Depends on how you want to interpret it, I suppose. Karl Marx invented the meme (Televison hadn't been invented yet, but Religion had), and he was German(!)
Why do you think the nation of Israel was created? You need oil to make war at this point in history.
The British turned against the Jews in 1939 and sided with the Arabs specifically to continue the flow of oil to their country during WW2. I don't think the creation of a Jewish state and oil have any real connection. Walter Rothschild (a zionist Jew) was the one behind the creation of a Jewish state, and it was presented under the auspice of having a territory on the east side of the mediterranean to facilitate troop movements to India in case they began to lose the Raj. Unfortunately for them they had to sell the Indians their freedom to stay in WW2.
Q.E.D. Israel (the Jews there, anyways) never had any bearing or leverage on oil in the region.
disclaimer: I'm not trying to push any sort of agenda, I'm just trying to point out that this line of thought is wrong
We tax the snot out of cigarettes and booze because they aren't healthy for society... we've had a TV in every home for 50+ years now, and parents are exposing their children to TV from birth... if you can't restrict people's use of TV, you might as well remove the incentive to watch it by making it more informational/educational, rather than an "opiate of the masses".
We ended up with the evening news in a response to a federal mandate that X% be used for reporting the news, how much better off would we have been if we'd restricted entertainment to Y% of the total broadcast time? How would society be if we limited mass entertainment? Would local entertainment like playhouses still be much more successful?
I recall getting in a lot of trouble for swearing in front of my parents for the first time while trying to resolve an IRQ conflict. I thought I was done with all that in win95 but I still had to wrestle with it to solve a conflict between an isa token ring adapter and my generic brand soundblaster. Ugh. Plug n play, my ass!
Quake for Steam ships with (I think?) DOSBox. Once you buy the game it downloads the non-DRM game and you could conceivably install it on FreeDOS. Other games, like the DOS version of Tie Fighter has some features (an entire campaign, I think?) that you don't get even in the Windows or Collector's Edition version. In both instances I ended up using DOSBox though.
I'm curious why they went with the PayPal CEO? Presumably he's going to have a lot of banking/legal background, which, while possibly useful, isn't horribly useful for an advertising/search company. Then again, beggars can't be choosers when you're asking someone to captain your sinking ship...
I generally roll with 2G on and screen brightness set to low; wifi is off unless I need it (blessed with an unlimited data plan). Believe me, if I'm keeping tabs on how long I can go without recharging, I've already played all the "how to keep your phone going for more than a day" games:) Slim phones just have crappy^H^H^H tiny batteries. A quick google for "Nexus S short battery life" results in a lot of complaints.
I leave my phone plugged in when I'm not using it, but I miss my old blackberry that I could leave off the charger for a day and a half and still check my email. If I didn't use it at all, it would happily sit there for 2 or 3 days. There's nothing wrong with wanting a more efficient phone. When I bought my android phone I had to buy a car charger and 2-3 extra charging cables, and stuck a spare wall charger in my glove box.
At one point they were called "mobile phones". Now they're "you have 45 minutes to get to your next charger before you get a low battery warning".
Ah, mr. "exception to every rule for karma guy" - we meet again! Even back in 1996 or so cassette tapes were still $1.50 or so if you bought them at the drug store. Even in the era of 8 and 20gb hard drives, you could store days worth of music with no penalty. If you needed space on a cassette, you had to dub over your least favorite songs, and then go find your friend who had the original and borrow it - again. This was never really an issue worth enforcing because it cost so damn much unless you bought cassettes in bulk.
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
Whatever social value(s) the media industry was trying to impress upon us over the last 10 years have failed, and it's too late to re-educate the next generation of parents. It's only going to get worse from here, and they've spent a decade building animosity in their customers. They'll pass that animosity along to their children in terms of pirated Disney films, Dora the Explorer and whatever the next incarnation of Teletubbies are. Instead of selecting a VHS from the family video library, they'll be directed to the pirate bay or similar to find whatever obscure children's video isn't already on netflix on-demand.
The generational shift has already happened, and public favor is against the media industry. Something's gotta budge, and it isn't public opinion.
I had a BB Curve in 2007 (which was already long in tooth) running 3.X, and looked like OS7 - the skin system on the BB is pretty malleable; someone uploaded a carbon copy of the OS 5 interface skin for 4.0 devices and I was pretty happy with that until I lost the thing at a restaurant. Despite the skin being shinier and not looking like a software engineer designed it, it's still the same general interface. Linking those two pictures is similar to showing me pics of Win95 and WinXP and saying "wow these are totally different functionally". At the very least the interface needs a revamp on par with the Win8 dashboard setup, or the overhaul Palm gave to their OS with the new WebOS. Anti-aliasing and higher resolution icons do not make a new OS. Even Wikipedia points out that most 4.0 apps will run on OS 7
I would imagine there is a sort of gentleman's code about using nuclear weapons. That is, after all, what the cold war was. "No, after you" "No, after YOU, I insist" back and forth. Even before we bombed Hiroshima we ticker tape paraded leaflets letting the whole city know we were going to drop a nuclear bomb on their heads a full month in advance. The Cuban Missile Crisis was two weeks of nuclear brinksmanship.
To badly quote and twist Lord of the rings, "One does not merely walk in to thermonuclear war"
Remember when Russia launched that blue spiral firework in to the sky over northern Norway? They made some (quiet) pre-launch announcement that they were going to do military testing in X Y Z sector between the hours of F and G on MNOP date. It's buried deep in the FAA logs somewhere.
Would it really be that surprising for a nation to make a pre-launch announcement of a non-nuclear-tipped ICBM? Wouldn't you not say anything if it was nuclear, to minimize the chance (or number of) of second strike warheads being launched your way? I mean generally once the thing is launched, whoever's on the receiving end is going to have their whole day ruined, you don't need to tell them exactly which city or military target you plan on hitting.
We've spent the last 60+ years working out what we would do, nuclear weapon monitoring, nuclear deterrence, etc, you would think a country would know what kind of weapons you're firing at it. Or are ICBMs just too impersonal in war to warrant anything but nuclear warheads?
Now that the technology is mature (20 years mature in the US, 5-10 years mature in other countries), would it be reasonable to start designing cheaper ICBMs with lower class warheads? I can't help but think that this sort of weapon is going to be fairly common in the future, and that kind of "nuclear response" mentality will disappear over time. The US government has restricted Armadillo Aerospace's purchase of hydrogen peroxide (for NASA funded projects) in the past because it's so blasted easy to write the software for the guidance system these days. Even a thousand conventionally tipped ICBMs (trident IIs are about $30 million each) is cheaper than a retrofit on a single aircraft carrier (generally about $4 bn).
I don't think RIM will die in 2013, but they're certainly circling the drain at this point. BBX/Blackberry 10 needed to be released in 2008/2009 as a complete rewrite, at this point they're going to end up as a novelty brand known for "how good their keyboards used to be before the buyout". Visually there's no difference between BB OS 3.5 (released in what, 2003?) and 7.0. At this point I think expecting a modern OS from them before 2014 isn't a realistic goal for them. Someone high up at RIM got all wrapped up in the idea that the iPad was the second coming of jesus, bet the company on it, and lost.
Railguns are super neat too, but why put them within harm's reach shooting at awkward, easily detectable shallow parabolic arcs, when you could build a carbon copy of China's DF-21 with a longer range? Rods from God is a pretty compelling argument. A tungsten rod with a 1 foot radar cross section (smaller than many seagulls) falling from the sky at mach 5 can be launched from anywhere in the world, falling out of the sky in a steep parabolic arc, and work on existing, proven technology. Additionally we already have subs floating around undetected in every ocean of the world loaded each with 24 ICBMs, there's no need to put floating targets on top of the water too.
I don't doubt we'll continue buying Carriers for the next 20 years, but I think "power projection" has been "let's bomb them in the middle of the night with a plane that took off in Missouri, then flies back home when it's done" for at least a few years now. With the advent of UAV technology (GPS jamming not included) soon, we'll be able to bomb our poorly-equipped enemies from the comfort of our own living room! You don't even need the same pilot for the entire mission. When his 8 hours are up, the other guy takes over and the first one goes home to his wife and kids.
Don't get me wrong, fighters are really, really neat toys, but we've been able to bomb the snot out of each other covertly for the last 10 years for sure, and probably more like 20 years via long range bombers. With recent improvements, we can do it without risking our soldier's lives.
Carriers seem like an awfully good projection of power for an immediate (less than 12 hours) retaliation, but round trip from the USA to Iraq and back is only 30-50 hours these days (by bomber).
Are you forgetting Mubarak, Saddam, the 1979 Iranian Revolution? We're good at installing them, perhaps, but terrible at maintaining them once they're in power. I'm sure there will be plenty more that can be added to the list over the next 20 years.
Sigonella and Aviano might be acceptable to run a long term war from, but the rest of those sites you listed don't look any more built up than a municipal civilian airport. Sigonella and Aviano are about 2,600 miles from the strait, while the much larger Ramstein (4 schools, a major regional millitary hospital, etc) is about 2,900 miles from the strait.
As for the Afghan bases, I'm not sure you'd want to run a war from an airfield in another active war zone:-)
I'm not aware of any bases in India, but I don' think flying through/near Pakistan's airspace for months on end after the whole Osama debacle would improve our relations with them. Pakistan kicked us out of one of our airbases early last month, too.
The US has several complete navies and a home base in Iraq, right next door.
You'll note that Iran waited until the US pulled every last infantryman out of Iraq on Dec 31st before making this proclomation (the next day), and the US turned around and agreed to sell Saudi Arabia essentially a $30 Billion Iranian Air Defense Kit the day after. We don't have a major base in the region that I'm aware of anymore. Turkey kicked us out in ~2006 or 2007, making Germany our closest base (besides the Carrier group)
Hanging off of your post a little bit, there's been some rumblings in the news about the Chinese DF-21, which is basically a straight up, straight down mortar shell designed to sink aircraft carriers (and other local battleships) within an 1100 mile radius (that includes singapore, japan, and both koreas). Sort of the same functionality as an ICBM, but with more conventional explosives attached. The big problem is that they come down at mach 2 or faster, making them difficult to detect, let alone intercept.
While I doubt we'd unwrap the ICBMs, there's no reason to think this non-nuclear-ized technology exists. We've already retired battleships from the navy, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that Carriers are on their way out too.
You must be new here, just last year we wrote the copyright legislation for Spain and New Zealand, and shoved it down their throats (they passed it, grudgingly). We've twisted China's arm about movie piracy in the past, and plenty of other countries as well. We're terrible about installing dictators in countries, but we're really good at writing laws and making them law in other countries. What copyright law passes here in our bellwether country becomes law in 20-70% of the rest of the world.
I just researched the hell out of the top 10 productivity apps I thought I would need, then purchased them. No complaints, spent about $30, using $22 worth of apps, which have been updated over the last year with new features, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on how you want to interpret it, I suppose. Karl Marx invented the meme (Televison hadn't been invented yet, but Religion had), and he was German(!)
The British turned against the Jews in 1939 and sided with the Arabs specifically to continue the flow of oil to their country during WW2. I don't think the creation of a Jewish state and oil have any real connection. Walter Rothschild (a zionist Jew) was the one behind the creation of a Jewish state, and it was presented under the auspice of having a territory on the east side of the mediterranean to facilitate troop movements to India in case they began to lose the Raj. Unfortunately for them they had to sell the Indians their freedom to stay in WW2.
Q.E.D. Israel (the Jews there, anyways) never had any bearing or leverage on oil in the region.
disclaimer: I'm not trying to push any sort of agenda, I'm just trying to point out that this line of thought is wrong
Who was selling it to them? Google "opium war". The Chinese were trying to outlaw western opiates then, too
We tax the snot out of cigarettes and booze because they aren't healthy for society... we've had a TV in every home for 50+ years now, and parents are exposing their children to TV from birth... if you can't restrict people's use of TV, you might as well remove the incentive to watch it by making it more informational/educational, rather than an "opiate of the masses".
We ended up with the evening news in a response to a federal mandate that X% be used for reporting the news, how much better off would we have been if we'd restricted entertainment to Y% of the total broadcast time? How would society be if we limited mass entertainment? Would local entertainment like playhouses still be much more successful?
What is a fossil driver
I recall getting in a lot of trouble for swearing in front of my parents for the first time while trying to resolve an IRQ conflict. I thought I was done with all that in win95 but I still had to wrestle with it to solve a conflict between an isa token ring adapter and my generic brand soundblaster. Ugh. Plug n play, my ass!
Quake for Steam ships with (I think?) DOSBox. Once you buy the game it downloads the non-DRM game and you could conceivably install it on FreeDOS. Other games, like the DOS version of Tie Fighter has some features (an entire campaign, I think?) that you don't get even in the Windows or Collector's Edition version. In both instances I ended up using DOSBox though.
I'm curious why they went with the PayPal CEO? Presumably he's going to have a lot of banking/legal background, which, while possibly useful, isn't horribly useful for an advertising/search company. Then again, beggars can't be choosers when you're asking someone to captain your sinking ship...
I generally roll with 2G on and screen brightness set to low; wifi is off unless I need it (blessed with an unlimited data plan). Believe me, if I'm keeping tabs on how long I can go without recharging, I've already played all the "how to keep your phone going for more than a day" games :) Slim phones just have crappy^H^H^H tiny batteries. A quick google for "Nexus S short battery life" results in a lot of complaints.
I leave my phone plugged in when I'm not using it, but I miss my old blackberry that I could leave off the charger for a day and a half and still check my email. If I didn't use it at all, it would happily sit there for 2 or 3 days. There's nothing wrong with wanting a more efficient phone. When I bought my android phone I had to buy a car charger and 2-3 extra charging cables, and stuck a spare wall charger in my glove box.
At one point they were called "mobile phones". Now they're "you have 45 minutes to get to your next charger before you get a low battery warning".
Ah, mr. "exception to every rule for karma guy" - we meet again! Even back in 1996 or so cassette tapes were still $1.50 or so if you bought them at the drug store. Even in the era of 8 and 20gb hard drives, you could store days worth of music with no penalty. If you needed space on a cassette, you had to dub over your least favorite songs, and then go find your friend who had the original and borrow it - again. This was never really an issue worth enforcing because it cost so damn much unless you bought cassettes in bulk.
Copyright infringement went mainstream in 1998-2002, and now a decade later those kids on the internet in high school spent four years in college learning about file sharing culure and now are having their own kids.
Whatever social value(s) the media industry was trying to impress upon us over the last 10 years have failed, and it's too late to re-educate the next generation of parents. It's only going to get worse from here, and they've spent a decade building animosity in their customers. They'll pass that animosity along to their children in terms of pirated Disney films, Dora the Explorer and whatever the next incarnation of Teletubbies are. Instead of selecting a VHS from the family video library, they'll be directed to the pirate bay or similar to find whatever obscure children's video isn't already on netflix on-demand.
The generational shift has already happened, and public favor is against the media industry. Something's gotta budge, and it isn't public opinion.
I had a BB Curve in 2007 (which was already long in tooth) running 3.X, and looked like OS7 - the skin system on the BB is pretty malleable; someone uploaded a carbon copy of the OS 5 interface skin for 4.0 devices and I was pretty happy with that until I lost the thing at a restaurant. Despite the skin being shinier and not looking like a software engineer designed it, it's still the same general interface. Linking those two pictures is similar to showing me pics of Win95 and WinXP and saying "wow these are totally different functionally". At the very least the interface needs a revamp on par with the Win8 dashboard setup, or the overhaul Palm gave to their OS with the new WebOS. Anti-aliasing and higher resolution icons do not make a new OS. Even Wikipedia points out that most 4.0 apps will run on OS 7
I would imagine there is a sort of gentleman's code about using nuclear weapons. That is, after all, what the cold war was. "No, after you" "No, after YOU, I insist" back and forth. Even before we bombed Hiroshima we ticker tape paraded leaflets letting the whole city know we were going to drop a nuclear bomb on their heads a full month in advance. The Cuban Missile Crisis was two weeks of nuclear brinksmanship.
To badly quote and twist Lord of the rings, "One does not merely walk in to thermonuclear war"
Remember when Russia launched that blue spiral firework in to the sky over northern Norway? They made some (quiet) pre-launch announcement that they were going to do military testing in X Y Z sector between the hours of F and G on MNOP date. It's buried deep in the FAA logs somewhere.
Would it really be that surprising for a nation to make a pre-launch announcement of a non-nuclear-tipped ICBM? Wouldn't you not say anything if it was nuclear, to minimize the chance (or number of) of second strike warheads being launched your way? I mean generally once the thing is launched, whoever's on the receiving end is going to have their whole day ruined, you don't need to tell them exactly which city or military target you plan on hitting.
We've spent the last 60+ years working out what we would do, nuclear weapon monitoring, nuclear deterrence, etc, you would think a country would know what kind of weapons you're firing at it. Or are ICBMs just too impersonal in war to warrant anything but nuclear warheads?
Now that the technology is mature (20 years mature in the US, 5-10 years mature in other countries), would it be reasonable to start designing cheaper ICBMs with lower class warheads? I can't help but think that this sort of weapon is going to be fairly common in the future, and that kind of "nuclear response" mentality will disappear over time. The US government has restricted Armadillo Aerospace's purchase of hydrogen peroxide (for NASA funded projects) in the past because it's so blasted easy to write the software for the guidance system these days. Even a thousand conventionally tipped ICBMs (trident IIs are about $30 million each) is cheaper than a retrofit on a single aircraft carrier (generally about $4 bn).
I don't think RIM will die in 2013, but they're certainly circling the drain at this point. BBX/Blackberry 10 needed to be released in 2008/2009 as a complete rewrite, at this point they're going to end up as a novelty brand known for "how good their keyboards used to be before the buyout". Visually there's no difference between BB OS 3.5 (released in what, 2003?) and 7.0. At this point I think expecting a modern OS from them before 2014 isn't a realistic goal for them. Someone high up at RIM got all wrapped up in the idea that the iPad was the second coming of jesus, bet the company on it, and lost.
Railguns are super neat too, but why put them within harm's reach shooting at awkward, easily detectable shallow parabolic arcs, when you could build a carbon copy of China's DF-21 with a longer range? Rods from God is a pretty compelling argument. A tungsten rod with a 1 foot radar cross section (smaller than many seagulls) falling from the sky at mach 5 can be launched from anywhere in the world, falling out of the sky in a steep parabolic arc, and work on existing, proven technology. Additionally we already have subs floating around undetected in every ocean of the world loaded each with 24 ICBMs, there's no need to put floating targets on top of the water too.
I don't doubt we'll continue buying Carriers for the next 20 years, but I think "power projection" has been "let's bomb them in the middle of the night with a plane that took off in Missouri, then flies back home when it's done" for at least a few years now. With the advent of UAV technology (GPS jamming not included) soon, we'll be able to bomb our poorly-equipped enemies from the comfort of our own living room! You don't even need the same pilot for the entire mission. When his 8 hours are up, the other guy takes over and the first one goes home to his wife and kids.
Don't get me wrong, fighters are really, really neat toys, but we've been able to bomb the snot out of each other covertly for the last 10 years for sure, and probably more like 20 years via long range bombers. With recent improvements, we can do it without risking our soldier's lives.
Carriers seem like an awfully good projection of power for an immediate (less than 12 hours) retaliation, but round trip from the USA to Iraq and back is only 30-50 hours these days (by bomber).
Are you forgetting Mubarak, Saddam, the 1979 Iranian Revolution? We're good at installing them, perhaps, but terrible at maintaining them once they're in power. I'm sure there will be plenty more that can be added to the list over the next 20 years.
Sigonella and Aviano might be acceptable to run a long term war from, but the rest of those sites you listed don't look any more built up than a municipal civilian airport. Sigonella and Aviano are about 2,600 miles from the strait, while the much larger Ramstein (4 schools, a major regional millitary hospital, etc) is about 2,900 miles from the strait.
:-)
As for the Afghan bases, I'm not sure you'd want to run a war from an airfield in another active war zone
I'm not aware of any bases in India, but I don' think flying through/near Pakistan's airspace for months on end after the whole Osama debacle would improve our relations with them. Pakistan kicked us out of one of our airbases early last month, too.
You'll note that Iran waited until the US pulled every last infantryman out of Iraq on Dec 31st before making this proclomation (the next day), and the US turned around and agreed to sell Saudi Arabia essentially a $30 Billion Iranian Air Defense Kit the day after. We don't have a major base in the region that I'm aware of anymore. Turkey kicked us out in ~2006 or 2007, making Germany our closest base (besides the Carrier group)
Hanging off of your post a little bit, there's been some rumblings in the news about the Chinese DF-21, which is basically a straight up, straight down mortar shell designed to sink aircraft carriers (and other local battleships) within an 1100 mile radius (that includes singapore, japan, and both koreas). Sort of the same functionality as an ICBM, but with more conventional explosives attached. The big problem is that they come down at mach 2 or faster, making them difficult to detect, let alone intercept.
Forbes alluded to this saying "its surface vessels are increasingly vulnerable to Chinese attack"
While I doubt we'd unwrap the ICBMs, there's no reason to think this non-nuclear-ized technology exists. We've already retired battleships from the navy, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that Carriers are on their way out too.
More reading:
http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-china-joins-the-yacht-club/
http://exiledonline.com/the-war-nerd-this-is-how-the-carriers-will-die/
You must be new here, just last year we wrote the copyright legislation for Spain and New Zealand, and shoved it down their throats (they passed it, grudgingly). We've twisted China's arm about movie piracy in the past, and plenty of other countries as well. We're terrible about installing dictators in countries, but we're really good at writing laws and making them law in other countries. What copyright law passes here in our bellwether country becomes law in 20-70% of the rest of the world.
I find it interesting that this media blitz comes at the same time as a lax in the rules on ETOPS saftey rules: http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/airlines-cleared-to-use-santas-shortcut-6281263.html
I just researched the hell out of the top 10 productivity apps I thought I would need, then purchased them. No complaints, spent about $30, using $22 worth of apps, which have been updated over the last year with new features, etc.