Is China pissed off that it is not a member of NATO? You can have your own little exclusive club without causing much problems. The real issue is funding. If the US drops double the funding on a democracy club then it does to the UN, people might look up and take notice. It says is a pretty bold statement that the UN is a waste of space when it comes to solving certain problems (which it is).
Honestly though, the biggest issue is not with the rest of the world being in a pissy mood about a democracy club that they can't join. The real issue would be the members. Europe would be loathed to join such an organization if it wielded any power because Europe is very adverse to military conflict. The US would throw a fit because it would want members to join that probably could not meet the requirements (namely Israel). I am not saying that this is a real solution, more of a pipe dream. My larger point is that when it comes to putting down bad people and stopping conflict, the UN is utterly worthless if there is not a diplomatic solution. If there is a diplomatic solution, the UN is the place to go. If the solution requires some guns and some ass kicking, the UN is the last place in the world to ask, as any Tutsi from Rwanda (not that there are many left) could attest.
Dictators that mistreat their citizens need to be reigned in as well - maybe not via invasion, but the UN need to stand up to dictators more. One fundamental right that the UN should stand up for is the right of citizens to leave their nation freely - this is probably the single most definitive measure of whether a government is oppressive - whether it allows its citizens to leave freely.
I suppose if you owned sheep you would hire a wolf to police them.
The UN is MADE of dictators who brutalize their own citizens. The UN is not the place to fix dictators who brutalize their population. Then UN watched the genocide in Yugoslavia for 10 years and did nothing. It took the US and Britain bullying NATO into doing something before that mess was cleaned up. The UN did absolutely NOTHING during the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda lost double digit percentage points of its population and the UN didn't lift a finger. Right now the Sudan is still a mess and the UN has done thing. The UN can't step between Israel and Palestine. The UN can't help in Iraq or Afghanistan. The UN has done nothing to solve the conflict in East Timor. It wrote angry letters to Zimbabwe as its "president" bulldozed entire neighborhoods of political rivals.
The UN is an utterly worthless institution for world policing. I am not saying that the UN doesn't have its place. I am just saying that its place never ever involves the use of force. If you want to sign environmental treaties, seek diplomatic solutions to problems, or coordinate humanitarian aid, the UN is the place to look. If you want someone to go beat the piss out of someone else for doing horrible and cruel things to other humans, convince the American it is in their best interest to go do it... but be ready with a broom. The Americans are good at smashing things and beating up bad guys (and people in the blast radius around the bad guys), but the clean up part... ehh, they kind of suck at that.
Personally, I think the answer is to form a league of democracies that meet strict standards of human rights and political freedom. Set the standards high and stick to them. It might be that Israel for instance wouldn't be able to join. You still might not have an organization capable of wielding a hammer and smashing dictators who step out of line, but at least you could dispense with the insanity of having Cuba and Libya on your human rights council.
Actually, the balance of power is not so clear. In a purely conventional fight, I have little doubt that South Korea would come out on top. You are right to say that South Korea has a better army with much better weaponry. Not only that, but the South Koreans as a people are pretty damn fanatical about NOT being ruled by their decrepit and starving neighbor to the north. The fact that the US would be there to back them out would only tip the odds well in favor of South Korea... in a conventional fight.
The problem is that North Korea would never fight a conventional war with South Korea. North Korea is loaded to the teeth with the (wait for it...) WMDs. No, this isn't Saddam where we "think" they have them and they don't. There is not a question in the world that North Korea is armed to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons. Forget nukes, North Korea has enough chemical weapons to get the job done and then some. To make matters worse, Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea. In a war between the Koreas you can rest assure that the opening move by North Korea would be blanket South Korea with chemical weapons via artillery, then lob off mid range missiles to hit knock out the rest of South Korea. In a surprise attack South Korea's chances for short term victory are actually pretty grim.
Long term of course North Korea stands no chance. South Korea could muster a force to hold the North back and the US, NATO, and probably even the EU would jump in to fight. That said, the civilian and military casualties suffered by all sides would be horrific. Throw in the fact that North Korea is run by a fellow who is certainly insane, and you are talking about a pretty damn scary situation. It isn't USSR and the US going toe to toe in nuclear Armageddon scary, but for the folks of South Korea, it might as well be.
First off, the article that talks about the US using mines in Afganistan is only aledged. Second, the gator mines in question are a type of mine that self destructs after a given time.
As far as the "plans" to use mines goes, I would be pissed off if my government didn't have plans to use land mines. Hell, I would be pissed off to learn that the government doesn't have a plan to deal with an alien invasion. I am pretty sure that if you went through the "plans" that the NSA and the Pentagon have on file, talking about using land mines in Iraq (which as far as I and your sources know they have not in the most recent war) should be the last of your worries. There are government agencies out there that spend their lives thinking up horrible situations and horrible solutions. This is a good thing.
We don't know how things will turn out at any given moment. Having a plan to nuke Iran or invade Israel might not sound like a good idea at the time, but it is good that if great need ever arose, someone has a plan waiting to be used. It is much better to have a plan that grows dust sitting in a file cabinet twelve security check points deep in the Pentagon that can be used, then it is to need such a plan and not have it. If "plans" to do bad things that are never done offend you, don't look any deeper. Plans to use landmines are easily one of the more benign plans the US government (and most other governments for that matter) has on file.
Yet we manage to accomplish more or less exactly the same thing with road infrastructure, without having five companies running their own roads to every house, then charging the house owners for access.
It's not that hard to design a system after that model, with specific interchange points on a local level.
The last solution in the world I want to see is a copy of the road system. Yes, I'll even take an ISP monopoly over a government monopoly. The second you give the government a hand in anything, you do two things.
First, they have heavily unionized workers that need to eat a still living baby before a dozen witnesses, each of which have to fill out a stack of papers agreeing to what they saw, before you can fire them. Look at the MBTA (that would be Boston's subway system) and compare it to your favorite airline. Do both have problems? Sure. Are there good people in both organizations? Yes. Does the MBTA have roughly a hundred times more service providers who would sooner scowl at you and tell you to fuck off then offer a smile? Absolutely. When the government does anything, it is unionized up the ass such that ever your absolutely worst workers can not be fired. Airliners have unions, but they are no so powerful that you can't toss an under performing employee. The customer service at current ISPs is pretty low. I can only think in horror how far the service would find a way to drop if it was government run.
Second, the government is horribly inefficient. Yes, your government services are often "free" in that you don't have to pay them when you use the service, but they are not free in that the amount you have to spend on taxes is astronomical. Government organizations are almost universally inefficient. My girlfriend works in a charity providing care to homeless and the mentally ill. She lives in dread of the days she needs to go to the social security offices in Boston. It always takes hours to even get in to see people. Once in you enter a bureaucratic hell that will almost certainly cost many more hours of your life. My girlfriend is always a little disturbed when some comes home from the social security office because she wonders how in the hell a mentally disabled or simply order person could possibly navigate such a government nightmare. All of that waste has a cost. The result is that only a tiny fraction of what is paid into the system via taxes ever actually reaches a human. Most of the money is pissed away in the bureaucracy.
Third, you kick open the door to regulation and censorship. Do you REALLY want the FCC to fuck with your internet connection more then it does? The FCC throws a hissy fit over seeing Janet Jackson's boob with a pasty over the nipple. You can't say fuck or cunt on broadcast TV because it is some mortal sin that results in million dollar fines. Fuck that fucking shit. I want to keep the FCC as far away from my internet connection as I possibly can. I don't doubt that they will try to regulate the Internet more in the future and probably succeed. That said, I don't want to throw the door open and invite them in to do it by hand over control of ISPs to the government.
My point is this. Giving this power over to the government solves nothing. You trade one slow and expensive institution for an even slower, more expensive, and far more likely to regulate and censor you into dust institution. You will end up spending more for vastly inferior service (if that is even possible to imagine) that will almost certainly be regulated into the ground. The government isn't going to do it cheaper or faster. They are going to do it slower at higher cost with vastly inferior customer service. I don't like the current system, but I certainly don't want to replace it with something worse. Swapping corporate ISPs for government ISPs is like deciding you don't like Bush and swapping him from Hitler. It isn't a solution.
I have 'invented' this technique a few times over the course of my working life in different projects. 10 years ago, 7 years ago, 4.5 years ago, each time for a different platform and each time it was fully automated (the last one was called a Persistance Facade, it was a Java implementation with objects being populated by reflection from database and database being populated from objects, everything was done automagically with an XML file that drove the conversion, and this XML file could also be generated automagically either from the DB or from the objects.)
If that is true, you personally can kill the entire lawsuit. Simply show that you had already done this before when the patent was claimed. Prior art kills a patent. By US law, the first guy to invent something is the only person who can patent it.
Seriously, call up whoever is getting sued and tell them that you have already evidence of prior art if you actually do.
Look, I DO believe in global warming. That said, crap headlines like this are, well, crap.
The fact that this point is warmer then some other point in some arbitrary number of years means nothing. There have been literally countless points in time when you can point backwards and say that it has not been so warm for 400+ years. Any idiot can see that pointing out that we are in another of such periods where the last local max with 400 years ago is thoroughly and completely normal and uninteresting.
Flouting stupid statistics like this is what makes smart people believe that global warming is a crap political ploy by environmentalist/anti-globalist/leftists/exc. If your goal is to divide, crap like this is a great idea as it assures everyone that the opposing side are idiots who couldn't tell the truth if their life depended upon it. If your goal is to build a consensus and spawn action, throwing out junk science is a waste of everyone's time.
There are a lot of good reasons to believe that the Earth is heating in an appreciable way and that humans could very well be the cause of much of that heating. We don't need to throw out junk science and sensationalist crap like "OMFG hottest year in 400 years!" as any idiot with even an ounce of grey matter is going to realize that "hottest year in 400 years" is pretty damn normal during any heating phase, especially heating phases that happen on geologic time.
Animals have been moved from on habitat to another by humans. If we hadn't come to be, I have doubts that the ecosystem would have tipped in the direction it has.
I hate to burst your bubble, but every single animal that you can see today is going to die regardless if humans are here or not. Yes, every single one. Droughts, volcanism, and comets, are going just about everything at one point or another. It has happened in the past and it will happen again. A comet is going to smack into Earth and make humanities little footprint look like ant tracks. New things will rise to take its place. The Earth (much to the horror of pseudo religious naturalist everywhere) is not a static unchanging place. Hell, if you simply wait around long enough EVERYTHING is going to die its final death when the sun goes nova and turns the Earth into a ball of ash.
"Nature" is not some grand anthropomorphized entity that gives a damn about life. Nature doesn't have an objective. If nature did have an objective, it would be to crush life by the powerful and impersonal forces of the universe that can easily swat Earth (and humanity) flat.
Conservation is only of value when it betters humanity. Now, do not take from this that I advocate burning the rainforest and BBQing California condors. My point is that "nature" is not a virtue in it of itself unless you hold some sort of pseudo religious beliefs around the environment. We conserve and preserve the environment for humanity's sake, not because it is a mortal sin for humans to destroy the environment.
The environment WILL be completely destroyed by natural forces. We should seek to preserve it in ways that benefit us.
Biosphere, while interesting, really only had minimal applications for space. The point of biosphere was to maintain an environment using a minimal amount of life support by using planets and animals and such. We are actually damn good at maintaining such environments; we just use big old air recyclers instead of natural plants. The ISS can go a fairly long time without oxygen, and military subs are built to go for many months without air.
The lesson from biosphere was that relying on creating a natural ecosystem is stupid. As smart as we are, ecosystems are far too complex to be maintained without some outside input by humans. The lesson we learned is that if you are going to Mars or building a colony on the moon, bring air recycling technology from Earth and keep an eye out for ice to make more air out of.
The safest approach is probably hybrid approach. Have plants around for food and for taking a load of air recyclers, but don't even think about trying to build a completely closed system that doesn't have a technological backup.
I grew up from day one in a dusty old house with a cat and a dog. I am horribly allergic to dust, cats, and dogs. I spent the first 6 years of my life very sick because of allergies that my parents didn't know I had.
Perhaps early exposure has some positive statistically effect on your likelihood of developing an allergy, but it is pretty clear that it is not the end all be all of allergy prevention. If your kid gets sick, despite early exposure, take them to an allergist and remove the containments that is making them sick. You are not going to cure them or do them some favor by keeping a cat around that they are horribly allergic to.
Look at the elevated position of Emperor Bush, claiming he is 'commander in chief'. This is a horrific attach on these important separations - the republicans are attempting to seize ultimate power for themselves and make the judiciary irrelevant. They say that military justice is above and beyond civilian justice.
The president of the US has always been the 'commander in chief' since Washington. That isn't an honorific, that is a military rank. Under the American system, the civilian president is the top of the chain of command. The guy at the top of the chain of a military command is the 'commander in chief'. It should also be pointed out that while the president is indeed the top of the chain of command, the military is sworn loyalty to the constitution and not the president. So, the president is the last word when it comes to orders, but the military is bound by the constitution and can refuse unconstitutional orders (i.e. go sack congress and make me dictator).
The merging of church and state is also very worrying. The republicans use religious arguments for attacking civil liberties such as homosexual relationships, womens' right to choose abortion. They pander to the religious right on issues such as recreational drug use.
Are we so utterly blind these days that we can't look backwards more then 4 years? Homosexuals have NEVER been able to legally merry in the US. It wasn't until just recently that there was a push to make it legal. Abortion was also illegal in most states until a single court decision in the 70's. As far as recreational drugs go, they too have largely been illegal for most of the history of the republic. Any time a recreational drug is legal, it is more by oversight then by actual intent. Further, recreational drugs are not a religious issue, they are a societal issue. There are plenty of atheists who are violently opposed to recreational drugs because of a perceived effect they have upon society.
Look, I completely agree that preventing homosexuals from marrying, enforcement of insane drug laws, and forcing 16 year old girls to crank out babies is complete and utter bullshit. The problem has nothing to do with things as they are now. The system has always sucked. 50 years ago blacks in the south went to segregated schools and had rights less then a citizen. 100 years ago women still couldn't vote. 200 years ago we were still slaughtering Native Americans. The problem is the system. Everything outside of what is in the constitution takes just 50% of the population to overrule. Democracies are shitty forms of government. Democracies can let a slim majority enslave a minority. The problem with gay rights, drug usage, and abortion has nothing to do with one political party or another. The problem is a slim majority that is willing to use the power of government to enforce their morality, regardless of the origin of that morality.
Democracies are shitty forms of government. Granted, they might be the shittiest form after everything else, but they still suck. What is the solution? There is no solution. Governments horde and grow power over time. Nothing short of revolution or colonization is going to change the government. Colonization via space might happen some day, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it this life time. Revolution might very well happen, but the revolutionaries of old will likely be disappointed to find that it is technology that will spawn any great change in the powerful established western democracies, not violent rebellion. There is a solution to democracy out there. My bet is that technology is what will make it possible.
Perhaps a better example is Iraq. Why invade Iraq over non-existent WMDs and WMD programmes (later change your tune to it all being about human rights) but do nothing when there are other countries (Iran and North Korea being the obvious candidates) which have real WMD programmes and just-as-real, possibly worse, human rights abuses?
People will argue that Iraq was about oil or about spreading democracy. Both answers are only vaguely true. What happened in Iraq was like what happens to mafia bosses. You can't nail them on the real crime, but you nail them for "tax evasion", which is one of the most common crimes that mafia bosses face. I believe that the US went into Iraq truly believing that they would find some token amount of chemical weapons that would justify an invasion. The weapons were not the reason for the invasion, but they made a good "tax evasion" style excuse to invade.
So what was the real reason, and why Iraq instead of Iran or North Korea? The real reason is because neo-cons had a belief that they could drop a Japan in the Middle East. It is foolish in hindsight, but the neo-cons truly and honestly believed that they could create a thriving democracy that would blow past all the other Middle Eastern nations. Iraq was to be the neo-cons proof that a free market democracy could (figuratively) conquer all where other forms of government have failed. It wasn't even a bad idea in principle (though in practice we see it was utterly delusional). If Iraq had risen to become a star in the middle of a land of poor theocracies and dictatorships, it might very well have influenced the nations around it to follow their lead towards democracy.
A rich, democratic, and prosperous Middle East kills two birds with one stone. First, democracies love to trade with each other. A democratic Middle East is a Middle East that is going to merrily trade its oil for cars, computers, financial services, and all the things the US has to offer. A rich and prosperous Middle East is also much less unlikely to ferment radicals willing to go blow themselves up in crowded New York streets.
Was it a delusional belief that an invasion would spawn a magical fairytale kingdom of free markets and democracy? Absolutely.
But why not Iran or North Korea? Iran is out for two reasons. First, Iran is vaguely democratic. Iran gives its people just enough power where they can very slowly change the course of their government over time. True, the religious leaders still rule and can veto anything the government does, but you can easily envision Iran some day evolving towards democracy in the same way Britain evolve from a monarchy to a democracy. Iran's people are also far too content for invasion. While Iran's people are not exactly happy with their government, it is not a case like in Iraq where two majority ethnic groups were being brutally oppressed by a minority. Iraq's people were ready to get rid of Saddam, Iran's people are not ready to get rid of their government.
That leaves us with North Korea. The reason why the US doesn't pound down North Korea's door is simple. North Korea has one of the largest arsenals of chemical weapons in the world. In fact, North Korea probably has THE largest arsenal of chemical weapons in the world. All of those weapons are loaded in missiles and artillery that is point into South Korea. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is in artillery range of North Korea. If the US was to invade North Korea, North Korea would kill every last living thing within a 100 miles of its border with chemical weapons, and probably take out every single South Korean city while they are at it. Any potential North Korean nukes are the least of our concerns. North Korea is effectively safe from military action because it holds a few million South Korean's hostage.
It is true that the US has done some pretty horrible things in the past and will probably do some more horrible things in the future. The US has done the things it has done because it has a higher goal of a stable democratic world. Its leaders have decided that the ends justify the means and have kicked over the lesser of two evils in order to try and achieve some higher victory.
Personally, I truly and honestly believe that the US under every single president (yes, even Bush, despite what a dumb fuck he is) has high democratic morals and actively seeks to achieve them. The issue comes when the global picture eclipses the local picture. If you have a choice during the cold war between letting a leftist revolutionary win a democratic election and invite the USSR on over or kicking them down regardless if the election is legitimate or not, you have a real moral dilemma. Different leaders have approach such dilemmas in different ways. Some times they have made grievous errors in judgment that neither supported a greater good nor achieved any sort of local good.
The larger point is something that you already alluded too. No one else has picked up the mantel of leadership. Every time someone goes out to do something that is clearly good, like try (futility) to end some misery in Somalia, stop the genocide in Yugoslavia, or take out brutal government and terrorist wonderland in Taliban Afghanistan, the US either does it alone, or it drags its allies kicking and screaming.
If the EU was to tomorrow get its shit together and declare that they are going to go kick in the front door of the Sudan and end the violence on their own, they wouldn't get a complaint from the US. If the EU had decided that it was going to do something about Rwanda, the US would not have objected. The US doesn't have a problem with handing over leadership. The problem is that everyone is desperately trying to avoid a role of leadership and actively trying to get in the way of the one leader actually making an effort.
The worst case of this was Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a European problem happening in Europe's backyard. The EU absolutely should have stopped that war 5 years early then when it was stopped. The US shouldn't of even had to of gotten involved. What happened? The EU did absolutely nothing. Not only did the EU do nothing, but the UN did nothing. This was a CLEAR case of genocide. What more did the UN need? Do you need gas chambers in the UN building killing innocent civilians before it feels the urge to move?
Instead of the EU taking up the mantel of leadership to fix a problem in its own backyard, the US had to. The US went to the UN and promptly got shot down. The US badgered NATO for over a year before they finally got NATO to agree to act. The US lead the operation - against the UN's permission - and dragged some allies kicking and screaming to lend a support role in cleaning that mess up. It wasn't until AFTER NATO had started bombing that the UN finally rubber stamped the operation once it was clear that the UN was going to fail to block action for another 10 years of genocide.
People don't like the US acting as the world's police? Then someone else should take up the role. I doubt it would take much convincing of the American public to get them to stop wasting money on the world's problems if someone else was chipping in to do their part.
"They're going to have a democratic form of government and they are going to like it!" There went your moral highground fascist. Democracy is something you are born with. Whether your government follows the "pretend we gave it to them" or the "pretend we took it away" school of thought is irrelevant. Trying to shove the "pretend we gave it to them" school of thought down the throat of a country that has democratically chosen the other option by not overthrowing their government is asinine.
Did you even read what I wrote? Is Taiwan a democracy? Yes. Would the US defend Taiwan against its biggest trading partner (China)? Yes. Would Europe? No, they sell the Chinese weapons instead.
Half of those nations have are a part of NATO. All of them except perhaps Sweden have defense treaties with the US. So yes, the don't "have" nukes. They have a treaty with a nation that has nukes that will merrily pop off nukes to defend them. That is like coming to a fight and declaring yourself unarmed... and having a squad of marines behind you and an attack helicopter hovering overhead.
Further, it has always been pretty clearly stated US policy that it would start popping off nukes to defend its allies regardless of the consequences to itself. If Germany had suffered a nuclear attack during the Cold War the US was very much ready to press the big old Armageddon button.
The US still has nukes because the US is likely to need them in the future as a deterrent. Europe has NOT picked up the mantel of world leadership that the US held since after World War II. It was the US has badgered Europe into going into Korea and Serbia. The US is the titan the plops down on occasion trying to fix the worlds wrongs. Now, I am not going to argue that every time the US juggernaut stomps its foot it is doing right. I am arguing that no one else has bothered to do so. There IS a need in this world for a nation or group of nations that is willing to show up around the world with guns to stop unprovoked assaults, such as in Korea, or genocides, such as in Serbia.
Answer me this. If China was to launch an assault on Taiwan tomorrow, would Europe run to the defense of a fellow democracy? Of course not. The only friend Taiwan could expect to come to its aid would be the big evil US. The US would park a battle fleet off the coat of Taiwan, drop a few thousand marines on the shore, and start sinking anything that tried to cross the channel despite the fact that it would be rumbling with the most populace nation in the world off of its own coast.
Europe has merrily thrown the defense of democracies to the wind and has actually tried to sell China weapons for which it could use to attack Taiwan despite pleading from the US not to. Europe has not entered into any sort of defense pact to defend Taiwan as the US has. Europe has put their economic prosperity and safety above defending fellow democracies.
When Europe can unite and show a willingness to strap on their boots and go kick some ass for democracy, I would be more then happy to see the US put down its arms and call it a centaury. I don't see that happening. The only time Europe comes out guns blazing is when it has to do with one of their former colonies or the US is leading the charge and carrying over half of the load. As long as the US is the only nation swinging its weight, you can expect the US to have a hefty supply of nukes to keep the people it pisses off at bay.
Personally, I think that the South Park guys sum up the argument for the good that the US provides to the world pretty eloquently in Team America, World's Police.
We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!
A drug is a drug is a drug. If Novartis could produce recreational drugs that the FDA would approve, they would. Safe recreational drugs are not being held back by pharmaceutical companies, they are being held back by the government. Pharmaceutical companies would like nothing more then to sell you non-addictive recreational drug that has side effects that are less then alcohol at your local liquore store. The government on the other hand abhors the thought of people taking any drugs other then the ones already legal (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, McDonalds, exc).
Could you imagine how terrible it would be if we had no war on drugs? God forbid we utterly destroy the source of income for all criminal gangs and organized crime. God forbid we have recreational drugs that don't come with the risk of contamination, improper dosages, and the risk of federal agents or criminals gunning you down. No, we must protect our war on drugs. If we didn't have a war on drugs, how would we will our prisons and fund gangs?
10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?
Simply put, no. What scares me is the way the government cracks down on these people and makes what they do unsafe. Drugs are rarely inherently bad. Most of the "bad" from drugs comes from the fact that they are either taken for purposes they are not designed for, or they are made in some sketchy ass basement by a guy who doesn't even know what an autoclave is.
The "drug problem" is a problem created wholly by the "drug war". If the FDA would unshackle researches to build drugs for recreation and enhancement, you would quickly fine lines of safe non-addictive drugs with all the danger of Tylenol. True, even Tylenol has its side effects, but it should be up to the users to decide what is and is not an acceptable side effect.
I have a coworker who eats at McDonalds. I don't. He eats there because he enjoys the food. I don't eat there because I don't like the side effects of McDonald's food (getting fat, dying early, malnourishment, exc.). I don't need the government to launch a "war on fast food" and gun down the makers of fast food or throw them in jail. Yes, fast food results in countless deaths each year. That doesn't give the government a blank check to go out killing people imprisoning people, and creating a massive black market.
I think the solution is simple. Set a level of acceptability and STICK WITH IT. None of this hypocritical crap where we can eat and drink all the fast food and alcohol we want killing your heart and liver respectively, but god forbid you anyone take peyote or marijuana. Set a reasonable limit to the health risks something can have when its effects are purely recreational or enhancement and stick with it. I personally would set the risk/addiction level to the same as cigarettes and alcohol. Anything that is less lethal then those things is legal. Let the pharmaceutical companies throw some money at the problem, and watch and be amazed as the entire American black market that funds 95% of all criminal activity evaporates.
The last thing I want to do when I come home from work is drop 5 hours into WoW too, but that has nothing to do with the medium. If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to grind through WoW, I would rather have a keyboard. Yes, I know you can hook up a keyboard to a consol, but I have yet to see a game that was really meant for a keyboard come out on a consol.
My point is that for games like WoW, FPS, RTS, and other such games, a computer just works better. If I have just gotten home and want to screw around, Wii costing half as much is far more appealing. Hell, if I am really desperate for a computer/TV hybrid, I can just buy a computer and hook it up to my TV. My point is that for geeks it is pretty clear that the PS3 is less then a computer in terms of functionality. For the casual gamer it is pretty clear that the Wii is much more his style of gaming and much more dead on when it comes to price. I am not saying that there does not exist some people that will shell out for a PS3, just that in my personal opinion the PS3 is occupying a no-mans land of price and gameplay.
If we were at the point where all TV programs were on demand and getting a new game was as simple as downloading it in some Steam like scheme, I think a 600 consol serving as the medium to do this would be a hit. Buy the consol then pay as you go for everything else. We are not yet at that point though. The consol is a gaming center that can play DvDs. It isn't the "center" of a houses entertainment, and so it can not command the sort of price that you would expect from something occupying the center of a houses entertainment.
From the looks of the detail sparce article I just made before I headed off to work (at a company that works with Nanotubes ironically enough), this actually looks pretty easy. The image of nanotubes that they show are almost certainly nanotubes made by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). CVD is cheap, scalable, fairly easy, and found in every semiconductor fab you have ever gone to. Now, I am not saying that there might be some real engineering challenges, but if alls they have to do is grow a mess of nanotubes ontop of a substrate as shown in the picture of the article, this is going to very easy and hit the market in the very near future.
That said, I would not hold my breath waiting for this product to come out. The making of the nanotubes in the way that they have is not hard, but I would be suprised to learn that there is not some other performance or quality issue that needs to be struggled with.
Maybe you like kludgy 1st person shooters and the inability to play most RTS and turn based strategy games, and hate quality MMORPGs?
Personally, I'll probably get a Wii. Why? Wii knows what it is. It is the thing I bring out when I have a few friends over and we want to screw around playing whatever insane game Nintendo has brought to the table. Wii is also priced such that it recognizes that it is not the center piece of my entertainment. Wii looks like it is going to be cheap, fun, and just the sort of things to waste some time with when the friends are over without pissing off my girlfriend for being anti-social.
If I want FPS, play on line, or do anything that requires graphical power to run, I would rather just use a computer. I don't tie want to tie up the TV to play an MMORPG or waste hours on some online FPS. Further, the controls on a computer are many times more satisfying then those game pads for the type of games it takes a computer to run.
Personally, I think the PS3 is a grievous mistake. Wii is going to clean up the casual gamer market and hardcore gamers are going to take one look at the PS3 price tag and decide to go do themselves a favor and just buy a new computer. The only people I can think who are really going to get much functionality out of a PS3 that they won't get out of a Wii or a computer will be sports games fans. Even then, the X-box 360 will put up a good fight for even those folks. What the x-box lacks in slightly worse graphics it will make up for by selling at less then half the price of a PS3 (by the time the PS3 hits).
The PS3 wants to be the centerpiece of a home entertainment system. I don't think that this is a bad idea in theory, I just think that it is premature. In another consol generation or two I think that consoles might be accepted enough to start blazing trails into other areas of entertainment, but I don't think that the time is right yet.
Of course, I suppose we will see. It seems like common sense that the PS3 is a mistake, but I figure Sony is paying someone 6 figures to do a proper market analysis. You would HOPE that that person has a better understanding of the market then we do. Only time will tell at this point. Personally though, my money is going to stay in my wallet until Wii comes out. If I decide to drop 600 dollars, it will probably be on a new computer, not the PS3 entertainment center of d00m.
Thanks for pointing it out. I had noticed it already that someone is wandering around labeling my stuff as flamebait even when it clearly is not. The poor smuck is just wasting his mod points though. I have excellent karma that isn't going to budge so much as an inch no matter how many mod points they throw at me. My real positive karma scores vastly outnumber the handful of mod points that my little adoring fan has to flamebait me with.
If anything I am kind of flattered that someone finds my posts so insightful that they are willing to stalk my posts and desperately try and mod them down in an attempt to keep people from reading them. People don't censor meaningless drivel; they censor stuff that has meaning and impact. I'll take earning a flamebait stalker as a badge of pride that someone finds my posts interesting enough keep tabs on everything I post.
No, robotics is good for warfare and humanity in general. Most of the bad things that happen in war happen because humans really don't like to die. If you are marching along as a soldier in Iraq, and suddenly you start taking fire from a building, how do you handle it? Right now you call in heavy fire support and simply flatten the building or riddle it full of holes. If you had robots, you might one day be able to send a robot in that goes into the building and incapacitates every armed person in the building without flattening the entire building and killing civilians. Instead of soldiers going nuts from being constantly shot at and lining up civilians to be shot, soldiers can work inside a well protected building with A/C controlling robots.
There WILL be war now and in the future. The question is what we can do about it. The Western world sat by and watched the genocide in Rwanda without acting because war is hard. No one wanted to go in guns blazing into an African nation. Hell, the last time we tried that was Somalia in a vain attempt to deliver food aid. We probably killed more people in self defense in Somalia then we saved by delivering food.
Imagine if we didn't have to put up with this shit. Imagine if stopping a genocide was as simple sending in a robot army that has no concern for its own safety that captures violent people and brings them to prison. Imagine a robot army whose overriding priority is to not kill civilians. Imagine the good that could be done if someone could drop an army in Somalia that captured anyone who tried to initiate violence? So long as we give a damn about what happens to people outside of our safe and cozy democracies, there are going to be wars. Even if we decide we don't want any part of the wars, that isn't going to stop countless coos, rebellions, and corrupt governments from initiating violence against their own people.
The danger in sending US troops is not the US troops. The US can flatten any non-nuclear nation with minimal losses. The problem with minimal losses is that minimal US losses means catastrophic civilian losses. A MOAB might very well get rid of all the insurgence in a city, but it also gets rid of all the civilians. What you see today is not the US army using all of its force and failing. What you see is an army desperately struggling with the balance between using enough force to protect their own and using as little force as possible in an attempt to not kill civilians. If "protecting your own" wasn't an issue, you wouldn't have Marines flattening buildings or bombs landing in cities.
War is a fact of life. If we are not fighting in one, someone else is. The only question is when war comes, do we want to get involved, and how humanly can we fight.
The parents point was that no one is trying to stop Russia or China. Even if the US made its multi-billion dollar defense system, it could never stop a full nuclear attack from Russia or even China. The real temptation in a missile defense system isn't to block China or Russia, but to block places like North Korea and Iran. If your system can shoot a dozen nukes out of the air, you have a pretty fair defense against a place like North Korea or Iran where a crackjob leader can rise to power overnight and start throwing nukes.
That said, the real price is going to be with soured relations with Russia and China and the billions such a program would demand. Nationalist in both nations would use the defense system as a method of drumming up support for their own political gains by casting the US being out to get them.
If one could snap their fingers and make a perfect missile defense system, it might be tempting to say to hell with what the rest of the world thinks. On the other hand, if you can snap your fingers and make a defense system that only knocks down half of what shoots at you, you really need to ask yourself if you were just better off investing in diplomacy and other things. A defense system that can't stop a dozen missiles is basically just a way to cut your losses if you do get into a nuke war, it isn't a real deterent any more. One nuke is one nuke too many to land on any city.
Slashdot Mirror
Is China pissed off that it is not a member of NATO? You can have your own little exclusive club without causing much problems. The real issue is funding. If the US drops double the funding on a democracy club then it does to the UN, people might look up and take notice. It says is a pretty bold statement that the UN is a waste of space when it comes to solving certain problems (which it is).
Honestly though, the biggest issue is not with the rest of the world being in a pissy mood about a democracy club that they can't join. The real issue would be the members. Europe would be loathed to join such an organization if it wielded any power because Europe is very adverse to military conflict. The US would throw a fit because it would want members to join that probably could not meet the requirements (namely Israel). I am not saying that this is a real solution, more of a pipe dream. My larger point is that when it comes to putting down bad people and stopping conflict, the UN is utterly worthless if there is not a diplomatic solution. If there is a diplomatic solution, the UN is the place to go. If the solution requires some guns and some ass kicking, the UN is the last place in the world to ask, as any Tutsi from Rwanda (not that there are many left) could attest.
Dictators that mistreat their citizens need to be reigned in as well - maybe not via invasion, but the UN need to stand up to dictators more. One fundamental right that the UN should stand up for is the right of citizens to leave their nation freely - this is probably the single most definitive measure of whether a government is oppressive - whether it allows its citizens to leave freely.
I suppose if you owned sheep you would hire a wolf to police them.
The UN is MADE of dictators who brutalize their own citizens. The UN is not the place to fix dictators who brutalize their population. Then UN watched the genocide in Yugoslavia for 10 years and did nothing. It took the US and Britain bullying NATO into doing something before that mess was cleaned up. The UN did absolutely NOTHING during the Rwandan genocide. Rwanda lost double digit percentage points of its population and the UN didn't lift a finger. Right now the Sudan is still a mess and the UN has done thing. The UN can't step between Israel and Palestine. The UN can't help in Iraq or Afghanistan. The UN has done nothing to solve the conflict in East Timor. It wrote angry letters to Zimbabwe as its "president" bulldozed entire neighborhoods of political rivals.
The UN is an utterly worthless institution for world policing. I am not saying that the UN doesn't have its place. I am just saying that its place never ever involves the use of force. If you want to sign environmental treaties, seek diplomatic solutions to problems, or coordinate humanitarian aid, the UN is the place to look. If you want someone to go beat the piss out of someone else for doing horrible and cruel things to other humans, convince the American it is in their best interest to go do it... but be ready with a broom. The Americans are good at smashing things and beating up bad guys (and people in the blast radius around the bad guys), but the clean up part... ehh, they kind of suck at that.
Personally, I think the answer is to form a league of democracies that meet strict standards of human rights and political freedom. Set the standards high and stick to them. It might be that Israel for instance wouldn't be able to join. You still might not have an organization capable of wielding a hammer and smashing dictators who step out of line, but at least you could dispense with the insanity of having Cuba and Libya on your human rights council.
Actually, the balance of power is not so clear. In a purely conventional fight, I have little doubt that South Korea would come out on top. You are right to say that South Korea has a better army with much better weaponry. Not only that, but the South Koreans as a people are pretty damn fanatical about NOT being ruled by their decrepit and starving neighbor to the north. The fact that the US would be there to back them out would only tip the odds well in favor of South Korea... in a conventional fight.
The problem is that North Korea would never fight a conventional war with South Korea. North Korea is loaded to the teeth with the (wait for it...) WMDs. No, this isn't Saddam where we "think" they have them and they don't. There is not a question in the world that North Korea is armed to the teeth with chemical and biological weapons. Forget nukes, North Korea has enough chemical weapons to get the job done and then some. To make matters worse, Seoul is within artillery range of North Korea. In a war between the Koreas you can rest assure that the opening move by North Korea would be blanket South Korea with chemical weapons via artillery, then lob off mid range missiles to hit knock out the rest of South Korea. In a surprise attack South Korea's chances for short term victory are actually pretty grim.
Long term of course North Korea stands no chance. South Korea could muster a force to hold the North back and the US, NATO, and probably even the EU would jump in to fight. That said, the civilian and military casualties suffered by all sides would be horrific. Throw in the fact that North Korea is run by a fellow who is certainly insane, and you are talking about a pretty damn scary situation. It isn't USSR and the US going toe to toe in nuclear Armageddon scary, but for the folks of South Korea, it might as well be.
First off, the article that talks about the US using mines in Afganistan is only aledged. Second, the gator mines in question are a type of mine that self destructs after a given time.
As far as the "plans" to use mines goes, I would be pissed off if my government didn't have plans to use land mines. Hell, I would be pissed off to learn that the government doesn't have a plan to deal with an alien invasion. I am pretty sure that if you went through the "plans" that the NSA and the Pentagon have on file, talking about using land mines in Iraq (which as far as I and your sources know they have not in the most recent war) should be the last of your worries. There are government agencies out there that spend their lives thinking up horrible situations and horrible solutions. This is a good thing.
We don't know how things will turn out at any given moment. Having a plan to nuke Iran or invade Israel might not sound like a good idea at the time, but it is good that if great need ever arose, someone has a plan waiting to be used. It is much better to have a plan that grows dust sitting in a file cabinet twelve security check points deep in the Pentagon that can be used, then it is to need such a plan and not have it. If "plans" to do bad things that are never done offend you, don't look any deeper. Plans to use landmines are easily one of the more benign plans the US government (and most other governments for that matter) has on file.
Yet we manage to accomplish more or less exactly the same thing with road infrastructure, without having five companies running their own roads to every house, then charging the house owners for access.
It's not that hard to design a system after that model, with specific interchange points on a local level.
The last solution in the world I want to see is a copy of the road system. Yes, I'll even take an ISP monopoly over a government monopoly. The second you give the government a hand in anything, you do two things.
First, they have heavily unionized workers that need to eat a still living baby before a dozen witnesses, each of which have to fill out a stack of papers agreeing to what they saw, before you can fire them. Look at the MBTA (that would be Boston's subway system) and compare it to your favorite airline. Do both have problems? Sure. Are there good people in both organizations? Yes. Does the MBTA have roughly a hundred times more service providers who would sooner scowl at you and tell you to fuck off then offer a smile? Absolutely. When the government does anything, it is unionized up the ass such that ever your absolutely worst workers can not be fired. Airliners have unions, but they are no so powerful that you can't toss an under performing employee. The customer service at current ISPs is pretty low. I can only think in horror how far the service would find a way to drop if it was government run.
Second, the government is horribly inefficient. Yes, your government services are often "free" in that you don't have to pay them when you use the service, but they are not free in that the amount you have to spend on taxes is astronomical. Government organizations are almost universally inefficient. My girlfriend works in a charity providing care to homeless and the mentally ill. She lives in dread of the days she needs to go to the social security offices in Boston. It always takes hours to even get in to see people. Once in you enter a bureaucratic hell that will almost certainly cost many more hours of your life. My girlfriend is always a little disturbed when some comes home from the social security office because she wonders how in the hell a mentally disabled or simply order person could possibly navigate such a government nightmare. All of that waste has a cost. The result is that only a tiny fraction of what is paid into the system via taxes ever actually reaches a human. Most of the money is pissed away in the bureaucracy.
Third, you kick open the door to regulation and censorship. Do you REALLY want the FCC to fuck with your internet connection more then it does? The FCC throws a hissy fit over seeing Janet Jackson's boob with a pasty over the nipple. You can't say fuck or cunt on broadcast TV because it is some mortal sin that results in million dollar fines. Fuck that fucking shit. I want to keep the FCC as far away from my internet connection as I possibly can. I don't doubt that they will try to regulate the Internet more in the future and probably succeed. That said, I don't want to throw the door open and invite them in to do it by hand over control of ISPs to the government.
My point is this. Giving this power over to the government solves nothing. You trade one slow and expensive institution for an even slower, more expensive, and far more likely to regulate and censor you into dust institution. You will end up spending more for vastly inferior service (if that is even possible to imagine) that will almost certainly be regulated into the ground. The government isn't going to do it cheaper or faster. They are going to do it slower at higher cost with vastly inferior customer service. I don't like the current system, but I certainly don't want to replace it with something worse. Swapping corporate ISPs for government ISPs is like deciding you don't like Bush and swapping him from Hitler. It isn't a solution.
I have 'invented' this technique a few times over the course of my working life in different projects. 10 years ago, 7 years ago, 4.5 years ago, each time for a different platform and each time it was fully automated (the last one was called a Persistance Facade, it was a Java implementation with objects being populated by reflection from database and database being populated from objects, everything was done automagically with an XML file that drove the conversion, and this XML file could also be generated automagically either from the DB or from the objects.)
If that is true, you personally can kill the entire lawsuit. Simply show that you had already done this before when the patent was claimed. Prior art kills a patent. By US law, the first guy to invent something is the only person who can patent it.
Seriously, call up whoever is getting sued and tell them that you have already evidence of prior art if you actually do.
Look, I DO believe in global warming. That said, crap headlines like this are, well, crap.
The fact that this point is warmer then some other point in some arbitrary number of years means nothing. There have been literally countless points in time when you can point backwards and say that it has not been so warm for 400+ years. Any idiot can see that pointing out that we are in another of such periods where the last local max with 400 years ago is thoroughly and completely normal and uninteresting.
Flouting stupid statistics like this is what makes smart people believe that global warming is a crap political ploy by environmentalist/anti-globalist/leftists/exc. If your goal is to divide, crap like this is a great idea as it assures everyone that the opposing side are idiots who couldn't tell the truth if their life depended upon it. If your goal is to build a consensus and spawn action, throwing out junk science is a waste of everyone's time.
There are a lot of good reasons to believe that the Earth is heating in an appreciable way and that humans could very well be the cause of much of that heating. We don't need to throw out junk science and sensationalist crap like "OMFG hottest year in 400 years!" as any idiot with even an ounce of grey matter is going to realize that "hottest year in 400 years" is pretty damn normal during any heating phase, especially heating phases that happen on geologic time.
Animals have been moved from on habitat to another by humans. If we hadn't come to be, I have doubts that the ecosystem would have tipped in the direction it has.
I hate to burst your bubble, but every single animal that you can see today is going to die regardless if humans are here or not. Yes, every single one. Droughts, volcanism, and comets, are going just about everything at one point or another. It has happened in the past and it will happen again. A comet is going to smack into Earth and make humanities little footprint look like ant tracks. New things will rise to take its place. The Earth (much to the horror of pseudo religious naturalist everywhere) is not a static unchanging place. Hell, if you simply wait around long enough EVERYTHING is going to die its final death when the sun goes nova and turns the Earth into a ball of ash.
"Nature" is not some grand anthropomorphized entity that gives a damn about life. Nature doesn't have an objective. If nature did have an objective, it would be to crush life by the powerful and impersonal forces of the universe that can easily swat Earth (and humanity) flat.
Conservation is only of value when it betters humanity. Now, do not take from this that I advocate burning the rainforest and BBQing California condors. My point is that "nature" is not a virtue in it of itself unless you hold some sort of pseudo religious beliefs around the environment. We conserve and preserve the environment for humanity's sake, not because it is a mortal sin for humans to destroy the environment.
The environment WILL be completely destroyed by natural forces. We should seek to preserve it in ways that benefit us.
Biosphere, while interesting, really only had minimal applications for space. The point of biosphere was to maintain an environment using a minimal amount of life support by using planets and animals and such. We are actually damn good at maintaining such environments; we just use big old air recyclers instead of natural plants. The ISS can go a fairly long time without oxygen, and military subs are built to go for many months without air.
The lesson from biosphere was that relying on creating a natural ecosystem is stupid. As smart as we are, ecosystems are far too complex to be maintained without some outside input by humans. The lesson we learned is that if you are going to Mars or building a colony on the moon, bring air recycling technology from Earth and keep an eye out for ice to make more air out of.
The safest approach is probably hybrid approach. Have plants around for food and for taking a load of air recyclers, but don't even think about trying to build a completely closed system that doesn't have a technological backup.
I grew up from day one in a dusty old house with a cat and a dog. I am horribly allergic to dust, cats, and dogs. I spent the first 6 years of my life very sick because of allergies that my parents didn't know I had.
Perhaps early exposure has some positive statistically effect on your likelihood of developing an allergy, but it is pretty clear that it is not the end all be all of allergy prevention. If your kid gets sick, despite early exposure, take them to an allergist and remove the containments that is making them sick. You are not going to cure them or do them some favor by keeping a cat around that they are horribly allergic to.
Look at the elevated position of Emperor Bush, claiming he is 'commander in chief'. This is a horrific attach on these important separations - the republicans are attempting to seize ultimate power for themselves and make the judiciary irrelevant. They say that military justice is above and beyond civilian justice.
The president of the US has always been the 'commander in chief' since Washington. That isn't an honorific, that is a military rank. Under the American system, the civilian president is the top of the chain of command. The guy at the top of the chain of a military command is the 'commander in chief'. It should also be pointed out that while the president is indeed the top of the chain of command, the military is sworn loyalty to the constitution and not the president. So, the president is the last word when it comes to orders, but the military is bound by the constitution and can refuse unconstitutional orders (i.e. go sack congress and make me dictator).
The merging of church and state is also very worrying. The republicans use religious arguments for attacking civil liberties such as homosexual relationships, womens' right to choose abortion. They pander to the religious right on issues such as recreational drug use.
Are we so utterly blind these days that we can't look backwards more then 4 years? Homosexuals have NEVER been able to legally merry in the US. It wasn't until just recently that there was a push to make it legal. Abortion was also illegal in most states until a single court decision in the 70's. As far as recreational drugs go, they too have largely been illegal for most of the history of the republic. Any time a recreational drug is legal, it is more by oversight then by actual intent. Further, recreational drugs are not a religious issue, they are a societal issue. There are plenty of atheists who are violently opposed to recreational drugs because of a perceived effect they have upon society.
Look, I completely agree that preventing homosexuals from marrying, enforcement of insane drug laws, and forcing 16 year old girls to crank out babies is complete and utter bullshit. The problem has nothing to do with things as they are now. The system has always sucked. 50 years ago blacks in the south went to segregated schools and had rights less then a citizen. 100 years ago women still couldn't vote. 200 years ago we were still slaughtering Native Americans. The problem is the system. Everything outside of what is in the constitution takes just 50% of the population to overrule. Democracies are shitty forms of government. Democracies can let a slim majority enslave a minority. The problem with gay rights, drug usage, and abortion has nothing to do with one political party or another. The problem is a slim majority that is willing to use the power of government to enforce their morality, regardless of the origin of that morality.
Democracies are shitty forms of government. Granted, they might be the shittiest form after everything else, but they still suck. What is the solution? There is no solution. Governments horde and grow power over time. Nothing short of revolution or colonization is going to change the government. Colonization via space might happen some day, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it this life time. Revolution might very well happen, but the revolutionaries of old will likely be disappointed to find that it is technology that will spawn any great change in the powerful established western democracies, not violent rebellion. There is a solution to democracy out there. My bet is that technology is what will make it possible.
Perhaps a better example is Iraq. Why invade Iraq over non-existent WMDs and WMD programmes (later change your tune to it all being about human rights) but do nothing when there are other countries (Iran and North Korea being the obvious candidates) which have real WMD programmes and just-as-real, possibly worse, human rights abuses?
People will argue that Iraq was about oil or about spreading democracy. Both answers are only vaguely true. What happened in Iraq was like what happens to mafia bosses. You can't nail them on the real crime, but you nail them for "tax evasion", which is one of the most common crimes that mafia bosses face. I believe that the US went into Iraq truly believing that they would find some token amount of chemical weapons that would justify an invasion. The weapons were not the reason for the invasion, but they made a good "tax evasion" style excuse to invade.
So what was the real reason, and why Iraq instead of Iran or North Korea? The real reason is because neo-cons had a belief that they could drop a Japan in the Middle East. It is foolish in hindsight, but the neo-cons truly and honestly believed that they could create a thriving democracy that would blow past all the other Middle Eastern nations. Iraq was to be the neo-cons proof that a free market democracy could (figuratively) conquer all where other forms of government have failed. It wasn't even a bad idea in principle (though in practice we see it was utterly delusional). If Iraq had risen to become a star in the middle of a land of poor theocracies and dictatorships, it might very well have influenced the nations around it to follow their lead towards democracy.
A rich, democratic, and prosperous Middle East kills two birds with one stone. First, democracies love to trade with each other. A democratic Middle East is a Middle East that is going to merrily trade its oil for cars, computers, financial services, and all the things the US has to offer. A rich and prosperous Middle East is also much less unlikely to ferment radicals willing to go blow themselves up in crowded New York streets.
Was it a delusional belief that an invasion would spawn a magical fairytale kingdom of free markets and democracy? Absolutely.
But why not Iran or North Korea? Iran is out for two reasons. First, Iran is vaguely democratic. Iran gives its people just enough power where they can very slowly change the course of their government over time. True, the religious leaders still rule and can veto anything the government does, but you can easily envision Iran some day evolving towards democracy in the same way Britain evolve from a monarchy to a democracy. Iran's people are also far too content for invasion. While Iran's people are not exactly happy with their government, it is not a case like in Iraq where two majority ethnic groups were being brutally oppressed by a minority. Iraq's people were ready to get rid of Saddam, Iran's people are not ready to get rid of their government.
That leaves us with North Korea. The reason why the US doesn't pound down North Korea's door is simple. North Korea has one of the largest arsenals of chemical weapons in the world. In fact, North Korea probably has THE largest arsenal of chemical weapons in the world. All of those weapons are loaded in missiles and artillery that is point into South Korea. Seoul, the capital of South Korea, is in artillery range of North Korea. If the US was to invade North Korea, North Korea would kill every last living thing within a 100 miles of its border with chemical weapons, and probably take out every single South Korean city while they are at it. Any potential North Korean nukes are the least of our concerns. North Korea is effectively safe from military action because it holds a few million South Korean's hostage.
It is true that the US has done some pretty horrible things in the past and will probably do some more horrible things in the future. The US has done the things it has done because it has a higher goal of a stable democratic world. Its leaders have decided that the ends justify the means and have kicked over the lesser of two evils in order to try and achieve some higher victory.
Personally, I truly and honestly believe that the US under every single president (yes, even Bush, despite what a dumb fuck he is) has high democratic morals and actively seeks to achieve them. The issue comes when the global picture eclipses the local picture. If you have a choice during the cold war between letting a leftist revolutionary win a democratic election and invite the USSR on over or kicking them down regardless if the election is legitimate or not, you have a real moral dilemma. Different leaders have approach such dilemmas in different ways. Some times they have made grievous errors in judgment that neither supported a greater good nor achieved any sort of local good.
The larger point is something that you already alluded too. No one else has picked up the mantel of leadership. Every time someone goes out to do something that is clearly good, like try (futility) to end some misery in Somalia, stop the genocide in Yugoslavia, or take out brutal government and terrorist wonderland in Taliban Afghanistan, the US either does it alone, or it drags its allies kicking and screaming.
If the EU was to tomorrow get its shit together and declare that they are going to go kick in the front door of the Sudan and end the violence on their own, they wouldn't get a complaint from the US. If the EU had decided that it was going to do something about Rwanda, the US would not have objected. The US doesn't have a problem with handing over leadership. The problem is that everyone is desperately trying to avoid a role of leadership and actively trying to get in the way of the one leader actually making an effort.
The worst case of this was Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was a European problem happening in Europe's backyard. The EU absolutely should have stopped that war 5 years early then when it was stopped. The US shouldn't of even had to of gotten involved. What happened? The EU did absolutely nothing. Not only did the EU do nothing, but the UN did nothing. This was a CLEAR case of genocide. What more did the UN need? Do you need gas chambers in the UN building killing innocent civilians before it feels the urge to move?
Instead of the EU taking up the mantel of leadership to fix a problem in its own backyard, the US had to. The US went to the UN and promptly got shot down. The US badgered NATO for over a year before they finally got NATO to agree to act. The US lead the operation - against the UN's permission - and dragged some allies kicking and screaming to lend a support role in cleaning that mess up. It wasn't until AFTER NATO had started bombing that the UN finally rubber stamped the operation once it was clear that the UN was going to fail to block action for another 10 years of genocide.
People don't like the US acting as the world's police? Then someone else should take up the role. I doubt it would take much convincing of the American public to get them to stop wasting money on the world's problems if someone else was chipping in to do their part.
"They're going to have a democratic form of government and they are going to like it!"
There went your moral highground fascist. Democracy is something you are born with. Whether your government follows the "pretend we gave it to them" or the "pretend we took it away" school of thought is irrelevant. Trying to shove the "pretend we gave it to them" school of thought down the throat of a country that has democratically chosen the other option by not overthrowing their government is asinine.
Did you even read what I wrote? Is Taiwan a democracy? Yes. Would the US defend Taiwan against its biggest trading partner (China)? Yes. Would Europe? No, they sell the Chinese weapons instead.
Half of those nations have are a part of NATO. All of them except perhaps Sweden have defense treaties with the US. So yes, the don't "have" nukes. They have a treaty with a nation that has nukes that will merrily pop off nukes to defend them. That is like coming to a fight and declaring yourself unarmed... and having a squad of marines behind you and an attack helicopter hovering overhead.
Further, it has always been pretty clearly stated US policy that it would start popping off nukes to defend its allies regardless of the consequences to itself. If Germany had suffered a nuclear attack during the Cold War the US was very much ready to press the big old Armageddon button.
The US still has nukes because the US is likely to need them in the future as a deterrent. Europe has NOT picked up the mantel of world leadership that the US held since after World War II. It was the US has badgered Europe into going into Korea and Serbia. The US is the titan the plops down on occasion trying to fix the worlds wrongs. Now, I am not going to argue that every time the US juggernaut stomps its foot it is doing right. I am arguing that no one else has bothered to do so. There IS a need in this world for a nation or group of nations that is willing to show up around the world with guns to stop unprovoked assaults, such as in Korea, or genocides, such as in Serbia.
Answer me this. If China was to launch an assault on Taiwan tomorrow, would Europe run to the defense of a fellow democracy? Of course not. The only friend Taiwan could expect to come to its aid would be the big evil US. The US would park a battle fleet off the coat of Taiwan, drop a few thousand marines on the shore, and start sinking anything that tried to cross the channel despite the fact that it would be rumbling with the most populace nation in the world off of its own coast.
Europe has merrily thrown the defense of democracies to the wind and has actually tried to sell China weapons for which it could use to attack Taiwan despite pleading from the US not to. Europe has not entered into any sort of defense pact to defend Taiwan as the US has. Europe has put their economic prosperity and safety above defending fellow democracies.
When Europe can unite and show a willingness to strap on their boots and go kick some ass for democracy, I would be more then happy to see the US put down its arms and call it a centaury. I don't see that happening. The only time Europe comes out guns blazing is when it has to do with one of their former colonies or the US is leading the charge and carrying over half of the load. As long as the US is the only nation swinging its weight, you can expect the US to have a hefty supply of nukes to keep the people it pisses off at bay.
Personally, I think that the South Park guys sum up the argument for the good that the US provides to the world pretty eloquently in Team America, World's Police.
We're dicks! We're reckless, arrogant, stupid dicks. And the Film Actors Guild are pussies. And Kim Jong Il is an asshole. Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole is a dick, with some balls. The problem with dicks is: they fuck too much or fuck when it isn't appropriate - and it takes a pussy to show them that. But sometimes, pussies can be so full of shit that they become assholes themselves... because pussies are an inch and half away from ass holes. I don't know much about this crazy, crazy world, but I do know this: If you don't let us fuck this asshole, we're going to have our dicks and pussies all covered in shit!
A drug is a drug is a drug. If Novartis could produce recreational drugs that the FDA would approve, they would. Safe recreational drugs are not being held back by pharmaceutical companies, they are being held back by the government. Pharmaceutical companies would like nothing more then to sell you non-addictive recreational drug that has side effects that are less then alcohol at your local liquore store. The government on the other hand abhors the thought of people taking any drugs other then the ones already legal (caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, McDonalds, exc).
Could you imagine how terrible it would be if we had no war on drugs? God forbid we utterly destroy the source of income for all criminal gangs and organized crime. God forbid we have recreational drugs that don't come with the risk of contamination, improper dosages, and the risk of federal agents or criminals gunning you down. No, we must protect our war on drugs. If we didn't have a war on drugs, how would we will our prisons and fund gangs?
10 million kids with the taste of speed in their mouths. Does that not scare anyone else?
Simply put, no. What scares me is the way the government cracks down on these people and makes what they do unsafe. Drugs are rarely inherently bad. Most of the "bad" from drugs comes from the fact that they are either taken for purposes they are not designed for, or they are made in some sketchy ass basement by a guy who doesn't even know what an autoclave is.
The "drug problem" is a problem created wholly by the "drug war". If the FDA would unshackle researches to build drugs for recreation and enhancement, you would quickly fine lines of safe non-addictive drugs with all the danger of Tylenol. True, even Tylenol has its side effects, but it should be up to the users to decide what is and is not an acceptable side effect.
I have a coworker who eats at McDonalds. I don't. He eats there because he enjoys the food. I don't eat there because I don't like the side effects of McDonald's food (getting fat, dying early, malnourishment, exc.). I don't need the government to launch a "war on fast food" and gun down the makers of fast food or throw them in jail. Yes, fast food results in countless deaths each year. That doesn't give the government a blank check to go out killing people imprisoning people, and creating a massive black market.
I think the solution is simple. Set a level of acceptability and STICK WITH IT. None of this hypocritical crap where we can eat and drink all the fast food and alcohol we want killing your heart and liver respectively, but god forbid you anyone take peyote or marijuana. Set a reasonable limit to the health risks something can have when its effects are purely recreational or enhancement and stick with it. I personally would set the risk/addiction level to the same as cigarettes and alcohol. Anything that is less lethal then those things is legal. Let the pharmaceutical companies throw some money at the problem, and watch and be amazed as the entire American black market that funds 95% of all criminal activity evaporates.
The last thing I want to do when I come home from work is drop 5 hours into WoW too, but that has nothing to do with the medium. If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to grind through WoW, I would rather have a keyboard. Yes, I know you can hook up a keyboard to a consol, but I have yet to see a game that was really meant for a keyboard come out on a consol.
My point is that for games like WoW, FPS, RTS, and other such games, a computer just works better. If I have just gotten home and want to screw around, Wii costing half as much is far more appealing. Hell, if I am really desperate for a computer/TV hybrid, I can just buy a computer and hook it up to my TV. My point is that for geeks it is pretty clear that the PS3 is less then a computer in terms of functionality. For the casual gamer it is pretty clear that the Wii is much more his style of gaming and much more dead on when it comes to price. I am not saying that there does not exist some people that will shell out for a PS3, just that in my personal opinion the PS3 is occupying a no-mans land of price and gameplay.
If we were at the point where all TV programs were on demand and getting a new game was as simple as downloading it in some Steam like scheme, I think a 600 consol serving as the medium to do this would be a hit. Buy the consol then pay as you go for everything else. We are not yet at that point though. The consol is a gaming center that can play DvDs. It isn't the "center" of a houses entertainment, and so it can not command the sort of price that you would expect from something occupying the center of a houses entertainment.
From the looks of the detail sparce article I just made before I headed off to work (at a company that works with Nanotubes ironically enough), this actually looks pretty easy. The image of nanotubes that they show are almost certainly nanotubes made by chemical vapor deposition (CVD). CVD is cheap, scalable, fairly easy, and found in every semiconductor fab you have ever gone to. Now, I am not saying that there might be some real engineering challenges, but if alls they have to do is grow a mess of nanotubes ontop of a substrate as shown in the picture of the article, this is going to very easy and hit the market in the very near future.
That said, I would not hold my breath waiting for this product to come out. The making of the nanotubes in the way that they have is not hard, but I would be suprised to learn that there is not some other performance or quality issue that needs to be struggled with.
Ha! Anyone that would mod that as flamebait has absolutely no sense of humor and should have their mod points stripped.
Maybe you like kludgy 1st person shooters and the inability to play most RTS and turn based strategy games, and hate quality MMORPGs?
Personally, I'll probably get a Wii. Why? Wii knows what it is. It is the thing I bring out when I have a few friends over and we want to screw around playing whatever insane game Nintendo has brought to the table. Wii is also priced such that it recognizes that it is not the center piece of my entertainment. Wii looks like it is going to be cheap, fun, and just the sort of things to waste some time with when the friends are over without pissing off my girlfriend for being anti-social.
If I want FPS, play on line, or do anything that requires graphical power to run, I would rather just use a computer. I don't tie want to tie up the TV to play an MMORPG or waste hours on some online FPS. Further, the controls on a computer are many times more satisfying then those game pads for the type of games it takes a computer to run.
Personally, I think the PS3 is a grievous mistake. Wii is going to clean up the casual gamer market and hardcore gamers are going to take one look at the PS3 price tag and decide to go do themselves a favor and just buy a new computer. The only people I can think who are really going to get much functionality out of a PS3 that they won't get out of a Wii or a computer will be sports games fans. Even then, the X-box 360 will put up a good fight for even those folks. What the x-box lacks in slightly worse graphics it will make up for by selling at less then half the price of a PS3 (by the time the PS3 hits).
The PS3 wants to be the centerpiece of a home entertainment system. I don't think that this is a bad idea in theory, I just think that it is premature. In another consol generation or two I think that consoles might be accepted enough to start blazing trails into other areas of entertainment, but I don't think that the time is right yet.
Of course, I suppose we will see. It seems like common sense that the PS3 is a mistake, but I figure Sony is paying someone 6 figures to do a proper market analysis. You would HOPE that that person has a better understanding of the market then we do. Only time will tell at this point. Personally though, my money is going to stay in my wallet until Wii comes out. If I decide to drop 600 dollars, it will probably be on a new computer, not the PS3 entertainment center of d00m.
Thanks for pointing it out. I had noticed it already that someone is wandering around labeling my stuff as flamebait even when it clearly is not. The poor smuck is just wasting his mod points though. I have excellent karma that isn't going to budge so much as an inch no matter how many mod points they throw at me. My real positive karma scores vastly outnumber the handful of mod points that my little adoring fan has to flamebait me with.
If anything I am kind of flattered that someone finds my posts so insightful that they are willing to stalk my posts and desperately try and mod them down in an attempt to keep people from reading them. People don't censor meaningless drivel; they censor stuff that has meaning and impact. I'll take earning a flamebait stalker as a badge of pride that someone finds my posts interesting enough keep tabs on everything I post.
No, robotics is good for warfare and humanity in general. Most of the bad things that happen in war happen because humans really don't like to die. If you are marching along as a soldier in Iraq, and suddenly you start taking fire from a building, how do you handle it? Right now you call in heavy fire support and simply flatten the building or riddle it full of holes. If you had robots, you might one day be able to send a robot in that goes into the building and incapacitates every armed person in the building without flattening the entire building and killing civilians. Instead of soldiers going nuts from being constantly shot at and lining up civilians to be shot, soldiers can work inside a well protected building with A/C controlling robots.
There WILL be war now and in the future. The question is what we can do about it. The Western world sat by and watched the genocide in Rwanda without acting because war is hard. No one wanted to go in guns blazing into an African nation. Hell, the last time we tried that was Somalia in a vain attempt to deliver food aid. We probably killed more people in self defense in Somalia then we saved by delivering food.
Imagine if we didn't have to put up with this shit. Imagine if stopping a genocide was as simple sending in a robot army that has no concern for its own safety that captures violent people and brings them to prison. Imagine a robot army whose overriding priority is to not kill civilians. Imagine the good that could be done if someone could drop an army in Somalia that captured anyone who tried to initiate violence? So long as we give a damn about what happens to people outside of our safe and cozy democracies, there are going to be wars. Even if we decide we don't want any part of the wars, that isn't going to stop countless coos, rebellions, and corrupt governments from initiating violence against their own people.
The danger in sending US troops is not the US troops. The US can flatten any non-nuclear nation with minimal losses. The problem with minimal losses is that minimal US losses means catastrophic civilian losses. A MOAB might very well get rid of all the insurgence in a city, but it also gets rid of all the civilians. What you see today is not the US army using all of its force and failing. What you see is an army desperately struggling with the balance between using enough force to protect their own and using as little force as possible in an attempt to not kill civilians. If "protecting your own" wasn't an issue, you wouldn't have Marines flattening buildings or bombs landing in cities.
War is a fact of life. If we are not fighting in one, someone else is. The only question is when war comes, do we want to get involved, and how humanly can we fight.
The parents point was that no one is trying to stop Russia or China. Even if the US made its multi-billion dollar defense system, it could never stop a full nuclear attack from Russia or even China. The real temptation in a missile defense system isn't to block China or Russia, but to block places like North Korea and Iran. If your system can shoot a dozen nukes out of the air, you have a pretty fair defense against a place like North Korea or Iran where a crackjob leader can rise to power overnight and start throwing nukes.
That said, the real price is going to be with soured relations with Russia and China and the billions such a program would demand. Nationalist in both nations would use the defense system as a method of drumming up support for their own political gains by casting the US being out to get them.
If one could snap their fingers and make a perfect missile defense system, it might be tempting to say to hell with what the rest of the world thinks. On the other hand, if you can snap your fingers and make a defense system that only knocks down half of what shoots at you, you really need to ask yourself if you were just better off investing in diplomacy and other things. A defense system that can't stop a dozen missiles is basically just a way to cut your losses if you do get into a nuke war, it isn't a real deterent any more. One nuke is one nuke too many to land on any city.