Iran launches speedboats. US ships pick them up on radar. Missiles are launched, and two minutes later their base is gone.
Their base, which also happened to be a civilian scuba training company, and they were doing an under-twelves half-price special. Congratulations, you just murdered a party of children.
Iran doesn't have to win militarily. That is impossible, and they know it. All they really need to do is make the US look like the villain here. Just view the whole confrontation as a very expensive propaganda stunt. Provoke the US into a war, make sure some civilians get caught in the middle, frame the US for their death.
Quite possible. Obama could benefit in the same way that Bush benefited from the 9/11 attacks - people rallied behind the president in a show of partiotism and national unity, and shortly after in a national call for vengence. For that to work though, Iran needs to strike first, and strike hard. Sinking a US warship would do the job, but will Iran be willing to risk the potential counterattack?
The armed forces they are deploying for thir conflict are speedboats and RPGs. Even if they are all gone in a few days, they can be replaced in a month. Wonder how much speedboats cost if you are buying them by the thousand? I would guess a lot less than the value of that oil trade.
And there is the problem: Ruinous bombardment isn't an option. It used to be, back in the wars of the past. If countries were at war, it was accepted practice to bomb the hell out of the enemy. Blow up thieir factories so they couldn't resupply, bomb their commercial districts to stall their economy, bomb the housing to demoralise their public. Simpler wars: There was a nice clear enemy country, and you tried to destroy it. Today, though, not so simple. Civilian casualties are unacceptable. Even if the US responded with the overwhelming force it it capable of and utterly obliterated the entire Iranian military... in ten years, they'll have built it up again.
The only way to perminantly end the problem of Iran is to go in there with ground forces, invate and occupy until a more friendly regime can be arranged. After seeing what a disaster occupying Iraq was, the US would have to be unbelieveably stupid to try that again on Iran - a country with a more than twice the population. Since that isn't feasable right now, this is going nowhere.
In short, Iran doesn't have the strength to win, but the US (And it's allies) don't have the willingness to fight to a complete smoking-ruins victory with all the massive civilian casualties and long-term difficulties that implies. Neither side can win.
And then what? This isn't WW2 any more. If country A attacks country B, B can't respond by carpet-bombing A's cities back into the stone age. Killing civilians is no longer an option, even if they happen to be citizens of A. The US really has only two options: Back down (After a show of partiotic force of some type, perhaps by bombing a few military targets) or invade Iran... and after discovering in first Afganistan and then Iraq how difficult it can be to maintain the peace in an occupied country, that isn't going to happen.
I imagine that is the plan. Iran couldn't win an actual war, and their leadership are smart enough to know that. But they also know that the US doesn't *want* a war right now. The public are already sick war. So they have a good chance at intimidating the US into backing down to avoid a politically-embarassing conflict.
You assume this is symmetric. It isn't. To win, Iran doesn't need to destroy the entire US navy, or even it's ability to fight. They just need to make the war sufficiently expensive either financially or politically to continue.
Layar, as bundled crap goes, is fairly benign. The worst it appears to do (so long as you don't use it) is automatically update itsself. Not a problem for me, potentially a concern to phone users who have usage quotas to worry about. More seriously, recall the recent CarrierIQ: Software installed on mobile phones by the suppliers, deliberatly hidden from the user's knowledge and made difficult to uninstall if it is found, which captures every website visited and keystroke performed - including things like passwords and banking details - and sends it all, in plain text, back to the operator. Now *THAT* in itsself is scarey enough to raise in objection to the notion of devices as appliances. If the user cannot control them, the user cannot ensure their security.
Asus Transformer. According to the comments on the marketplace, most of the complainants were using Samsung devices.
So long as you don't use Layar, the worst it appears to actually do is waste bandwidth auto-updating itsself. Not really an issue for me, I just wanted it gone on principle, but a serious concern for phone users on limited transfer quota.
"It's not that Linux isn't a great OS (I use it for server-side stuff) but it certainly doesn't provide the polished overall experiences that Microsoft or Apple do."
Major flamewar imminent! EVERYONE, GET TO THE BUNKER!
Yes, it is... because no, you can't. Well, it is possible with the SDK and a huge amount of trouble, but even that is just something Apple generously permits you to do. Probably in violation of the licence agreement, too. It isn't something any user could do with ease.
I'm inclined to agree with him rather more, because I recently had to root my tablet. During the last routine system update, mysterious new crap appeared: Something called Layar. It was impossible to uninstall without rooting, and the marketplace page for it is just page after page of people giving it one-star reviews and complaining that it was installed without their consent. I think it's some type of augmented-reality program.
I spent a lot of money on that tablet so I can read books in the bath and watch FiM on the train. I don't need the problems of it updating itsself to install new junk I don't want.
If one of the two parties were to collapse completly, the other would splinter without a common enemy - but that process would take many years, during which politics would be even dirtier than usual. Things would get worse before they had any hope of getting better. Internal party issues are not subject to anywhere near the same level of regulation as an actual election.
I can't even name them. The VP doesn't get much of a place in populist politics. People don't care about them. I imagine Palin would have changed that, had the election gone differently.
That's another trend of protests. Doesn't matter if it's the Occupiers, the Tea Partiers, the Environmentalists, the Pro-Lifers, or the Phelpses (Who get their own group, as no-one else can tolerate their company). One defining aspect of any protester is a powerful conviction in their beliefs, and in their need to share them. Loudly. With everyone. Especially those who aren't interested.
There are three reasons I see for giving up on the protests:
1. It isn't working. The rich remain obscenely rich, corporate interests continue to trump public interests, and politicians remain betrothed to their corporate sponsors. For all the fuss the protests made, they change nothing.
2. People are getting bored. Media coverage isn't what it was, and there is no point protesting if you don't get attention for it. That is the purpose of the protest.
3. With California using tear gas to dispel the protests, and the police in London declaring Occupy protesters a terrorist movement, it looks like the authorities are starting to tire of the embarassment and will put an end to things by force as soon as the media interest has faded sufficiently.
There seems to be a cycle in protests, regardless of what the cause is: 1. Anger. 2. Protest. 3. Realisation of futility. 4. Giving up. Occasionally, very occasionally, the protest might actually succeed.... but more often than not, protesters are simply ignored. That leaves them with the choice of either giving up or turning to more desperate measures like illegal direct action. We've seen a little of the latter in the Anonymous operation to use stolen credit card details to donate to charities.
I'm surprised we haven't had an anti-wall-street psycho start bombing banks yet. The environmental movement has a few, the pro-life movement has a few... maybe it just needs time.
Try thinking about it harder. It's undocumented because it's only used by one person, who works with the people who actually built it. I imagine they didn't document because they didn't expect anyone else would have to maintain it. Documentation is made by the designer for other people: If there are no other people, no documentation.
It's a common approach, though one that tends to go wrong if the one person who knows how something works should be unavailable. Makes perfect sense for small projects though, when the time and expense of producing documentation can easily outweigh that of the project itsself. There are many undocumented things at my workplace, but none of them critical - just things like the timelapse camera we have pointed at the construction site for our new building, and the program that monitors user areas for anyone trying to sneak in their pirate music collection.
Undocumented because it's unique. One of the advantages of being a person of importance at a university. If you need a never-before-designed piece of revolutinary communications equipment, you just pop down the corridoor to the engineering department and they'll make it.
Politicians don't want to look smarter. Quite the opposite: Many of them go to great lengths to appear dumber. Witness GW's cowboy act, or McCain's choice of populist anti-intellectual Palin as his VP candidate.
More accuratly, he is venturing into science education.
Cosmology is a very mathy field. It involves a lot of equasion, many of them a quite scarey length. Hawking can solve these equasions, and improve upon them - but to all but the most uber-nerdy of specialists in the field, his work would be incomprehenseable. As his fame has grown, he has devoted much of his time to science education: The difficult task of trying to get at least an outline of his work in a form accessible to a layperson. For this to be possible he has had to set aside the scarey math and embrace the less intimidating philosophy: At least with that approach people can understand him without needing a three-year university course first.
Molten salt batteries are nice for grid storage (though I gather flow batteries ha an advantage there: If space is no object, it'll give you the lowest Ah-per-$), but.. busses? Do you really want to put something inside a bus that, in the event of a crash, will either explode or splash molten salt over the passangers?
Li-ion does have the advantage of being an established, tested technology, and only dangerous if you are stupid enough to short one.
The situation with molten salt will change if Sumitomo's developments pay off and get it down to the claimed 57c, but I'm dubious regarding how well they'll live up to the press release. Doing it in the lab is one thing, a bus is quite another.
Also, molten salt would be useless for cars... the cells take time to warm up! No-one will buy a car that needs to be warmed up ten minutes in advance of any journey. Not a problem for busses, when all trips are scheduled in advance.
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And then they build it up again. Long term, nothing changes.
And there is a problem. This isn't a fair fight.
Iran launches speedboats. US ships pick them up on radar. Missiles are launched, and two minutes later their base is gone.
Their base, which also happened to be a civilian scuba training company, and they were doing an under-twelves half-price special. Congratulations, you just murdered a party of children.
Iran doesn't have to win militarily. That is impossible, and they know it. All they really need to do is make the US look like the villain here. Just view the whole confrontation as a very expensive propaganda stunt. Provoke the US into a war, make sure some civilians get caught in the middle, frame the US for their death.
Quite possible. Obama could benefit in the same way that Bush benefited from the 9/11 attacks - people rallied behind the president in a show of partiotism and national unity, and shortly after in a national call for vengence. For that to work though, Iran needs to strike first, and strike hard. Sinking a US warship would do the job, but will Iran be willing to risk the potential counterattack?
The armed forces they are deploying for thir conflict are speedboats and RPGs. Even if they are all gone in a few days, they can be replaced in a month. Wonder how much speedboats cost if you are buying them by the thousand? I would guess a lot less than the value of that oil trade.
And there is the problem: Ruinous bombardment isn't an option. It used to be, back in the wars of the past. If countries were at war, it was accepted practice to bomb the hell out of the enemy. Blow up thieir factories so they couldn't resupply, bomb their commercial districts to stall their economy, bomb the housing to demoralise their public. Simpler wars: There was a nice clear enemy country, and you tried to destroy it. Today, though, not so simple. Civilian casualties are unacceptable. Even if the US responded with the overwhelming force it it capable of and utterly obliterated the entire Iranian military... in ten years, they'll have built it up again.
The only way to perminantly end the problem of Iran is to go in there with ground forces, invate and occupy until a more friendly regime can be arranged. After seeing what a disaster occupying Iraq was, the US would have to be unbelieveably stupid to try that again on Iran - a country with a more than twice the population. Since that isn't feasable right now, this is going nowhere.
In short, Iran doesn't have the strength to win, but the US (And it's allies) don't have the willingness to fight to a complete smoking-ruins victory with all the massive civilian casualties and long-term difficulties that implies. Neither side can win.
And then what? This isn't WW2 any more. If country A attacks country B, B can't respond by carpet-bombing A's cities back into the stone age. Killing civilians is no longer an option, even if they happen to be citizens of A. The US really has only two options: Back down (After a show of partiotic force of some type, perhaps by bombing a few military targets) or invade Iran... and after discovering in first Afganistan and then Iraq how difficult it can be to maintain the peace in an occupied country, that isn't going to happen.
I imagine that is the plan. Iran couldn't win an actual war, and their leadership are smart enough to know that. But they also know that the US doesn't *want* a war right now. The public are already sick war. So they have a good chance at intimidating the US into backing down to avoid a politically-embarassing conflict.
You assume this is symmetric. It isn't. To win, Iran doesn't need to destroy the entire US navy, or even it's ability to fight. They just need to make the war sufficiently expensive either financially or politically to continue.
I should say though that, apart from this one issue, it's actually an excellent device and I have no other complaints.
Layar, as bundled crap goes, is fairly benign. The worst it appears to do (so long as you don't use it) is automatically update itsself. Not a problem for me, potentially a concern to phone users who have usage quotas to worry about. More seriously, recall the recent CarrierIQ: Software installed on mobile phones by the suppliers, deliberatly hidden from the user's knowledge and made difficult to uninstall if it is found, which captures every website visited and keystroke performed - including things like passwords and banking details - and sends it all, in plain text, back to the operator. Now *THAT* in itsself is scarey enough to raise in objection to the notion of devices as appliances. If the user cannot control them, the user cannot ensure their security.
Asus Transformer. According to the comments on the marketplace, most of the complainants were using Samsung devices.
So long as you don't use Layar, the worst it appears to actually do is waste bandwidth auto-updating itsself. Not really an issue for me, I just wanted it gone on principle, but a serious concern for phone users on limited transfer quota.
"It's not that Linux isn't a great OS (I use it for server-side stuff) but it certainly doesn't provide the polished overall experiences that Microsoft or Apple do."
Major flamewar imminent! EVERYONE, GET TO THE BUNKER!
Yes, it is... because no, you can't. Well, it is possible with the SDK and a huge amount of trouble, but even that is just something Apple generously permits you to do. Probably in violation of the licence agreement, too. It isn't something any user could do with ease.
I'm inclined to agree with him rather more, because I recently had to root my tablet. During the last routine system update, mysterious new crap appeared: Something called Layar. It was impossible to uninstall without rooting, and the marketplace page for it is just page after page of people giving it one-star reviews and complaining that it was installed without their consent. I think it's some type of augmented-reality program.
I spent a lot of money on that tablet so I can read books in the bath and watch FiM on the train. I don't need the problems of it updating itsself to install new junk I don't want.
Just because I consider something inevitable doesn't mean I advocate it. I just know that some battles can't be won.
If one of the two parties were to collapse completly, the other would splinter without a common enemy - but that process would take many years, during which politics would be even dirtier than usual. Things would get worse before they had any hope of getting better. Internal party issues are not subject to anywhere near the same level of regulation as an actual election.
I can't even name them. The VP doesn't get much of a place in populist politics. People don't care about them. I imagine Palin would have changed that, had the election gone differently.
That's another trend of protests. Doesn't matter if it's the Occupiers, the Tea Partiers, the Environmentalists, the Pro-Lifers, or the Phelpses (Who get their own group, as no-one else can tolerate their company). One defining aspect of any protester is a powerful conviction in their beliefs, and in their need to share them. Loudly. With everyone. Especially those who aren't interested.
There are three reasons I see for giving up on the protests:
1. It isn't working. The rich remain obscenely rich, corporate interests continue to trump public interests, and politicians remain betrothed to their corporate sponsors. For all the fuss the protests made, they change nothing.
2. People are getting bored. Media coverage isn't what it was, and there is no point protesting if you don't get attention for it. That is the purpose of the protest.
3. With California using tear gas to dispel the protests, and the police in London declaring Occupy protesters a terrorist movement, it looks like the authorities are starting to tire of the embarassment and will put an end to things by force as soon as the media interest has faded sufficiently.
There seems to be a cycle in protests, regardless of what the cause is: 1. Anger. 2. Protest. 3. Realisation of futility. 4. Giving up. Occasionally, very occasionally, the protest might actually succeed.... but more often than not, protesters are simply ignored. That leaves them with the choice of either giving up or turning to more desperate measures like illegal direct action. We've seen a little of the latter in the Anonymous operation to use stolen credit card details to donate to charities.
I'm surprised we haven't had an anti-wall-street psycho start bombing banks yet. The environmental movement has a few, the pro-life movement has a few... maybe it just needs time.
Try thinking about it harder. It's undocumented because it's only used by one person, who works with the people who actually built it. I imagine they didn't document because they didn't expect anyone else would have to maintain it. Documentation is made by the designer for other people: If there are no other people, no documentation.
It's a common approach, though one that tends to go wrong if the one person who knows how something works should be unavailable. Makes perfect sense for small projects though, when the time and expense of producing documentation can easily outweigh that of the project itsself. There are many undocumented things at my workplace, but none of them critical - just things like the timelapse camera we have pointed at the construction site for our new building, and the program that monitors user areas for anyone trying to sneak in their pirate music collection.
Undocumented because it's unique. One of the advantages of being a person of importance at a university. If you need a never-before-designed piece of revolutinary communications equipment, you just pop down the corridoor to the engineering department and they'll make it.
Politicians don't want to look smarter. Quite the opposite: Many of them go to great lengths to appear dumber. Witness GW's cowboy act, or McCain's choice of populist anti-intellectual Palin as his VP candidate.
More accuratly, he is venturing into science education.
Cosmology is a very mathy field. It involves a lot of equasion, many of them a quite scarey length. Hawking can solve these equasions, and improve upon them - but to all but the most uber-nerdy of specialists in the field, his work would be incomprehenseable. As his fame has grown, he has devoted much of his time to science education: The difficult task of trying to get at least an outline of his work in a form accessible to a layperson. For this to be possible he has had to set aside the scarey math and embrace the less intimidating philosophy: At least with that approach people can understand him without needing a three-year university course first.
Well, aside from Revelation. It's back to Wrathful Smitey God for that bit.
Molten salt batteries are nice for grid storage (though I gather flow batteries ha an advantage there: If space is no object, it'll give you the lowest Ah-per-$), but.. busses? Do you really want to put something inside a bus that, in the event of a crash, will either explode or splash molten salt over the passangers?
Li-ion does have the advantage of being an established, tested technology, and only dangerous if you are stupid enough to short one.
The situation with molten salt will change if Sumitomo's developments pay off and get it down to the claimed 57c, but I'm dubious regarding how well they'll live up to the press release. Doing it in the lab is one thing, a bus is quite another.
Also, molten salt would be useless for cars... the cells take time to warm up! No-one will buy a car that needs to be warmed up ten minutes in advance of any journey. Not a problem for busses, when all trips are scheduled in advance.