Well, the most likely molecule the alpha particle is going to hit in a living organism is a water molecule. Ionizing water molecules forms radicals, which then turn into hydrogen peroxide, which is a strong oxidant and will go on to damage other molecules (including DNA). Antioxidants turn hydrogen peroxide back into water and oxygen, rendering it much less harmful. OK, I am a little confused here (you might be right, though) but:
Alpha particle + H2O means you loose to electrons. This may mean a radical oxygen plus two protons. The radical oxygen would be neutralized by antioxidants, but do the protons cause harm as well?
While I support moving coal plants to nuclear (but only after minimizing the need for large-scale energy plants by doing everything we can to generate electricity from waste sources), I fear you are right and that it is not a viable option.
Also note that this just means that the long-term risks from a single large exposure to radiation are less than previously believed. It does not mean that low continuous does (for example, as one might get by painting watch dials with Radium-based paint) are safe, nor does it mean that there are no risks from such exposure.
It does mean that the balance is tilted more towards the risk of nuclear accident than the release of radon, etc, by coal-fired plants. My own opinion is that coal-fired plants, even just from a radiation perspective and without looking at greenhouse gasses, need to go even if we have to replace them with nuclear plants.
Nuclear radiation will produce sterility in men. I know this as it happened to my uncle. Who knows what other diseases might show up that don't necessarily produce immediate death. That actually could be one contributing cause of the fact that the birth defect rate in Hiroshima survivors (across the board) is far lower than expected. Those that are more at risk might be sterile.
First, not all radiation is considered equal. You really have to look at ionizing effect. The most hazardous radiation is alpha particles which are emitted inside your body (for example, as a result of Polonium 210, Plutonium, Strontium 90, etc consumption, inhaling radon, or other forms of exposure). This is dangerous because an alpha particle steals 2 electrons pretty much from the first molecule it interacts with. They can't penetrate the skin but if released inside the body, they are pretty horrible. Furthermore, since this causes an electrical imbalance, I am not sure that antioxidants help much at all here.
Beta particles, gamma rays, etc work by transfer of energy to electrons, breaking covalent bonds. It is more or less the same process by which you get a sunburn or sunlight bleaches pigments.
Now having said this, most radiation (aside from a nuclear accident) from a power plant are in the form of gamma rays. Yes, they are harmful, but most of the radiation from a coal-fired plant is in the form of radioactive isotopes and in particular alpha emitters like thorium and radon. Even from a radiation standpoint, coal-fired plants are far more costly than nuclear ones (and I do support nuclear as an alternative to coal once the need for such plants has been minimized).
Also I would point out that the studies have been building for a long time that the long-term effects of one-time exposure to radiation are not as high as we had thought (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, etc). However, it is hard to get from there, given the experience with Radium in watch dials, to either the idea that long-term exposure to radiation is safe or to the idea that there are no risks from exposure to a single incident.
Actually, from other research I have done, the rates of birth defects have been far lower than previously expected.
This is not to say that the radiation is safe. It just means that people may be able to move back to Chernobyl sooner than previously thought (possibly not within our lifetimes though).
1) You are absolutely right about bad figures. On average, coal-fired plants produce much more exposure to radiation than nuclear plants and this is generally ignored by the anti-nuclear folks (of which I still count myself one). However, I will say that if it were a choice between coal (lots of green house gases, radioactive pollution, etc) vs nuclear (waste disposal issues, etc) I would choose the latter. In short, nuclear may be bad, but coal is definitely worse.
2) We need to understand that energy use has environmental cost. Simply throwing more power generators at a problem doesn't fix it. We need to do what we can to minimize that cost and this means a multi-level strategy. There is no magic bullet. A few nuclear power plants may be necessary but if we are smart we will pursue a number of other means first.
3) Cost per kWhr is not the only measure of energy's real cost. I think one must factor in the total environmental cost as well. This includes carbon consumption, hazardous waste disposal, environmental cost of production and disposal of generating equipment etc. We need to start at the bottom and work our way up. This means:
a) Conservation-oriented policies. Let us help try to get people to push for more energy efficiency in general so we don't need as many generators as we might otherwise.
b) methane from manure composting from dairy farms which may have close to a net zero cost. (On one hand capturing/burning the methane is *good* for the environment. On the other, the equipment still has to be manufactured and disposed of.)
c) Encouraging thermal solar energy use from areas where one would normally waste the energy is another proven area where we could come out ahead in terms of general conservation.
d) Wind power, properly done, is something I would call low-cost.
e) Any other ideas on agricultural waste, esp. the stuff that normally just gets burned?
f) fish-friendly hydroelectric dams
g) Current generation of nuclear reactors should replace coal generators.
h) More research needs to be done on renewable energy sources, and on storage and transmission systems (I think that ultracapacitors should also be seen as a green alternative to batteries in wind generators, for example).
h) More research needs to be done on fuel cycle issues and how to effectively eliminate waste (for example, by using the waste as fuel in other nuclear reactors)
I don't think it is an either/or question. I am not convinced that it is practical to use renewable energy at the current generation for current or future electrical needs, but I would think that everyone should be in favor of minimizing the role of non-renewable energy (in general) and the environmental cost of energy as a whole. Nuclear almost certainly has a part to play, but let's not make it any larger a part than it needs to be.
However, if the machine played consistently well that would be one thing, but what do you make of the moves that people point to and say that they look like human mistakes? Either the machine is so complex it is capable of making human mistakes or humans were making the mistakes.
First of all, pointing fingers at holy books doesn't matter. Every holy book I have ever studied has contained divinely inspired sexually questionable acts (or sexually questionable acts by divine powers, for example, Mary conceiving at the age of 12, which seems to be a pedophilia-laden version of Leda and the Swan).
On the other hand something I do find greatly disturbing is t
The fact that Islam does not allow for a separation of sacred and social authority or law. These two concepts are very deeply homogenized in Islamic thought which leads inexorably to a world where there is no freedom of religion and no ability to seek one's own roots back beyond Islam. What is the penalty for converting away from Islam according to Islamic tradition again? Religious laws do not work, and "religion of law" is an oxymoron.
Secondly, I won't say Bush is the worst president ever. I think Harding was probably worse, and Woodrow Wilson (the great supporter of the KKK) doesn't seem that much better... However, we have a definite decline in leadership certainly since Kennedy and probably since Eisenhower.
Third, I think that Iraqis probably were better off prior to the invasion. You had a functioning educational infrastructure, etc. Sure Saddam was terrorizing the populations but he was relatively predictable (as opposed to the various criminal, terrorist, sectarian, etc. group terrorizing the population now). I.e. there was more security under Saddam, and there is probably more terror now that there is no law or order in most of the country.
We never should have invaded. There is no rational case which can be made for saying that Saddam was our problem or our responsibility. We would have had a greater moral right to invade Russia than we did to invade Iraq (I still think we should add Russia to the list of state sponsors of terrorism). Now, however, we have made the Iraqi civil war our responsibility. Every lawless killing is on our hands because we made it our responsibility when we invaded. However, this is not something we can now just turn and walk away from it now. We need a good plan to do what is necessary in Iraq to let the Iraqis take ownership for their country, but we also need to provide security to make it work. There are ways forward but our current leadership seems more intent on letting one side in the civil war (the Shiite sectarian militias) hide behind our troops and the Iraqi government, and then let our soldiers get killed instead. That is neither fair nor constructive, and it is one reason why we are losing the war of occupation in Iraq.
Furthermore this being the mistake of the Bush Administration, the Iraqi civil war is very much on his hands as well.
No, I wouldn't prefer to live in Iraq under Saddam than in America under Bush. We are protected from such acts of arbitrary government by our constitution, so regardless of the ambitions of the leader, we as a country have protections in place for our freedom. However, my statement holds that Iraqis were better off living under Saddam than living in the lawless area which has followed.
Putin still bears some strong measure of responsibility. He is under your theory still an accomplice.
If these were rogue FSB agents, then Putin has command responsibility for their actions, especially when there is no major effort to find and punish these people in a way which lets people know that these were in now way sponsored by Putin's government.
When rogue elements of one's own government commit crimes, if the government does not hold them accountable, then the government could be said to be supporting them. This was the major case against Milosevic at the Hague and it is reasonable. If a government turns a blind eye to such crimes, the government is supporting the crimes. End of story.
BTW, this is exactly the reason why I opposed the calls for Rumsfeld to step down after Abu Ghraib. Had he done so, the Bush Administration could have moved on and more or less argued that the matter was closed. But since he stayed, it meant that we had to continue to hold the Administration accountable for its failings there.
No. It *is* assault and battery. Unless there is an attempt to cause death, it is not attempted murder. It is also a cruel and unnecessary trampling on human dignity. However, neither the battery itself, nor the trampling on dignity is sufficient to warrant calling it torture in the absence of inflicted pain or a sense of danger of which the individual can be aware.
I think that we can be fairly certain of involvement by Putin's government in the Litvinenko assassination or at least interference in the subsequent investigation. The amount of Polonium which would have been used was quite high and there are a large number of controls relating to strong alpha emitters (like Polonium and Americium). Although these elements do have commercial uses, fairly strict accounting and control measures are in place as with any source of ionizing radiation. (Alpha emitters are often used to create electrical conduction in air, for example in smoke detectors or certain types of antistatic equipment. When contained they are reasonably safe-- the alpha particle cannot penetrate the skin so the decay has to happen inside the human body to be dangerous. In this case, however, it is the most dangerous form of radiation because it steals 2 electrons from various molecules thereby creating twice the free radicals of a single interaction of any other form of ionizing radiation.) Aside from commercial uses, Polonium is also used in older generations of detonators for nuclear weapons and therefore tends to be subject to even tighter controls than other alpha emitters.
The Polonium in the Litvinenko case was traced to a reactor in Russia. This is not cost effective nor is it the MO of various organized crime syndicates. Therefore the choice of Polonium must be significant. Due to the various accounting and control of Polonium, and due to its discovery on airplanes used in the London/Moscow route, we can be quite sure that this came from Russia, not from anywhere else. Either it was Putin's government sending a warning to dissidents or it was an extremely powerful opponent of Putin who would be able to pay off all the right people to obtain a significant quantity of Polonium.
Poisoning is one MO of the Kremlin. See the Yuchenko poisoning by dioxin, which the Ukrain argued was political assassination by the Kremlin and orchestrated by Russian agents (there is a definite pattern of political opponents at home or abroad being poisoned or shot).
The question is quite simple: Is this a message from the Kremlin that dissidents must remain quiet? Or is it an attempt to frame the Kremlin? If the assassination of Litvinenko, Politkavskaya, and others are the latter, then it would seem to be counterproductive, because of the chilling effect it has on getting other people to come forward. On the other hand, given other known similar incidents and given the chilling effect which has occurred, I would suggest that the Kremlin is almost certainly involved in these assassinations. No, we can't prove it, but the circumstantial evidence is fairly substantial.
I actually thought the article was pretty much right on track.
To the GP: Eric Raymond used the term "hacker" so no need to criticize the author for adopting it.
The issue isn't that IED's are new. They are not. However, the issue is that opposition groups (note the plural) in Iraq are using open source methods to collaborate on tactics and munitions development in ways we have not seen before. We are not fighting a centralized VC-like enemy (if we were, I would say it was time to bring the troops home). Instead we are fighting a loose community without a real command and control structure which operates a lot like open source communities.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam, the International Crisis Group has stated that there were literally hundreds of small independent insurgent groups which sprung up. While things have consolidated into 4 major Sunni groups and several Shiite ones, these groups still lack a lot of the standard coordination mechanisms we are used to seeing even in guerilla warfare. For this reason, insurgent groups are able to adapt to new developments much faster than we can, and hence we are at a strong disadvantage.
One of the conclusions of the article is that standardization on the part of the army is a dangerous thing because it means slow requisition times, and a difficulty adapting to new environments, while our opponents are not hampered by these disadvantages.
During the Kosovo campaign the Serbians were using microwave ovens as decoys against radar-homing missiles. A $100 countermeasure against a much more expensive weapon.
I would be very surprised if you couldn't build something like a V1 with commercial off-the-shelf parts.
Plywood wings and stabilizers. That should be downright easy. shell, explosives, fuel tank. The explosives are probably the hardest part. valved pulse jet. (could be made out of pipe, cap, valves, etc) Launch system (possibly ski jump type). Location and plywood.....
I have some ideas for more efficient and quieter variations on the pulse jet idea for super-simple applications. These might require custom-milled parts. However I suspect that with the right design, you could use stagnation pressure as a sort of valve at slower speeds than a ramjet might be able to work efficiently at.
The Soviets lost a lot more people in their space program as well. I am not diminishing their accomplishments (they were technologically handicapped in design technology too, which in many ways makes their accomplishments *more* noteworthy).
I do want an open and transparent government. But I also want a _competent_ government. Preferably, lead by a man without a previous record of splitting a country into 13 parts. A lot of the problems had to do with the fact the Soviet Union did not do much to erase the local tensions. Blaming the ability to give places like Georgia and the Ukraine a choice in whether to stay or go seems rather foolish IMO. In the US, you may not be aware of this but we have secessionist movements not only relating to the US in general but relating to states (there is a movement for example for Eastern Washington to secede from the state of Washington and become a separate state). Most of the time these are due to large cultural rifts where one side ends up dominant for a long period of time.
You misunderstand my point. It isn't a matter of force multiplier at all.
Instead, when you are having these sorts of issues, you start to have to worry about physical injury to the police officer. Being unarmed does not necessarily mean not posing a threat to serious bodily injury (which is where I would draw the line regarding tasing). I don't care if it is one cop-- if the cop is in reasonable danger of serious injury, the tasing is justified. Yes, this is a lower barrier than I would put on lethal force, but I think it is reasonable. It also draws a line which cuts off most of the cases of abuse, and it is something which can be reasonably reviewed (would a reasonable cop believed there was an imminent danger of physical injury?).
Hence tasing is justified in the case of imminent physical threat. It is not justified merely by the act of resisting but by someone who is strong enough to pose a physical danger to the police.
As for Union of Socialist Democrats - I don't understand people voting for Gorbachev _again_. I suppose a lot of people don't understand the desire for openness and transparency in government:-)
See the recent case of the man who went into a diabetic coma and was subsequently tasered while lying helpless. Yes, that is unnecessary, but I am hard pressed to call that torture. I would think for reasonable torture to exist, some consciousness of the events, pain, or other consequences must exist. You can't torture someone in a coma by doing things that are not felt or perceived upon recovery from the coma.
Slashdot Mirror
Alpha particle + H2O means you loose to electrons. This may mean a radical oxygen plus two protons. The radical oxygen would be neutralized by antioxidants, but do the protons cause harm as well?
That is more or less what I am proposing.
Replace coal plants with nuclear while also trying to do everything we can to reduce the need for nuclear power plants.
While I support moving coal plants to nuclear (but only after minimizing the need for large-scale energy plants by doing everything we can to generate electricity from waste sources), I fear you are right and that it is not a viable option.
Also note that this just means that the long-term risks from a single large exposure to radiation are less than previously believed. It does not mean that low continuous does (for example, as one might get by painting watch dials with Radium-based paint) are safe, nor does it mean that there are no risks from such exposure.
It does mean that the balance is tilted more towards the risk of nuclear accident than the release of radon, etc, by coal-fired plants. My own opinion is that coal-fired plants, even just from a radiation perspective and without looking at greenhouse gasses, need to go even if we have to replace them with nuclear plants.
I also think that if you did your job around Chernobyl, you are quite within your rights to brag about being bold!
First, not all radiation is considered equal. You really have to look at ionizing effect. The most hazardous radiation is alpha particles which are emitted inside your body (for example, as a result of Polonium 210, Plutonium, Strontium 90, etc consumption, inhaling radon, or other forms of exposure). This is dangerous because an alpha particle steals 2 electrons pretty much from the first molecule it interacts with. They can't penetrate the skin but if released inside the body, they are pretty horrible. Furthermore, since this causes an electrical imbalance, I am not sure that antioxidants help much at all here.
Beta particles, gamma rays, etc work by transfer of energy to electrons, breaking covalent bonds. It is more or less the same process by which you get a sunburn or sunlight bleaches pigments.
Now having said this, most radiation (aside from a nuclear accident) from a power plant are in the form of gamma rays. Yes, they are harmful, but most of the radiation from a coal-fired plant is in the form of radioactive isotopes and in particular alpha emitters like thorium and radon. Even from a radiation standpoint, coal-fired plants are far more costly than nuclear ones (and I do support nuclear as an alternative to coal once the need for such plants has been minimized).
Also I would point out that the studies have been building for a long time that the long-term effects of one-time exposure to radiation are not as high as we had thought (Hiroshima, Chernobyl, etc). However, it is hard to get from there, given the experience with Radium in watch dials, to either the idea that long-term exposure to radiation is safe or to the idea that there are no risks from exposure to a single incident.
Actually, from other research I have done, the rates of birth defects have been far lower than previously expected.
This is not to say that the radiation is safe. It just means that people may be able to move back to Chernobyl sooner than previously thought (possibly not within our lifetimes though).
A couple points in response:
1) You are absolutely right about bad figures. On average, coal-fired plants produce much more exposure to radiation than nuclear plants and this is generally ignored by the anti-nuclear folks (of which I still count myself one). However, I will say that if it were a choice between coal (lots of green house gases, radioactive pollution, etc) vs nuclear (waste disposal issues, etc) I would choose the latter. In short, nuclear may be bad, but coal is definitely worse.
2) We need to understand that energy use has environmental cost. Simply throwing more power generators at a problem doesn't fix it. We need to do what we can to minimize that cost and this means a multi-level strategy. There is no magic bullet. A few nuclear power plants may be necessary but if we are smart we will pursue a number of other means first.
3) Cost per kWhr is not the only measure of energy's real cost. I think one must factor in the total environmental cost as well. This includes carbon consumption, hazardous waste disposal, environmental cost of production and disposal of generating equipment etc. We need to start at the bottom and work our way up. This means:
a) Conservation-oriented policies. Let us help try to get people to push for more energy efficiency in general so we don't need as many generators as we might otherwise.
b) methane from manure composting from dairy farms which may have close to a net zero cost. (On one hand capturing/burning the methane is *good* for the environment. On the other, the equipment still has to be manufactured and disposed of.)
c) Encouraging thermal solar energy use from areas where one would normally waste the energy is another proven area where we could come out ahead in terms of general conservation.
d) Wind power, properly done, is something I would call low-cost.
e) Any other ideas on agricultural waste, esp. the stuff that normally just gets burned?
f) fish-friendly hydroelectric dams
g) Current generation of nuclear reactors should replace coal generators.
h) More research needs to be done on renewable energy sources, and on storage and transmission systems (I think that ultracapacitors should also be seen as a green alternative to batteries in wind generators, for example).
h) More research needs to be done on fuel cycle issues and how to effectively eliminate waste (for example, by using the waste as fuel in other nuclear reactors)
I don't think it is an either/or question. I am not convinced that it is practical to use renewable energy at the current generation for current or future electrical needs, but I would think that everyone should be in favor of minimizing the role of non-renewable energy (in general) and the environmental cost of energy as a whole. Nuclear almost certainly has a part to play, but let's not make it any larger a part than it needs to be.
However, if the machine played consistently well that would be one thing, but what do you make of the moves that people point to and say that they look like human mistakes? Either the machine is so complex it is capable of making human mistakes or humans were making the mistakes.
What do you make of "this move looks like a human mistake?"
First of all, pointing fingers at holy books doesn't matter. Every holy book I have ever studied has contained divinely inspired sexually questionable acts (or sexually questionable acts by divine powers, for example, Mary conceiving at the age of 12, which seems to be a pedophilia-laden version of Leda and the Swan).
On the other hand something I do find greatly disturbing is t
The fact that Islam does not allow for a separation of sacred and social authority or law. These two concepts are very deeply homogenized in Islamic thought which leads inexorably to a world where there is no freedom of religion and no ability to seek one's own roots back beyond Islam. What is the penalty for converting away from Islam according to Islamic tradition again? Religious laws do not work, and "religion of law" is an oxymoron.
Secondly, I won't say Bush is the worst president ever. I think Harding was probably worse, and Woodrow Wilson (the great supporter of the KKK) doesn't seem that much better... However, we have a definite decline in leadership certainly since Kennedy and probably since Eisenhower.
Third, I think that Iraqis probably were better off prior to the invasion. You had a functioning educational infrastructure, etc. Sure Saddam was terrorizing the populations but he was relatively predictable (as opposed to the various criminal, terrorist, sectarian, etc. group terrorizing the population now). I.e. there was more security under Saddam, and there is probably more terror now that there is no law or order in most of the country.
We never should have invaded. There is no rational case which can be made for saying that Saddam was our problem or our responsibility. We would have had a greater moral right to invade Russia than we did to invade Iraq (I still think we should add Russia to the list of state sponsors of terrorism). Now, however, we have made the Iraqi civil war our responsibility. Every lawless killing is on our hands because we made it our responsibility when we invaded. However, this is not something we can now just turn and walk away from it now. We need a good plan to do what is necessary in Iraq to let the Iraqis take ownership for their country, but we also need to provide security to make it work. There are ways forward but our current leadership seems more intent on letting one side in the civil war (the Shiite sectarian militias) hide behind our troops and the Iraqi government, and then let our soldiers get killed instead. That is neither fair nor constructive, and it is one reason why we are losing the war of occupation in Iraq.
Furthermore this being the mistake of the Bush Administration, the Iraqi civil war is very much on his hands as well.
No, I wouldn't prefer to live in Iraq under Saddam than in America under Bush. We are protected from such acts of arbitrary government by our constitution, so regardless of the ambitions of the leader, we as a country have protections in place for our freedom. However, my statement holds that Iraqis were better off living under Saddam than living in the lawless area which has followed.
Putin still bears some strong measure of responsibility. He is under your theory still an accomplice.
If these were rogue FSB agents, then Putin has command responsibility for their actions, especially when there is no major effort to find and punish these people in a way which lets people know that these were in now way sponsored by Putin's government.
When rogue elements of one's own government commit crimes, if the government does not hold them accountable, then the government could be said to be supporting them. This was the major case against Milosevic at the Hague and it is reasonable. If a government turns a blind eye to such crimes, the government is supporting the crimes. End of story.
BTW, this is exactly the reason why I opposed the calls for Rumsfeld to step down after Abu Ghraib. Had he done so, the Bush Administration could have moved on and more or less argued that the matter was closed. But since he stayed, it meant that we had to continue to hold the Administration accountable for its failings there.
No. It *is* assault and battery. Unless there is an attempt to cause death, it is not attempted murder. It is also a cruel and unnecessary trampling on human dignity. However, neither the battery itself, nor the trampling on dignity is sufficient to warrant calling it torture in the absence of inflicted pain or a sense of danger of which the individual can be aware.
I think that we can be fairly certain of involvement by Putin's government in the Litvinenko assassination or at least interference in the subsequent investigation. The amount of Polonium which would have been used was quite high and there are a large number of controls relating to strong alpha emitters (like Polonium and Americium). Although these elements do have commercial uses, fairly strict accounting and control measures are in place as with any source of ionizing radiation. (Alpha emitters are often used to create electrical conduction in air, for example in smoke detectors or certain types of antistatic equipment. When contained they are reasonably safe-- the alpha particle cannot penetrate the skin so the decay has to happen inside the human body to be dangerous. In this case, however, it is the most dangerous form of radiation because it steals 2 electrons from various molecules thereby creating twice the free radicals of a single interaction of any other form of ionizing radiation.) Aside from commercial uses, Polonium is also used in older generations of detonators for nuclear weapons and therefore tends to be subject to even tighter controls than other alpha emitters.
The Polonium in the Litvinenko case was traced to a reactor in Russia. This is not cost effective nor is it the MO of various organized crime syndicates. Therefore the choice of Polonium must be significant. Due to the various accounting and control of Polonium, and due to its discovery on airplanes used in the London/Moscow route, we can be quite sure that this came from Russia, not from anywhere else. Either it was Putin's government sending a warning to dissidents or it was an extremely powerful opponent of Putin who would be able to pay off all the right people to obtain a significant quantity of Polonium.
Poisoning is one MO of the Kremlin. See the Yuchenko poisoning by dioxin, which the Ukrain argued was political assassination by the Kremlin and orchestrated by Russian agents (there is a definite pattern of political opponents at home or abroad being poisoned or shot).
The question is quite simple: Is this a message from the Kremlin that dissidents must remain quiet? Or is it an attempt to frame the Kremlin? If the assassination of Litvinenko, Politkavskaya, and others are the latter, then it would seem to be counterproductive, because of the chilling effect it has on getting other people to come forward. On the other hand, given other known similar incidents and given the chilling effect which has occurred, I would suggest that the Kremlin is almost certainly involved in these assassinations. No, we can't prove it, but the circumstantial evidence is fairly substantial.
I actually thought the article was pretty much right on track.
To the GP: Eric Raymond used the term "hacker" so no need to criticize the author for adopting it.
The issue isn't that IED's are new. They are not. However, the issue is that opposition groups (note the plural) in Iraq are using open source methods to collaborate on tactics and munitions development in ways we have not seen before. We are not fighting a centralized VC-like enemy (if we were, I would say it was time to bring the troops home). Instead we are fighting a loose community without a real command and control structure which operates a lot like open source communities.
In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam, the International Crisis Group has stated that there were literally hundreds of small independent insurgent groups which sprung up. While things have consolidated into 4 major Sunni groups and several Shiite ones, these groups still lack a lot of the standard coordination mechanisms we are used to seeing even in guerilla warfare. For this reason, insurgent groups are able to adapt to new developments much faster than we can, and hence we are at a strong disadvantage.
One of the conclusions of the article is that standardization on the part of the army is a dangerous thing because it means slow requisition times, and a difficulty adapting to new environments, while our opponents are not hampered by these disadvantages.
During the Kosovo campaign the Serbians were using microwave ovens as decoys against radar-homing missiles. A $100 countermeasure against a much more expensive weapon.
I would be very surprised if you couldn't build something like a V1 with commercial off-the-shelf parts.
Plywood wings and stabilizers. That should be downright easy.
shell, explosives, fuel tank. The explosives are probably the hardest part.
valved pulse jet. (could be made out of pipe, cap, valves, etc)
Launch system (possibly ski jump type). Location and plywood.....
I have some ideas for more efficient and quieter variations on the pulse jet idea for super-simple applications. These might require custom-milled parts. However I suspect that with the right design, you could use stagnation pressure as a sort of valve at slower speeds than a ramjet might be able to work efficiently at.
The Soviets lost a lot more people in their space program as well. I am not diminishing their accomplishments (they were technologically handicapped in design technology too, which in many ways makes their accomplishments *more* noteworthy).
rememberlitvinenko
Exactly.
If the person dies, they wouldn't have been conscious of the consequences, right?
Look, in that case it might be murder or manslaughter, but I would be hard pressed to suggest one can torture to death someone who is in a coma.
You misunderstand my point. It isn't a matter of force multiplier at all.
Instead, when you are having these sorts of issues, you start to have to worry about physical injury to the police officer. Being unarmed does not necessarily mean not posing a threat to serious bodily injury (which is where I would draw the line regarding tasing). I don't care if it is one cop-- if the cop is in reasonable danger of serious injury, the tasing is justified. Yes, this is a lower barrier than I would put on lethal force, but I think it is reasonable. It also draws a line which cuts off most of the cases of abuse, and it is something which can be reasonably reviewed (would a reasonable cop believed there was an imminent danger of physical injury?).
Hence tasing is justified in the case of imminent physical threat. It is not justified merely by the act of resisting but by someone who is strong enough to pose a physical danger to the police.