"The people that are smart enough to really do this IT stuff properly for the DHS are smart enough to earn more money elsewhere."
And even if the pay was the same, there's still the many months and ungodly amount of paperwork involved in trying to get a government job. Are you going to go for the offering that's available next month or next year?
You can't go off and browse censored content unless you know what content is actually censored. If the censorship is effective enough, people won't even know what to look for, let alone where to look.
Besides, is it inherently less valuable to gain information on the human body and various sex acts, exploring one's own sexuality against the wishes of the state?
"due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing Web site."
Are they angry at their own government's censoring policy, or are they angry at those damned insurgents that posted those pictures, forcing their beloved, benevolent government to take such action?
"This decision comes after rental data was looked at for the 250 stores that carry both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray with the majority of rentals being Blu-Ray."
"They took guesses at what the population would be in 2007, and the very first guess was 388,000"
Oh, the population of the city. With all this talk of bomb shelters, I thought you were talking about a pessimistic guess from the paranoid 1950's of the world population in 2007.
"The terrorists behind 911 were not stateless. They were all Saudi Arabians."
Al Qaeda is, at it's core, opposed to the House of Saud. It's created to oppose the Saudi government, which is why bin Laden has a death warrant on his head from Riyadh long before 2001.
Being all Saudis doesn't mean they were acting on behalf of the Saudi government.
"They get *no* GPS. Magellan has 1 bird aloft so far as I know, and no weapons that can use it."
What fixed US assets would the Swedes be attacking? Besides, how can you be sure that they wouldn't be able to get GPS despite US efforts?
"We make all their weapons."
They're not Canada.
"If you want to say that a carrier group cannot move without the element of surprise, I think your imagination is broke."
Into the confines of the North Sea?
"Who is going to tell them where it is?"
Radar (see previous). And, really: as part of power projection, carrier battlegroups are designed to be seen.
"What Swedish Navy?"
This one. As I mentioned in another post, the most the US Navy has dealt with in the past 50 years have been speedboats.
"Do you think the Swedes can penetrate the shell of air defense over a modern U.S. carrier group?"
With technology and training on par with the US, the Swedes would only be limited by numbers.
"Do you think that they train for this fight?"
Off the top of my head, I don't know, but I'd be surprised if they didn't toy with the idea occasionally. I do know that the Australians (at least) have trained against real US carrier battlegroups and have won.
"All the European nations are similar: I believe that none could withstand more than a few hours of full-on attack, much like Iraq."
Iraq never really had technological parity, but the Serbians were pretty close with Soviet-era equipment. The main problem for both forces, however, wasn't the technology but the people using it, where promotions were gained through nepotism or cronyism rather than merit, and training for those without such connections was neglected. See Thermopylae for an example of what happens between forces of equal technology but unequal training and command. Western military technology isn't enough without Western military culture behind it, and it's been half a century since the US has faced an enemy that thinks and fights like we do.
"We possess cruise missiles that have ranges far greater than any country's size (save Australia), so there's no safe spot"
Here's an example of what I was just talking about. Cruise missiles in and of themselves can't take out hardened targets (such as a bunker), just about all the penetrators you mention need to be delivered, generally by a manned aircraft. Now, when was the last time the US faced an enemy who built bunkers to house military leadership who know what they're doing and how to coordinate a defense, rather than to house El Presidente and his exalted extended family?
"They spend 1.5% of their GDP on defense because they know the Americans will do all the heavy lifting."
They spend 1.5% of their GDP on defense because they don't need a four-ocean navy and don't have a plethora of military bases and commitments scattered across the globe. The "defense" they spend their money on really is defense, not this "Pax Americana" we're trying to buy. Whether or not our attempts to project our military force to other regions is a more cost-effective defense than a focus on local, regional security is debatable, but rather than tossing about the amount spent on the DOD in toto, how about looking at the amount spent on NORTHCOM?
No, I'm not. I didn't say "repel a full US invasion," I was referring to being able to blunt the force projection of sending in a single battlegroup or two; say, parking a carrier and its complement off the Grand Banks instead of the Persian Gulf. An airstrike against Montreal wouldn't be able to travel from the carrier to its target and back practically unmolested as we've seen with Baghdad and Belgrade, air superiority would not be guaranteed, and the ships themselves would have to worry about enemy capital ships rather than the occasional speedboat armed with a few Silkworms.
Canadian military hardware is on par with US technology (it is US technology) and the men and women operating it are just as skilled (volunteers organized in a meritocracy), completely different from every enemy the US has battled in the past fifty years. Barring some masterful US strategic maneuvers that the Canadians are unable to counter, any punitive action by the US against Canada could only rely on attrition: no overwhelming technological superiority, no "shock and awe."
I have no doubt that the US could eventually conquer any two of the countries I alluded to, but it would be a war, the kind the industrialized world hasn't seen since 1945, not the quaint little affairs we and our parents grew up accustomed to.
Both the Chinese and the Saudis can barely threaten their direct neighbors, let alone a nation half a world away, and both have a country to lose in the event of a conflict. Stateless terrorists are able to do what they do because they have no state to lose.
"Similar to what happened with Britain's navy. Once their expensive battleships ruled the seas until it became glaringly obvious how vulnerable they were to a few cheap aircraft. It wasn't the end of Britain but it did severely damage her ability to project global power. HMS IHaveBigGuns could no longer be confidently sent off to threaten some city unless it was accompanied by an even more expensive carrier group to protect it."
Except that there are plenty of examples from WWII where aircraft were shown to be not all that great against ships armored enough to survive hits from 16" shells (not to mention bristling with antiaircraft guns). Consider the effort it took to sink ships such as the Bismarck or the Yamato, or how several surplus and captured battleships remained floating even after two nuclear blasts at Bikini.
Battleships didn't go away because an airplane can sink them, they went away because airplanes can sink destroyers and other such smaller capital ships at a greater range than a battleship. Battles like Midway were notable for how the engagements took place with the fleets nowhere near gun ranges, not "ZOMG, you sunk my battleship!"
It wasn't the aircraft carrier that brought about the demise of the Royal Navy (the British could build aircraft carriers too, after all), it was getting smacked around in two different oceans by two different enemies for the better part of a decade as part of the bloodiest conflict in human history.
"or a stealth missile platform that can be maneuvered close enough to a carrier group to sink most of it."
Yes, it's called "a submarine."
"Who ever can afford to fight longest will win."
That plan worked so well in Vietnam and is doing wonders in Iraq.
"If I can sink your billion dollar battlegroup anchored off my coast using a few million dollars worth of missiles"
Note the phrase "off my coast." The main point of these carriers is the same as the main point of the battleships: to project power. So long as these engagements happen off your coast and not our coast, the cost will still be justified.
"I don't see anyone developing new offensive technology in the short term such that the US is being threatened but I can see a day in the not so distant future when carrier groups can no longer be sent to a region for fear of being sunk or air campaigns are not a viable option because most the planes are likely to shot down."
Those regions already exist. Any of over half a dozen European powers, Australia, and even our neighbor Canada have the military resources, technology and skill to smack down a carrier battlegroup that threatened its territory with near impunity. It would take a lot of US blood and lucre to, say, bring a war to Sweden. But all these countries, as well as others that might be capable of the technological breakthroughs that you envision, are all BFF with the States (which is why you overlooked them). The cultural and social environment needed for such technological breakthroughs to come about tend to be similar enough to our own to greatly mitigate the human causes of such a conflict.
"But then I don't share the [seemingly] common pathological fear of bacteria that's been created in the last decade or so."
Microbes, shmicrobes; I'm apparently a swarthy, greasy bastard and it's only a mater of time before the home keys and the wrist rests on my keyboards get smooth from the god-knows-what my skin excretes. And no, I don't eat potato chips at my keyboard, and when I do eat I go so far as to drape a napkin over the keyboard and type through it to keep the keyboard clean.
So I either figure out how to wash my natural geek gunk off my inputs without breaking out abrasive pads, or I start getting into the habit of dipping my hands into isopropanol before touching one.
"where the voting populace can post questions directly."/ahem
"Why the fuck should I care when it's still the middle of 2007, and even when November 2008 rolls around we'll be stuck with the two candidates that got on the general ballot by pandering to their parties' extremists, resulting in the umpteenth election in a row where only a slim majority of the registered voters (who themselves are less than a majority of the enfranchised) bother to show up at the polls?"
Alternatively:
"Do the candidates appreciate the irony that they are running for an elected office where the majority are all but guaranteed to vote 'none of the above' by staying home?"
Alright, toning down the flippancy...
"The people don't care. Do you plan to do anything about it?"
"Or simply lose a lot of cool ("indy") channels that don't get enough sponsorship to survive on their own?"
You mean like ESPN? Sorry, Disney, there just aren't that many rabid sports fans out there. And be sure to tell Viacom that they may have some problems keeping "M"TV afloat as well while you're heading out the door.
I look at my basic cable lineup here in brighthouse country, and I just don't see anything that counts as "independent" other than the local 24-hour news channel. All the "small" channels I'm seeing are simply chaffe that content providers bundle with channels that are in demand in the name of extorting more money out of cable providers and, ultimately, subscribers. This kind of bullshit is why people have been clamoring for a la carte cable for years (though I personally don't believe it's worth the price of additional censorship).
This argument you bring up, a favorite one used by large conglomerates trying to suggest that forcing useless channels upon us is the price we need to pay to keep "independent" broadcasting alive has no merit when there are no such independent cable channels to be found. CBS, Disney, News, Time-Warner, Viacom, GE... the only independent channels I find are independent broadcasters in my area.
Slashdot Mirror
"My interest in the plug-in matrix type game is to visit the billions of places I'll never afford to be able to go, or that simply aren't possible."
Haven't Shadowrun and Ghost in the Shell taught you anything about why you shouldn't put wires into your brain?
"The people that are smart enough to really do this IT stuff properly for the DHS are smart enough to earn more money elsewhere."
And even if the pay was the same, there's still the many months and ungodly amount of paperwork involved in trying to get a government job. Are you going to go for the offering that's available next month or next year?
You can't go off and browse censored content unless you know what content is actually censored. If the censorship is effective enough, people won't even know what to look for, let alone where to look.
Besides, is it inherently less valuable to gain information on the human body and various sex acts, exploring one's own sexuality against the wishes of the state?
"due to access restrictions by censors after images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre were posted on the photo-sharing Web site."
Are they angry at their own government's censoring policy, or are they angry at those damned insurgents that posted those pictures, forcing their beloved, benevolent government to take such action?
"some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they've heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues"
Yeah, and some of us have tried Vista and have first-hand experience with those "rumored" device and application compatibility issues.
I doubt any marketing campaign, no matter how "fact rich," can change users personal experiences.
"This wasn't a betrayal of the public trust"
Yeah, because you can't betray what you don't have.
He's not in office because of public trust, he's in office because he's not John Kerry.
How many movies are currently available as both BluRay and HD-DVD?
"This decision comes after rental data was looked at for the 250 stores that carry both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray with the majority of rentals being Blu-Ray."
8 rentals versus 6?
Here, let me fix that for you:
"It's not the market (number of sick people who can afford it) which determines where these devices are installed."
"Whether you like him or not, believe what he says or not, you have to agree that Michael Moore is influential."
Is that why George Bush won the 2004 election?
"And the government was afraid the Russkies knew where the egress points were on the surface, so the government poured a parking lot over it."
Asphalt burns, especially near a high-priority target.
What about the roads to drive it on? After all, we've abandoned them all one we all got our flying cars.
"They took guesses at what the population would be in 2007, and the very first guess was 388,000"
Oh, the population of the city. With all this talk of bomb shelters, I thought you were talking about a pessimistic guess from the paranoid 1950's of the world population in 2007.
"Water is insidious and never gives up."
Dihydrogen monoxide, the universal solvent, strikes again! We need to ban this stuff!
"The terrorists behind 911 were not stateless. They were all Saudi Arabians."
Al Qaeda is, at it's core, opposed to the House of Saud. It's created to oppose the Saudi government, which is why bin Laden has a death warrant on his head from Riyadh long before 2001.
Being all Saudis doesn't mean they were acting on behalf of the Saudi government.
"They get *no* GPS. Magellan has 1 bird aloft so far as I know, and no weapons that can use it."
What fixed US assets would the Swedes be attacking? Besides, how can you be sure that they wouldn't be able to get GPS despite US efforts?
"We make all their weapons."
They're not Canada.
"If you want to say that a carrier group cannot move without the element of surprise, I think your imagination is broke."
Into the confines of the North Sea?
"Who is going to tell them where it is?"
Radar (see previous). And, really: as part of power projection, carrier battlegroups are designed to be seen.
"What Swedish Navy?"
This one. As I mentioned in another post, the most the US Navy has dealt with in the past 50 years have been speedboats.
"Do you think the Swedes can penetrate the shell of air defense over a modern U.S. carrier group?"
With technology and training on par with the US, the Swedes would only be limited by numbers.
"Do you think that they train for this fight?"
Off the top of my head, I don't know, but I'd be surprised if they didn't toy with the idea occasionally. I do know that the Australians (at least) have trained against real US carrier battlegroups and have won.
"All the European nations are similar: I believe that none could withstand more than a few hours of full-on attack, much like Iraq."
Iraq never really had technological parity, but the Serbians were pretty close with Soviet-era equipment. The main problem for both forces, however, wasn't the technology but the people using it, where promotions were gained through nepotism or cronyism rather than merit, and training for those without such connections was neglected. See Thermopylae for an example of what happens between forces of equal technology but unequal training and command. Western military technology isn't enough without Western military culture behind it, and it's been half a century since the US has faced an enemy that thinks and fights like we do.
"We possess cruise missiles that have ranges far greater than any country's size (save Australia), so there's no safe spot"
Here's an example of what I was just talking about. Cruise missiles in and of themselves can't take out hardened targets (such as a bunker), just about all the penetrators you mention need to be delivered, generally by a manned aircraft. Now, when was the last time the US faced an enemy who built bunkers to house military leadership who know what they're doing and how to coordinate a defense, rather than to house El Presidente and his exalted extended family?
"They spend 1.5% of their GDP on defense because they know the Americans will do all the heavy lifting."
They spend 1.5% of their GDP on defense because they don't need a four-ocean navy and don't have a plethora of military bases and commitments scattered across the globe. The "defense" they spend their money on really is defense, not this "Pax Americana" we're trying to buy. Whether or not our attempts to project our military force to other regions is a more cost-effective defense than a focus on local, regional security is debatable, but rather than tossing about the amount spent on the DOD in toto, how about looking at the amount spent on NORTHCOM?
"Your kidding about the Canada part are you not?"
No, I'm not. I didn't say "repel a full US invasion," I was referring to being able to blunt the force projection of sending in a single battlegroup or two; say, parking a carrier and its complement off the Grand Banks instead of the Persian Gulf. An airstrike against Montreal wouldn't be able to travel from the carrier to its target and back practically unmolested as we've seen with Baghdad and Belgrade, air superiority would not be guaranteed, and the ships themselves would have to worry about enemy capital ships rather than the occasional speedboat armed with a few Silkworms.
Canadian military hardware is on par with US technology (it is US technology) and the men and women operating it are just as skilled (volunteers organized in a meritocracy), completely different from every enemy the US has battled in the past fifty years. Barring some masterful US strategic maneuvers that the Canadians are unable to counter, any punitive action by the US against Canada could only rely on attrition: no overwhelming technological superiority, no "shock and awe."
I have no doubt that the US could eventually conquer any two of the countries I alluded to, but it would be a war, the kind the industrialized world hasn't seen since 1945, not the quaint little affairs we and our parents grew up accustomed to.
Both the Chinese and the Saudis can barely threaten their direct neighbors, let alone a nation half a world away, and both have a country to lose in the event of a conflict. Stateless terrorists are able to do what they do because they have no state to lose.
"Similar to what happened with Britain's navy. Once their expensive battleships ruled the seas until it became glaringly obvious how vulnerable they were to a few cheap aircraft. It wasn't the end of Britain but it did severely damage her ability to project global power. HMS IHaveBigGuns could no longer be confidently sent off to threaten some city unless it was accompanied by an even more expensive carrier group to protect it."
Except that there are plenty of examples from WWII where aircraft were shown to be not all that great against ships armored enough to survive hits from 16" shells (not to mention bristling with antiaircraft guns). Consider the effort it took to sink ships such as the Bismarck or the Yamato, or how several surplus and captured battleships remained floating even after two nuclear blasts at Bikini.
Battleships didn't go away because an airplane can sink them, they went away because airplanes can sink destroyers and other such smaller capital ships at a greater range than a battleship. Battles like Midway were notable for how the engagements took place with the fleets nowhere near gun ranges, not "ZOMG, you sunk my battleship!"
It wasn't the aircraft carrier that brought about the demise of the Royal Navy (the British could build aircraft carriers too, after all), it was getting smacked around in two different oceans by two different enemies for the better part of a decade as part of the bloodiest conflict in human history.
"or a stealth missile platform that can be maneuvered close enough to a carrier group to sink most of it."
Yes, it's called "a submarine."
"Who ever can afford to fight longest will win."
That plan worked so well in Vietnam and is doing wonders in Iraq.
"If I can sink your billion dollar battlegroup anchored off my coast using a few million dollars worth of missiles"
Note the phrase "off my coast." The main point of these carriers is the same as the main point of the battleships: to project power. So long as these engagements happen off your coast and not our coast, the cost will still be justified.
"I don't see anyone developing new offensive technology in the short term such that the US is being threatened but I can see a day in the not so distant future when carrier groups can no longer be sent to a region for fear of being sunk or air campaigns are not a viable option because most the planes are likely to shot down."
Those regions already exist. Any of over half a dozen European powers, Australia, and even our neighbor Canada have the military resources, technology and skill to smack down a carrier battlegroup that threatened its territory with near impunity. It would take a lot of US blood and lucre to, say, bring a war to Sweden. But all these countries, as well as others that might be capable of the technological breakthroughs that you envision, are all BFF with the States (which is why you overlooked them). The cultural and social environment needed for such technological breakthroughs to come about tend to be similar enough to our own to greatly mitigate the human causes of such a conflict.
If you wanna use kilometers, build your own scramjet.
"But then I don't share the [seemingly] common pathological fear of bacteria that's been created in the last decade or so."
Microbes, shmicrobes; I'm apparently a swarthy, greasy bastard and it's only a mater of time before the home keys and the wrist rests on my keyboards get smooth from the god-knows-what my skin excretes. And no, I don't eat potato chips at my keyboard, and when I do eat I go so far as to drape a napkin over the keyboard and type through it to keep the keyboard clean.
So I either figure out how to wash my natural geek gunk off my inputs without breaking out abrasive pads, or I start getting into the habit of dipping my hands into isopropanol before touching one.
Really? I keep finding people trying to sell me CD-ROMs with information on sinusitis relief wholesalers.
Did you threaten to overrule him?
"where the voting populace can post questions directly." /ahem
"Why the fuck should I care when it's still the middle of 2007, and even when November 2008 rolls around we'll be stuck with the two candidates that got on the general ballot by pandering to their parties' extremists, resulting in the umpteenth election in a row where only a slim majority of the registered voters (who themselves are less than a majority of the enfranchised) bother to show up at the polls?"
Alternatively:
"Do the candidates appreciate the irony that they are running for an elected office where the majority are all but guaranteed to vote 'none of the above' by staying home?"
Alright, toning down the flippancy...
"The people don't care. Do you plan to do anything about it?"
"Or simply lose a lot of cool ("indy") channels that don't get enough sponsorship to survive on their own?"
You mean like ESPN? Sorry, Disney, there just aren't that many rabid sports fans out there. And be sure to tell Viacom that they may have some problems keeping "M"TV afloat as well while you're heading out the door.
I look at my basic cable lineup here in brighthouse country, and I just don't see anything that counts as "independent" other than the local 24-hour news channel. All the "small" channels I'm seeing are simply chaffe that content providers bundle with channels that are in demand in the name of extorting more money out of cable providers and, ultimately, subscribers. This kind of bullshit is why people have been clamoring for a la carte cable for years (though I personally don't believe it's worth the price of additional censorship).
This argument you bring up, a favorite one used by large conglomerates trying to suggest that forcing useless channels upon us is the price we need to pay to keep "independent" broadcasting alive has no merit when there are no such independent cable channels to be found. CBS, Disney, News, Time-Warner, Viacom, GE... the only independent channels I find are independent broadcasters in my area.