The M214, or its ficitious WWII equivalent, makes an appearance in RTCW, called the Venom. Those who have mastered it are ferocious; it does something like 200 points of damage a second to those in its path. To balance it out, it takes a half a second to bring the barrel up to speed (you can often hear the owner tapping the mouse to keep the barrel whirring but not yet firing from around the corner) and it overheats very quickly in which case it takes a second or two to cool down before you can shoot again. Oh and its pretty inaccurate at long ranges, the bullets really tend to spray everywhere.
Just an example of how they tried to add some limits to an uber-powerful weapon. They did a pretty good job; not too many people have mastered the venom. It's main use is for holding choke points or mowing your way through narrow hallways, and in the time it takes to spin up the gun, a *good* player can kill the venom and only lose half his health. Or just toss grenades at 'em.
Have you played any Raven Shield? I like the effects of flashbangs and tear gas. With tear gas, your vision goes all blurry and and the enemy can hear you coughing.
Remember the Biathlon event in the old C-64/Apple ][ Winter Games? The harder you pushed through the ski course, the faster your heart would be pumping. Then, when you got to the shooting range, the scope wobble was directly proportional to your heart rate. I remember seeing a documentarty about Olympic shooters (obviously a different animal from combat snipers) showing how they would actually wait for the pause bewteen heart beats to squeeze off a round. I thought the implementation on Winter Games was pretty well done.
The only FPS game I play online is RTCW, and a little ET. The sniper rifle is probably too powerful, but it's certainly not too powerful in the hands of a noob. However, when you can line up your shot unscoped, then have a bind that does zoom-wait-fire, where wait is the time to draw one frame, the weapon becomes too powerful. It takes no time to bring the weapon to a scoped position, though in RTCW's defense you can only stay scoped if you are moving in "crouch" mode. A head shot will drop anyone, and a body shot is equivalent of three or four bullets from a regular gun. Actually, my fix would be to make the regular guns made more powerful, but the I guess I should go play Raven Shield or something.
The idea of adding windage, and actually having gravity afffect the bullet, would be great. Maybe that's too much CPU time for right now. I always have liked the trail the sniper bullet cuts through the air in Halo, because it looks like it's actually getting buffeted by the wind, but I think that's just graphics and doesn't affect the actual trajectory.
The author's point about the existence of snipers in FPS maps is a good one. In real life, snipers might get dropped out of an airplane in the dead of night, spend three days in the same position, not moving, crapping and pissing themselves, waiting to acquire the target. Then they would take the shot, wait for the extraction team, and their first stop back in civilization would be the infirmary, where doctors would remove the ticks and leeches that have accumulated after 72 hours.
Option #2 is a great way to win the races in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Just blow up the other cars with a rocket launcher at the start of the race and it's smooth sailing.
Iraq bears lots of similarities to Panama. Noriega was our man, but he stepped out of line, so he was removed. Same deal with Iraq.
"a bit more particular" is an interesting choice. I would say "a bit more arbitrary." The U.S. will continue to look the other way when it comes to the human rights, etc. abuses of our Allies -- for example, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, all partners in the War on Terror. Two of those countries are military dictatorships, one is a kingdom. None of them have a free press. In other words, there is no self-determination going on there either. The whole "democracy" thing was never a reason for the war; it was about the imminent danger to the US from the WMD, remember? All this talk about democracy is just people looking for the silver lining, unwilling to accept that the entire case for the war was a sham.
Then there's always the Chile option; support a revolution if you'r afraid the product of Democracy isn't going to be in U.S. interests. That's what almost happened in Venezuela pre-9/11. There was almost a military coup, and the U.S. response was essentially this: "That's too bad; Venezuela's democratically elected government should have been more responsive to the needs of the people, and this wouldn't have happened." Nevermind that the charter of the OAS, in which the U.S. is a member, states we have to support democratic governments in this hemisphere. Of course, it just so happened that Chavez was nationalizing the oil industry, which could mean lost money for big oil in the U.S. You do the math. (Note: That's not too different from how the Shah came to power in Iran in 1953, either. He was installed by a CIA-backed coup. Of course, that was prompted by our fear of the Red Menace. We screwed over a whole country and now that the USSR is gone we've made our bed and now we have to lie in it.)
There is still plenty of anti-US sentiment in the world post-USSR; it kind of reminds me of the Sorcerer's Apprentice where he puts out the big fire only to have it morph into two smaller fires, those become four even smaller fires, and so on.
Perhaps once we stop overthrowing governments that don't meet our arbitrary conditions, anti US sentiment aroudn the world will lessen. A good way to do that might be to stop electing Republicans, since we had a Republican President standing behind each of the events I listed above.
Re:NASA is dying... Bushcraft Confirms
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
do you have a source on that? all i've heard so far is speculation on both sides.
based on what little i know, it makes sense to me that bush avoided vietnam by joining the NG. Otherwise, why not just join the army and go to 'nam?
no so hilarious when you're driving down the street with a thousand bucks to buy a big screen tv, you get pulled over, and the cops take your money because they aribtrarily determine you were going to buy drugs with it.
The important lesson here is that you can be deprived of all that stuff, so long as there is due process. In other words, once the cops seize your stuff, they don't have to give it back, so long as the initial seizure was legal.
It's really bad in civil cases. They can take your stuff (house, car, boat, whatever), never charge you with anything, and you'll never see it again. Seizing assets in a civil action this way is a big part of the War on Drugs. All the cops have to do is make the assertion at the time of seizure that the property in question was being used in conjunction with a drug operation. But they never have to prove that in court. As I said they never have to charge you with anything. But they will file suit against your property; there are plenty of court cases like "US v. $17.254.38" and I'll let you guess who wins.
It sucks, but as the only people really directly affected are (1) drug dealers (2) black people carrying hundreds in cash when their cars are pulled over (3) computer geeks most people are ignorant of the problem and/or don't see it as a problem.
But he couldn't have used "Strategy" or MicroStrategy would have a case against him. (Assuming they are still around.)
So because his name is phonetically "Micro" he is denied the chance to register certain domain names starting with his name, spelled properly, and ending in any of a number of endings that are copyrighted by various corporate interests.
Every time I get that Columbia House mailer, I'm always amused to see Billy Joel(R) and Chicago(R).
MicroMachines might have a harder time winning their lawsuit, unless Mike Rowe starts selling tiny little toy cars on his web site.
America was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001. 3000 people dead. Fighting terrorism is now the mission of every American.
Maybe if it had been more of a mission before 9/11 and the attacks would never have happened.
Coincidentally, we are currently in the process of complying with Osama bin Laden's demand to remove our infidel troops from their proximity to the holy lands of Islam and stationing them in Qatar or UAE instead.
Plenty of nations have been attacked by terrorists throughout history; they usually don't make it the centerpiece of their foreign and domestic policy.
Re:Militarisation of space - one option
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 1
obviously most of the electoral collage feel that the country belongs in the right (damn liberals)
Something like 271 electors voted for Bush, 267 for Gore. That's pretty close; technically you can call it "most" but it's not too persuasive.
In fact, since this is Slashdot, let's do the math. There's 538 electoral votes total. Poisson distribution tells us that any sample size n has sqtn(n)/n percent uncertainty. For the electoral college, that works out to just over 4.3 percent. 4.3 percent of 538 is just over 23 electoral votes.
In other words, the result of the last electoral college were not statisticlaly significant. It was too close to call.
If you look at the popular vote, Bush received 50,456,002 votes, and Gore 50,999,897. With that large a sample size, the uncertainty is much less. Let's say there were a hundred million votes total (actually there were slightly more than that, don't forget Nader and Buchanan, etc.) sqrt (10^8)/10^8 give us.01% uncertainty, or ten thousand votes. Gore's margin of victory in the popular vote exceeds this uncertainty by about fifty times.
The electoral college also has the odd behavior of awarding an entire state to one candidate, even if the voters are almost exactly split down the middle, as was the case in Florida and a few other states. It's an all-or-nothing proposition. Personally I think America's interests would be best served if we were to form coalition governments. As it is, we have a winner-take-all system, and one in which the winner isn't necessarily the guy who gets the most votes.
A different-yet-similar crisis happened in France in 2001, when so many liberals ran against Chirac that they split the liberal vote and the ultra-right-wing candidate took second place. The way France's elections are designed there's a run-off between the top two if noone gets a majority. So French voters, who cast many more votes for leftist candidates on the first go-round, were left with a choice between a super-right wing guy and an average right-wing guy.
Anyway, I do have one last question: how do you think Gore would have handled 9/11? You're not the first person I've heard make the comment that Gore would not be up to the task. I'm just wondering what you think Bush did that was so great, and what would Gore have done differently that would be so disastrous? Not that I have any great love for Al Gore, but what would he have done differently? Would we maybe have Osama bin Laden by now? Would I not have to get to the airport two or three hours ahead of time? Would citizens not be held indefinitely with no charges filed and no access to a lawyer? What?
In case you didn't know, the whole Bosnia situation was actually Gen. Clark's brainchild, and it was a mess, but not nearly as big a mess as we've got in Iraq. For example, there were no U.S combat fatalities in Bosnia.
considering saddam is so horrible, wouldn't it just be easier to get his goons to gouge the children's eyes out, rather than depend on collateral damage from the americans?
i think you take your propaganda a little too far.
Re:The Militarization Of Space
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hmmm, where to begin. For starters, Iraq WAS its own sovereign country before we invaded it.
America doesn't "imply" that enemies are evil, they go ahead and put them in the Axis of Evil.
Capitalism: It's not profit at any legal cost, it's profit at any cost so long as you can get away with it. Enron for example. Not that this is anything new; Machiavelli spelled it out explicity about half a millenia ago.
Being opposed to the neoconservative doctrine doesn't make you a socialist. Neocons are mostly about foreign policy anyways; not about how to run the country internally. Their whole thing is about how to keep America on top now that the USSR is gone, and Europe is no longer beholden to us for protection, and naturally will directy compete with us economically. With the euro at about $1.26, they're doing pretty well.
That's also the reason for the war; to keep OPEC on the dollar. It creates an incredible demand for the dollar when the only way you can buy oil, the lifebood of industry, is with dollars. If has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Saddam is, in fact, Eeevil.
This statement doesn't imply that the [USA] is inherently aggressive. Look at TR's walk softly and carry a big stick approach
There's this political cartoon with George W. Bush saying "Bring it on!" and behind him is a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, except T.R.'s face is cringing in agony. Brilliant.
Re:The Militarization Of Space
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
He's also free to vote the bastards out of office.
How come nobody ever says "You're always free to vote" or "You're always free to state your opinion." or what about "a diversity of opinions and the freedom to express them is a vital part of a health society."
Or do you believe that our democracy is so fragile that it cannot withstand any dissent? That's not what the First Amendment says.
Re:NASA is dying... Bushcraft Confirms
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 0, Troll
why do nasa engineers drink sprite? because they can't get seven up.
I haven't heard any Columbia jokes. Anyone? Maybe the shuttle blowing up is only funny the first time.
Re:NASA is dying... Bushcraft Confirms
on
The Future of NASA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I find it funny that his a father, a real hero, was not in a hurry to sacrafice lives. Yet, he was a total coward for 'nam, but goes to war for just some oil.
The explanation is that bush jr. trying to find a way to prove to his daddy that he's a real man. Since he couldn't accomplish that during nam, and had to get spirited into the safety of the national guard instead, he sends hundreds to die in Iraq. Thus proving by proxy that he has what it takes.
He has to prove to his daddy that, in spite of the fact that he is a closeted homosexual with a "beard" wife, he's worthy of the love that has been denied. He's trying to earn his dad's approbation and invading a country, flexing muscle, makes the most sense to him.
it also happens to fit perfectly in line with neoconservative policy, but that's really a happy accident. Bush Sr. had the stones to keep the neocons in their place, but jr, being a spineless wimp who no longer wants to be loooked down on as sort of a simpleton, has surrounded himself with a cadre of yes-men who can confirm for him at each morning's intel briefing that he is doing the right thing, the poll numbers are good, and that he's demonstrating real leadership. Now mr president if you could just agree to this, and sign this, we'll let you get back to your month-long vacation.
that's my take anyway. Lots of it is hypothesis, but it's the most rational explanation i've been able to cobble together from the few facts we do have.
I should have put a smiley after my Irishmen comment. It was supposed to be funny.
Divide and Conquer; if only the Brits knew how successful they'd be. That legacy has long outlasted the Empire it was intended to preserve. Kind of the diplomatic equivalent of a land mine.
Large-scale commercial agriculture may not be sustainable. Hunter-gathering is.
We're banking on the ability of technology to invent our way out of the very same holes we are creating by the implementation of technology. That's the cycle that keeps civilization marching onwards. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's simply the way it is. It has pros and cons, as does any civilization. The pro is, look at all the shinies we have. The con is, it may not be sustainable.
Example: Farming, as in being tied to the land, was a new technology. The downside was that the soil became depleted. The new technology called crop rotation addresed that issue. Another example, more of a counterexample, is pesticide use. After WWII U.S. farmers realized they could dramatically increase yield by use of chemical pesticides. Fifty years later the pesticides aren't nearly as effective since the bugs have developed genetic resistance. The next cycle is GMO crops, which have been in widespread use for a decade or two. The downside of this is that the GMO crops which produce their own pesticide (think Bt corn) not only kill off predatory bugs but all other insects.
It's a vicious cycle, and once you're hooked it's hard to get off. Clearly we can't go back to hunter-gathering, billions would starve. But what do we do with the billions? What will be the hidden cost to the new technology that allows us to feed an ever-increasing human population
And let's face it, something has to give. There's a finite amount of arable land; irrigation has lots of bad environmental effects, as does clearing forest for agriculture.
The first farmers of the Fertile Crescent clearly were acting in their best interests for the short term. They would simply have no way of knowing how things would turn out in the long run. For that matter, we don't really have much of a clue either. Who could have predicted AIDS or Mad Cow disease? And even things that could be predicted, like the problems caused by those invasive species of mussels (tiger mussels?) taking a foothold in American waters, how could we have stopped the movement of cargo across the oceans? For it is the very act of trading the goods we've had the free time to create as a result of the agricultural revolution which provides the mechanism allowing invasive species to find new homes and devastate the "natural" environment.
You want your parents and kids to do well, but what about five generations down the road? Are you going to bet their future on the technology approach? Will there ever be enough technology or do we constantly need more? What if we find ourselves up against the wall and that new technology doesn't come through? Maybe we're already past that point and we just don't know it yet.
I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life, and I'm certainly no hunter-gatherer. But I do think these are real questions that most of society doesn't even give a second thought to.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, like when in the movies guys are just standing there and all of a sudden all the little bushes stand up and turn out to be Delta Force. Got it.
What is a "gilly suit?"
The M214, or its ficitious WWII equivalent, makes an appearance in RTCW, called the Venom. Those who have mastered it are ferocious; it does something like 200 points of damage a second to those in its path. To balance it out, it takes a half a second to bring the barrel up to speed (you can often hear the owner tapping the mouse to keep the barrel whirring but not yet firing from around the corner) and it overheats very quickly in which case it takes a second or two to cool down before you can shoot again. Oh and its pretty inaccurate at long ranges, the bullets really tend to spray everywhere.
Just an example of how they tried to add some limits to an uber-powerful weapon. They did a pretty good job; not too many people have mastered the venom. It's main use is for holding choke points or mowing your way through narrow hallways, and in the time it takes to spin up the gun, a *good* player can kill the venom and only lose half his health. Or just toss grenades at 'em.
Have you played any Raven Shield? I like the effects of flashbangs and tear gas. With tear gas, your vision goes all blurry and and the enemy can hear you coughing.
simple. play enemy territory.
Remember the Biathlon event in the old C-64/Apple ][ Winter Games? The harder you pushed through the ski course, the faster your heart would be pumping. Then, when you got to the shooting range, the scope wobble was directly proportional to your heart rate. I remember seeing a documentarty about Olympic shooters (obviously a different animal from combat snipers) showing how they would actually wait for the pause bewteen heart beats to squeeze off a round. I thought the implementation on Winter Games was pretty well done.
The only FPS game I play online is RTCW, and a little ET. The sniper rifle is probably too powerful, but it's certainly not too powerful in the hands of a noob. However, when you can line up your shot unscoped, then have a bind that does zoom-wait-fire, where wait is the time to draw one frame, the weapon becomes too powerful. It takes no time to bring the weapon to a scoped position, though in RTCW's defense you can only stay scoped if you are moving in "crouch" mode. A head shot will drop anyone, and a body shot is equivalent of three or four bullets from a regular gun. Actually, my fix would be to make the regular guns made more powerful, but the I guess I should go play Raven Shield or something.
The idea of adding windage, and actually having gravity afffect the bullet, would be great. Maybe that's too much CPU time for right now. I always have liked the trail the sniper bullet cuts through the air in Halo, because it looks like it's actually getting buffeted by the wind, but I think that's just graphics and doesn't affect the actual trajectory.
The author's point about the existence of snipers in FPS maps is a good one. In real life, snipers might get dropped out of an airplane in the dead of night, spend three days in the same position, not moving, crapping and pissing themselves, waiting to acquire the target. Then they would take the shot, wait for the extraction team, and their first stop back in civilization would be the infirmary, where doctors would remove the ticks and leeches that have accumulated after 72 hours.
bravo. best one i've seen all week.
Option #2 is a great way to win the races in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. Just blow up the other cars with a rocket launcher at the start of the race and it's smooth sailing.
Iraq bears lots of similarities to Panama. Noriega was our man, but he stepped out of line, so he was removed. Same deal with Iraq.
"a bit more particular" is an interesting choice. I would say "a bit more arbitrary." The U.S. will continue to look the other way when it comes to the human rights, etc. abuses of our Allies -- for example, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan, all partners in the War on Terror. Two of those countries are military dictatorships, one is a kingdom. None of them have a free press. In other words, there is no self-determination going on there either. The whole "democracy" thing was never a reason for the war; it was about the imminent danger to the US from the WMD, remember? All this talk about democracy is just people looking for the silver lining, unwilling to accept that the entire case for the war was a sham.
Then there's always the Chile option; support a revolution if you'r afraid the product of Democracy isn't going to be in U.S. interests. That's what almost happened in Venezuela pre-9/11. There was almost a military coup, and the U.S. response was essentially this: "That's too bad; Venezuela's democratically elected government should have been more responsive to the needs of the people, and this wouldn't have happened." Nevermind that the charter of the OAS, in which the U.S. is a member, states we have to support democratic governments in this hemisphere. Of course, it just so happened that Chavez was nationalizing the oil industry, which could mean lost money for big oil in the U.S. You do the math. (Note: That's not too different from how the Shah came to power in Iran in 1953, either. He was installed by a CIA-backed coup. Of course, that was prompted by our fear of the Red Menace. We screwed over a whole country and now that the USSR is gone we've made our bed and now we have to lie in it.)
There is still plenty of anti-US sentiment in the world post-USSR; it kind of reminds me of the Sorcerer's Apprentice where he puts out the big fire only to have it morph into two smaller fires, those become four even smaller fires, and so on.
Perhaps once we stop overthrowing governments that don't meet our arbitrary conditions, anti US sentiment aroudn the world will lessen. A good way to do that might be to stop electing Republicans, since we had a Republican President standing behind each of the events I listed above.
do you have a source on that? all i've heard so far is speculation on both sides.
based on what little i know, it makes sense to me that bush avoided vietnam by joining the NG. Otherwise, why not just join the army and go to 'nam?
maybe you're buying it used from some guy who put an ad in the paper.
maybe you don't trust the banks.
maybe you just went to the bank to withdraw the cash and you're buying it from some pawn shop who will give you a better price if you pay in cash.
there are plenty of reasons why you would carry that much cash around.
yes, there's plenty of proof.
http://www.google.com/search?q=civil+forfeiture
no so hilarious when you're driving down the street with a thousand bucks to buy a big screen tv, you get pulled over, and the cops take your money because they aribtrarily determine you were going to buy drugs with it.
The important lesson here is that you can be deprived of all that stuff, so long as there is due process. In other words, once the cops seize your stuff, they don't have to give it back, so long as the initial seizure was legal.
It's really bad in civil cases. They can take your stuff (house, car, boat, whatever), never charge you with anything, and you'll never see it again. Seizing assets in a civil action this way is a big part of the War on Drugs. All the cops have to do is make the assertion at the time of seizure that the property in question was being used in conjunction with a drug operation. But they never have to prove that in court. As I said they never have to charge you with anything. But they will file suit against your property; there are plenty of court cases like "US v. $17.254.38" and I'll let you guess who wins.
It sucks, but as the only people really directly affected are
(1) drug dealers
(2) black people carrying hundreds in cash when their cars are pulled over
(3) computer geeks
most people are ignorant of the problem and/or don't see it as a problem.
But he couldn't have used "Strategy" or MicroStrategy would have a case against him. (Assuming they are still around.)
So because his name is phonetically "Micro" he is denied the chance to register certain domain names starting with his name, spelled properly, and ending in any of a number of endings that are copyrighted by various corporate interests.
Every time I get that Columbia House mailer, I'm always amused to see Billy Joel(R) and Chicago(R).
MicroMachines might have a harder time winning their lawsuit, unless Mike Rowe starts selling tiny little toy cars on his web site.
America was attacked by terrorists on September 11, 2001. 3000 people dead. Fighting terrorism is now the mission of every American.
Maybe if it had been more of a mission before 9/11 and the attacks would never have happened.
Coincidentally, we are currently in the process of complying with Osama bin Laden's demand to remove our infidel troops from their proximity to the holy lands of Islam and stationing them in Qatar or UAE instead.
Plenty of nations have been attacked by terrorists throughout history; they usually don't make it the centerpiece of their foreign and domestic policy.
obviously most of the electoral collage feel that the country belongs in the right (damn liberals)
.01% uncertainty, or ten thousand votes. Gore's margin of victory in the popular vote exceeds this uncertainty by about fifty times.
Something like 271 electors voted for Bush, 267 for Gore. That's pretty close; technically you can call it "most" but it's not too persuasive.
In fact, since this is Slashdot, let's do the math. There's 538 electoral votes total. Poisson distribution tells us that any sample size n has sqtn(n)/n percent uncertainty. For the electoral college, that works out to just over 4.3 percent. 4.3 percent of 538 is just over 23 electoral votes.
In other words, the result of the last electoral college were not statisticlaly significant. It was too close to call.
If you look at the popular vote, Bush received 50,456,002 votes, and Gore 50,999,897. With that large a sample size, the uncertainty is much less. Let's say there were a hundred million votes total (actually there were slightly more than that, don't forget Nader and Buchanan, etc.) sqrt (10^8)/10^8 give us
The electoral college also has the odd behavior of awarding an entire state to one candidate, even if the voters are almost exactly split down the middle, as was the case in Florida and a few other states. It's an all-or-nothing proposition. Personally I think America's interests would be best served if we were to form coalition governments. As it is, we have a winner-take-all system, and one in which the winner isn't necessarily the guy who gets the most votes.
A different-yet-similar crisis happened in France in 2001, when so many liberals ran against Chirac that they split the liberal vote and the ultra-right-wing candidate took second place. The way France's elections are designed there's a run-off between the top two if noone gets a majority. So French voters, who cast many more votes for leftist candidates on the first go-round, were left with a choice between a super-right wing guy and an average right-wing guy.
Anyway, I do have one last question: how do you think Gore would have handled 9/11? You're not the first person I've heard make the comment that Gore would not be up to the task. I'm just wondering what you think Bush did that was so great, and what would Gore have done differently that would be so disastrous? Not that I have any great love for Al Gore, but what would he have done differently? Would we maybe have Osama bin Laden by now? Would I not have to get to the airport two or three hours ahead of time? Would citizens not be held indefinitely with no charges filed and no access to a lawyer? What?
In case you didn't know, the whole Bosnia situation was actually Gen. Clark's brainchild, and it was a mess, but not nearly as big a mess as we've got in Iraq. For example, there were no U.S combat fatalities in Bosnia.
considering saddam is so horrible, wouldn't it just be easier to get his goons to gouge the children's eyes out, rather than depend on collateral damage from the americans?
i think you take your propaganda a little too far.
Hmmm, where to begin. For starters, Iraq WAS its own sovereign country before we invaded it.
America doesn't "imply" that enemies are evil, they go ahead and put them in the Axis of Evil.
Capitalism: It's not profit at any legal cost, it's profit at any cost so long as you can get away with it. Enron for example. Not that this is anything new; Machiavelli spelled it out explicity about half a millenia ago.
Being opposed to the neoconservative doctrine doesn't make you a socialist. Neocons are mostly about foreign policy anyways; not about how to run the country internally. Their whole thing is about how to keep America on top now that the USSR is gone, and Europe is no longer beholden to us for protection, and naturally will directy compete with us economically. With the euro at about $1.26, they're doing pretty well.
That's also the reason for the war; to keep OPEC on the dollar. It creates an incredible demand for the dollar when the only way you can buy oil, the lifebood of industry, is with dollars. If has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Saddam is, in fact, Eeevil.
This statement doesn't imply that the [USA] is inherently aggressive. Look at TR's walk softly and carry a big stick approach
There's this political cartoon with George W. Bush saying "Bring it on!" and behind him is a portrait of Teddy Roosevelt, except T.R.'s face is cringing in agony. Brilliant.
He's also free to vote the bastards out of office.
How come nobody ever says "You're always free to vote" or "You're always free to state your opinion." or what about "a diversity of opinions and the freedom to express them is a vital part of a health society."
Or do you believe that our democracy is so fragile that it cannot withstand any dissent? That's not what the First Amendment says.
Galaxybucks?
why do nasa engineers drink sprite?
because they can't get seven up.
I haven't heard any Columbia jokes. Anyone? Maybe the shuttle blowing up is only funny the first time.
I find it funny that his a father, a real hero, was not in a hurry to sacrafice lives. Yet, he was a total coward for 'nam, but goes to war for just some oil.
The explanation is that bush jr. trying to find a way to prove to his daddy that he's a real man. Since he couldn't accomplish that during nam, and had to get spirited into the safety of the national guard instead, he sends hundreds to die in Iraq. Thus proving by proxy that he has what it takes.
He has to prove to his daddy that, in spite of the fact that he is a closeted homosexual with a "beard" wife, he's worthy of the love that has been denied. He's trying to earn his dad's approbation and invading a country, flexing muscle, makes the most sense to him.
it also happens to fit perfectly in line with neoconservative policy, but that's really a happy accident. Bush Sr. had the stones to keep the neocons in their place, but jr, being a spineless wimp who no longer wants to be loooked down on as sort of a simpleton, has surrounded himself with a cadre of yes-men who can confirm for him at each morning's intel briefing that he is doing the right thing, the poll numbers are good, and that he's demonstrating real leadership. Now mr president if you could just agree to this, and sign this, we'll let you get back to your month-long vacation.
that's my take anyway. Lots of it is hypothesis, but it's the most rational explanation i've been able to cobble together from the few facts we do have.
Well done. My hat's off to you.
I should have put a smiley after my Irishmen comment. It was supposed to be funny.
Divide and Conquer; if only the Brits knew how successful they'd be. That legacy has long outlasted the Empire it was intended to preserve. Kind of the diplomatic equivalent of a land mine.
I'll take my dogma over FBI == The Truth any day, thank you very much.
Large-scale commercial agriculture may not be sustainable. Hunter-gathering is.
We're banking on the ability of technology to invent our way out of the very same holes we are creating by the implementation of technology. That's the cycle that keeps civilization marching onwards. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's simply the way it is. It has pros and cons, as does any civilization. The pro is, look at all the shinies we have. The con is, it may not be sustainable.
Example: Farming, as in being tied to the land, was a new technology. The downside was that the soil became depleted. The new technology called crop rotation addresed that issue. Another example, more of a counterexample, is pesticide use. After WWII U.S. farmers realized they could dramatically increase yield by use of chemical pesticides. Fifty years later the pesticides aren't nearly as effective since the bugs have developed genetic resistance. The next cycle is GMO crops, which have been in widespread use for a decade or two. The downside of this is that the GMO crops which produce their own pesticide (think Bt corn) not only kill off predatory bugs but all other insects.
It's a vicious cycle, and once you're hooked it's hard to get off. Clearly we can't go back to hunter-gathering, billions would starve. But what do we do with the billions? What will be the hidden cost to the new technology that allows us to feed an ever-increasing human population
And let's face it, something has to give. There's a finite amount of arable land; irrigation has lots of bad environmental effects, as does clearing forest for agriculture.
The first farmers of the Fertile Crescent clearly were acting in their best interests for the short term. They would simply have no way of knowing how things would turn out in the long run. For that matter, we don't really have much of a clue either. Who could have predicted AIDS or Mad Cow disease? And even things that could be predicted, like the problems caused by those invasive species of mussels (tiger mussels?) taking a foothold in American waters, how could we have stopped the movement of cargo across the oceans? For it is the very act of trading the goods we've had the free time to create as a result of the agricultural revolution which provides the mechanism allowing invasive species to find new homes and devastate the "natural" environment.
You want your parents and kids to do well, but what about five generations down the road? Are you going to bet their future on the technology approach? Will there ever be enough technology or do we constantly need more? What if we find ourselves up against the wall and that new technology doesn't come through? Maybe we're already past that point and we just don't know it yet.
I'm not trying to tell you how to live your life, and I'm certainly no hunter-gatherer. But I do think these are real questions that most of society doesn't even give a second thought to.