Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, and therefore not bound by its protocols. Further, the five major nuclear powers have generally lowered their nuclear stance, as the US has seen a general reduction in weapon counts since about 1965, and the Soviets peaked in 1985 or so; at that time, the US and USSR combined for a total of around 70,000 weapons, and this has declined to about 26,000 weapons, with further withdrawals scheduled. There is no prohibition in the NPT for replacing old warheads with newer ones, as the concept of MAD still stands. Generally speaking newer warheads are less powerful than older, anyway. It was not uncommon to see 1MT or larger yields on warheads in the early decades, and yet (except for China) the yields of nuclear warheads that have been cycled in have decreased to an average of somewhere around 300kT, with many of them settable to well below that. This is because the accuracy has increased dramatically making it less necessary to have that kind of power to ensure destruction of the target. The last new warhead to come online in the US was the W88 warhead used in the Trident II SLBM which debuted in 1988, and for Russia possibly the warhead on the Topol-M which debuted in the mid-1990s.
Iran has obligations under the NPT to open up its nuclear research program to international inspectors to allow them to confirm what Iran says is taking place, something that even the US and Russia do. Iran has refused to allow inspectors entry into several key facilities, and has refused to turn over information about them, violating their Safeguards agreement, according to the IAEA. Pakistan's refusal to make available A.Q. Khan -- known for stealing from other nations several plans critical for development of his own country's nuclear weapons -- for interviewing by the IAEA even after evidence came to light that he supplied at least some of Iran's nuclear technology has further heightened suspicions as to the nature of the program.
I do see some hope in that Iran's economy -- which Ahmadinejad promised to turn around -- has continued to further tank even as Ahmadinejad has poured what may be billions of dollars into the nuclear program which has done little more than raise tensions with the West even as employment problems worsen. Evidence of support issues within the elite ranks of the clerics has come to light, and it may well be that Ahmadinejad will last only one term (though that means we still have to put up with him for another 2.5 years).
Osama bin Laden went to Afghanistan of his own accord, taking millions of his own cash with him to fund his private side of the war against the Soviets. He was well-known for not only eschewing all aid from the West -- sometimes reacting violently to the suggestion of taking assistance from the CIA -- but also for executing any Western person found unexpectedly near his camps. Journalist Robert Fisk has reported all of this on several occasions, including the first time when he interviewed him and was warned about how he should act in bin Laden's presence.
There were a lot of groups active against the Soviets, and not all of them were allied. To group them all together shows a serious misunderstanding of the complexities of that war.
Atheros drivers, while released by manufacturers, are usually pretty agnostic in the final installation, as they target the chipsets themselves. This happens often with pretty much everybody -- it's getting more and more rare for companies (especially video card manufacturers) to do any serious tweaking of the drivers, because they're running close to reference hardware. For wireless NICs, the changes are often minor such as slightly different transmit powers or more or less sensitive antennae, and have nothing to do with what the drivers cover.
Allowing employees to visit adult sites may create a hostile work environment and sets you up for a lawsuit from other employees who might see it and be offended. You may be able to get away with it when it's you and a couple of buddies starting up, but when your profits are in the billions, you're a giant stack of cash waiting for the first person to claim sexual harassment.
Southern California, actually, and more specifically Orange County. There was a line that was supposed to run from Fullerton in the north of the county to Irvine in the south end, but the Irvine residents managed to block it because it would bring too many people to their area. I think part of the reason they fought it is the perception that public transit is for poor people.
They also fought the airport (conversion from the old El Toro MCAS) using some very dodgy tactics, suggesting that aircraft would have trouble clearing hills on a northbound departure. However, loaded C-5 Galaxies never had such trouble, and it's widely believed that they just didn't want the sound nearby for fear of losing value on their homes, even though abatement was planned into the project. I'm sure some of them also didn't want a few thousand white collar jobs invading their cushy gated communities as well.
If it works for you, great. However, most cities in the US have exceptionally poor public transportation. I work eight miles from where I live. To drive to and from work takes 25 and 35 minutes respectively using streets (freeways take slightly longer). Taking the bus involves over an hour in each direction, and we're on exactly the same route. An extensive light rail project running from almost where I used to live to just about where I work was scrapped due to concerns from the rich end of it in favor of a project less than a quarter of the size and servicing even less of the county population (this same rich end also scuttled a new airport near them).
I've done more than a dozen clean installs of Fedora on hardware ranging from a P200 to the Latitude D820 from which I type this, and never once had a corrupt package from an image or a CD. I've done numerous upgrades via yum, including an upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 kernels, and only ran into issues on a few occasions, almost all of them dealing with the kernel transition.
Why would they accept an OS that gets slower with every release?
RH9 pretty much screamed on one of my home systems. FC1 was pretty snappy, too. FC3, not so much. FC5 was even a little slower. FC6 seemed to stabilize. In all cases, I was running a pretty basic desktop environment without anything flashy, not much in the way of extraneous services running (HTTP and FTP only), and only me accessing them.
All major OSes get some bloat as they grow. Vista's sheer size is inexcusable, but it's not terribly slower than XP, at least on a 1.6GHz P4 notebook.
Turn off the themes engine (24MB RAM on average, IIRC), and it actually isn't that bad. The themes engine is the most intensive single consumer of resources shy of the actual user.
In deployment, no, but Russia was playing with them a couple of years ago. It was probably more of a response to the GMD system than any real threat to deploy, since they could (and would) instead launch hundreds of missiles, overwhelming any possible defense.
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) are not intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) from a technical sense, and usually not from a practical sense, either. Trident missiles used by the US and UK have a range of 12,000km, more than double the maximum range used by the State Department when describing IRBMs. Russia has used SLBMs with ranges of 7000km or more (up to about 8000km) since the early 1960s). Only the French and Chinese field SLBMs with ranges that fall within the State Dept's definition of an IRBM (3000km-5500km).
THAAD is intended for use against tactical weapons, such as those that might be deployed over a theater. Mixing eras, it would be used against weapons with V-1 and V-2 missile ranges. It's also far less expensive (and apparently far more effective within its given role) than the more well-known ABM system, and will be complementary to the eventual deployment of the ABL, which itself sort of straddles the divide, being dependent more on the curvature of the earth than anything else for its range.
President Bush said Thursday the United States has notified Russia that it intends to pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, starting a six-month timetable for withdrawal and opening the way for the creation of an anti-missile defense system.
He did not annul the treaty, but rather went through the process detailed in the treaty for withdrawing from it by providing six months of notice to the president of Russia. He went on to say that the Soviet Union and the hostility that it had towards the United States no longer existed, and so the ABM had become a hindrance to new threats, losing its value.
The number of dimensions isn't that high. When all of the string theories are combined into M-theory, the total number of dimensions is eleven, IIRC. Harder to understand? Yes. Impossible to visualize? Yep. But not abhorrently high.
Your friend may not be your friend much longer when he's hit with a charge of making a fraudulent 911 call, or possibly aiding and abetting. In Indiana, the base crime is a class B misdemeanor (Indiana Code 35-44-2-2(c)), punishable by "imprison[ment] for a fixed term of not more than one hundred eighty (180) days; in addition, he may be fined not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000)" (IC 35-50-3-3). At that point, he may readily turn you over to avoid facing such a charge.
Prepaid phones still have information stored for the call record. While a prepaid phone may not require knowledge of the owner, its call log can still be acquired, and those who have been called from it may be asked who it belongs to. I suspect it will be pretty rare for someone to buy a prepaid phone simply to make false 911 calls, as that strikes me as more expensive than it's worth.
The point here is not whether people should be breaking laws. The issue is how much control are we willing to hand over to the state. By being under constant supervision, we risk not only harassment on the letter of the law (remember, 61mph in a 60mph zone is illegal and a citable offense, even if your speedometer is out of calibration, which is an offense in itself), but also further laws. Some laws are enacted not just because of public safety, but because an action annoys someone in power. If tapes were presented showing a situation that someone finds annoying, then a lawmaker may well be persuaded to try to get something passed, and I think there are few who would disagree that the body of laws in the US has managed to get fairly onerous over the years.
There are benefits to having police officers, something impossible to deny. But the job should not be made too easy for them to hit every single law-breaker, no matter how minor the infraction, because that breeds arrogance and corruption, two things we want to minimize in any police force.
If you truly never break any traffic laws, then you're one of the rarest of drivers. In California, one frequently must break speed limit laws on the freeways in order to avoid becoming a hindrance to traffic, as the true speed of several freeways is often ~10mph over the speed limit; I-15 near the Highway 395 interchange is the best example I can think of, with a speed limit of 70mph and all three lanes of traffic often going 80mph or faster -- I've been in a cluster traveling at 95mph.
Incidentally, I've not had a single moving violation in 14 years of driving. I don't mind intersection cameras that catch people running red lights, as I've seen several accidents due to that, including the end result of one which killed two people going through a green light and left the front and back halves of their car on opposite corners of the intersection.
When you call 911 on a cell, your cell number comes with it, so it can be traced to you. On many phones, if there's a sufficient signal, your GPS coordinates may also be sent. There's enough there to provide deterrence from people abusing the system through false images, including possibly some extra penalties regarding fraudulent 911 calls.
There's a significant difference between public photography and the state taking pictures. There are cases where there may be valid security reasons to do so, such as at state-owned buildings to catch thieves and vandals on record.
It has been the history of this nation to provide certain barriers for police to help ensure that they remain as honest as possible. This is why there are requirements for warrants and Miranda warnings. It's not that we don't want evidence to not make it to court, but we want to be as sure as possible that the evidence was obtained without coercion or undue deception, and that it is done with the consent of the people involved in the case. This puts power in the hands of the people rather than the state.
The presence of cameras can allow for intimidation or harassment through automated means (think just about how many traffic laws you break in a given week, including speeding, rapid lane changes, rolling stops, and similar minor offenses), even though they may be useful for solving more serious crimes. Make things too simple for the state, and the state gets lazy. This doesn't cover blackmail potential, or other abuse that can occur -- such as the museum camera that was used to peer into German Chancellor Angela Merkel's home. The kind of devices often mentioned as desired by police are PTZ (point-tilt-zoom) cameras, and depending on placement, may be quite capable of being aimed to peer into the home or yard of a private citizen. Even with oversight boards, who is going to be able to review ~720 hours of use per month, especially when it is over hundreds or even thousands of cameras?
For that matter, MD5 hasn't been the gold standard in several years, even before the MD5 weaknesses came to light. That it is one of the most commonly used hashing algorithms doesn't make it the gold standard.
Possible but not likely. However, one term on the FISC (Claude Hilton) is due to expire in 2007. Two more are set for next year, two for 2009, one in 2010, two in 2011, one in 2012, and two in 2013 for the FISC. The Court of Review has vacancies coming in 2008, 2010, and 2012. All terms expire on 18 May of their respective years. All current judges would have been appointed by Rehnquist before he died.
The issue is not whether there is warming (there quite clearly is), but whether its major cause is anthropogenic or a result of natural events.
Honestly, I don't see the world's ecology getting much better almost no matter what happens. In the race to use biodiesel, Europe is subsidizing the destruction of huge swaths of rain forest in Indonesia and other Pacific island regions. In the race to become free of nuclear influence, several nations are ditching their reactors which produce no output of greenhouse gases and installing natgas plants. There are a few interesting concepts coming around for solar, but they still require proof of concept before they're usabl Coal seam fires in China put out as much CO2 as the entire US vehicle fleet, but the efforts spent to deal with that are cursory at best. Cities in India, Mexico, and South America pour smoke into the air from fires and vehicles with extremely poor (if any) emission controls.
There is no combination of courage and logic on a large enough scale to put together the right set of technologies to deal with global warming, even if it is mostly anthropogenic.
It has absolutely nothing to do with Bush. The North Korean government has been telling its people that the US will be invading any day now for more than 50 years. Increased activity by the Soviets in the Pacific? Coming invasion of North Korea. Troop rotation through Okinawa? Coming invasion of North Korea. New president elected? Coming invasion of North Korea. Redeployment of troops away from the border? Coming invasion of North Korea. Reduction of US troops in South Korea? Coming invasion of North Korea.
In the meantime, every story is followed by word of how the brave North Korean army either has stiffened its guard, thus heading off an attack, or will gloriously protect North Korea from the imperialist American empire.
The truth is that the North Korean military would likely crumble in the face of any significant combat. Morale is low, technology outdated, and equipment quality is often questionable. Casualties would probably be high for an invading force due to massive minefields and forces who fight to the death because they would be machine-gunned if they retreated, but it would not be terribly difficult to sever all contact with command and control (C2) sites, thus leaving a military trained only to fight under the command of higher levels in a situation where it cannot work efficiently -- thinking for itself. This is exactly what happened to the Iraqi forces in the first Gulf War, when its units were cut off from C2 sites and forced to fight a mobile war for which it had never trained.
I think the limiting factor will be that they want to use the power savings of the set as a selling point, and having a refresh rate 2x the speed of the competition would mean you need to use almost 2x the power since that would mean sending 2x as many electrons through the nanotube guns of the emitters.
Why would the power increase that much? Maybe I'm not understanding part of the technology, but I would think that the electron stream would remain constant if there was no change in the color through a period of two cycles at the higher refresh rate. There may be a marginal increase in electricity use during a change in brightness level as an intermediary step may require more than would be used at the lower refresh rate, but I doubt that the overall use would be that much greater.
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Israel is not a signatory to the NPT, and therefore not bound by its protocols. Further, the five major nuclear powers have generally lowered their nuclear stance, as the US has seen a general reduction in weapon counts since about 1965, and the Soviets peaked in 1985 or so; at that time, the US and USSR combined for a total of around 70,000 weapons, and this has declined to about 26,000 weapons, with further withdrawals scheduled. There is no prohibition in the NPT for replacing old warheads with newer ones, as the concept of MAD still stands. Generally speaking newer warheads are less powerful than older, anyway. It was not uncommon to see 1MT or larger yields on warheads in the early decades, and yet (except for China) the yields of nuclear warheads that have been cycled in have decreased to an average of somewhere around 300kT, with many of them settable to well below that. This is because the accuracy has increased dramatically making it less necessary to have that kind of power to ensure destruction of the target. The last new warhead to come online in the US was the W88 warhead used in the Trident II SLBM which debuted in 1988, and for Russia possibly the warhead on the Topol-M which debuted in the mid-1990s.
Iran has obligations under the NPT to open up its nuclear research program to international inspectors to allow them to confirm what Iran says is taking place, something that even the US and Russia do. Iran has refused to allow inspectors entry into several key facilities, and has refused to turn over information about them, violating their Safeguards agreement, according to the IAEA. Pakistan's refusal to make available A.Q. Khan -- known for stealing from other nations several plans critical for development of his own country's nuclear weapons -- for interviewing by the IAEA even after evidence came to light that he supplied at least some of Iran's nuclear technology has further heightened suspicions as to the nature of the program.
I do see some hope in that Iran's economy -- which Ahmadinejad promised to turn around -- has continued to further tank even as Ahmadinejad has poured what may be billions of dollars into the nuclear program which has done little more than raise tensions with the West even as employment problems worsen. Evidence of support issues within the elite ranks of the clerics has come to light, and it may well be that Ahmadinejad will last only one term (though that means we still have to put up with him for another 2.5 years).
Osama bin Laden went to Afghanistan of his own accord, taking millions of his own cash with him to fund his private side of the war against the Soviets. He was well-known for not only eschewing all aid from the West -- sometimes reacting violently to the suggestion of taking assistance from the CIA -- but also for executing any Western person found unexpectedly near his camps. Journalist Robert Fisk has reported all of this on several occasions, including the first time when he interviewed him and was warned about how he should act in bin Laden's presence.
There were a lot of groups active against the Soviets, and not all of them were allied. To group them all together shows a serious misunderstanding of the complexities of that war.
Atheros drivers, while released by manufacturers, are usually pretty agnostic in the final installation, as they target the chipsets themselves. This happens often with pretty much everybody -- it's getting more and more rare for companies (especially video card manufacturers) to do any serious tweaking of the drivers, because they're running close to reference hardware. For wireless NICs, the changes are often minor such as slightly different transmit powers or more or less sensitive antennae, and have nothing to do with what the drivers cover.
Allowing employees to visit adult sites may create a hostile work environment and sets you up for a lawsuit from other employees who might see it and be offended. You may be able to get away with it when it's you and a couple of buddies starting up, but when your profits are in the billions, you're a giant stack of cash waiting for the first person to claim sexual harassment.
The reverse is actually true -- that scene was based on They Live.
I need to get that movie on DVD.
Southern California, actually, and more specifically Orange County. There was a line that was supposed to run from Fullerton in the north of the county to Irvine in the south end, but the Irvine residents managed to block it because it would bring too many people to their area. I think part of the reason they fought it is the perception that public transit is for poor people.
They also fought the airport (conversion from the old El Toro MCAS) using some very dodgy tactics, suggesting that aircraft would have trouble clearing hills on a northbound departure. However, loaded C-5 Galaxies never had such trouble, and it's widely believed that they just didn't want the sound nearby for fear of losing value on their homes, even though abatement was planned into the project. I'm sure some of them also didn't want a few thousand white collar jobs invading their cushy gated communities as well.
If it works for you, great. However, most cities in the US have exceptionally poor public transportation. I work eight miles from where I live. To drive to and from work takes 25 and 35 minutes respectively using streets (freeways take slightly longer). Taking the bus involves over an hour in each direction, and we're on exactly the same route. An extensive light rail project running from almost where I used to live to just about where I work was scrapped due to concerns from the rich end of it in favor of a project less than a quarter of the size and servicing even less of the county population (this same rich end also scuttled a new airport near them).
I have no idea what you're doing wrong, then.
I've done more than a dozen clean installs of Fedora on hardware ranging from a P200 to the Latitude D820 from which I type this, and never once had a corrupt package from an image or a CD. I've done numerous upgrades via yum, including an upgrade from 2.4 to 2.6 kernels, and only ran into issues on a few occasions, almost all of them dealing with the kernel transition.
All major OSes get some bloat as they grow. Vista's sheer size is inexcusable, but it's not terribly slower than XP, at least on a 1.6GHz P4 notebook.
Turn off the themes engine (24MB RAM on average, IIRC), and it actually isn't that bad. The themes engine is the most intensive single consumer of resources shy of the actual user.
Submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) are not intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) from a technical sense, and usually not from a practical sense, either. Trident missiles used by the US and UK have a range of 12,000km, more than double the maximum range used by the State Department when describing IRBMs. Russia has used SLBMs with ranges of 7000km or more (up to about 8000km) since the early 1960s). Only the French and Chinese field SLBMs with ranges that fall within the State Dept's definition of an IRBM (3000km-5500km).
THAAD is intended for use against tactical weapons, such as those that might be deployed over a theater. Mixing eras, it would be used against weapons with V-1 and V-2 missile ranges. It's also far less expensive (and apparently far more effective within its given role) than the more well-known ABM system, and will be complementary to the eventual deployment of the ABL, which itself sort of straddles the divide, being dependent more on the curvature of the earth than anything else for its range.
The number of dimensions isn't that high. When all of the string theories are combined into M-theory, the total number of dimensions is eleven, IIRC. Harder to understand? Yes. Impossible to visualize? Yep. But not abhorrently high.
Your friend may not be your friend much longer when he's hit with a charge of making a fraudulent 911 call, or possibly aiding and abetting. In Indiana, the base crime is a class B misdemeanor (Indiana Code 35-44-2-2(c)), punishable by "imprison[ment] for a fixed term of not more than one hundred eighty (180) days; in addition, he may be fined not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000)" (IC 35-50-3-3). At that point, he may readily turn you over to avoid facing such a charge.
Prepaid phones still have information stored for the call record. While a prepaid phone may not require knowledge of the owner, its call log can still be acquired, and those who have been called from it may be asked who it belongs to. I suspect it will be pretty rare for someone to buy a prepaid phone simply to make false 911 calls, as that strikes me as more expensive than it's worth.
The point here is not whether people should be breaking laws. The issue is how much control are we willing to hand over to the state. By being under constant supervision, we risk not only harassment on the letter of the law (remember, 61mph in a 60mph zone is illegal and a citable offense, even if your speedometer is out of calibration, which is an offense in itself), but also further laws. Some laws are enacted not just because of public safety, but because an action annoys someone in power. If tapes were presented showing a situation that someone finds annoying, then a lawmaker may well be persuaded to try to get something passed, and I think there are few who would disagree that the body of laws in the US has managed to get fairly onerous over the years.
There are benefits to having police officers, something impossible to deny. But the job should not be made too easy for them to hit every single law-breaker, no matter how minor the infraction, because that breeds arrogance and corruption, two things we want to minimize in any police force.
If you truly never break any traffic laws, then you're one of the rarest of drivers. In California, one frequently must break speed limit laws on the freeways in order to avoid becoming a hindrance to traffic, as the true speed of several freeways is often ~10mph over the speed limit; I-15 near the Highway 395 interchange is the best example I can think of, with a speed limit of 70mph and all three lanes of traffic often going 80mph or faster -- I've been in a cluster traveling at 95mph.
Incidentally, I've not had a single moving violation in 14 years of driving. I don't mind intersection cameras that catch people running red lights, as I've seen several accidents due to that, including the end result of one which killed two people going through a green light and left the front and back halves of their car on opposite corners of the intersection.
When you call 911 on a cell, your cell number comes with it, so it can be traced to you. On many phones, if there's a sufficient signal, your GPS coordinates may also be sent. There's enough there to provide deterrence from people abusing the system through false images, including possibly some extra penalties regarding fraudulent 911 calls.
There's a significant difference between public photography and the state taking pictures. There are cases where there may be valid security reasons to do so, such as at state-owned buildings to catch thieves and vandals on record.
It has been the history of this nation to provide certain barriers for police to help ensure that they remain as honest as possible. This is why there are requirements for warrants and Miranda warnings. It's not that we don't want evidence to not make it to court, but we want to be as sure as possible that the evidence was obtained without coercion or undue deception, and that it is done with the consent of the people involved in the case. This puts power in the hands of the people rather than the state.
The presence of cameras can allow for intimidation or harassment through automated means (think just about how many traffic laws you break in a given week, including speeding, rapid lane changes, rolling stops, and similar minor offenses), even though they may be useful for solving more serious crimes. Make things too simple for the state, and the state gets lazy. This doesn't cover blackmail potential, or other abuse that can occur -- such as the museum camera that was used to peer into German Chancellor Angela Merkel's home. The kind of devices often mentioned as desired by police are PTZ (point-tilt-zoom) cameras, and depending on placement, may be quite capable of being aimed to peer into the home or yard of a private citizen. Even with oversight boards, who is going to be able to review ~720 hours of use per month, especially when it is over hundreds or even thousands of cameras?
For that matter, MD5 hasn't been the gold standard in several years, even before the MD5 weaknesses came to light. That it is one of the most commonly used hashing algorithms doesn't make it the gold standard.
Possible but not likely. However, one term on the FISC (Claude Hilton) is due to expire in 2007. Two more are set for next year, two for 2009, one in 2010, two in 2011, one in 2012, and two in 2013 for the FISC. The Court of Review has vacancies coming in 2008, 2010, and 2012. All terms expire on 18 May of their respective years. All current judges would have been appointed by Rehnquist before he died.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court 2006 Membership
The issue is not whether there is warming (there quite clearly is), but whether its major cause is anthropogenic or a result of natural events.
Honestly, I don't see the world's ecology getting much better almost no matter what happens. In the race to use biodiesel, Europe is subsidizing the destruction of huge swaths of rain forest in Indonesia and other Pacific island regions. In the race to become free of nuclear influence, several nations are ditching their reactors which produce no output of greenhouse gases and installing natgas plants. There are a few interesting concepts coming around for solar, but they still require proof of concept before they're usabl Coal seam fires in China put out as much CO2 as the entire US vehicle fleet, but the efforts spent to deal with that are cursory at best. Cities in India, Mexico, and South America pour smoke into the air from fires and vehicles with extremely poor (if any) emission controls.
There is no combination of courage and logic on a large enough scale to put together the right set of technologies to deal with global warming, even if it is mostly anthropogenic.
It has absolutely nothing to do with Bush. The North Korean government has been telling its people that the US will be invading any day now for more than 50 years. Increased activity by the Soviets in the Pacific? Coming invasion of North Korea. Troop rotation through Okinawa? Coming invasion of North Korea. New president elected? Coming invasion of North Korea. Redeployment of troops away from the border? Coming invasion of North Korea. Reduction of US troops in South Korea? Coming invasion of North Korea.
In the meantime, every story is followed by word of how the brave North Korean army either has stiffened its guard, thus heading off an attack, or will gloriously protect North Korea from the imperialist American empire.
The truth is that the North Korean military would likely crumble in the face of any significant combat. Morale is low, technology outdated, and equipment quality is often questionable. Casualties would probably be high for an invading force due to massive minefields and forces who fight to the death because they would be machine-gunned if they retreated, but it would not be terribly difficult to sever all contact with command and control (C2) sites, thus leaving a military trained only to fight under the command of higher levels in a situation where it cannot work efficiently -- thinking for itself. This is exactly what happened to the Iraqi forces in the first Gulf War, when its units were cut off from C2 sites and forced to fight a mobile war for which it had never trained.
Why would the power increase that much? Maybe I'm not understanding part of the technology, but I would think that the electron stream would remain constant if there was no change in the color through a period of two cycles at the higher refresh rate. There may be a marginal increase in electricity use during a change in brightness level as an intermediary step may require more than would be used at the lower refresh rate, but I doubt that the overall use would be that much greater.
While it does mean spending money, there's nothing stopping you from buying the books, though the prices on them can be... significant. For Single Variable Calculus (the first math course listed), the book used is Calculus with Analytic Geometry , which seems to go for about $150 new no matter where you look. The book is also used in Multivariable Calculus and Principles of Aeronautic Control, so at least it can be spread out a bit.
Ow.