Usage-based billing is NOT a consequence of network neutrality. The two have absolutely no relationship. Network Neutrality is being used a a pretext for usage-based billing, but that is very different. I could claim that a warm day is a pretext for playing WoW, but that would not mean there was any relationship between the two. It's fiction.
The complaint that some pipes are getting overloaded is stupid beyond belief. AQM doesn't violate Network Neutrality but is quite capable of handling pipe overload at the ISP level. Above that, most of the problem is caused by Tier 1 backbone providers oversubscribing and/or going for a Spanning Tree topology rather than mesh.
Blaming customers and locking them out until they pay protection money would be like airlines overbooking an aircraft then demanding surplus passengers cough up the cash for a chartered plane to rescue them. Sorry, but as malign, degenerate and corrupt as the airlines are, even they don't demand that! I see bugger all reason to allow any network provider to get away with what we'd never allow any other industry to excuse.
Going for a Spanning Tree when network loads were rising exponentially -- a problem caused by the network providers themselves NOT providing multicast to the home but demanding that everyone use P2P for audio and video, for profit reasons* -- rather than going for a mesh meant that pipes were bound to be saturated. They knew that when they started cutting back on routes, but fat profits meant more than good service. That's their business decision. They're allowed to make it. But they should ALSO be allowed to suffer the consequences. This is one bail-out the tax payer has NO reason to fund.
*ISPs wanted to charge customers for content in a way multicast doesn't allow. Since P2P is more network-intensive, not only did ISPs hope to charge more for the content being delivered but they also hoped to force customers to buy fatter pipes than actually needed. This is all well-documented history, anyone using the MBone prior to it being enabled by default on Tier 1 will be familiar with this. The problems of P2P were well-known to everyone the moment Cornell University released its client (yes, that's what CU stands for in the name), which is why clients and the reflectors supported multicast streaming. It was a game of chicken, in essence - the ISPs would back down or the users would back down. The game continues to this day, only the users are now so used to content-on-demand via YouTube et al that they have forgotten any other way ever existed. The ISPs still won't enable multicast because the moment they do, caching and distributed video delivery becomes easier and the network usage will plummet, killing their argument that they need to charge more to handle demand. Their argument is fiction and their issues are self-caused and self-sustained, but the moment that becomes obvious even to the most idiotic of anti-nerds, the ISPs will be absolutely dead in the water as far as milking the market is concerned.
SCOTUS has already made clear that stuff not ratified by Congress has no validity. So, yes, that Congress. No ratification = no validity in SCOTUS' eyes = nothing happening. If you want something to happen, it has to be ratified. I don't like that, I think watchdogs should have the authority to bite, but I don't sit on SCOTUS, I have no authority to add an amendment to the Constitution, so I have no say in what the law is. I can only say that that's what has been Decided and that's what we have to live with.
No, it was not inflamatory. No military historian regards Market Garden as anything other than a disaster and equally no military historian regards Iraq II as being any better. Nor do any observers regard Iraq as being anything more than a suburb of Iran. Iraq has no meaningful independence. This is the reality on the ground.
Well, no, it didn't. The war did nothing to do that. Saddam wasn't caught until LONG after the war was over, and most of those who actually carried out the torture either joined the government or joined Al Queda. Way to go. The "democracy" doesn't exist - election fraud is rife, the constitution was ruled illegal by the appeals court during Saddam's trial and civil war is likely to break out at any moment.
As for Chemical Ali, you're grasping badly at straw men. Assuming that the opposite of war is the support of a dictatorship is a stretch even a Black Hole would find hard to achieve. Congratulations, you're more destructive than a singularity, how does that make you feel?
Well, you don't seem to have much of a grasp of Chaos Theory, or indeed when it applies. As for "pseudo-intellectuals", if you can't be bothered reading the paper on the Butterfly Effect you have little credibility on labeling others -- particularly when you have no comprehension of what the others in question know.
Pakistan has lost more civilians per year since 9/11 than the entire Western world has lost in both civilians AND military combined in ALL the years since 9/11, so no sane person would call what exists any kind of peace. Factor in the losses in India and the rest of the subcontinent and you see a highly unstable, violently dangerous environment.
It doesn't help that the US only ever backs whatever nation in the subcontinent it happens to think of as "winning" at that point in time, supplying weapons, technology and training far beyond the capacity of any of the region to actually handle in a mature, rational fashion. (To be fair, nobody in the subcontinent regards Russia, China, the UK, France, or any other nation as being any better. Some are regarded as far, far worse. Which is impressive. If Satan is the mythological Father of Lies, it must take a lot of effort by these other nations to achieve a lower credibility rating than that.)
Peace may well be achievable, but not through MAD.
That's a big reason why ABMs were banned under SALT. If one side believed a nuclear war was not only "winnable" but actually "survivable" then MAD totally breaks down. It's also why Russia is furious with the US right now. If the US thought, no matter how stupidly or naively, that MAD no longer applied then they are more likely to attempt limited nuclear exchanges. Especially as the US public has developed a distaste for boots on the ground.
Such an exchange will, inevitably, escalate. There is no scenario in which a limited exchange stays limited, but put Perry or Gingrich in the Oval Office and you're not likely to see a President who gives a damn.
Well, no, Buddha was a tribal prince that happened to like some Hindu ideas but did some interesting and novel extrapolations. He was quite mortal and even Buddhists do not regard him as a god. Well, not the ones that actually understand a word of their practice, so I imagine some theocratic anthropologists still regard it as a religion.
I concur. The situation in the Middle East is extremely volatile and unilateral disarmament by one side in what sadly resembles a 10,000 year drunken brawl isn't going to help. Having said that, I would observe that outside interference in the region (by Eastern and Western powers - I don't distinguish according to who interferes) has worsened the situation.
The modern Iranian government is a product of Western interference starting with the removal of a democratic leader, continuing through Reagan's negotiations with Iran to prevent the hostage release on his predecessor's watch, worsening dramatically during the Col. Oliver North saga and then going positively downhill after the Axis of Evil denouncement, election-rigging attempts by the US in Iran, etc. Iran shouldn't be a theocracy and certainly shouldn't be a paranoid schizophrenic one. Both of those traits were a result of interference. Don't get me wrong - Russia and China have been just as bad, if not worse, as was Hitler, Mussolini, the Roman Empire, and countless other power-brokers. If interference in and of itself is a bad thing, then ALL who interfere are guilty.
However, obviously leaving well enough alone isn't an option now. The pilot's been shot, the plane is plunging towards the ground, bailing out and doing nothing to help on the grounds that it's the passengers' problem won't do a damn bit of good. It was past that point before Judaism ever existed. Nonetheless, shooting every other passenger who can fly the plane isn't going to make things better either. If you want to save something, you can't first crush it out of existence.
Everything, but everything, in the Middle East is about both nationalist politics and schizophrenic forms of religion. You can't remove either politics or religion from the region, so the only option left is to work on dissolving nationalism and curing the schizophrenia -- tactics I see a total lack of by all powers trying to mess with the region.
I would disagree. A government is not, and never has been, a race. That is infinitely worse than calling a corporation a person, although it's basically along the same lines. Would you judge all Americans according to either the views of GW Bush or Obama? I hope you'd call that absolutely absurd. Yet both their policies have been unquestionably a function of their respective cultures and those who oppose their policies also do so because they are opposed to those cultures.
Would you call the Tea Party racist because it despises left-wing culture? Would you call the socialists racist because they consider right-wing culture neo-Nazi fascists? I hope the answer would be no. I'd call both stupid for holding such views, but I wouldn't call them racists. A government is a representative of the people, but it is not - never has been, never will be - the people itself.
"The Jews are different - Israel == Jews!" Well, no, that's not actually true. There are plenty of Jews who regard modern Israel as a mockery of their religion. Seriously. They hold that Israel has only ever been given or taken by God and that the UN, not being any kind of God, has no business trying to act like one. These people are still Jews, are they not? There's no McCarthyite UnJewish Commission that I know of, declaring them as UnJews. So Israel is not a race or even a culture. It is simply a nation. A nation that has every right to exist, just like all other nations. It is no less, but it is also no more.
"Ok, but Israel is a Jewish Nation, right?" I'll accept that it represents some Jews, but the Falasha are routinely treated as a backwards, inferior people. It's hard to argue Israel as truly Jewish when First Temple Jews are treated no better than the Tinkers, Gypseys and Romanies are in Europe. Israelis are very selective over what branches of Judaism are tolerated. They are perfectly entitled to be as finicky as they like, it's a democracy and a democracy has the right to self-determination via majority rule. However, you cannot claim it represents those it regards as second-class.
I do not believe Israel should be required to change, in any respect or in any regard. Israel has the right to be what it is, where it is, how it is. I may dislike certain decisions of theirs, but I have no right to question their right to make those decisions. As a Rationalist, however, I refuse to allow any entity to define fact as fiction or fiction as fact (be it East, West, North or South, Iran, Israel, the US, the EU or the troglodytes that currently infest many web boards). That which is is. That which is not is not.
Since when did doing the right thing depend on your opponent not doing the wrong thing? If the right thing is truly the right thing, then it remains so regardless of any other outcome.
Depends on the microscope they used. Seriously, though, there is nothing at the moment that prohibits deceptive advertising and the watchdog would likely lose if any actual ban on any piece of advertising got challenged in court. The situation is currently futile and will remain so until all branches (SCOTUS included) uniformly agree that selling a product that doesn't exist is not "artistic license". (The view of courts in the past is that it is and therefore it is protected speech.)
Well, you won't get individual burger chains voluntarily making their ads look like crap (it won't improve sales but it will make their competitors look better), the same goes with cosmetics companies, et al. Voluntary compliance simply won't happen.
Ok, what about the watchdog? Well, as the FCC found out when trying to impose rulings on network neutrality, the courts regard watchdogs as being not much more than mere advisory panels. In short, if a company took a watchdog to court, claiming that Congress had ruled these kinds of deceptive advertising to be non-protected Commercial Speech that they had First Amendment protections to be as deceptive as they damn well felt like, the company would almost certainly win.
Which means that if you honestly believe that there's a limit to the acceptable level of deception, Congress has to have some involvement. It needn't be a full-blown law, and that would likely also fail as UnConstitutional, but there has to be something that is at that level which clearly denotes that there is a difference between protected commercial speech (satire/parody, comedic representation, figurative representation, et al) and actual attempts to deceive a customer into buying something that never existed. And, no, what the US currently has is obviously not enough, or the cosmetics companies would be up the proverbial creek without paddle (or indeed canoe) via lemon laws. The product is, after all, "defective" when compared with what it's sold as. They aren't and the watchdog didn't even bother using such laws, showing the laws have no value or significance.
How was the invasion successful? It failed on every one of its objectives (it allowed Al Queda not only in but to steal vast quantities of RDX other high explosives, it failed to capture or eliminate Saddam Hussein, it caused the total fragmentation of international resolve, it destroyed massive quantities of infrastructure - a violation of Sun Tzu's instructions, it broke the Middle East stalemate between Iraq and Iran, it succeeded in killing figures who would have been useful in rebuilding).
It also caused widespread looting -- not only by Iraqis, as US soldiers plundered substantial amounts of archaeological relics from Babylon. Since history is a valuable resource and cannot be replaced, destruction of it by the invasion force substantially damaged Iraq's capacity to rebuild. Something the US troops who looted knew damn well at the time. I will accept no excuses and believe firmly that no forgiveness should ever be given for those who raped such sites.
No, the net worth of the country is the net worth of the country. The government has no say in that. Printing more money doesn't alter the net worth. Printing more money simply increases the amount of money that the same amount of net worth is mapped to.
The CIA's own strategic review might well be propaganda, but if that is the case then you could equally well say the same thing about the claims of Iran starting. So what do you believe? Either the threat assessments are correct, in which case Iran stopped, or the threat assessments are wrong, in which case Iran never started. Your choice. Either there was no threat at the time action started or there is no threat to this day.
If the former, I am correct. If the latter, you are wrong. Take your pick.
That would have worked. So would doing nothing. Doesn't matter which successful move you make, what matters is that it's successful. The error is in making moves you know are bad, then keeping on making bad moves in the hope that enough badness will eventually work out good. That NEVER works.
A trivial example. You can win in chess by destroying the opponent's pieces, or you can win in chess without capturing any but playing brilliantly. What never works in chess is to play badly in the hopes of making your opponent play worse. The successful strategies always lead to you winning, the bad strategies always lead to you losing. Which good or bad strategy you follow won't alter the outcome.
In terms of nukes, yes, but their rockets have a 100% failure rate. Sabotage won't help, though high-res satellite photos of the launch sites kept constantly up-to-date would help shut down any attack - the failure rate is so high on their rockets that even if they massively improve on them they can't pose a significant threat except by sheer force of numbers on the theory something will get through. Deprive them of numbers and they're only able to pose a threat to themselves, which they do admirably.
You have, of course, read and documented all the times where I =have= made predictions in the past? No? Then I'll enlighten you. Those times (and there have been a number) where I've given a date for something being developed or something happening, I've had an error margin of +/- 6 months at worst. Those times when I =have= made predictions as to things being good or bad, likely or unlikely, I've had a success rate of around 85%. As a futurologist, I have a track record that is second to none.
Precisely. If the known facts do not allow for a P-code hack, then the simplest explanation that fits all known data is that a P-code hack was not required because the drone wasn't using the secure system. Since the simplest solution is the most likely to be correct, C/A is the most likely explanation until more data is available.
We know from stellar nurseries we've seen elsewhere that the current model is largely correct. We know from spectrometry that the gas cloud is abundant in light elements and poor in elements that form in later-generation stars, and know also from spectrometry that the star itself is also very rich in light elements. Spectrometry, the the level of light given off, plus the estimated distance also tells us where in the sequence the star is, because the sequence is now very well known. We can further verify a few details -- the solar winds push gas away from the sun, but there are no solar winds before there's a sun to emit them. By measuring output and the degree of push, you can determine how long the gas cloud has been blasted at by the star. If this matches expectation, all's well. If the gas cloud shows evidence of more displacement than can be accounted for, there'd be problems. So far, all looks good.
So although the exact details of stellar formation do shift from time to time, major changes aren't likely. Minor ones, on the other hand, are commonplace. For example, some stellar nurseries close to the galactic centre are being hammered by solar winds from supermassive stars in the region. Current models cannot account entirely for how the stars were able to condense at all under such conditions. (You wouldn't expect fog patches to form in gale force 9 winds for the same reason. If you see fog in such conditions, then there's some extremely freaky condition to explain it - a total lack of air currents or turbulence is possible if you've exactly the right environment, and therefore something similar must exist in these freak star formations. It's an addition to, though, rather than a replacement of existing models.)
Slashdot Mirror
Usage-based billing is NOT a consequence of network neutrality. The two have absolutely no relationship. Network Neutrality is being used a a pretext for usage-based billing, but that is very different. I could claim that a warm day is a pretext for playing WoW, but that would not mean there was any relationship between the two. It's fiction.
The complaint that some pipes are getting overloaded is stupid beyond belief. AQM doesn't violate Network Neutrality but is quite capable of handling pipe overload at the ISP level. Above that, most of the problem is caused by Tier 1 backbone providers oversubscribing and/or going for a Spanning Tree topology rather than mesh.
Blaming customers and locking them out until they pay protection money would be like airlines overbooking an aircraft then demanding surplus passengers cough up the cash for a chartered plane to rescue them. Sorry, but as malign, degenerate and corrupt as the airlines are, even they don't demand that! I see bugger all reason to allow any network provider to get away with what we'd never allow any other industry to excuse.
Going for a Spanning Tree when network loads were rising exponentially -- a problem caused by the network providers themselves NOT providing multicast to the home but demanding that everyone use P2P for audio and video, for profit reasons* -- rather than going for a mesh meant that pipes were bound to be saturated. They knew that when they started cutting back on routes, but fat profits meant more than good service. That's their business decision. They're allowed to make it. But they should ALSO be allowed to suffer the consequences. This is one bail-out the tax payer has NO reason to fund.
*ISPs wanted to charge customers for content in a way multicast doesn't allow. Since P2P is more network-intensive, not only did ISPs hope to charge more for the content being delivered but they also hoped to force customers to buy fatter pipes than actually needed. This is all well-documented history, anyone using the MBone prior to it being enabled by default on Tier 1 will be familiar with this. The problems of P2P were well-known to everyone the moment Cornell University released its client (yes, that's what CU stands for in the name), which is why clients and the reflectors supported multicast streaming. It was a game of chicken, in essence - the ISPs would back down or the users would back down. The game continues to this day, only the users are now so used to content-on-demand via YouTube et al that they have forgotten any other way ever existed. The ISPs still won't enable multicast because the moment they do, caching and distributed video delivery becomes easier and the network usage will plummet, killing their argument that they need to charge more to handle demand. Their argument is fiction and their issues are self-caused and self-sustained, but the moment that becomes obvious even to the most idiotic of anti-nerds, the ISPs will be absolutely dead in the water as far as milking the market is concerned.
Surely packet-dropping would be nacklash, not acklash.
Agreed. It is a shame that people confuse governing those who would regulate with governing those who would be regulated.
SCOTUS has already made clear that stuff not ratified by Congress has no validity. So, yes, that Congress. No ratification = no validity in SCOTUS' eyes = nothing happening. If you want something to happen, it has to be ratified. I don't like that, I think watchdogs should have the authority to bite, but I don't sit on SCOTUS, I have no authority to add an amendment to the Constitution, so I have no say in what the law is. I can only say that that's what has been Decided and that's what we have to live with.
Which means that you are allowed to tell a Whopper of a lie.
No, it was not inflamatory. No military historian regards Market Garden as anything other than a disaster and equally no military historian regards Iraq II as being any better. Nor do any observers regard Iraq as being anything more than a suburb of Iran. Iraq has no meaningful independence. This is the reality on the ground.
Well, no, it didn't. The war did nothing to do that. Saddam wasn't caught until LONG after the war was over, and most of those who actually carried out the torture either joined the government or joined Al Queda. Way to go. The "democracy" doesn't exist - election fraud is rife, the constitution was ruled illegal by the appeals court during Saddam's trial and civil war is likely to break out at any moment.
As for Chemical Ali, you're grasping badly at straw men. Assuming that the opposite of war is the support of a dictatorship is a stretch even a Black Hole would find hard to achieve. Congratulations, you're more destructive than a singularity, how does that make you feel?
Well, you don't seem to have much of a grasp of Chaos Theory, or indeed when it applies. As for "pseudo-intellectuals", if you can't be bothered reading the paper on the Butterfly Effect you have little credibility on labeling others -- particularly when you have no comprehension of what the others in question know.
Pakistan has lost more civilians per year since 9/11 than the entire Western world has lost in both civilians AND military combined in ALL the years since 9/11, so no sane person would call what exists any kind of peace. Factor in the losses in India and the rest of the subcontinent and you see a highly unstable, violently dangerous environment.
It doesn't help that the US only ever backs whatever nation in the subcontinent it happens to think of as "winning" at that point in time, supplying weapons, technology and training far beyond the capacity of any of the region to actually handle in a mature, rational fashion. (To be fair, nobody in the subcontinent regards Russia, China, the UK, France, or any other nation as being any better. Some are regarded as far, far worse. Which is impressive. If Satan is the mythological Father of Lies, it must take a lot of effort by these other nations to achieve a lower credibility rating than that.)
Peace may well be achievable, but not through MAD.
That's a big reason why ABMs were banned under SALT. If one side believed a nuclear war was not only "winnable" but actually "survivable" then MAD totally breaks down. It's also why Russia is furious with the US right now. If the US thought, no matter how stupidly or naively, that MAD no longer applied then they are more likely to attempt limited nuclear exchanges. Especially as the US public has developed a distaste for boots on the ground.
Such an exchange will, inevitably, escalate. There is no scenario in which a limited exchange stays limited, but put Perry or Gingrich in the Oval Office and you're not likely to see a President who gives a damn.
Well, no, Buddha was a tribal prince that happened to like some Hindu ideas but did some interesting and novel extrapolations. He was quite mortal and even Buddhists do not regard him as a god. Well, not the ones that actually understand a word of their practice, so I imagine some theocratic anthropologists still regard it as a religion.
I concur. The situation in the Middle East is extremely volatile and unilateral disarmament by one side in what sadly resembles a 10,000 year drunken brawl isn't going to help. Having said that, I would observe that outside interference in the region (by Eastern and Western powers - I don't distinguish according to who interferes) has worsened the situation.
The modern Iranian government is a product of Western interference starting with the removal of a democratic leader, continuing through Reagan's negotiations with Iran to prevent the hostage release on his predecessor's watch, worsening dramatically during the Col. Oliver North saga and then going positively downhill after the Axis of Evil denouncement, election-rigging attempts by the US in Iran, etc. Iran shouldn't be a theocracy and certainly shouldn't be a paranoid schizophrenic one. Both of those traits were a result of interference. Don't get me wrong - Russia and China have been just as bad, if not worse, as was Hitler, Mussolini, the Roman Empire, and countless other power-brokers. If interference in and of itself is a bad thing, then ALL who interfere are guilty.
However, obviously leaving well enough alone isn't an option now. The pilot's been shot, the plane is plunging towards the ground, bailing out and doing nothing to help on the grounds that it's the passengers' problem won't do a damn bit of good. It was past that point before Judaism ever existed. Nonetheless, shooting every other passenger who can fly the plane isn't going to make things better either. If you want to save something, you can't first crush it out of existence.
Everything, but everything, in the Middle East is about both nationalist politics and schizophrenic forms of religion. You can't remove either politics or religion from the region, so the only option left is to work on dissolving nationalism and curing the schizophrenia -- tactics I see a total lack of by all powers trying to mess with the region.
I would disagree. A government is not, and never has been, a race. That is infinitely worse than calling a corporation a person, although it's basically along the same lines. Would you judge all Americans according to either the views of GW Bush or Obama? I hope you'd call that absolutely absurd. Yet both their policies have been unquestionably a function of their respective cultures and those who oppose their policies also do so because they are opposed to those cultures.
Would you call the Tea Party racist because it despises left-wing culture? Would you call the socialists racist because they consider right-wing culture neo-Nazi fascists? I hope the answer would be no. I'd call both stupid for holding such views, but I wouldn't call them racists. A government is a representative of the people, but it is not - never has been, never will be - the people itself.
"The Jews are different - Israel == Jews!" Well, no, that's not actually true. There are plenty of Jews who regard modern Israel as a mockery of their religion. Seriously. They hold that Israel has only ever been given or taken by God and that the UN, not being any kind of God, has no business trying to act like one. These people are still Jews, are they not? There's no McCarthyite UnJewish Commission that I know of, declaring them as UnJews. So Israel is not a race or even a culture. It is simply a nation. A nation that has every right to exist, just like all other nations. It is no less, but it is also no more.
"Ok, but Israel is a Jewish Nation, right?" I'll accept that it represents some Jews, but the Falasha are routinely treated as a backwards, inferior people. It's hard to argue Israel as truly Jewish when First Temple Jews are treated no better than the Tinkers, Gypseys and Romanies are in Europe. Israelis are very selective over what branches of Judaism are tolerated. They are perfectly entitled to be as finicky as they like, it's a democracy and a democracy has the right to self-determination via majority rule. However, you cannot claim it represents those it regards as second-class.
I do not believe Israel should be required to change, in any respect or in any regard. Israel has the right to be what it is, where it is, how it is. I may dislike certain decisions of theirs, but I have no right to question their right to make those decisions. As a Rationalist, however, I refuse to allow any entity to define fact as fiction or fiction as fact (be it East, West, North or South, Iran, Israel, the US, the EU or the troglodytes that currently infest many web boards). That which is is. That which is not is not.
Since when did doing the right thing depend on your opponent not doing the wrong thing? If the right thing is truly the right thing, then it remains so regardless of any other outcome.
Depends on the microscope they used. Seriously, though, there is nothing at the moment that prohibits deceptive advertising and the watchdog would likely lose if any actual ban on any piece of advertising got challenged in court. The situation is currently futile and will remain so until all branches (SCOTUS included) uniformly agree that selling a product that doesn't exist is not "artistic license". (The view of courts in the past is that it is and therefore it is protected speech.)
Well, you won't get individual burger chains voluntarily making their ads look like crap (it won't improve sales but it will make their competitors look better), the same goes with cosmetics companies, et al. Voluntary compliance simply won't happen.
Ok, what about the watchdog? Well, as the FCC found out when trying to impose rulings on network neutrality, the courts regard watchdogs as being not much more than mere advisory panels. In short, if a company took a watchdog to court, claiming that Congress had ruled these kinds of deceptive advertising to be non-protected Commercial Speech that they had First Amendment protections to be as deceptive as they damn well felt like, the company would almost certainly win.
Which means that if you honestly believe that there's a limit to the acceptable level of deception, Congress has to have some involvement. It needn't be a full-blown law, and that would likely also fail as UnConstitutional, but there has to be something that is at that level which clearly denotes that there is a difference between protected commercial speech (satire/parody, comedic representation, figurative representation, et al) and actual attempts to deceive a customer into buying something that never existed. And, no, what the US currently has is obviously not enough, or the cosmetics companies would be up the proverbial creek without paddle (or indeed canoe) via lemon laws. The product is, after all, "defective" when compared with what it's sold as. They aren't and the watchdog didn't even bother using such laws, showing the laws have no value or significance.
Absolutely. I think no matter what we disagree on, we're agreed on all those points.
How was the invasion successful? It failed on every one of its objectives (it allowed Al Queda not only in but to steal vast quantities of RDX other high explosives, it failed to capture or eliminate Saddam Hussein, it caused the total fragmentation of international resolve, it destroyed massive quantities of infrastructure - a violation of Sun Tzu's instructions, it broke the Middle East stalemate between Iraq and Iran, it succeeded in killing figures who would have been useful in rebuilding).
It also caused widespread looting -- not only by Iraqis, as US soldiers plundered substantial amounts of archaeological relics from Babylon. Since history is a valuable resource and cannot be replaced, destruction of it by the invasion force substantially damaged Iraq's capacity to rebuild. Something the US troops who looted knew damn well at the time. I will accept no excuses and believe firmly that no forgiveness should ever be given for those who raped such sites.
No, the net worth of the country is the net worth of the country. The government has no say in that. Printing more money doesn't alter the net worth. Printing more money simply increases the amount of money that the same amount of net worth is mapped to.
The CIA's own strategic review might well be propaganda, but if that is the case then you could equally well say the same thing about the claims of Iran starting. So what do you believe? Either the threat assessments are correct, in which case Iran stopped, or the threat assessments are wrong, in which case Iran never started. Your choice. Either there was no threat at the time action started or there is no threat to this day.
If the former, I am correct. If the latter, you are wrong. Take your pick.
That would have worked. So would doing nothing. Doesn't matter which successful move you make, what matters is that it's successful. The error is in making moves you know are bad, then keeping on making bad moves in the hope that enough badness will eventually work out good. That NEVER works.
A trivial example. You can win in chess by destroying the opponent's pieces, or you can win in chess without capturing any but playing brilliantly. What never works in chess is to play badly in the hopes of making your opponent play worse. The successful strategies always lead to you winning, the bad strategies always lead to you losing. Which good or bad strategy you follow won't alter the outcome.
In terms of nukes, yes, but their rockets have a 100% failure rate. Sabotage won't help, though high-res satellite photos of the launch sites kept constantly up-to-date would help shut down any attack - the failure rate is so high on their rockets that even if they massively improve on them they can't pose a significant threat except by sheer force of numbers on the theory something will get through. Deprive them of numbers and they're only able to pose a threat to themselves, which they do admirably.
You have, of course, read and documented all the times where I =have= made predictions in the past? No? Then I'll enlighten you. Those times (and there have been a number) where I've given a date for something being developed or something happening, I've had an error margin of +/- 6 months at worst. Those times when I =have= made predictions as to things being good or bad, likely or unlikely, I've had a success rate of around 85%. As a futurologist, I have a track record that is second to none.
Precisely. If the known facts do not allow for a P-code hack, then the simplest explanation that fits all known data is that a P-code hack was not required because the drone wasn't using the secure system. Since the simplest solution is the most likely to be correct, C/A is the most likely explanation until more data is available.
We know from stellar nurseries we've seen elsewhere that the current model is largely correct. We know from spectrometry that the gas cloud is abundant in light elements and poor in elements that form in later-generation stars, and know also from spectrometry that the star itself is also very rich in light elements. Spectrometry, the the level of light given off, plus the estimated distance also tells us where in the sequence the star is, because the sequence is now very well known. We can further verify a few details -- the solar winds push gas away from the sun, but there are no solar winds before there's a sun to emit them. By measuring output and the degree of push, you can determine how long the gas cloud has been blasted at by the star. If this matches expectation, all's well. If the gas cloud shows evidence of more displacement than can be accounted for, there'd be problems. So far, all looks good.
So although the exact details of stellar formation do shift from time to time, major changes aren't likely. Minor ones, on the other hand, are commonplace. For example, some stellar nurseries close to the galactic centre are being hammered by solar winds from supermassive stars in the region. Current models cannot account entirely for how the stars were able to condense at all under such conditions. (You wouldn't expect fog patches to form in gale force 9 winds for the same reason. If you see fog in such conditions, then there's some extremely freaky condition to explain it - a total lack of air currents or turbulence is possible if you've exactly the right environment, and therefore something similar must exist in these freak star formations. It's an addition to, though, rather than a replacement of existing models.)