Look how many on that list are only capable of being on that list because either the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand have defense agreements with them.
They can afford not to have militaries because other people are responsible for their defense.
Unfortunately for the Greeks, they don't realize that things will be worse with the Drachma, because the government will have no money to pay them. Since the foreign banks won't lend them any more money, they will just have to print more, causing inflation, and making the currency worthless on the international market.
Your forgetting something very important, something Tsipras understands better then you do. If Greece as one of the oldest EU members, drops out of the Eurozone, it will push more people to do the same.
Fact is the way the Euro dollar was introduced was flawed from the start, having a pan-European currency and everyone's prices regulated to make them equal, and yet wages were never adjusted, nor was the conversion between the various currencies and the Euro to make things more evenly adjusted.
The Greek drachma was valued at 350 drachmas to the Euro dollar, people kept the same wages based on this conversion, so were their pensions, making Greece the lowest paid country in the Eurozone, and yet, the prices for the basics such as food were standardized under the law, which meant selling food for less then what was regulated was illegal and many got punished for it at the start of the Euro dollar. So a German making a average of 45,000 Euros a year has nearly the same cost of living as the Greek average of 23,000 Euros.
A cup of coffee in Greece before the Euro, was 80 drachmas, with the introduction of the Euro and the regulations to level prices, it became 1 Euro, or 350 drachmas, or 4 times the cost over night, without any kind of government method to allow people to deal with this jump in prices.
Beyond the costs of living jump, one must remember that the Germans and the French stood to profit the most from the loans the smaller governments were taking out. When the Greek PM "started" this entire "problem", it was not to ask for money, but to ask for a lower interest rate. A interest rate that between Eurozone countries was to be prime, and yet at the time the prime was 2%, and German and French government loans and private investment loans undersigned by both of those governments to Greece were at 6%, all he asked for was 4%, not bail out money, not support, just a interest rate that was still above what was the initial Euro agreements for. Only when the PM made the German parliament look like idiots over this did Germany start talking about "bail outs".
Fact is, unlike the then PM, Tsipras knows that he can push the Eurozone and actually get what is best for Greece, they wont allow Greece to drop the Euro dollar and all of this "push Greece out" talk is thin threats, the kind of threats that the former PM bowed down to, and accepted a worse faith then just economic collapse, a faith of being pushed down and kept down by the people who have meddled into Greek political affairs constantly for the last 200 years. If Greece leaves the Euro so will others, so far since before the introduction of the Euro, Greek politicians only cared about lining their pockets, and it is easiest when your a "yes man" to the people willing to give you the money.
Tsipras may be somewhat foolish playing a game of poker, but he isn't the one bluffing at the moment.
I wouldn't be surprised if they could withhold wages from those on the lowest rungs. The execs could argue that the competition is sucking away the money, and that wages will be coming soon. In the mean time, execs will get paid.
People get executed in China for this quite often. Even one missed payment to a employee is justification for execution.
This kind of thinking appears to only work here in the West where people are idiots and believe that unpaid over time will eventually get paid out, in the mean time the company knows even if you complain about it the fines are relatively small and are pointless so they don't care if they keep doing it.
The Hugue Convention of 1907 defines who is a legal and not a legal combatant.
The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps, fulfilling the following conditions:
To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
To carry arms openly; and
To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
In countries where militia or volunteer corps constitute the army, or form part of it, they are included under the denomination "army."
Insurgents typically (while doing a operation anyways, when parading around they are fine with showing off), do not wear a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance, nor do they carry their weapons openly, nor do they conduct operations in accordance to the laws and customs of war.
Which means they become a non-belligerent, which have no right to POW status. The Geneva Protocols are in addition to this, but do not supersede this, as they are Protocols attached to this convention.
So the Gestapo were quite within their rights to torture and execute members of the French Resistance? Or, in fact, any civilians who might have helped them, since presumably aiding and abetting an unlawful combatant is the same as being an unlawful combatant yourself?
Arsehole.
You should learn to be more polite, after all you don't know me, or the fact I have family who fought in the Greek Resistance against the Germans, and family who helped them. And regardless if they were fighting or were too old to fight, a number of them were executed as unlawful combatants by the German forces as they occupied Greece.
Just because I agree with the idea that a unlawful combatant has no rights based on international rule of law, and the precedence of what has happened in wars, doesn't mean its not because I don't have a personal connection to it.
Doesn't work that way, if your armed, not a part of a state military, and not in full uniform, you are automatically a unlawful combatant the moment you start shooting or blowing things up. You have no right to a legally competent tribunal.
The US treating them a POW's is the problem, they were not, and every war since all these rules of war were originally agreed upon, they'd have been executed where they were captured, before or after a interrogation but never given any kind of prisoner status none the less.
$30/roll will just continue to increase as film becomes a smaller and smaller niche
Actually, good quality film has been getting cheaper compared to the purchasing power of a dollar, when you consider that the same $30 roll 20 years ago is still just $30 a roll.
Can you still "send out" police film for developing, or do the agencies already have to maintain their own darkroom machines?
There are a number of places that will do the better quality (but very cheap, cheaper then what you'd buy as standard ISO film stock for regular photography at a dollar or 2 a roll) police film. Its not that difficult to process and I know here in Ontario there are a couple of labs that will do it for you.
And, whether credible news agencies will use rendering tools or not, un-credible ones (the majority of the market) will.
Depends on how much money your willing to spend, transparency film is rated for 120+ MP equivalency, and that isn't all that expensive film ($15 a roll or so). Even cheapo police film ain't that bad:
Gorilla Taken 60 feet away and then zoomed in, with "cheap" buck a roll police film.
At about $30 a roll you can get film that is just utterly amazing (document film, that is converted to be used with outdoor cameras) which boasts a impressive ~400 MP equivalency.
Girl on a building Also things like this are possible with the original image:
Boat, full frame And zoomed in to see the ship itself, using the same picture frame from the film (not a zoomed picture but the original film negative):
Boat zoomed in
And this is just regular film, 35mm, let alone the 4x5" and otherwise that people use for fine resolution landscapes that blows any digital out of the water.
Regardless, film, especially the negatives are easier to spot editing, and will remain for quite some time, even in news photography, especially of the topic (war zones) film negatives are worth more then their weight in gold over the digital pictures taken, as news outlets treat the negative as the original work, but there is no such "original work" from a digital camera that can be duplicated with relative ease compared to the film negatives.
So, when Syria blows up again in 2025, you use some stock footage from 2012, compile it up, and blend it into a recent cityscape render of wherever you want the injured little girl and her family to appear.
Saves a trip around the world, and safer than putting a professional in a war zone.
Which not only makes it not news, it makes it at best discreditable that the fighting in 2025 as you say is actually happening, at worst, its simply propaganda designed to make foreign intervention easier.
Either way, the fighting, the injured little girl, and her family do not exist.
There are reasons, especially for some important cases, that even today the FBI, and other developed nations national police forces still take out the film cameras instead of digital cameras. Because even the suspected photoshop of a digital picture is grounds to throw it out and make it inadmissible to be used as evidence.
The reason for it was to fund academia through a military scapegoat: kill two birds with one stone.
Fund academia? Perhaps your talking about a different Longitude Act, because the funding was the Longitude Prizes, which by the way were only paid out if you already made a advancement, or improved a existing design. They were rewards not research funding per-say.
Real funding tends to be given out first, used up to come up with the solution then if successful more funding for improvements is given for continued advancements. But funding come before the work, rewards come after the work, there is a relative difference.
The technological advancements made have been used with far less effect for the common man
Again, your speaking about this on a computer using the internet. Both technological advancements that wouldn't be around today without the direct involvement of Military funding during the electronic boom of the 1940-1960 time frame.
So explain to me, how the internet, which most of/. readers (and including you based on the tone of your posting) seem to think is this new Global weapon against oppression and corruption, and to be used against "the man", have been used with "less effect for the common man"? Seems to me, your attitude wouldn't work without your ability to express yourself like a Anonymous Coward, without this technology.
So again, if you feel that the internet, and modern computers are not worth it, nor is anything else developed for the military such as television, gigahertz communications, then shut down your computer, your cell phone, your TV, and take a hammer to them. Because obviously their "effect" on our lives is tiny and therefor you wont miss them.
If we wanted to wait another few centuries for basic advancements sure, but the fact is that human technological progress was greatest the last century in our history, of a direct result of military funding of research, both due to World War 2, and due to the Cold War. The jump in advancements in the last century, judging by the civilian advancements in the same time period, and the past few thousand years of civilization shows us that we'd be celebrating the year 3,000 before we got someone to the moon etc.
And anything that can be construed as military interest is really an underlying business interest, like the discovery of the Americas, but that was made possible by academic discoveries in timekeeping in Academia that allowed for long-term longitudinal navigation.
You do realize that the discovery and colonization of the Americas, were done a century before the invention of the famed accurate method for longitudinal navigation that John Harrison's marine chronometer in 1737 gave us? My ancestors who colonized Canada in 1604 would have something to say about that.
Also before John Harrison's marine chronometer, in 1737, most methods of keeping longitude were relatively useless for most travel and grossly inaccurate. Which by the way he created and competed in that competition that was funded by the British Parliament for the expressed purpose of the Military after the Scilly Naval Disaster of 1707. Yes another military inspired innovation.
So what was your point again? Because I think you don't have a valid one.
War is easier to mobilize a economy, and at the end the end of the day, as long as there is no political interference, similar to what happens today in all government agencies not just the Military, stuff can get done as long as you allow it to.
Regardless if we work towards a better mankind, or towards a world with more effective, and better ways to kill people isn't the issue. Either way, the end result is the same, a world with more opportunities and options for everyone over time. The question only then becomes, what would be more effective? A "Department of Technology" funding projects, or the military?
And something tells me no "Department of Technology" spending money would actually benefit us more then the contributions of the Military. Seeing how the research funding is spent around here, without a goal, or purpose, just to "try" something, and then forget about it, simply because there is no interest in the projects. Whereas, the Military, even when the project fails, they learn from it, and do not fund the same type of project twice like government research grant money tends to do. Plus past experience of the last few thousand years, tends to show that Military research and development tends to make a bigger impact on our lives on the long run then civilian research grants.
Would be interesting to figure a dollar figure return on investment though, but that kind of data would be very difficult to compile in any case.
Lets see Anonymous Coward, for you to post this the world wide military achievements required to start up the technology and make it viable in the first place include:
Computers, who's Military war efforts during Worlds War 2 and the Cold War funded such projects such as Colossus (UK 1943), ENIAC (US 1946), EDVAC (US 1949), all funded with the sole goal of winning wars.
The silicon transistor, without it NOTHING in your computer would work at all.
Magnetic memory was created with the MIT Whirlwind computer, which was designed for the SAGE system (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment of the US Air Force, aka NORAD and intercepting Soviet Bombers)
The first microprocessor was the MP944, which was created for the US Navy's F-14 fighter planes.
ARPANET, the reason we have a working internet today, was created so the Military and its research stations, and educational (university) partners could communicate more effectively then direct one to one connections people at the time used (aka instead of a telephone based data connection, to what we have now).
The reasons NASA was allowed to do what it did, and spend the money it did to go to the Moon, all of the old probes etc, was political games due to the Cold War, to compete with Russia. The agency's scientific contributions alone at the time were not the goal of the Governments funding, it was a way to try and "beat" the Russians without resorting to Nuclear War.
I suspect that if we want starships all we have to do is find a way of not putting enormous amounts of money into fighting and making money and just use it to develop the required technologies. I suspect that if the worldwide military budget and manpower were devoted to the human species for just one year the we'd see similar leaps in technology as the 1940-1970 period. Engineering is easy, people are difficult.
I suspect that if we allowed the Military to R&D anything the hell they wanted WITHOUT political interference and gave them the budgets they had in the 1940-1970 time frame, as compared to both the Federal Spending, and GDP of each country, you'd find technology would progress just as fast.
As far back as the creation of a mass producible silicon transistor, the DoD funded that effort by Shockley to the tune of 15 million dollars (currently would have been 150 million dollars due to inflation of the last 60 years) to get the transistor that was built out of germanium into silicon so that it would be capable of being used in the guidance computers of missiles. You know the same simple technology that without it, we wouldn't be having this discussion on this website today.
Imagine the military throwing 150 million dollars to create the transistor today, people would go ape shit crazy and call it a total waste of money, the members of Congress would try to make sure that the money was spent in their interests regardless if their locations was not ideal, due to manpower knowledge or otherwise. And in the end the transistor would be another wasted experiment to the tune of a few times the initial 150 million outlay.
World War 2 and the mass mobilization for war, and then the mobilization to dominate in a MAD situation with nuclear weapons is what drove the progress we had then in the first place, not picking roses in the garden and playing nice with each other.
If only people were taught history, perhaps we would not have these kinds of discussions.
IBM didn't go after Compaq after they knew Compaq built the BIOS in a clean room environment, but they did go after a few other companies that just tried to copy the BIOS right out of the technical manuals IBM provided about the IBM PC.
IBM's goal was never to limit clone building, far from it, they rather supported it, they just refused to allow others to use their source code. IBM needed to standardize the desktop market as quickly as possible, because of their issues with clients purchasing their mini-computers and mainframes and then trying to get some other brand desktop computer with little documentation, and even less standardization between the manufacturers to play nice with their big iron.
The documents showing nearly every technical aspect of the initial IBM PC and later series of computers were made available for less then it cost to buy the PC itself. The original IBM PC started at $3,000 and yet IBM sold the technical documents to anyone who asked for a copy for a mere $400 at the same time.
Clean room software engineering is supposed to be only knowing the inputs and outputs of the piece of software your trying to implement, without any inside knowledge of the source code.
This is how companies like Award, Phoenix and Compaq got away with cloning the IBM BIOS on the original IBM PC's as they used programmers and engineers who had never seen a copy of the code itself, and instead only provided them with "Input Command X results in Y if condition Z is met" type of documentation.
Reading the code and then rewriting it to do the exact same thing has been a violation of software copyrights since the 1980's when many companies tried to do that to the IBM BIOS, the legality of doing what your implying in court cases has already been shown to be illegal for the last 3 decades or so.
Now you just have to assassinate the character of 97 percent of working climate scientists.
You mean in a world where trying to find natural non-man made global warming studies means a loss of funding the moment you even mention it?
In addition to that, what good is a "climate scientist", last I checked they predicted that we'd have a ice age coming in the 1970s, then as the temperatures warmed up the last couple decades, it became "global warming", and with the temperature drop in the 2000's, it suddenly became a "expected" part of it so they renamed it "climate change".
And when they got worried that their data wont look nice cause the hockey stick wasn't going to show up on their charts, what did they do? They manipulate their data.
If it was not for the politics and left-wing wack jobs supporting them still they'd have been discredited themselves long ago, for their theories constantly needing major revisions to explain that its all humanities fault and we "must" do something about "greenhouse gases". Because no matter what happens with the temperature, their tune will not change, even if we got into a ice age tomorrow, they'd still find a way to blame it on CO2 instead of problems we are currently facing on this world. Over population, lack of food supplies, health care, pollution (you know the toxic kind that tends to kill other living things), etc.
I'm neither right-wing or left-wing, I just think for someone to believe in Global warming being the source of all our problems, it just shows they are mentally defective. We have bigger problems on our hands and climate has shown throughout our written history, and geological history that has been pieced together, to be a rather unpredictable beast regardless how well we try and model it.
A mechanically linked stick set up, if the one pilot is pushing one way, and the co-pilot is pushing the other way, you'd feel the resistance and you'd know something is wrong.
On the Airbus however, if your pushing to the right, and your co-pilot decides to push to the right cause he sees your about to hit a tree, your co-pilot's stick is in neutral, so not only does the plane not accept his input, your stick doesn't attempt to move in the direction your co-pilot is pushing, so you have no idea your co-pilot is trying to move you away from that tree.
A second warning that doesn't ever sound in safe scenarios (e.g. FALLING, FALLING, FALLING) might just have made them twig to "crap, it really is stalling".
Perhaps your not a pilot, but hearing "STALL, STALL, STALL" is the computer's way of saying "I've lost the ability to generate lift and now we are falling unless you cause the plane to generate lift".
No this accident was a case of idiot pilots who thought their job was to have a good time in the cockpit instead of flying the plane.
You do know the Barge alone has a scrap value of about 8 million dollars, and that is assuming you only scrap it out for the metal content in it. Scrapping a ship is good money even if your only making 90 cents a pound.
Let alone anything of value that might be in it, such as equipment etc that can be sold for more then 90 cents a pound.
Of course they will fail, after all it only took them 30 years to go from a 3rd world country where millions died of starvation to a first world nation. Their government system is unable to work and do whats best without democracy./sarcasm
Slashdot Mirror
Look how many on that list are only capable of being on that list because either the US, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand have defense agreements with them.
They can afford not to have militaries because other people are responsible for their defense.
Unfortunately for the Greeks, they don't realize that things will be worse with the Drachma, because the government will have no money to pay them. Since the foreign banks won't lend them any more money, they will just have to print more, causing inflation, and making the currency worthless on the international market.
Your forgetting something very important, something Tsipras understands better then you do. If Greece as one of the oldest EU members, drops out of the Eurozone, it will push more people to do the same.
Fact is the way the Euro dollar was introduced was flawed from the start, having a pan-European currency and everyone's prices regulated to make them equal, and yet wages were never adjusted, nor was the conversion between the various currencies and the Euro to make things more evenly adjusted.
The Greek drachma was valued at 350 drachmas to the Euro dollar, people kept the same wages based on this conversion, so were their pensions, making Greece the lowest paid country in the Eurozone, and yet, the prices for the basics such as food were standardized under the law, which meant selling food for less then what was regulated was illegal and many got punished for it at the start of the Euro dollar. So a German making a average of 45,000 Euros a year has nearly the same cost of living as the Greek average of 23,000 Euros.
A cup of coffee in Greece before the Euro, was 80 drachmas, with the introduction of the Euro and the regulations to level prices, it became 1 Euro, or 350 drachmas, or 4 times the cost over night, without any kind of government method to allow people to deal with this jump in prices.
Beyond the costs of living jump, one must remember that the Germans and the French stood to profit the most from the loans the smaller governments were taking out. When the Greek PM "started" this entire "problem", it was not to ask for money, but to ask for a lower interest rate. A interest rate that between Eurozone countries was to be prime, and yet at the time the prime was 2%, and German and French government loans and private investment loans undersigned by both of those governments to Greece were at 6%, all he asked for was 4%, not bail out money, not support, just a interest rate that was still above what was the initial Euro agreements for. Only when the PM made the German parliament look like idiots over this did Germany start talking about "bail outs".
Fact is, unlike the then PM, Tsipras knows that he can push the Eurozone and actually get what is best for Greece, they wont allow Greece to drop the Euro dollar and all of this "push Greece out" talk is thin threats, the kind of threats that the former PM bowed down to, and accepted a worse faith then just economic collapse, a faith of being pushed down and kept down by the people who have meddled into Greek political affairs constantly for the last 200 years. If Greece leaves the Euro so will others, so far since before the introduction of the Euro, Greek politicians only cared about lining their pockets, and it is easiest when your a "yes man" to the people willing to give you the money.
Tsipras may be somewhat foolish playing a game of poker, but he isn't the one bluffing at the moment.
I wouldn't be surprised if they could withhold wages from those on the lowest rungs. The execs could argue that the competition is sucking away the money, and that wages will be coming soon. In the mean time, execs will get paid.
People get executed in China for this quite often. Even one missed payment to a employee is justification for execution.
This kind of thinking appears to only work here in the West where people are idiots and believe that unpaid over time will eventually get paid out, in the mean time the company knows even if you complain about it the fines are relatively small and are pointless so they don't care if they keep doing it.
The Hugue Convention of 1907 defines who is a legal and not a legal combatant.
The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps, fulfilling the following conditions:
To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;
To carry arms openly; and
To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
In countries where militia or volunteer corps constitute the army, or form part of it, they are included under the denomination "army."
Insurgents typically (while doing a operation anyways, when parading around they are fine with showing off), do not wear a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance, nor do they carry their weapons openly, nor do they conduct operations in accordance to the laws and customs of war.
Which means they become a non-belligerent, which have no right to POW status. The Geneva Protocols are in addition to this, but do not supersede this, as they are Protocols attached to this convention.
So the Gestapo were quite within their rights to torture and execute members of the French Resistance? Or, in fact, any civilians who might have helped them, since presumably aiding and abetting an unlawful combatant is the same as being an unlawful combatant yourself? Arsehole.
You should learn to be more polite, after all you don't know me, or the fact I have family who fought in the Greek Resistance against the Germans, and family who helped them. And regardless if they were fighting or were too old to fight, a number of them were executed as unlawful combatants by the German forces as they occupied Greece.
Just because I agree with the idea that a unlawful combatant has no rights based on international rule of law, and the precedence of what has happened in wars, doesn't mean its not because I don't have a personal connection to it.
Doesn't work that way, if your armed, not a part of a state military, and not in full uniform, you are automatically a unlawful combatant the moment you start shooting or blowing things up. You have no right to a legally competent tribunal.
The US treating them a POW's is the problem, they were not, and every war since all these rules of war were originally agreed upon, they'd have been executed where they were captured, before or after a interrogation but never given any kind of prisoner status none the less.
$30/roll will just continue to increase as film becomes a smaller and smaller niche
Actually, good quality film has been getting cheaper compared to the purchasing power of a dollar, when you consider that the same $30 roll 20 years ago is still just $30 a roll.
Can you still "send out" police film for developing, or do the agencies already have to maintain their own darkroom machines?
There are a number of places that will do the better quality (but very cheap, cheaper then what you'd buy as standard ISO film stock for regular photography at a dollar or 2 a roll) police film. Its not that difficult to process and I know here in Ontario there are a couple of labs that will do it for you.
Film grain has resolution limits, RAM does not.
And, whether credible news agencies will use rendering tools or not, un-credible ones (the majority of the market) will.
Depends on how much money your willing to spend, transparency film is rated for 120+ MP equivalency, and that isn't all that expensive film ($15 a roll or so). Even cheapo police film ain't that bad:
Gorilla
Taken 60 feet away and then zoomed in, with "cheap" buck a roll police film.
At about $30 a roll you can get film that is just utterly amazing (document film, that is converted to be used with outdoor cameras) which boasts a impressive ~400 MP equivalency.
Girl on a building
Also things like this are possible with the original image:
Boat, full frame
And zoomed in to see the ship itself, using the same picture frame from the film (not a zoomed picture but the original film negative):
Boat zoomed in
And this is just regular film, 35mm, let alone the 4x5" and otherwise that people use for fine resolution landscapes that blows any digital out of the water.
Regardless, film, especially the negatives are easier to spot editing, and will remain for quite some time, even in news photography, especially of the topic (war zones) film negatives are worth more then their weight in gold over the digital pictures taken, as news outlets treat the negative as the original work, but there is no such "original work" from a digital camera that can be duplicated with relative ease compared to the film negatives.
So, when Syria blows up again in 2025, you use some stock footage from 2012, compile it up, and blend it into a recent cityscape render of wherever you want the injured little girl and her family to appear.
Saves a trip around the world, and safer than putting a professional in a war zone.
Which not only makes it not news, it makes it at best discreditable that the fighting in 2025 as you say is actually happening, at worst, its simply propaganda designed to make foreign intervention easier.
Either way, the fighting, the injured little girl, and her family do not exist.
There are reasons, especially for some important cases, that even today the FBI, and other developed nations national police forces still take out the film cameras instead of digital cameras. Because even the suspected photoshop of a digital picture is grounds to throw it out and make it inadmissible to be used as evidence.
Again, you keep arguing with the assumption that only military means are possible. Both logic and history go against that assumption.
No what I am saying is the military seems to be more efficient at it. And our world today shows that to be the case.
The reason for it was to fund academia through a military scapegoat: kill two birds with one stone.
Fund academia? Perhaps your talking about a different Longitude Act, because the funding was the Longitude Prizes, which by the way were only paid out if you already made a advancement, or improved a existing design. They were rewards not research funding per-say.
Real funding tends to be given out first, used up to come up with the solution then if successful more funding for improvements is given for continued advancements. But funding come before the work, rewards come after the work, there is a relative difference.
The technological advancements made have been used with far less effect for the common man
Again, your speaking about this on a computer using the internet. Both technological advancements that wouldn't be around today without the direct involvement of Military funding during the electronic boom of the 1940-1960 time frame.
/. readers (and including you based on the tone of your posting) seem to think is this new Global weapon against oppression and corruption, and to be used against "the man", have been used with "less effect for the common man"? Seems to me, your attitude wouldn't work without your ability to express yourself like a Anonymous Coward, without this technology.
So explain to me, how the internet, which most of
So again, if you feel that the internet, and modern computers are not worth it, nor is anything else developed for the military such as television, gigahertz communications, then shut down your computer, your cell phone, your TV, and take a hammer to them. Because obviously their "effect" on our lives is tiny and therefor you wont miss them.
If we wanted to wait another few centuries for basic advancements sure, but the fact is that human technological progress was greatest the last century in our history, of a direct result of military funding of research, both due to World War 2, and due to the Cold War. The jump in advancements in the last century, judging by the civilian advancements in the same time period, and the past few thousand years of civilization shows us that we'd be celebrating the year 3,000 before we got someone to the moon etc.
And anything that can be construed as military interest is really an underlying business interest, like the discovery of the Americas, but that was made possible by academic discoveries in timekeeping in Academia that allowed for long-term longitudinal navigation.
You do realize that the discovery and colonization of the Americas, were done a century before the invention of the famed accurate method for longitudinal navigation that John Harrison's marine chronometer in 1737 gave us? My ancestors who colonized Canada in 1604 would have something to say about that.
Also before John Harrison's marine chronometer, in 1737, most methods of keeping longitude were relatively useless for most travel and grossly inaccurate. Which by the way he created and competed in that competition that was funded by the British Parliament for the expressed purpose of the Military after the Scilly Naval Disaster of 1707. Yes another military inspired innovation.
So what was your point again? Because I think you don't have a valid one.
War is easier to mobilize a economy, and at the end the end of the day, as long as there is no political interference, similar to what happens today in all government agencies not just the Military, stuff can get done as long as you allow it to.
Regardless if we work towards a better mankind, or towards a world with more effective, and better ways to kill people isn't the issue. Either way, the end result is the same, a world with more opportunities and options for everyone over time. The question only then becomes, what would be more effective? A "Department of Technology" funding projects, or the military?
And something tells me no "Department of Technology" spending money would actually benefit us more then the contributions of the Military. Seeing how the research funding is spent around here, without a goal, or purpose, just to "try" something, and then forget about it, simply because there is no interest in the projects. Whereas, the Military, even when the project fails, they learn from it, and do not fund the same type of project twice like government research grant money tends to do. Plus past experience of the last few thousand years, tends to show that Military research and development tends to make a bigger impact on our lives on the long run then civilian research grants.
Would be interesting to figure a dollar figure return on investment though, but that kind of data would be very difficult to compile in any case.
Lets see Anonymous Coward, for you to post this the world wide military achievements required to start up the technology and make it viable in the first place include:
Computers, who's Military war efforts during Worlds War 2 and the Cold War funded such projects such as Colossus (UK 1943), ENIAC (US 1946), EDVAC (US 1949), all funded with the sole goal of winning wars.
The silicon transistor, without it NOTHING in your computer would work at all.
Magnetic memory was created with the MIT Whirlwind computer, which was designed for the SAGE system (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment of the US Air Force, aka NORAD and intercepting Soviet Bombers)
The first microprocessor was the MP944, which was created for the US Navy's F-14 fighter planes.
ARPANET, the reason we have a working internet today, was created so the Military and its research stations, and educational (university) partners could communicate more effectively then direct one to one connections people at the time used (aka instead of a telephone based data connection, to what we have now).
The reasons NASA was allowed to do what it did, and spend the money it did to go to the Moon, all of the old probes etc, was political games due to the Cold War, to compete with Russia. The agency's scientific contributions alone at the time were not the goal of the Governments funding, it was a way to try and "beat" the Russians without resorting to Nuclear War.
Shale I continue?
I suspect that if we want starships all we have to do is find a way of not putting enormous amounts of money into fighting and making money and just use it to develop the required technologies. I suspect that if the worldwide military budget and manpower were devoted to the human species for just one year the we'd see similar leaps in technology as the 1940-1970 period. Engineering is easy, people are difficult.
I suspect that if we allowed the Military to R&D anything the hell they wanted WITHOUT political interference and gave them the budgets they had in the 1940-1970 time frame, as compared to both the Federal Spending, and GDP of each country, you'd find technology would progress just as fast.
As far back as the creation of a mass producible silicon transistor, the DoD funded that effort by Shockley to the tune of 15 million dollars (currently would have been 150 million dollars due to inflation of the last 60 years) to get the transistor that was built out of germanium into silicon so that it would be capable of being used in the guidance computers of missiles. You know the same simple technology that without it, we wouldn't be having this discussion on this website today.
Imagine the military throwing 150 million dollars to create the transistor today, people would go ape shit crazy and call it a total waste of money, the members of Congress would try to make sure that the money was spent in their interests regardless if their locations was not ideal, due to manpower knowledge or otherwise. And in the end the transistor would be another wasted experiment to the tune of a few times the initial 150 million outlay.
World War 2 and the mass mobilization for war, and then the mobilization to dominate in a MAD situation with nuclear weapons is what drove the progress we had then in the first place, not picking roses in the garden and playing nice with each other.
If only people were taught history, perhaps we would not have these kinds of discussions.
IBM didn't go after Compaq after they knew Compaq built the BIOS in a clean room environment, but they did go after a few other companies that just tried to copy the BIOS right out of the technical manuals IBM provided about the IBM PC.
IBM's goal was never to limit clone building, far from it, they rather supported it, they just refused to allow others to use their source code. IBM needed to standardize the desktop market as quickly as possible, because of their issues with clients purchasing their mini-computers and mainframes and then trying to get some other brand desktop computer with little documentation, and even less standardization between the manufacturers to play nice with their big iron.
The documents showing nearly every technical aspect of the initial IBM PC and later series of computers were made available for less then it cost to buy the PC itself. The original IBM PC started at $3,000 and yet IBM sold the technical documents to anyone who asked for a copy for a mere $400 at the same time.
Clean room software engineering is supposed to be only knowing the inputs and outputs of the piece of software your trying to implement, without any inside knowledge of the source code.
This is how companies like Award, Phoenix and Compaq got away with cloning the IBM BIOS on the original IBM PC's as they used programmers and engineers who had never seen a copy of the code itself, and instead only provided them with "Input Command X results in Y if condition Z is met" type of documentation.
Reading the code and then rewriting it to do the exact same thing has been a violation of software copyrights since the 1980's when many companies tried to do that to the IBM BIOS, the legality of doing what your implying in court cases has already been shown to be illegal for the last 3 decades or so.
Now you just have to assassinate the character of 97 percent of working climate scientists.
You mean in a world where trying to find natural non-man made global warming studies means a loss of funding the moment you even mention it?
In addition to that, what good is a "climate scientist", last I checked they predicted that we'd have a ice age coming in the 1970s, then as the temperatures warmed up the last couple decades, it became "global warming", and with the temperature drop in the 2000's, it suddenly became a "expected" part of it so they renamed it "climate change".
And when they got worried that their data wont look nice cause the hockey stick wasn't going to show up on their charts, what did they do? They manipulate their data.
If it was not for the politics and left-wing wack jobs supporting them still they'd have been discredited themselves long ago, for their theories constantly needing major revisions to explain that its all humanities fault and we "must" do something about "greenhouse gases". Because no matter what happens with the temperature, their tune will not change, even if we got into a ice age tomorrow, they'd still find a way to blame it on CO2 instead of problems we are currently facing on this world. Over population, lack of food supplies, health care, pollution (you know the toxic kind that tends to kill other living things), etc.
I'm neither right-wing or left-wing, I just think for someone to believe in Global warming being the source of all our problems, it just shows they are mentally defective. We have bigger problems on our hands and climate has shown throughout our written history, and geological history that has been pieced together, to be a rather unpredictable beast regardless how well we try and model it.
What is the saying, put a group of random outwardly law abiding people in a room, and there will be a reason to hang every one of them.
A mechanically linked stick set up, if the one pilot is pushing one way, and the co-pilot is pushing the other way, you'd feel the resistance and you'd know something is wrong.
On the Airbus however, if your pushing to the right, and your co-pilot decides to push to the right cause he sees your about to hit a tree, your co-pilot's stick is in neutral, so not only does the plane not accept his input, your stick doesn't attempt to move in the direction your co-pilot is pushing, so you have no idea your co-pilot is trying to move you away from that tree.
A second warning that doesn't ever sound in safe scenarios (e.g. FALLING, FALLING, FALLING) might just have made them twig to "crap, it really is stalling".
Perhaps your not a pilot, but hearing "STALL, STALL, STALL" is the computer's way of saying "I've lost the ability to generate lift and now we are falling unless you cause the plane to generate lift".
No this accident was a case of idiot pilots who thought their job was to have a good time in the cockpit instead of flying the plane.
You do know the Barge alone has a scrap value of about 8 million dollars, and that is assuming you only scrap it out for the metal content in it. Scrapping a ship is good money even if your only making 90 cents a pound.
Let alone anything of value that might be in it, such as equipment etc that can be sold for more then 90 cents a pound.
Of course they will fail, after all it only took them 30 years to go from a 3rd world country where millions died of starvation to a first world nation. Their government system is unable to work and do whats best without democracy. /sarcasm