No, I'm just saying that the United States has reasons that extend to the moral, financial, and political to do this.
I'm not trying to say the US is necessarily selfish, though now that you bring it up any student of international relations would characterize any state as selfish. States act in their own self interest at all times, that's what selfish means. So to revise the first sentence of this paragraph, I'm not saying that the United States is any more selfish than any other country out there.
Finaly, reading over that sentence it sounds like crap. I think I meant self interest and put selfish interest down without checking it. The thrust of the point remains, though perhaps you understand what I mean now.
Whale v. Petroleum products aside, look at it from another view point.
Limited Reserves: Everyone, except the deeply crazy, accept that the petroleum reserves are not infinite. There is a finite volume of oil in the world and eventually we will use all or most of it.
Environmental Impact: Burning oil produces CO2 and lots of other stuff not nearly as pleasant. Some of the things we release into the atmosphere are lethally poisonous. Again, all but the deeply crazy would prefer not to be breathing those things in.
Prohibitively Expensive: Oil is expensive. It needs to be pumped out of the ground, typically in some wretched stretch of land that no one really wants to inhabit, shipped off to refineries, laboriously purified, shipped somewhere else where its pumped into trucks and hauled cross country (using yet more gas nonetheless) to wherever it's going to be used.
The United States is the richest most powerful country in the world. As oil dependency's nasty side effects become clearer and clearer, it becomes not only the responsibility of the United States, but in her own selfish interest as well, to develop new and renewable power sources.
Getting away from a dependency on oil is good for the world. It just is. Cheaper energy benefits the people of the world. Cleaner air and water benefits the people of the world.
Saving oil and other natural resources for the products that are made from them as opposed to burning them for energy is good, not only for those that consume those products, but those that produce them as well. What is going to happen to Saudi Arabia when (and it is a matter of when) the wells go dry? What about Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and many others?
As for the enlightened self interest of the United States... besides the ability to corner the energy market for the foreseeable future, the US has a vested interest in promoting stability around the world, as that same stability creates markets for US goods and prevents the US from having to go bomb things (or at least thinking it has to go bomb things).
Long and the short of it: an oil dependency is bad. We can get away from it. Such a move has the potential to make the world a safer place and make the United States even richer and more powerful than it is already.
Quoth (of Poe fame) is a verb meaning "to say" or indicating some other verbal utterance.
Because the article is not capable of speech it is improper to use the word "Quoth" in reference to it.
Further, the author's use of a subordinate clause, while not necessarily the best structure for the sentence, is not objectionable on grammatical grounds. In other words, the sentence is syntactically correct though stylistically flawed.
Don't be a grammar Nazi unless you have an adequate grasp of English grammar.
You may or may not have heard of Transubstantiation. It is nonetheless, a belief held by a great many Christians the world over.
How about the Petrine Doctrine?
The Catholics reading this are probably wondering why these would be obscure to anyone, yet I assure you your run of the mill Protestant is wondering what the hell I'm talking about.
Everyone knows the basic tenants of most major religions, the finer details, however, escape most casual students.
That's a good question, and one for which I don't have a (terribly) good answer.
I can say this.
The fear of Soviet Missiles in Cuba was not that they could strike at US cities. Soviet strikes on our cities were fairly unlikely as those would typicaly be targets of a second strike.
The Cuban Missiles, however, could wipe out many US bomber bases before bombers could get aloft. This, in turn, devalues the US deterant, which made a preemptive strike by the Soviets more likely.
A bomb in DC, if it did not have much of a chance of stoping a retalitory US strike, does not pose the same threat. In short, while a lot of people die, the Soviets still have a really good reason not to set it off.
The problem with this argument is that the Soviets clearly thought that such a weapon would prevent a US retalitory strike because it has little point otherwise. Reality is not what matters here, but perception. If the Russians thought it would prevent a retalitory strike than the US had to treat it as a destabilizing influence.
Regretably no. The only on-line reference I can find to the weapon is in the personal memoriors of a Mr. Hugh Sidey [White House reporter in the Kennedy Administration] which should turn up for you in a google search.
Regretably Mr. Sidey's insight is 2nd hand, he relates a discussion he had with Kennedy on the topic.
I've seen other references in print, but nothing I can turn up on line.
If you find anything else on the topic please let me know.
As for the secrecy of the KGB and the USSR in reguards to this, the weapon in the Soviet Embassy was never intended as a deterant. It was a first strike weapon.
If it was well known you'd assume someone might try to do something about it..
It's generaly accepted that the Soviet Union built a small number of so called "Suit Case" nukes in the latter years of the cold war.
Of course, the term is a misnomer, because the intelligence community mis-translated "Backpack Nuke" into "Suitcase Nuke."
KGB documents indicate that the Soviet Union kept one such device in the basement of the Soviet Embassy in DC to use as a decapitation weapon in the event of nuclear hostilities.
Suitcase nuke, in any case, refers simply to a small nuclear weapon theoretically made man portable, or at least small enough to easily secure within a car's trunk. The United States produced a fair number of these weapons, though they were never fashioned (to the best of my knowledge) into a form intended for covert deployment. The most famous such miniaturized nuclear weapon was the Davy Crocket, a low yield nuclear weapon designed for battlefield deployment in Germany in the event of a Soviet tank invasion of Europe.
Of course, for a halfnium suitcase nuke to be built you'd need a compact X-ray source that could discharge a fair quantity of X-ray's before being blown apart by the halfnium discharge, in otherwords you'd need a fission bomb... which kind of invalidates the entire point.
I know where you're coming from, but the way Bush went about this was one of the most offensive things about his administration.
Bush banned research on stem cells harvested from abortions. Abortions are going to happen reguardless, harvesting stem cells at least allows the death of the unborn child (if you buy into that) to serve to save lives and better humanity.
If Bush wanted to prevent abortions from happening to get stem cells he should have put in place laws restricting the availability of stem cells to the family of the aborted fetus. Further steps should have been put in place to prevent the sale of stem cells harvested from an aborted fetus.
Nonetheless, when all is said and done all Bush's regulations have accomplished is the crippling of scientific persuit. Bush hasn't stopped a single abortion through this shift, he has simply denied the American medical community the resources they need to cure the sick.
I would pay for this feature. If any open source project generates a convicing and sufficiently amusing Old Burned Out Hippy (TM) that does Hackish spell/grammer check, decent syntax checking, and is customizeable enough I will be first in line to download it and first in line to donate to their project immediately thereafter.
"Dude, you've got like, mail and stuff"
"You forgot a semi-colon. Dumbass."
"Oh for the love of Christ man! Visual Basic? Did your mom drop you?"
"[long drag] I can't find the SMTP server man. Try again later"
Traditionaly missiles are easiest to hit at the boost phase. The are just begining their acceleration and so are moving comparitively slowly. Futher, they have a conventient tongue of flame which serves as a great way to determine where the missile is.
On decent, a ballistic missile tends to be just the warhead, perhaps with a guidance package in more advanced systems. This is a much smaller target which is moving much faster and is devoid of all the explosive fuel which makes a laser kill on the weapon feasable (punching a hole in a chemical warhead upon decent would accomplish... well... not a whole hell of a lot).
Kim Jong II is an excelent example of a state with an established nuclear capability and the ability to threaten with nuclear weapons. Yes, he also has missiles.
I'm not arguing that the airborn system would not have some use in defending places like Japan from Kim Jong II, what I'm arguing is that it is less effective than the present deterant we have.
We have troops in Japan, we have troops in South Korea. Kim Jong knows that if he launches on either of those targets he will take American lives with a weapon of mass destruction. The United States will respond in kind, and South Korea will get to join the list of countries located on islands.
Further, the difference between a ballistic missile and a theater missile is that the ballistic missile does that inconvenient warhead re-entry thing I was talking about earlier. Theater missiles tend to be single or maybe double stage and don't tend to have seperable warheads. Consequentely they are much easier to hit on decent, which is why Patriot works on decending missiles.
The airborn system, which someone else asserted has a limited range of something like 100 miles (can anyone find a solid number on the range?), is primarily designed to work on ascending missiles (at least, that's what the company's website says). This means you have to be near/over hostile territory to use this system and that places the crew in harms way. The Patriot batteries seem to be serving well in this capacity. Why go with an airborn solution?
The sad part is I knew that.... I remember thinking it was weird that they were replacing the Los Angeles class with the Virginia class (City / State).
Any plans to replace the Ohios that you're aware of?
Except for this to work we have to have a 747, which is as stealthy as a tank in a ballroom, orbiting over their country in leisurely circles so we can catch the missiles in the first 90 seconds or so of launch.
As we all know, a 747 handles like a bloated cow and isn't exactly equipped to out run, out turn, or out climb even the SAM missiles the Soviets were using in the 1960s.
So basically, this will be an excellent weapons system if a rogue state happens to have the cash sitting about to buy a few ICBMS and nukes at a 5 to 10 million a pop (you figure disused Soviet SS4s) but no spare change left over to pick up a few Stinger missiles.
Missiles are expensive. Missiles that can hit a target across thousands of miles are even more expensive. Those aren't expensive because they're costly to manufacture, they are expensive because they are costly to develop. Consequently any state that has ICBMs capable of striking the United States is likely to have a lot of them. Similarly the warhead on an ICBM is a fair bit more advanced than your rudimentary WOMD, largely because it has been miniaturized to allow it to fit in an area about the size of a four drawer filing cabinet.
If anyone is going to attack the US with missiles, they are going to do it with a lot of missiles, not a few that they purchased. It is easier to deploy a small number of warheads with stealth than with missiles. Large numbers of warheads require missiles.
So what is the system for then? If it can't knock down a large volley of missiles and we can't expect these "rogue nations" we keep hearing about to attack with ballistic missiles what is the system for?
The answer is simple really; it defends against a second strike. It is an order of magnitude more expensive to make weapons designed for second-strike capability: that is to say, weapons that will survive the first portion of a nuclear exchange. These second strike weapons are what creates the concept of deterrence. If China launches on us today, the nuclear subs and some of the hardened silos will survive, which will be enough to reduce China to a smoking crater. Thus China doesn't launch.
Now take this from the Chinese perspective. Much like the former Soviet Union, China's nuclear weapons follow a first strike doctrine. China's weapons are, for the most part, un-hardened, land based, fixed sites. The result is that China's nuclear doctrine is fixated on striking first (which is fairly destabilizing). If someone else strikes China first, China has very few missiles left with which to retaliate. And this system is designed to stop a very few missiles.
In other words, missile defense systems are now, and have always been designed to prevent the United States from suffering the consequences of escalating a conventional conflict to a nuclear one.
This in turn made a lot of sense in the cold war. Since nuclear deterrence is based on the infamous 3 Cs (Capability, Credibility, and Communication) and the ABM programs made our Credibility stronger (with these systems we were more likely to use nukes when we said we would) the ABM system would have made our bargaining position with the Soviets stronger.
However, today there is no Cold War. China has, for the most part, decided that we're not worth pissing off, and no other antagonistic force has a sufficient quantity of nuclear weapons to bother challenging the US in a conflict in which ballistic missiles are likely to be used. ABM today is little more than graft, and ill-conceived graft at that. The system makes the US less likely to consider the horrific consequences of using a nuclear weapon in a tactical situation (much like the proposals by the Bush administration to use nukes in the caves of Afghanistan).
In short, every argument you make above is incorrect. Aircraft mounted ABM is ineffective because you can only hit during launch, and that requires being over a country pissed enough to launch nuclear weapons at you. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction does not imply the proliferation of the technology necessary to make those weapons strategically deployable. And 500 billion, while a bargain to save a city, won't do so because anyone with 20 or fewer weapons is far more likely to put a bomb on a boat and sail it to NYC than they are to put it on a missile at about a thousand times the price.
Finally, the deterrent factor doesn't exist. Until someone works out a way to eliminate (or hell, even FIND) Ohio class (or the soon to be deployed Virginia class) ballistic missile subs at sea, our deterrent is very, very, very safe.
ABM is a bad idea. It makes a nuclear exchange more likely, and that is bad for everyone.
I'm always mildly disturbed by the fact that I can buy a DVD of a concert performance of most (recent) albums for a price very close to the MSRP of the CD.
The DVD will come with extra features, video, and lets not forget Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
If I'm going to buy music from a popular new artist, it isn't going to be on CD.
There's other laws protecting you from that. You can't be issued a ticket from those cameras at stop lights for the same reason.
If the camera/black box/whatever can't tell -=who=- was driving the car, they can't give a ticket to anyone.
Now, if you're in a wreck at a stoplight and the camera records car A running the light, the driver of car A can be charged even if there are no other witnesses.
If the cops jack into your Black Box and discover you were going 120 in a 65 zone they can't do shit about it because they haven't the slightest idea of weather it was you, your wife, your daughter, or some kid that stole your car and went for a joy ride.
The Big Bang is a theory. No one can replicate the Big Bang, but to test the theory one does not need to do so. One needs only utilize the models to determine what sorts of radiation etc should remain in the universe if the event did occur. If one can then find that radiation the theory is upheld. If not it is falsified.
Since one can test for this radiation many times the experiment is replicable, and falsifiable. Thus your point about the Big Bang and astronomy as a psudo-science under my definition fails.
Secondly, "supernatural" in this context refers to those things that are not of the physical, verifiable, testable world. I.E. they are above the nautral world.
Saying "God created the heavens and the earth" is a supernatural answer to the question "where did the universe come from." It is supernatural because there is no way to show the theory to be false. If you said "God created the heavens and the earth and then carved his name in 40 foot high flaming letters in Mt. Everest" we could go to Mt. Everst, find that no one's name is carved in 40 foot high flaming letters, and fail to uphold the theory.
That is the difference between what is science and what is faith. It is the difference between what can be tested and what can not.
Science is what can be tested. Faith is something you belive in despite a total lack of real evidence.
Mind reading, alien abductions, big foot, and (to a certain extent) string theory are at this point matters of faith.
This is a loaded question, by asking said scientist to explain these "facts" as you put it, you are asking them to pre-suppose that these things exist.
Science is not in the buisness of putting forth ideas which involve the supernatural. If a scientist is to put forth a theory that theory must have some criteria by which it can be disproven.
If someone postulates that mind reading involves the detection of tiny fluctuations in the electromagnetic emissions of the brain and he can read minds normaly, but can't when his head is in a faraday cage then perhaps you have a crediable study. As is, you need to have someone who can consistantly read minds before you can do anything else.
Science is experimentation to disprove. An idea that can not be disproved through experimentation becomes an accepted truth if and only if that idea had some method by which it could be disproved.
I finished reading the page and was still laughing out loud at this comment. I just wanted to let you know since mod points won't do anything at this point.
In some areas the cable infrastructure isn't (wasn't?) set up to deal with cable modems, the result was that if you got a cable modem you got basic cable for free. I know that was the case in some apartments where I went to college.
Net result was that the cable people decided to just include basic cable in the price of cable internet service. Then they decided to give you a break on the service if you signed up legitimately because it lets them count you for advertising revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm just saying that the United States has reasons that extend to the moral, financial, and political to do this.
I'm not trying to say the US is necessarily selfish, though now that you bring it up any student of international relations would characterize any state as selfish. States act in their own self interest at all times, that's what selfish means. So to revise the first sentence of this paragraph, I'm not saying that the United States is any more selfish than any other country out there.
Finaly, reading over that sentence it sounds like crap. I think I meant self interest and put selfish interest down without checking it. The thrust of the point remains, though perhaps you understand what I mean now.
Whale v. Petroleum products aside, look at it from another view point.
Limited Reserves: Everyone, except the deeply crazy, accept that the petroleum reserves are not infinite. There is a finite volume of oil in the world and eventually we will use all or most of it.
Environmental Impact: Burning oil produces CO2 and lots of other stuff not nearly as pleasant. Some of the things we release into the atmosphere are lethally poisonous. Again, all but the deeply crazy would prefer not to be breathing those things in.
Prohibitively Expensive: Oil is expensive. It needs to be pumped out of the ground, typically in some wretched stretch of land that no one really wants to inhabit, shipped off to refineries, laboriously purified, shipped somewhere else where its pumped into trucks and hauled cross country (using yet more gas nonetheless) to wherever it's going to be used.
The United States is the richest most powerful country in the world. As oil dependency's nasty side effects become clearer and clearer, it becomes not only the responsibility of the United States, but in her own selfish interest as well, to develop new and renewable power sources.
Getting away from a dependency on oil is good for the world. It just is. Cheaper energy benefits the people of the world. Cleaner air and water benefits the people of the world.
Saving oil and other natural resources for the products that are made from them as opposed to burning them for energy is good, not only for those that consume those products, but those that produce them as well. What is going to happen to Saudi Arabia when (and it is a matter of when) the wells go dry? What about Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and many others?
As for the enlightened self interest of the United States... besides the ability to corner the energy market for the foreseeable future, the US has a vested interest in promoting stability around the world, as that same stability creates markets for US goods and prevents the US from having to go bomb things (or at least thinking it has to go bomb things).
Long and the short of it: an oil dependency is bad. We can get away from it. Such a move has the potential to make the world a safer place and make the United States even richer and more powerful than it is already.
Starcraft's menu structure did this too, but I'm not sure if it was faked or not.
Also, you couldn't drag them, but they held transparency while moving.
At least, that's what I seem to recall.
Neither do you.
Quoth (of Poe fame) is a verb meaning "to say" or indicating some other verbal utterance.
Because the article is not capable of speech it is improper to use the word "Quoth" in reference to it.
Further, the author's use of a subordinate clause, while not necessarily the best structure for the sentence, is not objectionable on grammatical grounds. In other words, the sentence is syntactically correct though stylistically flawed.
Don't be a grammar Nazi unless you have an adequate grasp of English grammar.
You may or may not have heard of Transubstantiation. It is nonetheless, a belief held by a great many Christians the world over.
How about the Petrine Doctrine?
The Catholics reading this are probably wondering why these would be obscure to anyone, yet I assure you your run of the mill Protestant is wondering what the hell I'm talking about.
Everyone knows the basic tenants of most major religions, the finer details, however, escape most casual students.
Ports are still naked before the world. The upgrades (in theory) went into the airports.
That's a good question, and one for which I don't have a (terribly) good answer.
I can say this.
The fear of Soviet Missiles in Cuba was not that they could strike at US cities. Soviet strikes on our cities were fairly unlikely as those would typicaly be targets of a second strike.
The Cuban Missiles, however, could wipe out many US bomber bases before bombers could get aloft. This, in turn, devalues the US deterant, which made a preemptive strike by the Soviets more likely.
A bomb in DC, if it did not have much of a chance of stoping a retalitory US strike, does not pose the same threat. In short, while a lot of people die, the Soviets still have a really good reason not to set it off.
The problem with this argument is that the Soviets clearly thought that such a weapon would prevent a US retalitory strike because it has little point otherwise. Reality is not what matters here, but perception. If the Russians thought it would prevent a retalitory strike than the US had to treat it as a destabilizing influence.
I wish I could give you a better answer.
Regretably no. The only on-line reference I can find to the weapon is in the personal memoriors of a Mr. Hugh Sidey [White House reporter in the Kennedy Administration] which should turn up for you in a google search.
Regretably Mr. Sidey's insight is 2nd hand, he relates a discussion he had with Kennedy on the topic.
I've seen other references in print, but nothing I can turn up on line.
If you find anything else on the topic please let me know.
As for the secrecy of the KGB and the USSR in reguards to this, the weapon in the Soviet Embassy was never intended as a deterant. It was a first strike weapon.
If it was well known you'd assume someone might try to do something about it..
It's generaly accepted that the Soviet Union built a small number of so called "Suit Case" nukes in the latter years of the cold war.
Of course, the term is a misnomer, because the intelligence community mis-translated "Backpack Nuke" into "Suitcase Nuke."
KGB documents indicate that the Soviet Union kept one such device in the basement of the Soviet Embassy in DC to use as a decapitation weapon in the event of nuclear hostilities.
Suitcase nuke, in any case, refers simply to a small nuclear weapon theoretically made man portable, or at least small enough to easily secure within a car's trunk. The United States produced a fair number of these weapons, though they were never fashioned (to the best of my knowledge) into a form intended for covert deployment. The most famous such miniaturized nuclear weapon was the Davy Crocket, a low yield nuclear weapon designed for battlefield deployment in Germany in the event of a Soviet tank invasion of Europe.
Of course, for a halfnium suitcase nuke to be built you'd need a compact X-ray source that could discharge a fair quantity of X-ray's before being blown apart by the halfnium discharge, in otherwords you'd need a fission bomb... which kind of invalidates the entire point.
Probably not, afterall...
:)
A computer does what you tell it to do
A computer is completely rational
A computer's memory is cleared everytime you turn it off
.
.
.
I could go on but the female mods are allready going to burn me on this one
I know where you're coming from, but the way Bush went about this was one of the most offensive things about his administration.
Bush banned research on stem cells harvested from abortions. Abortions are going to happen reguardless, harvesting stem cells at least allows the death of the unborn child (if you buy into that) to serve to save lives and better humanity.
If Bush wanted to prevent abortions from happening to get stem cells he should have put in place laws restricting the availability of stem cells to the family of the aborted fetus. Further steps should have been put in place to prevent the sale of stem cells harvested from an aborted fetus.
Nonetheless, when all is said and done all Bush's regulations have accomplished is the crippling of scientific persuit. Bush hasn't stopped a single abortion through this shift, he has simply denied the American medical community the resources they need to cure the sick.
Yes, just one, a recently released Terminator 2 Disk. But there isn't a player sold for it at this time [though it will work on your computer].
People need to check their facts. (see below).
I would pay for this feature. If any open source project generates a convicing and sufficiently amusing Old Burned Out Hippy (TM) that does Hackish spell/grammer check, decent syntax checking, and is customizeable enough I will be first in line to download it and first in line to donate to their project immediately thereafter.
"Dude, you've got like, mail and stuff"
"You forgot a semi-colon. Dumbass."
"Oh for the love of Christ man! Visual Basic? Did your mom drop you?"
"[long drag] I can't find the SMTP server man. Try again later"
Traditionaly missiles are easiest to hit at the boost phase. The are just begining their acceleration and so are moving comparitively slowly. Futher, they have a conventient tongue of flame which serves as a great way to determine where the missile is.
On decent, a ballistic missile tends to be just the warhead, perhaps with a guidance package in more advanced systems. This is a much smaller target which is moving much faster and is devoid of all the explosive fuel which makes a laser kill on the weapon feasable (punching a hole in a chemical warhead upon decent would accomplish... well... not a whole hell of a lot).
Kim Jong II is an excelent example of a state with an established nuclear capability and the ability to threaten with nuclear weapons. Yes, he also has missiles.
I'm not arguing that the airborn system would not have some use in defending places like Japan from Kim Jong II, what I'm arguing is that it is less effective than the present deterant we have.
We have troops in Japan, we have troops in South Korea. Kim Jong knows that if he launches on either of those targets he will take American lives with a weapon of mass destruction. The United States will respond in kind, and South Korea will get to join the list of countries located on islands.
Further, the difference between a ballistic missile and a theater missile is that the ballistic missile does that inconvenient warhead re-entry thing I was talking about earlier. Theater missiles tend to be single or maybe double stage and don't tend to have seperable warheads. Consequentely they are much easier to hit on decent, which is why Patriot works on decending missiles.
The airborn system, which someone else asserted has a limited range of something like 100 miles (can anyone find a solid number on the range?), is primarily designed to work on ascending missiles (at least, that's what the company's website says). This means you have to be near/over hostile territory to use this system and that places the crew in harms way. The Patriot batteries seem to be serving well in this capacity. Why go with an airborn solution?
The sad part is I knew that.... I remember thinking it was weird that they were replacing the Los Angeles class with the Virginia class (City / State).
Any plans to replace the Ohios that you're aware of?
Except for this to work we have to have a 747, which is as stealthy as a tank in a ballroom, orbiting over their country in leisurely circles so we can catch the missiles in the first 90 seconds or so of launch.
As we all know, a 747 handles like a bloated cow and isn't exactly equipped to out run, out turn, or out climb even the SAM missiles the Soviets were using in the 1960s.
So basically, this will be an excellent weapons system if a rogue state happens to have the cash sitting about to buy a few ICBMS and nukes at a 5 to 10 million a pop (you figure disused Soviet SS4s) but no spare change left over to pick up a few Stinger missiles.
Somehow, that seems unlikely.
I call bullshit. Here's why.
Missiles are expensive. Missiles that can hit a target across thousands of miles are even more expensive. Those aren't expensive because they're costly to manufacture, they are expensive because they are costly to develop. Consequently any state that has ICBMs capable of striking the United States is likely to have a lot of them. Similarly the warhead on an ICBM is a fair bit more advanced than your rudimentary WOMD, largely because it has been miniaturized to allow it to fit in an area about the size of a four drawer filing cabinet.
If anyone is going to attack the US with missiles, they are going to do it with a lot of missiles, not a few that they purchased. It is easier to deploy a small number of warheads with stealth than with missiles. Large numbers of warheads require missiles.
So what is the system for then? If it can't knock down a large volley of missiles and we can't expect these "rogue nations" we keep hearing about to attack with ballistic missiles what is the system for?
The answer is simple really; it defends against a second strike. It is an order of magnitude more expensive to make weapons designed for second-strike capability: that is to say, weapons that will survive the first portion of a nuclear exchange. These second strike weapons are what creates the concept of deterrence. If China launches on us today, the nuclear subs and some of the hardened silos will survive, which will be enough to reduce China to a smoking crater. Thus China doesn't launch.
Now take this from the Chinese perspective. Much like the former Soviet Union, China's nuclear weapons follow a first strike doctrine. China's weapons are, for the most part, un-hardened, land based, fixed sites. The result is that China's nuclear doctrine is fixated on striking first (which is fairly destabilizing). If someone else strikes China first, China has very few missiles left with which to retaliate. And this system is designed to stop a very few missiles.
In other words, missile defense systems are now, and have always been designed to prevent the United States from suffering the consequences of escalating a conventional conflict to a nuclear one.
This in turn made a lot of sense in the cold war. Since nuclear deterrence is based on the infamous 3 Cs (Capability, Credibility, and Communication) and the ABM programs made our Credibility stronger (with these systems we were more likely to use nukes when we said we would) the ABM system would have made our bargaining position with the Soviets stronger.
However, today there is no Cold War. China has, for the most part, decided that we're not worth pissing off, and no other antagonistic force has a sufficient quantity of nuclear weapons to bother challenging the US in a conflict in which ballistic missiles are likely to be used. ABM today is little more than graft, and ill-conceived graft at that. The system makes the US less likely to consider the horrific consequences of using a nuclear weapon in a tactical situation (much like the proposals by the Bush administration to use nukes in the caves of Afghanistan).
In short, every argument you make above is incorrect. Aircraft mounted ABM is ineffective because you can only hit during launch, and that requires being over a country pissed enough to launch nuclear weapons at you. Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction does not imply the proliferation of the technology necessary to make those weapons strategically deployable. And 500 billion, while a bargain to save a city, won't do so because anyone with 20 or fewer weapons is far more likely to put a bomb on a boat and sail it to NYC than they are to put it on a missile at about a thousand times the price.
Finally, the deterrent factor doesn't exist. Until someone works out a way to eliminate (or hell, even FIND) Ohio class (or the soon to be deployed Virginia class) ballistic missile subs at sea, our deterrent is very, very, very safe.
ABM is a bad idea. It makes a nuclear exchange more likely, and that is bad for everyone.
I'm always mildly disturbed by the fact that I can buy a DVD of a concert performance of most (recent) albums for a price very close to the MSRP of the CD.
The DVD will come with extra features, video, and lets not forget Dolby 5.1 surround sound.
If I'm going to buy music from a popular new artist, it isn't going to be on CD.
There's other laws protecting you from that. You can't be issued a ticket from those cameras at stop lights for the same reason.
If the camera/black box/whatever can't tell -=who=- was driving the car, they can't give a ticket to anyone.
Now, if you're in a wreck at a stoplight and the camera records car A running the light, the driver of car A can be charged even if there are no other witnesses.
If the cops jack into your Black Box and discover you were going 120 in a 65 zone they can't do shit about it because they haven't the slightest idea of weather it was you, your wife, your daughter, or some kid that stole your car and went for a joy ride.
My folks have one they'd love to get rid of. Of course it's mounted and set up in Virginia, which may or may not be a problem for you.
The Big Bang is a theory. No one can replicate the Big Bang, but to test the theory one does not need to do so. One needs only utilize the models to determine what sorts of radiation etc should remain in the universe if the event did occur. If one can then find that radiation the theory is upheld. If not it is falsified.
Since one can test for this radiation many times the experiment is replicable, and falsifiable. Thus your point about the Big Bang and astronomy as a psudo-science under my definition fails.
Secondly, "supernatural" in this context refers to those things that are not of the physical, verifiable, testable world. I.E. they are above the nautral world.
Saying "God created the heavens and the earth" is a supernatural answer to the question "where did the universe come from." It is supernatural because there is no way to show the theory to be false. If you said "God created the heavens and the earth and then carved his name in 40 foot high flaming letters in Mt. Everest" we could go to Mt. Everst, find that no one's name is carved in 40 foot high flaming letters, and fail to uphold the theory.
That is the difference between what is science and what is faith. It is the difference between what can be tested and what can not.
Science is what can be tested. Faith is something you belive in despite a total lack of real evidence.
Mind reading, alien abductions, big foot, and (to a certain extent) string theory are at this point matters of faith.
I call bullshit.
This is a loaded question, by asking said scientist to explain these "facts" as you put it, you are asking them to pre-suppose that these things exist.
Science is not in the buisness of putting forth ideas which involve the supernatural. If a scientist is to put forth a theory that theory must have some criteria by which it can be disproven.
If someone postulates that mind reading involves the detection of tiny fluctuations in the electromagnetic emissions of the brain and he can read minds normaly, but can't when his head is in a faraday cage then perhaps you have a crediable study. As is, you need to have someone who can consistantly read minds before you can do anything else.
Science is experimentation to disprove. An idea that can not be disproved through experimentation becomes an accepted truth if and only if that idea had some method by which it could be disproved.
I finished reading the page and was still laughing out loud at this comment. I just wanted to let you know since mod points won't do anything at this point.
Damn that's funny.
In some areas the cable infrastructure isn't (wasn't?) set up to deal with cable modems, the result was that if you got a cable modem you got basic cable for free. I know that was the case in some apartments where I went to college.
Net result was that the cable people decided to just include basic cable in the price of cable internet service. Then they decided to give you a break on the service if you signed up legitimately because it lets them count you for advertising revenue.