Instead of saying "welcome to 3rd-world America", say instead "welcome to prewar America".
Seriously - the ongoing wailing about "the US is falling behind" is getting a little tiresome.
First, lets dispense with US exceptionalism. I love my country, and there are a number of notably special things about its situation geographically, culturally, historically, etc that make it a unique place but Americans are not (and have never been) intrinsically smarter, prettier, faster, stronger, or any way different than any other cross-section of humanity. We have the same proportions of brilliant scientists and racist a-holes as pretty much any other random bunch of 330 million people you'd gather in the world.
Secondly, and more directly to my point - to fear the US 'falling behind' speaks to a staggering level of ignorance of the last 100 years of world history.
In 1912 - a mere 100 years ago - the list of great powers in the world would have been Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and only marginally, the USA. The US was a largely agrarian country of mostly first-generation immigrants, late industrializing and largely disconnected with Old World affairs.
Yet after two catastrophic continent-spanning conflicts in 25 years (and a not-insignificant influenza epidemic), the three leading European states were prostrate - two from their almost-Pyrrhic victory (UK, France), one lay dismembered and occupied after being pummeled nearly into dust (Germany) - one of the powers entirely ceased to exist (A/H), one emerged from civil war at least superficially changed (Russia - USSR), one emerged from nowhere (Japan), and only one was basically unscathed - the United States.
In the two conflicts total deaths over the span of these listed powers totalled something more than 50 million. US fatalities were approximately 500,000. Possibly more significantly, the wars had completely devastated the industrial, technological, and even cultural infrastructure of the old world, with the subsequent Cold War arguably further contributing - paralyzing truly independent European development for 4+ decades.
The US was in the historically-unique position of being a superpower by default, not by inclination. US armies had not marched all over the world subjugating enemies, conquering colonies, and gathering territory for the motherland. (Certainly the US had engaged in its own efforts in colonialism like other Powers of the day, much of it naked military conquest barely cloaked as 'liberatory' exercises.) But it's clear that even the burgeoning jingoism of the early-20th-century US wasn't posed as a challenge to the Great Powers, except insofar as it was competitive to Old World efforts to colonize and dominate the largely-unexploited Western Hemisphere. Instead, the US was largely aimed at internal development, a patronizing benevolence toward other peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and essentially (even as late as the early 20th-century) a *revolutionary* geopolitical stance vis a vis the Old World states and their efforts to "lock down" most of the undeveloped world into agreed-upon exclusionary spheres of influence.
For emerging in 1945 as the dominant superpower on the planet, it should be astonishing that the US began the 20th century with a second-rate navy and almost no army to speak of.
In fact, as a superpower, one might point out that the US has been particularly clumsy. Certainly, many anti-Americans (and we've generated many of them) would point to the scores of bad US foreign policy decisions as clear signs of its essentially-malignant nature; in point of fact, most if not all were simply colossal blunders born of a government run by unsophisticated and unsubtle men born and raised in a country that was (in their day) fairly irrelevant. Wilson's naivete in insisting on national boundaries in post-WWI Europe almost guaranteed non-self-sufficient states vulnerable to Caesarist populism. Read about the WW2 conferences between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR - FDR, for
" World-consuming general war is an abnormality, no matter how you look at it."
Really? I'd say that interstate conflict between the Great Powers was depressingly frequent (at slightly less than once per century), and it was really only such a conflict that had the chance to - and occasionally did - flare up into general systemwide conflagration.
Going backward from WWI: 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War 1866 - Austro-Prussian War 1792-1815 Napoleonic Wars - general systemwide conflict 1854-55 Crimean War 1756-1763 7 Years' War 1740-48 War of Austrian Succession 1701-1713 War of Spanish Succession 1618-1648 30 years' War - general systemwide conflict
So yes, in a sense we agree - nuclear weapons have prevented great power wars.
I'm not demeaning the tragedy of non-great power conflicts, not at all. But ignoring political correctness, we have to recognize that as tragic as other wars are (dead is dead, whether you're a Tutsi killed by a Hutu, or an American-backed Cuban rebel shot by a Soviet-backed Cuban soldier), no matter how large they can be in terms of dead (Asian conflicts in particular have a depressing habit of experiencing typical numbers of dead by orders of magnitude more than what are usual for the Western world...), these 'peripheral' conflicts CAN'T blossom into system-wide wars unless and until great powers become involved. Thus in the absolute sense, nuclear weapons have capped conflicts into remaining peripheral or proxy wars - and that is certainly an intrinsic good for the system, if certainly the opposite for the unfortunate peoples who now suffer instead of the first-world peoples for their governments' goals.
One might argue persuasively that by removing the threat of imminent personal vulnerability to war from their respective heartlands, nuclear weapons have made such peripheral wars MORE common directly because of the near-impossibility that (for example) Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, or Moscow will ever have to burn because of bad geopolitical choices of their leader. That, in fact, I would largely agree with. It makes Robert E Lee's comment even more prescient: "It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it." Having successfully tucked 'war' out of sight, perhaps our politicians resort far too casually to a tool that they know their loved-ones will never have to face themselves.
I was with you until "(re Nuclear power)...risk of catastrophe overshadows everything, and means that if you try to build and run a reactor everything costs too much because of the dangers. In the long run, nuclear is not feasible..."
That statement ignores the last 30+ years of nuclear power research particularly into failsafe designs like the PBR that can't melt down as long as you have gravity.
Please understand the us DoE is technologically stuck in about 1976.
Hosts of semi- or completely autonomous drones, dumped into systems from hi-speed attacking craft approaching at a significant fraction of C.
Very small, so that the energy they put out is low. Expendable, large numbers of vehicles. Some would act on attack missions (as their dropoff craft would have been detected) but most would sit gathering intel for a long (ie hundreds of hours) span to squirt to stealthed transmission drones out in the Oort cloud.
This intel would supplement long term observations, meaning that for ballistic targets - planets, orbital stations, etc - would be easy targets for attack by high-c mostly-dumb strikes from far outside the system, conceivably even ly away. So the idea of anything bigger being safe is absolutely farcical. In fact it's the converse.
So you end up with mutually-assured destruction, with the person shooting first having a huge advantage. Thus any civilization cognizant of this threat would have failsafe autonomous systems that were assembled (they hope) with enough circumspection and subtlety that they evaded original detection, and thus would survive the first-strike enough to make a retributive strike of their own.
The only way to avoid this would be to attack someone before they even know you exist or are at a tech level where they could effectively reply - a rather brutal level of pragmatic elimination of potential competition one can only hope is beneath a society that's achieved interstellar technology.
And that's the scary bit...when a strategic defense relies on a hope presuming the psychology of an utterly unknown and unknowable foe.
Like our world during the cold war and today, this annihilatory threat would (one hopes) preclude "massive existential space war" ala space operas, meaning that conflict could only ever happen by less-capable proxies, raiding, etc.
And in the 60 years before 1945? How many casualties were there of wars then? Let's use half that time - how peaceful was it in just the THIRTY years before 1945?
It was clear that war was growing remarkably in brutality and scope, with the ever-advancing mechanization of destruction, citizen-armies, and the concept of total war.
It was, that is, until 1945.
People react viscerally to nuclear weapons, and can't quite comprehend how the idea of an escalation in lethality could actually lead to less great-power war.
The fact is that the OP is right; the 'wars' you talk about barely even ranked MENTION in the history books before 1945. Proxy wars between greater powers, tribal genocides, border disputes between smaller states - the number of deaths in each of these were large, but their likelihood of conflagrating into world-consuming general war was incredibly low.
The fact is that now wars are fought on a scale that would have made Rudyard Kipling laugh at their triviality. 100 casualties in a day is a massive tragedy for us - at Arras, the casualty rate was over 4000/day for two months.
Yes, nuclear weapons are horrific. That horror has arguably prevented much more loss of life than it ever caused.
It's a failure of democracy in the sense of the incompetents we put in office.
I'm an American, and I think this makes perfect sense. Sure, you'll get some of the "I don't want to do it just because Europe does" nonsense, but in reality most people could see the point, and would probably agree.
But do our politicians spend ANY time doing anything remotely close to logical, reasonable things like this? No, they spend all their time arguing larger issues that will never be resolved.
For that matter, we just passed last year Obamacare which cost $billions (probably $trillions when you calculate the impact/cost to businesses), and will reduce the actual number of people not covered by insurance from about 14 million...to perhaps 8 million.
"This is a fascinating phenomenon and nobody has really much idea of whatâ(TM)s going on. What we do know is that itâ(TM)s absolutely essential to not jump to conclusions about whatâ(TM)s going on. Time and time again over the decades past climatologists have been brutally misled by short-term phenomena, by statistics gathered only over a few years. Blips happen for all manner of impenetrable reasons."
Personally, I see drones as being being more likely to be deployed as cargo aircraft, traffic monitoring, environmental monitoring, and ultimately, as passenger aircraft.
Sure, it's possible, even likely that the government will want to deploy domestic drones but frankly we as a populace leave so many electronic breadcrumbs from credit card usage to constant internet connects to carrying gps-cellphones I don't see a huge potential additional intel windfall from drone-format intelligence gathering (for the bulk of the US population).
As presented in the blog summary (which may or may represent their actual paper accurately) it looks very much like a case of observer bias - they had a cooling period, and they looked just before it to see if anything happened, which seemed to be these 4 big eruptions. That (alone) can't be the basis for a compelling theory.
Without comparing the larger frequency of eruptions over time, this data is meaningless. If these 4 eruptions were an outlier, then indeed this is interesting. If they weren't (ie if either a) this was a typical frequency of vulcanism over time, and/or b) there were periods of comparable or heavier vulcanism without such observed climate effect) then this theory loses a lot of its traction.
Looking at volcanic megaevents - the HUGE collection of eruptions about 132 million years ago, and again about 30 mya - doesn't seem to present ongoing climatological effects, but then the Little Ice Age phase is so short (centuries) it wouldn't really even be a blip on a paleoclimatological chart.
Re:By extraordinary coincidence...
on
Lake Vostok Reached
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Was there ever any compromise on their drilling procedure?
My understanding was that the Russians were using a method that was likely to cause contamination, despite pleas by western agencies for them to either a) hold off until better tech was developed or b) funding was established to allow them to use (donated) already-developed tech from the west that would be less contaminating?
I'd guess since this is happening roughly according to their original schedule, the answer is "no" which would be tragic.
Let's say Anon managed to through some one-time gap (ie a sympathetic insider, perhaps) managed to get the login details to this one conference. It's meaningless, because they can't repeat the success.
However, if they leak it: - heads roll at the FBI - everyone's walking on eggshells because of management fury - everyone's required to use full-secure protocols and resources for the stupidest trivial conversations - FBI still doesn't know who leaked it, so begins witchhunt which consumes resources, and makes everyone nervous.
I think it's probably a one-off, parlayed into a fairly clever bit of system-attack.
You know, like a single coordinated unrepeatable multiplane hijacking could theoretically cause an entire country to be consumed by paroxysms of paranoia for more than a decade, leading to absurd legislation, efficiency costs for hundreds of millions of people, as well as actual TRILLIONS of dollars of waste.
Complaints about this will NEVER MATTER until it impacts the bottom line.
STOP BUYING UBI GAMES.
Unless and until publishers see a recognizable impact on their sales that they can attribute to repressive DRM, they won't stop.
And remember, a lot of these guys BELIEVE the bullshit line about every pirated game is a "lost sale" so the negative impact of DRM would have to be a pretty massive number.
"The White House has issued a statement in which they refuse to comment on the petition to investigate Chris Dodd for bribery from the MPAA to pass legislation. The reason given: 'because it requests a specific law enforcement action."
Isn't the president the EXECUTIVE branch?
From Whitehouse.gov: "...The President is responsible for implementing and enforcing the laws written by Congress..."
Yes, we're requesting a law enforcement action. That's (essentially) the Executive's job. You know...the Justice Dept, the FBI, ATF, all those guys?
"Frankly, I will be glad. The USA as an idea has failed its people and I'm tired of the US's enforced exported culture. It is vile." I'm not sure where you're writing from but I'm not sure that - if there was a US civil war - that anyone would be "glad". A civil war within the USA with 330 million people would be bad enough. A civil war splitting the core of the only global superpower would drag in every other government on the planet, and quickly spread, even setting aside thermonuclear weapons.
No, it's ironic that you act all dismayed at the vitriol (as well as exhibit some nice classic US hatred "enforced exported culture" - what bullshit is that?) yet the idea of a conflict in which hundreds of thousands may die as something that makes you "glad". What are the words for "pot", "kettle", and "black" in your native tongue?
That said, I think the fear/delicious anticipation of the US falling into civil war is silly. The only thing that's changed is that the dirty laundry of US politics is not only more visible than ever, it's enhanced and highlighted by the need to support a 24-hour news cycle. The bitterness, divisiveness, etc. is all pretty much exactly the same as its always been; except now that hardcore leftist senator and hardcore rightist senator can't so easily come to a 'backroom deal' anymore, as government is now under the 24-hour baleful eye of video cameras. Politicians duelled to the DEATH in the 19th century. For that matter, we HAVE been through a *civil war* so its rather stupid to claim that the current political climate is "the most bitter ever". It simply isn't.
Crime is falling, violence is falling, hard drug use is falling. The language isn't more divisive (the only way you could even say that is sheer ignorance), it's just no longer monopolized through the channels of media - now everyone gets to talk. The police aren't militarized, ethnic hatred is overblown (see above; you did notice that we have a BLACK president, elected by a popular majority, right?), extreme paranoia (huh?), social chaos (huh? the "OWP" movement was idle rich kids who wanted to be 'meaningful' like their co-opted former-hippy parents), endless multiple wars (again, could only be said out of ignorance: there have always been 'little wars' throughout US history and that of any Great Power), extremes of poverty/wealth (indeed; our "poor" live in conditions envied by the bulk of middle-class people across the world), and "perverse legal and ethical injustice" is just weasel words for "I disagree with your choices".
So no, evanism is just another bitter sidebencher cheering the atmosphere he claims to see as it validates and confirms his built-in hatreds.
From TFA: "And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we've pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we'll still be telling stories about why it happened. It's mystery all the way down."
Rationality has provided us a magnificent method to explain many, many things, but one might sardonically note that the rest of it is pretty much a description of the reason for religion.
Like Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, rationality is magnificent for everything until it reaches its limits*...for everything else there's faith.
*Lest I be declared some glassy-eyed evangelical luddite, like the universe, these limits can expand infinitely - which also never means that there isn't something on the other side.
...who are so deeply offended by the use of "their" music by the "wrong" people:
If you sell your song to agents/distributors who you legally empower to pimp that music to be used as theme music in movies, in Muzak versions in elevators, and in waiting rooms, don't be surprised that they ALSO pimp that music to political organizations that are offering decent $$.
In fact, unless you have a rider in your contract that allows you some special control over said distribution and the right to nay-say certain clients for whatever reason (you don't like their business, their politics, the color of their hair) then you haven't got shit legal basis for your suit and can pretty much fuck off.
1_...how $25 million in repairs is "beyond economical repair" on a $240 million plane? If I have a $20,000 car that's in an accident, it's not uncommon to have $2000 in repairs...that's hardly "totalled".
2. Now, looking at the pictures, that's pretty serious...but then it's more than $25 million in damage.
3. the E8 is a converted 707...didn't they stop building those in the 1970s? If this is a 30 year old airframe (at best) then either that damage is $25 million or the plane is worth less than $240 million today.
4. Finally, as I understand it this damage was done by a subcontractor. When I use subcontractors, they have liability insurance to cover the systems they're working on, plus potential liabilities. Doesn't the US government require AT LEAST such protections when farming out work to contractors?
By the way, I'd like to further remind the Air Force that this is a COMBAT aircraft. Granted, it's not supposed to be in dogfights or shot at, but this is a piece of military equipment, maintained in difficult conditions/circumstances by relatively inexperienced crew (for example an aircraft carrier's crew largely is swapped out about every 18-36 months). That seems incompatible with its evident fragility.
The idea of any significant exploitation of space without a base on the moon is deeply flawed, on simple economics (until we have a space elevator, anyway).
The fact is that lofting every single kg of mass out of Earth's very deep gravity well is hard, dangerous, and expensive. The only point at which large-scale exploitation or permanent habitation of space will be possible is if the 000's of tons of raw material - metals, water, air - are already UP there. A lunar base and the relative ease with which raw materials could be mass-driven into lunar orbit suddenly opens the possibility of large scale construction of ships and, yes, orbital habitats (which will probably be located nearer the moon than Earth anyway).
Further, one of the most significant barriers to long-term human habitation in space is radiation, which can really only be mitigated by mass - short of lofting even more 000s of tons of matter just to serve as shielding, the Lunar surface (and subterranean bases) provides a perfect redoubt for humans hiding from persistent radiation showers.
I'd finally argue that in terms of space habitation, we need to walk before we run. I'm no engineer, but I suspect that construction of a subterranean lunar colony for 1000 people would be at least an order of magnitude simpler and more fault-tolerant than building a similarly-scaled space-habitat. The only benefit I can see in favor of the space habitat (and it's a biggie) is that theoretically we could build a torus or a large-enough cylinder and spin it for artificial gravity*, something self-evidently not possible with a moon base.
*as much as this is a stable of science fiction, I'm not entirely convinced it's going to serve as interchangeably with actual gravity as portrayed. Coriolis forces, EÃtvÃs effect, all sorts of 'funky' things happen until the diameter and thus RPM of the structure are huge, something like 250m diamter.
Because, to-date, the options offered AREN'T cheaper, they're not universal, and the alternatives seem to all be lowest-common-denominator service.
Let's face it, there's very little that the government does efficiently or well (aside, frankly, from killing people), without tremendous waste, corruption, and loss.
I've worked extremely hard, and I refuse to accept for my family any mitigation in what services I can purchase on their behalf. I'm unimpressed with the medical care I see available in Canada (the most-often considered alternative), and see that the European model is grossly expensive due to rampant freeloading.
In short, I don't believe Universal Health Care will be cheaper or better, so no thanks, I'll keep the current system, flawed as it is.
Er, I'm looking at a magazine rack right now and I see at least 10 US computer magazines that include discs of demos and other content...most are game magazines, perhaps 3/4 of them.
Most of them also offer disk-less versions, because (from my PoV) I don't want spend $10 on (magazine+shovelware) when I can get the same magazine for $6 and download what I want later.
Could have everything to do with US consumer habits - rather than accept the shovelware handed to us, we'd rather fetch what we want, perhaps US consumers are more adept at that.
Could be (as is the point of so many comments) that Europe is just awesomer.
But frankly I like lots of places in the world, and tend to try to avoid qualitative judgments like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of saying "welcome to 3rd-world America", say instead "welcome to prewar America".
Seriously - the ongoing wailing about "the US is falling behind" is getting a little tiresome.
First, lets dispense with US exceptionalism. I love my country, and there are a number of notably special things about its situation geographically, culturally, historically, etc that make it a unique place but Americans are not (and have never been) intrinsically smarter, prettier, faster, stronger, or any way different than any other cross-section of humanity. We have the same proportions of brilliant scientists and racist a-holes as pretty much any other random bunch of 330 million people you'd gather in the world.
Secondly, and more directly to my point - to fear the US 'falling behind' speaks to a staggering level of ignorance of the last 100 years of world history.
In 1912 - a mere 100 years ago - the list of great powers in the world would have been Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria/Hungary, and only marginally, the USA. The US was a largely agrarian country of mostly first-generation immigrants, late industrializing and largely disconnected with Old World affairs.
Yet after two catastrophic continent-spanning conflicts in 25 years (and a not-insignificant influenza epidemic), the three leading European states were prostrate - two from their almost-Pyrrhic victory (UK, France), one lay dismembered and occupied after being pummeled nearly into dust (Germany) - one of the powers entirely ceased to exist (A/H), one emerged from civil war at least superficially changed (Russia - USSR), one emerged from nowhere (Japan), and only one was basically unscathed - the United States.
In the two conflicts total deaths over the span of these listed powers totalled something more than 50 million. US fatalities were approximately 500,000. Possibly more significantly, the wars had completely devastated the industrial, technological, and even cultural infrastructure of the old world, with the subsequent Cold War arguably further contributing - paralyzing truly independent European development for 4+ decades.
The US was in the historically-unique position of being a superpower by default, not by inclination. US armies had not marched all over the world subjugating enemies, conquering colonies, and gathering territory for the motherland. (Certainly the US had engaged in its own efforts in colonialism like other Powers of the day, much of it naked military conquest barely cloaked as 'liberatory' exercises.) But it's clear that even the burgeoning jingoism of the early-20th-century US wasn't posed as a challenge to the Great Powers, except insofar as it was competitive to Old World efforts to colonize and dominate the largely-unexploited Western Hemisphere. Instead, the US was largely aimed at internal development, a patronizing benevolence toward other peoples of the Western Hemisphere, and essentially (even as late as the early 20th-century) a *revolutionary* geopolitical stance vis a vis the Old World states and their efforts to "lock down" most of the undeveloped world into agreed-upon exclusionary spheres of influence.
For emerging in 1945 as the dominant superpower on the planet, it should be astonishing that the US began the 20th century with a second-rate navy and almost no army to speak of.
In fact, as a superpower, one might point out that the US has been particularly clumsy. Certainly, many anti-Americans (and we've generated many of them) would point to the scores of bad US foreign policy decisions as clear signs of its essentially-malignant nature; in point of fact, most if not all were simply colossal blunders born of a government run by unsophisticated and unsubtle men born and raised in a country that was (in their day) fairly irrelevant. Wilson's naivete in insisting on national boundaries in post-WWI Europe almost guaranteed non-self-sufficient states vulnerable to Caesarist populism. Read about the WW2 conferences between Stalin, Churchill, and FDR - FDR, for
" World-consuming general war is an abnormality, no matter how you look at it."
Really? I'd say that interstate conflict between the Great Powers was depressingly frequent (at slightly less than once per century), and it was really only such a conflict that had the chance to - and occasionally did - flare up into general systemwide conflagration.
Going backward from WWI:
1870-71 Franco-Prussian War
1866 - Austro-Prussian War
1792-1815 Napoleonic Wars - general systemwide conflict
1854-55 Crimean War
1756-1763 7 Years' War
1740-48 War of Austrian Succession
1701-1713 War of Spanish Succession
1618-1648 30 years' War - general systemwide conflict
So yes, in a sense we agree - nuclear weapons have prevented great power wars.
I'm not demeaning the tragedy of non-great power conflicts, not at all. But ignoring political correctness, we have to recognize that as tragic as other wars are (dead is dead, whether you're a Tutsi killed by a Hutu, or an American-backed Cuban rebel shot by a Soviet-backed Cuban soldier), no matter how large they can be in terms of dead (Asian conflicts in particular have a depressing habit of experiencing typical numbers of dead by orders of magnitude more than what are usual for the Western world...), these 'peripheral' conflicts CAN'T blossom into system-wide wars unless and until great powers become involved. Thus in the absolute sense, nuclear weapons have capped conflicts into remaining peripheral or proxy wars - and that is certainly an intrinsic good for the system, if certainly the opposite for the unfortunate peoples who now suffer instead of the first-world peoples for their governments' goals.
One might argue persuasively that by removing the threat of imminent personal vulnerability to war from their respective heartlands, nuclear weapons have made such peripheral wars MORE common directly because of the near-impossibility that (for example) Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, or Moscow will ever have to burn because of bad geopolitical choices of their leader. That, in fact, I would largely agree with. It makes Robert E Lee's comment even more prescient: "It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it." Having successfully tucked 'war' out of sight, perhaps our politicians resort far too casually to a tool that they know their loved-ones will never have to face themselves.
I was with you until "(re Nuclear power)...risk of catastrophe overshadows everything, and means that if you try to build and run a reactor everything costs too much because of the dangers. In the long run, nuclear is not feasible..."
That statement ignores the last 30+ years of nuclear power research particularly into failsafe designs like the PBR that can't melt down as long as you have gravity.
Please understand the us DoE is technologically stuck in about 1976.
In the phrase "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
R'lyeh was apparently mistranscribed by Mr Johanssen. Rl'yeh is the southern Pacific. R'lyeh is in fact, the moon.
Hosts of semi- or completely autonomous drones, dumped into systems from hi-speed attacking craft approaching at a significant fraction of C.
Very small, so that the energy they put out is low. Expendable, large numbers of vehicles. Some would act on attack missions (as their dropoff craft would have been detected) but most would sit gathering intel for a long (ie hundreds of hours) span to squirt to stealthed transmission drones out in the Oort cloud.
This intel would supplement long term observations, meaning that for ballistic targets - planets, orbital stations, etc - would be easy targets for attack by high-c mostly-dumb strikes from far outside the system, conceivably even ly away. So the idea of anything bigger being safe is absolutely farcical. In fact it's the converse.
So you end up with mutually-assured destruction, with the person shooting first having a huge advantage. Thus any civilization cognizant of this threat would have failsafe autonomous systems that were assembled (they hope) with enough circumspection and subtlety that they evaded original detection, and thus would survive the first-strike enough to make a retributive strike of their own.
The only way to avoid this would be to attack someone before they even know you exist or are at a tech level where they could effectively reply - a rather brutal level of pragmatic elimination of potential competition one can only hope is beneath a society that's achieved interstellar technology.
And that's the scary bit...when a strategic defense relies on a hope presuming the psychology of an utterly unknown and unknowable foe.
Like our world during the cold war and today, this annihilatory threat would (one hopes) preclude "massive existential space war" ala space operas, meaning that conflict could only ever happen by less-capable proxies, raiding, etc.
Except that people have been doing that calculation, and coming up with similar numbers for 80 years.
Over the last 3 decades, we've consumed more than 3x the worlds TOTAL known reserves in 1976. And today's proven reserves are 2x what they were then.
And in the 60 years before 1945? How many casualties were there of wars then? Let's use half that time - how peaceful was it in just the THIRTY years before 1945?
It was clear that war was growing remarkably in brutality and scope, with the ever-advancing mechanization of destruction, citizen-armies, and the concept of total war.
It was, that is, until 1945.
People react viscerally to nuclear weapons, and can't quite comprehend how the idea of an escalation in lethality could actually lead to less great-power war.
The fact is that the OP is right; the 'wars' you talk about barely even ranked MENTION in the history books before 1945. Proxy wars between greater powers, tribal genocides, border disputes between smaller states - the number of deaths in each of these were large, but their likelihood of conflagrating into world-consuming general war was incredibly low.
The fact is that now wars are fought on a scale that would have made Rudyard Kipling laugh at their triviality. 100 casualties in a day is a massive tragedy for us - at Arras, the casualty rate was over 4000/day for two months.
Yes, nuclear weapons are horrific. That horror has arguably prevented much more loss of life than it ever caused.
It's a failure of democracy in the sense of the incompetents we put in office.
I'm an American, and I think this makes perfect sense. Sure, you'll get some of the "I don't want to do it just because Europe does" nonsense, but in reality most people could see the point, and would probably agree.
But do our politicians spend ANY time doing anything remotely close to logical, reasonable things like this? No, they spend all their time arguing larger issues that will never be resolved.
For that matter, we just passed last year Obamacare which cost $billions (probably $trillions when you calculate the impact/cost to businesses), and will reduce the actual number of people not covered by insurance from about 14 million...to perhaps 8 million.
Really, our system is flat-out broken.
"This is a fascinating phenomenon and nobody has really much idea of whatâ(TM)s going on. What we do know is that itâ(TM)s absolutely essential to not jump to conclusions about whatâ(TM)s going on. Time and time again over the decades past climatologists have been brutally misled by short-term phenomena, by statistics gathered only over a few years. Blips happen for all manner of impenetrable reasons."
Just wondering if this is equally applicable?
I'm not sure, which is more likely:
- partisan drivel intended to smear a politician
- a politician saying one thing to the public and doing another
Truly, I'm not sure which is more likely, they're both pretty much 100%.
Personally, I see drones as being being more likely to be deployed as cargo aircraft, traffic monitoring, environmental monitoring, and ultimately, as passenger aircraft.
Sure, it's possible, even likely that the government will want to deploy domestic drones but frankly we as a populace leave so many electronic breadcrumbs from credit card usage to constant internet connects to carrying gps-cellphones I don't see a huge potential additional intel windfall from drone-format intelligence gathering (for the bulk of the US population).
Since, at the rate we're going, it's going to be that long before we actually venture seriously into space again.
Alternately, there WILL be such videos, but they'll be in Chinese.
...offering why those large volcanoes in particular had this effect.
According to http://www.volcano.si.edu/faq/index.cfm?faq=06 (which admittedly doesn't go back that far) it seems that volcanic activity has been relatively flat over time.
As presented in the blog summary (which may or may represent their actual paper accurately) it looks very much like a case of observer bias - they had a cooling period, and they looked just before it to see if anything happened, which seemed to be these 4 big eruptions. That (alone) can't be the basis for a compelling theory.
Without comparing the larger frequency of eruptions over time, this data is meaningless. If these 4 eruptions were an outlier, then indeed this is interesting. If they weren't (ie if either a) this was a typical frequency of vulcanism over time, and/or b) there were periods of comparable or heavier vulcanism without such observed climate effect) then this theory loses a lot of its traction.
Looking at volcanic megaevents - the HUGE collection of eruptions about 132 million years ago, and again about 30 mya - doesn't seem to present ongoing climatological effects, but then the Little Ice Age phase is so short (centuries) it wouldn't really even be a blip on a paleoclimatological chart.
Was there ever any compromise on their drilling procedure?
My understanding was that the Russians were using a method that was likely to cause contamination, despite pleas by western agencies for them to either a) hold off until better tech was developed or b) funding was established to allow them to use (donated) already-developed tech from the west that would be less contaminating?
I'd guess since this is happening roughly according to their original schedule, the answer is "no" which would be tragic.
Or, it's brilliant.
Let's say Anon managed to through some one-time gap (ie a sympathetic insider, perhaps) managed to get the login details to this one conference. It's meaningless, because they can't repeat the success.
However, if they leak it:
- heads roll at the FBI
- everyone's walking on eggshells because of management fury
- everyone's required to use full-secure protocols and resources for the stupidest trivial conversations
- FBI still doesn't know who leaked it, so begins witchhunt which consumes resources, and makes everyone nervous.
I think it's probably a one-off, parlayed into a fairly clever bit of system-attack.
You know, like a single coordinated unrepeatable multiplane hijacking could theoretically cause an entire country to be consumed by paroxysms of paranoia for more than a decade, leading to absurd legislation, efficiency costs for hundreds of millions of people, as well as actual TRILLIONS of dollars of waste.
Right?
Complaints about this will NEVER MATTER until it impacts the bottom line.
STOP BUYING UBI GAMES.
Unless and until publishers see a recognizable impact on their sales that they can attribute to repressive DRM, they won't stop.
And remember, a lot of these guys BELIEVE the bullshit line about every pirated game is a "lost sale" so the negative impact of DRM would have to be a pretty massive number.
Baseless, reactionary dogmatic negativity is no more inherently valid than baseless, reactionary dogmatic patriotism. (shrug)
Someone slobbering senseless 'rah rah America' is brainless.
Someone slobbering senseless 'i hate America' is EQUALLY brainless.
"The White House has issued a statement in which they refuse to comment on the petition to investigate Chris Dodd for bribery from the MPAA to pass legislation. The reason given: 'because it requests a specific law enforcement action."
Isn't the president the EXECUTIVE branch?
From Whitehouse.gov: "...The President is responsible for implementing and enforcing the laws written by Congress..."
Yes, we're requesting a law enforcement action. That's (essentially) the Executive's job. You know...the Justice Dept, the FBI, ATF, all those guys?
"Frankly, I will be glad. The USA as an idea has failed its people and I'm tired of the US's enforced exported culture. It is vile."
I'm not sure where you're writing from but I'm not sure that - if there was a US civil war - that anyone would be "glad". A civil war within the USA with 330 million people would be bad enough. A civil war splitting the core of the only global superpower would drag in every other government on the planet, and quickly spread, even setting aside thermonuclear weapons.
No, it's ironic that you act all dismayed at the vitriol (as well as exhibit some nice classic US hatred "enforced exported culture" - what bullshit is that?) yet the idea of a conflict in which hundreds of thousands may die as something that makes you "glad". What are the words for "pot", "kettle", and "black" in your native tongue?
That said, I think the fear/delicious anticipation of the US falling into civil war is silly. The only thing that's changed is that the dirty laundry of US politics is not only more visible than ever, it's enhanced and highlighted by the need to support a 24-hour news cycle. The bitterness, divisiveness, etc. is all pretty much exactly the same as its always been; except now that hardcore leftist senator and hardcore rightist senator can't so easily come to a 'backroom deal' anymore, as government is now under the 24-hour baleful eye of video cameras. Politicians duelled to the DEATH in the 19th century. For that matter, we HAVE been through a *civil war* so its rather stupid to claim that the current political climate is "the most bitter ever". It simply isn't.
Crime is falling, violence is falling, hard drug use is falling. The language isn't more divisive (the only way you could even say that is sheer ignorance), it's just no longer monopolized through the channels of media - now everyone gets to talk.
The police aren't militarized, ethnic hatred is overblown (see above; you did notice that we have a BLACK president, elected by a popular majority, right?), extreme paranoia (huh?), social chaos (huh? the "OWP" movement was idle rich kids who wanted to be 'meaningful' like their co-opted former-hippy parents), endless multiple wars (again, could only be said out of ignorance: there have always been 'little wars' throughout US history and that of any Great Power), extremes of poverty/wealth (indeed; our "poor" live in conditions envied by the bulk of middle-class people across the world), and "perverse legal and ethical injustice" is just weasel words for "I disagree with your choices".
So no, evanism is just another bitter sidebencher cheering the atmosphere he claims to see as it validates and confirms his built-in hatreds.
From TFA: "And yet, we must never forget that our causal beliefs are defined by their limitations. For too long, we've pretended that the old problem of causality can be cured by our shiny new knowledge. If only we devote more resources to research or dissect the system at a more fundamental level or search for ever more subtle correlations, we can discover how it all works. But a cause is not a fact, and it never will be; the things we can see will always be bracketed by what we cannot. And this is why, even when we know everything about everything, we'll still be telling stories about why it happened. It's mystery all the way down."
Rationality has provided us a magnificent method to explain many, many things, but one might sardonically note that the rest of it is pretty much a description of the reason for religion.
Like Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise, rationality is magnificent for everything until it reaches its limits*...for everything else there's faith.
*Lest I be declared some glassy-eyed evangelical luddite, like the universe, these limits can expand infinitely - which also never means that there isn't something on the other side.
...who are so deeply offended by the use of "their" music by the "wrong" people:
If you sell your song to agents/distributors who you legally empower to pimp that music to be used as theme music in movies, in Muzak versions in elevators, and in waiting rooms, don't be surprised that they ALSO pimp that music to political organizations that are offering decent $$.
In fact, unless you have a rider in your contract that allows you some special control over said distribution and the right to nay-say certain clients for whatever reason (you don't like their business, their politics, the color of their hair) then you haven't got shit legal basis for your suit and can pretty much fuck off.
- The people that pay you.
A few points occur to me:
1_ ...how $25 million in repairs is "beyond economical repair" on a $240 million plane? If I have a $20,000 car that's in an accident, it's not uncommon to have $2000 in repairs...that's hardly "totalled".
2. Now, looking at the pictures, that's pretty serious...but then it's more than $25 million in damage.
3. the E8 is a converted 707...didn't they stop building those in the 1970s? If this is a 30 year old airframe (at best) then either that damage is $25 million or the plane is worth less than $240 million today.
4. Finally, as I understand it this damage was done by a subcontractor. When I use subcontractors, they have liability insurance to cover the systems they're working on, plus potential liabilities. Doesn't the US government require AT LEAST such protections when farming out work to contractors?
By the way, I'd like to further remind the Air Force that this is a COMBAT aircraft. Granted, it's not supposed to be in dogfights or shot at, but this is a piece of military equipment, maintained in difficult conditions/circumstances by relatively inexperienced crew (for example an aircraft carrier's crew largely is swapped out about every 18-36 months). That seems incompatible with its evident fragility.
I entirely disagree.
The idea of any significant exploitation of space without a base on the moon is deeply flawed, on simple economics (until we have a space elevator, anyway).
The fact is that lofting every single kg of mass out of Earth's very deep gravity well is hard, dangerous, and expensive. The only point at which large-scale exploitation or permanent habitation of space will be possible is if the 000's of tons of raw material - metals, water, air - are already UP there. A lunar base and the relative ease with which raw materials could be mass-driven into lunar orbit suddenly opens the possibility of large scale construction of ships and, yes, orbital habitats (which will probably be located nearer the moon than Earth anyway).
Further, one of the most significant barriers to long-term human habitation in space is radiation, which can really only be mitigated by mass - short of lofting even more 000s of tons of matter just to serve as shielding, the Lunar surface (and subterranean bases) provides a perfect redoubt for humans hiding from persistent radiation showers.
I'd finally argue that in terms of space habitation, we need to walk before we run. I'm no engineer, but I suspect that construction of a subterranean lunar colony for 1000 people would be at least an order of magnitude simpler and more fault-tolerant than building a similarly-scaled space-habitat. The only benefit I can see in favor of the space habitat (and it's a biggie) is that theoretically we could build a torus or a large-enough cylinder and spin it for artificial gravity*, something self-evidently not possible with a moon base.
*as much as this is a stable of science fiction, I'm not entirely convinced it's going to serve as interchangeably with actual gravity as portrayed. Coriolis forces, EÃtvÃs effect, all sorts of 'funky' things happen until the diameter and thus RPM of the structure are huge, something like 250m diamter.
Because, to-date, the options offered AREN'T cheaper, they're not universal, and the alternatives seem to all be lowest-common-denominator service.
Let's face it, there's very little that the government does efficiently or well (aside, frankly, from killing people), without tremendous waste, corruption, and loss.
I've worked extremely hard, and I refuse to accept for my family any mitigation in what services I can purchase on their behalf. I'm unimpressed with the medical care I see available in Canada (the most-often considered alternative), and see that the European model is grossly expensive due to rampant freeloading.
In short, I don't believe Universal Health Care will be cheaper or better, so no thanks, I'll keep the current system, flawed as it is.
Er, I'm looking at a magazine rack right now and I see at least 10 US computer magazines that include discs of demos and other content...most are game magazines, perhaps 3/4 of them.
Most of them also offer disk-less versions, because (from my PoV) I don't want spend $10 on (magazine+shovelware) when I can get the same magazine for $6 and download what I want later.
Could have everything to do with US consumer habits - rather than accept the shovelware handed to us, we'd rather fetch what we want, perhaps US consumers are more adept at that.
Could be (as is the point of so many comments) that Europe is just awesomer.
But frankly I like lots of places in the world, and tend to try to avoid qualitative judgments like this.