"First, the body was buried at sea, according to the US military, which means there's no proof he's actually dead. " Fact is, people still vehemently deny we went to the moon. It's inarguable that even if they'd had an AL JAZZERA camera team rolling with them, filming everything, and keeping the camera on OBL's face/body from the moment he was spotted, to his killing, to the dragging of his corpse onto a ship and dumping into the sea...conspiracy theorists would STILL question it. Forever. And produce reams of evidence "proving" he's still alive.
"Second, I guarantee that within two days a new bin Laden tape will be released. True. See my point above. Personally, I thought he'd been dead for years and this already was going on. I guess, by some people's standards, I may still be right! LOL
"Third, while there is potent symbolism for the West in killing bin Laden, keep in mind that he headed an organization which advocated suicide bombing as a tactic. Bin Laden's death is going to make him a martyr in the world of radical Islamic terror." So wait, they haven't ALREADY been desperately trying to attack the west for the past 10 (or actually, 18) years? Not sure how that's going to change. If they get a little more suicidal, that's great. Maybe we can outstrip their birthrate.
"Fourth, to the West, this looks like the USA is still the baddest motherfucker around, and we always get our man. To people who live in Pakistan, the Middle East, and other, non-Western places, this looks like the only superpower in the world spent ten years and billions of dollars to kill one guy who pissed it off, in a campaign culminating in the use of clandestine intelligence and spec ops, in someone else's country. How's that for international diplomacy?" If there's one place in the world that appreciates an implacable and unreasoning sense of vengeance, it's the MidEast. Hell, that's possibly the only part of our foreign policy they GET..
Actually no. *We* know the CIA are a bunch of boobs, about as sneaky as a camel in a chador, and as insightful as squirrels on a sugar-jag. (OK, I couldn't think of a better example of something the opposite of insightful...)
I mean, these guys MISSED the fall of the Soviet Union....you know, the enemy they'd been fixated on for FORTY years? Against whom our entire intelligence machinery was directed, to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars since WW2? Missed the fall of the Shah. They couldn't kill a tinpot Cuban dictator. Couldn't even pull off a simple arms-for-hostages trade in the 1980s without everybody finding out, and this was before the internet! And don't even get me STARTED on the Bay of Pigs.
No, *we* know they're frightfully incompetent.
However, the picture is different from the Mid East (and chunks of Latin America). There, you need to understand that every little thing that goes wrong is blamed on the CIA by the (government run) papers, TV, and radio. No milk in the market? Clearly an American CIA plot to starve and stunt our children. Fearless leader had your brother in law thrown in jail? He only did it because the CIA and the American government is forcing him to do so. Your paycheck is worthless due to 1000% inflation? CIA. CIA. CIA.
Certainly, the people in these areas aren't stupid, they understand that they're reading and hearing propoganda, but this has been a tocsin rung since 1950 (first whispered by the Soviets, of course) but since grown a life of its own.
Now couple that multigenerational role as bogeymen under every pillow, to the experience of today's insurgents, who (if they live) come home in pieces, telling momma and poppa and family about cars blowing up in the middle of the desert without anyone around and no planes in the sky, or conversations recorded when they were whispered 3 levels underground, silent airplanes, soldiers that shoot at impossible ranges in the dark and can sniff out the most careful ambush, and multiply that by the native gullibility of people kept deliberately ignorant by their despotic governements?
Yes, to them the CIA is like a cabal of black wizards of Mordor that can hear anything you say, kill you with a gesture from continents away (ok that's true, although they're more likely to accidentally wipe out a school or bus), and can peer inter your innermost thoughts.
"The biggest casualty will probably be our Constitution.... Bye-bye Bill of Rights."
You know, I'd already composed a long, complicated sarcastic screed, mocking your silly FUD, but I thought it's not worth the time to finish. The fact is that our Bill of Rights is at least as secure as it was the day it was written. The only way you could even make such a statement would be if you never lived in an Eastern Block country pre-1990, or China today.
Having just traveled by air, I'll grant you that getting my balls felt up inexpertly was perhaps a touch unreasonable.* So I'll concede the 4th amendment, sure. And the 10th has been vanishing since FDR, how is that Bush's fault?
*then again, let my pay $10 for some privacy and someone who'll do a good job, and then it's worth the time. Hell, it's a better way to spend my $$ than some stupid arbitrary baggage fee.
In a perfect world, sure, I'm certain that the US gov't would have preferred to grab him alive, milk him dry for intel, and then have him found guilty in a trial and executed.
However: - his capture would simply have resulted in an uncountable number of abductions of US citizens, mostly innocents, in an effort to trade them for his release. How would YOU like to have been the American president faced with telling Mr and Mrs Smith that their little Johnny or Joanna was just BEHEADED on Al-Jazeera when you could have traded this single, nearly-irrelevant, stinky old man for them? - further, his capture would have opened up a whole new round of deep hand-wringing about how we 'dare' treat him. Could we dare make him uncomfortable, or would that be "inhumane"? Is forcing him to hear Backstreet Boyz for 24 hours a day cruel and/unusual? - his trial would quite likely have been a mockery of grandstanding and posturing - offering him a world stage he's been too afraid to step up to for the last 10 years. - finally, in reality, what are the odds that he really was going to EVER be captured? He was not a luxury-loving sybarite like Saddam Hussein, whose narcissism made it likely that - at the end - he wouldn't take himself out. Osama was a different creature, having fought in his 20s with the mujahedeen, and having walked AWAY from wealth and luxury in favor of hardship in pursuit of a 'cause'. Seriously, what is the real likelihood that he could have been so totally surprised and immobilized in less than the 0.5 seconds it would have taken him to put a bullet through the roof of his own mouth?
As I mentioned above, organizationally he's probably largely irrelevant; but symbols matter - and his extinction lends credibility to the near-magical capabilities of American intel-gathering amongst the Al-Qaeda faithful, as well as a useful air of implacability to the resolution of the US gov't, even across administrations.
So no, I doubt it was a "choice" by anyone, except OBL himself. Good riddance to him.
This has been a particular chorus in the world of computer games.
Quite literally, the code for some games is sitting forgotten in a drawer somewhere, "property" that will never - ever - be exploited. It's too old to be of any use whatsoever for commercial products, while there is a niche of old-time gamers who would love to port/rewrite/develop it for opensource use. But no, someone "owns" it, and can't give up the idea of squeezing that long-dried-out teat for a few more drops of wealth.
For example, the ancient CRPG Darklands. For a more modern game, I fear for AoC: as a game, at least for the first year, it sucked rocks. But I appreciated the amazing amount of work they'd done building REH's world. Perhaps free-to-play will save it and at least pay the bills, but if it did go dark , I'd desperately hope that the world-as-data would be made available for SOMEONE to use in the future.
I don't think there's been much discussion of China's vulnerability, mainly because their society seems so much less DEPENDENT on tech than the West (particularly the US).
To pick a superficial example: - person A has a top of the line firewall, and orders all their groceries online every other day - person B has a garden and farm animals.
Clearly, person A has far better 'defenses' than person B, but who's really more vulnerable.
Disney not joining is meaningless and unsurprising. Disney is nearly Luddite when it comes to distribution technologies - they refuse EVERYTHING at first, and are only dragged in later when the cash pile becomes too big to ignore.
DIVX (the original crappy planned-expiring rental disc technology, not the codec) Didn't they even refuse to put their films on DVD at first, out of piracy fears?
The 'math' on aliens doesn't really work out in favor of them being anything we can comprehend, much less communicate with, even if you believe as I do that the existence of alien races is almost a mathematical certainty.
Here goes: Age of universe, something around 14 gy (gigayears). Age of earth, around 4.5 gy. (Now, it's reasonably certain that the solar system is actually at least 'round 2' in this neighborhood - due to the presence of trans-iron elements, etc. At least one generation of stars in the area coalesced, evolved, and exploded spewing these deep stellar fusion products across the area. Given the known distribution of these heavy elements, it's likely that the pre-solar-system planetary nebula was created by both ejecta from red giants and multiple erupting giant stars. Giant stars have extremely short life spans, on the order of 100 megayears, so let's consider generously that process took about 1 gy in total.) So...from nothing to us = ~5.5gy. Let's assume our evolutionary track and our star are entirely average. It's taken our planet 5.5gy to produce a space-traveling, sentient species. (No, we're not there yet, but probably less that 500 years, so bear with me.) We as recognizable members of our species have been around perhaps 2 my.
Assuming any other suitable system (and I'd guess that there are hundreds of millions) could do the same, and further assume that the early universe was simply uninhabitable for whatever reason for at least 4 gy. That means any other species is going to be anywhere on the scale of evolution, from say (us minus 2 my) to (us+4 gy). Think about that scale.
If it were represented by a 2 meter stick, all of human existence (2my) is the first millimeter.
You tell me, are we LIKELY to run into a species in the first millimeter of that stick (ie find some species grubbing around as cavemen, once we start exploring)? What are the odds that we brush up against a civilization only a few thousand years more advanced (ie classic "spaceships" and recognizable "explorers", etc) - say something like the next 1 or 2 nanometers on that 2 meter stick?
Or is it far, far, far more likely that other species, on average are likely to be hundreds of millions, or billions of years more advanced than us? Then ask yourself - could we see them, no matter how hard we tried, if they didn't want us to? A *BILLION* years more advanced, presumably with the increasing rate of technological development that we see here on Earth? Assuming they would even deign to watch us, like we occasionally stop and are amused at ants working to busily on the sidewalk...do ants have any idea they're being observed? Could they even comprehend us? They truly would be gods, and (I imagine, by their standards although human logic almost certainly doesn't apply) it would have to be one seriously farked-up individual of theirs that would actually try to relate to we ants. Hell, from that perspective, things we take to be absolutely natural phenomena like volcanoes and earthquakes, could easily be a bored alien adolescent screwing with us.
So that's my case - the likelihood of us encountering an alien race of only a "little" more advanced tech is vanishingly, almost impossibly small. The only caveat would be that this immediate stellar neighborhood, say 100ly radius, almost certainly all an identical 'environment', and the chance of parallel evolution occurring close in time might be even an order of magnitude higher than the 'open' universe in general. But that's an order of magnitude on a very, very small number to start.
The fact is that the US has already 'officially' adopted the metric system. In many ways, the metric system is more convenient.
However, the US populace is (or at least used to be) far less likely than others to do something simply "because the government says so". Beyond that, there's simple mulish contrariness.
What metric 'evangelists' can't seem to accept is that there ARE times and places where the Imperial system is useful, and even handier to use than metric. Metric is decimal, which makes up and down conversion many, many times easier, as well as far simpler to use with computers/calculators. Temperatures? Let's remember that Celsius, for example, started with zero as boiling and 100 was freezing. If we really want a non-subjective, science-based system, Kelvin would by far be the right choice. Further, I'd argue that Fahrenheit is again, more humanly useful....0-100 is a much more intuitive measure of the range of typical human temperature experience, and besides, in normal daily life does the freezing/boiling point of perfectly distilled water matter that much? I don't encounter pristine water all that often.
But in HUMAN terms, most people on a daily basis don't commonly need to deal in hundredths or thousandths of anything. It's hard to remember, but for the bulk of human history, precision didn't necessarily outweigh utility. Further, the units of measure of the metric system are as grossly arbitrary as the imperial system. Sure, the meter has been rationalized down to the distance light travels in an (arbitrary) amount of time, etc. But measuring out a room without a tapemeasure, I bet I can get closer to the footage than you can to the square meters - I just use my feet.
Time is a good example. If decimalization is so precious, why not go to a day with 100 time units, each 100 subunits long? It would certainly ease calculation and increase precision - how absurd is it that we're using a, what, ancient Sumerian/Babylonian base-12 system? I'm being facetious of course - we use it because it WORKS. Why replace a system that works?
And ultimately that's my point. First - the segments of the US that find it useful, has moved to the metric system - science, military, etc. Second - it's needless busybodyness for someone to look over your shoulder to tell you how to live your life. It's nearly parallel for smarmy Euros to assert that the US "should" switch, mainly because it would be easier for them. Tough noogies. Third - and this is entirely a utilitarian argument - one might look at the growth of the US economy and dominance of the US culturally, and objectively assert that the Imperial system is "clearly" more conducive to economic success. I think that'd be a dumb argument, but it's out there.
All of them are re: the recipe for the GERMANSâ(TM) invisible ink in WWI (samples, methods for detecting, etc.). What ârecent advancement in techâ(TM) suddenly made this no longer secret?
Notice that theyâ(TM)re stamped âoeExempt from automatic declassificationâ in 1978. In 1999, the agency rejected a Freedom of Information Act request to release the six documents, asserting that doing so âoecould be expected to damage the national security.â Really?
I recognize as well as anyone the need for secret documents staying secret, but someone needs to be bitch-slapped for keeping âoelemon juice/vinegar secret inkâ recipe almost perpetually secret (yes, one of them the primary ingredient is acetic acid). Thatâ(TM)s just silly.
I can't find anything in any of those links that describes technical details of Whitespace wifi? Max bandwidth? Positives/Negatives? The Wiki article talks about a suit filed by broadcasters against the FCC for licensing this tech, as they assert devices in these frequencies cause interference, but says a result was expected Feb 2011...with no update.
....seriously tho, it sure looks like Toshiba "won" the format war by taking the fat payout from Sony.
Except for me, of course, I was one of the morons that bought a Toshiba HD-A3 dvd player. It's a nice upsampling DVD player, but with HD being dead it's overqualified for what it does... (what did netflix DO with all their HD loaners?)
Not as a justification but an honest question - aren't ideologically-driven liberals EXACTLY THE SAME?
And yes, I'd say that if you're a science magazine not simply discussing the scientific merits of one argument or another, you're veering dangerously close to losing your objectivity. I can't recall seeing similar excoriation of the Obama administration in SciAm, for their - burying of the report undermining the case for Cap and Trade - deliberately blurring the lines in oreports between peer-reviewed findings and the Secretary's comments, making it seem like the Secretary's recommenation (for a moratorium on offshore drilling) had been peer-reviewed - PRECISELY the same method (& White House explanation) that the Bush White House had used to edit Climate reports.
I'm sure their lack of outrage is just coincidence, right?
Read their Bjorn Lomborg piece - it's at least a dozen pages of the most ad-hominem, puerile garbage that wouldn't even manage to make a persuasive argument on a no-login forum, much less pass for thoughtful discourse in a monologue-medium like a magazine.
Of course, this was meant to be funny, but the fact is that SciAm long since stopped being a "science" magazine, and turned into an advocacy magazine.
From slash articles on Bjorn Lomborg, to umpteen editorials and thinly-designed hit pieces on the Bush Administration's politicization of science data, SciAm abandoned objectivity entirely. Certainly, they'd always had a vaguely leftish tilt, taking an obvious anti-Reagan stance in the 1980s, but the magazine nevertheless maintained SOME credibility at that time by not pushing their politics too far.
The problem with today's level of technology is that it's beyond simple understanding. Either you listen to experts who have their own biases and politics (ala FOX or CNN), or you try to grab as much raw data as possible - only possible thanks to the internet - and logically try to parse it yourself, despite the knowledge that you may not personally have the training or experience or both needed to interpret it correctly.
I'm not sure "mass produce" in this context means the Nike version: hordes of semi-literate unskilled laborers slaving for nearly nothing in wages.
I'd suspect that in this context, it means simply engineering a multipurpose design that's as modular as possible (ie the same systems for multiple stages), and not trying to re-invent a uniquely specialized and perfect wheel each time they need one.
In the wake of the recent events in Japan, I've been reviewing serious information on radiation dosage and effects such as that at http://mitnse.com/.
That's gotten me to think further on a rarely-mentioned impact on astronaut health, and that's the "risk" of persistently higher levels of radiation - it seems that in actuality persistently higher radiation exposures (up to 200x normal background levels, for example) actually INCREASE human health (to a point, obviously), and extend lifespan.
(Notice no mention of this in popular media accounts of the effects of radiation...http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/16/health/la-he-japan-quake-radiation-20110316)
I would just find it ironic that if, after so much concern for the health and safety of astronauts in regards to radiation, that we might find that they are healthier and live longer than we poor terrestrials.
Er, actually no. You're wrong in every fact you tried to present.
1) Budgeted military spending since 2001 is approximately $5 trillion. (About $500b per year). Special appropriations are used for wars and other "unanticipatable" costs - assuming the entirety of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were paid by special appropriations, that's barely $1 trillion since 2001. So in no way were "most" defense expenditures special appropriations. 20% is huge, but in no way "most".
2) A Ponzi scheme is where (according to Wiki) "...A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors...". How is Military spending a fraudulent investment scheme that bilks later investors to pay earlier investors? That doesn't even make sense.
Individual actions can't solve collective problems, but they can prove you're not totally a hypocrite.
It's extremely easy to campaign for collective sacrifices, it's also meaningless when you know that there is no realistic chance of you ever suffering the sacrifice in reality. Voluntarily doing so at least shows for sure that you're not a hypocrite.
"I put my numbers in and it showed that a little over a quarter goes towards defense and military spending (I'm not sure I'm getting my money's worth on that one), and a little under a quarter for health care."
I picked the default distribution for 80k income with 2 kids, fairly typical. $4960 for Social Security $1160 for Medicare $3863 for everything else, incl 1015 for Defense, 938 for Health Care, 846 for Job and Family Security, and everything else under $200.
So out of approx $10k, this makes it easy: 49% for SS 11% for Medicare 38% for everything else.
I'm not sure how that calculates out to "25% for military, 25% for health care" unless you're (ignorantly) only looking at the proportion of your INCOME tax and ignoring the 50% bite of SS, and 11% of medicare.
Considering SS is a Ponzi scheme that I doubt I'll ever see my 'contribution' (LOL), and that of the "Health Care, 846 for Job and Family Security" maybe $100 contribute to the general good, the rest are all intended as income-redistributive. So essentially of the 10k tax burden, the summarizer sees 25% 'wasted' on military. I see 10% spent on military (which is, indeed, probably too high), and 49%+11%+20%=80% as pretty much taken from my pocket to give to people that either couldn't control their reproductive organs, or otherwise make the right choices at various life-crossroads.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your points, but:
"First, the body was buried at sea, according to the US military, which means there's no proof he's actually dead. "
Fact is, people still vehemently deny we went to the moon. It's inarguable that even if they'd had an AL JAZZERA camera team rolling with them, filming everything, and keeping the camera on OBL's face/body from the moment he was spotted, to his killing, to the dragging of his corpse onto a ship and dumping into the sea...conspiracy theorists would STILL question it. Forever. And produce reams of evidence "proving" he's still alive.
"Second, I guarantee that within two days a new bin Laden tape will be released.
True. See my point above. Personally, I thought he'd been dead for years and this already was going on. I guess, by some people's standards, I may still be right! LOL
"Third, while there is potent symbolism for the West in killing bin Laden, keep in mind that he headed an organization which advocated suicide bombing as a tactic. Bin Laden's death is going to make him a martyr in the world of radical Islamic terror."
So wait, they haven't ALREADY been desperately trying to attack the west for the past 10 (or actually, 18) years? Not sure how that's going to change. If they get a little more suicidal, that's great. Maybe we can outstrip their birthrate.
"Fourth, to the West, this looks like the USA is still the baddest motherfucker around, and we always get our man. To people who live in Pakistan, the Middle East, and other, non-Western places, this looks like the only superpower in the world spent ten years and billions of dollars to kill one guy who pissed it off, in a campaign culminating in the use of clandestine intelligence and spec ops, in someone else's country. How's that for international diplomacy?"
If there's one place in the world that appreciates an implacable and unreasoning sense of vengeance, it's the MidEast. Hell, that's possibly the only part of our foreign policy they GET..
Actually no. *We* know the CIA are a bunch of boobs, about as sneaky as a camel in a chador, and as insightful as squirrels on a sugar-jag. (OK, I couldn't think of a better example of something the opposite of insightful...)
I mean, these guys MISSED the fall of the Soviet Union....you know, the enemy they'd been fixated on for FORTY years? Against whom our entire intelligence machinery was directed, to the tune of TRILLIONS of dollars since WW2? Missed the fall of the Shah. They couldn't kill a tinpot Cuban dictator. Couldn't even pull off a simple arms-for-hostages trade in the 1980s without everybody finding out, and this was before the internet!
And don't even get me STARTED on the Bay of Pigs.
No, *we* know they're frightfully incompetent.
However, the picture is different from the Mid East (and chunks of Latin America). There, you need to understand that every little thing that goes wrong is blamed on the CIA by the (government run) papers, TV, and radio. No milk in the market? Clearly an American CIA plot to starve and stunt our children. Fearless leader had your brother in law thrown in jail? He only did it because the CIA and the American government is forcing him to do so. Your paycheck is worthless due to 1000% inflation? CIA. CIA. CIA.
Certainly, the people in these areas aren't stupid, they understand that they're reading and hearing propoganda, but this has been a tocsin rung since 1950 (first whispered by the Soviets, of course) but since grown a life of its own.
Now couple that multigenerational role as bogeymen under every pillow, to the experience of today's insurgents, who (if they live) come home in pieces, telling momma and poppa and family about cars blowing up in the middle of the desert without anyone around and no planes in the sky, or conversations recorded when they were whispered 3 levels underground, silent airplanes, soldiers that shoot at impossible ranges in the dark and can sniff out the most careful ambush, and multiply that by the native gullibility of people kept deliberately ignorant by their despotic governements?
Yes, to them the CIA is like a cabal of black wizards of Mordor that can hear anything you say, kill you with a gesture from continents away (ok that's true, although they're more likely to accidentally wipe out a school or bus), and can peer inter your innermost thoughts.
"The biggest casualty will probably be our Constitution. ... Bye-bye Bill of Rights."
You know, I'd already composed a long, complicated sarcastic screed, mocking your silly FUD, but I thought it's not worth the time to finish. The fact is that our Bill of Rights is at least as secure as it was the day it was written. The only way you could even make such a statement would be if you never lived in an Eastern Block country pre-1990, or China today.
Having just traveled by air, I'll grant you that getting my balls felt up inexpertly was perhaps a touch unreasonable.* So I'll concede the 4th amendment, sure. And the 10th has been vanishing since FDR, how is that Bush's fault?
*then again, let my pay $10 for some privacy and someone who'll do a good job, and then it's worth the time. Hell, it's a better way to spend my $$ than some stupid arbitrary baggage fee.
I'm not sure "choice" is a fair word to use.
In a perfect world, sure, I'm certain that the US gov't would have preferred to grab him alive, milk him dry for intel, and then have him found guilty in a trial and executed.
However:
- his capture would simply have resulted in an uncountable number of abductions of US citizens, mostly innocents, in an effort to trade them for his release. How would YOU like to have been the American president faced with telling Mr and Mrs Smith that their little Johnny or Joanna was just BEHEADED on Al-Jazeera when you could have traded this single, nearly-irrelevant, stinky old man for them?
- further, his capture would have opened up a whole new round of deep hand-wringing about how we 'dare' treat him. Could we dare make him uncomfortable, or would that be "inhumane"? Is forcing him to hear Backstreet Boyz for 24 hours a day cruel and/unusual?
- his trial would quite likely have been a mockery of grandstanding and posturing - offering him a world stage he's been too afraid to step up to for the last 10 years.
- finally, in reality, what are the odds that he really was going to EVER be captured? He was not a luxury-loving sybarite like Saddam Hussein, whose narcissism made it likely that - at the end - he wouldn't take himself out. Osama was a different creature, having fought in his 20s with the mujahedeen, and having walked AWAY from wealth and luxury in favor of hardship in pursuit of a 'cause'. Seriously, what is the real likelihood that he could have been so totally surprised and immobilized in less than the 0.5 seconds it would have taken him to put a bullet through the roof of his own mouth?
As I mentioned above, organizationally he's probably largely irrelevant; but symbols matter - and his extinction lends credibility to the near-magical capabilities of American intel-gathering amongst the Al-Qaeda faithful, as well as a useful air of implacability to the resolution of the US gov't, even across administrations.
So no, I doubt it was a "choice" by anyone, except OBL himself. Good riddance to him.
Blackberry, meet Palm. Palm, could you perhaps slide over on the curb there and make a space for BB to sit down too?
This has been a particular chorus in the world of computer games.
Quite literally, the code for some games is sitting forgotten in a drawer somewhere, "property" that will never - ever - be exploited. It's too old to be of any use whatsoever for commercial products, while there is a niche of old-time gamers who would love to port/rewrite/develop it for opensource use. But no, someone "owns" it, and can't give up the idea of squeezing that long-dried-out teat for a few more drops of wealth.
For example, the ancient CRPG Darklands.
For a more modern game, I fear for AoC: as a game, at least for the first year, it sucked rocks. But I appreciated the amazing amount of work they'd done building REH's world. Perhaps free-to-play will save it and at least pay the bills, but if it did go dark , I'd desperately hope that the world-as-data would be made available for SOMEONE to use in the future.
I don't think there's been much discussion of China's vulnerability, mainly because their society seems so much less DEPENDENT on tech than the West (particularly the US).
To pick a superficial example:
- person A has a top of the line firewall, and orders all their groceries online every other day
- person B has a garden and farm animals.
Clearly, person A has far better 'defenses' than person B, but who's really more vulnerable.
They DO realize that really, to build a space station, it has to be in SPACE - you know, where people can see it?
Not, for example, in a pool.
I'm just sayin'.
Sure, late in the DIVX game (while Disney refused to release on DVD), Disney conceded and joined DIVX as a 'least worst' option.
Disney not joining is meaningless and unsurprising.
Disney is nearly Luddite when it comes to distribution technologies - they refuse EVERYTHING at first, and are only dragged in later when the cash pile becomes too big to ignore.
DIVX (the original crappy planned-expiring rental disc technology, not the codec)
Didn't they even refuse to put their films on DVD at first, out of piracy fears?
Paradigm-shifting forecasts notwithstanding, maybe you're just bone-stupid relying on someone else's storage to save your data?
Seriously, the 'cloud' storage IS a decent idea for data that needs to be accessed frequently from widely different locations.
But to rely on it (as some as suggested) as a primary storage point?
AHAHAHAHAAHHAAH. You're just plain dumb.
Not sure what your point is? They mean the same thing, and can be used interchangably...I'm sorry if that confused you.
If you need an explanation: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+a+gigayear
The 'math' on aliens doesn't really work out in favor of them being anything we can comprehend, much less communicate with, even if you believe as I do that the existence of alien races is almost a mathematical certainty.
Here goes:
Age of universe, something around 14 gy (gigayears).
Age of earth, around 4.5 gy.
(Now, it's reasonably certain that the solar system is actually at least 'round 2' in this neighborhood - due to the presence of trans-iron elements, etc. At least one generation of stars in the area coalesced, evolved, and exploded spewing these deep stellar fusion products across the area. Given the known distribution of these heavy elements, it's likely that the pre-solar-system planetary nebula was created by both ejecta from red giants and multiple erupting giant stars. Giant stars have extremely short life spans, on the order of 100 megayears, so let's consider generously that process took about 1 gy in total.)
So...from nothing to us = ~5.5gy.
Let's assume our evolutionary track and our star are entirely average.
It's taken our planet 5.5gy to produce a space-traveling, sentient species. (No, we're not there yet, but probably less that 500 years, so bear with me.) We as recognizable members of our species have been around perhaps 2 my.
Assuming any other suitable system (and I'd guess that there are hundreds of millions) could do the same, and further assume that the early universe was simply uninhabitable for whatever reason for at least 4 gy. That means any other species is going to be anywhere on the scale of evolution, from say (us minus 2 my) to (us+4 gy). Think about that scale.
If it were represented by a 2 meter stick, all of human existence (2my) is the first millimeter.
You tell me, are we LIKELY to run into a species in the first millimeter of that stick (ie find some species grubbing around as cavemen, once we start exploring)? What are the odds that we brush up against a civilization only a few thousand years more advanced (ie classic "spaceships" and recognizable "explorers", etc) - say something like the next 1 or 2 nanometers on that 2 meter stick?
Or is it far, far, far more likely that other species, on average are likely to be hundreds of millions, or billions of years more advanced than us? Then ask yourself - could we see them, no matter how hard we tried, if they didn't want us to? A *BILLION* years more advanced, presumably with the increasing rate of technological development that we see here on Earth? Assuming they would even deign to watch us, like we occasionally stop and are amused at ants working to busily on the sidewalk...do ants have any idea they're being observed? Could they even comprehend us? They truly would be gods, and (I imagine, by their standards although human logic almost certainly doesn't apply) it would have to be one seriously farked-up individual of theirs that would actually try to relate to we ants. Hell, from that perspective, things we take to be absolutely natural phenomena like volcanoes and earthquakes, could easily be a bored alien adolescent screwing with us.
So that's my case - the likelihood of us encountering an alien race of only a "little" more advanced tech is vanishingly, almost impossibly small. The only caveat would be that this immediate stellar neighborhood, say 100ly radius, almost certainly all an identical 'environment', and the chance of parallel evolution occurring close in time might be even an order of magnitude higher than the 'open' universe in general. But that's an order of magnitude on a very, very small number to start.
The fact is that the US has already 'officially' adopted the metric system.
In many ways, the metric system is more convenient.
However, the US populace is (or at least used to be) far less likely than others to do something simply "because the government says so". Beyond that, there's simple mulish contrariness.
What metric 'evangelists' can't seem to accept is that there ARE times and places where the Imperial system is useful, and even handier to use than metric. Metric is decimal, which makes up and down conversion many, many times easier, as well as far simpler to use with computers/calculators. Temperatures? Let's remember that Celsius, for example, started with zero as boiling and 100 was freezing. If we really want a non-subjective, science-based system, Kelvin would by far be the right choice. Further, I'd argue that Fahrenheit is again, more humanly useful....0-100 is a much more intuitive measure of the range of typical human temperature experience, and besides, in normal daily life does the freezing/boiling point of perfectly distilled water matter that much? I don't encounter pristine water all that often.
But in HUMAN terms, most people on a daily basis don't commonly need to deal in hundredths or thousandths of anything. It's hard to remember, but for the bulk of human history, precision didn't necessarily outweigh utility. Further, the units of measure of the metric system are as grossly arbitrary as the imperial system. Sure, the meter has been rationalized down to the distance light travels in an (arbitrary) amount of time, etc. But measuring out a room without a tapemeasure, I bet I can get closer to the footage than you can to the square meters - I just use my feet.
Time is a good example. If decimalization is so precious, why not go to a day with 100 time units, each 100 subunits long? It would certainly ease calculation and increase precision - how absurd is it that we're using a, what, ancient Sumerian/Babylonian base-12 system? I'm being facetious of course - we use it because it WORKS. Why replace a system that works?
And ultimately that's my point.
First - the segments of the US that find it useful, has moved to the metric system - science, military, etc.
Second - it's needless busybodyness for someone to look over your shoulder to tell you how to live your life. It's nearly parallel for smarmy Euros to assert that the US "should" switch, mainly because it would be easier for them. Tough noogies.
Third - and this is entirely a utilitarian argument - one might look at the growth of the US economy and dominance of the US culturally, and objectively assert that the Imperial system is "clearly" more conducive to economic success. I think that'd be a dumb argument, but it's out there.
All of them are re: the recipe for the GERMANSâ(TM) invisible ink in WWI (samples, methods for detecting, etc.). What ârecent advancement in techâ(TM) suddenly made this no longer secret?
Notice that theyâ(TM)re stamped âoeExempt from automatic declassificationâ in 1978. In 1999, the agency rejected a Freedom of Information Act request to release the six documents, asserting that doing so âoecould be expected to damage the national security.â Really?
I recognize as well as anyone the need for secret documents staying secret, but someone needs to be bitch-slapped for keeping âoelemon juice/vinegar secret inkâ recipe almost perpetually secret (yes, one of them the primary ingredient is acetic acid). Thatâ(TM)s just silly.
I can't find anything in any of those links that describes technical details of Whitespace wifi? Max bandwidth? Positives/Negatives? The Wiki article talks about a suit filed by broadcasters against the FCC for licensing this tech, as they assert devices in these frequencies cause interference, but says a result was expected Feb 2011...with no update.
Damn right I know my neighborhood better.
Yes, google maps. I am certain that my ex girlfriend lives on Whore Avenue.
And my boss does happen to live on Penis Street.
....seriously tho, it sure looks like Toshiba "won" the format war by taking the fat payout from Sony.
Except for me, of course, I was one of the morons that bought a Toshiba HD-A3 dvd player. It's a nice upsampling DVD player, but with HD being dead it's overqualified for what it does... (what did netflix DO with all their HD loaners?)
Not as a justification but an honest question - aren't ideologically-driven liberals EXACTLY THE SAME?
And yes, I'd say that if you're a science magazine not simply discussing the scientific merits of one argument or another, you're veering dangerously close to losing your objectivity. I can't recall seeing similar excoriation of the Obama administration in SciAm, for their
- burying of the report undermining the case for Cap and Trade
- deliberately blurring the lines in oreports between peer-reviewed findings and the Secretary's comments, making it seem like the Secretary's recommenation (for a moratorium on offshore drilling) had been peer-reviewed - PRECISELY the same method (& White House explanation) that the Bush White House had used to edit Climate reports.
I'm sure their lack of outrage is just coincidence, right?
Read their Bjorn Lomborg piece - it's at least a dozen pages of the most ad-hominem, puerile garbage that wouldn't even manage to make a persuasive argument on a no-login forum, much less pass for thoughtful discourse in a monologue-medium like a magazine.
Of course, this was meant to be funny, but the fact is that SciAm long since stopped being a "science" magazine, and turned into an advocacy magazine.
From slash articles on Bjorn Lomborg, to umpteen editorials and thinly-designed hit pieces on the Bush Administration's politicization of science data, SciAm abandoned objectivity entirely. Certainly, they'd always had a vaguely leftish tilt, taking an obvious anti-Reagan stance in the 1980s, but the magazine nevertheless maintained SOME credibility at that time by not pushing their politics too far.
The problem with today's level of technology is that it's beyond simple understanding.
Either you listen to experts who have their own biases and politics (ala FOX or CNN), or you try to grab as much raw data as possible - only possible thanks to the internet - and logically try to parse it yourself, despite the knowledge that you may not personally have the training or experience or both needed to interpret it correctly.
Yes, a strong case has been made for AGW (weakened, IMO by the grandstanding and uncritical adulation of Al Gore, frankly). But AGW != GW, and as much as I've seen points that are persuasive, I've seen a lot of goalpost shifting and smoke and mirrors, more akin to televangelism than to science.
Several months ago, in discussing this subject, I found a list of more than 160 serious climate scientists that objected to AGW - http://www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/ - interestingly, that site no longer comes up? Google cache at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QW7i-7So08MJ:www.copenhagenclimatechallenge.org/+copenhagen+climate+challenge&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com
Strange? Hard to decide?
I'm not sure "mass produce" in this context means the Nike version: hordes of semi-literate unskilled laborers slaving for nearly nothing in wages.
I'd suspect that in this context, it means simply engineering a multipurpose design that's as modular as possible (ie the same systems for multiple stages), and not trying to re-invent a uniquely specialized and perfect wheel each time they need one.
In the wake of the recent events in Japan, I've been reviewing serious information on radiation dosage and effects such as that at http://mitnse.com/.
That's gotten me to think further on a rarely-mentioned impact on astronaut health, and that's the "risk" of persistently higher levels of radiation - it seems that in actuality persistently higher radiation exposures (up to 200x normal background levels, for example) actually INCREASE human health (to a point, obviously), and extend lifespan.
(Notice no mention of this in popular media accounts of the effects of radiation...http://articles.latimes.com/2011/mar/16/health/la-he-japan-quake-radiation-20110316)
I would just find it ironic that if, after so much concern for the health and safety of astronauts in regards to radiation, that we might find that they are healthier and live longer than we poor terrestrials.
Er, actually no. You're wrong in every fact you tried to present.
1) Budgeted military spending since 2001 is approximately $5 trillion. (About $500b per year). Special appropriations are used for wars and other "unanticipatable" costs - assuming the entirety of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were paid by special appropriations, that's barely $1 trillion since 2001. So in no way were "most" defense expenditures special appropriations. 20% is huge, but in no way "most".
2) A Ponzi scheme is where (according to Wiki) "...A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors, not from any actual profit earned by the organization, but from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors...". How is Military spending a fraudulent investment scheme that bilks later investors to pay earlier investors? That doesn't even make sense.
Individual actions can't solve collective problems, but they can prove you're not totally a hypocrite.
It's extremely easy to campaign for collective sacrifices, it's also meaningless when you know that there is no realistic chance of you ever suffering the sacrifice in reality.
Voluntarily doing so at least shows for sure that you're not a hypocrite.
"I put my numbers in and it showed that a little over a quarter goes towards defense and military spending (I'm not sure I'm getting my money's worth on that one), and a little under a quarter for health care."
I picked the default distribution for 80k income with 2 kids, fairly typical.
$4960 for Social Security
$1160 for Medicare
$3863 for everything else, incl 1015 for Defense, 938 for Health Care, 846 for Job and Family Security, and everything else under $200.
So out of approx $10k, this makes it easy:
49% for SS
11% for Medicare
38% for everything else.
I'm not sure how that calculates out to "25% for military, 25% for health care" unless you're (ignorantly) only looking at the proportion of your INCOME tax and ignoring the 50% bite of SS, and 11% of medicare.
Considering SS is a Ponzi scheme that I doubt I'll ever see my 'contribution' (LOL), and that of the "Health Care, 846 for Job and Family Security" maybe $100 contribute to the general good, the rest are all intended as income-redistributive.
So essentially of the 10k tax burden, the summarizer sees 25% 'wasted' on military. I see 10% spent on military (which is, indeed, probably too high), and 49%+11%+20%=80% as pretty much taken from my pocket to give to people that either couldn't control their reproductive organs, or otherwise make the right choices at various life-crossroads.