Well, while your point is well taken, the 2000 year old texts are also chock full of dross (for want of a better word), while current medical texts are much, much better in that respect. (Not perfect, not nearly, but much better).
So, clearly there has been an advancement in and with the scientific process. The main problem before that being that its surprisingly easy to fool yourself, and people often did. It still surprisingly easy to fool yourself, scientists do it all the time, but by disciplining our subjectivity as much as is humanly possible by means of the scientific process, we make much fewer mistakes today, and the ones that are made are caught sooner.
I think you watch too many cop movies and not enough war movies.
Yes, but those weren't aimed shots at visible and identified targets. Those were suppressing fire, reconnaissance by fire, or area denial by fire. That takes a lot of rounds that won't injure an enemy, but that's OK. Those rounds weren't supposed to hit an enemy, they were fired to make him keep his head down, see if he was there to begin with, or make him see the error of his ways.
This use of fires in police work, or any civilian setting for that matter, is generally frowned upon.
That's an interesting question. Wasn't there analysis of the Stuxnet-code that suggested that parts of it was decidedly old-school? At least suggesting that it wasn't written by spring chickens...
But yes, in general one could probably argue that in info war circumstances age with comensuarte knowledge and wisdom could be an asset. It's not all staying up around the clock for days on end (something those of us nearing fifty are decidedly not as good at any more...:-))
Yeah, you can always scrape the bottom of the barrel, but you'd ideally want people in their early twenties for front line infantry service.
Those of us that had a force consisting almost entirely of national service men, in Sweden for example the military age was between 18 and 47. At 47 you were transferred to the civilian service. Of course a troop of forty year olds is considered a C-line troop and used only for rear guard duties. (Professional officers can of course be older.)
So while needs must, past 35 you're on average not much good to anyone in front line service.
There is more to language names than the content and structure of language. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are still mutually intelligible, yet I think the speakers of those languages would take strong issue with someone wanting to lump each language under one name simply because they are mutually intelligible. Political boundaries, culture, even religion can call for a different name for a language.
As a Swede working in Norway our two "languages" are much closer than either of us would care to admit. There are almost dialects of Swedish with a larger difference, and the differences within Norwegian are larger still.
So it's really a case of "army and navy". Any serious linguist ought really to consider them dialects. Spoken Danish is a different and getting more so, but if you can get them to "spit out the porridge" the underlying language is very similar to both. It's almost completely a question of differing in pronunciation, with the odd bit of vocabulary thrown in.
Yes, its because it doesn't in general fulfill the legal requirements for "theft". That's why most jurisdictions had to come up with a whole new crime that fit it. Check your local laws.
If you want to steal energy, the low tech solution is to clam on to the lines before it goes into the meter. Very popular with the hoe growers overhere, has been for many decades.
And the defence against this is equally old. The electricity company also monitors how much power is delivered at the other end, and if the discrepancy is too large, they start monitoring individual subscribers to see where the loss is.
With smart meters, this becomes so easy that you could automate it. With smart meters you can more or less continuously monitor usage by the subscribers and delivered power to the group of subscribers, cheaply and on-line. Simple statistical anomaly detection can relatively easily point out both when someone is "stealing" electricity and point the finger at the subscriber that's probably the culprit. Before there was a large lag and metering to catch the "thief" was expensive and involved manual labour. Today you have computerised reporting every hour.
So while "stealing" electricity may be as easy as ever, getting away with it just now became harder.
You're suggesting it's difficult for a vegetable packer or a water bottling plant? These are industrial processes, where it's trivial to measure radioactivity as and when the products are processed and packaged. Especially in the case of the water bottling plant. Do you seriously think they don't measure the chemical properties of the water they're bottling as it is? Adding a step in that process, a step that is simpler and easier to measure than other properties they are already measuring is cheap and easy.
When it comes to the consumer, measuring radioactivity is of course fraught with problems, But most of those problems are problems of false alarms, i.e. thinking foodstuff is contaminated that really isn't. So that's not a safety concern as such, more of a nuisance. If you want to do it as a consumer it would be completely possible (if a bit over the top). Compare that with biological or chemical contaminants where it would be completely impractical, that is, impossible to do anything worthwhile when the food is already on your plate. Much, much, more difficult to detect and classify. You have to basically perform a different cumbersome test for each and every contaminant you're looking for. Tests that would take days in the case of biological contaminants. In the case of radioactive contamination it really is (more or less) as easy as "waving a Geiger counter" over the plate. And a good calibrated Geiger counter can be had for less than a common smartphone...
There's even historical precedent. What did you think we did in Sweden past Chernobyl? Yes, it caught us by surprise, the initial detection being made by a nuclear power plant in the eastern parts, but "fool me twice" and all that. We're continuously monitoring the air from the east for radiological contamination, and the food supply chain was checked both overall and individually when that was warranted, with recommendations for which foodstuffs to avoid and where to get game meat from e.g. moose tested. As large scale contamination goes, this one was easy compared to all the other crap that falls from the sky.
So not only is securing the food supply chain from radioactive contaminants reaching the consumer doable, and doable on a large scale. We have historically already done it.
Yes, well, taken to its logical conclusion they couldn't have won no matter what they did. At least as soon as the Soviets were involved. They didn't have the manpower, raw materials or industrial base to outfight the rest of the world. Even a nuke against London would only have delayed the inevitable, and made the end that much worse. (The US had the B-36 on the drawing board, but put it on hold in favour of increased B-29 production as there wasn't a need for the B-36. The Nazis couldn't effectively reach the US, well maybe the east coast, but even a nuke against New York or Washington would only have pissed the Americans off even more...).
So, any strategy is a losing strategy in the end. My point was mainly that even though the allied really had no reason to fear a Nazi nuclear bomb, they were too far behind, they could have wreaked havoc with nerve gas. Sure that wouldn't have been a winning strategy in the end, and as you say provoked an even nastier response, but it could have seriously bloodied the allies noses before they got up, even more determined to finish the job. The Normandy landings could have failed for example. (They were closely enough run affairs as it was.)
Yes, there's that. However, as deplorable as that was, it didn't really help their war effort. It could be successfully argued that it took away from it. In fact, there's a theory that says that the allied feet dragging on the matter was that they didn't mind at all that the Nazis spent time and effort on an endeavour that took that same time and effort from something that could have helped their war effort.
Not that I subscribe much to that theory, just to be clear.
Well, its a good thing overall that they were stopped. It's just that their advancement of nuclear weapons wasn't a particular reason to. They would have fallen for many other reasons long before that became a problem.
What's more interesting in that regard is that the Nazis did have largish quantities of nerve gas stored, and the capacity to make more. Hitler didn't press the issue though since he was, wrongly, told that the allies must have the same capability (they didn't) and since he himself had been injured by gas in WWI he wasn't too keen on starting gas warfare.
For example, the German army reportedly had something like 13 tons of Tabun available during the Normandy invasion. If they had had the willingness to use it, things could have turned out much different. (At least there. By that time it was probably too late to stop the Soviets, nerve gas or no nerve gas.)
So the Nazis could have employed weapons of mass destruction, its just their capacity to wage nuclear war that was never that substantial, they were years from a working bomb.
Interesting. I hadn't seen that one before. They argue that Heisenberg knew more than he let on as a bargaining chip to be used in the negotiation with the allies. They play his "tons" statement as both not giving away useful information and as a pedagogical device used to explain the principles to Otto Hahn.
It's a nice theory, but I'm not sure it passes Occam's razor. It's still quite possible that he just didn't know any better, or was a bit confused himself as to the details, not having given the subject serious consideration (the paper itself stresses that he was a reactor guy first and foremost).
That said, its certainly possible. I guess we'll never know. It's difficult to ascertain exactly how people thought in hindsight, even under the best of circumstances.
After the war, Heisenberg *claimed* that he prevented work on the bomb, and accused Bohr of being morally wrong in helping to create a bomb.
Whether Heisenberg deliberately obstructed the creation of a Nazi bomb, we'll never know. We only have his word for it.
Well, he met with Bohr during the war, just before Bohr fled west. The contents of the meeting is unclear however, and there are differing accounts of what was said. So there's at least the possibility.
Forthermore, we know that Heisenberg didn't have a "can do" attitude when it came to developing a bomb, dragging his feet. This is sharp contrast to someone like Werner von Braun, who was instrumental in getting the rockets flying, even as the prototypes exploded left and right. Now, whether Heisenberg dragged his feet because he didn't think it was something that should be done on philosophical or moral grounds, because he didn't think the project could be done on scientific/engineering grounds, or something else, we don't know with any real certainty. Personally I think its a "all of the above in various parts" kind of answer, and I don't think that moral outlook necessarily was the overarching concern. But even so, he was far from the worst of the bunch. Quite the opposite.
Well we already knew that the Nazis were very far from a nuclear weapon. They didn't even have the theories right by the end of the war. So this is just confirming something that wasn't under much question.
Heisenberg himself didn't realise that with compression the mean free path becomes much shorter and hence you can get a supercritical assembly with much less fissile material than you would otherwise need. When told of the Hiroshima explosion he calculated that the Americans had just managed to refine 500kg of U235 in order to make a bomb. An overestimate by about a factor of ten.
The German physicists also discarded plutonium early on as an alternative, and whey they discovered their error it was far too late in the programme to do anything about it.
Also Heisenberg himself seems to not have been too keen on the idea, always downplaying the possibility, and trying to convince Bohr that on-one should work on developing the bomb.
Why? Because what you fail do understand is that the background radiation is the least of your worries. Radionuclides in the dust, in the soil and generally in the environment are. You will contaminate your clothes, that is for sure. You can easily contaminate your food if you are not very careful and there is a good chance to breathe in radioactive dust.
Uhh, "Radioniclides in the dust, in the soil and generally in the environment" is the definition of background radiation. It doesn't matter where it comes from. Radiation is radiation when we're talking population risks.
And background radiation is what we're talking about. You'd do well to read up on the places where the background radiation is high and the population studies that have been done on those places and the large accidental irradiations (the Taiwan one is illustrating). Furthermore, while it's much too early to say that radiation hormesis is real, the LNT-model is dead and done for. You'd do well to read up on the many studies that have been done on the subject.
I'm referring to radionuclide contamination as a result of these releases that are difficult to detect in the food chain or as inhalants, as opposed to localized emitted radiation.
There is no such thing as a radionuclide that's difficult to detect. Or rather, there's no such thing as an active radionuclide that's difficult to detect. We can accurately measure every single decay, and from a distance to boot. The ones that are more difficult to detect are the ones which very long half-lives, and in that case their danger comes from their chemical properties anyway, not their radiological properties.
There is a common misconception about DMCA complaints that they are sworn under penalty of perjury. Like most misconceptions there is an element of truth to it. In this case, it is a matter of the *scope* of what is being attested to under penalty of perjury. Specifically, that the person filing the complaint is in fact a duly authorized agent of the copyright holder for the work that is claimed to being infringed.
Yes. But in the many cases where even this wasn't true, i.e. they weren't a duly authorized agent, or any agent at all, nothing happened to the people doing the swearing under penalty of perjury. So it's a paper tiger at best.
One thing worth noting about the difference between 'how laptops use internet' and 'how phones use internet' is that computers will open up TCP connections like they're going out of style, whereas mobile devices are generally optimized to avoid that. The switching gear on the carrier side assumes the latter, not the former. It may not necessarily tax spectrum, but it will tax the networking gear, especially if you're torrenting.
OK, it's been a couple of years since I built 3G SGSN/GGNS "routers" for mobile internet, but that's not how the system worked back then at least. The network didn't know, or care about individual TCP connections from the subscriber. In fact, the network didn't really care about the mobile data at all. All the data to and from the mobile was/is heavily tunneled. The only parameter of the user traffic the network ever even looked at was the IP address. And even that was very limited. The destination address was checked for incoming traffic to the mobile to decide which tunnel to put it in. The source address of the mobile's packet was checked on egress from the network, if egress filtering (to prevent the mobiles from doing IP spoofing) was enabled.
This was by cultural design, i.e. given the option telecoms people will bury their problems under yet another layer of the communications stack. But, by happy accident, it's what preserved the security of the provider networks, more or less. We haven't had any major, large scale outages due to e.g. mobile worms etc, as it's very difficult to affect what the network is doing by sending IP-traffic over it. The network basically doesn't listen to the traffic in the tunnel and hence can't be affected by it.
Now, the ugly thing on the horizon when I left was deep packet inspection, and indeed if you do deep packet inspection then you can run out of resources to do TCP connection tracking. However, the network isn't really dependent on this to "work" (well shaping is a possible exception). So the answer to that question then, to the providers that complain is "Cry me a river. If it hurts when you do that. Don't do that then!"
P.S. If they changed all this in 4G, i.e. making the network more sensitive to what the mobile actually does on the network level, then, I'm of course all ears.
BTW,I have gay friends and have had gay roommates all while still believing in God. And yes I have black friends and have dated women from a variety of nationalities all while being a conservative Christian. Can you all say the same?
Nope. I've never been a conservative Christian, so as that's a necessary condition, I'm going to have to go with "no".
It is possible to win a counter-insurgency campaign...
Yes, sure. Witness the British in Malaya, or Kenya to take just two examples.
However, the Vietnamese situation was complicated by external state actors, the North, the Soviet Union. Even if you could have isolated the southern insurgents from their supporting base, (Either the decent way, like Malaya, or the deplorable way, like in Kenya), they could still have received substantial support from the North, like they did during the majority of the war. So any strategy would have had to be two pronged, both a "hearts and minds" to isolate insurgents from their support in the south (the US didn't have the stomach for a Kenyan solution, which is a good thing), and a military intervention against supporting external regimes and their supply lines. Without the latter part, the insurgents would still have had much too much wind in their sails, for too long.
As it was, they couldn't get popular support, in no small part due to the corruption of the southern regime, and a decisive military intervention was politically impossible. A no-win situation if there ever was one.
And even with the right strategy, counter insurgencies take time. Something the US doesn't have, as their political will, and hence staying power has been, and probably will always be, low.
Yes. We're in violent agreement there. The problem with fighting an insurgency is that they need only to not lose for them to win, while you need to actually decisively win, to, well, win.
Since the politics of the situation prevented actually striking decisively against the North (which would also have been costly in its own right) or even their supply routes through neighbouring countries, the war was "un-winnable" from the start. Given the situation the best that could have been achieved was a drawn out occupation by security forces of a pacified rural south. Probably complete with an East German "iron curtain" border. Like Korea but much, much worse. (Speaking of the border situation. Not the pacification.)
A pretty crappy situation to be in politically and economically in either case.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, while your point is well taken, the 2000 year old texts are also chock full of dross (for want of a better word), while current medical texts are much, much better in that respect. (Not perfect, not nearly, but much better).
So, clearly there has been an advancement in and with the scientific process. The main problem before that being that its surprisingly easy to fool yourself, and people often did. It still surprisingly easy to fool yourself, scientists do it all the time, but by disciplining our subjectivity as much as is humanly possible by means of the scientific process, we make much fewer mistakes today, and the ones that are made are caught sooner.
I'm reminded by the first time I saw an "Drug free school zone" sign on the street in the US.
"I thought you already weren't allowed to sell drugs in the US, so what's up with the sign?"
"It's indeed to bring the point across that you're not allowed to sell drugs here.... Either..." :-)
I think you watch too many cop movies and not enough war movies.
Yes, but those weren't aimed shots at visible and identified targets. Those were suppressing fire, reconnaissance by fire, or area denial by fire. That takes a lot of rounds that won't injure an enemy, but that's OK. Those rounds weren't supposed to hit an enemy, they were fired to make him keep his head down, see if he was there to begin with, or make him see the error of his ways.
This use of fires in police work, or any civilian setting for that matter, is generally frowned upon.
And the age for cyber-war?
That's an interesting question. Wasn't there analysis of the Stuxnet-code that suggested that parts of it was decidedly old-school? At least suggesting that it wasn't written by spring chickens...
But yes, in general one could probably argue that in info war circumstances age with comensuarte knowledge and wisdom could be an asset. It's not all staying up around the clock for days on end (something those of us nearing fifty are decidedly not as good at any more... :-))
Yeah, you can always scrape the bottom of the barrel, but you'd ideally want people in their early twenties for front line infantry service.
Those of us that had a force consisting almost entirely of national service men, in Sweden for example the military age was between 18 and 47. At 47 you were transferred to the civilian service. Of course a troop of forty year olds is considered a C-line troop and used only for rear guard duties. (Professional officers can of course be older.)
So while needs must, past 35 you're on average not much good to anyone in front line service.
There is more to language names than the content and structure of language. Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian are still mutually intelligible, yet I think the speakers of those languages would take strong issue with someone wanting to lump each language under one name simply because they are mutually intelligible. Political boundaries, culture, even religion can call for a different name for a language.
Which made someone quip "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy."
As a Swede working in Norway our two "languages" are much closer than either of us would care to admit. There are almost dialects of Swedish with a larger difference, and the differences within Norwegian are larger still.
So it's really a case of "army and navy". Any serious linguist ought really to consider them dialects. Spoken Danish is a different and getting more so, but if you can get them to "spit out the porridge" the underlying language is very similar to both. It's almost completely a question of differing in pronunciation, with the odd bit of vocabulary thrown in.
Here is just one little example: If a Government project fails its stated goals, what happens? If a Private Company's project fails, what happens?
Apparently they get bailed out by your congress...
Yes, its because it doesn't in general fulfill the legal requirements for "theft". That's why most jurisdictions had to come up with a whole new crime that fit it. Check your local laws.
If you want to steal energy, the low tech solution is to clam on to the lines before it goes into the meter. Very popular with the hoe growers overhere, has been for many decades.
And the defence against this is equally old. The electricity company also monitors how much power is delivered at the other end, and if the discrepancy is too large, they start monitoring individual subscribers to see where the loss is.
With smart meters, this becomes so easy that you could automate it. With smart meters you can more or less continuously monitor usage by the subscribers and delivered power to the group of subscribers, cheaply and on-line. Simple statistical anomaly detection can relatively easily point out both when someone is "stealing" electricity and point the finger at the subscriber that's probably the culprit. Before there was a large lag and metering to catch the "thief" was expensive and involved manual labour. Today you have computerised reporting every hour.
So while "stealing" electricity may be as easy as ever, getting away with it just now became harder.
You're suggesting it's difficult for a vegetable packer or a water bottling plant? These are industrial processes, where it's trivial to measure radioactivity as and when the products are processed and packaged. Especially in the case of the water bottling plant. Do you seriously think they don't measure the chemical properties of the water they're bottling as it is? Adding a step in that process, a step that is simpler and easier to measure than other properties they are already measuring is cheap and easy.
When it comes to the consumer, measuring radioactivity is of course fraught with problems, But most of those problems are problems of false alarms, i.e. thinking foodstuff is contaminated that really isn't. So that's not a safety concern as such, more of a nuisance. If you want to do it as a consumer it would be completely possible (if a bit over the top). Compare that with biological or chemical contaminants where it would be completely impractical, that is, impossible to do anything worthwhile when the food is already on your plate. Much, much, more difficult to detect and classify. You have to basically perform a different cumbersome test for each and every contaminant you're looking for. Tests that would take days in the case of biological contaminants. In the case of radioactive contamination it really is (more or less) as easy as "waving a Geiger counter" over the plate. And a good calibrated Geiger counter can be had for less than a common smartphone...
There's even historical precedent. What did you think we did in Sweden past Chernobyl? Yes, it caught us by surprise, the initial detection being made by a nuclear power plant in the eastern parts, but "fool me twice" and all that. We're continuously monitoring the air from the east for radiological contamination, and the food supply chain was checked both overall and individually when that was warranted, with recommendations for which foodstuffs to avoid and where to get game meat from e.g. moose tested. As large scale contamination goes, this one was easy compared to all the other crap that falls from the sky.
So not only is securing the food supply chain from radioactive contaminants reaching the consumer doable, and doable on a large scale. We have historically already done it.
No, we know his momentum with high certainty (and it was low) that means that his position cannot be known with any precision.
Or did I just miss a loud wooshing sound?
Yes, well, taken to its logical conclusion they couldn't have won no matter what they did. At least as soon as the Soviets were involved. They didn't have the manpower, raw materials or industrial base to outfight the rest of the world. Even a nuke against London would only have delayed the inevitable, and made the end that much worse. (The US had the B-36 on the drawing board, but put it on hold in favour of increased B-29 production as there wasn't a need for the B-36. The Nazis couldn't effectively reach the US, well maybe the east coast, but even a nuke against New York or Washington would only have pissed the Americans off even more...).
So, any strategy is a losing strategy in the end. My point was mainly that even though the allied really had no reason to fear a Nazi nuclear bomb, they were too far behind, they could have wreaked havoc with nerve gas. Sure that wouldn't have been a winning strategy in the end, and as you say provoked an even nastier response, but it could have seriously bloodied the allies noses before they got up, even more determined to finish the job. The Normandy landings could have failed for example. (They were closely enough run affairs as it was.)
Yes, there's that. However, as deplorable as that was, it didn't really help their war effort. It could be successfully argued that it took away from it. In fact, there's a theory that says that the allied feet dragging on the matter was that they didn't mind at all that the Nazis spent time and effort on an endeavour that took that same time and effort from something that could have helped their war effort.
Not that I subscribe much to that theory, just to be clear.
Well, its a good thing overall that they were stopped. It's just that their advancement of nuclear weapons wasn't a particular reason to. They would have fallen for many other reasons long before that became a problem.
What's more interesting in that regard is that the Nazis did have largish quantities of nerve gas stored, and the capacity to make more. Hitler didn't press the issue though since he was, wrongly, told that the allies must have the same capability (they didn't) and since he himself had been injured by gas in WWI he wasn't too keen on starting gas warfare.
For example, the German army reportedly had something like 13 tons of Tabun available during the Normandy invasion. If they had had the willingness to use it, things could have turned out much different. (At least there. By that time it was probably too late to stop the Soviets, nerve gas or no nerve gas.)
So the Nazis could have employed weapons of mass destruction, its just their capacity to wage nuclear war that was never that substantial, they were years from a working bomb.
There is an interesting discussion of Heisenberg's critical mass calculations here: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.d...
Interesting. I hadn't seen that one before. They argue that Heisenberg knew more than he let on as a bargaining chip to be used in the negotiation with the allies. They play his "tons" statement as both not giving away useful information and as a pedagogical device used to explain the principles to Otto Hahn.
It's a nice theory, but I'm not sure it passes Occam's razor. It's still quite possible that he just didn't know any better, or was a bit confused himself as to the details, not having given the subject serious consideration (the paper itself stresses that he was a reactor guy first and foremost).
That said, its certainly possible. I guess we'll never know. It's difficult to ascertain exactly how people thought in hindsight, even under the best of circumstances.
After the war, Heisenberg *claimed* that he prevented work on the bomb, and accused Bohr of being morally wrong in helping to create a bomb. Whether Heisenberg deliberately obstructed the creation of a Nazi bomb, we'll never know. We only have his word for it.
Well, he met with Bohr during the war, just before Bohr fled west. The contents of the meeting is unclear however, and there are differing accounts of what was said. So there's at least the possibility.
Forthermore, we know that Heisenberg didn't have a "can do" attitude when it came to developing a bomb, dragging his feet. This is sharp contrast to someone like Werner von Braun, who was instrumental in getting the rockets flying, even as the prototypes exploded left and right. Now, whether Heisenberg dragged his feet because he didn't think it was something that should be done on philosophical or moral grounds, because he didn't think the project could be done on scientific/engineering grounds, or something else, we don't know with any real certainty. Personally I think its a "all of the above in various parts" kind of answer, and I don't think that moral outlook necessarily was the overarching concern. But even so, he was far from the worst of the bunch. Quite the opposite.
So you are saying that Heisenberg was uncertain?
Well, his momentum was low, we know that, so that means that his position was indeterminable. Which is a fair match which history actually. :-)
Well we already knew that the Nazis were very far from a nuclear weapon. They didn't even have the theories right by the end of the war. So this is just confirming something that wasn't under much question.
Heisenberg himself didn't realise that with compression the mean free path becomes much shorter and hence you can get a supercritical assembly with much less fissile material than you would otherwise need. When told of the Hiroshima explosion he calculated that the Americans had just managed to refine 500kg of U235 in order to make a bomb. An overestimate by about a factor of ten.
The German physicists also discarded plutonium early on as an alternative, and whey they discovered their error it was far too late in the programme to do anything about it.
Also Heisenberg himself seems to not have been too keen on the idea, always downplaying the possibility, and trying to convince Bohr that on-one should work on developing the bomb.
Why? Because what you fail do understand is that the background radiation is the least of your worries. Radionuclides in the dust, in the soil and generally in the environment are. You will contaminate your clothes, that is for sure. You can easily contaminate your food if you are not very careful and there is a good chance to breathe in radioactive dust.
Uhh, "Radioniclides in the dust, in the soil and generally in the environment" is the definition of background radiation. It doesn't matter where it comes from. Radiation is radiation when we're talking population risks.
And background radiation is what we're talking about. You'd do well to read up on the places where the background radiation is high and the population studies that have been done on those places and the large accidental irradiations (the Taiwan one is illustrating). Furthermore, while it's much too early to say that radiation hormesis is real, the LNT-model is dead and done for. You'd do well to read up on the many studies that have been done on the subject.
I'm referring to radionuclide contamination as a result of these releases that are difficult to detect in the food chain or as inhalants, as opposed to localized emitted radiation.
There is no such thing as a radionuclide that's difficult to detect. Or rather, there's no such thing as an active radionuclide that's difficult to detect. We can accurately measure every single decay, and from a distance to boot. The ones that are more difficult to detect are the ones which very long half-lives, and in that case their danger comes from their chemical properties anyway, not their radiological properties.
There is a common misconception about DMCA complaints that they are sworn under penalty of perjury. Like most misconceptions there is an element of truth to it. In this case, it is a matter of the *scope* of what is being attested to under penalty of perjury. Specifically, that the person filing the complaint is in fact a duly authorized agent of the copyright holder for the work that is claimed to being infringed.
Yes. But in the many cases where even this wasn't true, i.e. they weren't a duly authorized agent, or any agent at all, nothing happened to the people doing the swearing under penalty of perjury. So it's a paper tiger at best.
One thing worth noting about the difference between 'how laptops use internet' and 'how phones use internet' is that computers will open up TCP connections like they're going out of style, whereas mobile devices are generally optimized to avoid that. The switching gear on the carrier side assumes the latter, not the former. It may not necessarily tax spectrum, but it will tax the networking gear, especially if you're torrenting.
OK, it's been a couple of years since I built 3G SGSN/GGNS "routers" for mobile internet, but that's not how the system worked back then at least. The network didn't know, or care about individual TCP connections from the subscriber. In fact, the network didn't really care about the mobile data at all. All the data to and from the mobile was/is heavily tunneled. The only parameter of the user traffic the network ever even looked at was the IP address. And even that was very limited. The destination address was checked for incoming traffic to the mobile to decide which tunnel to put it in. The source address of the mobile's packet was checked on egress from the network, if egress filtering (to prevent the mobiles from doing IP spoofing) was enabled.
This was by cultural design, i.e. given the option telecoms people will bury their problems under yet another layer of the communications stack. But, by happy accident, it's what preserved the security of the provider networks, more or less. We haven't had any major, large scale outages due to e.g. mobile worms etc, as it's very difficult to affect what the network is doing by sending IP-traffic over it. The network basically doesn't listen to the traffic in the tunnel and hence can't be affected by it.
Now, the ugly thing on the horizon when I left was deep packet inspection, and indeed if you do deep packet inspection then you can run out of resources to do TCP connection tracking. However, the network isn't really dependent on this to "work" (well shaping is a possible exception). So the answer to that question then, to the providers that complain is "Cry me a river. If it hurts when you do that. Don't do that then!"
P.S. If they changed all this in 4G, i.e. making the network more sensitive to what the mobile actually does on the network level, then, I'm of course all ears.
BTW,I have gay friends and have had gay roommates all while still believing in God. And yes I have black friends and have dated women from a variety of nationalities all while being a conservative Christian. Can you all say the same?
Nope. I've never been a conservative Christian, so as that's a necessary condition, I'm going to have to go with "no".
It is possible to win a counter-insurgency campaign...
Yes, sure. Witness the British in Malaya, or Kenya to take just two examples.
However, the Vietnamese situation was complicated by external state actors, the North, the Soviet Union. Even if you could have isolated the southern insurgents from their supporting base, (Either the decent way, like Malaya, or the deplorable way, like in Kenya), they could still have received substantial support from the North, like they did during the majority of the war. So any strategy would have had to be two pronged, both a "hearts and minds" to isolate insurgents from their support in the south (the US didn't have the stomach for a Kenyan solution, which is a good thing), and a military intervention against supporting external regimes and their supply lines. Without the latter part, the insurgents would still have had much too much wind in their sails, for too long.
As it was, they couldn't get popular support, in no small part due to the corruption of the southern regime, and a decisive military intervention was politically impossible. A no-win situation if there ever was one.
And even with the right strategy, counter insurgencies take time. Something the US doesn't have, as their political will, and hence staying power has been, and probably will always be, low.
Yes. We're in violent agreement there. The problem with fighting an insurgency is that they need only to not lose for them to win, while you need to actually decisively win, to, well, win.
Since the politics of the situation prevented actually striking decisively against the North (which would also have been costly in its own right) or even their supply routes through neighbouring countries, the war was "un-winnable" from the start. Given the situation the best that could have been achieved was a drawn out occupation by security forces of a pacified rural south. Probably complete with an East German "iron curtain" border. Like Korea but much, much worse. (Speaking of the border situation. Not the pacification.)
A pretty crappy situation to be in politically and economically in either case.