I'm not sure the order of magnitude of the effect, but it would seem that the overall stratiegic and tactical theories that are in vogue at the time of the war directly relates to the casualties it produces. A lot of the death toll of the Great War can be laid at Clauswitz's (sp?) feet, while the teachings of Sun-Tzu seem to be SOP of today (special ops are used a heck of a lot more now than they were 100 years ago, and to greater effect).
Yes, us quirky and backwards Americans don't celebrate Labor Day on 1 May. Heck, we're so barbaric that we don't even go out to do the normal Labor Day traditions like smashing storefronts and burning cars on our Labor Day. How we got to where we are today is a total enigma.
"I'd go off here on a tangent about how we should have a Constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to demonstrate at least third-grade science and literacy skills before you get to vote, and maybe, I dunno, maybe an eighth-grade science education before you can run for elected office."
We had that for quite a while. But the people who don't know what they're doing decided that they did know what they're doing and not long after that things like the seventeenth amendment got passed. So here we are in good ol' fashioned mob rule.
"Since we are the most powerful and influential country in the world, why bother caring about the world outside my little realm?"
True for the Romans, the jury is still out on the Brits, but I don't think that's 100% true for us.
Ethnocentrism brings about apathy about the goings-on in other peoples' countries, but that doesn't affect a culture's curiousity about the unknown universe around them.
The average Roman citizen didn't really give a damn about bringing civilization to the folks north of the Danube or of Hadrian's Wall. Empire-building was getting so "BC" and the Circus was so much more interesting, so the empire was left to rot.
The British empire did pretty well because at the time there was no end to the unknown discoveries just waiting to be found. The British people were all for funding exploratory efforts and the British government obliged. The French and the Spanish sent explorers out to find some money to make, but the British had their Hudsons and their Cooks and their Hillarys and their Shakeltons who went out just for the hell of it. It wasn't until they started running out of unexplored territory in the 19th century that they started to decay. Sure, there was the occasional expedition to the poles, but once that had been done...
The American empire has come to power at an interesting point in history, one that hasn't been seen since maybe the 15th century. Our culture is all but founded by people eager to tame wilds and seek their fortunes in the unknown, and we find that we have the technical capability to do things nobody else has been able to do (and what most other people still can't do). The US wakes up one morning with an empire, and what's the first thing we do? Build the Panama Canal. We develop portable nuclear power and we go under the Arctic ice cap. While much of the space race was political, I'm pretty sure we're still spending a higher percentage of our national budget on space exploration than any other country.
While we may be sitting back content with the notion that there's not much to be learned from other nations and cultures, outright exploration still seems to be alive and well in the US,
You forgot to mention pop divas doing freakin' annoying cola commercials.
I swear that new line of Pepsi ads has done nothing but tell us that not only do cola ads suck ass now, they continue a proud tradition of ass-suckage dating back at least 50 years...
"Harldy a winning strategy. If MS were to drop the price of the XBOX, they'd go DEEPER into the hole on each machine sold. As it is, it costs like $400 or $500 to build one of the machines. Nintendo, however, is either close to break even point, or even making a profit on their $200 machine."
Even if Nintendo isn't at the break even point yet, remember that the GameCube is 66% of the price of the XBox, so dollar-for-dollar Nintendo gets more market penetration than XBox.
"MS would be smart to make better games, that'd be a far better strategy than trying to beat them at price."
Making better games is only part of it. You also need a large library in general to really make money. If you have a large library with many companies developing for you, you're more likely to find some real gems in that library.
"I'm not a China supporter or a Communist, but the fact is that just because it's a bastard regime does not mean that the USA or anyone else has some divine-right to interfere."
That's debatable. Beijing has repeatedly and documentably persecuted minority groups as it sees fit. The current group of persecutees that makes the news the most are the Falun Gong sect. But they are far from being the only ones.
If they are unable to defend themselves, why shouldn't we look to aid them?
"the Chinese... are as capable of wiping the US off the face of the earth just as the US can do the same to it.
HAH! HAH! And again HAH!
The United States is currently the world's only superpower. "Superpower" means that we can project our influence (be it political, economical, or martial) to any point on the globe at any time. All continents. All oceans. All countries on this planet have to deal with us in one way or the other. Last year proved that even 180 degrees of longitude isn't enough to escape us.
The People's Republic of China is a regional power at best and will continue to be so in the forseeable future. Their economic influence may have some global reach, but their political power doesn't reach much beyond eastern Asia and their military influence literally ends at their borders. Their army is numerous but ill-equipped and inexperienced. Their aerospace industry has literally been purchased from foreign suppliers. Their surface fleet couldn't even properly invade the Spratleys. Their few submarines can be found with Geiger counters. And their intercontinental ballistic missiles number in the 20's. The People's Republic would be hard pressed to make their influence felt in the Alleutians, and even that wouldn't last more than a week. For at least the next few decades (if not the rest of the century), the only country that truly has the power to attack us in the way you're talking about is Russia.
Being able to build a nuclear device is one thing. Being able to mass-produce reliable warheads on a large scale is something else entirely. Being able to build self-guided boosters capable of carrying said warheads and properly following a ballistic flightpath to a target on the other side of the world is orders of magnitude more difficult than either of those.
"This "we could beat you up if we really wanted to" attitude is juvenile"
Call it what you will, but it is realistic. Again, there is a reason why we are called a superpower.
"will probably stop abruptly when the US is nuked, which is a fairly obvious ultimate goal for any terrorist organisation, of which there are many."
A realistic terrorist-built device will have a yield of maybe 10-20 kilotons. It would be silly to expect there to be much more than 5 such devices built. Each bomb, if properly used, would probably kill ~20,000 each.
Whether you believe it or not the US has shown a remarkable amount of self-restraint in dealing with Afghanistan. Public outcry against the attacks in the US was such that most people wouldn't have minded nuking Afghanistan. No need to ask for Pakistani airspace, no need to deal with the logistics of long-range bomber flights, no need to try to cooperate with an indigenous force, simply punch in some GPS coordinates and that would have been that. No line, no wait. It wouldn't have even made an appreciable dent in the US nuclear stockpile.
Public opinion is currently at the point that, if there were a terrorist nuclear attack at any point in the near future, within a week at least one country would cease to exist out of shear principle. After a few years we will have rebuilt and be right back where we were before (New York's financial district was wiped out and yet we're the ones leading the economic recovery), while whatever hapless country on the other end of our retaliatory strike won't have anything left to rebuild with.
"And please, comparing Alexander The Great to Curious George is an insult of global proportions..."
I'm not. We're talking about George W. Bush here, not Lyndon B. Johnson. Bush's leadership technique avoids micromanagement like the plague and giving credit for the military victory to someone much higher than Pentagon brass or the folks at Langley would be hollow. Unlike just about Democrat president after Truman, Bush knows enough to stay out of their way and let them do what they do best.
The interesting thing about the United States is that we have the uncanny ability to do whatever we decide we want to do. Our campaign in Vietnam fell apart because of a lack of public support (partly because of poor management of the campaign), in essence we didn't really have our hearts in it. But even then our military achieved every goal they were given by their superious. They just had the wrong goals...
Ehh... I know this'll never get moderated up, but it's still worth it for the potential "I told you so!" statements in the future.:)
"China has not invaded anywhere I am aware of,"
I'm sure the Dalai Lama would be glad to correct this omission from your knowledge of history.
Not that Tibet is the only example of a country the People's Republic of China sent "peacekeepers" to. There was a farce of a Chinese invastion into Vietnam in 1979 (Beijing didn't like having a friend of the Soviets on their southern border), but that didn't last very long.
Judging from the continuous saber-rattling coming out of Beijing ever since Chairman Mao first came to power, the only thing keeping the People's Republic from going on many more expansionist military campaigns is a complete lack of a decent military (closely related to their complete lack of trust in the military).
"at least not recently and it certainly has not invaded Taiwan."
Mao Tse-tung's communist forces overthrew Chiang Kai-shek's regime in the 1940's. Guess where Chiang's government and supporters fled to and essentially took over? To Beijing, Taiwan is their property and the fact that Communist troops have yet to land there and enforce Beijing's rule is a mere formality. Doing so would also finish the job they set out to do in the 1940's.
"Great way to justify more increases in the 'defense' budget, the US is defenseless!"
Attacking the US is like attacking a bear cub. Sure, you might hurt the poor thing a little, but you shouldn't expect to live much longer...
We recently launched a combined-arms retaliatory attack on a landlocked country literally on the other side of the world. And we had victory in about a month. We helped to establish a friendly government in Afghanistan. The last foreign invader to pull that one off was Alexander the Great. Neither the British nor the Soviet empires, during the respective heights of their histories, could say that after the course of years, and we did it in about a month.
Now, are you sure we're defenseless? It is extremely difficult to stop an attacker who is willing to exchange their life for yours (the biggest example is how difficult it was for the USN to prevent kamikaze attacks). The only way to stop that kind of attack is to convince the attacker that the trade isn't worth it. And that can't happen if the attacker is too dumb to listen ("Look at that defenseless little bear cub...").
9/11 didn't happen because we were defenseless, 9/11 happened because Arab zealots were too blinded by their own idealism to realize that not even Afghanistan provided a haven for their ilk. If bin Laden hadn't been lulled into a sense of security by our lackluster performance in Somalia, he wouldn't have ordered the attacks.
"spending more on the military than the entire rest of the world (including allies) put together."
Even if that were true (which I doubt), keep in mind that the US GDP is 1/3 of everybody else's combined. I have a feeling that the percentage-of-national-budget figures are much more balanced, and I wouldn't be surprised if we weren't the leaders in that figure.
"the red army invaded (and they were itching to do so)"
So when Kruschev was talking about how they will "bury" us, do you think he was really talking about burying us in love and affection?
"Ignore the fact that the USSR were having their ass handed to them in Afghanistan."
Ignoring the particulars of the invastion of Afghanistan for the moment...
End of WWII and beginnings of "iron curtain": 1945 or so.
Soviet invastion of Afghanistan: 1979 or so.
That leaves a 34 year gap for the Soviets to look at Western Europe and lick their lips.
Now, if we look at the particulars of the invastion of Afghanistan, we can see that this wasn't exactly an all-out effort on the part of Moscow. There are many similarities between Afghanistan and the US campaign in Vietnam. The big one is that they were both executed in a very half-assed manner, with only nominal troop commitments and confused/conflicting goals in an effort to keep the appearance of being a justifiable and low-intensity conflict. If the Kremlin had taken the choke leash off of the Red Army, that campaign would have turned out very differently.
So even at the height of the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan, the vast majority of Soviet military assets were still along their borders with Western Europe and China.
"The military simulations started from the assumption that the USSR tanks were equal to the NATO tanks,"
That's biased in NATO's favor. Ever since the T-38 in WWII the Soviets have had the best tanks in the world hands down. NATO tanks were (and still are) out-massed and out-gunned by Soviet tanks. The only thing we had to rely on was superior technology. And the advantages of Western military technology versus Soviet were (and are) slim to none.
"ignore the fact that 60% of the Russian tanks were relics from WWII"
Those weren't "just relics" from WWII, those were T-38s. There are many reports out of Korea of bazooka slugs and rounds from UN tanks simply bouncing off the armor on those beasts.
And even if it is "just 60%" of the Soviet tank force, I'm willing to bet that that 60% still outnumbered NATO's 100%
"and they only had enough fuel to train for a few days a year"
Um, say what? Where did you get this info? I mean, we're only talking about the most oil-rich country in the world...
"and their troops were unwilling conscripts etc."
Another figure I'd like to see substantiated. But even if you're right, you'd be surprised how far "unwilling conscripts" will go when they have political officers threatening to shoot them in the back if need be. See Stalingrad.
And again, troop quality can be corrected for with troop quantity.
"If we are not careful we will be driven to the same sort of destructive and pointless standoff with China."
If the US tries to start an arms race, China couldn't if they wanted to. They have neither the capital, the technology nor the culture to do anywhere near as well as the Soviets.
Besides, we have something like a 50 year head start in that one. China's only hope is to try to convince the rest of the world that they're really nice folks being oppressed by the big mean US (take a look at their international political manuvers, especially in the UN0. In your case it looks like they've been successful.
"First Taiwan agrees that it is part of China"
Nope. Most Taiwanese aren't fond of the idea of being a part of China (Communist or otherwise). In fact, Taiwan has never truly been an integral part of China.
"in fact it still lays claims to the rest of China"
No, that ended decades ago.
"More importantly however the Chineese politicians are not the Maoist revolutionaries the US media would have us believe."
Fact: the #2 man in the government that used tanks to stop a student protest in Tianenmen Square is the #1 man in today's Chinese government.
"In fact the horrors of the cultural revolution are the principal fear,"
Chinese unemployment is going up as quickly as their GDP. If this keeps up, is there any reason to believe that there won't be a second cultural revolution?
"The Chinese leadership show every sign of understanding that the one thing they can do that would absolutely make reuinification with Taiwan impossible is to invade."
The continued missile drills along the Communist side of the Straights of Taiwan seem to suggest otherwise. To me it suggests that the pathetic state of the People's Army is what is preventing that invasion. An invastion of Taiwan would make reunification impossible because a Chinese invastion of Taiwan is impossible.
"What we have to do is to make sure that China continues on its present path which is definitely heading towards a more open, more democratic society."
That's something Beijing has been telling the Chinese peoople for decades. "Once the economy takes off and the people begin to prosper, then we'll talk about being a more open society." Hasn't happened yet. China's Communist regime, much like Pyongyang's, has two goals and they are in this order:
Perpetuate itself
Improve the lives of its people
The Chinese economy wouldn't be turning towards capitalism if Beijing wasn't sure that it could remain in complete control. Heck, they're only allowing as much as they are because they fear ending up like the Soviets.
"The US is certainly not in a position to extol the virtues of democracy after the administrations recent meddling in Venezuela."
The staunchly anti-American (pro-Castro, even) and pro-Socialist Hugo Chavez seems to be doing a fine job of screwing up his country all by himself. I'm sorry, but any national government that fears its own military (including China) has some major problems.
We border Mexico, so we've always had a big interest in what goes on down there. They should be the best example of American "meddling" in Latin America. Let's see... their economy is booming and they recently had their first truly democratic election in ages (voting in a former Coke executive, even). Oh, the horrors!
"Presidents who go to the supreme court to stop the votes being counted do not have much credibility with me on that score,"
I wonder if you realize you just ruled out Gore as well...
The two candidates were calling into question issues concerning state and federal election laws. The Florida and US Supreme Courts had the task of interpreting those election laws. Both courts made rulings that they felt best agreed with those election laws. If you want somebody to blame, why not blame the people responsible for those election laws: the legislatures in Tallahassee and Washington.
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You know, it might be interesting to call this Best Buy and ask to speak to Rod. I'm not talking about cussing him out, but pretending to be a member of the press and asking him questions about the incident ("Hi, I'm _____ from Slashdot (like they'd know it's not a real news org) and I'd like to ask you a few questions about the recent arrest of Mr. Abraham. Is it true that you lied to the police?")
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IANAL, I just watch a lot of Law & Order.:)
"When I tried to get him to look in the locked case where the ram is so he could SEE THE SAME BRAND, he ordered me out of the store."
At the very, absolute least call up your local Better Business Bureau.
Store policy on returns is clearly stated on the signs in the store. If they go back on their printed policy, sue their pants off.
If you paid with cash, you're up a creek. If you paid with a check, check fraud comes to mind. Best option: if you paid with a credit or debit card and it was less than 60 days ago, call up the card's issuer and talk about a chargeback. That will get corporate's attention in a hurry.
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IANAL.
"So I went to BB at Tucker,GA last Friday armed with the receipts, my original and the copies I printed from the site."
I've never shopped off of their website. Do you get a copy of the receipt e-mailed to you as well? That would come in handy if you still had it.
"There was this customer service lady who told me that six or seven people have been trying to PM with the same receipt there and its not possible."
Any way you could find some of these other people so you could confirm each others' story?
"Looks like they first told her that the receipt was a Fraudulent one and that they have proof to that effect, but once we all got to the precinct changed the story saying that they cant prove it anymore."
It sounds like the police would currently have the receipt as evidence. Find out if they have it.
If you were arrested for fraud and the person who had you arrested changed their tune, then that sounds like false arrest, or at the very least libel.
Find out if the Best Buy folks gave the woman (detective?) you were talking to a sworn statement about asking you to leave. If they did they may have perjured themselves.
Either way, step 1 of this is to get a lawyer and talk to them. Heck, they may even be coming out of the woodwork to find you as I type.:)
"In addition, if it's a typo, then you don't honor it."
That may be how things work on the internet, but not in the real world. Heck, it wasn't too long ago that I got a Gravis Xperience gamepad at a Best Buy for the price of a Gamepad Pro because the demo was mispriced. See, in the real world saying "Oh, that was a typo, pay up" is a quick way to lose customers.
First off, let's pretend we have the gobs and gobs of money needed to cover 1% of the moon's surface with solar panels. Then let's pretend that our increasingly fictional scheme will be in sunlight all during the month (as opposed to the two weeks when our solar panels will be facing the sun).
How exactly do you intend to get the power back here to earth?
There's only one reasonable solution: Microwave transfer. This means that this "environmentally friendly" energy you're getting will result in a very powerful microwave beam scorching a path along the earth's surface with the orbit of the moon. You'd be "saving the environment" by creating something that can (and will) cause death and destruction on the earth's surface comparable to a nuclear war.
Sorry, I think that building better fission reactors is a far easier, safer and cheaper way of doing things.
"First, to the best of my knowledge, there is no Constitutional guarantee of fair use."
BUZZ!
Somebody hasn't been reading their Federalist Papers, have they? Fair use is guaranteed by the following line in the US Constitution:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech[.]
You'll find it under the section referred to as "Articles of Amendment." It's the first line of the first one.
The use of the writings/creations/whatever of another person is speech, and as such no law can prevent it without being unconstitutional. Copyright sidesteps the issue by being "for a limited time" and therefore it (in theory) doesn't quite go far enough to be called "abridging."
However, in practice the rich self-interests have that "limited time" to be about the average life span of a human being in the industrialized world.
"Fair use rights have been at times granted by Congress (e.g. the Audio Home Recording Act)"
Congress isn't affecting speech per se, Congress was governing the allowed uses of a medium they "own" (in this case the radio spectrum). Note that you can't legally broadcast in the United States over any meaningful distance without first getting an FCC license.
"The second, and more disturbing point, is that large portions of the DMCA may be exempt from constitutional challenges. Aricle VI of the Constitution includes the statement "This Constitution...and all treaties made...under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land."
Do a search for "Bricker Amendment" and you'll probably get more info.
The "Supreme Law of the Land" clause has given Congress rights that would otherwise have been denied to it by the 9th amendment (since the Constitution doesn't say "Congress can regulate hunting and fishing of endangered animals"), but it has yet to be tested to see whether or not it allows Congress to do things that are denied more explicitly (such as the previously mentioned 1st amendment).
Those that have been worried about such a test proposed the Bricker Amendment in the 1950's (Republicans were worried about the UN superceding the US Constitution), and it seems to be popular again with the so-called political right.
"withdrawing from the treaty as was done several months ago by President Bush with the ABM treaty."
The ABM Treaty had a specific clause detailing how a signatory can leave the treaty (essentially it just said "You can't leave without giving x months warning.") This is what the Bush administration did (remember how it was all over the news months before it actually happened?).
"Fair Use is not limited, however, possibly a limit of the amount of material may need to be implemented. IOW, don't paste all 144 pages up to make your point, take selected phrases.. this may keep the copyright lawyers at bay."
If this doesn't scream "overbroad" I don't know what does. So 144 pages is too much. What about 143? 142? 141?
Let's skip a bit. 3? 2? 1? Arguments could be made for copying one or two pages of a work, but that all depends on the work.
So maybe we should go by percentage instead. 10%? 9%? 8%? What if the work you're copying is raw data (say thermodynamic steam tables) and makes up the bulk of the work? Wouldn't that seem to require a larger percentage of "fair use" than Dianetics?
This is something that can ONLY be determined on a case-by-case basis. This is why we have courts. If we were to make a law or set a legal precedent that applied to all works instead of to the works in question then you'd see legal abuses of copyright law far worse than what you're seeing now. I mean, heck, it'd take a decade to figure out how you measure a work (Words? Sentences? Paragraphs? Characters? Pages? Ideas? Concepts? Dots-per-inch?), and probably another decade before it becomes vaguely enforcable.
Like it or not, fair use is up there with pornography; it's something about which the judges are forced to say "I can't put my finger on it but I'll know it when I see it."
"The White House is instead pursuing an "e-identification" initiative, an effort to develop ways to authenticate people and businesses online who already have government identification numbers such as Social Security, business-registration and employer-identification numbers."
In case you haven't noticed, we all have social security numbers.
"suggests they use Passport to verify the identity of visitors to their Web sites."
... and access to our government should be restricted because...?
As I've learned the hard way in recent years, you NEED several hours of REM sleep a day. It's not just a matter of feeling "refreshed" in the morning, it's a big factor in mental health.
" Perpetually the US Administration talks about reducing the dependence on foreign oil, promoting the opening up of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuges for drilling, and basically writing a blank environmental cheque for oil companies to sign."
Modern drilling and pumping operations are quite environmentally friendly as it is. Seismic analysis allows the prospectors to drill far fewer holes and the Alyeska Pipeline has been shown to have nearly negligible environmental impact. The only truly messy part in getting more oil is the refining process, which doesn't happen anywhere near the state of Alaska (this is why we have oil tankers).
"Yet this is the same administration... that continually refuses to enforce basic fuel efficiency... directives."
First off, CAFE what?
Secondly this isn't a sign of a failing of the government (besides, you shouldn't be looking to the government to solve all of our problems in the first place) but a sign of the general tastes in American vehicle consumption.
Generally speaking this can all be traced back to the mid 70's when the government was pushing for both fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions. In order to make the adjustment to the new regulations in the short amount of time given, car manufacturers came up with questionable solutions. For example emission percentages were lowered not by putting out fewer pollutants but by puming more clean air into the exhaust before it comes out the tail pipe.
Another example of such a quick-fix were the hastily-deployed models with a diesel engine retrofitted where a gasoline-burning engine was before. These engines were rough, noisy and not at all fun to operate, and the average American consumer has come to equate diesel engines with this memory of them.
It has been known for some time that diesel engines are both more fuel efficient and cheaper to operate than gas-burning engines. My father's Dodge Ram 1500 weighs something like 3 tons empty and it gets about 22 mpg of diesel fuel. Compare that to the "efficiency" of the much smaller and more aerodynamic Durango.
However, because of the American market's brief brush with cars powered by diesel engines, diesels simply don't sell well in the states. It has gotten to the point where GM and Ford offer many models with diesel engines in the European market that they simply won't offer in the US (the aforementioned Durango is either currently or will shortly be offered with a diesel engine in Europe).
Because diesels can't get a decent foothold in the US any time soon, we're stuck with waiting for new technologies (like diesel-electric hybrids, which even then aren't selling as well as gasoline-electric hybrids). But even with that the US has a problem with deploying cars using different fuel (such as natural gas or hydrogen). Unlike the numerous European countries that offer these fuel alternatives at the pump, the United States is the third largest country in the world with patches of sparse population bigger than many European countries. It will take a considerably long time and a large amount of capital to put in the infrastructure to offer these new fuels nationwide. Heck, there has yet to be a cell phone provider to offer truly nationwide coverage.
"If people want to feel patriotic, they should forsake getting that new Expedition and buy themselves a Dodge Neon or a Toyota Corolla"
I believe the Expedition is another example of a model offered with a diesel only in Europe. The Neon and the Corolla too, I believe.
Large vehicles like the Expedition are popular in the US because we take long car trips with the entire family. Sure, perhaps the "soccer moms" are being a bit extraneous, but when was the last time you tried to make a two-day road trip with two kids in a sedan? If one of them is a girl you'll be lucky to fit all your luggage in the trunk.
Why aren't these vehicles as popular in Europe? For one they have a denser public transportation infrastructure (another cultural difference between the US and Europe is the fact that we like independant personal transportation). Another factor is that there are few if any European countries where you can drive 20 hours in a straight line and still be in the same country.
You can be sure that these vehicles aren't selling well because they advertise the price of gasoline. But if the American consumer feels that that is an acceptable cost, who is the government to tell them that it isn't?
No, that's what Microsoft would want Japanese gamers to believe. In fact the manufacturers have never said what MSX stands for and and there are at least three other possible definitions of that acronym.
Slashdot Mirror
"No, its caveman nature. This is 2002, Humans should evolve to my level, or else why should I consider them human?"
It's human nature to consider yourself better than everybody else.
I'm not sure the order of magnitude of the effect, but it would seem that the overall stratiegic and tactical theories that are in vogue at the time of the war directly relates to the casualties it produces. A lot of the death toll of the Great War can be laid at Clauswitz's (sp?) feet, while the teachings of Sun-Tzu seem to be SOP of today (special ops are used a heck of a lot more now than they were 100 years ago, and to greater effect).
Yes, us quirky and backwards Americans don't celebrate Labor Day on 1 May. Heck, we're so barbaric that we don't even go out to do the normal Labor Day traditions like smashing storefronts and burning cars on our Labor Day. How we got to where we are today is a total enigma.
This sounds like a job for...
STEAM TABLES!
"I'd go off here on a tangent about how we should have a Constitutional amendment requiring prospective voters to demonstrate at least third-grade science and literacy skills before you get to vote, and maybe, I dunno, maybe an eighth-grade science education before you can run for elected office."
We had that for quite a while. But the people who don't know what they're doing decided that they did know what they're doing and not long after that things like the seventeenth amendment got passed. So here we are in good ol' fashioned mob rule.
"Since we are the most powerful and influential country in the world, why bother caring about the world outside my little realm?"
True for the Romans, the jury is still out on the Brits, but I don't think that's 100% true for us.
Ethnocentrism brings about apathy about the goings-on in other peoples' countries, but that doesn't affect a culture's curiousity about the unknown universe around them.
The average Roman citizen didn't really give a damn about bringing civilization to the folks north of the Danube or of Hadrian's Wall. Empire-building was getting so "BC" and the Circus was so much more interesting, so the empire was left to rot.
The British empire did pretty well because at the time there was no end to the unknown discoveries just waiting to be found. The British people were all for funding exploratory efforts and the British government obliged. The French and the Spanish sent explorers out to find some money to make, but the British had their Hudsons and their Cooks and their Hillarys and their Shakeltons who went out just for the hell of it. It wasn't until they started running out of unexplored territory in the 19th century that they started to decay. Sure, there was the occasional expedition to the poles, but once that had been done...
The American empire has come to power at an interesting point in history, one that hasn't been seen since maybe the 15th century. Our culture is all but founded by people eager to tame wilds and seek their fortunes in the unknown, and we find that we have the technical capability to do things nobody else has been able to do (and what most other people still can't do). The US wakes up one morning with an empire, and what's the first thing we do? Build the Panama Canal. We develop portable nuclear power and we go under the Arctic ice cap. While much of the space race was political, I'm pretty sure we're still spending a higher percentage of our national budget on space exploration than any other country.
While we may be sitting back content with the notion that there's not much to be learned from other nations and cultures, outright exploration still seems to be alive and well in the US,
You forgot to mention pop divas doing freakin' annoying cola commercials.
I swear that new line of Pepsi ads has done nothing but tell us that not only do cola ads suck ass now, they continue a proud tradition of ass-suckage dating back at least 50 years...
"Harldy a winning strategy. If MS were to drop the price of the XBOX, they'd go DEEPER into the hole on each machine sold. As it is, it costs like $400 or $500 to build one of the machines. Nintendo, however, is either close to break even point, or even making a profit on their $200 machine."
Even if Nintendo isn't at the break even point yet, remember that the GameCube is 66% of the price of the XBox, so dollar-for-dollar Nintendo gets more market penetration than XBox.
"MS would be smart to make better games, that'd be a far better strategy than trying to beat them at price."
Making better games is only part of it. You also need a large library in general to really make money. If you have a large library with many companies developing for you, you're more likely to find some real gems in that library.
"I'm not a China supporter or a Communist, but the fact is that just because it's a bastard regime does not mean that the USA or anyone else has some divine-right to interfere."
... are as capable of wiping the US off the face of the earth just as the US can do the same to it.
That's debatable. Beijing has repeatedly and documentably persecuted minority groups as it sees fit. The current group of persecutees that makes the news the most are the Falun Gong sect. But they are far from being the only ones.
If they are unable to defend themselves, why shouldn't we look to aid them?
"the Chinese
HAH! HAH! And again HAH!
The United States is currently the world's only superpower. "Superpower" means that we can project our influence (be it political, economical, or martial) to any point on the globe at any time. All continents. All oceans. All countries on this planet have to deal with us in one way or the other. Last year proved that even 180 degrees of longitude isn't enough to escape us.
The People's Republic of China is a regional power at best and will continue to be so in the forseeable future. Their economic influence may have some global reach, but their political power doesn't reach much beyond eastern Asia and their military influence literally ends at their borders. Their army is numerous but ill-equipped and inexperienced. Their aerospace industry has literally been purchased from foreign suppliers. Their surface fleet couldn't even properly invade the Spratleys. Their few submarines can be found with Geiger counters. And their intercontinental ballistic missiles number in the 20's. The People's Republic would be hard pressed to make their influence felt in the Alleutians, and even that wouldn't last more than a week. For at least the next few decades (if not the rest of the century), the only country that truly has the power to attack us in the way you're talking about is Russia.
Being able to build a nuclear device is one thing. Being able to mass-produce reliable warheads on a large scale is something else entirely. Being able to build self-guided boosters capable of carrying said warheads and properly following a ballistic flightpath to a target on the other side of the world is orders of magnitude more difficult than either of those.
"This "we could beat you up if we really wanted to" attitude is juvenile"
Call it what you will, but it is realistic. Again, there is a reason why we are called a superpower.
"will probably stop abruptly when the US is nuked, which is a fairly obvious ultimate goal for any terrorist organisation, of which there are many."
A realistic terrorist-built device will have a yield of maybe 10-20 kilotons. It would be silly to expect there to be much more than 5 such devices built. Each bomb, if properly used, would probably kill ~20,000 each.
Whether you believe it or not the US has shown a remarkable amount of self-restraint in dealing with Afghanistan. Public outcry against the attacks in the US was such that most people wouldn't have minded nuking Afghanistan. No need to ask for Pakistani airspace, no need to deal with the logistics of long-range bomber flights, no need to try to cooperate with an indigenous force, simply punch in some GPS coordinates and that would have been that. No line, no wait. It wouldn't have even made an appreciable dent in the US nuclear stockpile.
Public opinion is currently at the point that, if there were a terrorist nuclear attack at any point in the near future, within a week at least one country would cease to exist out of shear principle. After a few years we will have rebuilt and be right back where we were before (New York's financial district was wiped out and yet we're the ones leading the economic recovery), while whatever hapless country on the other end of our retaliatory strike won't have anything left to rebuild with.
"And please, comparing Alexander The Great to Curious George is an insult of global proportions..."
I'm not. We're talking about George W. Bush here, not Lyndon B. Johnson. Bush's leadership technique avoids micromanagement like the plague and giving credit for the military victory to someone much higher than Pentagon brass or the folks at Langley would be hollow. Unlike just about Democrat president after Truman, Bush knows enough to stay out of their way and let them do what they do best.
The interesting thing about the United States is that we have the uncanny ability to do whatever we decide we want to do. Our campaign in Vietnam fell apart because of a lack of public support (partly because of poor management of the campaign), in essence we didn't really have our hearts in it. But even then our military achieved every goal they were given by their superious. They just had the wrong goals...
"Four games. Four fucking games. Out of a entire fucking INDUSTRY, this asshole reviews four games."
This isn't about games in general, it's about games with a "Mature Audiences" rating being sold to minors.
I dare anybody to name four games rated "MA" that have any redeeming qualities.
"China has not invaded anywhere I am aware of,"
I'm sure the Dalai Lama would be glad to correct this omission from your knowledge of history.
Not that Tibet is the only example of a country the People's Republic of China sent "peacekeepers" to. There was a farce of a Chinese invastion into Vietnam in 1979 (Beijing didn't like having a friend of the Soviets on their southern border), but that didn't last very long.
Judging from the continuous saber-rattling coming out of Beijing ever since Chairman Mao first came to power, the only thing keeping the People's Republic from going on many more expansionist military campaigns is a complete lack of a decent military (closely related to their complete lack of trust in the military).
"at least not recently and it certainly has not invaded Taiwan."
Mao Tse-tung's communist forces overthrew Chiang Kai-shek's regime in the 1940's. Guess where Chiang's government and supporters fled to and essentially took over? To Beijing, Taiwan is their property and the fact that Communist troops have yet to land there and enforce Beijing's rule is a mere formality. Doing so would also finish the job they set out to do in the 1940's.
"Great way to justify more increases in the 'defense' budget, the US is defenseless!"
Attacking the US is like attacking a bear cub. Sure, you might hurt the poor thing a little, but you shouldn't expect to live much longer...
We recently launched a combined-arms retaliatory attack on a landlocked country literally on the other side of the world. And we had victory in about a month. We helped to establish a friendly government in Afghanistan. The last foreign invader to pull that one off was Alexander the Great. Neither the British nor the Soviet empires, during the respective heights of their histories, could say that after the course of years, and we did it in about a month.
Now, are you sure we're defenseless? It is extremely difficult to stop an attacker who is willing to exchange their life for yours (the biggest example is how difficult it was for the USN to prevent kamikaze attacks). The only way to stop that kind of attack is to convince the attacker that the trade isn't worth it. And that can't happen if the attacker is too dumb to listen ("Look at that defenseless little bear cub...").
9/11 didn't happen because we were defenseless, 9/11 happened because Arab zealots were too blinded by their own idealism to realize that not even Afghanistan provided a haven for their ilk. If bin Laden hadn't been lulled into a sense of security by our lackluster performance in Somalia, he wouldn't have ordered the attacks.
"spending more on the military than the entire rest of the world (including allies) put together."
Even if that were true (which I doubt), keep in mind that the US GDP is 1/3 of everybody else's combined. I have a feeling that the percentage-of-national-budget figures are much more balanced, and I wouldn't be surprised if we weren't the leaders in that figure.
"the red army invaded (and they were itching to do so)"
So when Kruschev was talking about how they will "bury" us, do you think he was really talking about burying us in love and affection?
"Ignore the fact that the USSR were having their ass handed to them in Afghanistan."
Ignoring the particulars of the invastion of Afghanistan for the moment...
End of WWII and beginnings of "iron curtain": 1945 or so.
Soviet invastion of Afghanistan: 1979 or so.
That leaves a 34 year gap for the Soviets to look at Western Europe and lick their lips.
Now, if we look at the particulars of the invastion of Afghanistan, we can see that this wasn't exactly an all-out effort on the part of Moscow. There are many similarities between Afghanistan and the US campaign in Vietnam. The big one is that they were both executed in a very half-assed manner, with only nominal troop commitments and confused/conflicting goals in an effort to keep the appearance of being a justifiable and low-intensity conflict. If the Kremlin had taken the choke leash off of the Red Army, that campaign would have turned out very differently.
So even at the height of the Soviet invasion into Afghanistan, the vast majority of Soviet military assets were still along their borders with Western Europe and China.
"The military simulations started from the assumption that the USSR tanks were equal to the NATO tanks,"
That's biased in NATO's favor. Ever since the T-38 in WWII the Soviets have had the best tanks in the world hands down. NATO tanks were (and still are) out-massed and out-gunned by Soviet tanks. The only thing we had to rely on was superior technology. And the advantages of Western military technology versus Soviet were (and are) slim to none.
"ignore the fact that 60% of the Russian tanks were relics from WWII"
Those weren't "just relics" from WWII, those were T-38s. There are many reports out of Korea of bazooka slugs and rounds from UN tanks simply bouncing off the armor on those beasts.
And even if it is "just 60%" of the Soviet tank force, I'm willing to bet that that 60% still outnumbered NATO's 100%
"and they only had enough fuel to train for a few days a year"
Um, say what? Where did you get this info? I mean, we're only talking about the most oil-rich country in the world...
"and their troops were unwilling conscripts etc."
Another figure I'd like to see substantiated. But even if you're right, you'd be surprised how far "unwilling conscripts" will go when they have political officers threatening to shoot them in the back if need be. See Stalingrad.
And again, troop quality can be corrected for with troop quantity.
"If we are not careful we will be driven to the same sort of destructive and pointless standoff with China."
If the US tries to start an arms race, China couldn't if they wanted to. They have neither the capital, the technology nor the culture to do anywhere near as well as the Soviets.
Besides, we have something like a 50 year head start in that one. China's only hope is to try to convince the rest of the world that they're really nice folks being oppressed by the big mean US (take a look at their international political manuvers, especially in the UN0. In your case it looks like they've been successful.
"First Taiwan agrees that it is part of China"
Nope. Most Taiwanese aren't fond of the idea of being a part of China (Communist or otherwise). In fact, Taiwan has never truly been an integral part of China.
"in fact it still lays claims to the rest of China"
No, that ended decades ago.
"More importantly however the Chineese politicians are not the Maoist revolutionaries the US media would have us believe."
Fact: the #2 man in the government that used tanks to stop a student protest in Tianenmen Square is the #1 man in today's Chinese government.
"In fact the horrors of the cultural revolution are the principal fear,"
Chinese unemployment is going up as quickly as their GDP. If this keeps up, is there any reason to believe that there won't be a second cultural revolution?
"The Chinese leadership show every sign of understanding that the one thing they can do that would absolutely make reuinification with Taiwan impossible is to invade."
The continued missile drills along the Communist side of the Straights of Taiwan seem to suggest otherwise. To me it suggests that the pathetic state of the People's Army is what is preventing that invasion. An invastion of Taiwan would make reunification impossible because a Chinese invastion of Taiwan is impossible.
"What we have to do is to make sure that China continues on its present path which is definitely heading towards a more open, more democratic society."
That's something Beijing has been telling the Chinese peoople for decades. "Once the economy takes off and the people begin to prosper, then we'll talk about being a more open society." Hasn't happened yet. China's Communist regime, much like Pyongyang's, has two goals and they are in this order:
The Chinese economy wouldn't be turning towards capitalism if Beijing wasn't sure that it could remain in complete control. Heck, they're only allowing as much as they are because they fear ending up like the Soviets.
"The US is certainly not in a position to extol the virtues of democracy after the administrations recent meddling in Venezuela."
The staunchly anti-American (pro-Castro, even) and pro-Socialist Hugo Chavez seems to be doing a fine job of screwing up his country all by himself. I'm sorry, but any national government that fears its own military (including China) has some major problems.
We border Mexico, so we've always had a big interest in what goes on down there. They should be the best example of American "meddling" in Latin America. Let's see... their economy is booming and they recently had their first truly democratic election in ages (voting in a former Coke executive, even). Oh, the horrors!
"Presidents who go to the supreme court to stop the votes being counted do not have much credibility with me on that score,"
I wonder if you realize you just ruled out Gore as well...
The two candidates were calling into question issues concerning state and federal election laws. The Florida and US Supreme Courts had the task of interpreting those election laws. Both courts made rulings that they felt best agreed with those election laws. If you want somebody to blame, why not blame the people responsible for those election laws: the legislatures in Tallahassee and Washington.
You know, it might be interesting to call this Best Buy and ask to speak to Rod. I'm not talking about cussing him out, but pretending to be a member of the press and asking him questions about the incident ("Hi, I'm _____ from Slashdot (like they'd know it's not a real news org) and I'd like to ask you a few questions about the recent arrest of Mr. Abraham. Is it true that you lied to the police?")
IANAL, I just watch a lot of Law & Order. :)
"When I tried to get him to look in the locked case where the ram is so he could SEE THE SAME BRAND, he ordered me out of the store."
At the very, absolute least call up your local Better Business Bureau.
Store policy on returns is clearly stated on the signs in the store. If they go back on their printed policy, sue their pants off.
If you paid with cash, you're up a creek. If you paid with a check, check fraud comes to mind. Best option: if you paid with a credit or debit card and it was less than 60 days ago, call up the card's issuer and talk about a chargeback. That will get corporate's attention in a hurry.
IANAL.
:)
"So I went to BB at Tucker,GA last Friday armed with the receipts, my original and the copies I printed from the site."
I've never shopped off of their website. Do you get a copy of the receipt e-mailed to you as well? That would come in handy if you still had it.
"There was this customer service lady who told me that six or seven people have been trying to PM with the same receipt there and its not possible."
Any way you could find some of these other people so you could confirm each others' story?
"Looks like they first told her that the receipt was a Fraudulent one and that they have proof to that effect, but once we all got to the precinct changed the story saying that they cant prove it anymore."
It sounds like the police would currently have the receipt as evidence. Find out if they have it.
If you were arrested for fraud and the person who had you arrested changed their tune, then that sounds like false arrest, or at the very least libel.
Find out if the Best Buy folks gave the woman (detective?) you were talking to a sworn statement about asking you to leave. If they did they may have perjured themselves.
Either way, step 1 of this is to get a lawyer and talk to them. Heck, they may even be coming out of the woodwork to find you as I type.
"In addition, if it's a typo, then you don't honor it."
That may be how things work on the internet, but not in the real world. Heck, it wasn't too long ago that I got a Gravis Xperience gamepad at a Best Buy for the price of a Gamepad Pro because the demo was mispriced. See, in the real world saying "Oh, that was a typo, pay up" is a quick way to lose customers.
First off, let's pretend we have the gobs and gobs of money needed to cover 1% of the moon's surface with solar panels. Then let's pretend that our increasingly fictional scheme will be in sunlight all during the month (as opposed to the two weeks when our solar panels will be facing the sun).
How exactly do you intend to get the power back here to earth?
There's only one reasonable solution: Microwave transfer. This means that this "environmentally friendly" energy you're getting will result in a very powerful microwave beam scorching a path along the earth's surface with the orbit of the moon. You'd be "saving the environment" by creating something that can (and will) cause death and destruction on the earth's surface comparable to a nuclear war.
Sorry, I think that building better fission reactors is a far easier, safer and cheaper way of doing things.
"First, to the best of my knowledge, there is no Constitutional guarantee of fair use."
BUZZ!
Somebody hasn't been reading their Federalist Papers, have they? Fair use is guaranteed by the following line in the US Constitution:
Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech[.]
You'll find it under the section referred to as "Articles of Amendment." It's the first line of the first one.
The use of the writings/creations/whatever of another person is speech, and as such no law can prevent it without being unconstitutional. Copyright sidesteps the issue by being "for a limited time" and therefore it (in theory) doesn't quite go far enough to be called "abridging."
However, in practice the rich self-interests have that "limited time" to be about the average life span of a human being in the industrialized world.
"Fair use rights have been at times granted by Congress (e.g. the Audio Home Recording Act)"
Congress isn't affecting speech per se, Congress was governing the allowed uses of a medium they "own" (in this case the radio spectrum). Note that you can't legally broadcast in the United States over any meaningful distance without first getting an FCC license.
"The second, and more disturbing point, is that large portions of the DMCA may be exempt from constitutional challenges. Aricle VI of the Constitution includes the statement "This Constitution...and all treaties made...under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land."
Do a search for "Bricker Amendment" and you'll probably get more info.
The "Supreme Law of the Land" clause has given Congress rights that would otherwise have been denied to it by the 9th amendment (since the Constitution doesn't say "Congress can regulate hunting and fishing of endangered animals"), but it has yet to be tested to see whether or not it allows Congress to do things that are denied more explicitly (such as the previously mentioned 1st amendment).
Those that have been worried about such a test proposed the Bricker Amendment in the 1950's (Republicans were worried about the UN superceding the US Constitution), and it seems to be popular again with the so-called political right.
"withdrawing from the treaty as was done several months ago by President Bush with the ABM treaty."
The ABM Treaty had a specific clause detailing how a signatory can leave the treaty (essentially it just said "You can't leave without giving x months warning.") This is what the Bush administration did (remember how it was all over the news months before it actually happened?).
BTW, IANAL.
"Fair Use is not limited, however, possibly a limit of the amount of material may need to be implemented. IOW, don't paste all 144 pages up to make your point, take selected phrases .. this may keep the copyright lawyers at bay."
If this doesn't scream "overbroad" I don't know what does. So 144 pages is too much. What about 143? 142? 141?
Let's skip a bit. 3? 2? 1? Arguments could be made for copying one or two pages of a work, but that all depends on the work.
So maybe we should go by percentage instead. 10%? 9%? 8%? What if the work you're copying is raw data (say thermodynamic steam tables) and makes up the bulk of the work? Wouldn't that seem to require a larger percentage of "fair use" than Dianetics?
This is something that can ONLY be determined on a case-by-case basis. This is why we have courts. If we were to make a law or set a legal precedent that applied to all works instead of to the works in question then you'd see legal abuses of copyright law far worse than what you're seeing now. I mean, heck, it'd take a decade to figure out how you measure a work (Words? Sentences? Paragraphs? Characters? Pages? Ideas? Concepts? Dots-per-inch?), and probably another decade before it becomes vaguely enforcable.
Like it or not, fair use is up there with pornography; it's something about which the judges are forced to say "I can't put my finger on it but I'll know it when I see it."
"The White House is instead pursuing an "e-identification" initiative, an effort to develop ways to authenticate people and businesses online who already have government identification numbers such as Social Security, business-registration and employer-identification numbers."
In case you haven't noticed, we all have social security numbers.
"suggests they use Passport to verify the identity of visitors to their Web sites."
... and access to our government should be restricted because...?
As I've learned the hard way in recent years, you NEED several hours of REM sleep a day. It's not just a matter of feeling "refreshed" in the morning, it's a big factor in mental health.
"Don't you think your FBI would shut these sites down as soon as words gets out?"
Hell, if they can get in trouble for shutting down the so-called Nuremberg List, I can see the FBI at least hesitating before going after such a site.
Fire bad!
FIRE BAD!!
" Perpetually the US Administration talks about reducing the dependence on foreign oil, promoting the opening up of the Alaskan Wildlife Refuges for drilling, and basically writing a blank environmental cheque for oil companies to sign."
... that continually refuses to enforce basic fuel efficiency ... directives."
Modern drilling and pumping operations are quite environmentally friendly as it is. Seismic analysis allows the prospectors to drill far fewer holes and the Alyeska Pipeline has been shown to have nearly negligible environmental impact. The only truly messy part in getting more oil is the refining process, which doesn't happen anywhere near the state of Alaska (this is why we have oil tankers).
"Yet this is the same administration
First off, CAFE what?
Secondly this isn't a sign of a failing of the government (besides, you shouldn't be looking to the government to solve all of our problems in the first place) but a sign of the general tastes in American vehicle consumption.
Generally speaking this can all be traced back to the mid 70's when the government was pushing for both fuel efficiency and cleaner emissions. In order to make the adjustment to the new regulations in the short amount of time given, car manufacturers came up with questionable solutions. For example emission percentages were lowered not by putting out fewer pollutants but by puming more clean air into the exhaust before it comes out the tail pipe.
Another example of such a quick-fix were the hastily-deployed models with a diesel engine retrofitted where a gasoline-burning engine was before. These engines were rough, noisy and not at all fun to operate, and the average American consumer has come to equate diesel engines with this memory of them.
It has been known for some time that diesel engines are both more fuel efficient and cheaper to operate than gas-burning engines. My father's Dodge Ram 1500 weighs something like 3 tons empty and it gets about 22 mpg of diesel fuel. Compare that to the "efficiency" of the much smaller and more aerodynamic Durango.
However, because of the American market's brief brush with cars powered by diesel engines, diesels simply don't sell well in the states. It has gotten to the point where GM and Ford offer many models with diesel engines in the European market that they simply won't offer in the US (the aforementioned Durango is either currently or will shortly be offered with a diesel engine in Europe).
Because diesels can't get a decent foothold in the US any time soon, we're stuck with waiting for new technologies (like diesel-electric hybrids, which even then aren't selling as well as gasoline-electric hybrids). But even with that the US has a problem with deploying cars using different fuel (such as natural gas or hydrogen). Unlike the numerous European countries that offer these fuel alternatives at the pump, the United States is the third largest country in the world with patches of sparse population bigger than many European countries. It will take a considerably long time and a large amount of capital to put in the infrastructure to offer these new fuels nationwide. Heck, there has yet to be a cell phone provider to offer truly nationwide coverage.
"If people want to feel patriotic, they should forsake getting that new Expedition and buy themselves a Dodge Neon or a Toyota Corolla"
I believe the Expedition is another example of a model offered with a diesel only in Europe. The Neon and the Corolla too, I believe.
Large vehicles like the Expedition are popular in the US because we take long car trips with the entire family. Sure, perhaps the "soccer moms" are being a bit extraneous, but when was the last time you tried to make a two-day road trip with two kids in a sedan? If one of them is a girl you'll be lucky to fit all your luggage in the trunk.
Why aren't these vehicles as popular in Europe? For one they have a denser public transportation infrastructure (another cultural difference between the US and Europe is the fact that we like independant personal transportation). Another factor is that there are few if any European countries where you can drive 20 hours in a straight line and still be in the same country.
You can be sure that these vehicles aren't selling well because they advertise the price of gasoline. But if the American consumer feels that that is an acceptable cost, who is the government to tell them that it isn't?
No, that's what Microsoft would want Japanese gamers to believe. In fact the manufacturers have never said what MSX stands for and and there are at least three other possible definitions of that acronym.