I too work in nanotechnology. In fact, the company I work for just kicked out their first product, a carbon nanotubes based memory cell. I completely disagree with you. I think we are moving forward at a blistering pace that is just getting faster.
I suggest holding onto your ass, as pharmaceutical companies are about to start blasting new useful products. You need to remember that what we see in a lot of industries is on a time lag. It takes a bare minimum of 10-15 years to create a drug from scratch and get it through the FDA. Think about that for a moment. The drugs being released today come from before the Internet was being widely used. The fruits of these efforts are already starting to become clear. My father for instance probably just tacked an extra 10-20 years onto his life with new cholesterol lowering drug. Things are only going to get better.
Everything is shrinking at an accelerated rate. The amount of information that we have access to is expanding exponentially. As a culture, we are so used to change that we are utterly blind to it when it happens. 5 years ago I knew only one or two people with cell phones, and those people rarely used them. I recall having friends who swore they would never own one of those damn things.
Just the other day I ran into the first person I have met in the past year under the age of 50 who doesn't own a cell phone. This guy came to a gathering of about a dozen people that I was throwing. We were crowded in my living room when someone asked what his cell phone number was so they could coordinate meeting up the next day. The guy said he didn't own a cell phone. That statement brought conversation in the room to a dead stop. The group then spent a few minutes trying to figure out how in the hell you coordinate meeting at a park if you can't use a cell phone. In this group, there were people that just 5 years ago swore they would never use a cell phone. Now, they have to struggle to remember how meet up with someone without using a cell phone.
As a culture we are desensitized to change. We don't suffer from 'future shock' as some futurist thought we would. As new things come we roll with it very well. Show a guy from 1990 the year 2006, and he would be awed. True, we don't have floating cars or cool looking buildings. A city street today looks roughly like a city street from 15 years ago. What a person from 1990 WOULD notice right away is the fact that everyone owns a cell phone. They would be blown away by how trivial it is to get knowledge simply by using the Internet. The speed and power of our computers, or games, and our MP3 players would be unlike anything they could have imagined possible. They would recognize that socially technology is changing how we interact at a blistering rate.
Things are accelerating very quickly. There might be a limit or a set of breaks out there somewhere, but it sure as hell isn't in sight right now. The best is without a doubt yet to come.
You are right to be concerned with his motives. That said, you should also be concerned with what he is stating happened. Honestly, I don't give two shits if the NSA has a computer listen to what I say and sends up the occasional yellow alert when I talk about CS Source and also realizes that my girlfriends, sisters, friend's brother, cousins' dentist's, son is a terrorist. Any sort of closer look will quickly reveal that I am not a jihadist. What can I saw, I am an engineer. I can't help but appreciate data mining.
There ARE two things that do worry me about this situation.
First, this stuff can NOT be used in a normal court of law. If they find out that I might be a drug dealer or a murderer, they should destroy the information without thinking twice. We are talking about the most closed source of the closed source. If I can't have access to it, it damn well better not be used against any American citizen as evidence of any wrong doing. This violates the 5th amendment a dozen different ways and absolutely should not be used in normal criminal proceedings. The only way to ensure that this is done is to have some form of oversight. Yes, I know the NSA doesn't like oversight. Tough shit. If you want to spy on Americans, you need to find yourself a secret and independent oversight from another branch of the government, preferable the judicial branch. This NEEDS oversight.
Second, this needs to be done in a legal manner. The executive branch absolutely should have had to of gone through the judiciary branch of the government. Again, I don't care if they go through some secret court so long as it is independent of the executive branch. Someone other then the people ordering this needs to sign off on it as being legal. I absolutely do not want the executive branch of the government playing judge and jury in these grey areas. Someone should have had to of sign off on this declaring it legal. If this isn't legal, then the executive branch needs to apply to the legislative branch for these powers.
We live in a democracy that is built around checks and balances. The true violation here was that Americans had their rights curtailed by the executive branch without having it signed off by another other branch. What they did was clearly in a very grey area of the law, and they decided to play judge and jury in total violation of the principles of checks and balances. This is an exceedingly dangerous precedent to set. I hope that the executive branch has its balls tacked to the wall over this one so that it is made damn clear in the future that if you want to pull this sort of stunt, you have to do it within the law and with checks, balances, and oversight.
Whole globalism is not all rosy and great, one nice side effect of globalism is that the more liberal European laws become defacto American laws and vice versa.
One company I interviewed at made specialized batteries in the US. For years, their batteries contained lead and some other more nasty chemicals. The EU passed some laws that in effect banned this company from selling their batteries while they had these chemicals. They explained to me that one of the major projects they were working on was redesigning their batteries so that they could be sold in EU again. In fact, they anticipated more such laws in the EU and the US and so were making a big push to go green.
It might be a small consolation, but it shows that America is not the end all be all when it comes to environmental law.
Some other hopeful signs is that all Western nations have started pumping substantial amounts of money into nanotechnology and energy research in both the public and private sector. While I would like to see more money diverted to these fields, we have a pretty fair start.
I am not saying that the future is safe and secure. In fact, if we don't get our shit together quickly I think that the third world is going to suffer horribly for our slow response in finding solutions. A Katrina stings the US, but it absolutely destroys third world nations that are much more susceptible to natural disasters. While neither the tsunami nor the Pakistani earthquake were caused by human actions, they shows the absolute devastation that natural disasters wracked on third world nations. The Pakistan earthquake in particular shows how an event that would be an irritation for a western nation can kill hundreds of thousands of people in less developed nations. To this day Pakistan is still reeling from the effects of the quake as more people die from the ability to provide shelter for the hundreds of thousands of refugees that it created.
The biggest problem with plants is that they don't do much to get rid of CO2. They just store it for a few years and to a limited extent return it to the ground. While planting more plants is unlikely to hurt things (even if they release trace amounts of methan), they do not solve the core problem. The core problem is that we are taking massive quantities of old organic matter and burning it. When we burn organic matter that has not been in the ecosystem for millions of years, we add substantial amounts of CO2 (among other things) into the atmosphere. There are other things that add green house gases that we have absolutely no control over, like volcanoes. Throw in potential effects that the sun might be having, and plants really become only a tiny slice of the pie for good or for ill.
Honestly, I think the solution in the long term is technological in nature. 5 billion people are on their way to consuming as much as the 1 billion biggest consumers. In a utopia, we might be able to convince the big consumers to stop consuming that those who currently consume little to carry on not consuming. We don't live in that ideal world.
The solution is for the technologically advanced and rich nations of the world to work like hell to make the industrial revolution that the other 5 billion or so people are about to go through is cleaner then the one the Western world already had. There is no policy that can stop what is going to happen. The only hope that we have is to apply technology to mitigate and reverse the damage that has and will continue to be done.
I am not suggesting we blast pollution into the air because it is a lost cause. I am suggesting that in addition to taking restraint steps where we can, we work our hardest to find real solutions that are compatible with first world style living and environmental concerns. The sooner we recognize that as a species we WILL consume more as time goes on and recognize that the solution is two parts technology and one part restraint, the sooner we will find solution to these very real problems.
To any of the moderates who didn't catch it, this is a subtle (or not to subtle) attempt to suggest that future summaries try and use less obscure lingo. It is irritating to try and pick through a pile of acronyms to figure out what in the hell is being talked about. It is as simple as DYA (defining your acronyms) to bring a little sense to a summary. You could even throw in one extra sentence describing the project you are discussing so that people who might have some interest yet are not yet in the know can decide if they want to look more closely into the topic. I am not saying you need to spell out everything, just give people and indication as to what in the hell you are talking about so that they can decide if they want pursue further learning.
Summaries like the one given to this article mean absolutely nothing to anyone who isn't already familiar with what is being talked about. I am not saying we need to dumb down the information, just throw in an extra sentence describing what the hell you are talking about, and throw in the meaning of any acronyms in brackets. The dozen more words it would take to do this would drastically expand the number of people that this article might be relevant too.
Slashdot isn't a technical trade journal. You don't need to awe the reader with how well you know the lingo of your trade. Slashdot is a place to grow and learn. The first step in helping people to grow and learn is to be comprehensible.
Different Wants, Different Numbers
on
The MMO Numbers Game
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Obviously, the number you pick depends upon what you are looking to measure. For subscription games from the company's perspective, the only number that matters is the number of paying customers. This is clearly a good measure of how well they are doing. For a non-subscription game like Second Life, they really need to look at how much the average player gives to the company per month, and how many registered players there are. So, Second Life might have 100,000 'registered' users, but if 90% of them never log in, and 97% of them have never spent a cent on the game, they will be making an average of (random number) 50 cents per registered user. Obviously, this is pittance.
From the gamer side, the number that matters is the number of people that can be online at once, and how steady those numbers are throughout the day. A game like EVE ranks very high in this regard. They have 22,000 players at peak hours and due to their international market maintain a very high average because the game is well covered from both the US and Europe (less so from Asia though). WoW on the other hand does not score as high as it splits its mass of users up into separate shards and has separate servers from different time zones. This results in a smaller online user base per shard and sharp dips and peaks in user numbers.
Current users online is a pretty important number IMO. The fewer shards you have, the greater ability you have to tell a divergent story line.
This was shown pretty clearly in Asheron's Call. Asheron's Call was the first MMORPG to really make it a goal to tell a story. I recall early on years back when during one month's events players were tasked with retrieving a certain item in a PvP area. On all the shard's but one, the players quickly retrieved the item clearing the way for the next month's events. On one shard though, a group of players defended the area and prevented fellow players from retrieving that item. In effect, they created a divergent story. On all the other shard's the story moved forward according to the developer's plans. On one server though, the story diverged in a different direction. So what happened? Exactly what you would expect to happen. Not wanting to maintain multiple different stories at the same time, the development team congratulated the players who had defended the item, but told them that they lost anyways. The story moved forward the same on all servers.
A single server offers a greater deal of freedom in terms of shaping the story. The developers are not bound to keep dozens of different copies of the same story. Nor do they have to worry about divergent stories. I think that this contributes strongly to how WoW has been extremely ineffective at creating a dynamic world changing stories for its players. World changing events are extremely hard to deal with when you have multiple servers.
The downside to a single server game is that it places a MUCH greater stress on expansion, especially if the game does well. In the case of WoW, it means that they would have had to of built their world with at least half of a million players in mind, and then rapidly expand it as their player numbers grew. Further, they would not have been able to expand contact only upwards. They would need to expand not only high end content to deal with the ever increasing number of players achieving higher levels, but also expand lower end content to deal with over crowding as the number of n00bs continues to expand. Dealing with such expansion pressures would require either a complete rethinking in MMORPG design such that a greater emphasis is put on world expansion and design, or innovative new strategies in game play design. EVE for example opted for innovative gameplay. EVE is very sparse in traditional content and instead opts for a sandbox approach where players generate much of the content.
Personally, I want to see MMORPG shoot for single shards. The technical and content challenges that this will create will drive innovative MMORPG design.
I think the real problem here is a lack of GGPS with a LDN. I can't even begin to understand what they were thinking when they made this change. It is completely impossible to follow a GST when the DOK isn't present. What I really think we need is more clarity in the RTY. When you omit the meaning of an RTY the result is something that is completely incomprehnsivle to the user. I think this should be a lesson to all.
Can we say anarchocapitalist HELL?
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A Year In Second Life
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Joking aside, I hated Second Life. Second Life is like living in Snow Crash, and I don't mean in a good way. The place is one massive strip mall. There is almost nothing there except for casinos, porn shops, a few dance clubs, and strip malls. It would be one thing if it was a world full of interesting art (and there is some), intellectual debate, or anything of that nature. Instead, it is like slugging your way through the absolute worst of the Internet; nothing but casinos, shopping, and porn. Second Life COULD have looked like the Burning Man Festival. Instead, it looks like some anarchocapitalist hell as envisioned by a Marxist. Someone wake me up when an interesting online community is built.
You are right that there are issues with GM foods. The IP issues in particular are very troubling. If a company has their crops pollinate my crops, they sure as hell shouldn't suddenly own everything on my field. There are also worries about environmental effects. Though, in the case of environmental effects we need to realize that a few square kilometers of a single planet is NEVER natural. We also need to realize that GM foods can drastically help reduce the amount of pollution put out by a farm by reducing the fertilizer waste.
The thing to keep in mind with GM foods is that like all technologies, it will bring harm and good. GM foods have the ability to cure hunger in certain places. Nutritionally enriched rice in particular is doing wonders in Asia for malnourishment. GM foods offer a potential band-aid to global environmental change. Here in the US a climate shift is not a big deal for farmers. US farmers can switch crops and modify their methods with relative ease. Poor farmers in Africa on the other hand do not have the luxury. If their stable crop suddenly stops growing, they are, in a word, fucked. Other dangers include poor soil due to soil erosion. Modify crops to grow in these places are a possible stopgap measure to prevent mass starvation.
GM foods is something that we must pursue for the sake world hunger and malnourishment. To me, the issue is far less about if we should do, and more a question of 'how'. The how of it is what we are really fucking up. Growing untested GM food in the wild is down right stupid. Untested GM foods should be grown in enclosed areas. Cross pollination issues need to be dealt with. Cross pollination might be okay if you are giving Africa a super crop that will grow more and be more resistant to drought, but it is a down right horrible idea if you are growing corn with an anti-biotic in it for the sake of pharmaceutical production. Further, this whole notion that cross pollinated genes some how belong to someone is down right insane. The only way I will accept that cross pollination of genes belongs to a certain company is if farmers can sue said company for violating their private property and demand reparation payments for the damage to their crops.
This stuff needs to be looked at with a balanced and level head. Anyone who claims that GM is all good or all bad is just a fundamentalist who has no intentions of thinking this issue through. Fundamentalist should never be listened to, no matter what their position.
The parent is off base by saying that the Iraq war was an attempt to keep Israel from nuking the Middle East. That said, he is dead on about that danger. North Korea is notorious for selling anything to anyone for money. North Korean diplomats are known use their diplomatic immunity to smuggle as narcotics simply to get some extra funding for the state. They sell weapons to everyone and anyone who will buy them.
The fear that they would sell to a terrorist organization is very well founded. Further, the fear that Israel would respond to a nuke being used in its territory by glassing over a piece of the Middle East is very well founded. The scenario is not hard to imagine.
Pick your favorite Palestinian resistance group that has state or pseudo state backing. Both Iran and Syria either actively support some of these groups, or blatantly turn a blind eye to them. Imagine if such a group bought a nuke from North Korea. They throw it in a boat, park it off Tel-Aviv, then detonate. They then make their usual claim of responsibility. Now Iran or Syria is sitting there with their pants down. I don't doubt for a single instance that Israel would nuke the capital of any nation that looked even a little guilty of harboring that group. Further, you need to realize that it wouldn't matter if the nation harboring the terrorist rounded up all of them and shot them the next day. Israel [i]would[/i] make an example of them regardless of what they did. There isn't a doubt in my mind that at least one Middle Eastern city would be nuked, if not more.
Now you are sitting there with a very pissed off Iran or Syria. Hell, it isn't like these nations ever liked Israel to begin with, but could you imagine how they would feel after getting nuked? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where this mess would lead.
Nukes are bad, m'kay? Any nation that gets nuked will nuke someone else back if they can find a target. Nukes are horrible weapons of mass destruction, and most nations would make a lesson out of any nation that would dare to use them. If Britain, the US, or (and especially) Israel had a nuke used on them, these nations would respond in overwhelmingly violent manner for the singular purpose of leaving in the history of the world a genocidal incident showing just how horrible these weapons can be.
I sure as hell hope no nukes go off in my life time, because you can rest assure that if one nuke goes off, another one is going to follow somewhere else.
There really is no danger of MAD. That said, you are right that there is a slight danger of a nation being wiped out. The scenario that I see having some small possibility is that an Islamic fundamentalist group is given a nuclear weapon by a state, most likely Iran or North Korea, and that weapon is detonated in the US or (even worse) Israel.
If the US ever traced a detonated nuclear weapon back to another nation, and it was clear that that nation handed over the nuclear weapon intentionally, they would be fux00red. The US would invade at the bare minimum, and probably glass them over if they thought such an invasion would fail. North Korea in particular would be a candidate for glassing, while Iran would be a candidate for a limited nuking and a full scale invasion. Whatever the case, the nation in question probably would stand no chance to fire back. Playing nuclear war with Washington is a horrible idea. Unless you own a few thousand nukes, the US is not only going to win, but probably win without taking a scratch because they can drop a nuke on any spot even so much as suspected as housing nukes. If Washington has to guess where your remaining nukes are, they will leave no stone unglassed.
Now, to make the situation even uglier, consider if Israel was nuked. The US would likely try and show some restraint if they thought they could achieve their ends and avoid further attacks without glassing a nation over. Glassing a nation is a way to make the prospect of nuclear war too horrible to ever be considered again, but obviously involves mass whole sale genocide. The US might balk at genocide if other options existed. Israel on the other hand would show absolutely no such restraint. Israel would have no compulsions about making a lesson out of the offending nation. Israel would almost certainly glass the entire nation. While Israel doesn't have enough weapons to glass the world, they do have more then enough to glass over any Middle Eastern nation.
All that said, the real loss in life might not be in the actual nukes themselves. The real loss of life would come in the complete collapse of financial markets. People would flee the cities. Societies would spread out very quickly. This sudden change would have disastrous effects on economics. Developed nations would likely find themselves in a deep depression. The effects on the developed would be sever, but the resulting collapse of the world economy would be even worse on developing nations. Such a depression would ravage the economies of developing nations, resulting in mass starvation.
It is believed that at one point the population of the human race was knocked down to a few thousand. This is backed up with genetic testing. Humans are extremely similar in terms of genetics. There is more difference between two random humans in the same race, then there is between two average humans of different races. In other words, if were to average all the genetics of each individual race, you would find that they are more similar to each other then difference you find between humans due to natural variation. It is pretty conclusive that humans all descend from the same few thousand people.
You aren't learning how to use your stuff effectively against China. You are learning how to use it effectively against guerrillas. If you'll fight against China, these lessons might actually work against you, since you'llmake assumptions about enemys firepower (and your ability to withstand it) and capabilities that simply aren't true.
True, the amount strategy being learned is likely limited. That said, the amount being learned by taking stuff out into the field and using it is absolutely invaluable. That also says nothing about having battle hardened veterans. Leaders experience in war are massively more effective sending forward some poor bastard who has never faced a life or death situation. The people fighting today will be experienced leaders 10-15 years from now.
The Iraq way of blowing up American troops without any regard to bystanders seems to be working just fine. Apart from such guerrilla tactics, cutting your supply lines would render your technology near useless (a fighter doesn't fly without fuel, after all) and, since you rely on it so much, would likely lead to your troops getting slaughtered.
That simply isn't true. Supply lines are untouched and the loss of life to American soldiers is astronomically small. The US looses more people to accidental drowning each year then they do to the Iraq war. The Iraqi resistance has shown itself completely and utterly incapable of doing any real harm to US units. Suicide bombings and IEDs are political weapons, not weapons of war. Fighting a conventional army in the manner the Iraqi resistance fights would be a quick and surefire way to be defeated over night.
Apart from that, a hostile force could simply sponsor fundamentalistic Islam anti-american revolts in arabian countries. That would send your economy into chaos and make it impossible for you to keep up the expenditure of fighting a major war; you might even need the troops to keep order in your own country.
First, not all of the oil in the world is in the Middle East. Second, even if it was, and even if every single one of those governments was being run by a government hostile to the US, they would be utterly powerless to stop the US from getting the oil that it wanted. ANY oil sold enters the world market. The US can buy oil from the EU, and the EU can buy oil from the US. So long as they were selling to someone, they are have no choice but to indirectly sell to the US. The worst the Middle East could do would be to stop selling oil to all of the west. Refusing to sell to both the EU and the US is simply suicide and an invitation to invasion.
Further, you need to realize that even if you could tank the US economy, you can't do it without destroying the rest of the world's economy. The US is 1/5 of the world's economy. You can't remove that much of the economy of the world without sending everyone else into collapse. Hell, the big fear during the Asian financial crises in the late 90's was that it would reach US. It was known that if the US economy went belly up it would almost certainly drag the rest of the world with it.
Please note that this last point cannot be prevented just with your strategic oil reserves or domestic oil production. Anti-american governments in Middle-East would stop accepting dollars as payment for oil, and likely switch to euro; this, in turn, would make dollars value collapse...
Switching to the Euro wouldn't tank the value of the dollar. The only advantage that paying in one currency has over the other is the ability to avoid small exchange rate charge that banks charge. We are talking less then pennies on the dollar. In fact, OPEC is already talking about switching to the Euro for other fiscal reasons. No one is complaining all that loud.... and stop you from getting any loans from anyone outside your country. At the same time, it would make it impossible to pay for all the outsourced production, leading to shortages of pretty much everything.
Electrocution is a pretty minor threat. Do you think this is going to be a solid hunk of conductive metal? Let me ask you this. Can you electrocute a tank? Further, even if this was a solid hunk of conductive metal, anything strong enough to go through a hunk of metal, through a soldiers clothing, and into his body... well hell, it is strong enough to simply hit any soldier with, mechanized legs or none.
Honestly, if the enemy has to use "acid bath pits" and tasers, I'll call this a massive improvement. Acid bath pits and tasers sound a lot easier to avoid then "bullets" and "explosives".
The US has been supplying Taiwan with their air force and navy. While little known, Taiwan's air force is damn slick and made up of all the airplanes you would expect to see from an early 1990's US air force. They also have some pretty solid navel capabilities as we have been selling them one generation old destroyers. Taiwan probably could not win a protracted battle with China, but they certainly wouldn't be rolled over by China. China could take Taiwan the same way they help retake North Korea; slow and bloody attrition.
The real concern would be if China could take Taiwan rapidly. If that was the case it would mean the US would have to muster a counter invasion instead of simply offering a defense. Under such circumstances when a political solution that we would have to come to would be more likely to be in China's favor.
All likely scenarios involve China taking the island quickly and suing for peace under favorable terms because the US and China can't fight. We would destroy each other economically. Hell, we would destroy the world economically. Personally, I think China and Taiwan will never come to blows. So long as the US is willing to park a fleet of carriers off of the coast of Taiwan and fight that battle, neither side can afford the horrible economic consequences (and that ignores the loss in lives for all sides).
As to China using Iraq to develop counter weapons, yes that might be true to a limited extent. It is important to realize though that the insurgents in Iraq are ONLY testing ground forces. Further, the methods that they are using are purely guerilla tactics. Afghanistan in its fight with the USSR fought with guerilla tactics to be sure, but they also used other modern weapons of war. Afghanistan had F-16, anti-aircraft guns, artillery, jamming equipment, and all the things you would expect from a modern army. The insurgents have AK-47's, a few cheap RPGs, and the ability to stuff massive amounts of explosives into trucks. That isn't the kind of war China would ever fight with the US. China is only seeing the toys the US is using, not how to defeat them.
While knowing what the US is using is important, the benefits that the US army is receiving by being in constant combat are absolutely invaluable. The value of such lessons can be seen in some of the simple stuff. The US will never go to war again without giving everyone body armor. We will never have mobile units fight in a city in unarmored Humvees. We know how to operate our drones. Hell, we are developing new drones at break neck speed. War spurs innovation in war. The command and control kinks are being ironed out of the army. These are all lessons that if the US fights again, it won't have to relearn.
The real question is, is the experience the US armed forces are getting and the technological innovations that war drives forward in future war systems outweighing lost elements of surprise? I would say that without a doubt, the benefits massively outweigh the losses. I would have nothing but pity for a force that would have to fight the US 10-15 years down the road. They would face a well trained and experienced human/mechanized/drone army that could do more with a squad then most armies could do with a battalion. Stuff like what is shown in this article is only the beginning.
Infantry impervious to small arms loaded with 200+ pounds of armor and weapons back up by a swarm of drones of all shapes and sizes isn't sci-fi. It is already well on its way. If you want to fight the US army, find a way to win politically or use a nuke. Any other way is simply futile.
We certainly need to maintain military R&D, but to say we are losing out to China is insane. We are advancing militarily much faster then China can even contemplate. Give it 10 years and I wouldn't even be a little bit surprised to see full body exo-suits attached to mechanized infantry divisions and drones up the ass. Meanwhile, China is still working on developing a better method of invading Taiwan other then loading up the army on fishing boats and hoping that if they send enough a few off the poor bastards will make it. Further, you need to realize the type of conflict that the US would have with China would never be your protracted land war. There is no land to fight over next to China that either the US or China is willing to fight over.
The only place in the world we would want to bother fighting China over would be Taiwan. The key to Taiwan is in naval and aerial might. Right now Taiwan has an air force that could easily take on the Chinese air force without US help. With US help it isn't even a contest.
As to fighting in Iraq, you are absolutely insane if you think that it is damaging our ability to fight in the long term. In the short term we are certainly spread thin, but there are no looming battles in the short term. In the long term, Iraq is providing countless lessons. Sure, China gets to see our new toys in actions to a limited extent, but that is offset by the disgusting amounts of experience that the US armed forces are racking up. We are testing things in live fire. Troops are learning how to fight in hostile cities. We are learning damn quick how to protect vehicles and troops from RPG explosions. We are getting much better at fighting around civilians. Our drone technology is moving forward by leaps and bounds do to demand and field experience.
Hell, I am not saying the Iraq war is a good thing for the US as a whole, but to say that it is hurting the military in the long term is just plan ignorant. That is like arguing pre-World War II US military was better equipped then post World War II US military forces. Nothing could be further from the truth. A war in which the losses to lives and equipment are sustainable physically (politically is an entirely different matter) make the military stronger. Iraq is just such a war.
I can cut my response down to a very concisely. ID is by definition NOT science. ID does not offer any predictive capacity. A theory MUST offer some predictive capacity or else it is not a theory.
If you want to argue that ID has some sort of scientific merit, get that shit published in just ONE journal. So far ID hasn't even managed that feat. That puts ID below UFOs in terms of credibility. Get yourself published in a journal worth its pulp and maybe we could even talk about teaching it in schools. Until that time, this is just a bull shit method of religious nuts trying to shove religion into the public sector
Honestly, I don't care what you believe. I don't care if you preach what you believe. Take that religious non-sense into a class room though, and people will be rightfully pissed off. Achieve the level of 'science', and then we can talk again. Until then, go back to church.
ID is not a form of creationism. Not even close. Really, it is important to be intellectually honest about these things. Creationism is not a very respected theory, intellectually speaking.
ID isn't a respectable theory either. It isn't even a theory, much less a theory with a scrap of peer reviewed work done it. Research on UFOs and little green men has more scientific credibility and a much larger body of peer reviewed papers then ID does.
Further, ID absolutely is being used as a foot in the door for creationism. It isn't a magical coincidence that the ID advocates just all happen to be Christians. Creationism was utterly destroyed by science and is utterly unacceptable to teach in a school science class. Now ID tries to carry on where creationism was stopped cold. It desperately seeks a way to imply the G word in public schools. True, it isn't creationism in the traditional sense, but it was spawned from the same place.
Also, I didn't imply that ID is science. It is not.
That brings you a lot closer to reality the nut jobs trying to bring this crap into a science class room. Good for you. Too bad the other advocates of ID trying to bring this crap into a science class room seem to disagree with you. They seem deeply intent upon calling it science and shoving it down the throats of the masses using the force of government.
As far as schools teaching it, that is another question that I did not even come close to addressing.
There is a fundamental issue here. You think people are pissed off at ID because it is big misunderstanding about what ID is. The truth is that people are pissed off because a handful of religious zealots are trying to teach it as science. People start getting pissed off whenever ID is mentioned because no other philosophy has advocates trying to mandate its teaching in a science class room by law.
Doesn't it seem a little fishy to you that no other philosophy has entire organizations built around trying to use law to enforce the teaching of their philosophy in publicly funded schools? ID is a wedge being used to try and spew the G word all over the inside of science class rooms and nothing else. Want to prove me wrong? Stop trying to use the force of law to teach this crap.
I suggest writing an e-mail to your favorite ID advocacy group explaining to THEM how they misunderstand ID. Anyone who understands ID as you present it wouldn't consider trying to shove this crap into science class room. As you have already stated, this crap isn't science, so why are the advocates of ID so keen on using the force of government to put it in a science class room?
No one cares if you believe in ID or not. Creationism and scientific explanations have lived side by side for as long as the two have existed. The point of conflict is when creationism (be it ID or something else) tries to intrude upon science.
ID is not science. You cannot make a prediction with ID and test that prediction. ID has absolutely no predictive powers. Further ID relies on the words 'too complex'. The argument boils down to that from what we know right now, we can't fully explain certain things. This argument could have been used against lightening 500 years ago. We could have argued that from what we know of lightening, it couldn't exist without and intelligent creator. Clearly, that is not the case. No one argues any more that each time a bolt of lightening is cast it is the will of the creator.
The conflict over ID is that ID folks are trying to shove a piece of non-science into publicly funded science class rooms in schools in a nations where there is supposed to be a separation between government and religion. As long as ID folks insist upon using public funds to push their religious minded philosophy (it isn't even a theory) in public schools, you better believe people are going react with indignation every time they hear the words "intelligent design".
Take this philosophy and shove it into a church or Sunday school where it belongs. As long as the ID folks keep trying to push this nonsense upon everyone else using the power of the state, you can be damn sure every even vaguely scientifically minded person out there is going to be pissed off every time the words intelligent design is mentioned.
Imagine if one day the government mandated that all churches must teach Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (FSM) in Sunday school. Imagine the kind of response you would get from Christians each time FSM was mentioned. I bet you it wouldn't be one of tolerant understanding for another religion. It would be pissed off indignation at a group is trying to impose its religious values using the force of the government.
No one gives a damn if ID is taught in a church. People DO give a damn if this religious philosophy is being taught in a science class room as science.
The left calls the right fascist, the right calls the left traitors communist, and no one goes to jail for it. Welcome to freedom of speech buddy. It isn't freedom from being called names. The right can say whatever the damn well please and the left can response however they want. Then Pat Roberts and Sam Webb can throw into the mix their insane rantings. Isn't the first amendment great?
That is true that the malicious intent part does not apply to private persons, but Juniper without a doubt is considered a public figure. Juniper can't take out a full page ad in the New York Times declaring a person who said something negative about them a pedifile because that person is not a public figure. On the other hand you personally could take a full page ad in the New York Times (or your message board) declaring Juniper the scum of the earth.
Honestly, when it comes to libel and slander laws, American laws are dead on. We have a lot of shitty laws that other enlightened nations don't have (marijuana prohibition, a hypocritical drinking age, excessive corporate welfare, exc.) , but when it comes to libel and slander, it doesn't get much better then what the US has. You are protected from baseless slander from large and powerful entities, but private individuals are free to say just about anything.
While you are given WAY more leeway when dealing with political speeches (this is done so we can debate politics without fear of persecution) you cannot make bold statements like "Clinton killed a man in Arkansas" without evidence.
You are flat out wrong. You can say anything you want to without fear of a lawsuit. Clinton WAS accused of rape. A Kennedy was accused of murder. Exc. This happens all the time. Use libel laws are easily some of the weakest in the world. To win in the US you need to not only prove that the statement is not true, but also show that the other person did it to be malicious, and that it caused you harm. So, if you want to sue a guy for saying you murdered another man, you would not only need to prove that you didn't murder him, but also prove that your accuser knew that you didn't murder him, and that he did it for some malicious intent. How do you prove those things? You don't.
It is damn close to impossible to sue someone for libel in the US to win. The burden of proof is completely on the person is filing the lawsuit AND it has to be done out of malicious intent. Proving one of those things is very hard. Proving both of them is close to impossible.
Libel laws in the US keep Coke from taking out an add against Pepsi declaring that Pepsi puts rat poison in their drinks and nothing else.
First, libel in the US is damn close to impossible to win. If you had done even the most basic research, you would realize that these guys are going to lose horribly in their attempt to sue. In the US, not only do you need to PROVE that what someone is saying is untrue, you also need to prove that they said it knowning that it wasn't true, AND that they did it to cause you harm. How do you prove those things? You basically can't. Libel cases almost always get thrown out.
Two, anyone can sue anyone. The only thing that matters is the outcome. I could sue you for being a troll right now if I wanted to. The beauty of the justice system is that while you can make any claim of wrong doing you want, if your claim is totally baseless, it promtply gets thrown out at the first hearing. Who gives a shit if someone filed some court papers? This will be the "end of freedom of speech" as soon as... you know... someone actually wins one of these cases.
The only interesting point that can be made is: is there still a meaning to a *libel* offense? Wouldn't we all be better off if free speech were, in fact, free?
If this is happening the US, Juniper will lose. Period. End of story. US libel laws are easily one of the weakest you can find in the developed world. In order to get to win a libel case, not only do you have to prove what they said was completely untrue, but you also have to prove that they knew it wasn't true and that they did for malicious intent. In other words, the burden of proof is very much on the guy trying to do the suing. It is extraordinarily rare for libel cases to be won in the US.
Now, if this is happening in say Britain, Canada, or one of the many other countries with strong libel laws, there might be something to this. That said, I think this is happening in the US. I doubt they even get past the first round of court proceedings to find the names of the suspects.
The US has a lot of fucked up policies and laws. The US stance on libel isn't one of them. Unless the posters are shown to be rivals from another corporation posting intentionally incorrect statements, Juniper doesn't stand a chance in hell.
Not to feed the trolls, but what exactly is a 'legal' war? Is it one the UN signs off on? Does that mean that Korean war would have been illegal if the USSR had not been stupid and walked out that day instead of vetoing it? Was World War I and World War II illegal wars? What the fuck exactly are the conditions to make a war 'legal'?
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I too work in nanotechnology. In fact, the company I work for just kicked out their first product, a carbon nanotubes based memory cell. I completely disagree with you. I think we are moving forward at a blistering pace that is just getting faster.
I suggest holding onto your ass, as pharmaceutical companies are about to start blasting new useful products. You need to remember that what we see in a lot of industries is on a time lag. It takes a bare minimum of 10-15 years to create a drug from scratch and get it through the FDA. Think about that for a moment. The drugs being released today come from before the Internet was being widely used. The fruits of these efforts are already starting to become clear. My father for instance probably just tacked an extra 10-20 years onto his life with new cholesterol lowering drug. Things are only going to get better.
Everything is shrinking at an accelerated rate. The amount of information that we have access to is expanding exponentially. As a culture, we are so used to change that we are utterly blind to it when it happens. 5 years ago I knew only one or two people with cell phones, and those people rarely used them. I recall having friends who swore they would never own one of those damn things.
Just the other day I ran into the first person I have met in the past year under the age of 50 who doesn't own a cell phone. This guy came to a gathering of about a dozen people that I was throwing. We were crowded in my living room when someone asked what his cell phone number was so they could coordinate meeting up the next day. The guy said he didn't own a cell phone. That statement brought conversation in the room to a dead stop. The group then spent a few minutes trying to figure out how in the hell you coordinate meeting at a park if you can't use a cell phone. In this group, there were people that just 5 years ago swore they would never use a cell phone. Now, they have to struggle to remember how meet up with someone without using a cell phone.
As a culture we are desensitized to change. We don't suffer from 'future shock' as some futurist thought we would. As new things come we roll with it very well. Show a guy from 1990 the year 2006, and he would be awed. True, we don't have floating cars or cool looking buildings. A city street today looks roughly like a city street from 15 years ago. What a person from 1990 WOULD notice right away is the fact that everyone owns a cell phone. They would be blown away by how trivial it is to get knowledge simply by using the Internet. The speed and power of our computers, or games, and our MP3 players would be unlike anything they could have imagined possible. They would recognize that socially technology is changing how we interact at a blistering rate.
Things are accelerating very quickly. There might be a limit or a set of breaks out there somewhere, but it sure as hell isn't in sight right now. The best is without a doubt yet to come.
You are right to be concerned with his motives. That said, you should also be concerned with what he is stating happened. Honestly, I don't give two shits if the NSA has a computer listen to what I say and sends up the occasional yellow alert when I talk about CS Source and also realizes that my girlfriends, sisters, friend's brother, cousins' dentist's, son is a terrorist. Any sort of closer look will quickly reveal that I am not a jihadist. What can I saw, I am an engineer. I can't help but appreciate data mining.
There ARE two things that do worry me about this situation.
First, this stuff can NOT be used in a normal court of law. If they find out that I might be a drug dealer or a murderer, they should destroy the information without thinking twice. We are talking about the most closed source of the closed source. If I can't have access to it, it damn well better not be used against any American citizen as evidence of any wrong doing. This violates the 5th amendment a dozen different ways and absolutely should not be used in normal criminal proceedings. The only way to ensure that this is done is to have some form of oversight. Yes, I know the NSA doesn't like oversight. Tough shit. If you want to spy on Americans, you need to find yourself a secret and independent oversight from another branch of the government, preferable the judicial branch. This NEEDS oversight.
Second, this needs to be done in a legal manner. The executive branch absolutely should have had to of gone through the judiciary branch of the government. Again, I don't care if they go through some secret court so long as it is independent of the executive branch. Someone other then the people ordering this needs to sign off on it as being legal. I absolutely do not want the executive branch of the government playing judge and jury in these grey areas. Someone should have had to of sign off on this declaring it legal. If this isn't legal, then the executive branch needs to apply to the legislative branch for these powers.
We live in a democracy that is built around checks and balances. The true violation here was that Americans had their rights curtailed by the executive branch without having it signed off by another other branch. What they did was clearly in a very grey area of the law, and they decided to play judge and jury in total violation of the principles of checks and balances. This is an exceedingly dangerous precedent to set. I hope that the executive branch has its balls tacked to the wall over this one so that it is made damn clear in the future that if you want to pull this sort of stunt, you have to do it within the law and with checks, balances, and oversight.
Whole globalism is not all rosy and great, one nice side effect of globalism is that the more liberal European laws become defacto American laws and vice versa.
One company I interviewed at made specialized batteries in the US. For years, their batteries contained lead and some other more nasty chemicals. The EU passed some laws that in effect banned this company from selling their batteries while they had these chemicals. They explained to me that one of the major projects they were working on was redesigning their batteries so that they could be sold in EU again. In fact, they anticipated more such laws in the EU and the US and so were making a big push to go green.
It might be a small consolation, but it shows that America is not the end all be all when it comes to environmental law.
Some other hopeful signs is that all Western nations have started pumping substantial amounts of money into nanotechnology and energy research in both the public and private sector. While I would like to see more money diverted to these fields, we have a pretty fair start.
I am not saying that the future is safe and secure. In fact, if we don't get our shit together quickly I think that the third world is going to suffer horribly for our slow response in finding solutions. A Katrina stings the US, but it absolutely destroys third world nations that are much more susceptible to natural disasters. While neither the tsunami nor the Pakistani earthquake were caused by human actions, they shows the absolute devastation that natural disasters wracked on third world nations. The Pakistan earthquake in particular shows how an event that would be an irritation for a western nation can kill hundreds of thousands of people in less developed nations. To this day Pakistan is still reeling from the effects of the quake as more people die from the ability to provide shelter for the hundreds of thousands of refugees that it created.
The biggest problem with plants is that they don't do much to get rid of CO2. They just store it for a few years and to a limited extent return it to the ground. While planting more plants is unlikely to hurt things (even if they release trace amounts of methan), they do not solve the core problem. The core problem is that we are taking massive quantities of old organic matter and burning it. When we burn organic matter that has not been in the ecosystem for millions of years, we add substantial amounts of CO2 (among other things) into the atmosphere. There are other things that add green house gases that we have absolutely no control over, like volcanoes. Throw in potential effects that the sun might be having, and plants really become only a tiny slice of the pie for good or for ill.
Honestly, I think the solution in the long term is technological in nature. 5 billion people are on their way to consuming as much as the 1 billion biggest consumers. In a utopia, we might be able to convince the big consumers to stop consuming that those who currently consume little to carry on not consuming. We don't live in that ideal world.
The solution is for the technologically advanced and rich nations of the world to work like hell to make the industrial revolution that the other 5 billion or so people are about to go through is cleaner then the one the Western world already had. There is no policy that can stop what is going to happen. The only hope that we have is to apply technology to mitigate and reverse the damage that has and will continue to be done.
I am not suggesting we blast pollution into the air because it is a lost cause. I am suggesting that in addition to taking restraint steps where we can, we work our hardest to find real solutions that are compatible with first world style living and environmental concerns. The sooner we recognize that as a species we WILL consume more as time goes on and recognize that the solution is two parts technology and one part restraint, the sooner we will find solution to these very real problems.
To any of the moderates who didn't catch it, this is a subtle (or not to subtle) attempt to suggest that future summaries try and use less obscure lingo. It is irritating to try and pick through a pile of acronyms to figure out what in the hell is being talked about. It is as simple as DYA (defining your acronyms) to bring a little sense to a summary. You could even throw in one extra sentence describing the project you are discussing so that people who might have some interest yet are not yet in the know can decide if they want to look more closely into the topic. I am not saying you need to spell out everything, just give people and indication as to what in the hell you are talking about so that they can decide if they want pursue further learning.
Summaries like the one given to this article mean absolutely nothing to anyone who isn't already familiar with what is being talked about. I am not saying we need to dumb down the information, just throw in an extra sentence describing what the hell you are talking about, and throw in the meaning of any acronyms in brackets. The dozen more words it would take to do this would drastically expand the number of people that this article might be relevant too.
Slashdot isn't a technical trade journal. You don't need to awe the reader with how well you know the lingo of your trade. Slashdot is a place to grow and learn. The first step in helping people to grow and learn is to be comprehensible.
Obviously, the number you pick depends upon what you are looking to measure. For subscription games from the company's perspective, the only number that matters is the number of paying customers. This is clearly a good measure of how well they are doing. For a non-subscription game like Second Life, they really need to look at how much the average player gives to the company per month, and how many registered players there are. So, Second Life might have 100,000 'registered' users, but if 90% of them never log in, and 97% of them have never spent a cent on the game, they will be making an average of (random number) 50 cents per registered user. Obviously, this is pittance.
From the gamer side, the number that matters is the number of people that can be online at once, and how steady those numbers are throughout the day. A game like EVE ranks very high in this regard. They have 22,000 players at peak hours and due to their international market maintain a very high average because the game is well covered from both the US and Europe (less so from Asia though). WoW on the other hand does not score as high as it splits its mass of users up into separate shards and has separate servers from different time zones. This results in a smaller online user base per shard and sharp dips and peaks in user numbers.
Current users online is a pretty important number IMO. The fewer shards you have, the greater ability you have to tell a divergent story line.
This was shown pretty clearly in Asheron's Call. Asheron's Call was the first MMORPG to really make it a goal to tell a story. I recall early on years back when during one month's events players were tasked with retrieving a certain item in a PvP area. On all the shard's but one, the players quickly retrieved the item clearing the way for the next month's events. On one shard though, a group of players defended the area and prevented fellow players from retrieving that item. In effect, they created a divergent story. On all the other shard's the story moved forward according to the developer's plans. On one server though, the story diverged in a different direction. So what happened? Exactly what you would expect to happen. Not wanting to maintain multiple different stories at the same time, the development team congratulated the players who had defended the item, but told them that they lost anyways. The story moved forward the same on all servers.
A single server offers a greater deal of freedom in terms of shaping the story. The developers are not bound to keep dozens of different copies of the same story. Nor do they have to worry about divergent stories. I think that this contributes strongly to how WoW has been extremely ineffective at creating a dynamic world changing stories for its players. World changing events are extremely hard to deal with when you have multiple servers.
The downside to a single server game is that it places a MUCH greater stress on expansion, especially if the game does well. In the case of WoW, it means that they would have had to of built their world with at least half of a million players in mind, and then rapidly expand it as their player numbers grew. Further, they would not have been able to expand contact only upwards. They would need to expand not only high end content to deal with the ever increasing number of players achieving higher levels, but also expand lower end content to deal with over crowding as the number of n00bs continues to expand. Dealing with such expansion pressures would require either a complete rethinking in MMORPG design such that a greater emphasis is put on world expansion and design, or innovative new strategies in game play design. EVE for example opted for innovative gameplay. EVE is very sparse in traditional content and instead opts for a sandbox approach where players generate much of the content.
Personally, I want to see MMORPG shoot for single shards. The technical and content challenges that this will create will drive innovative MMORPG design.
I think the real problem here is a lack of GGPS with a LDN. I can't even begin to understand what they were thinking when they made this change. It is completely impossible to follow a GST when the DOK isn't present. What I really think we need is more clarity in the RTY. When you omit the meaning of an RTY the result is something that is completely incomprehnsivle to the user. I think this should be a lesson to all.
Joking aside, I hated Second Life. Second Life is like living in Snow Crash, and I don't mean in a good way. The place is one massive strip mall. There is almost nothing there except for casinos, porn shops, a few dance clubs, and strip malls. It would be one thing if it was a world full of interesting art (and there is some), intellectual debate, or anything of that nature. Instead, it is like slugging your way through the absolute worst of the Internet; nothing but casinos, shopping, and porn. Second Life COULD have looked like the Burning Man Festival. Instead, it looks like some anarchocapitalist hell as envisioned by a Marxist. Someone wake me up when an interesting online community is built.
You are right that there are issues with GM foods. The IP issues in particular are very troubling. If a company has their crops pollinate my crops, they sure as hell shouldn't suddenly own everything on my field. There are also worries about environmental effects. Though, in the case of environmental effects we need to realize that a few square kilometers of a single planet is NEVER natural. We also need to realize that GM foods can drastically help reduce the amount of pollution put out by a farm by reducing the fertilizer waste.
The thing to keep in mind with GM foods is that like all technologies, it will bring harm and good. GM foods have the ability to cure hunger in certain places. Nutritionally enriched rice in particular is doing wonders in Asia for malnourishment. GM foods offer a potential band-aid to global environmental change. Here in the US a climate shift is not a big deal for farmers. US farmers can switch crops and modify their methods with relative ease. Poor farmers in Africa on the other hand do not have the luxury. If their stable crop suddenly stops growing, they are, in a word, fucked. Other dangers include poor soil due to soil erosion. Modify crops to grow in these places are a possible stopgap measure to prevent mass starvation.
GM foods is something that we must pursue for the sake world hunger and malnourishment. To me, the issue is far less about if we should do, and more a question of 'how'. The how of it is what we are really fucking up. Growing untested GM food in the wild is down right stupid. Untested GM foods should be grown in enclosed areas. Cross pollination issues need to be dealt with. Cross pollination might be okay if you are giving Africa a super crop that will grow more and be more resistant to drought, but it is a down right horrible idea if you are growing corn with an anti-biotic in it for the sake of pharmaceutical production. Further, this whole notion that cross pollinated genes some how belong to someone is down right insane. The only way I will accept that cross pollination of genes belongs to a certain company is if farmers can sue said company for violating their private property and demand reparation payments for the damage to their crops.
This stuff needs to be looked at with a balanced and level head. Anyone who claims that GM is all good or all bad is just a fundamentalist who has no intentions of thinking this issue through. Fundamentalist should never be listened to, no matter what their position.
The parent is off base by saying that the Iraq war was an attempt to keep Israel from nuking the Middle East. That said, he is dead on about that danger. North Korea is notorious for selling anything to anyone for money. North Korean diplomats are known use their diplomatic immunity to smuggle as narcotics simply to get some extra funding for the state. They sell weapons to everyone and anyone who will buy them.
The fear that they would sell to a terrorist organization is very well founded. Further, the fear that Israel would respond to a nuke being used in its territory by glassing over a piece of the Middle East is very well founded. The scenario is not hard to imagine.
Pick your favorite Palestinian resistance group that has state or pseudo state backing. Both Iran and Syria either actively support some of these groups, or blatantly turn a blind eye to them. Imagine if such a group bought a nuke from North Korea. They throw it in a boat, park it off Tel-Aviv, then detonate. They then make their usual claim of responsibility. Now Iran or Syria is sitting there with their pants down. I don't doubt for a single instance that Israel would nuke the capital of any nation that looked even a little guilty of harboring that group. Further, you need to realize that it wouldn't matter if the nation harboring the terrorist rounded up all of them and shot them the next day. Israel [i]would[/i] make an example of them regardless of what they did. There isn't a doubt in my mind that at least one Middle Eastern city would be nuked, if not more.
Now you are sitting there with a very pissed off Iran or Syria. Hell, it isn't like these nations ever liked Israel to begin with, but could you imagine how they would feel after getting nuked? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where this mess would lead.
Nukes are bad, m'kay? Any nation that gets nuked will nuke someone else back if they can find a target. Nukes are horrible weapons of mass destruction, and most nations would make a lesson out of any nation that would dare to use them. If Britain, the US, or (and especially) Israel had a nuke used on them, these nations would respond in overwhelmingly violent manner for the singular purpose of leaving in the history of the world a genocidal incident showing just how horrible these weapons can be.
I sure as hell hope no nukes go off in my life time, because you can rest assure that if one nuke goes off, another one is going to follow somewhere else.
There really is no danger of MAD. That said, you are right that there is a slight danger of a nation being wiped out. The scenario that I see having some small possibility is that an Islamic fundamentalist group is given a nuclear weapon by a state, most likely Iran or North Korea, and that weapon is detonated in the US or (even worse) Israel.
If the US ever traced a detonated nuclear weapon back to another nation, and it was clear that that nation handed over the nuclear weapon intentionally, they would be fux00red. The US would invade at the bare minimum, and probably glass them over if they thought such an invasion would fail. North Korea in particular would be a candidate for glassing, while Iran would be a candidate for a limited nuking and a full scale invasion. Whatever the case, the nation in question probably would stand no chance to fire back. Playing nuclear war with Washington is a horrible idea. Unless you own a few thousand nukes, the US is not only going to win, but probably win without taking a scratch because they can drop a nuke on any spot even so much as suspected as housing nukes. If Washington has to guess where your remaining nukes are, they will leave no stone unglassed.
Now, to make the situation even uglier, consider if Israel was nuked. The US would likely try and show some restraint if they thought they could achieve their ends and avoid further attacks without glassing a nation over. Glassing a nation is a way to make the prospect of nuclear war too horrible to ever be considered again, but obviously involves mass whole sale genocide. The US might balk at genocide if other options existed. Israel on the other hand would show absolutely no such restraint. Israel would have no compulsions about making a lesson out of the offending nation. Israel would almost certainly glass the entire nation. While Israel doesn't have enough weapons to glass the world, they do have more then enough to glass over any Middle Eastern nation.
All that said, the real loss in life might not be in the actual nukes themselves. The real loss of life would come in the complete collapse of financial markets. People would flee the cities. Societies would spread out very quickly. This sudden change would have disastrous effects on economics. Developed nations would likely find themselves in a deep depression. The effects on the developed would be sever, but the resulting collapse of the world economy would be even worse on developing nations. Such a depression would ravage the economies of developing nations, resulting in mass starvation.
Moral of the story? Nukes = teh sux
It is believed that at one point the population of the human race was knocked down to a few thousand. This is backed up with genetic testing. Humans are extremely similar in terms of genetics. There is more difference between two random humans in the same race, then there is between two average humans of different races. In other words, if were to average all the genetics of each individual race, you would find that they are more similar to each other then difference you find between humans due to natural variation. It is pretty conclusive that humans all descend from the same few thousand people.
You aren't learning how to use your stuff effectively against China. You are learning how to use it effectively against guerrillas. If you'll fight against China, these lessons might actually work against you, since you'llmake assumptions about enemys firepower (and your ability to withstand it) and capabilities that simply aren't true.
... and stop you from getting any loans from anyone outside your country. At the same time, it would make it impossible to pay for all the outsourced production, leading to shortages of pretty much everything.
True, the amount strategy being learned is likely limited. That said, the amount being learned by taking stuff out into the field and using it is absolutely invaluable. That also says nothing about having battle hardened veterans. Leaders experience in war are massively more effective sending forward some poor bastard who has never faced a life or death situation. The people fighting today will be experienced leaders 10-15 years from now.
The Iraq way of blowing up American troops without any regard to bystanders seems to be working just fine. Apart from such guerrilla tactics, cutting your supply lines would render your technology near useless (a fighter doesn't fly without fuel, after all) and, since you rely on it so much, would likely lead to your troops getting slaughtered.
That simply isn't true. Supply lines are untouched and the loss of life to American soldiers is astronomically small. The US looses more people to accidental drowning each year then they do to the Iraq war. The Iraqi resistance has shown itself completely and utterly incapable of doing any real harm to US units. Suicide bombings and IEDs are political weapons, not weapons of war. Fighting a conventional army in the manner the Iraqi resistance fights would be a quick and surefire way to be defeated over night.
Apart from that, a hostile force could simply sponsor fundamentalistic Islam anti-american revolts in arabian countries. That would send your economy into chaos and make it impossible for you to keep up the expenditure of fighting a major war; you might even need the troops to keep order in your own country.
First, not all of the oil in the world is in the Middle East. Second, even if it was, and even if every single one of those governments was being run by a government hostile to the US, they would be utterly powerless to stop the US from getting the oil that it wanted. ANY oil sold enters the world market. The US can buy oil from the EU, and the EU can buy oil from the US. So long as they were selling to someone, they are have no choice but to indirectly sell to the US. The worst the Middle East could do would be to stop selling oil to all of the west. Refusing to sell to both the EU and the US is simply suicide and an invitation to invasion.
Further, you need to realize that even if you could tank the US economy, you can't do it without destroying the rest of the world's economy. The US is 1/5 of the world's economy. You can't remove that much of the economy of the world without sending everyone else into collapse. Hell, the big fear during the Asian financial crises in the late 90's was that it would reach US. It was known that if the US economy went belly up it would almost certainly drag the rest of the world with it.
Please note that this last point cannot be prevented just with your strategic oil reserves or domestic oil production. Anti-american governments in Middle-East would stop accepting dollars as payment for oil, and likely switch to euro; this, in turn, would make dollars value collapse...
Switching to the Euro wouldn't tank the value of the dollar. The only advantage that paying in one currency has over the other is the ability to avoid small exchange rate charge that banks charge. We are talking less then pennies on the dollar. In fact, OPEC is already talking about switching to the Euro for other fiscal reasons. No one is complaining all that loud.
Electrocution is a pretty minor threat. Do you think this is going to be a solid hunk of conductive metal? Let me ask you this. Can you electrocute a tank? Further, even if this was a solid hunk of conductive metal, anything strong enough to go through a hunk of metal, through a soldiers clothing, and into his body... well hell, it is strong enough to simply hit any soldier with, mechanized legs or none.
Honestly, if the enemy has to use "acid bath pits" and tasers, I'll call this a massive improvement. Acid bath pits and tasers sound a lot easier to avoid then "bullets" and "explosives".
The US has been supplying Taiwan with their air force and navy. While little known, Taiwan's air force is damn slick and made up of all the airplanes you would expect to see from an early 1990's US air force. They also have some pretty solid navel capabilities as we have been selling them one generation old destroyers. Taiwan probably could not win a protracted battle with China, but they certainly wouldn't be rolled over by China. China could take Taiwan the same way they help retake North Korea; slow and bloody attrition.
The real concern would be if China could take Taiwan rapidly. If that was the case it would mean the US would have to muster a counter invasion instead of simply offering a defense. Under such circumstances when a political solution that we would have to come to would be more likely to be in China's favor.
All likely scenarios involve China taking the island quickly and suing for peace under favorable terms because the US and China can't fight. We would destroy each other economically. Hell, we would destroy the world economically. Personally, I think China and Taiwan will never come to blows. So long as the US is willing to park a fleet of carriers off of the coast of Taiwan and fight that battle, neither side can afford the horrible economic consequences (and that ignores the loss in lives for all sides).
As to China using Iraq to develop counter weapons, yes that might be true to a limited extent. It is important to realize though that the insurgents in Iraq are ONLY testing ground forces. Further, the methods that they are using are purely guerilla tactics. Afghanistan in its fight with the USSR fought with guerilla tactics to be sure, but they also used other modern weapons of war. Afghanistan had F-16, anti-aircraft guns, artillery, jamming equipment, and all the things you would expect from a modern army. The insurgents have AK-47's, a few cheap RPGs, and the ability to stuff massive amounts of explosives into trucks. That isn't the kind of war China would ever fight with the US. China is only seeing the toys the US is using, not how to defeat them.
While knowing what the US is using is important, the benefits that the US army is receiving by being in constant combat are absolutely invaluable. The value of such lessons can be seen in some of the simple stuff. The US will never go to war again without giving everyone body armor. We will never have mobile units fight in a city in unarmored Humvees. We know how to operate our drones. Hell, we are developing new drones at break neck speed. War spurs innovation in war. The command and control kinks are being ironed out of the army. These are all lessons that if the US fights again, it won't have to relearn.
The real question is, is the experience the US armed forces are getting and the technological innovations that war drives forward in future war systems outweighing lost elements of surprise? I would say that without a doubt, the benefits massively outweigh the losses. I would have nothing but pity for a force that would have to fight the US 10-15 years down the road. They would face a well trained and experienced human/mechanized/drone army that could do more with a squad then most armies could do with a battalion. Stuff like what is shown in this article is only the beginning.
Infantry impervious to small arms loaded with 200+ pounds of armor and weapons back up by a swarm of drones of all shapes and sizes isn't sci-fi. It is already well on its way. If you want to fight the US army, find a way to win politically or use a nuke. Any other way is simply futile.
We certainly need to maintain military R&D, but to say we are losing out to China is insane. We are advancing militarily much faster then China can even contemplate. Give it 10 years and I wouldn't even be a little bit surprised to see full body exo-suits attached to mechanized infantry divisions and drones up the ass. Meanwhile, China is still working on developing a better method of invading Taiwan other then loading up the army on fishing boats and hoping that if they send enough a few off the poor bastards will make it. Further, you need to realize the type of conflict that the US would have with China would never be your protracted land war. There is no land to fight over next to China that either the US or China is willing to fight over.
The only place in the world we would want to bother fighting China over would be Taiwan. The key to Taiwan is in naval and aerial might. Right now Taiwan has an air force that could easily take on the Chinese air force without US help. With US help it isn't even a contest.
As to fighting in Iraq, you are absolutely insane if you think that it is damaging our ability to fight in the long term. In the short term we are certainly spread thin, but there are no looming battles in the short term. In the long term, Iraq is providing countless lessons. Sure, China gets to see our new toys in actions to a limited extent, but that is offset by the disgusting amounts of experience that the US armed forces are racking up. We are testing things in live fire. Troops are learning how to fight in hostile cities. We are learning damn quick how to protect vehicles and troops from RPG explosions. We are getting much better at fighting around civilians. Our drone technology is moving forward by leaps and bounds do to demand and field experience.
Hell, I am not saying the Iraq war is a good thing for the US as a whole, but to say that it is hurting the military in the long term is just plan ignorant. That is like arguing pre-World War II US military was better equipped then post World War II US military forces. Nothing could be further from the truth. A war in which the losses to lives and equipment are sustainable physically (politically is an entirely different matter) make the military stronger. Iraq is just such a war.
I can cut my response down to a very concisely. ID is by definition NOT science. ID does not offer any predictive capacity. A theory MUST offer some predictive capacity or else it is not a theory.
If you want to argue that ID has some sort of scientific merit, get that shit published in just ONE journal. So far ID hasn't even managed that feat. That puts ID below UFOs in terms of credibility. Get yourself published in a journal worth its pulp and maybe we could even talk about teaching it in schools. Until that time, this is just a bull shit method of religious nuts trying to shove religion into the public sector
Honestly, I don't care what you believe. I don't care if you preach what you believe. Take that religious non-sense into a class room though, and people will be rightfully pissed off. Achieve the level of 'science', and then we can talk again. Until then, go back to church.
ID is not a form of creationism. Not even close. Really, it is important to be intellectually honest about these things. Creationism is not a very respected theory, intellectually speaking.
ID isn't a respectable theory either. It isn't even a theory, much less a theory with a scrap of peer reviewed work done it. Research on UFOs and little green men has more scientific credibility and a much larger body of peer reviewed papers then ID does.
Further, ID absolutely is being used as a foot in the door for creationism. It isn't a magical coincidence that the ID advocates just all happen to be Christians. Creationism was utterly destroyed by science and is utterly unacceptable to teach in a school science class. Now ID tries to carry on where creationism was stopped cold. It desperately seeks a way to imply the G word in public schools. True, it isn't creationism in the traditional sense, but it was spawned from the same place.
Also, I didn't imply that ID is science. It is not.
That brings you a lot closer to reality the nut jobs trying to bring this crap into a science class room. Good for you. Too bad the other advocates of ID trying to bring this crap into a science class room seem to disagree with you. They seem deeply intent upon calling it science and shoving it down the throats of the masses using the force of government.
As far as schools teaching it, that is another question that I did not even come close to addressing.
There is a fundamental issue here. You think people are pissed off at ID because it is big misunderstanding about what ID is. The truth is that people are pissed off because a handful of religious zealots are trying to teach it as science. People start getting pissed off whenever ID is mentioned because no other philosophy has advocates trying to mandate its teaching in a science class room by law.
Doesn't it seem a little fishy to you that no other philosophy has entire organizations built around trying to use law to enforce the teaching of their philosophy in publicly funded schools? ID is a wedge being used to try and spew the G word all over the inside of science class rooms and nothing else. Want to prove me wrong? Stop trying to use the force of law to teach this crap.
I suggest writing an e-mail to your favorite ID advocacy group explaining to THEM how they misunderstand ID. Anyone who understands ID as you present it wouldn't consider trying to shove this crap into science class room. As you have already stated, this crap isn't science, so why are the advocates of ID so keen on using the force of government to put it in a science class room?
No one cares if you believe in ID or not. Creationism and scientific explanations have lived side by side for as long as the two have existed. The point of conflict is when creationism (be it ID or something else) tries to intrude upon science.
ID is not science. You cannot make a prediction with ID and test that prediction. ID has absolutely no predictive powers. Further ID relies on the words 'too complex'. The argument boils down to that from what we know right now, we can't fully explain certain things. This argument could have been used against lightening 500 years ago. We could have argued that from what we know of lightening, it couldn't exist without and intelligent creator. Clearly, that is not the case. No one argues any more that each time a bolt of lightening is cast it is the will of the creator.
The conflict over ID is that ID folks are trying to shove a piece of non-science into publicly funded science class rooms in schools in a nations where there is supposed to be a separation between government and religion. As long as ID folks insist upon using public funds to push their religious minded philosophy (it isn't even a theory) in public schools, you better believe people are going react with indignation every time they hear the words "intelligent design".
Take this philosophy and shove it into a church or Sunday school where it belongs. As long as the ID folks keep trying to push this nonsense upon everyone else using the power of the state, you can be damn sure every even vaguely scientifically minded person out there is going to be pissed off every time the words intelligent design is mentioned.
Imagine if one day the government mandated that all churches must teach Flying Spaghetti Monsterism (FSM) in Sunday school. Imagine the kind of response you would get from Christians each time FSM was mentioned. I bet you it wouldn't be one of tolerant understanding for another religion. It would be pissed off indignation at a group is trying to impose its religious values using the force of the government.
No one gives a damn if ID is taught in a church. People DO give a damn if this religious philosophy is being taught in a science class room as science.
The left calls the right fascist, the right calls the left traitors communist, and no one goes to jail for it. Welcome to freedom of speech buddy. It isn't freedom from being called names. The right can say whatever the damn well please and the left can response however they want. Then Pat Roberts and Sam Webb can throw into the mix their insane rantings. Isn't the first amendment great?
That is true that the malicious intent part does not apply to private persons, but Juniper without a doubt is considered a public figure. Juniper can't take out a full page ad in the New York Times declaring a person who said something negative about them a pedifile because that person is not a public figure. On the other hand you personally could take a full page ad in the New York Times (or your message board) declaring Juniper the scum of the earth.
Honestly, when it comes to libel and slander laws, American laws are dead on. We have a lot of shitty laws that other enlightened nations don't have (marijuana prohibition, a hypocritical drinking age, excessive corporate welfare, exc.) , but when it comes to libel and slander, it doesn't get much better then what the US has. You are protected from baseless slander from large and powerful entities, but private individuals are free to say just about anything.
While you are given WAY more leeway when dealing with political speeches (this is done so we can debate politics without fear of persecution) you cannot make bold statements like "Clinton killed a man in Arkansas" without evidence.
You are flat out wrong. You can say anything you want to without fear of a lawsuit. Clinton WAS accused of rape. A Kennedy was accused of murder. Exc. This happens all the time. Use libel laws are easily some of the weakest in the world. To win in the US you need to not only prove that the statement is not true, but also show that the other person did it to be malicious, and that it caused you harm. So, if you want to sue a guy for saying you murdered another man, you would not only need to prove that you didn't murder him, but also prove that your accuser knew that you didn't murder him, and that he did it for some malicious intent. How do you prove those things? You don't.
It is damn close to impossible to sue someone for libel in the US to win. The burden of proof is completely on the person is filing the lawsuit AND it has to be done out of malicious intent. Proving one of those things is very hard. Proving both of them is close to impossible.
Libel laws in the US keep Coke from taking out an add against Pepsi declaring that Pepsi puts rat poison in their drinks and nothing else.
You are a moron for two reasons.
First, libel in the US is damn close to impossible to win. If you had done even the most basic research, you would realize that these guys are going to lose horribly in their attempt to sue. In the US, not only do you need to PROVE that what someone is saying is untrue, you also need to prove that they said it knowning that it wasn't true, AND that they did it to cause you harm. How do you prove those things? You basically can't. Libel cases almost always get thrown out.
Two, anyone can sue anyone. The only thing that matters is the outcome. I could sue you for being a troll right now if I wanted to. The beauty of the justice system is that while you can make any claim of wrong doing you want, if your claim is totally baseless, it promtply gets thrown out at the first hearing. Who gives a shit if someone filed some court papers? This will be the "end of freedom of speech" as soon as... you know... someone actually wins one of these cases.
The only interesting point that can be made is: is there still a meaning to a *libel* offense? Wouldn't we all be better off if free speech were, in fact, free?
If this is happening the US, Juniper will lose. Period. End of story. US libel laws are easily one of the weakest you can find in the developed world. In order to get to win a libel case, not only do you have to prove what they said was completely untrue, but you also have to prove that they knew it wasn't true and that they did for malicious intent. In other words, the burden of proof is very much on the guy trying to do the suing. It is extraordinarily rare for libel cases to be won in the US.
Now, if this is happening in say Britain, Canada, or one of the many other countries with strong libel laws, there might be something to this. That said, I think this is happening in the US. I doubt they even get past the first round of court proceedings to find the names of the suspects.
The US has a lot of fucked up policies and laws. The US stance on libel isn't one of them. Unless the posters are shown to be rivals from another corporation posting intentionally incorrect statements, Juniper doesn't stand a chance in hell.
Not to feed the trolls, but what exactly is a 'legal' war? Is it one the UN signs off on? Does that mean that Korean war would have been illegal if the USSR had not been stupid and walked out that day instead of vetoing it? Was World War I and World War II illegal wars? What the fuck exactly are the conditions to make a war 'legal'?