Actually I would suggest putting the billions of dollars that go into these extravagant military projects that find new, easier, faster ways to kill people into educating people so they don't want to kill people. And while were at it, how about some state funded medical insurance that doesn't suck.
I agree completely. Well, except for the "state funded" part. Government, taken as an entity, doesn't care about people. And no amount of legislative rule-making and bureaucratic promising will ever be able to change that. State-run programs always end up turning into an impersonal, inflexible machine that takes geometrically shaped pegs of all types and pounds them through a round hole. Government is what gets us INTO messes (like wars), so I'm loath to look to it for solutions.
For every advance in weapon technology, there should follow the concern of it falling into the wrong hands.
So what do you suggest? Uninventing it? Destroying anything that could lead to its re-discovery? Kill anyone smart enough to think of something similar? Your working the wrong angle. Weapons aren't the problem. People wanting to kill people is.
Yeah. Didn't much care for it. I really liked "Roger & Me", but it struck a chord with my mostly populist views. BFC struck me as too much of a "hip, urban elitist liberal" work in that it conveniently ignored reality in order to reach what I think was a predetermined conclusion of Mr. Moore's. In my opinion, he's become just another lock-step liberal hoping the Hollywood Beautiful People will accept him if he parrots their cherished platitudes.
Distributor: AOL, please don't PVR our show, it's under "special" programming
AOL: That will be 50 Million.
And then Distributor's lawyers haul AOL's lawyers into court, show the judge the broadcast contract, which certainly says how many times AOL can rebroadcast Show X, and t6he judge says: OK, you agreed in the contract to pay $1.5mil to broadcast the show once. Every VOD stream of it you sent is a re-broadcast. My judgement for the plaintiff is $1.5mil times 35,000 rebroadcasts for a total of $52.5billion.
You see, contract law exists to prevent exactly this sort of strong-arming.
The Motorola i58 and i88 (both available via Nextel) and be set to output NEMA data, then you just have to use that
What more, according to my i58sr's manual, Java applications can access data from the GPS. My i58 can even be set to either a)always, b)never, or c)pop up a "yes/no" to allow Java programs to read the GPS location. So yeah, we've already got mapping capability here-- it's just not "standard quipment".
There is no sanctity of the home. See Bowers v. Hardwick.
It could be argued that Bowers v. Hardwick only said that committing crimes in the privacy of your bedroom doesn't give you some special immunity to prosecution. The Georgia police weren't given free reign to kick down doors looking for sodomizers.
The US was real buddy-buddy with the other signers of the Baghdad Pact, so I doubt the US was all that hot to have the monarchy overthrown by either communists or Ba'athists.
Poisonous chemicals and deadly viruses are not weapons in their own right. They have many legitimate commercial, agricultural and research uses. Whether or not it was [a good idea/moral] to let Iraq buy dual-use precursor materials is open for debate, but the fact remains (and no one claims otherwise) that Saddam manufactured all his biochem weapons domestically.
actually, yes it is. The helicopters were from the Soviets. The gas was made by Iraq itself, even if we did give Iraq access to the precursor chemicals. Saddam Hussein wasn't put into power by the US, he gained his position as the result of overthrowing the constitutional monarchy put in place by the British, which we WERE backing. In the context of changing geopolitical realities, the Reagan administration letting Iraq buy potassium cyanide and plague samples is pretty meaningless. Your articles all pretty much say the same thing, and what they say is hardly significant. How about Clinton letting Loral sell technology to China that let them build ICBMs? How does that sit with ya'?
The US needs to scrupulously avoid the slightest suspicion at this point that this war is fought for economic reasons. And that means that the US should go out of its way to open up reconstruction contracts to non-US companies.
You know, anyone who thinks we bombed Iraq just to get the rebuilding contracts isn't gonna be satisfied no matter WHO gets the contract. I'd see no reason to cater to the whims and fancies of adversarial entities. Keep the money in the US and let them grumble like the always do.
The whole "democracy for everyone!" idea is bunk. What makes you think that a system of government that works well for a rich, industrialized nation will work equally well for a decentralized nomad country (Afghanistan) and a very conservative religious society (Iran).
All humans desire the right to self determination. To say that somehow only we rich, industrialized nations can handle freedom is a bit elitist, don't you think? Are you saying that brutal dictatorship is the system they should have? No, of course you didn't mean that, but "international community... pressur[ing] all governments in that direction" is a sit-and-wait handwringer's strategy. It's tantamount to saying we'll frown at and scold them until they shape up, but since they're only backwards nomads, we won't expect them to act civilized and stop killing their own citizens.
Isn't this kinda like what the phone companies in the early days got slapped down for? Didn't the phone company used to make you use their phone in order to use their phone service?
Actually, AT&T owned the entire phone system, including the phone wire in your house! They only made you use their phone instruments because, legally, they were theirs. In the MCI vs. Ma Bell case, they got clobbered over long distance service competition. No longer [owning/being responsible for] the phones and the house wiring was something the Regional Bell Operating Companies that were spun off from AT&T wanted.
The Navy's answer: keep the vendor and re-treat the parts.
Reminds me of my father's experience with the Navy requiring "second sourcing" of parts. They apparently couldn't have just one company supplying these milled-steel parts on the AIM-54 Phoenix missile that the weapons station pylon clamps on to, so they chose Raytheon as a second-source manufacturer. All the parts they sent to Hughes Aircraft to be put on the Phoenix were wrong. Not only were they CAST instead of MILLED, they were incorrectly sized and shaped. They didn't fit right on the pylon, but they could be FORCED on. Unfortunately, this could result in a misfire where the weapon wouldn't drop, or WORSE, where it'd PARTIALLY drop and break the pylon. The Navy's solution? Send 'em back till re-mill them the right shape. Hughes had repeated problems with Raythoen second-source parts. These problems "stopped", though, after Raytheon bought Hughes from GM. Scary, eh?
Is there any water left anymore in the Colorado by the time it hits the ocean? I was under the impression that the Colorado River flowed into toilets, mostly.
Heh, mostly, yeah. And the water that DOES reach the Gulf of California-- well, after travelling through Mexico, it sure SMELLS like a toilet.
At least InDesign is ahead of QuarkXpress in terms of OS X support--
Good. Maybe our graphic design outsourcing will stop coming back in Quark for Mac. Quark is a travesty. Quark for Mac files aren't even compatible with Quark for PC or vice-versa. You have to run them through a converter, which then breaks them. Quark must die!
Sorry 'bout the rant. I've had a few bad experiences with Quark recently...
A lightning bolt once struct the street in front of my house about 6 feet from my car. That's likely several pulses of well over 500 amperes at over half a billion volts...
First, you're describing the lightning spark itself there. EMPs aren't measured in volt-amps. Second, the EMP from a.1 second lightning bolt (be it 6 feet or even 6 inches away) is nothing compared to one from a nuclear detonation. Essentially, a nuclear blast at 2.5 kilometers will result in inductive currents through any unshielded circuits comparable to those circuits being struck by lightning directly. Grounded, overcurrent protected, and fully shielded enclosures are required for any solid state electronics you wish to continue working after exposure to a nuclear EMP.
And even if it did, what if that equipment was in rugged military chassis, or more usually inside tank, armored transport, ship, concrete (with rebar) bunker, etc.
Most US and Soviet made vehicles have EMP shielded internal systems in case of nuclear war. Mostly what the EMP would take out is civilian vehicles and systems, and a few of the more sensitive military systems that use antennas (some radar, radio).
As opposed to the ones the US and British seem to be using in Iraq over the last couple of days?
Pffff! Helicopters are inherently dangerous and malfunction-prone. ALL the armed services crash helicopters with unnerving regularity. When I was with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), we rode in helicopters a LOT, and I have personally been in THREE crashes/hard-landings. The problem with helicopters is that they're pretty much doomed if they lose power or if any of the control systems crap out. Compounding this is the fact that they vibrate like you wouldn't believe, which has a tendency to make things "come loose". In wartime, the helos are logging a LOT more hours than in garrison, so the number of failures resulting in crashes will go up. As awful as it sounds, a couple helicopters going down from mechanical failure is statistically inevitable on an operation of this scale.
Texas is the only state thate began as a sovreign country before it joined the US
is not technicly true, California was the Bear Flag Republic for about 4 years before the US annexed it. I don't think it had much of real government compaired to Texas at the time but it was technicly a sovreign nation for a bit.
Good point. As a Californian I should have remembered that, but hey, I went to schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District so I have an excuse.:)
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I agree completely. Well, except for the "state funded" part. Government, taken as an entity, doesn't care about people. And no amount of legislative rule-making and bureaucratic promising will ever be able to change that. State-run programs always end up turning into an impersonal, inflexible machine that takes geometrically shaped pegs of all types and pounds them through a round hole. Government is what gets us INTO messes (like wars), so I'm loath to look to it for solutions.
So what do you suggest? Uninventing it? Destroying anything that could lead to its re-discovery? Kill anyone smart enough to think of something similar? Your working the wrong angle. Weapons aren't the problem. People wanting to kill people is.
Yeah. Didn't much care for it. I really liked "Roger & Me", but it struck a chord with my mostly populist views. BFC struck me as too much of a "hip, urban elitist liberal" work in that it conveniently ignored reality in order to reach what I think was a predetermined conclusion of Mr. Moore's. In my opinion, he's become just another lock-step liberal hoping the Hollywood Beautiful People will accept him if he parrots their cherished platitudes.
And then Distributor's lawyers haul AOL's lawyers into court, show the judge the broadcast contract, which certainly says how many times AOL can rebroadcast Show X, and t6he judge says: OK, you agreed in the contract to pay $1.5mil to broadcast the show once. Every VOD stream of it you sent is a re-broadcast. My judgement for the plaintiff is $1.5mil times 35,000 rebroadcasts for a total of $52.5billion.
You see, contract law exists to prevent exactly this sort of strong-arming.
What more, according to my i58sr's manual, Java applications can access data from the GPS. My i58 can even be set to either a)always, b)never, or c)pop up a "yes/no" to allow Java programs to read the GPS location. So yeah, we've already got mapping capability here-- it's just not "standard quipment".
It could be argued that Bowers v. Hardwick only said that committing crimes in the privacy of your bedroom doesn't give you some special immunity to prosecution. The Georgia police weren't given free reign to kick down doors looking for sodomizers.
But maybe the EU could muster some troops and liberate you. =)
Heh. Thanks, but I think we can manage ourselves. After all, we're all ARMED and CRAZY.
"Spray systems mounted on the Mi-8 HIP helicopters were also used against troop concentrations"". (the Mi-8 is a Soviet design)
"Iraqi Su-22 FITTERs and MiG-23 FLOGGERs conducted most air-launched chemical attacks". (likewise, so are the Su-22 and MiG-23)
The US was real buddy-buddy with the other signers of the Baghdad Pact, so I doubt the US was all that hot to have the monarchy overthrown by either communists or Ba'athists.
Poisonous chemicals and deadly viruses are not weapons in their own right. They have many legitimate commercial, agricultural and research uses. Whether or not it was [a good idea/moral] to let Iraq buy dual-use precursor materials is open for debate, but the fact remains (and no one claims otherwise) that Saddam manufactured all his biochem weapons domestically.
actually, yes it is. The helicopters were from the Soviets. The gas was made by Iraq itself, even if we did give Iraq access to the precursor chemicals. Saddam Hussein wasn't put into power by the US, he gained his position as the result of overthrowing the constitutional monarchy put in place by the British, which we WERE backing. In the context of changing geopolitical realities, the Reagan administration letting Iraq buy potassium cyanide and plague samples is pretty meaningless. Your articles all pretty much say the same thing, and what they say is hardly significant. How about Clinton letting Loral sell technology to China that let them build ICBMs? How does that sit with ya'?
You know, anyone who thinks we bombed Iraq just to get the rebuilding contracts isn't gonna be satisfied no matter WHO gets the contract. I'd see no reason to cater to the whims and fancies of adversarial entities. Keep the money in the US and let them grumble like the always do.
I can't believe people still use that phrase. Tell me, do you feel more threatened by the Elders of Zion or the Bavarian Illuminati?
tin foil hat indeed...
All humans desire the right to self determination. To say that somehow only we rich, industrialized nations can handle freedom is a bit elitist, don't you think? Are you saying that brutal dictatorship is the system they should have? No, of course you didn't mean that, but "international community... pressur[ing] all governments in that direction" is a sit-and-wait handwringer's strategy. It's tantamount to saying we'll frown at and scold them until they shape up, but since they're only backwards nomads, we won't expect them to act civilized and stop killing their own citizens.
Actually, AT&T owned the entire phone system, including the phone wire in your house! They only made you use their phone instruments because, legally, they were theirs. In the MCI vs. Ma Bell case, they got clobbered over long distance service competition. No longer [owning/being responsible for] the phones and the house wiring was something the Regional Bell Operating Companies that were spun off from AT&T wanted.
(lightbulb goes on over head) Ha! OK, I'm with ya there. Good point.
Reminds me of my father's experience with the Navy requiring "second sourcing" of parts. They apparently couldn't have just one company supplying these milled-steel parts on the AIM-54 Phoenix missile that the weapons station pylon clamps on to, so they chose Raytheon as a second-source manufacturer. All the parts they sent to Hughes Aircraft to be put on the Phoenix were wrong. Not only were they CAST instead of MILLED, they were incorrectly sized and shaped. They didn't fit right on the pylon, but they could be FORCED on. Unfortunately, this could result in a misfire where the weapon wouldn't drop, or WORSE, where it'd PARTIALLY drop and break the pylon. The Navy's solution? Send 'em back till re-mill them the right shape. Hughes had repeated problems with Raythoen second-source parts. These problems "stopped", though, after Raytheon bought Hughes from GM. Scary, eh?
I know you posted AC and probably won't see this but,
WTF are you talking about? You can't copyright a bong! Is there some subtle point I missed?
Also, it's not like inventions have anything to do with copyright. You're thinking of patents.
Cripes, people, try to get that one through your heads!
Max thermal output of Athlon XP 3000+: 74 watts
Max thermal output of Pentium4 3.0GHz: 80 watts
Get back under yer bridge, troll.
Heh, mostly, yeah. And the water that DOES reach the Gulf of California-- well, after travelling through Mexico, it sure SMELLS like a toilet.
Good. Maybe our graphic design outsourcing will stop coming back in Quark for Mac. Quark is a travesty. Quark for Mac files aren't even compatible with Quark for PC or vice-versa. You have to run them through a converter, which then breaks them. Quark must die!
Sorry 'bout the rant. I've had a few bad experiences with Quark recently...
First, you're describing the lightning spark itself there. EMPs aren't measured in volt-amps. Second, the EMP from a .1 second lightning bolt (be it 6 feet or even 6 inches away) is nothing compared to one from a nuclear detonation. Essentially, a nuclear blast at 2.5 kilometers will result in inductive currents through any unshielded circuits comparable to those circuits being struck by lightning directly. Grounded, overcurrent protected, and fully shielded enclosures are required for any solid state electronics you wish to continue working after exposure to a nuclear EMP.
Actually, it's the beaver because they're "nature's engineer". Beavers aren't particularly industrious animals.
Most US and Soviet made vehicles have EMP shielded internal systems in case of nuclear war. Mostly what the EMP would take out is civilian vehicles and systems, and a few of the more sensitive military systems that use antennas (some radar, radio).
Pffff! Helicopters are inherently dangerous and malfunction-prone. ALL the armed services crash helicopters with unnerving regularity. When I was with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), we rode in helicopters a LOT, and I have personally been in THREE crashes/hard-landings. The problem with helicopters is that they're pretty much doomed if they lose power or if any of the control systems crap out. Compounding this is the fact that they vibrate like you wouldn't believe, which has a tendency to make things "come loose". In wartime, the helos are logging a LOT more hours than in garrison, so the number of failures resulting in crashes will go up. As awful as it sounds, a couple helicopters going down from mechanical failure is statistically inevitable on an operation of this scale.
Texas is the only state thate began as a sovreign country before it joined the US
is not technicly true, California was the Bear Flag Republic for about 4 years before the US annexed it. I don't think it had much of real government compaired to Texas at the time but it was technicly a sovreign nation for a bit.
Good point. As a Californian I should have remembered that, but hey, I went to schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District so I have an excuse. :)