The extremists have largely abandoned their "global jihad". Most are extremely localized and territorial. The Pakistani Taliban have no interest in India or, indeed, Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban have no interest in India, or indeed in Pakistan.
That leaves Al Queda itself, which has no interest in any of those countries. It wants to fight America and Britain. I have no doubt that "step 2" of its master plan involves fighting other countries, but since it can never succeed in "step 1", all other steps are irrelevant.
It seems clear to me which of us thinks. I seem to have bothered to actually research what groups are threatening whom, why and when. You, on the other hand, appear to have no clue that there are even any groups. Your ignorance is second only to your stupifyingly moronic interpretation.
I agree he was a hater. I agree something had to be done. I accept that it may turn out there was no alternative but the solution used. However, I will not rejoice in the death of another, no matter who, no matter how, no matter when. I particularly will not rejoice in the death of one who rejoiced in the death of others. When you become the very thing you despise, what victory then?
Yeah, precisely the guys that you DON'T want in Pakistan firing at people, no matter how justified. It really wouldn't matter that much if bin Laden was the most reviled person in Pakistan, having armed CIA agents in covert ops with guns blazing (now, of all times) is likely to provoke a backlash. If bin Laden had been there for 9 months, he was likely to be there a bit longer. Well, unless he was pregnant and wanted to get that out of the way in privacy. You never know.
Guy Fawkes was captured and tried in a court of law. Not, admittedly, under any conditions we'd call fair, but fair enough that it destroyed a lot of his support. Even then, despite all of that, it is Guy Fawkes who became legend and is remembered today. Guy Fawkes has an entire night to his own, with acts of remembrance. Don't recall seeing King Charles' Day on the calendar.
The US army has no shortage of concussion grenades. It has tested and used microwave weapons for causing extreme pain. A violent blast of light during a dark raid will kill night vision and blind night vision goggles, but if your side shielded them for the duration, you can see and they can't. The Indian military have weaponised the extremely hot peppers you can get - my guess is that if you're close enough to put a bullet through someone's head that you're close enough to put a pepper spray canister in his room.
Hell, for that matter, if you can fire regular rounds at the guy, why not have a couple of sharp shooters armed with rubber bullets in their rifles? Much better chance of capture if you've something that can be used on the battlefield to capture.
Why wouldn't they? Al Queda would most likely try to strike America with the nukes. China is hardly going to object to their major competitor being taken out. As for India, again they'll do nothing. They're gaining influence in Afghanistan and Al Queda capturing Pakistan will seal Afghanistan's fate. It'll have to become an Indian protectorate.
We've seen this dance played out many times in European history. Just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean we won't see it again. It is in India's interests to have Afghanistan too terrified to remain on its own. It is in China's interests for America to be far too distracted to offer a serious economic threat.
If he was right next to the capital, as has been suggested by some reports, why would he need to keep anything at the compound? Remember, he's been constantly on the move and when you move you want to travel as light as possible. Phones are also unlikely - we know he did everything by courier. So, no, it is exceedingly unlikely that he was where the intel was. Same as the President doesn't stay in the Pentagon.
"You can't hide anywhere" is a pretty useless message to give to someone who believes that dying in battle is a glorious death. These people have a similar mindset to the Japanese kamakazi pilots. Telling them that it's bad for their health isn't going to be much of a deterrent. If anything, it'll bolster the numbers.
Consider American history for a moment here. The gunslingers who died in battle are the ones you remember to this day, and each and every single person who dreams of America returning to the Wild West days - and there's lots - aren't picturing the lawmen when they do so. They're picturing those gunslingers and the blaze of glory they supposedly lived in. What we have done is give bin Laden that blaze of glory, that ultimate legend status that remembers the fight against the men of power but conveniently forgets the cruelty and the evil. Cults of such sick and perverse figures always spring up and all nations have them.
(Alexander the Great murdered his father, torched entire cities filled with civilians, and even ordered his men to walk over cliffs to their deaths in order to terrify opponents into submission. General Custer had no problems massacring women and children. As for the charge of the light brigade.... magnificent perhaps but it isn't war.)
Boeing has purposefully destroyed a number of aircraft in various PR stunts (such as demonstrating a non-exploding fuel), so it is possible they would be willing to provide the Mythbusters crew with an older 737 or somesuch.
It's ok. Once the corporations take over, people will mutate into orcs, elves and the like. The shadowrunner novels are actually IBM field guides for when the takeover is complete.
We don't need any. Killing political leaders is, at best, useless. At worst, given the failed assassination of Gadaffi and the failed attempt to character assassinate Chavez all within the last couple of days, there's a serious risk that the US has miscalculated and will unite segments of Africa and South America with the terrorist organizations. No, that's second-worst. At worst, Russia and China will see this as confirmation of the failed assassination of Gadaffi and the failed character assassination of Chavez, deem the US to be an immediate threat to global security, and take action to stop the Blue Menace.
However, I'll offer a conspiracy theory if you like. Osama bin Laden has been ill for some time, we know that. The American public is quite incapable of maintaining focus if it perceives the goal as being reached, we know that too. Osama bin Laden gets offered up as a sacrificial lamb, but in a way that radicalizes the whole of Pakistan and could easily lead to a coup. Al Queda loses a man it no longer needs in a gambit to gain a country it covets. You can replace men, but it's much harder to replace a subcontinent.
Why would it? It's pretty much accepted that bin Laden was radicalized by the 2nd in command - who, therefore, was the real power behind the throne. What's more, by landing troops in Pakistan, the US risks a great many Pakistanis joining up with terrorist groups.
Further, by killing bin Laden rather than capturing him, the US has created a martyr. That's usually a very bad move. Further, the media's interpretation of President Obama's remarks was that he had ordered bin Laden's assassination. The US has been trying to assassinate a number of other leaders recently - bodily or by character. That could create some extremely unholy alliances, since leaders generally don't approve of being assassinated and Al Queda is likely to be looking for alternative bases.
Tomorrow, then, will be just like today only the US will have fewer people to blame.
Capturing bin Laden would have been the wisest move. By depriving him of martyrdom, the US would have avoided an excalation in the conflicts. Further, it would have likely resulted in a paniced upper echelon of Al Queda as they'd not know what he knew or what he'd say. And in not knowing, they'd likely act rashly. And that is what we needed.
What happened tonight was a PR stunt intended to bolster the ratings of the Democrats and undercut Republican credentials on security. It had nothing whatsoever to do with actual security at all.
Apparently the US was involved in drafting the NZ copyright laws, so it would not surprise me if it was linked to this EU Commision decision. The EU actually does remarkably well on making sound, ethical decisions when not interfered with. Not perfectly, true, but remarkably well (for politicians) nonetheless. When the EU makes obviously bad decisions that happen to duplicate bad decisions elsewhere, where those bad decisions were definitely made by the US, the US is the most likely suspect.
America often wonders why other nations are extremely suspicious of its motives. What I end up wondering is how America has reached the point of being so oblivious.
(To be fair, I'll point out that EVERY country that has ever maintained an empire - and, yes, America's iron grip over other nations means it maintains an empire - has been totally oblivious to the harm it causes. There has never been a benign empire in the history of humanity, and the brains of those in charge invariably turn to mush, placing the consequences of their actions far beyond their comprehension.)
The individual recorders don't have the capacity. Instead, have twice the number of recorders so that both types of data get mirrored. If the backup recorders are as far from the originals as possible, then if the damage wrecks one set there's a good chance the other set will be intact. (The plane is unlikely to break such that two diametrically opposite parts of the plane will impact the ground or water with equal severity.)
Depends on the airframe. If instead of a tissue-thick aluminium airframe you had something better able to absorb the shock of impact, you should be fine. Your only requirement is that the mass of water displaced by a largely-intact airframe exceeds the mass of that airframe. Well, after making an airframe capable of plunging 20,000 feet into storm-churned ocean waters without disintegrating either on the way down or when it hits the water.
(This isn't impossible. If the wings and tail are designed to break away cleanly instead of ripping, what you have left is a rather large and populated javelin. So long as it is strong lengthwise, you should be fine. Replace the curtains between sections with a graphene bulkhead and even the total obliteration of every section up to the compartment housing the black boxes would not impact the buoyancy of the section of interest.)
Having said that, redundant black boxes on an aircraft would seem the better strategy. Finding the recorders seems to be less of a problem than extreme damage. The quality of information obtainable is also suspect. Again, if necessary, add more recorders. If the top-level Airbus can sport swimming pools, it can sport additional diagnostic and monitoring systems. The more data collected in any given accident, the more flaws can be fixed at the same time, the less likely catastrophic accidents are likely to happen.
Then it would drift, making it harder to find. Having it sink means less chance of ocean currents pulling it. The ideal would be to have the container capable of anchoring itself if totally detached from the airframe.
The article on dark silicon really makes your point for you. Think: If the current trend is towards having specialist cores, you can have both ix86 AND ARM implemented on the same chip. The Cell processor demonstrates how to do hybrid architectures, but clearly the degree of hybridization being planned in the future will be far greater. Having a chip that can do ix86 and ARM means one chip can be used in both markets, which means greater volume and therefore lower overheads for the chip company. It also means greater flexibility by the software developers, although it will seriously screw with a lot of conventions.
It's hard to tell whether that's a freak case or not. The hard drive that survived the Columbia space shuttle explosion, ploughed into the ground at speeds definitely higher than its warranty permitted and yet was readable is probably more a testament to the sheer randomness of life than to good manufacturing practices. Having said that, FDRs are padded multiple times over and it would not surprise anyone if it had survived just fine. Certainly the salvage people are saying the shedding of the outer casing means very little.
This is the one thing I can NEVER comprehend about systems like Gnome or KDE. They came out in an era where modular was the way to be. They are packaged in a modular fashion. The libraries are all dynamically linked and all the OS' that matter support dynamic loading at runtime not just at load time.
Is it so horribly wrong to have a GUI experience that works with the user rather than having the user comform to it?
I want to see a GUI where if even 1 person uses a feature, that feature exists and can be loaded. Where you aren't obligated to ship everything to everyone, but only those bits that are actually needed. Nothing superfluous at all, yet no restrictions or limits either. I want to see a GUI that doesn't look the same on every machine to all users, but looks the same to the same user on any machine.
How long have kernel modules been in Linux? Has even one (serious) person ever complained that no two Linux kernels expose identical APIs? Has even one (serious) vendor ever had problems with it?
So why are GUIs opting for the Windows 2.0 look rather than the Linux 2.6 look? What is wrong with these guys? Do I have to write the damn thing myself?
Ah, but those could be shards from the dome the stars are painted on. Those would reflect light differently. (C'mon, guys, with some effort we shoul be able to turn this into an international conspiracy theory!)
Slashdot Mirror
The extremists have largely abandoned their "global jihad". Most are extremely localized and territorial. The Pakistani Taliban have no interest in India or, indeed, Afghanistan. The Afghan Taliban have no interest in India, or indeed in Pakistan.
That leaves Al Queda itself, which has no interest in any of those countries. It wants to fight America and Britain. I have no doubt that "step 2" of its master plan involves fighting other countries, but since it can never succeed in "step 1", all other steps are irrelevant.
It seems clear to me which of us thinks. I seem to have bothered to actually research what groups are threatening whom, why and when. You, on the other hand, appear to have no clue that there are even any groups. Your ignorance is second only to your stupifyingly moronic interpretation.
I agree he was a hater. I agree something had to be done. I accept that it may turn out there was no alternative but the solution used. However, I will not rejoice in the death of another, no matter who, no matter how, no matter when. I particularly will not rejoice in the death of one who rejoiced in the death of others. When you become the very thing you despise, what victory then?
Yeah, precisely the guys that you DON'T want in Pakistan firing at people, no matter how justified. It really wouldn't matter that much if bin Laden was the most reviled person in Pakistan, having armed CIA agents in covert ops with guns blazing (now, of all times) is likely to provoke a backlash. If bin Laden had been there for 9 months, he was likely to be there a bit longer. Well, unless he was pregnant and wanted to get that out of the way in privacy. You never know.
Guy Fawkes was captured and tried in a court of law. Not, admittedly, under any conditions we'd call fair, but fair enough that it destroyed a lot of his support. Even then, despite all of that, it is Guy Fawkes who became legend and is remembered today. Guy Fawkes has an entire night to his own, with acts of remembrance. Don't recall seeing King Charles' Day on the calendar.
The US army has no shortage of concussion grenades. It has tested and used microwave weapons for causing extreme pain. A violent blast of light during a dark raid will kill night vision and blind night vision goggles, but if your side shielded them for the duration, you can see and they can't. The Indian military have weaponised the extremely hot peppers you can get - my guess is that if you're close enough to put a bullet through someone's head that you're close enough to put a pepper spray canister in his room.
Hell, for that matter, if you can fire regular rounds at the guy, why not have a couple of sharp shooters armed with rubber bullets in their rifles? Much better chance of capture if you've something that can be used on the battlefield to capture.
Why wouldn't they? Al Queda would most likely try to strike America with the nukes. China is hardly going to object to their major competitor being taken out. As for India, again they'll do nothing. They're gaining influence in Afghanistan and Al Queda capturing Pakistan will seal Afghanistan's fate. It'll have to become an Indian protectorate.
We've seen this dance played out many times in European history. Just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean we won't see it again. It is in India's interests to have Afghanistan too terrified to remain on its own. It is in China's interests for America to be far too distracted to offer a serious economic threat.
If he was right next to the capital, as has been suggested by some reports, why would he need to keep anything at the compound? Remember, he's been constantly on the move and when you move you want to travel as light as possible. Phones are also unlikely - we know he did everything by courier. So, no, it is exceedingly unlikely that he was where the intel was. Same as the President doesn't stay in the Pentagon.
"You can't hide anywhere" is a pretty useless message to give to someone who believes that dying in battle is a glorious death. These people have a similar mindset to the Japanese kamakazi pilots. Telling them that it's bad for their health isn't going to be much of a deterrent. If anything, it'll bolster the numbers.
Consider American history for a moment here. The gunslingers who died in battle are the ones you remember to this day, and each and every single person who dreams of America returning to the Wild West days - and there's lots - aren't picturing the lawmen when they do so. They're picturing those gunslingers and the blaze of glory they supposedly lived in. What we have done is give bin Laden that blaze of glory, that ultimate legend status that remembers the fight against the men of power but conveniently forgets the cruelty and the evil. Cults of such sick and perverse figures always spring up and all nations have them.
(Alexander the Great murdered his father, torched entire cities filled with civilians, and even ordered his men to walk over cliffs to their deaths in order to terrify opponents into submission. General Custer had no problems massacring women and children. As for the charge of the light brigade.... magnificent perhaps but it isn't war.)
Boeing has purposefully destroyed a number of aircraft in various PR stunts (such as demonstrating a non-exploding fuel), so it is possible they would be willing to provide the Mythbusters crew with an older 737 or somesuch.
It's ok. Once the corporations take over, people will mutate into orcs, elves and the like. The shadowrunner novels are actually IBM field guides for when the takeover is complete.
We don't need any. Killing political leaders is, at best, useless. At worst, given the failed assassination of Gadaffi and the failed attempt to character assassinate Chavez all within the last couple of days, there's a serious risk that the US has miscalculated and will unite segments of Africa and South America with the terrorist organizations. No, that's second-worst. At worst, Russia and China will see this as confirmation of the failed assassination of Gadaffi and the failed character assassination of Chavez, deem the US to be an immediate threat to global security, and take action to stop the Blue Menace.
However, I'll offer a conspiracy theory if you like. Osama bin Laden has been ill for some time, we know that. The American public is quite incapable of maintaining focus if it perceives the goal as being reached, we know that too. Osama bin Laden gets offered up as a sacrificial lamb, but in a way that radicalizes the whole of Pakistan and could easily lead to a coup. Al Queda loses a man it no longer needs in a gambit to gain a country it covets. You can replace men, but it's much harder to replace a subcontinent.
Why would it? It's pretty much accepted that bin Laden was radicalized by the 2nd in command - who, therefore, was the real power behind the throne. What's more, by landing troops in Pakistan, the US risks a great many Pakistanis joining up with terrorist groups.
Further, by killing bin Laden rather than capturing him, the US has created a martyr. That's usually a very bad move. Further, the media's interpretation of President Obama's remarks was that he had ordered bin Laden's assassination. The US has been trying to assassinate a number of other leaders recently - bodily or by character. That could create some extremely unholy alliances, since leaders generally don't approve of being assassinated and Al Queda is likely to be looking for alternative bases.
Tomorrow, then, will be just like today only the US will have fewer people to blame.
Capturing bin Laden would have been the wisest move. By depriving him of martyrdom, the US would have avoided an excalation in the conflicts. Further, it would have likely resulted in a paniced upper echelon of Al Queda as they'd not know what he knew or what he'd say. And in not knowing, they'd likely act rashly. And that is what we needed.
What happened tonight was a PR stunt intended to bolster the ratings of the Democrats and undercut Republican credentials on security. It had nothing whatsoever to do with actual security at all.
Apparently the US was involved in drafting the NZ copyright laws, so it would not surprise me if it was linked to this EU Commision decision. The EU actually does remarkably well on making sound, ethical decisions when not interfered with. Not perfectly, true, but remarkably well (for politicians) nonetheless. When the EU makes obviously bad decisions that happen to duplicate bad decisions elsewhere, where those bad decisions were definitely made by the US, the US is the most likely suspect.
America often wonders why other nations are extremely suspicious of its motives. What I end up wondering is how America has reached the point of being so oblivious.
(To be fair, I'll point out that EVERY country that has ever maintained an empire - and, yes, America's iron grip over other nations means it maintains an empire - has been totally oblivious to the harm it causes. There has never been a benign empire in the history of humanity, and the brains of those in charge invariably turn to mush, placing the consequences of their actions far beyond their comprehension.)
Only if their next reply contains dupes and starts with "First Post!"
The individual recorders don't have the capacity. Instead, have twice the number of recorders so that both types of data get mirrored. If the backup recorders are as far from the originals as possible, then if the damage wrecks one set there's a good chance the other set will be intact. (The plane is unlikely to break such that two diametrically opposite parts of the plane will impact the ground or water with equal severity.)
Depends on the airframe. If instead of a tissue-thick aluminium airframe you had something better able to absorb the shock of impact, you should be fine. Your only requirement is that the mass of water displaced by a largely-intact airframe exceeds the mass of that airframe. Well, after making an airframe capable of plunging 20,000 feet into storm-churned ocean waters without disintegrating either on the way down or when it hits the water.
(This isn't impossible. If the wings and tail are designed to break away cleanly instead of ripping, what you have left is a rather large and populated javelin. So long as it is strong lengthwise, you should be fine. Replace the curtains between sections with a graphene bulkhead and even the total obliteration of every section up to the compartment housing the black boxes would not impact the buoyancy of the section of interest.)
Having said that, redundant black boxes on an aircraft would seem the better strategy. Finding the recorders seems to be less of a problem than extreme damage. The quality of information obtainable is also suspect. Again, if necessary, add more recorders. If the top-level Airbus can sport swimming pools, it can sport additional diagnostic and monitoring systems. The more data collected in any given accident, the more flaws can be fixed at the same time, the less likely catastrophic accidents are likely to happen.
Then it would drift, making it harder to find. Having it sink means less chance of ocean currents pulling it. The ideal would be to have the container capable of anchoring itself if totally detached from the airframe.
If you're going to charge spectators for watching the conflaguration, you gotta make it spectacular.
Only if you're a grocer.
In Ye Olde Country, the strangest meat pie was the crescent-moon-shaped Cornish pastie.
Not square.
The article on dark silicon really makes your point for you. Think: If the current trend is towards having specialist cores, you can have both ix86 AND ARM implemented on the same chip. The Cell processor demonstrates how to do hybrid architectures, but clearly the degree of hybridization being planned in the future will be far greater. Having a chip that can do ix86 and ARM means one chip can be used in both markets, which means greater volume and therefore lower overheads for the chip company. It also means greater flexibility by the software developers, although it will seriously screw with a lot of conventions.
It's hard to tell whether that's a freak case or not. The hard drive that survived the Columbia space shuttle explosion, ploughed into the ground at speeds definitely higher than its warranty permitted and yet was readable is probably more a testament to the sheer randomness of life than to good manufacturing practices. Having said that, FDRs are padded multiple times over and it would not surprise anyone if it had survived just fine. Certainly the salvage people are saying the shedding of the outer casing means very little.
I track a lot of scientific software on Freshmeat. You'd be amazed at the redundancy. Medical stuff isn't as bad as some areas.
This is the one thing I can NEVER comprehend about systems like Gnome or KDE. They came out in an era where modular was the way to be. They are packaged in a modular fashion. The libraries are all dynamically linked and all the OS' that matter support dynamic loading at runtime not just at load time.
Is it so horribly wrong to have a GUI experience that works with the user rather than having the user comform to it?
I want to see a GUI where if even 1 person uses a feature, that feature exists and can be loaded. Where you aren't obligated to ship everything to everyone, but only those bits that are actually needed. Nothing superfluous at all, yet no restrictions or limits either. I want to see a GUI that doesn't look the same on every machine to all users, but looks the same to the same user on any machine.
How long have kernel modules been in Linux? Has even one (serious) person ever complained that no two Linux kernels expose identical APIs? Has even one (serious) vendor ever had problems with it?
So why are GUIs opting for the Windows 2.0 look rather than the Linux 2.6 look? What is wrong with these guys? Do I have to write the damn thing myself?
Ah, but those could be shards from the dome the stars are painted on. Those would reflect light differently. (C'mon, guys, with some effort we shoul be able to turn this into an international conspiracy theory!)