I far more useful thing to worry about is that the US 7th Fleet generaly stays parked in the straits seperating the PRC from the ROC.
In short, the US has voiced its willingness to bomb the shit out of China over this matter several times.
On a historicaly corrective note... Mao's starvation of 60 (not 50) million in the Great Leap Forward was a lot less about maintaining his hold on power (anyone who can manage to starve 60 million people has plenty of that) but more about trying to jumpstart China's economy much as Stalin did the 5 years plans.
Stalin, incidently, starved about 30 million Ukranians to death doing this. It's also quite argueable that Stalin didn't really accomplish much of anything by doing this... in fact the quasi-capitalistic system Bukharin had put in place would probably have panned out in much the same manner (but with 30 Million more Ukrainians to kick around).
Agreeing with your point but including a subtle modification.
While the Catholic Church has taken a beating at the hands of the Scientific Method, claims to "absolute truth" were little more than the unsubstantiated blustering of a few arrogant Pontifexs.
It is generally understood within the Church that the Pope (and consequently his Church) is infallible on matters of doctrine only. This stems from the Petrine Doctrine. The Petrine Doctrine in turn, derives from Matthew 16:19 wherein Christ says
"And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven."
From this the Church derives authority on matters of doctrine. It does not have any authority over matters of science or other disciplines. In short, the Petrine Doctrine grants the Pope no more power to pronounce Galileo wrong than it gives him to pronounce Polyester Suits as a Bad Idea (tm).
That really has more to do with the cancer studies going on in the united states than much of anything else.
As a cancer survivor myself, I'm pretty familiar with the system. Basicly if you go to any of the major hospitals in the country you're going to a research hospital. There, you're going to get care that's a notch above what's available to the general public, and you'll get it at a discount (because you'll be part of a trial group)
Europe simply doesn't burn the research dollars we do on cancer. Consequentely there are fewer clinical trials.
That, and the smoking rate in Europe is a hell of a lot higher, resulting in a higher proportion of smoking related cancers in older patients. By that time there's not a whole hell of a lot more you can do. A more telling statistic would be childhood cancer survival rates.
I just called DirecTV and checked. They -=do=- have TIVO units available for direct sale.
Other information gleened from that call...
1.) No HD units available for direct sale 2.) No known plans for a HD-TIVO unit at this time (though there is some speculation as pointed out earlier in this thread on TIVO boards)
DircTivo has a number of problems, not the least of which is supply. The biggest one though, is capacity.
Now, as a disclaimer, I currently receive a pay check from Echostar Dish Networks. This is probably going to sound like an advertisement... but what can I do:)
We were recently informed that DirecTv no longer -=has=- TIVO units to distribute and that this shortfall should continue into February of next year. Paralized by fits of convulsive laughter, Dish Network has released the 522 recently and should release the 921 later this year. You can get a rundown on those systems here
The sweet thing on the 522 is actualy still vapor ware. It's a dual tuner receiver currently designed to serve two rooms (with DVR functions). It's also got a single user mode (not yet implemented) to allow you to use it on one TV.
And now... the shameless plug.
The 522 is available to new customers with the Digital Home Plan promotion right now. The 921 isn't available yet. When it does debut it will the first Dish Network receiver running Linux.
To be fair the leading advertising slogan among the Carib Indians at the time (invading people's from the Brizilian mainland) was "Arawak, it's what's for dinner."
That would be water. Of course, that's kind of annoying to be hauling about in quantity. It does have the helpfull property of sustaining human life, however... so I suppose you could make a case for it.
What you really need is something that sheilds just like water but without taking up quite so much space.
Re:Who mods this shit up?
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
Sarcasm aside, doesn't this have the unfortunate tendancy to drive down land values artificialy? Furthermore, as any SimCity buff can tell you, low land values tend to spread a great deal like mold.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that moving from neighborhoods that predate the automobile to those built on quiet streets that become not so quiet due to changes over time, where do you draw the line? Where does it become the government's problem to compensate and where does it remain the citizen's tough luck?
Obviously the government has the right to aquire property from its citizens should the need arise (tons of legal precidents for that). Should the government be therefore obligated to compensate citizens or to help mitigate the affect of lost property value due to goverment changes to the area? Following from that should the government have the responcibility to zone areas according to noise polution so the commercial area I live next to (which used to contain walk in shops with little or no parking) can't be turned into a parking garage or a car wash?
We're both pointing out the extremes here, which really do have obvious solutions to them. Of course the government should compensate me for noise insulation if they put a 6 lane highway through my back yard. Of course they shouldn't do so if I buy up land next to a six lane highway and build a house on it. The question is the middle ground. Where is the differentiation?
It never ceases to amaze me how completely unaware of the world around them my fellow US Citizens can be.
London (by most accounts) traces her founding to Roman times, around 43 AD to be specific. Now, the widespread use of the automobile doesn't really occur until the early 20th century. By my count that gives the people of London approximately 1,857 years (give or take a few) to build houses with the reasonable expectation that the loudest thing they'd hear would be "clip clop clip clop."
In the United States the rage is a little less stark. Here we've had since about 1600 or somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 years with the reasonable expectation of "clip clop" noise pollution and little else.
Obviously this is a somewhat sarcastic way of explaining this. My point is that not everyone has the choice to build their homes around the interstate highway plans (or the M? for you Brits) of the government.
I guess this is one of the many examples of European liberalism. You know, the political ideology that expresses the radical notion that the government should look out for its citizens rather than spending all its money bombing someone else's.
Pardon my insistance but your statement is inaccurate.
Cortez did introduce a wide variety of dieseases to the Americas. However, to assume that Cortez, a Spanish explorer, had even a rudimentry knowledge of how diseases were spread in the early 16th Century is a bit unreasonable.
Now the Brittish Army did give smallpox laiden blankets to Native Americans but this was much later. The deed in question was done by a Lord Jeffery Amherst c. 1763. This practice was continued by the US army well into the 19th century and was used by General Custer against some of the tribes he fought.
I'm going to say what everyone else has been too nice to say. I'm going to get modded into smoking oblivion for it but I don't care.
You're a git.
Let me move on from that.
Nanotechnology is patently not limited to full scale Drexler assemblers capable of sophisticated assembly in short periods of time.
To assume this would be analogous to telling Robert Oppenheimer that he wasn't doing any work with nuclear energy in 1944 because he hadn't yet managed to create a 150% efficient cold fusion power plant that would fit in a small automobile.
The first steps into this technology are going to be crude and a good long ways from the Holy Grail of the feild.
It's also been mentioned that if nanotech weren't a pipe dream we'd see its rapid decimation into the market place by now. This assumes that the rate of adaptation paralells that of other, TOTALY UNRELATED technologies.
The acceleration of a technology is dependent almost entirely on market pressures. If there's no money to be made there's not going to be a lot of research in the feild. Fusion is the perfect example here. The research budget for Fusion research in this country could be covered out of pocket by some of our wealthier citizens. Consequently there's not a lot of progress being made (well, a lot less than there could be). I garuntee you if Exxon-Mobile corporation decided tomorow that it needed an energy source to replace petrolium and it needed it yesterday fusion research would take off in a hurry. We'd see the first commercial Tokamak reactors inside of a decade.
Many of the technologies we've been promised haven't panned out the way we expected them too. They aren't pipe dreams, they weren't ready for the market yet. More to the point, the market wasn't ready for them yet. Nanotech will get adopted at it's own pace. You probably won't notice it until you've gotten used to it.
At one point there was a website called ad-critic.com. It's since gone over to a pay service (thereby demonstrating exactly how sick in the head people can be... they want me to PAY to see ADS?).
Point being people would go to this site and burn precious bandwidth downloading advertisments! Some of the best adds I've seen were on that site.
Point being, there are examples where people will go out of their way to see a really well done add. We've all seen the Honda "Rube Goldberg" add. Everyone remembers the Budweiser "Waz up" and it's countless variations. I still get a chuckle from the "Real Men of Genious" adds that Bud Lite is pushing right now.
Some adds are good. Some suck. Drug adds in particular piss me off. At one point I started a list of drugs my TV had told me I need, but that I didn't know what they did. You've gotta ask yourself, can that be for anything OTHER than pissing people off?
I is a word, a metaphysical handle for a concept. That concept is your "self." Now of course, you can't actualize or understand the true nature of your "self" because all that your are, your very intelegence is imprinted with the imperfection of language. Language has, implicit to it, definitions that are both inprecise and imutable.
"I" then, is a word refering to the reflection of your "self" as seen through the lense of the world you've been conditioned to accept.
"I" must exist, however, because without someone to QUESTION if "I" exists "I" can not exist. In short, the capability of questioning the existance of "I" cements that very existance.
Ok... I'm done. Now someone else handle the good and evil part.
We had a better trained, better equipped Army, as evidenced by the fact that the North Vietnamese lost many, MANY more soldiers in combat than the US did. There is no question that the US Army could have and in fact should have won the day, they just weren't allowed to do their job.
Fine point. The United States could have militarily defeated the Viet-cong easily. This is true.
However, the United States entered Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism. In short, to preserve South Vietnam as a democratic State embracing the capitalist system. The rules and restrictions placed on the army were to ensure that there was a South Vietnam left to become that State.
So even had those limitations been absent the US would still have emerged the looser in the Vietnam War. Why? Because there were two possible outcomes to that war.
1 - The US goes home and lets the country unite under a communist government.
2 - The US stays and fights, reducing the entire place to a smoldering mass of ash and chared jungle... not communism, true, but not democratic capitalism either.
The US lost in Vietnam not because it was outgunned, out clevered, or out fought, but because it set out to do force an entire country to do something that country didn't want to do. Oh... that and the Chinese got involved.
I'm just curious. How did we get from "I don't like the direction Bush/Ashcroft/et allia are taking the government" to "it would really suck not to have a government"?
The system's not without problems, but I'm certainly not advocating overthrowing the entire damn thing and starting over from scratch.
What I am saying is that the weapons of mass destruction we keep hearing about are laughably easy to make. Nukes... not so much, but chemical and biological weapons can be assembled easily and without much expense. Granted, these aren't suitable for battlefeild use, but you can put a big notch in the population of LA with this kind of stuff.
There comes a point where the government is doing more harm than good by "protecting" us from the terrorists. I think we've passed that point.
Watch the airports? Fine Better cockpit security? Fine Tighter customs control? Fine Imprisoning people without trial or hope of appeal outside the relm of judicial oversight? Not fine.
Uhhhh.... this is an example of assuming causality. Because there have been very few terrorist attacks in the United States since Sept 11, 2001 the Bush administration must be doing a good job combating terrorism.
This assumes a few things.
1 - Legions of bloodthirsty terrorists wish nothing more than to see the United States reduced to a smoking abrasion in the earth's crust.
2 - These people have decided that the best time to act on these urges would be right now, while the Bush Administration is hunting for them.
3 - These terrorists are being found, tried, and convicted in secret military courts while the president's approval ratings sink ever lower as the US population grows more and more convinced that the world isn't nearly as dangerous as Mr Ashcroft would have us think.
It also has, implicit in it, at least one conclusion that those that advance it probably won't like.
1 - Three acts of terrorism have occurred in the United States since Pres. Bush took power. (9-11, Anthrax, Sniper). Thus Bush averages 1 attack per year (3 years in office, 3 attacks). Clinton, in comparison averages 1 every 4 years (World Trade Center Bombing and Oklahoma City). By the parent post's logic Clinton did a better job of protecting against terrorism.
But let's not get into that particular quagmire. The real question is this. At what cost? Terrorism isn't the leading cause of death in this country. More people die from pretty much everything than die in terrorist attacks. Want to protect the US Citizenry? Sink that $87 Billion for Iraq into Cancer research.
Ok... lets go with Cancer though. Apparently this country is unwilling to use the stem cells from a fetus that was aborted to try to cure cancer. I can accept a religious problem with that.
So here's the (hypothetical) trade. A cure for cancer, today. The price: The government gets to tap your phone, confiscate property without due process, track your internet usage, spy on you without judicial oversight, conduct secret searches of your home, and check up on your library readings. Oh, they also get to use your car to spy on you and can detain you indefinitely in a military base with no hope of appeal or civilian trial. Is it worth it? Remember, we're talking about curing cancer here... one of the biggest killers of US citizens of any age.
Gut feeling, if you're not willing to give up the rights of a bunch of dead tissue that someone didn't want to carry to birth to cure this disease you're probably not willing to give us a bunch of your own personal rights to do the same. So why is it that what Ashcroft is doing is so great? Why is it that for the POSSIBILITY of preventing terrorism we're willing to let this man and his minions trample upon our civil liberties?
I don't have an easy answer for this question. I can tell you that people with the attitude expressed in the parent post are part of the problem, not the solution. Ben Franklin was right, "those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither."
Cripple terrorism? Plunk pool chlorine tablets into a two liter of coke and twist on the cap and you've got a chemical munition. Nothing Ashcroft does can prevent a desperate individual willing to die for his cause. We're throwing our freedoms away for the tattered remnants of a dream.
The fundamental problem with most teachers/administrator's is that they've gone and collected at least one BA/BS and at least one post graduate degree (typicaly in education, meaningless as that is).
The result is they've been away from the setting they're trying to control for an absolute minimum of 7 years (typicaly more).
Most of these people have forgotten what it's like to be between the ages of 11 and 18. They've lost track of how insanely vicious, cruel, and downright rabbid kids can be at this age.
When they do try to fix it the result is a half wited program that sounds like a cross between Disney and Soviet propaganda. It insults the intelegence of the students, takes five times longer than it needs to take, and general just pisses people off.
Most students leave the auditorium thinking how great it would be to kick the shit out of that punk ass little bastard who took notes on his palm pilot.
Wana solve these problems? Hire younger teachers. Get people fresh out of college who are closer to the students age wise.
Of course, No Child Left Behind is just going to make this worse, not better... but that's another rant for another day.
1 - Terrorism isn't generaly a R&D effort. The act of terrorism isn't anything new, contrary to what GW Bush Inc. seems to belive. For centuries people have been committing acts of terrorism, but these are not the organizations that develop the new and frightening weapons of war.
Terrorism is, by it's very nature, a low budget enterprise. Until Mr and Mrs Smith can grow little Susie a custom built kitten with neon pink fur by hitting some buttons on the Recombinator (tm) you won't see gene level modifications as something available to terrorists.
2 - We've been making viruses resistance to treatment/immunization for years now. Read Ken Alblik's autobiography on his roll in the Soviet Bioweapons program. Until the 1970s the United States was engaged in offensive biological warfare . Today we still research defensive biowarfare, which means that we use developing treatments as an excuse to weaponize deadly organisims.
The former Soviet Union (according to most sources) weaponized the small pox virus. Weaponization, for the unaware, is a process of making a virus resistant to treatment and immunization techniques while increasing it's kill rate.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, if you have something insanely dangerous and you want to it to fall into the wrong hands, the best thing you can do with it it hand it to the Russian Army to guard.
I have the utmost respsect for the scientific community. The work they do is amazing and valuable research, but this isn't something I'm worried about. Somehow, I doubt that a bunch of PhDs in a lab can come up with anything (much) more deadly than billions of years of evolution and 50 years of cold war has produced.
The terminology used in the Political Sciences today is
[new] - Post Developed Nation 1st World - Developed Nation 2nd World - Developing Nation 3rd World - Highly Indebted Poor Country
Since the 1st 2nd & 3rd worlds are a strictly Cold War designation that refers specificly to a bi-polar system they really don't apply today (in a multi-polar system).
Slashdot Mirror
I far more useful thing to worry about is that the US 7th Fleet generaly stays parked in the straits seperating the PRC from the ROC.
In short, the US has voiced its willingness to bomb the shit out of China over this matter several times.
On a historicaly corrective note... Mao's starvation of 60 (not 50) million in the Great Leap Forward was a lot less about maintaining his hold on power (anyone who can manage to starve 60 million people has plenty of that) but more about trying to jumpstart China's economy much as Stalin did the 5 years plans.
Stalin, incidently, starved about 30 million Ukranians to death doing this. It's also quite argueable that Stalin didn't really accomplish much of anything by doing this... in fact the quasi-capitalistic system Bukharin had put in place would probably have panned out in much the same manner (but with 30 Million more Ukrainians to kick around).
Seems to work in the United States too..... at least the jailing part.
Everyone wave at Mr. Ashcroft!
While the Catholic Church has taken a beating at the hands of the Scientific Method, claims to "absolute truth" were little more than the unsubstantiated blustering of a few arrogant Pontifexs.
It is generally understood within the Church that the Pope (and consequently his Church) is infallible on matters of doctrine only. This stems from the Petrine Doctrine. The Petrine Doctrine in turn, derives from Matthew 16:19 wherein Christ says
From this the Church derives authority on matters of doctrine. It does not have any authority over matters of science or other disciplines. In short, the Petrine Doctrine grants the Pope no more power to pronounce Galileo wrong than it gives him to pronounce Polyester Suits as a Bad Idea (tm).
That really has more to do with the cancer studies going on in the united states than much of anything else.
As a cancer survivor myself, I'm pretty familiar with the system. Basicly if you go to any of the major hospitals in the country you're going to a research hospital. There, you're going to get care that's a notch above what's available to the general public, and you'll get it at a discount (because you'll be part of a trial group)
Europe simply doesn't burn the research dollars we do on cancer. Consequentely there are fewer clinical trials.
That, and the smoking rate in Europe is a hell of a lot higher, resulting in a higher proportion of smoking related cancers in older patients. By that time there's not a whole hell of a lot more you can do. A more telling statistic would be childhood cancer survival rates.
A retraction.
I just called DirecTV and checked. They -=do=- have TIVO units available for direct sale.
Other information gleened from that call...
1.) No HD units available for direct sale
2.) No known plans for a HD-TIVO unit at this time (though there is some speculation as pointed out earlier in this thread on TIVO boards)
Because retailers != DirecTv. They work for them and sell their merchandice, but don't share inventory.
DirecTv (at least last I was told) had ceased DIRECT sale of TIVO units.
Oh, and in reference to another post. The 921 IS a HDTV DVR Unit.
DircTivo has a number of problems, not the least of which is supply. The biggest one though, is capacity.
:)
Now, as a disclaimer, I currently receive a pay check from Echostar Dish Networks. This is probably going to sound like an advertisement... but what can I do
We were recently informed that DirecTv no longer -=has=- TIVO units to distribute and that this shortfall should continue into February of next year. Paralized by fits of convulsive laughter, Dish Network has released the 522 recently and should release the 921 later this year. You can get a rundown on those systems here
The sweet thing on the 522 is actualy still vapor ware. It's a dual tuner receiver currently designed to serve two rooms (with DVR functions). It's also got a single user mode (not yet implemented) to allow you to use it on one TV.
And now... the shameless plug.
The 522 is available to new customers with the Digital Home Plan promotion right now. The 921 isn't available yet. When it does debut it will the first Dish Network receiver running Linux.
To be fair the leading advertising slogan among the Carib Indians at the time (invading people's from the Brizilian mainland) was "Arawak, it's what's for dinner."
The Arawak's weren't long for this world.
That would be water. Of course, that's kind of annoying to be hauling about in quantity. It does have the helpfull property of sustaining human life, however... so I suppose you could make a case for it.
What you really need is something that sheilds just like water but without taking up quite so much space.
No, His mods are infalable.
Sarcasm aside, doesn't this have the unfortunate tendancy to drive down land values artificialy? Furthermore, as any SimCity buff can tell you, low land values tend to spread a great deal like mold.
I guess what I'm getting at here is that moving from neighborhoods that predate the automobile to those built on quiet streets that become not so quiet due to changes over time, where do you draw the line? Where does it become the government's problem to compensate and where does it remain the citizen's tough luck?
Obviously the government has the right to aquire property from its citizens should the need arise (tons of legal precidents for that). Should the government be therefore obligated to compensate citizens or to help mitigate the affect of lost property value due to goverment changes to the area? Following from that should the government have the responcibility to zone areas according to noise polution so the commercial area I live next to (which used to contain walk in shops with little or no parking) can't be turned into a parking garage or a car wash?
We're both pointing out the extremes here, which really do have obvious solutions to them. Of course the government should compensate me for noise insulation if they put a 6 lane highway through my back yard. Of course they shouldn't do so if I buy up land next to a six lane highway and build a house on it. The question is the middle ground. Where is the differentiation?
It never ceases to amaze me how completely unaware of the world around them my fellow US Citizens can be.
London (by most accounts) traces her founding to Roman times, around 43 AD to be specific. Now, the widespread use of the automobile doesn't really occur until the early 20th century. By my count that gives the people of London approximately 1,857 years (give or take a few) to build houses with the reasonable expectation that the loudest thing they'd hear would be "clip clop clip clop."
In the United States the rage is a little less stark. Here we've had since about 1600 or somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 years with the reasonable expectation of "clip clop" noise pollution and little else.
Obviously this is a somewhat sarcastic way of explaining this. My point is that not everyone has the choice to build their homes around the interstate highway plans (or the M? for you Brits) of the government.
I guess this is one of the many examples of European liberalism. You know, the political ideology that expresses the radical notion that the government should look out for its citizens rather than spending all its money bombing someone else's.
Pardon my insistance but your statement is inaccurate.
Cortez did introduce a wide variety of dieseases to the Americas. However, to assume that Cortez, a Spanish explorer, had even a rudimentry knowledge of how diseases were spread in the early 16th Century is a bit unreasonable.
Now the Brittish Army did give smallpox laiden blankets to Native Americans but this was much later. The deed in question was done by a Lord Jeffery Amherst c. 1763. This practice was continued by the US army well into the 19th century and was used by General Custer against some of the tribes he fought.
I'm going to say what everyone else has been too nice to say. I'm going to get modded into smoking oblivion for it but I don't care.
You're a git.
Let me move on from that.
Nanotechnology is patently not limited to full scale Drexler assemblers capable of sophisticated assembly in short periods of time.
To assume this would be analogous to telling Robert Oppenheimer that he wasn't doing any work with nuclear energy in 1944 because he hadn't yet managed to create a 150% efficient cold fusion power plant that would fit in a small automobile.
The first steps into this technology are going to be crude and a good long ways from the Holy Grail of the feild.
It's also been mentioned that if nanotech weren't a pipe dream we'd see its rapid decimation into the market place by now. This assumes that the rate of adaptation paralells that of other, TOTALY UNRELATED technologies.
The acceleration of a technology is dependent almost entirely on market pressures. If there's no money to be made there's not going to be a lot of research in the feild. Fusion is the perfect example here. The research budget for Fusion research in this country could be covered out of pocket by some of our wealthier citizens. Consequently there's not a lot of progress being made (well, a lot less than there could be). I garuntee you if Exxon-Mobile corporation decided tomorow that it needed an energy source to replace petrolium and it needed it yesterday fusion research would take off in a hurry. We'd see the first commercial Tokamak reactors inside of a decade.
Many of the technologies we've been promised haven't panned out the way we expected them too. They aren't pipe dreams, they weren't ready for the market yet. More to the point, the market wasn't ready for them yet. Nanotech will get adopted at it's own pace. You probably won't notice it until you've gotten used to it.
At one point there was a website called ad-critic.com. It's since gone over to a pay service (thereby demonstrating exactly how sick in the head people can be... they want me to PAY to see ADS?).
Point being people would go to this site and burn precious bandwidth downloading advertisments! Some of the best adds I've seen were on that site.
Point being, there are examples where people will go out of their way to see a really well done add. We've all seen the Honda "Rube Goldberg" add. Everyone remembers the Budweiser "Waz up" and it's countless variations. I still get a chuckle from the "Real Men of Genious" adds that Bud Lite is pushing right now.
Some adds are good. Some suck. Drug adds in particular piss me off. At one point I started a list of drugs my TV had told me I need, but that I didn't know what they did. You've gotta ask yourself, can that be for anything OTHER than pissing people off?
More likely than that, EverQuest probably has a damage function.
if (IS_UNKILLABLE(monster) && monster.hp < monster.maxHp) { monster.hp = monster.maxHP; }
I is a word, a metaphysical handle for a concept. That concept is your "self." Now of course, you can't actualize or understand the true nature of your "self" because all that your are, your very intelegence is imprinted with the imperfection of language. Language has, implicit to it, definitions that are both inprecise and imutable.
"I" then, is a word refering to the reflection of your "self" as seen through the lense of the world you've been conditioned to accept.
"I" must exist, however, because without someone to QUESTION if "I" exists "I" can not exist. In short, the capability of questioning the existance of "I" cements that very existance.
Ok... I'm done. Now someone else handle the good and evil part.
We had a better trained, better equipped Army, as evidenced by the fact that the North Vietnamese lost many, MANY more soldiers in combat than the US did. There is no question that the US Army could have and in fact should have won the day, they just weren't allowed to do their job.
Fine point. The United States could have militarily defeated the Viet-cong easily. This is true.
However, the United States entered Vietnam to prevent the spread of communism. In short, to preserve South Vietnam as a democratic State embracing the capitalist system. The rules and restrictions placed on the army were to ensure that there was a South Vietnam left to become that State.
So even had those limitations been absent the US would still have emerged the looser in the Vietnam War. Why? Because there were two possible outcomes to that war.
1 - The US goes home and lets the country unite under a communist government.
2 - The US stays and fights, reducing the entire place to a smoldering mass of ash and chared jungle... not communism, true, but not democratic capitalism either.
The US lost in Vietnam not because it was outgunned, out clevered, or out fought, but because it set out to do force an entire country to do something that country didn't want to do. Oh... that and the Chinese got involved.
I'm just curious. How did we get from "I don't like the direction Bush/Ashcroft/et allia are taking the government" to "it would really suck not to have a government"?
The system's not without problems, but I'm certainly not advocating overthrowing the entire damn thing and starting over from scratch.
What I am saying is that the weapons of mass destruction we keep hearing about are laughably easy to make. Nukes... not so much, but chemical and biological weapons can be assembled easily and without much expense. Granted, these aren't suitable for battlefeild use, but you can put a big notch in the population of LA with this kind of stuff.
There comes a point where the government is doing more harm than good by "protecting" us from the terrorists. I think we've passed that point.
Watch the airports? Fine
Better cockpit security? Fine
Tighter customs control? Fine
Imprisoning people without trial or hope of appeal outside the relm of judicial oversight? Not fine.
Uhhhh.... this is an example of assuming causality. Because there have been very few terrorist attacks in the United States since Sept 11, 2001 the Bush administration must be doing a good job combating terrorism.
This assumes a few things.
1 - Legions of bloodthirsty terrorists wish nothing more than to see the United States reduced to a smoking abrasion in the earth's crust.
2 - These people have decided that the best time to act on these urges would be right now, while the Bush Administration is hunting for them.
3 - These terrorists are being found, tried, and convicted in secret military courts while the president's approval ratings sink ever lower as the US population grows more and more convinced that the world isn't nearly as dangerous as Mr Ashcroft would have us think.
It also has, implicit in it, at least one conclusion that those that advance it probably won't like.
1 - Three acts of terrorism have occurred in the United States since Pres. Bush took power. (9-11, Anthrax, Sniper). Thus Bush averages 1 attack per year (3 years in office, 3 attacks). Clinton, in comparison averages 1 every 4 years (World Trade Center Bombing and Oklahoma City). By the parent post's logic Clinton did a better job of protecting against terrorism.
But let's not get into that particular quagmire. The real question is this. At what cost? Terrorism isn't the leading cause of death in this country. More people die from pretty much everything than die in terrorist attacks. Want to protect the US Citizenry? Sink that $87 Billion for Iraq into Cancer research.
Ok... lets go with Cancer though. Apparently this country is unwilling to use the stem cells from a fetus that was aborted to try to cure cancer. I can accept a religious problem with that.
So here's the (hypothetical) trade. A cure for cancer, today. The price: The government gets to tap your phone, confiscate property without due process, track your internet usage, spy on you without judicial oversight, conduct secret searches of your home, and check up on your library readings. Oh, they also get to use your car to spy on you and can detain you indefinitely in a military base with no hope of appeal or civilian trial. Is it worth it? Remember, we're talking about curing cancer here... one of the biggest killers of US citizens of any age.
Gut feeling, if you're not willing to give up the rights of a bunch of dead tissue that someone didn't want to carry to birth to cure this disease you're probably not willing to give us a bunch of your own personal rights to do the same. So why is it that what Ashcroft is doing is so great? Why is it that for the POSSIBILITY of preventing terrorism we're willing to let this man and his minions trample upon our civil liberties?
I don't have an easy answer for this question. I can tell you that people with the attitude expressed in the parent post are part of the problem, not the solution. Ben Franklin was right, "those who would trade freedom for security deserve neither."
Cripple terrorism? Plunk pool chlorine tablets into a two liter of coke and twist on the cap and you've got a chemical munition. Nothing Ashcroft does can prevent a desperate individual willing to die for his cause. We're throwing our freedoms away for the tattered remnants of a dream.
I'll just submit this for general consumption.
The fundamental problem with most teachers/administrator's is that they've gone and collected at least one BA/BS and at least one post graduate degree (typicaly in education, meaningless as that is).
The result is they've been away from the setting they're trying to control for an absolute minimum of 7 years (typicaly more).
Most of these people have forgotten what it's like to be between the ages of 11 and 18. They've lost track of how insanely vicious, cruel, and downright rabbid kids can be at this age.
When they do try to fix it the result is a half wited program that sounds like a cross between Disney and Soviet propaganda. It insults the intelegence of the students, takes five times longer than it needs to take, and general just pisses people off.
Most students leave the auditorium thinking how great it would be to kick the shit out of that punk ass little bastard who took notes on his palm pilot.
Wana solve these problems? Hire younger teachers. Get people fresh out of college who are closer to the students age wise.
Of course, No Child Left Behind is just going to make this worse, not better... but that's another rant for another day.
God I suck.
That should be the United States was engaged in offensive [biological weapons research].
Gotta clear up a few things here.
1 - Terrorism isn't generaly a R&D effort. The act of terrorism isn't anything new, contrary to what GW Bush Inc. seems to belive. For centuries people have been committing acts of terrorism, but these are not the organizations that develop the new and frightening weapons of war.
Terrorism is, by it's very nature, a low budget enterprise. Until Mr and Mrs Smith can grow little Susie a custom built kitten with neon pink fur by hitting some buttons on the Recombinator (tm) you won't see gene level modifications as something available to terrorists.
2 - We've been making viruses resistance to treatment/immunization for years now. Read Ken Alblik's autobiography on his roll in the Soviet Bioweapons program. Until the 1970s the United States was engaged in offensive biological warfare . Today we still research defensive biowarfare, which means that we use developing treatments as an excuse to weaponize deadly organisims.
The former Soviet Union (according to most sources) weaponized the small pox virus. Weaponization, for the unaware, is a process of making a virus resistant to treatment and immunization techniques while increasing it's kill rate.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, if you have something insanely dangerous and you want to it to fall into the wrong hands, the best thing you can do with it it hand it to the Russian Army to guard.
I have the utmost respsect for the scientific community. The work they do is amazing and valuable research, but this isn't something I'm worried about. Somehow, I doubt that a bunch of PhDs in a lab can come up with anything (much) more deadly than billions of years of evolution and 50 years of cold war has produced.
The terminology used in the Political Sciences today is
[new] - Post Developed Nation
1st World - Developed Nation
2nd World - Developing Nation
3rd World - Highly Indebted Poor Country
Since the 1st 2nd & 3rd worlds are a strictly Cold War designation that refers specificly to a bi-polar system they really don't apply today (in a multi-polar system).
What?
The writings of CONFUSUS reference the use of chopsticks in China c. 500 BC. For more information read here.