounded to keep signals that are inside from getting out. They don't have to be grounded to keep signals that are outside from getting in.
I'd like you to try something:
Find an industry that has no industry-specific government regulation. Start selling a product that is manifestly unsafe. It kills 90% of the people who don't follow your manual to the letter, something like that. Then, when the police knock on your door to haul your ass off to jail, tell them "You have no cause to arrest me, this industry isn't regulated!" Time how long they laugh using a stopwatch, and report back.
Aside from the safety concerns above the craft, there are also major concerns for those around a launch site and for the enviorment in general. Rocket fuel is really nasty stuff.
Most rocket fuel is not. Space shuttles use what is basically a giant sparkler for the boosters, and boring liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the main engines. Not very nasty at all. SpaceShipOne uses tire rubber and laughing gas.
I remember the warnings after Columbia went bang sent out to people informing them that getting near peices of the reckage could be very hazerdous for their health.
You are not nearly cynical enough. 99% of the reasong those warnings were made was to keep people from walking off with evidence by injecting them with fear.
The remaining 1% is probably due to the nasty hypergolic fuels used for reaction thrusters and the like. This is not a huge concern, because the quantities are small, but it does exist.
What happens when one of the crafts goes bang over some city or populated area?
Same as what happens when an airliner crashes and burns over a populated area; horrible publicity, gigantic lawsuits, huge reparations. (Have you noticed that having a giant bureaucracy in place doesn't prevent the occasional airliner from crashing into a city?)
And what is to stop them from taking off on the outskirts of populated areas to begin with?
The fact that launch sites are already heavily regulated? The fact that anything that gets to space will go through FAA-controlled airspace first, and so allows the FAA to keep people from doing stupid things like launching big rockets from city parks? The fact that people would sue them into oblivion for even announcing plans?
Sure they arn't now, but no regulations exist on the books to ensure that they don't.
I really, really, really doubt that. The various licences that Scaled Composites obtained made headlines almost as large as their flights did. I doubt it would have been such a big deal if those licenses weren't necessary.
All this will do is make it so that you will have to go through the mountains of paperwork needed for FAA clearance and another mountain of paperwork needed for clearance from this other regulatory body. And instead of a bloated, unfriendly government agency being able to veto your flight, you will have two bloated, unfriendly agencies and a "no" from either one will sink your venture.
Incredibly insightful posts. Thanks for the history and geopolitics lesson.
Thanks for the compliment. I don't know how much I deserve it, as I'm basically just going by memory with a little help from the World Factbook. In case anybody isn't already, take everything I'm saying wiht a grain of salt.
Some questions and some thoughts.
Questions:
Is Beijing in range of North Korea's missiles?
Beijing is a couple of hours by airliner to the west of North Korea. Although the missiles probably aren't aimed in that direction, if we're beginning to talk of a credible threat to parts of the continental US, then all of China would be within range.
How effective would bombing southern missile emplacements be? A missile attack on Seoul really only becomes mass death if:
a) there are a lot of them
and/or
b) their combined effect is great (i.e. firebombing, etc.)
The threat against Seoul isn't missiles, it's artillery. Seoul is very close to the DMZ, and it's within range of thousands of North Korean artillery emplacements. I've seen estimates that the North could put 100,000 shells an hour into Seoul during the opening hours or days of a war. Taking them out preemptively isn't really workable, because artillery is numerous, small, and hard to destroy.
I thought I read something about a North Korea-Pakistan link. Have you heard anything about this?
I believe there has been some exchange going on involving nuclear weapons systems. Possibly North Korean missile technology in exchange for Pakistani warhead knowhow.
Thoughts:
This seems to be yet another example of a two-bit dictatorship that came as a result of rapid disengagement by the world's superpowers (USSR/Russia, USA, China). It's amazing how well running a country as a military outpost and then leaving abruptly works to foment hatred and dangerous regimes.
I think this happens because they were always dangerous, but formerly under control. Now there is no control. (This goes for North Korea, Iraq, bin Laden, you name it.)
To my armchair international negotiator's brain it seems that the only road is to help create a legitimate political alternative to Kim Jong Il.
N. Korea/S. Korea is like Isreal/Palestine to me in that there is really only one endgame, and that's a single state. Fortunately, the S. Koreans are apparently all for this (not so sure it'll pan out like they hope when millions of starving, illiterate, brainwashed peasants coming storming down looking for jobs in Samsung's HDTV plants).
You're probably right. I can't think of another country that was forcibly divided by outsiders and then stayed separated for so long. I'm sure somebody will remind me of some.
[snip] Yes, the approach is long and fraught with difficulty, but it can actually work. Countries like Poland, Mexico, India have all worked their way back from dictaorships to more or less functioning democracies. Given how paranoid Kim Jong Il is, and the current disarray of the US diplomacy, not to mention HUMINT, this is a decade-long project (which, as you note, makes it very hard for any one politician to own it). It is also one where the likelihood of being hornswaggled by an Ahmed Chalabi-type character is just as high as in Iraq and the stakes are 100 times as high. But it does have potential to bring real stability.
The problem is that there is no incentive for the leadership to change, and as far as I know, no organized political opposition to the leadership. North Korea is, from what we hear, as close to a one-party state without opposition as has ever existed. (The reality may be different, as there is little information flow in or out that isn't controlled by their government.) One day the people may well rise up and take back control of their destinies, but it won't be soon. A decade seems highly optimistic; half a century might be workable.
Again, I don't mean to put the suggestion down. It's a lovely idea, and I'd love for it to work.
Thank you for such a greast write up - it puts it into perspective. It is obvious what caused the political emnity between N&S, and following this, the populace see the N/S divide continuously.
This still doesn't say what the North wants...
To rule the south? to stop people looking at it like it is a crazy homicidal country?
They are fearful (my $20 says rightfully so) that world politics is scheming to take it down. This breeds more fear and war rhetoric, which breeds more scheming.
I think you have it pretty much right. What they want, at least in the near term, is to survive. They believe their survival is threatened. It may be so. Which one happened first is irrelevant at this stage; the situation is unstable and can't go back to how it was by just having one side back down. When you believe that your enemy will do anything to beat you, you will not believe the evidence when your enemy backs down.
I think the North and South need to become one. How to happen?
Consider the pain that Germany went through during reunification. The difference in the economies of the two sides made things very difficult, and East Germany was one of the most advanced economies on the Eastern side of things. East Germany was incredibly rich compared to North Korea.
One of the North's biggest international supporters, in terms of money and whatnot, is actually South Korea. They support the North because they fear collapse or reunification even more than the existence of their crazy neighbor.
First, if you tell the north this, they will let off all thier nukes thinking you are poised to crush them all out of history.
They are cornered really.
I agree 100%.
We need, as a global community, to voice support for north korea in all actions that are peace related.
I think this happens already, it's just that they do so little. When they apologized for kidnapping various Japanese people last year, everybody gave them a big pat on the back. Then they ruined it by announcing that they had, in fact, not followed the terms of the 1994 agreement and had an active nuclear weapons program.
Then we can remove barriers.
Political... we need to get thier political government to realise that they cannot be at war, but to give them a 4 year governance of the north 'district' or new korea.
When they realise this position removes all need for them to worry about food, education and jobs in north korea, and they get a nice car and house, they will comply.
Then they get phased out by elected officials - politics can do in 10 minutes what it would take 6 months of bloody combat to do.
or undo.
This sounds pretty ridiculous to me. Power is not acquired because of the creature comforts that come with it. People don't want to rule a country because the job comes with a nice house and it guarantees that their kids have enough food. Power is not a means to an end, it is an end in and of itself. Somebody who has risen to the top of a Stalinist totalitarian system will not give up that position willingly, no matter what happens.
These people will go down figting if they go down at all. Given the alternative between being being found in a hole in the ground by US soldiers after being overrun, and being set up with a nice house and a luxury car in the countryside, many people will legitimately choose the former. But even rational people will eventually come to the same decision. In order to protect your position from outside invasion, you must threaten a long and bloody resistance. Your threat has to be credible, meaning that you're pretty much forced to carry it out if it ever comes to that.
The same thing goes for people who keep pointing out that using nuclear weapons would be suicidal. That's true, but it doesn't preclude their use. The use for the weapons is as a threat, but in order for the threat to work, it has to be a credible threat.
Now, I'd say no
That's entirely legitimate. Motive, means, and opportunity.
Means I already discussed.
Opportunity is there every day. It's just one order to send their army rushing across the DMZ into South Korea, start producing nukes, or launch those nukes at the US.
That brings us to motive. As you recognize, that's the most complicated piece of the whole thing. I don't entirely understand this part, but I'll do my best.
Korea's history in the 20th century isn't very happy. It spent most of the first half of the century under Japanese occupation. The Japanese were not known as particularly friendly occupiers (this is putting it much nicer than it should be). As the Second World War came to a close, Korea got liberated from two directions at once, with the US coming in from the south, and the USSR coming in from the north. Just as in Germany, the two sides immediately set up governments that were loyal to them. Of course, the US claimed that South Korea was an independent ally, and North Korea was a puppet to the Russians. The USSR claimed the opposite. Presumably the truth was in between.
Anyway, to cut the story short, war happened, with each side getting lots of assistance (and presumably more than a few orders) from their superpower allies. Each side saw the other side's system as fundamentally evil, and something that had to be stopped, but pragmatically there was nothing more to do. Like in Germany, the two sides were forced to deal with each other. Unlike Germany, the two sides had spent years fighting each other in war, and relations were much colder. The two Germanies kept reasonably close all through the Cold War, but the two Koreas were (and still are) separated by the most heavily fortified border on the planet, just waiting for somebody to twitch and start another war.
Fast forward a few decades, to the 90s. Communism collapses or transforms worldwide. By 1992, the remaining countries that are still actually Communist (and not just calling themselves that) have dwindled to, basically, Cuba and North Korea. North Korea's two big traditional allies, Russia and China, have basically converted to the other side and are busily making friends with the West. China is still Communist in name, and still making friendly gestures to North Korea, but nothing significant.
Motive for the leaders depends on whether you think they are idealistic or pragmatic. If they're idealistic, then North Korea is pretty much the last bastion in the world for Communism. The Imperialist Capitalists have conquered pretty much the rest of the planet. If they're pragmatic, it's almost the same, just with a cynical touch; the entire power structure depends on the rigid Communist system. They fear, rightly or not, that reforms will destroy their government.
Motive for the people is simpler, since they hear what their government wants them to hear. The fact that the US has had troops in South Korea for over fifty years doesn't help. Never mind that it's not an occupying force; government propaganda excels at twisting the truth in subtle ways.
The three disaster scenarios are collapse, conventional attack, and nuclear attack. Collapse doesn't need a motive, of course, since it wouldn't be intentional. Both attack scenarios share a motive; they provide hostages to secure the country's safety (the inhabitants of Seoul for the conventional attack, the inhabitants of Seattle or San Francisco for the nuclear option). Conventional attack has another potential motive, which is conquering/liberating the South. Take the fact that diplomatic communications with North Korea are almost nil, combine it with the fact that the North's leaders are incredibly paranoid, and you have a situation which is ripe for misunderstandings. MAD only works well when both sides are rational and communicating with each other. It is entirely conceivable that a move which we think is non-threatening could be interpreted as something which needs a response.
Actually, joking aside, the US is more interested in bombing the shit out of North Korea than making any gestures of help for these people.
Do you have any suggestions? The international community would be very happy to hear it if you actually came up with something workable.
The problem is that North Korea is both dangerous and oppressive on a scale that makes Iraq look like Luxembourg by comparison. While Iraq's people were somewhat poor and rather oppressed, North Korea is systematically crushing, murdering, and starving its people. It is more or less the crushing poverty and famine you would think typical of Ethopia with a government so tyrannical and powerful that it would make Stalin proud. The whole thing is run by nutjobs who are so into the cult of personality that the current President has been dead for over ten years and they still can't stand to remove him from the office.
Despite having an economy that is smaller than a medium-sized American city, and being full of starving people, this country has one of the largest and most powerful armies in the world. This is accomplished by spending almost one quarter of their entire GDP (note: not budget, but GDP) on the military. By contrast, the US spends about 3.3% of its GDP on its military.
North Korea is many things Iraq was not. It is genuinely, horribly oppressive. (Iraq's regime was evil, but not any more evil than dozens of other countries.) It has an actual, credible military threat to our allies in the region. (Seoul would be more or less flat within hours of the beginning of a war.) It has a great possibility of making life very difficult for any invaders, because of its gigantic army, the fact that the terrain is incredibly mountainous, and its people have been trained from birth to believe that their government is all that stands between them and a world bent on turning them into slaves. North Korea is also a pariah in the international community in a way that Iraq never was. The only country that even pretends to be friendly with them is China, and they only do it because it's a bad idea to piss off an army of a million fanatics sitting on your doorstep.
Oh, did I mention that this delightful place either has nuclear weapons or could produce them within a year if they so chose? Did I also mention that they have ballistic missiles with enough range to hit some targets on the west coast of the US? Another thing that's different from Iraq; they actually have WMD, and their leader is probably crazy enough to consider using them even if it meant the certain death of himself and 99% of his people.
Sending food, money, or anything else will not help these people. The North Koreans are suffering not because of abject poverty or famine, but because their government is totally insane. The poverty and famine is just a side effect.
The current plan seems to boil down to saying "nice doggy" and hoping that something changes. Leaving things as they are is not really acceptable, given that they will only increase their capacity to do murder and mayhem in the world at large. Invasion is pretty much out of the question, given the difficulty of protecting our allies in the region and the difficulty of actually winning. Engineering a collapse is out of the question for similar reasons; the only thing worse than having a million-man army lead by total wackos on your doorstep is having a the remnants of a million-man fanatical army suddenly stripped of its leadership and left to fend for itself, not to mention the nuclear weapons factor.
If you can come up with some kind of plan to help out, that would be great. The current worldwide consensus seems to be "pretend that there really isn't a problem, and hope that I'm out of office by the time it reaches the crisis point."
Probably. Given the context, I assumed you were talking about manned launches only. In that case, I guess we really agree after all.
And despite a few tragic "early terminated" missions, its safety record is extremely high, especially compared to its competition.
Can you provide the figures you're using? I recall that NASA is averaging around a 1% fatality rate right now. The only competition with any record, the Russian program, is also at around 1%. The Chinese haven't done enough to count yet. Assuming I'm not totally off base, how does a 1% fatality rate, the same as the Russians', qualify as "extremely high, especially compared to its competition"?
His point was that all those guys are on the level of the guy in the balloon chair, not that they didn't exist. Only Scaled Composites was a serious contender.
I can't tell if you actually believe that or if you're just trying to show what he believes. Just in case it's the former; at the very least, the Da Vinci team is very close to making a serious attempt. They were going to launch this week, but were forced to delay. They may yet make a flight that would qualify for the X-Prize, if it hadn't been won first, by the end of the year.
Armadillo was also theoretically capable of putting something up by year's end (IIRC Carmack spoke of making a hurried attempt at it if Rutan's project crashed and burned), although that seems to be getting less realistic by the minute.
I'm sure that some of the others on that list were at least halfway serious as well.
Think harder. Today's launch was SpaceShipOne's third. Its first flight was in June, and there was more than three months of time during which somebody else could have had a launch.
Maybe the category (the foot means "humor") will help you understand.