I don't think they posed much of a threat to mainland America anyway. With all of their secrecy and military buildup, etc.. all they could really manage to target was a remote US military outpost (Hawaii).
I get the sense that you have no idea how wide the Pacific is. How is it that our side won? You can't even reach Japan from the American mainland, so our military posed no threat to them.
Or what happens if it desensitizes soldiers to the point that their slight paranoia turns to burning down whole villages?
Wouldn't "desensitizing" cause the opposite of paranoia? A unit of soldiers is more likely to shell a village into matchsticks because they're actually afraid of the enemy who might be lurking there.
Also, the original plan called for a final shuttle flight to return Hubble inside the payload bay. Hubble was to be studied in detail to see the effects of long-term exposure in space to help design future craft to be more resistant.
After that, it was going to be given to the Smithsonian AIr and Space museum. A fitting place given the discoveries made with Hubble. Sometimes I think we are often shortsighted these days...Doing everything for the bottom line
The original plan didn't count on 40% of the Shuttle fleet exploding or breaking up, either. NASA seems unwilling to risk an enormously expensive, essentially irreplaceable spacecraft and the lives of another bunch of astronauts in order to get a display piece back for the Smithsonian. Can you really blame them?
I'm also astounded by the negativism and pessimism by the majority of slashdotters.
The responses you see here aren't really negativism and pessimism. They're anti-Bush hysteria. If Howard Dean had announced the same plan, the same I'm-against-Bush-because-the-man-on-TV-told-me-to crowd would be drooling all over themselves at this brave heralding of man's destiny in the stars.
A handicapped friend had an unusual and extraordinary need. We met up with a master gunsmith who was so fascinated by this new challenge he'd never had before that he swept us to the head of the line despite having weeks of backlog and spent a weekend machining this unique one-off item for us.
Oddly enough, this is how Inigo Montoya got his sword in The Princess Bride. His father was a master weaponsmith who was so famous that he was perpetually backlogged, until a man with six fingers came and asked for a blade weighted for his unusual deformity. Senor Montoya was so fascinated by the challenge that he dropped everything else. As for what happened, read the book or watch the movie.
That was what the west was like before feminism. Rape of women and childeren punished less then stealing from the company.
Before feminism, in many American states, rape was punishable by the death penalty. This is no longer the case. If you are willing to believe the feminists that women were treated before feminism as if they were property, why do you not think that men valued and tried hard to protect that property?
That is travel faster than light, to a long distance, turn around and then look at earth with a powerful telescope, we should be able to see kennedy getting shot? wouldnt we?
To witness President Kennedy being shot, you'd have to be a little over 40 light years from Earth. If you imagine the light which depicted instants of time on Earth as being like photographs which are shot into space, then every second another would be "dispatched" and would currently be 40 light years out.
But consider that the Earth is constantly rotating. Every "photograph" would be fired off at a slightly different angle. And over a distance of 40 light years, the differences in angle would mean that the "photographs" would be huge distances apart.
So it might be possible to go to a point 40 light years away and peek at the Earth, to see a specific instant in time... but only that instant, because the light depicting the next instant went off in a different direction, and so on.
One is tempted to think that you could just "orbit" the Earth at an altitude of 40 light years to watch things unfold in sequence, but intuition or simple geometry will reveal that you'd have to be going really, really fast to match the Earth's rotation at that distance.
And Bush's tax cut of $1.4 trillon sure helped out all of those disadvantaged rich people.
C'mon, weigh it up: vast amounts of money are already being spent on things which are much further down the priority list than astronomy programmes.
Reducing the level of taxation by $1.4 trillion is "spending" money? A tax cut is a reduction in revenues, not an expenditure. Nobody's "spent" anything.
A lack of modern technology did nothing to stop European Crusaders from bitch-slapping the Muslim world back when travelling meant riding a horse, organising meant yelling across a field, and plastic expolosives were torches soaked in animal fat.
It is silly to characterize the Crusades as the same type of military action as terrorism. The Crusades were large-scale, long-distance invasions attempting to recapture territory which was lost to what we might term a hostile power. These efforts were so massive that they could happen only once in a generation, and so difficult to organize that they were nearly all dismal failures (which is why it is ridiculous to describe the Crusaders as having "bitch-slapped" Saladin or the Turks). Terrorism does not attempt to capture and hold territory - it attempts to frighten and kill civilian populations by single actions.
Your historical examples are erudite and worthy of repect, but I can't help pointing out that excepting enslavement and piracy, these are examples of rebellion against colonial powers. You're only arguing that the Muslim world is more apt to organize insurgency around Allah than around a secular leader.
These actions were initially insurgencies against colonial powers, because that's who was nearest. Modern Islamic terrorism has been successfully "exported" by failed Muslim nation-states, however, to reduce internal tensions. This "escape-valve" was only possible because of the radical nature of Muslim society, however; a parallel is that Great Britain could reduce internal tensions through dispatching colonists, but that was very much less an option for, say, Imperial China.
As far as slavery and piracy goes, I've got to wonder who the worst offenders were at that time.
There is little need to wonder. Western powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom were putting an end to the oceanic slave trade at essentially the same time that they were at war with the piratical Barbary states. The Muslim-dominated African slave trade continues to this day, especially in the Sudan; this is well-documented and several charities exist which are attempting to fight it.
f you want to claim that there is something a touch rotten about Islam compared to Judaism and Christianity then frankly I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean I think the Muslim world is actually hell bent for leather on eliminating Infidels on principal and that we've only noticed it just now.
You seem unfamiliar with what the Koran actually demands. Wahabist Islam (the hard-core sect which drives Al-Qaeda, which dominates Saudi Arabia, and from which the Taliban sprung) requires that Islam must be the sole religion of the world. Christians and Jews are permitted to exist, but only in a state of "dhimmitude", whereby they are tolerated subjects who must subject themselves to the Muslim authorities. In the last days, the Jews are to be exterminated anyway. All persons must live according to the dictates of sharia law, which demands the head-to-toe veiling of women, the instant slaying of homosexuals, that you kill your daughter for damaging your family honor if she is raped, etc. Our ideas of religious tolerance - that everyone should simply be free to follow their own religion - are perceived in this tradition as incomprehensible, or merely fear of Islam.
Nor are the Wahabis merely crazed or incoherent. I've read a number of their tracts and pamphlets in translation, which argue in quite reasoned detail why the Western idea of freedom of speech is an abomination in the sight of God, why it cannot be permitted for territory to ever leave the control of Islam (as soon as Israel is gone, Spain and the Balkans are next), and why the United States must be destroyed first.
To say that we "only just noticed" that radical Islam is trying to destroy the West is disingenous. It's only very, very recently that radical Islam has pulled itself up from being the poo
If it really were as simple as you claim Islamic terrorism directed at the West would have been a problem long before 1971 or so.
*Getting* from the Muslim world to the West was no trivial - or inexpensive - matter before 1971 (an age of expensive air travel - and before that, none at all). So was maintaining communications amongst cells of saboteurs and murderers. And the the vast monetary resources which increased oil prices provided to the Wahabis after 1971 are one of the reasons why Islamic terrorism is feasible at all - plastic explosive ain't cheap.
Islamic religious warfare against Western powers certainly existed before the 1970s. The Nazis tried with some success to stir up jihad against the British in Iraq during the Second World War. The Mahdi waged religious war against the Gordon and Kitchener in Africa a few decades before that, and the Sepoy Mutiny was earlier in the same century.
Before the nineteenth century, there were actual non-Turkish Muslim powers. The Barbary states kidnapped and enslaved thousands of Christians as galley slaves, and waged piracy on Western shipping. You could call that "terrorism" as well; it was certainly religiously motivated.
hear my friends say these terrorists simply hate us because the US is a successful world power, but they miss the point that these people have suffered greatly because of US policy to do whatever necessary to protect our monetary interests.
The terrorists hate us because Westerners refuse to acknowledge that Mohammed is the Prophet of God, and that the Koran is His word. That's the simple facts, and everything else flows from that. Sorry that it's not a complicated explanation, and sorry that it doesn't make it convenient to blame the Fortune 500 or the Pentagon.
I'm not some right-wing biggot... But trying to have a conversation with someone left of center about an issue they disagree with is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
Perhaps that should give you pause for thought about the philosophical underpinnings of modern liberalism. Are you really sure it's the right wing which is "bigoted"?
Eve at the Catholic church I went to when I was a kid, they used read this llooonnnnggggggg passage that is one solid, multipage sentence describing Christ's lineage.
You're probably thinking of the first chapter of the gospel of Matthew. People in the first century A.D. placed much greater stock in genealogy than we do today; prominent Romans, for instance, went to tremendous amounts of trouble to prove their descent from various famous (and sometimes mythological) figures of the past.
Although it's a really complicated topic to summarize, the earliest Christians basically saw themselves as a Jewish sect. Consequently, it was important when setting down accounts of the Messiah to detail precisely His connection with Jewish history and tradition, to prove that Christianity really "fit" as part of the Jewish world. That is why we don't really care very much how exactly Jesus' mother's husband was descended from Nahshon or Manasseh, but it would have mattered to Matthew.
The phrase is "alea iacta est"; according to Suetonius, this is what Caesar said when crossing the Rubicon to begin the war against Pompey the Great.
It's virtually certain that Caesar was referring to the rolling of a die, if he indeed actually said this at all ("the die is cast"). Caesar makes no reference to the occasion in his own autobiographical account, De Bello Civilis. Some later scholars have suggested that Caesar may actually have said "alea iacta esto"; "let the die have been cast". The difference in meaning is that between "I have made a momentous decision" and "may this have been an important event".
Teach and uplift and bring others to our level? This is certainly not what Europe was doing between the 1500s and 50 years ago.
How mysterious. All the railroad, harbor, electrical, and road infrastructure in former European colonies was built in the last fifty years? The introduction of schools, written languages (in Africa, Australia, and the Americas), civil laws, medicine, etc. occurred magically in 1953?
Why, the concept of "uplifting" other peoples even seems to be European in origin. I don't recall the Aztecs ever giving foreign aid to anyone, or the Manchus believing that it would be a good idea to make other peoples wealthier. Stranger and stranger.
Or, on the other hand, you're staggeringly ignorant of history. One or the other.
We'll know if the USA actually went to the moon or if that was just a hoax, unless this is a hoax as well. I guess this time I can break out my telescope.
Sorry, but your telescope is a hoax too. It's really just a poster-mailing tube with plastic wrap over both ends.
Slashdot Mirror
Were you asleep during the Kosovo War?
I get the sense that you have no idea how wide the Pacific is. How is it that our side won? You can't even reach Japan from the American mainland, so our military posed no threat to them.
Wouldn't "desensitizing" cause the opposite of paranoia? A unit of soldiers is more likely to shell a village into matchsticks because they're actually afraid of the enemy who might be lurking there.
Also, the original plan called for a final shuttle flight to return Hubble inside the payload bay. Hubble was to be studied in detail to see the effects of long-term exposure in space to help design future craft to be more resistant.
After that, it was going to be given to the Smithsonian AIr and Space museum. A fitting place given the discoveries made with Hubble. Sometimes I think we are often shortsighted these days...Doing everything for the bottom line
The original plan didn't count on 40% of the Shuttle fleet exploding or breaking up, either. NASA seems unwilling to risk an enormously expensive, essentially irreplaceable spacecraft and the lives of another bunch of astronauts in order to get a display piece back for the Smithsonian. Can you really blame them?
The responses you see here aren't really negativism and pessimism. They're anti-Bush hysteria. If Howard Dean had announced the same plan, the same I'm-against-Bush-because-the-man-on-TV-told-me-to crowd would be drooling all over themselves at this brave heralding of man's destiny in the stars.
Lego bricks, you idiot! Then we can just build in orbit anything we might need.
Oddly enough, this is how Inigo Montoya got his sword in The Princess Bride. His father was a master weaponsmith who was so famous that he was perpetually backlogged, until a man with six fingers came and asked for a blade weighted for his unusual deformity. Senor Montoya was so fascinated by the challenge that he dropped everything else. As for what happened, read the book or watch the movie.
Before feminism, in many American states, rape was punishable by the death penalty. This is no longer the case. If you are willing to believe the feminists that women were treated before feminism as if they were property, why do you not think that men valued and tried hard to protect that property?
All credit to you - I just thought it was so funny I wanted other people to see it.
To witness President Kennedy being shot, you'd have to be a little over 40 light years from Earth. If you imagine the light which depicted instants of time on Earth as being like photographs which are shot into space, then every second another would be "dispatched" and would currently be 40 light years out.
But consider that the Earth is constantly rotating. Every "photograph" would be fired off at a slightly different angle. And over a distance of 40 light years, the differences in angle would mean that the "photographs" would be huge distances apart.
So it might be possible to go to a point 40 light years away and peek at the Earth, to see a specific instant in time... but only that instant, because the light depicting the next instant went off in a different direction, and so on.
One is tempted to think that you could just "orbit" the Earth at an altitude of 40 light years to watch things unfold in sequence, but intuition or simple geometry will reveal that you'd have to be going really, really fast to match the Earth's rotation at that distance.
C'mon, weigh it up: vast amounts of money are already being spent on things which are much further down the priority list than astronomy programmes.
Reducing the level of taxation by $1.4 trillion is "spending" money? A tax cut is a reduction in revenues, not an expenditure. Nobody's "spent" anything.
Well, by definition, no, unless you subscribe to some of the weirder resolutions to the "Grandfather Paradox".
It is silly to characterize the Crusades as the same type of military action as terrorism. The Crusades were large-scale, long-distance invasions attempting to recapture territory which was lost to what we might term a hostile power. These efforts were so massive that they could happen only once in a generation, and so difficult to organize that they were nearly all dismal failures (which is why it is ridiculous to describe the Crusaders as having "bitch-slapped" Saladin or the Turks). Terrorism does not attempt to capture and hold territory - it attempts to frighten and kill civilian populations by single actions.
Your historical examples are erudite and worthy of repect, but I can't help pointing out that excepting enslavement and piracy, these are examples of rebellion against colonial powers. You're only arguing that the Muslim world is more apt to organize insurgency around Allah than around a secular leader.
These actions were initially insurgencies against colonial powers, because that's who was nearest. Modern Islamic terrorism has been successfully "exported" by failed Muslim nation-states, however, to reduce internal tensions. This "escape-valve" was only possible because of the radical nature of Muslim society, however; a parallel is that Great Britain could reduce internal tensions through dispatching colonists, but that was very much less an option for, say, Imperial China.
As far as slavery and piracy goes, I've got to wonder who the worst offenders were at that time.
There is little need to wonder. Western powers such as the United States and the United Kingdom were putting an end to the oceanic slave trade at essentially the same time that they were at war with the piratical Barbary states. The Muslim-dominated African slave trade continues to this day, especially in the Sudan; this is well-documented and several charities exist which are attempting to fight it.
f you want to claim that there is something a touch rotten about Islam compared to Judaism and Christianity then frankly I'd agree with you. That doesn't mean I think the Muslim world is actually hell bent for leather on eliminating Infidels on principal and that we've only noticed it just now.
You seem unfamiliar with what the Koran actually demands. Wahabist Islam (the hard-core sect which drives Al-Qaeda, which dominates Saudi Arabia, and from which the Taliban sprung) requires that Islam must be the sole religion of the world. Christians and Jews are permitted to exist, but only in a state of "dhimmitude", whereby they are tolerated subjects who must subject themselves to the Muslim authorities. In the last days, the Jews are to be exterminated anyway. All persons must live according to the dictates of sharia law, which demands the head-to-toe veiling of women, the instant slaying of homosexuals, that you kill your daughter for damaging your family honor if she is raped, etc. Our ideas of religious tolerance - that everyone should simply be free to follow their own religion - are perceived in this tradition as incomprehensible, or merely fear of Islam.
Nor are the Wahabis merely crazed or incoherent. I've read a number of their tracts and pamphlets in translation, which argue in quite reasoned detail why the Western idea of freedom of speech is an abomination in the sight of God, why it cannot be permitted for territory to ever leave the control of Islam (as soon as Israel is gone, Spain and the Balkans are next), and why the United States must be destroyed first.
To say that we "only just noticed" that radical Islam is trying to destroy the West is disingenous. It's only very, very recently that radical Islam has pulled itself up from being the poo
*Getting* from the Muslim world to the West was no trivial - or inexpensive - matter before 1971 (an age of expensive air travel - and before that, none at all). So was maintaining communications amongst cells of saboteurs and murderers. And the the vast monetary resources which increased oil prices provided to the Wahabis after 1971 are one of the reasons why Islamic terrorism is feasible at all - plastic explosive ain't cheap.
Islamic religious warfare against Western powers certainly existed before the 1970s. The Nazis tried with some success to stir up jihad against the British in Iraq during the Second World War. The Mahdi waged religious war against the Gordon and Kitchener in Africa a few decades before that, and the Sepoy Mutiny was earlier in the same century.
Before the nineteenth century, there were actual non-Turkish Muslim powers. The Barbary states kidnapped and enslaved thousands of Christians as galley slaves, and waged piracy on Western shipping. You could call that "terrorism" as well; it was certainly religiously motivated.
The terrorists hate us because Westerners refuse to acknowledge that Mohammed is the Prophet of God, and that the Koran is His word. That's the simple facts, and everything else flows from that. Sorry that it's not a complicated explanation, and sorry that it doesn't make it convenient to blame the Fortune 500 or the Pentagon.
Perhaps that should give you pause for thought about the philosophical underpinnings of modern liberalism. Are you really sure it's the right wing which is "bigoted"?
You're probably thinking of the first chapter of the gospel of Matthew. People in the first century A.D. placed much greater stock in genealogy than we do today; prominent Romans, for instance, went to tremendous amounts of trouble to prove their descent from various famous (and sometimes mythological) figures of the past.
Although it's a really complicated topic to summarize, the earliest Christians basically saw themselves as a Jewish sect. Consequently, it was important when setting down accounts of the Messiah to detail precisely His connection with Jewish history and tradition, to prove that Christianity really "fit" as part of the Jewish world. That is why we don't really care very much how exactly Jesus' mother's husband was descended from Nahshon or Manasseh, but it would have mattered to Matthew.
It's virtually certain that Caesar was referring to the rolling of a die, if he indeed actually said this at all ("the die is cast"). Caesar makes no reference to the occasion in his own autobiographical account, De Bello Civilis. Some later scholars have suggested that Caesar may actually have said "alea iacta esto"; "let the die have been cast". The difference in meaning is that between "I have made a momentous decision" and "may this have been an important event".
As indicated by the article title, the species in question are 'Humans', you silly person.
How mysterious. All the railroad, harbor, electrical, and road infrastructure in former European colonies was built in the last fifty years? The introduction of schools, written languages (in Africa, Australia, and the Americas), civil laws, medicine, etc. occurred magically in 1953?
Why, the concept of "uplifting" other peoples even seems to be European in origin. I don't recall the Aztecs ever giving foreign aid to anyone, or the Manchus believing that it would be a good idea to make other peoples wealthier. Stranger and stranger.
Or, on the other hand, you're staggeringly ignorant of history. One or the other.
Clarification: iChat doesn't require an AOL account. It requires an AIM account. Very different, thankfully.
Sorry, but your telescope is a hoax too. It's really just a poster-mailing tube with plastic wrap over both ends.